========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 16:22:26 +1100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: MESSAGE-ID field duplicated. Last occurrence was retained. From: John Tranter Subject: John Tranter poetry readings, USA and UK, Nov-Dec 1998 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Australian poet and Jacket magazine editor John Tranter will read from his new book "Late Night Radio" . . . SAN FRANCISCO . . . on Thursday November 12 at 4.30 pm (a free event) Poetry Center SFSU, 1600 Holloway, San Francisco reading room HUM 512 inquiries (415) 338 2227 ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND . . . on Wednesday November 25, at 7 pm ( a free event) at The University, St Andrews inquiries Prof Robert Crawford, School of English tel (01334) 462 666, (01334) 476 161 LONDON U.K. . . . on Wednesday December 2, 6.30 for 7.00 p.m. (a free event) at AUSTRALIA HOUSE, The STRAND, London WC2B 4LA inquiries Mr Lee Cooper (0171) 887 5297 "Late Night Radio" ISBN 0 7486 6238 3 October 1998 -- 96 pages -- L 7.95 (Pounds sterling) is published by Polygon Press / The University of Edinburgh Press. 22 George Sq, Edinburgh EH8 9LF tel.(0131) 650 8436 email: Distributed in the UK by Compass Independent Book Sales, London (0181) 995 6324, fax (0181) 995 6324 Distributed in the USA by Subterranean Company, PO Box 160, 265 South Fifth Street, Monroe OR 97456 USA tel (541) 847 5274, fax (541) 847 6018 from John Tranter, 39 Short Street, Balmain NSW 2041, Sydney, Australia tel (+612) 9555 8502 fax (+612) 9818 8569 Editor, Jacket magazine: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/welcome.html Homepage: five megabytes of glittering literature, free, at http://www.alm.aust.com/~tranterj/index.html ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 18:54:01 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Hambone 14 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_001A_01BE05C8.FD3BB7E0" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_001A_01BE05C8.FD3BB7E0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Since it doesn't appear to have been listed--(forgive me in advance if = it has been)--I would like to draw your attention to the latest HAMBONE = (14)--A great read with work from Nathaniel Tarn, Barbara Guest, Amiri = Baraka, Michael Davidson, Lydia Davis, and others--including your humble = correspondent Jesse Glass. $18.00 sub., $10.00 individual issues. 134 HUNOLT ST, SANTA CRUZ, CA. 95060. Nathaniel Mackey, ed. Another magazine that should be of interest to list members: The Abiko Quarterly--A mag. of prose, poetry & James Joyce studies Laurel Sicks, ed. & pub. 8-1-8 Namiki Abiko-shi, Chiba-ken 270-11, Japan. Usually over 400 pages of work that ranges from traditional to highly = experimental writing, this mag. gives a fascinating look at English = language and Japanese poetry and prose. Subs are a tad expensive at = $30.00 per year, but issues are the size of small telephone books and = Sicks is unusually generous in working out deals with poets--mag & book = exchanges, etc.--She also publishes a huge section of reviews. =20 ------=_NextPart_000_001A_01BE05C8.FD3BB7E0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Since it doesn't appear to have been = listed--(forgive me in advance if it has been)--I would like to draw = your=20 attention to the latest HAMBONE (14)--A great read with work from = Nathaniel=20 Tarn, Barbara Guest, Amiri Baraka, Michael Davidson, Lydia Davis, and=20 others--including your humble correspondent Jesse Glass.  $18.00 = sub.,=20 $10.00 individual issues.
134 HUNOLT ST, SANTA CRUZ, CA. = 95060. =20 Nathaniel Mackey, ed.
 
Another magazine that should be of = interest to=20 list members:
 
The Abiko Quarterly--A mag. of = prose, poetry=20 & James Joyce studies
Laurel Sicks, ed. & = pub.
8-1-8 Namiki
Abiko-shi, Chiba-ken
270-11, Japan.
 
Usually over 400 pages of work that = ranges from=20 traditional to highly experimental writing, this mag. gives a = fascinating look=20 at English language and Japanese poetry and prose.  Subs are a tad=20 expensive at $30.00 per year, but issues are the size of  small = telephone=20 books and Sicks is unusually generous in working out deals with = poets--mag &=20 book exchanges, etc.--She also publishes a huge section of = reviews.  =20
------=_NextPart_000_001A_01BE05C8.FD3BB7E0-- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 05:37:24 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: Kent J. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit So don't worry about me. I'm fine, really. --Kent Johnson I could not help myself---havent you ever fallen in love in an airport? --George Bowering I am not a potted plant. --Oliver North's lawyer, during the Iran-Contra hearings Unlike those who toy with Kent Johnson, I wanted to write and tell him how moved I was by his confession. Kent, as you may know I found the love of my life, George Bowering, on this list, only to lose him to the obviously made-up "Eliza McGrand" (a.k.a. Pierre Joris), who promised him his choice of small hand-held appliances and a lifetime pass to that fuckfest MLA. Pierre, how could you?? George, I still have the frilly bustier and stained Muk Luks you wore when you read to me nightly from _Renfrew of the Royal Mounted_. But never mind. I have gone on to other things and perhaps you, Kent, can learn something from my degradation. In solidarity, Rachel Loden P.S. Let me know if you'd like my extra copy of the "people who love too much" 365 daily affirmations calendar. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 10:00:27 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher Subject: Re: joking aside, s/he thing In-Reply-To: <363BC07F.329F@idt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" dan, thanx for your response... i'm outta here manana and away from the machine for a week, so this will probably be my last attempt to clear the air a bit... here's the beef, in a nutshell: that the use of he/him/his as a universal is flawed, esp. from a feminist pov, for alla the reasons so many have rehearsed... that we need to find a different way to handle same (treichler/frank recommend, along with recasting specific sentences, use of they/their, with he or she used alternately (and NOT within the same para)---i find this completely reasonable, and would leave it to writers to work out usage so as to avoid a ping-pong feel to the prose)... the issue, btw, and as i've understood it, has never been about using a "she" (e.g.) when the referent was verifiably a she ("virginia woolf")... now the way i'm reading you (and the way some others are reading you, i think), is that any attempt to alter the use of he/him/his -- AS *the* ungendered universal -- is "ugly" and equally problematic... that no harm is really done (or has really been done) by the tacit, ungendered universality of the male pronoun per se---that this usage is not harmful in itself, it simply reflects underlying or overarching social realities... ergo that such language practices shouldn't be messed with in any formal, prescriptive sense... i guess this is what we're disagreeing over, and i'm at a loss as to what more can be said... i certainly wouldn't penalize my students b/c they haven't "gotten with the program"---but this is more a pedagogical issue per se than a language issue... i could ask that you have a closer look at the substantial amount of literature in support of (directly and indirectly) introducing a different usage... generally i'm not in favor of prescriptions mself---i understand this issue in terms of a general recommendation, and one that requires (on my part) relatively little effort, with some beneficial results for certain of my readers (and with very little loss in the way of linguistic precision---i don't find the use of they/their esp. distressful)... i guess you would ask me to reconsider the history of he/him/his usage... don't know what more there is to say here---the disagreement is over (if i may) the political fall-out of using language this way rather than that... i say there's a LOT at stake in those itsy-bitsy pronouns, and that we would do well to reconsider our deployment of same... you say that what i say is at stake is not really at stake, and that more havoc would be wrought by attempting to "correct" usage along these lines... so ok, i guess this is where we stop on this issue---though i don't like mself to invoke endings... i just don't know where else to go with this---but it's ok if we have to end things here... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 11:17:22 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: MLA Kathy et alia: I am presenting a paper on a panel titled "Ellipsis and Silence: The Poetry of George Oppen," on 12/29 at 8:30 AM. The panel is being chaired by David Clippinger. Other panelists are: Alan Golding, Burt Hatlen, and Gwyn McVay. An all Poetics-L panel! Burt Kimmelman Department of Humanities and Social Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 973.596.3376 (p) 973.642.4689 (f) kimmelman@admin.njit.edu (e) http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma (i) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 11:29:18 -0500 Reply-To: daniel7@IDT.NET Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Zimmerman Organization: Bard-O Subject: Re: joking aside, s/he thing MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks again, Joe. I don't intend to sound like a nutcase here [e.g., I would not chide a student or anyone else for using the feminine pronoun preferentially, as long as he or she does so consistently within a paper]. It feels as if I'd have to write a book about this to make myself clear, but I doubt anyonme would want to read it. Enjoy your break. Best, Dan Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote: > > dan, thanx for your response... i'm outta here manana and away from the > machine for a week, so this will probably be my last attempt to clear the > air a bit... > > here's the beef, in a nutshell: that the use of he/him/his as a universal > is flawed, esp. from a feminist pov, for alla the reasons so many have > rehearsed... that we need to find a different way to handle same > (treichler/frank recommend, along with recasting specific sentences, use of > they/their, with he or she used alternately (and NOT within the same > para)---i find this completely reasonable, and would leave it to writers to > work out usage so as to avoid a ping-pong feel to the prose)... the issue, > btw, and as i've understood it, has never been about using a "she" (e.g.) > when the referent was verifiably a she ("virginia woolf")... > > now the way i'm reading you (and the way some others are reading you, i > think), is that any attempt to alter the use of he/him/his -- AS *the* > ungendered universal -- is "ugly" and equally problematic... that no harm > is really done (or has really been done) by the tacit, ungendered > universality of the male pronoun per se---that this usage is not harmful in > itself, it simply reflects underlying or overarching social realities... > ergo that such language practices shouldn't be messed with in any formal, > prescriptive sense... > > i guess this is what we're disagreeing over, and i'm at a loss as to what > more can be said... i certainly wouldn't penalize my students b/c they > haven't "gotten with the program"---but this is more a pedagogical issue > per se than a language issue... i could ask that you have a closer look at > the substantial amount of literature in support of (directly and > indirectly) introducing a different usage... generally i'm not in favor of > prescriptions mself---i understand this issue in terms of a general > recommendation, and one that requires (on my part) relatively little > effort, with some beneficial results for certain of my readers (and with > very little loss in the way of linguistic precision---i don't find the use > of they/their esp. distressful)... i guess you would ask me to reconsider > the history of he/him/his usage... > > don't know what more there is to say here---the disagreement is over (if i > may) the political fall-out of using language this way rather than that... > i say there's a LOT at stake in those itsy-bitsy pronouns, and that we > would do well to reconsider our deployment of same... you say that what i > say is at stake is not really at stake, and that more havoc would be > wrought by attempting to "correct" usage along these lines... > > so ok, i guess this is where we stop on this issue---though i don't like > mself to invoke endings... i just don't know where else to go with > this---but it's ok if we have to end things here... > > best, > > joe ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 12:55:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Yasusada bibliography MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Listees: Because he is using _Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada_ in his poetics course this semester, Charles Bernstein had suggested that I prepare a bibliography of work by and about Yasusada. I had sent a copy to the poet and critic Akitoshi Nagahata in Japan, and he kindly offered to put it up on the web. Yasusada has been discussed here from time to time, so I thought I would provide the URL for those who might be interested. (Not listed is a radio feature by Australia Public Radio from Oct. 11-13. The recording can be accessed, I believe, through the APR site.) The bib also contains a number of links to critical articles related to the Yasusada discussion. http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~nagahata/yasusada-bib.html. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 13:41:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Welcome to Poetics List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable =20 Rev. 10-31-98 (This message is sent out to all new and renewing subscribers and it is sent out to the list at the beginning of every month) ____________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Poetics List & The Electronic Poetry Center sponsored by The Poetics Program, Department of English, Faculty of Art & Letters, of the State University of New York, Buffalo Postal Address: 438 Clemens Hall, SUNY, Buffalo, NY 14260 ___________________________________________________________ http://writing.upenn.edu/epc ___________________________________________________________ _______Contents___________ 1. About the Poetics List=20 2. Subscriptions=20 3. Cautions=20 4. Digest Option=20 5. Temporarily turning off Poetics mail=20 6. Who's Subscribed=20 7. The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC)=20 8. Poetics Archives at EPC=20 9. Publishers & Editors Read This! [This document was prepared by Charles Bernstein= (bernstei@acsu.buffalo.edu), Loss Peque=F1oGlazier (glazier@acsu.buffalo.edu), and Joel Kuszai (poetics@acsu.buffalo.edu). ___________________________________________________________ Above the world-weary horizons New obstacles for exchange arise Or unfold, O ye postmasters! 1. About the Poetics List The Poetics List was founded in late 1993 with the epigraph above. There are presently almost 700 subscribers. Please note that this is a private list and information about the list= should not be posted to other lists or directories of lists. The idea is to keep= the list to those with specific rather than general interests, and also to keep the scale of the list relatively small and the volume manageable. The Poetics List, while committed to openness, is moderated. While= individual posts of participants are sent directly to all subscribers, we continue to work to promote the editorial function of this project. The definition of that project, while provisional, and while open to continual redefinition by list participants, is nonetheless aversive to a generalized discussion of poetry. Rather, our aim is to support, inform, and extend those directions in= poetry that are committed to innovations, renovations, and investigations of form and/or/as content, to the questioning of received forms and styles, and to= the creation of the otherwise unimagined, untried, unexpected, improbable, and impossible.=20 **We also encourage subscribers to post information on publications and reading series that they have coordinated, edited, published, or in which they= appear (see section 9 below).** (THIS MEANS *YOU*). Please keep in mind that all posts go out immediately to all subscribers,= and become part of an on-line archive. *Posting to Poetics is a form of publication, not personal communication.* Participants are asked to exercise caution before posting messages! While spontaneity of response may seem the very heart of the list at its best, it also has the darker side of= circulating ideas that have not been well considered (or considered by another reader -- editor or friend). Given the nature of the medium, subscribers do well to maintain some skepticism when reading the list and, where possible, to try= to avoid taking what may be something close to a spontaneous comment made in= the heat of exchange as if it were a revised or edited essay ("Let the Reader Beware!"). The "list owner" of Poetics is Charles Bernstein. Joel Kuszai is list manager.=20 For subscription information contact us at POETICS@acsu.buffalo.edu. ___________________________________________________________ 2. Subscriptions Subscriptions to Poetics are free of charge. But we ask that you subscribe with your real name and we reserve the right to request additional information, including address and phone number. All subscription information you supply will remain confidential. You can subscribe (sub) or unsubscribe (unsub) by sending a one-line= message, with no subject line, to: listserv@listserv.buffalo.edu the one-line message should say: unsub poetics {or} sub poetics Jill Jillway (replacing Jill Jillway with your own name; but note: do not use your name= to unsub) We will be sent a notice of all subscription activity. Please allow several days for your new or re-subscription to take effect. * If you are having difficulty unsubscribing, please note: Sometimes your e-mail address may be changed slightly by your system administrator. If this happens you will not be able to send messages to Poetics or to unsubscribe, although you will continue to get your Poetics mail. To avoid this, unsub from the old address and resub from the new address. If you can no longer do this there is a solution if you use Eudora (an e-mail program that is available free at shareware sites): from the= Tools menu select "Options" and then select set-up for "Sending Mail": you may be able to substitute your old address here and send the unsub message. The most frequent problem with subscriptions is bounced messages. If your system is often down or if you have a low disk quota, Poetics messages may= get bounced. Please try avoid having messages from the list returned to us. If the problem is low disk quota, you may wish to request an increase from your system administrator. (You may wish to argue that this subscription is part of your scholarly communication!) You may also wish to consider obtaining a= commercial account. In general, if a Poetics message is bounced from your account, your subscription to Poetics will be temporarily suspended. If this happens,= simply resubscribe to the list in the normal manner, once your account problem has been resolved. All questions about subscriptions, whether about an individual subscription= or subscription policy, should be addressed to the list's administrative= address: poetics@acsu.buffalo.edu. Please note that it may take up to ten days, or more, for us to reply to messages. ____________________________________________________________________ 3. Cautions Please do not post to the list personal or backchannel correspondence, or other unpublished material, without the express permission of the author.= Copyright for all material posted on Poetics remains with the author; material from= this list and its archive may not be reproduced without the author's permission, beyond the standard rights accorded by "fair use". The Poetics List has a 50 message daily limit. If more than 50 messages are received, the listserver will automatically hold those additional messages until the list is manually unlocked, usually the following day. While it is difficult to prescribe a set limit on the number of daily, weekly, or= monthly posts for any subscriber, please keep this limit in mind. If you plan to respond to multiple threads, it is generally preferable to consolidate your reply into one message. While relevant excerpts from a post to which you are responding may usefully be appended to your reply, please do not include in your new post the whole text of a long previously posted message. As an outside maximum, the listserv is set to accept no more than 5 messages a day from= any one subscriber. Participants who post more frequently than these parameters suggest will receive a reminder asking them to limit the volume of their posts. Please do not send attachments or include extremely long documents in a= post, since this may make it difficult for those who get the list via "digest" or who cannot decode attached or specially formatted files. The use of "styled"= text or HTML formatting in the body of email posts to the list appears not to be compatible with the the list's automatic digest program and as result such messages disrupt the format of the Digest, even though this coding is= readable for some subscribers who do not use the digest option. When sending to the list, please send only "plain text". Note, however, there is no problem with sending clickable URLs in HTML format In addition to being archived at the EPC, some posts to Poetics (especially reviews, obituary notices, announcements, etc.) may also become part of specific EPC subject areas. Brief reviews of poetry events and publications are always welcome. (See section 7.) Please do not send inquiries to the list to get an individual subscribers address. To get this information, see section 6. If you want someone to send out information to the list as a whole, or= supply information missing from an post, or thank someone for posting something you requested, please send the request or comment to the individual backchannel, not to the whole list. ____________________________________________________________________ 4. Digest Option The Listserve program gives you he option to receive all the posted Poetics message each day as a single message. If you would prefer to receive ONE message each day, which would include all messages posted to the list for= that day, you can use the digest option. Send this one-line message (no subject line) to listserv@listserv.buffalo.edu set poetics digest NOTE:!! Send this message to "listserv" not to Poetics or as a reply to this message!! You can switch back to individual messages by sending this message: set poetics mail ____________________________________________________________________ 5. Temporarily turning off Poetics mail Do not leave your Poetics subscription "active" if you are going to be away for any extended period of time! Your account may become flooded and you may= lose not only Poetics messages but other important mail. You can temporarily turn off your Poetics subscription by sending a message to "listserv@listserv.buffalo.edu" set poetics nomail & turn it on again with: set poetics mail When you return you can check or download missed postings from the Poetics archive. (See 8 below.) ____________________________________________________________________ 6. Who's Subscribed To see who is subscribed to Poetics, send an e-mail message to listserv@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu; leave the "Subject" line of the e-mail message blank. In the body of your e-mail message type: review poetics You will be sent within a reasonable amount of time (by return e-mail) a rather long list containing the names and e-mail addresses of Poetics subscribers.= =20 This list is alphabetized by server not name. or try: review POETICS by name review POETICS by country which will give you the list alphabetically by name or a flawed list by country (since all ".com" and ".net"s are counted as US) *Please do not send a message to the list asking for the address of a= specific subscriber.* ____________________________________________________________________ 7. What is the Electronic Poetry Center? our URL is http://writing.upenn.edu/epc The mission of this World-Wide Web based electronic poetry center is to= serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the United States and the world. The Center provides access to the burgeoning number of electronic resources in the new poetries including RIF/T and other electronic poetry journals, the POETICS List archives, an AUTHOR library of electronic poetic texts, and direct= connections to numerous related electronic RESOURCES. The Center also provides= information about contemporary print little magazines and SMALL PRESSES engaged in= poetry and poetics. And we have an extensive collection of soundfiles of poets' reading their work, as well as the archive of LINEbreak, the radio interview series. The EPC is directed by Loss Peque=F1o Glazier. ____________________________________________________________________ 8. Poetics Archives via EPC Go to the EPC and select Poetics from the opening screen. Follow the links= to Poetics Archives. You may browse the archives by month and year or search= them for specific information. Your interface will allow you to print or download any of these files. Or set your browser to go directly to: http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/archive ____________________________________________________________________ 9. Publishers & Editors Read This! PUBLISHERS & EDITORS: Our listings of poetry and poetics information is open and available to you. We are trying to make access to printed publications= as easy as possible to our users and ENCOURAGE you to participate! Send a list= of your press/publications to glazier@acsu.buffalo.edu with the words EPC Press Listing in the subject line. You may also send materials on disk. (Write= file name, word processing program, and Mac or PC on disk.) Send an e-mail= message to the address above to obtain a mailing address to which to send your disk. Though files marked up with html are our goal, ascii files are perfectly acceptable. If your word processor will save files in Rich Text Format= (.rtf) this is also highly desirable Send us extended information on new publications (including any back cover copy and sample poems) as well as complete catalogs/backlists (including excerpts from reviews, sample poems, etc.). Be sure to include full information for ordering--including prices and addresses and phone numbers both of the press and any distributors. Initially, you might want to send short announcements of new publications directly to the Poetics list as subscribers do not always (or ever) check= the EPC; in your message please include full information for ordering. If you have a fuller listing at EPC, you might also mention that in any Poetics posts. Some announcements circulated through Poetics and the EPC have received a noticeable responses; it may be an effective way to promote your publication and we are glad to facilitate information about interesting publications. ____________________________________________________________________ END OF POETICS LIST WELCOME ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 14:26:45 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: ken|n|ing Subject: Publication announcements))) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII To add to the mix: Now may be a good time for those interested to subscribe to Kenning. The third (autumn/winter '98) issue is due in two to three weeks & stands at just over 76 pages: subscribing now will get you the second and third issues, together featuring poetry by authors such as Charles Bernstein, Hoa Nguyen, Liz Waldner, Katy Lederer, Alice Notley, Gustaf Sobin, Ray DiPalma, Lisa Jarnot, etc etc, poetics by Tina Darragh, John Taggart, Alice Notley, reviews of recent chapbooks, and an interview with Nathaniel Mackey: subscribers send $9.50 made out to the editor, Patrick F. Durgin, to the address below, and receive a hand printed portfolio to contain several issues Also would like to recommend the new issue of Hambone, announced elsewhere on this list. Rachel Blau DuPlessis' new work therein was particularly intriguing for me There will be a complete publication announcement to this list once the third issue of Kenning is ready to send. But again, to receive the summer and autumn/winter issues, subscribe NOW Thanks Patrick F. Durgin | | k e n n i n g````````````````|`````````````````````````````````` a newsletter of contemporary |poetry, poetics, and non-fiction writing |418 Brown St. #10 Iowa City, IA 52245 USA ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 14:06:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Tripwire No. 2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Tripwire No. 2 has arrived in my mailbox, earning David Buuck and Yedda Morrison the tagline "fastest turnaround in the business." Steven Farmers' work, the magazine's opener, is a must-read. Also included is a good selection of reviews, including my own musings on "Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women," edited by Mary Margaret Sloan. The magazine's address is: P.O. Box 420936 SF, CA 94142-0936 And they're distributed through Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Thanks to others for weighing in on Hambone 14. Best, Kathy Lou Schultz ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 15:20:10 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: This is not a suggestion, but . . . Content-Type: text/plain Gabriel Gudding is right! & Furthermore, since Patrick Pritchett _has_ left poetry, left it stone cold, & we can announce it to the world, I am happy to forward a Very Special Offer: *Take Patrick Pritchett's place in his reading with Anselm Hollo & Laura Wright at the Left Hand Bookstore, Boulder, Colorado, January 21, 1999. The ex-poet Pritchett's place will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Send checks payable to Left Hand Reading Series Huckster Mark DuCharme. No tippied checks accepted.* GG wrote: >1). Pritchett, surely you meant to tippy "the business of publishing and >book-selling," not "the business of poetry." If you did mean to tippy >"the business of poetry is the commerce of poetry," I'd say you already >left, man. You already left. > >2). Good riddance. > >3). I think Mairead's point is simply this: if you Must advertise here, >do it with pizzazz. Do it, in other words, with poetry, Pritchett. > >Gabriel Gudding > >--------------Mairead wrote: >> Subject: Re: This is not a suggestion, but . . . >> Date: Friday, October 30, 1998 9:44AM >> >> This list is like a huckster shop with books and readings constantly being >> touted, lipstick (I still don't understand that), MLA tricks, blah blah >> blah. If you don't got the inclination or the dough it's no fun reading >> this stuff: why not make it fun (as Masha did) by at least SELLING in an >> interesting, enthralling, exhilarating, salivating way? Just the dumb >> banner doesn't do it, even with a few lame comments attached. >> > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 19:31:55 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: mla Comments: To: daniel7@IDT.NET In-Reply-To: <363C8C5E.4C91@idt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ed cohen, ira livingston and i are doing a panel called poetics out of bounds. they do stuff on poetry and science, i do stuff on eccentric poetries. come if you can, it should be fun. they're theory jocks. if you saw them at the Cross-Cultural Poetics conf, ed will be doing the same thing, more or less, ira's is new, and so is mine, as in as yet unwritten yikes. --md ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 20:08:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: MLA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII For that matter, I'm on a panel called Letter Sensations and Embodied Life (I think) and I'll be talking about interpenetrating subjectivities/ poetics/virtualities of the future and now, why not. This is with Vicki Kirby and Ann Weinstone and we should be great fun I do hope. Alan ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 21:46:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: The Transcendental Friend MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I have just been hypering about in _The Transcendental Friend_ and feel inspired to gush that it is one of the most exciting places for poetry and its thinking that I have ever seen. It's not only the wonderful and idiosyncratic contents. It is also that this is the first literary "magazine" I've encountered that marshals materials in a way to become truly a Poem-- a big poem built-up of other poems and graphics and other kinds of very unordinary writing, all connected by links and interfaces that make you feel somewhat like the place is alive and crawling Here you will find postmodern and apocryphal Middle English texts, ancient glyphs, the magnified faces of insects, and a generous gallery of the Russian cosmonauts. Like the house Kurt Schwitter's was building, this place is an unfolding art work and something you have to see for yourself (though you can't see Schwitter's house anymore). A fresh issue every month and many "friends" from this List. www.morningred.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 22:55:27 -0500 Reply-To: mgk3k@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: humument home page? In-Reply-To: from "A. Jenn Sondheim" at Nov 1, 98 08:08:59 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Does anyone know what's become of Tom Philips's Humument Home Page (formerly at )? Matt ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 22:00:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Yasusada Bib 2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: Multipart/Mixed; boundary=Message-Boundary-13818 --Message-Boundary-13818 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-description: Mail message body I've noticed that I failed to include a number of published items on the version that Akitoshi Nagahata has put up on the web. So I thought I would go ahead and send this newly updated version (attached) for those of you who might be interested. Kent --Message-Boundary-13818 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-disposition: inline Content-description: Attachment information. The following section of this message contains a file attachment prepared for transmission using the Internet MIME message format. If you are using Pegasus Mail, or any another MIME-compliant system, you should be able to save it or view it from within your mailer. If you cannot, please ask your system administrator for assistance. ---- File information ----------- File: aybib.doc Date: 1 Nov 1998, 21:56 Size: 20992 bytes. 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/////////////////////////////////////////////////////w== --Message-Boundary-13818-- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 01:37:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vance Bell Subject: Re: Tom Phillips In-Reply-To: <199811020503.AAA56270@dept.english.upenn.edu> from "Automatic digest processor" at Nov 2, 98 00:02:43 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am sorry if this has already be given out -- I am only on the digest version of POETICS: Re: Tom Phillips stuff see http://www.rosacordis.com/humument/index2.html -- +==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+ Vance E. Bell, Jr. | Other Voices University of Pennsylvania | P.O. Box 31907 vbell@dept.english.upenn.edu | Philadelphia, PA 19104-1907 http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~ov +==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 10:12:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'll be doing a paper on Bunting on the last morning of MLA. Panel on "the British pocket epic." Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Duke University kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Program in Writing and Rhetoric (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 10:30:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Harriet Zinnes Subject: reading announcement Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit 2 November l998 Harriet Zinnes will give a reading from her new book of stories, THE RADIANT ABSURDITY OF DESIRE, on Wednesday, November ll, at 7:30 p.m.,at Barnes & Noble, 4 Astor Place, New York City. Do say "hello" if you are able to attend! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 11:04:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: Readings at the Poetry Project Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" For the week of Nov.2 - on: Monday, Nov. 2 -- Open reading, 8pm (sign-up at 7:30 pm). Don't bag it just cuz you call yourself a real poet. Wednesday, Nov. 4 -- The Defiant Muse: Readings from Dutch Women Poets A reading in celebration of the publication of The Defiant Muse: Dutch and Flemish Feminist Poems from The Middle Ages to the Present (The Feminist Press). Featuring Carla Boogaard, Anna Enquist, Elly de Waard, Maaijke Meijer, Meena Alexander, & others. 8pm. Friday, Nov. 6 -- Don't Follow Leaders: Artists' Takes On Politics Election Day-week reading featuring Tom Gogola, Eliot Katz, Tuli Kupferberg, Rachel Levitsky, Leslea Newman, & Peter Lamborn Wilson. 10:30 pm Saturday, Nov. 7 -- Tribute to Hannah Weiner A tribute to the late poet Hannah Weiner with readings, talks, memories from Charles Alexander, Bruce Andrews, Abigail Child, Maria Damon, Tina Darragh, Alan Davies, Maurice Finegold, Ernesto Grosman, Bob Harrison, Michael Heller, Henry Hills, Peter Inman, Jackson Mac Low, Sharon Mattlin, Bernadette Mayer, Douglas Messerli, Phil niblock, Nick Piombino, Joan Retallack, Barbara Rosenthal, James Sherry, Ron Silliman, Ann Tardos, Fiona Templeton, Lewis Warsh, Barrett Watten, Lee Ann Brown, Andrew Levy, and Charles Bernstein. 4 pm. More information can be had by calling the Project at 212-674-0910, or scanning the Project website at www.poetryproject.com Also, for the sake of possible future forgetfulness, this would be the next months of Mondays: Nov. 9 -- Buck Downs & Judith Goldman Nov. 16 -- Matthew Rohrer & Chris Stroffolino Nov. 23 -- Brett Evans & Sianne Ngai Nov. 30 -- Tonya Foster & Jonathan Skinner Dec. 7 -- Open Mic Dec. 14 -- Janice Lowe & Robert Bove Jan. 11 -- Wendy Kramer & Rachel Levitsky Jan. 25 -- Nava Fader & David Mills ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 08:06:35 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: HAPPINESS Content-Type: text/plain Has anyone seen the movie, HAPPINESS? It's Tolstoy for the 90's (all that UnHappy family business). It's very sharp, critical and frank about sex, social limitations of desire and the repressed animal drive that gets sublimated in such cartoonish, hideous ways. This is by the director of Welcome to the Doll House, a sinister film of adolescent growing pains. Check it out if you like to sweat or feel those butterflies aflutter in your stomach. This film takes the "father/son--man-to-man talk" to a new level. Whew. I'm nervous, bleak. Ouch. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 08:14:30 +0000 Reply-To: arshile@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Salerno Organization: Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts Subject: Arshile Benefit at New College MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Friends: Just a reminder about our Tenth Issue Benefit Reading in San Francisco, as follows: Arshile Benefit Reading at New College of California to be held in the Theater at New College 777 Valencia Street (at 19th Street) San Francisco, California Friday, November 13, 1998, 7:00 p.m. Participants: Edmund Berrigan Sarah Anne Cox Peter Gizzi Nina Glaser Barbara Guest Jack Hirschman Kevin Killian John Laskey Stefanie Marlis Laura Moriarty Carl Rakosi Jocelyn Saidenberg Aaron Shurin Elizabeth Willis We will be asking for a five dollar donation for admission. Hope you will join us. Mark Salerno ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 11:19:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Annie Finch Subject: Petition Comments: To: brandg@email.uc.edu, czaitz@pacbell.net, MUFAC@muohio.edu, Sue_Standing@wheatonma.edu, truscott@muohio.edu, ENG430A@listserv.muohio.edu, 2226.conte@muohio.edu, Sam Gwynn , Pat Mora , RoiFinch@aol.com, y1979-l@aya.yale.edu, eng_emp.mac@muohio.edu, eng_gra.mac@muohio.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The "Stop The Hate" Petition Opening Statement: "As a religious voice, we state strongly that violence on the basis of sexual orientation, race or gender is wrong, is evil, is reprehensible." John Buehrens, President of The Unitarian Universalist Association, speaks for Unitarian Universalists but his words are reflected in the hearts of people everywhere who believe we must speak out, take action against, and condemn hate crimes in all their ugly forms. A resolution follows: WHEREAS: We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and WHEREAS: We commend the efforts of those individuals who dedicate their lives to causes of social justice and human rights; and WHEREAS: We support actions that protect the individual's rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, That we hereby urge the passage of The Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), H.R.3081 and S.1529 (The Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), H.R.3081 and S.1529, would amend current federal law (which permits federal prosecution of a hate crime only if the crime was motivated by bias based on religion, national origin, or color) to include real or perceived sexual orientation, gender, and disability so the FBI would be able to investigate and prosecute violent hate crimes against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Under this bill, hate crimes that cause death or bodily injury because of prejudice can be investigated federally, regardless of whether the victim was exercising a federally protected right. The only way that our representatives can be aware of the base of support for this change to the current law is by making our voices heard. Please add your name to this petition and forward it to friends who believe in what it stands for. The petition will then be forwarded to the President of The United States; the Vice President of the United States; and our United States Senators and House Members. Petition Management: 1 This petition is being passed around the Internet. Please add your name to it so that we can have tougher laws against all hate crimes. Please keep the petition rolling. Do not reply to me. Please sign and forward to others to sign. This is being forwarded to several people at once to add their names . It will not matter if many people receive the same list as the names are being managed. 2 If you print out this petition for signing please email the listing of names with locations to the email address: AllRunique@aol.com (an email address created to receive this petition) Include a note to indicate you have a hand-signed petition and include the number of names listed. 3. If you happen to be the 100th, 150th, 200th, 250th, etc. signer of this petition, please forward a copy to the email address: AllRunique@aol.com 4. If you sign, please pass it on to others. If not, please do not kill it: send it on to the email address: AllRunique@aol.com Thank You Leslie Palmer, UU ... I cannot stay silent, my outrage and compassion will not allow. Note: It is preferable that you Select the entirety of this letter and then COPY it into a new outgoing message, add your name to the bottom of the list, then send it on. Sign Here: 1)=09Leslie Palmer, Jacksonville, FL 2)=09Stephen Silverman, South Burlington, VT 3)=09Mel Harkrader Pine, Reston, VA 4)=09Barry Finkelstein, Arlington, VA 5)=09Roberta Finkelstein, Arlington, VA 6)=09Judy Welles, Carlisle, PA 7)=09Kate Seitz bortner, York, PA 8)=09Len De Roche, Kingston, MA 9)=09Bonnie Vegiard, Danbury CT 10)=09Audree Simer O'Connell, Stockton, CA 11)=09Peter Lach, Stockton, CA 12)=09Nathan Gonzales, Pomona, CA 13)=09Elizabeth Gonzales, Fresno, CA 14)=09Kenneth Fries, Fresno, CA 15)=09Robin Greiner, Fresno, CA 16)=09Nancy Casad, Fresno, CA 17)=09Tom Aitken, Kaimu, HI 18) Carolyn Martinez Golojuch, Makakilo, HI 19) Eleanor M. Binder, Baltimore, MD 20) Susan Stanskas, Fredericksburg, VA 21) Rev. Ellie Atwood-Tarbell, Rochester, NY 22) John Martin, Frankfort, KY 23) Steven Coy, New York, NY 24) Craig Lucas, Putnam Valley, NY 25) Rafael Campo, MD, Jamaica Plain, MA 26) Marilyn Hacker N.Y. N.Y. 27) Annie Finch, Cincinnati, OH ____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________ ________________________ Annie Finch http://muohio.edu/~finchar Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing Miami University Oxford, Ohio 45220 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 11:22:46 -0500 Reply-To: gps12@columbia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Re: Readings at the Poetry Project In-Reply-To: <199811021603.LAA28691@relay.thorn.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Monday, Nov. 2 -- Open reading, 8pm (sign-up at 7:30 pm). Don't bag it > just cuz you call yourself a real poet. Could you let us know if/how much it costs to get in? Thanks, Gary ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 12:10:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: new poets on web site Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" A new selection of poets is now up on the "Poets & Poems" section of the Poetry Project's website at www.poetryproject.com. Check out new work by: Will Alexander Laynie Browne Brian Lucas Kristin Prevallet Also, hot news flash: French poet Olivier Cadiot will now be reading with Harry Mathews at the Project on Wednesday, November 11th. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 11:04:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: 3 quick things MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I wantd to post three quick things. 1) Rachel L: What confession? I never said that I had sex with George Bowering. 2) After posting the updated Yasusada bibliography, I received a warning message about sending attachments to the List. Sorry. 3) The most recent issue of Postmodern Culture (the web journal) has a very interesting-looking essay by Ben Friedlander on (for the most part) Ron Silliman. Much of his commentary (including Prague School-like diagrams of see-saws and senders and receivers) seems to be provoked by RS's essay on "wild form" that is on the EPC. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 12:20:47 -0500 Reply-To: Mark Prejsnar Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: book plug for Hank Lazer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Last week i was giving a lot of attention to Hank's Ealry Days of the Lang Dynasty...I was gonna post here a mini-review, consisting of notes for a possible paper review; then i read Perloff's excellent essay on this chapbook, and she said most of the the things i was gonna point out (including that it is very good).... So, to follow up on Joel's Meow Press caterwaul, i'll mention at least that: Lazer's book is one of the most witty, energetic and distinctive pieces of social/political poetry (it's also meditative poetry, also highly "lyrical") to appear in quite some time. (..came out in 1996 i believe); It's therefore a real steal and i strongly recommend it to folks who haven't seen it... The cats at Meow do really distinctive and beautiful chaps...i don't know of anyone who has made such an art of combining a lovely, recognizeable design-concept with affordability. The cover and design of Lang Dynasty is especially neat, using artwork based on Chinese calligraphy that is closely integrated with the poem. Kudos all around in short.... mark prejsnar ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 19:26:05 +0200 Reply-To: robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lunds universitet Subject: Re: Russian poetry festival Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sorry to join this discussion so late -- there's been some serious voodoo going down with the email server here is soggy Lund, Sweden and I'm only now getting mail sent to me on Friday, but I was really struck by this: Kent Johnson wrote: > I suspect others were fascinatied by Zaviola's post and > would liek to know more about new Russian poetry. A very good place > to begin is with a book I edited called _Third Wave: The New Russian > Poetry_ (Michigan, 1992), wherein a number of the folks Zaviola > mentions appear. The book has a long introduction by Alexei > Parschikov and Andrew Wachtel, great poems and poetics statements by > the contributors, and an afterword essay by Mikhail Epstein _Third Wave_ is a fantastic book, and Epstein's essay a great intro some elements of the Russian scene. Wachtel translated a poem by one of the Third Wavers, Ilya Kutik, for Samizdat #1, and I've been in touch with Masha and Sergei about having a piece on the conference, along with a few poems in translation, in a future issue, possibly as early as December. I had hoped to make it over to St. Petersburg for the conference, but had to make a choice between going there or to the Academy of European Poets festival in Malmo. Despite some good readings in Malmo, I think I should have risked that aeroflot trip to Russia. Bob Robert Archambeau Lund University, Sweden ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 09:59:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: SPT off-site events this weekend Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Small Press Traffic will host two exciting off-site events this weekend. 1. On Friday night--at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts--we'll present a group reading by local residents who knew Jack Spicer. Each will read one of Spicer's poems and talk a bit. Unlike at New College, where we pack people in until the walls bulge, there is limited space at Yerba Buena--so if you're interested in attending I recommend you either call the Yerba Buena ticket office (415-978-ARTS/2787) and buy your ticket in advance--or show up early. Please don't call Yerba Buena's ticket office and try to buy tickets for SPT events held at New College (as a couple of people did). Hello???? 2. On Saturday afternoon--at the Bay Area Book Festival--we'll present a reading by Jay Dillemuth, Lauren Gudath, Rob Halpern, and Sarah Rosenthal. See details below. Dodie ---------------------------- Verse and Vino co-produced with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' In Conversation series (curated by Natasha Boas) Jack Spicer's Ecotopia: a Celebration =46riday, November 6, 7:30 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Lounge 701 Mission Street (at 3rd), San Francisco $5/$3 for seniors & students =46or tickets or information call 978-ARTS/2787 Jack Spicer (1925-1965), one of the most important post-modern poets, was born in Los Angeles but wrote most of his major work here in San Francisco, where he died at age 40. Spicer was a center of an active community of poets and visual artists who roved from North Beach to Aquatic Park, Polk Gulch to Candlestick Park. A passionate environmentalist and city theorist, Spicer wrote: "True conservation is the effort of the artist and the private man to keep things true. . . Death is not final. Only parking lots." Two new books explore Spicer's legacy: The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi, and a biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian (both volumes from Wesleyan University Press/University Presses of New England). Tonight, Ellingham, Gizzi and Killian will appear and discuss their books, then turn over the floor to many of Jack Spicer=B9s contemporaries=8Bartists, writers, thinkers=8Bwho wi= ll each read from his work. "Our city shall stand as the lumber rots and Runcible mountain crumbles, and the ocean, eating all of islands, comes to meet us." Among those reading on this historic occasion will be Jim Alexander David Bromige Wesley Day Lew Ellingham Gerald Fabian Nemi Frost Larry Kearney Joanne Kyger Alvin William Moore Mary Rice Moore John Norton Ariel Parkinson James Schevill Richard Tagett ------------------------------------------------ Saturday, November 7, 3-4 p.m. Bay Area Book Festival Reading Concourse Exhibition Center Brannan between 7th and 8th Streets, San Francisco =46ree with book festival admission ($3) Jay Dillemuth Lauren Gudath Rob Halpern Sarah Rosenthal SPT board members Pamela Lu and Jocelyn Saidenberg have curated an hour's worth of the new generation, the exciting young writers of the Bay Area, at the soi-disant Allen Ginsberg Poetry Cafe, at the Ninth Annual San =46rancisco Bay Area Book Council Festival. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 13:40:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Classicist Pigs In-Reply-To: <19981101232010.18189.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote: > Gabriel Gudding is right! 5). Let me be the first to agree with Mark DuCharme that I am right. I am a clacketing magpie. And that should be respected. I have differences, issues. Things I've sturgled with. And I've sturgled with some pretty hard things. Some old, some new. All hard. I've sturgled hard to even speak up let alone be Speak Out. Some when someone comes along maligning and basically - let's just admit it -- basically kicking in the teeth of experimental poetry and poets who Don't have access to them the means of production, aren't among the elite, who when someone comes out along and does this, I SPEAK OUT. That's right. I do. I speak out. My own background is personal. I have a personal background. And as anyone who has a personal background knows and who has a struggled to find his/her voice and who has had a personal issues, background, compilcated issues, issues that are hard to deal with and having debt with them who has finally learned to hear my own voice, I speak when I speak: and I spoke. I spoke not only for Pritchett, whether that Pritchett was/is Poetry's Pritchett or Poem Pritchett (which is righly retinized as the Johannine Pritchett the first Pritchett of Pete the yes even the Pete of the pope, the first Pete, the Peter the Pope though not that other the Peter the Peter the Great, not that elitist Pete), I spoke for the Pete in all of us, for Peteses everywhere, for Peteses sake, Peteses who don't necessarily have a Voice, who can't even "Pete" themselves let alone Re-peat themselves. And I spoke. I spoke out. In my difference. In my Divarsity. Of my issues. Of my personal past. I spoke because I AM the Poet the Pete: of all Peteses: I am that symbols of American the Beautiful. I am that icom of True Rebellion: rebellion for the Good, not the STATS KWO. Humor is not funny. And Your Mockery, O Mocker, Your Mickery of this most impotent matter -- your mockery of Pete and Poets and Poetry and that thing you said about Laureats and Lariats and Lawrences and the complete Dismal of My accusations and Feelings is offensive and I take Offense at them, and also of your dismal of Other Things as well: your mickery of all these people in ALL their differences and Otherness, is Repregnant and is also Repehensible. We are each chllenged in our own unique way and we have to utilizize these challenges and AUTHORIZE ourselves and spurn ourselves on to TAKE BACK what elitists and classicists have Taken From Us. I feel strongly about this yes. We will TAKE you BACK what has been taken from us and if this means of having a sit down demonstration on your desk, we will stand up and Do It, so be it god. I because we WANT positivity, we WANT to you to respect this. It's true. It's true I've had personal times. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 13:52:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: louis stroffolino Subject: TUSK! (or aerial view of a huckster graveyard) In-Reply-To: <199811021603.LAA28691@relay.thorn.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Where the gash rakes its sleeve in renegade silt and slakes its main squeeze for a spin too rash to be a drag construction hinges and hammers an interest that dipped the focus thing into the fringe of the ground vacuuming up the snarls with the snub to be doubled in punishment and flesh from the relaxation that escaped through the chimney like the opposite of wit in a city small as a century in the meannesss of sleep when there were too many things identical until the firewomen got the sentries to barbecue the icicles and clouds gathered to watch the beautiful fist of summer strip the graveyards from the elephants and pass it off as a typo! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 20:24:51 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michel Delville Subject: URGENT QUERY: Rosmarie Waldrop's address Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Dear listers, Would anybody know how I can get in touch with Rosmarie Waldrop *in Germany* (phone; address; e-mail)? You can backchannel to me-- Thanks for your help. Michel Delville mdelville@ulg.ac.be --------------------------- Michel Delville English Department University of Li=E8ge 3 Place Cockerill 4000 Li=E8ge BELGIUM fax: ++ 32 4 366 57 21 e-mail: mdelville@ulg.ac.be ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 15:00:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: Gary'$ question & ZINC Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Gary Sullivan asked about prices for Project readings & it goes $7 -- General $4 -- Students Free for members This goes for all readings unless otherwise noted. The Hannah Weiner tribute falls under "should have been otherwise noted". Something like free (I think). As well, this Sunday a reading at the Zinc Bar (90 W. Houston; 6:30 pm): Ted Greenwald & Bill Luoma That's a $3 donation Best, anselm berrigan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 16:02:58 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: the zrrow of Kent Muchas gracias, Mr. Kent, for mentioning the Ben Friedlander essay on the on Silliman essay in Postmodern Culture online (available via EPC site, electronic mags section). It was followed by an equally interesting translation of a manifesto on poetry by Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko. Some possibilities there for discussion along the lines of favorite Poetics List chestnuts - form & content, art & politics, Zukofsky, generations, Kerouac... Dragomoschenko more Russian-philosophical, seems to be rather cleverly replaying the "poetry" of postmodernist conundrums (nature of the "I", poetry a disturbance of the "machine" of fulness or totality, etc...) Silliman via Friedlander more typically anglo-american pragmatical (how do literary form and liberation/revolution conjoin, etc...) Boringly reductive here so check the originals... Friedlander approaches the subject (Silliman's essay) with sensible even-handed academic objectivity - no particular axe to grind, just analyzing the way the essay works... I find this stuff fascinating mainly because I disagree so strongly & have to work to discover why... Friedlander's essay is a sort of mini-canonization exercise: elaborating on how Silliman's essay succeeds simply by _expressing_ the oscillation or dialectic between aesthetic liberation on one hand & the problem of political liberation on the other... in my view he is able to do this because there is a para-poetics at work in all poetry - call it a set of unspoken allegiances or values - in this case leftist-materialist - shared both by the academic world & the poetry it canonizes. I'm not condemning this at all - just suggesting that there are other para-poetics based on different allegiances - I have a para-poetics too - it would be interesting to analyze contemporary poets' work not only in terms of what's on the page but by every "move" they make in an ideological frame - - Henry Gould p.s. remember the good old days? so many voices on this list have moved on or clammed up. Mairead has a point about hucksterism. I'm not against the announcements at all - it's just interesting to observe how certain voices gradually move from conversation to announcements over the years.... but perhaps "conversation" is not the right word for the sleight-of-speech that goes on here electronically... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 17:46:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: from the Horde (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - from the Horde - Our name are Heraclitus, be careful, please don't bite us, Or all the world will cease. We've hardly just begun, but we're already done, with dark Parmenides. You might see us faking, the chains we'll be a-breaking, with axiomatics making, a fool of all of these. Sometimes we'll get quite hard, rereading Baudrillard, but that lasts just a minute, there's hardly a thing in it, although he's quite a card. So look towards Irigaray, that's what we've got to say, our ontology she knows, she's soaked with all those flows, and that's the way it goes, or maybe not so hard, you might ask Lyotard, and then where all the gaps were, you might begin to stir, swooping and swaying with forks and knives, looping and flaying with whips and lives, oh that slut, her! Judith Butler! Don't you know that everywhere, you get tangled in pubic hair! We love the telly, radio; we're up above, and down below, we've got no space and have no time, but we can make a theory rhyme. We'll crawl up your leg when you howl and beg, crawl down your arm when you chant a charm. We have no names, not monopoles, not not even holes. We're not monads or churls, nomads or girls, hackers or whirls. We're Her-a-clit-us, to be sure, we're running with fetish, running allure! Catch us in you, there's no sin too! We could go on, but it's your song, you've got bees in your hung lungs, stung! __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 17:58:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Eco and Epstein MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT This rather amazing letter came to me a little while ago from my friend Mikhail Epstein, author of, among numerous other things, the wonderful book of essays _After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture_ (U of Massachussetts P. 1996). This book, by the way, includes a number of fascinating pieces on the current poetry scene in Russia. I foward this with ME's permission. Kent Dear Kent: Reality leaves behind our fantasy. Can you imagine that these very days Russian internet heatedly discusses the question if Mikhail Epstein is an existent person or a hyperauthor most probably created by the mastermind of Umberto Eco? This is not a joke. They even have published a montage of two photographs where I look very much like Umberto Eco would have looked twenty years ago. http://www.russ.ru/journal/travmp/98-10-29/epsht0.htm The noise started after the publication of my article "Informational explosion and the trauma of Postmodernism" to which the editors added a very ambitious subtitle: "On the main law of hisdtory." It's quite a academic article dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the publication of Malthus's demographic bombshell (1798) and formulating a different, now more evident non-demographic disproportion between the arithmetic increase of the span of human life and geometric progression of informational wealth - the growing discrepancy that quickly transforms each human being into an idiot. Postmodernism is treated in the article as an outcome of this traumatic experience, producing superficial perception of signs and destroying their connection with the signifieds, creating the theories of hyperreality, simulacrum, difference-deference, etc. (Trauma, in contemporary terms, is the split before signs and signifieds and the removal of the latter into the unconscious). Postmodern "simulacrum" is the next stage of the traumatic process that Marxist tradition described as "alienation" and Existentialism, as "discommunication"-- the 3 progressive forms of incommensurability between an individual and the species, a human being and the humankind. That's simple. In the 2-3 last weeks, more than 100 reviews and responses were added to the publication of this article in "Russian Journal," the most reputable Russian intellectual journal on the Web, and the question finally focused on the question of the author's identity. Does Mikhail Epstein (ME!) exist? How can he prove his existence? Who is behind him? Eco is the most probable candidate famous for his hyperauthorial devices... This is how creation of hyperauthors brings forth the effect of boomerang on the creators themselves, presenting them as hyperauthors of some more primary creators, etc. Isn't this an applied theological argument leading to the Primary Cause? Cordially yours, Misha ********************************************************* Mikhail N. Epstein, REEALC (Dept. of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures) 121 Trimble Hall, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA tel. (404)727-2594 fax: (404) 727-2903 e-mail: russmne@emory.edu Home page: http:/www.emory.edu/INTELNET/Index.html Russian pages and virtual library (in Russian) http://www.russ.ru/antolog/INTELNET/rus_ukaz.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 18:18:49 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: Eco and Epstein MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit note that the link to Mikhail Epstein's homepage is missing a backslash & should read: http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/Index.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 20:38:14 -0500 Reply-To: mgk3k@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: from "A. Jenn Sondheim" at Nov 1, 98 08:08:59 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'll be giving a paper on David Blair's WAX, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (session 474). WAX, for those not in the know, is a hypermedia environment (and before that, an electronic film). To the best of my knowledge, it is the largest single creative hypermedia environment extant today (over 2000 nodes and 25,000 links), as well as one of the oldest (its earliest incarnations pre-date the Web) and wonderfully thick and layered (text, images, sound, video, 3-D models, MOO-spaces, and soon, real audio/video streams, all stacked atop one another); see . I'll also be chairing a panel (529) on strategies for supporting new media teaching and research in traditional humanities settings. Speakers are Randy Bass, Neil Fraistat, David Gants, Diane Kresja, and Joe Tabbi. Matt ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:49:04 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: special collections--contemporary experimental MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit DOES anyone happen to know if there is a list compiled of special collections that are actively collecting experimental small press, complete with contact information? If none exist would be a great service for this list to compile such a document Miekal ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:11:36 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental In-Reply-To: <363E28B4.3527@mwt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I second that. Miekal, there is one list at the back of Joan Lyons's ARTIST'S BOOKS: A SOURCEBOOK AND ANTHOLOGY, which has something of a crossover potential for both experimental 'language' books and more specifically "artist's books" -- but that list is pretty out of date. It has been a beginning to many, though. I have a list of libraries more interested in rather deluxe letterpress 'fine press' books, which has never been ideal for Chax, but it has helped. After tomorrow, I leave for a week, and I can't get it together to post a list to poetics tomorrow, but I'll be glad to do so later in November, if others will do the same. It would actually be good to develop a list of special collections, book dealers and bookstores interested in such works, and perhaps private collectors -- if it's known that the collector wouldn't mind being on such a distributed list -- some would mind. I think the library collections have decreased in the last twenty years to some extent, due to library budget cuts and probably for other reasons as well. thanks for suggesting this, miekal -- charles (who always remembers fondly living about a block from miekal) At 09:49 PM 11/2/98 +0000, you wrote: >DOES anyone happen to know if there is a list compiled of special >collections that are actively collecting experimental small press, >complete with contact information? If none exist would be a great >service for this list to compile such a document > >Miekal > > chax press : alexander writing/design/publishing chax@theriver.com http://alexwritdespub.com/chax 520 620 1626 (phone) 520 620 1636 (fax) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:08:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: MLA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit See! I knew ya'll were up the something. Thanks to everyone for posting their MLA doings-to-come. (And please chime in if you haven't already. . .) Kathy Lou David Kellogg wrote: > > I'll be doing a paper on Bunting on the last morning of MLA. Panel on > "the British pocket epic." > > Cheers, > David > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > David Kellogg Duke University > kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Program in Writing and Rhetoric > (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 > FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:12:29 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: lip(s)tick MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Another case of lipstick--Lipstick Eleven No. 1 that is--is on its way tomorrow. So to all you lovely loves who have ordered, love is on the way back at ya! And if you like our little home for experimental writing (and of course we hope you do) send submissions for No. 2 by January 15, 1999--it's sooner, or eh, later, than you think. Thanks, Kathy Lou Schultz Lipstick Eleven 42 Clayton Street San Francisco, CA 94117-1110 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 02:17:00 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Miekal, Charles Another good thing to do would be to round up our funds for Baker & Taylor with a few others so that anyone who asks for an author in a public library would have all the titles show up. Rather than someone assuming it doesn't exist or going to the Bowker books to find it then showing to the librarian. Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 02:22:25 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: books MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Anyone-- I have a lit journal I'm producing which I need perfect bound for cheap. 500 copies, 6 by 9 looks like it will measure to 72 pages. 50lb inside, 80 cover. Flat cover is fine, single (paper) color. Any suggestions which will get me around a dollar a copy? Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 02:23:02 -0500 Reply-To: Tom Orange Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: silliman's wild form In-Reply-To: <199811030503.AAA14702@juliet.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, Henry Gould writes: "Friedlander's essay is a sort of mini-canonization exercise: elaborating on how Silliman's essay succeeds simply by _expressing_ the oscillation or dialectic between aesthetic liberation on one hand & the problem of political liberation on the other... in my view he is able to do this because there is a para-poetics at work in all poetry - call it a set of unspoken allegiances or values - in this case leftist-materialist - shared both by the academic world & the poetry it canonizes." as i read him, friedlander is torn as to whether or not silliman's essay succeeds. the see-saw gives ben a very appropriate structural model for exposing the argumentative underpinnings of silliman's text, from the micro-level of the sentence to the macro-level of gestures characteristic of silliman's overall poetics, namely the setting up of opposing concepts or stances that refuse stabilization and instead invite a paratactic stacking of additional stances that are ultimately (dare i say?) torqued into incommensurability. the result is confusion rather than intelligible argumentation. ben's bottom line on "wild form" -- that "the effort involved is remarkable, and retains intellectual force on a global scale despite the local failure of this or that attempt at transformation" -- hardly renders the essay an unqualified success. (what he says of /tjanting/, namely that "the architectural plan remains sound even if the building erected on that plan's basis fails to meet code," is, i think equally applicable to "wild form.") now if by mini-canonization you mean taking what might otherwise be considered a "minor text" -- "wild form" is only four or so pages long -- and reading it as symptomatic of a larger "para-poetics" as you say, i agree -- this is the analyzing every move in an ideological frame you speak of. (one of the comments from the audience at last year's louisville conference where ben gave an earlier version of this essay was that "wild form" wasn't worth the time and effort!) but i don't think ben's line of critique here is "in allegiance with" any leftist-materialist values specific to silliman -- or "the academic world," if one could be so specific there. if anything it's posing a challenge to what might be thought of as classic poststructuralist argumentations and politics of poetic form... t. tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 08:21:41 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Marie Schmid Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: <363E8FB6.34D@worldnet.att.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hi all: Another "non-poetic" paper presentation: I'll be giving a paper on unionizing the academic workplace on a panel called "Is Our Labor Academic?" The panel is has been organized by the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA and other panelists are Cary Nelson, Kirsten Christensen, and Ian Marshall. The panel will be chaired by Mark Kelley. Hope to see some of you there. Julie Schmid Department of English University of Iowa ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:10:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "W. Freind" Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: <363E8FB6.34D@worldnet.att.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'm giving two: one on Yasusada, and one on Bataille. Bill Freind On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, Kathy Lou Schultz wrote: > See! I knew ya'll were up the something. Thanks to everyone for posting > their MLA doings-to-come. (And please chime in if you haven't already. . > .) > Kathy Lou > > > David Kellogg wrote: > > > > I'll be doing a paper on Bunting on the last morning of MLA. Panel on > > "the British pocket epic." > > > > Cheers, > > David > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > David Kellogg Duke University > > kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Program in Writing and Rhetoric > > (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 > > FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:09:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: GROBERTS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU Subject: Re: MLA MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII I am giving a paper in the three panel series on "Poetic Language" sponsored by the Division for Linguistic Approaches to Literature. My paper on the word "now" in Paradise Lost and the Prelude is scheduled for Tuesday, 12/29, 7-9 pm, session 701. Perhaps panelists might consider this list as a place to work out kinks in their presentations? I am already reading Oppen's collected, and Duncan's Bending the Bow with the panel-topics in mind. Gary R. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:50:22 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: Re: MLA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Hi Y'all! I'm giving a paper on the word "engine" in Sade's major works (rev it up, Big Boy). And I'm going to prove how the disassociation of the sign from the signified has really made us into wretched little brownie nose beings. Then I will prove, conclusively, that Henry Gould is the only living poet with peeves in his pocket, and then maybe Ron Silliman will return from World Tour and answer the simple question: does personality affect the line within given geographical regions? > >I am giving a paper in the three panel series on "Poetic Language" >sponsored by the Division for Linguistic Approaches to Literature. My >paper on the word "now" in Paradise Lost and the Prelude is scheduled >for Tuesday, 12/29, 7-9 pm, session 701. > >Perhaps panelists might consider this list as a place to work out kinks >in their presentations? I am already reading Oppen's collected, and >Duncan's Bending the Bow with the panel-topics in mind. > >Gary R. > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:44:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Loss Pequen~o Glazier" Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental In-Reply-To: <363E28B4.3527@mwt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Miekal, Any major library will have a copy of the following. It covers every subject but if you nose around "poetry" and "literature" you'll come up with a few interesting libraries and good contact information. Phone the library first to make sure you are sending it to an individual who is still in their employ. I don't think a lot of libraries are collecting extensively. Worse yet I suspect even less money is available these days since libraries seem in a frenzy to purchase expensive "general purpose" databases from huge corporate information providers. Loss TITLE: Subject collections : a guide to special book collections and subject emphases as reported by university, college, public, and special libraries and museums in the United States and Canada / compiled by Lee Ash and William G. Miller, with the collaboration of Barry Scott, Kathleen Vickery, and Beverley McDonough. AUTHOR: Ash, Lee. EDITION: 7th ed., rev. and enl. PUBLISHED: New Providence, N.J. : R.R. Bowker, c1993. At 09:49 PM 11/2/98 +0000, you wrote: >DOES anyone happen to know if there is a list compiled of special >collections that are actively collecting experimental small press, >complete with contact information? If none exist would be a great >service for this list to compile such a document > >Miekal > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:25 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Loss the citation you enclose is a good lead for sniffing out possibilities but I think Im more interested in hearing from publishers out there who have first hand contact with such archives & collections. maria & I did a little brainstorming a few weeks ago & came up with a list of "suspects", tho this list is very incomplete & has yet to be confirmed & contact information has yet to be assembled (perhaps the book Loss mentions will make this job easy). I enclose our list as a basis for beginning a compilation. SUNY-Purchase University of New Mexico-Albuquerque Bard College Goddard Stanford SUNY-Albany San Francisco St Naropa University of Texas-Austin University of Maine-Orono University of Pennsylvannia-Philadelphia Lamont Library-Harvard Columbia New School Bienecke Library-Yale University of Iowa-Iowa City University of Tulsa University of Alberta Simon Fraser University UCLA UC-Santa Cruz San Francisco Public Library Little Magazine Collection the following pretty much collect all of Xexoxial's output: University College-London UK MOMA SUNY-Buffalo University of Wisconsin-Madison UC-San Diego also there would seem to be a whole sector of special collections that interface visual-verbal, sound poetry, performance poetry with the visual arts such as the Getty. others? miekal ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 11:42:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: <19981103155023.7942.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I'm giving a paper on the word "of" in "Leaves of Grass." I'm also hoping to get a grant, or at least a subsidy from my university, to buy up all the publications offered on this list and display them in a little wooden case in that room beside the bar, you know the one, Russell Edson is working on my preliminary designs in bog oak or so he assures me at any rate. Another project is to videotape ALL the EXPERIMENTAL readings taking place nationwide all in one frantic week. PLEASE everyone: info on cheap airline tickets/organizations sympathetic to this type of venture would be most welcome. And by the way, my dissertation (Consumerism and American Poetics: the Field Is Ripe for the Dollar Crop) is available at my website: http://www.$.prairie.beads/html On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Dale Smith wrote: > Hi Y'all! I'm giving a paper on the word "engine" in Sade's major works > (rev it up, Big Boy). And I'm going to prove how the disassociation of > the sign from the signified has really made us into wretched little > brownie nose beings. Then I will prove, conclusively, that Henry Gould > is the only living poet with peeves in his pocket, and then maybe Ron > Silliman will return from World Tour and answer the simple question: > does personality affect the line within given geographical regions? > > > > > >I am giving a paper in the three panel series on "Poetic Language" > >sponsored by the Division for Linguistic Approaches to Literature. My > >paper on the word "now" in Paradise Lost and the Prelude is scheduled > >for Tuesday, 12/29, 7-9 pm, session 701. > > > >Perhaps panelists might consider this list as a place to work out kinks > >in their presentations? I am already reading Oppen's collected, and > >Duncan's Bending the Bow with the panel-topics in mind. > > > >Gary R. > > > > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 08:58:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hilton Manfred Obenzinger Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Of Engine Now Why do they mock the word? Why does the word mock them? May Satan suck their engines With intimations of their turds. Milton Wordsworth Obenzinger On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Mairead Byrne wrote: > I'm giving a paper on the word "of" in "Leaves of Grass." I'm also hoping > to get a grant, or at least a subsidy from my university, to buy up all > the publications offered on this list and display them in a little wooden > case in that room beside the bar, you know the one, Russell Edson > is working on my preliminary designs in bog oak or so he assures me at > any rate. Another project is to videotape ALL the EXPERIMENTAL readings > taking place nationwide all in one frantic week. PLEASE everyone: info on > cheap airline tickets/organizations sympathetic to this type of venture > would be most welcome. And by the way, my dissertation (Consumerism and > American Poetics: the Field Is Ripe for the Dollar Crop) is available at > my website: http://www.$.prairie.beads/html > > On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Dale Smith wrote: > > > Hi Y'all! I'm giving a paper on the word "engine" in Sade's major works > > (rev it up, Big Boy). And I'm going to prove how the disassociation of > > the sign from the signified has really made us into wretched little > > brownie nose beings. Then I will prove, conclusively, that Henry Gould > > is the only living poet with peeves in his pocket, and then maybe Ron > > Silliman will return from World Tour and answer the simple question: > > does personality affect the line within given geographical regions? > > > > > > > > > >I am giving a paper in the three panel series on "Poetic Language" > > >sponsored by the Division for Linguistic Approaches to Literature. My > > >paper on the word "now" in Paradise Lost and the Prelude is scheduled > > >for Tuesday, 12/29, 7-9 pm, session 701. > > > > > >Perhaps panelists might consider this list as a place to work out kinks > > >in their presentations? I am already reading Oppen's collected, and > > >Duncan's Bending the Bow with the panel-topics in mind. > > > > > >Gary R. > > > > > > > > > ______________________________________________________ > > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:34:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Wheeler Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To add -- Fales Library at NYU has begun to collect/archive a lot of what used to be called "ephemerals" as well as small-press work under the excuse of a "downtown" writers' archive. >I enclose our list as a basis for beginning a compilation. > >SUNY-Purchase >University of New Mexico-Albuquerque >Bard College >Goddard >Stanford >SUNY-Albany >San Francisco St >Naropa >University of Texas-Austin >University of Maine-Orono >University of Pennsylvannia-Philadelphia >Lamont Library-Harvard >Columbia >New School >Bienecke Library-Yale >University of Iowa-Iowa City >University of Tulsa >University of Alberta >Simon Fraser University >UCLA >UC-Santa Cruz >San Francisco Public Library Little Magazine Collection > >the following pretty much collect all of Xexoxial's output: > >University College-London UK >MOMA >SUNY-Buffalo >University of Wisconsin-Madison >UC-San Diego > >also there would seem to be a whole sector of special collections that >interface visual-verbal, sound poetry, performance poetry with the >visual arts such as the Getty. others? > >miekal > > Susan Wheeler susan.wheeler@nyu.edu voice/fax (212) 254-3984 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:36:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Kelleher Subject: Re: special collections--contemporary experimental MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Miekal, et al I worked for a year at the Segue foundation in New York collecting materials for their experimental poetry collection. It focused mainly on stuff written in the last twenty years. Small, existing in the basement offices of Roof books, but conatins a few gems like Greniers sentences, etc. The new curator is Max Winter and the phone number at Segue (you need an appointment to view the collection) is 212.674.0199. Mike ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:25:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pete Neufeld Subject: melodeon poetry systems-- chapbook announcement MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" We're doing a series of 8 chapbooks by young, Bay Area poets working in and out of the multiple traditions of experimental writing, the first two of which are currently available-- Sarah Rosenthal's _not-chicago_ and Travis Ortiz' _geography of parts_ -- the next two installments in the series will be Tricia Roush's _Books of Danger_ and Jono Schneider's _Walking & Talking_ available, well, sometime after Dec. 1 and before the end of the year. Each book sells for $6.00 plus $1.50 postage, but, in the spirit of free trade, we'll pay postage on listserv orders and those of you with the vision to purchase all four, well, we'll cut four bucks for the total sale price of $20.00. Also-- the next issue (#3) of _melodeon_ is due in December's window with, among others-- Tricia Roush, Cole Swenson, Kit Robinson, trans. by Andrew Joron and Chris Daniels, Edmund Berrigan, Emily Grossman, Stephen Ratcliffe, E. Tracy Grinnel-- and some people I'm sure I'm leaving out. This issue goes for $3 and listys get postage on the house-- issue #2 is also still available. melodeon poetry systems c/o Pete Neufeld 3573 19th Street San Francisco, CA 94110 pls make checks payable to me, not the name of the press. Thanks. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:46:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: MLA, Cornell Hire in Poetry In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 1. This is a terribly indiscreet post but what the heck right. 2. In case any of you are interested in a job teaching the creative writing aspects of poetry here at Cornell, you should know: 3. That Cornell is hiring. They've got a new line for a poet hire. 4. This is a major big deal for the department. It's happening fast; so fast the department's not had sufficient time to properly advertise. 5. So, since advertising has been in the air this past week on the list, I thought you should all know HERE'S A JOB. 6. The only catch is your resume and papers (manuscripts and whathaveyou) must be postmarked by THIS FRIDAY (though it's probably ok to be a few days late). 7. And do me a favor: DON'T TELL THEM I SENT YOU. 8. Good luck. Gabe On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Hilton Manfred Obenzinger wrote: > Of Engine Now > > Why do they mock the word? > Why does the word mock them? > May Satan suck their engines > With intimations of their turds. > > Milton Wordsworth Obenzinger > > > On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Mairead Byrne wrote: > > > I'm giving a paper on the word "of" in "Leaves of Grass." I'm also hoping > > to get a grant, or at least a subsidy from my university, to buy up all > > the publications offered on this list and display them in a little wooden > > case in that room beside the bar, you know the one, Russell Edson > > is working on my preliminary designs in bog oak or so he assures me at > > any rate. Another project is to videotape ALL the EXPERIMENTAL readings > > taking place nationwide all in one frantic week. PLEASE everyone: info on > > cheap airline tickets/organizations sympathetic to this type of venture > > would be most welcome. And by the way, my dissertation (Consumerism and > > American Poetics: the Field Is Ripe for the Dollar Crop) is available at > > my website: http://www.$.prairie.beads/html > > > > On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Dale Smith wrote: > > > > > Hi Y'all! I'm giving a paper on the word "engine" in Sade's major works > > > (rev it up, Big Boy). And I'm going to prove how the disassociation of > > > the sign from the signified has really made us into wretched little > > > brownie nose beings. Then I will prove, conclusively, that Henry Gould > > > is the only living poet with peeves in his pocket, and then maybe Ron > > > Silliman will return from World Tour and answer the simple question: > > > does personality affect the line within given geographical regions? > > > > > > > > > > > > > >I am giving a paper in the three panel series on "Poetic Language" > > > >sponsored by the Division for Linguistic Approaches to Literature. My > > > >paper on the word "now" in Paradise Lost and the Prelude is scheduled > > > >for Tuesday, 12/29, 7-9 pm, session 701. > > > > > > > >Perhaps panelists might consider this list as a place to work out kinks > > > >in their presentations? I am already reading Oppen's collected, and > > > >Duncan's Bending the Bow with the panel-topics in mind. > > > > > > > >Gary R. > > > > > > > > > > > > > ______________________________________________________ > > > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > > > > > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:59:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Latta Subject: Re: MLA, Cornell Hire in Poetry In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Here's the MLA posting: Assistant Professor--Creative Writing (Poetry) The Department of English seeks a poet with a distinguished publication record and a history of excellence in teaching. The appointment begins in August 1999. The successful candidate will teach creative writing at the undergraduate level and in our M.F.A. program, supervise M.F.A. dissertations, and might also teach courses in literature and expository writing. Please send a letter of application, c.v., dossier, and a writing sample to Jonathan Culler, Chair, 256 Goldwin Smith Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14853-3201. Application should be postmarked by November 9th. Cornell University is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and people of color are encouraged to apply. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 11:13:44 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pete Neufeld Subject: Reading this Thursday MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I'd like to announce that Eric Frost and Tricia Roush will be reading at New College's Cultural Center (between 18th and 19th on Valencia directly across the street from the theater space) on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. (unlike the MLA-- free). I encourage those in the area to attend-- Pete ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:17:14 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chicago Review Subject: Forthcoming Chicago Review Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A double issue of Chicago Review will go on sale in a few weeks. You may reserve your copy now by mailing $8, payable to Chicago Review, to the address at the bottom of your screen. Subscriptions are $18 per volume. Volume 44, Numbers 3 & 4 Contents: --Special section on the poetry of Peter Dale Scott, author of Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle, and noted critic of US foreign policy. Section includes three new cantos from "Minding the Darkness," the third volume in Scott's epic trilogy. Essayists include Alan Williamson and David Gewanter. --Special section on the life of Basil Bunting. Contributors are Tom Pickard, "The Lives of Basil Bunting"; Colin Simms, "The Bunting Tapes"; Bill Griffiths, "Basil Bunting and Eric Mottram"; and John Seed, "An English Objectivist?" Includes SUNYAB archival photos of BB from the 1970s and 1980s. --Poetry Hank Lazer Tomaz Salamun Matthew Rohrer Greg Miller Ciaran Carson Eleanor Wilner Cole Swenson Connie Deanovich Mark Salerno John Morris --Essays Matthew Rohrer on Tomaz Salamun Michael Heller on William Bronk William Olsen on Frank Bidart Harriet Zinnes on Yayoi Kusama Plus fiction, reviews, and notes & comments. Chicago Review is an international journal of writing and critical exchange, published quarterly by the University of Chicago. Andrew Rathmann, Editor -------------- Chicago Review 5801 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago IL 60637-1794 ph/fax 773.702.0887 chicago-review@uchicago.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:32:13 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Joe Ross Reading in L.A. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Next reading at Loyola Marymount University is: Joe Ross Tuesday Nov. 10 7:30 PM Hilton 300 A & B 7900 Loyola Blvd. (near LAX) don't miss it! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:11:55 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Re: MLA, Cornell Hire in Poetry, etc. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Assistant Professor--Creative Writing (Poetry) > The Department of English seeks a poet with a distinguished >publication record and a history of excellence in teaching. now this is interesting -- an "entry-level" position that obviously requires one who has "already" entered -- of course, with the ever-accelerating abuse of "part-time" employment in academia, there are no doubt hundreds of people who will qualify under this description -- but something tells me Cornell's idea of a "distinguished publication record" isn't mine -- for that matter, i suspect that their idea of "a history of excellence in teaching" isn't mine either anyway, I, too, will speak at MLA -- session # 640 -- Tuesday 11/29 Ann duCille, Manthia Diawara and I will discuss, it says here, "Redrawing the Boundaries of Black Literature and Culture" if you feel redrawn, come on by ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:04:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Poetry in Translation In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19981103131153.006cb600@popmail.lmu.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The translation conference at Stevens November 13-15 will mostly concern poetry. I'll send details in a couple of days. Wonderful poets, wonderful poetry -- Chinese, French, Russian, Greek, etc., etc., etc. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dorothy Trujillo Subject: B.Gyson Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" re: Gyson interest on Buffalo Poetics list. The Brion Gyson show will not, unfortunately be coming to Vancouver. The only other galleries that are definately (AT THIS TIME) having the show are in Winnipeg and Saskatoon. Bruce Grenville, the curator, says there are hopes of having it travel to Montreal, Mexico and perhaps 'Europe' but nothing is firm yet. The book is expected in January, however. The reasons for it not coming to Vancouver are spatial/temporal as there is a lot of interest in it here. The exhibition space requirements are 6000 square feet and the exhibition schedules of galleries able to accommodate this are full during the time frame needed.RATS. Bruce Grenville is a curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and I thought we would be able to have the show but them's the snags. All Best, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:38:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dorothy Trujillo Subject: gysin tour Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Pardon my spelling idiocy in previous posting. I was having trouble enough with Winnipeg, neglecting Gysin. Anyway. Just as I was mucking THAT up, the curator emailed me exhibition dates, to date, as follows: Gysin Tour Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon May 7 - July 4th 1999 Winnipeg Art Gallery Jan - March 2000 Museo Carillo Gil, Mexico City unconfirmed The Edmonton Art Gallery is co-ordinating the tour. Catherine Crowston is the senior curator. All Best, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 23:39:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Erik Sweet Subject: Tool A Magazine.../John Wieners ??? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hello all: Just like to announce a party on December 4th at Segue in NYC celebrating the second issue of "Tool a Magazine" the # 2 issue will feature great poems from a variety of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Brian Lucas, Eleni Sikelianos, Brenda Coultas, Todd Moore, Paul Metcalf, Kenneth Koch, plus more more....the party..is on a Friday night around 7PM The # 2 issue will be out on this date. The party so far will feature readings by Brian Lucas, Sean Killian, Jorge Clar plus a few more so plan ahead! On the topic of John Wieners..just reading "Cultural Affairs in Boston" and wondering if Wieners has given any readings lately... Erik Sweet ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 00:30:30 -0500 Reply-To: shana Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: shana Subject: MaLAdy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit So, I'll be chairing a panel on the significance of the "1-2-3-4-5" song and cartoon often featured on Sesame Street, as well as a thesis titled, "kent johnson makes a great potted plant." It will be brought to you by the letter S and the number 7. Seriously, did anyone read the Atlantic Monthly? If so, did he/she/they (note, there are pronoun options here) notice that both the plumly and rabinowitz poems in there used the words "crystal" and "facet" in two consecutive lines? I thought that was weird. Or maybe it's just a facet of my OCD. I'm going to go wash my hands now. shana "How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. Grace. Love.Take care of us. Please."--C.K.Williams ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 01:10:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: special collections--contemporary experiemental In-Reply-To: <199811040501.AAA26108@juliet.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII should put in a good word for the poetry holdings at kent state university. not much, to my knowledge, in the way of bookworks or multimedia, but very solid in small press poetry from the past 30 or so years. was there a few afternoons ago drooling, so to speak, over early coolidge stuff, signed copy of "oflengths" from a '73 tottel's, signed copy of the '67 eponymous chap, etc... t. tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 01:20:03 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: papers etc In-Reply-To: <01J3QEAUC05U03U3YE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jee, all this news about papers. I gave two papers in Indianapolis last week, one on Ondaatje's fiction and one on Blaser's poetry. This was for the midwest group of USAmericans who study CanLit. Indianapolis on Friday night in the dead middle of town, is deserted. Most of downtown is parking structures. There are still Vonneguts in the phone book, though. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:37:21 -0500 Reply-To: BANDREWS@prodigy.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: BETSY ANDREWS Subject: It's the same story since the beginning of creation... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The easy Yankee's victory parade and the uneasy Mideast peace agreement collided on the NYT front page last week. (Clinton cleansing his image, going Virginal again. Paper says, "Clinton didn't blink.") Here's a comment on that: SLEEPWALK History shed its elliptic dress, crawled down the onion- skin hall of creation and slept with the toddling flesh. Wan and hairless, we've scrambled since then from the thorny proscenium leaf. On dilated ponds beyond manicured plots of gospel, we steal and slide. Either side of parted waters, sleep-taught children grind chalkmark hoops at their thighs, ticker-tapes of yolky dominion, provisos glazed in ghost. At the museum of street signs to razed expectation, the wrecking crew plays at host. Twixt rube and con hangs gambit, the cross at the corner of demon and priest where the choirboy genuflects at the bumper of the semi- nal claptrap of sleep. Late morning traffic of absolutism, primrose defile 'round the living room couch where the Virgin lays eggs bloated as eyeballs, presidential as dead trout; to the stygian shores of chosen retention where the rabbis wring their tongues; to the Wall of volitionally bloodied noses; to the bullet-proof phylactery; home-run past the dozer beneath the artillery pulpit, discharging forty rapid-fire winks in his dutiful helmet. At bat with the somniloquacious book- keeper, the Virgin is an addict of vesper's raw meat, and his old wife demures at his wake. We keep vigil by the red millenial stock, but the profits of dewy dreams all rise when the oracle is state-subsidized. Oil and blood, it's blood, that's what it is. Aunt poli- shes a switch for the glossolalial brat, for the jail- bird of high-pitched espionage who dreams history a long-toothed cat, the thorn in its paw the standard disorder: Lying dogs howl while they nap. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:44:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Conte Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: RongRong the Archive MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------83171DE0573A9095D60E7C90" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------83171DE0573A9095D60E7C90 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I recall that the New York Dada of the early teens published several short-lived journals--The Blind Man, and RongRong--that are now safely archived in places like the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo. But the Dadaists also felt that institutions like archives, libraries, and museums were the crypts of art. Only the dead went there. It strikes me as antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde for an "experimental magazine" to aspire to be archived. What possible motive could there be for "innovative" writing to be housed in a glass case in an inaccessible location for the readers of eighty years hence to marvel at the audacity of? Do these archives actually _pay_ for the subscriptions sent to them? Or do you have to give it away for free? Joseph Conte --------------83171DE0573A9095D60E7C90 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; name="vcard.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: Card for Conte, Joseph Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="vcard.vcf" begin: vcard fn: Joseph Conte n: Conte;Joseph org: SUNY at Buffalo adr;dom: Department of English;;306 Clemens Hall;Buffalo;New York;14260-4610; email;internet: jconte@acsu.buffalo.edu title: Associate Professor tel;work: (716) 645-2575 x1009 tel;fax: (716) 645-5980 tel;home: www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jconte/ x-mozilla-cpt: ;0 x-mozilla-html: FALSE version: 2.1 end: vcard --------------83171DE0573A9095D60E7C90-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:27:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "J. Kuszai" Subject: archive this MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Joseph makes a good point about the desire to be swept under the archival carpet, where everything is far in the past. Seems an odd community to aspire to, even with the dead droppings giving us permissions. Get what you play for. "If he could have only known the committee was going to vote him into the hall of fame, maybe he would have held on a little longer." Watching his induction ceremony from above, takes a deep breath, sighs relief. The celestial madhouse that ranks poetry above food or drink steers poets to this dreadful end. That ranks hanging out with other poets above all other earthly criteria, even when it means putting up with the morania and overt hostility generated by some of our most obsessively respondant participants. On the other side of things, I often think about Archive mailing lists as sales-organs, and I have a "special collections" list that could be exported to a variety of field-delimited formats. I agree with Charles that this should not be broadcast here. I was told that my list, which was given to me several years ago was of "buying libraries." And it is between 50-60 names/addresses in N.A. (US and Canada). I would like to see an international list. And I know mine is not perfect. I have some updates. Only one library responded to my 50 first mp books (and 20 ephemera) subscription/ad (something no longer in effect) Still, I think that was a good deal for them and am surprised that more libraries didn't respond. I hope the awareness such a mailing brings will lead to increased sales at SPD, but I have no way of knowing as I don't know how many library orders they receive for Meow Press. I have sent out free samples, often as gifts to the library workers, and this is sucessful in the sense of immediate impact and good vibes, but not in terms of long term sales (it is also a difficult thing to sustain in an operation/budget like mine). As I have reverted to a print as needed production system, I generally have less copies to circulate for free as I used to. And frankly, this has been the basis of the success of my project: the ability to give away 100 or so copies of a chapbook over the course of a year or so, and really only a small percentage of people are willing to spend money on chapbooks--this economy existing very much on exchange and gratis, so much that even asking for help has become hucksterism. Indeed, my sense was that Miekal wants to sell some books, or maybe that's just how I read it. It is not easy to find people willing to buy this product that is as far from "profitable" as you can get in this kind of economic system. The amount of money "coming in" to MP doesn't cover my expenses in terms of material, which is good, because the purpose of my press has been to minimize the costs--and I'd be obliged to generate lots of excess cultural-product if I had a million dollars and a silicon-graphics workstation. It doesn't even cover mail costs, nevermind compensate for the hours it takes to assemble, etc., the books. But I'm not simply making these books to generate cultural capital. Or to hoist up some spectacle of pure-poetry for people to snicker at. But that doesn't mean that the economics of this are by any means more important. I'd be happy to trade lists with people if we could come up with some terms/mechanism for the exchange. BTW- I've had much more luck dealing with individuals both over the email channels and also from mass mailings. Not many people stumble over the website, and I don't know how to market actively on the web. Direct mailings to a pretty focused group of people has had good results and is worth doing annually, though it is much work and the intial "stamp" investment is a real shock. Also- I'd be happy to take this discussion to a backchannel cc list if it meant no more interruption by the meanies. Steve Dickison had circulated a list of publishers I'd like to actively involve in a publisher's roundtable. In fact, it might be worth reaching out to Steve D., who is a major resource we are about to lose ... any thoughts-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:20:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim McCrary Subject: Re: gysin tour Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit DORTHY...was good to see your post as we here at Burroughs Communications have been involved, obviously. I had back channeled to respond to some Gysin questions earlier. Our associate Jose Ferez is in London now and I will forward your schedule, although he may already have it by now. Our regrets that Vancover didnt have show. I hope to see it somewhere, sometime as well. all best, Jim McCrary ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 23:36:13 -0400 Reply-To: efristr1@nycap.rr.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Fristrom Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit SUNYA's magazine "The Little Magazine" doesn't aspire to be in libraries. It aspires to be packed away in big boxes in the basement of SUNYA (or covertly in other basements). Still, what subscription money we have received--particularly in terms of subscriptions--mostly comes from libraries. That is, until we switched to CD-ROM (digital encryption?). Now, few people know where to shelve us. Go thin and people will hate you. (And don't publish for a year and people will hate you. Rumor has it though that the new CD is on its way. What rough beast comes snorkling up the Hudson? Hmmm?) Joseph Conte wrote: > But the Dadaists also felt that institutions like archives, libraries, > > and museums were the crypts of art. Only the dead went there. > > It strikes me as antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde for an > "experimental magazine" to aspire to be archived. What possible > motive > could there be for "innovative" writing to be housed in a glass case > in > an inaccessible location for the readers of eighty years hence to > marvel > at the audacity of? > > Do these archives actually _pay_ for the subscriptions sent to them? > Or > do you have to give it away for free? > > Joseph Conte > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:30:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim McCrary Subject: Re: gysin tour Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit sorry about that...uh...add my name to the offensive. jim mccrary ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:23:24 -0500 Reply-To: Mark Wallace Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: The Letters of Mina Harker Comments: cc: Bellamy and Killian MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hello listfolks: I just wanted to note, in case it hasn't been done already, that Dodie Bellamy's LETTERS FROM MINA HARKER, published this year by Hard Press, really seems to me one of the best books of the year. Energetic, outrageous, precise, and so funny that there are certain lines that I laugh AGAIN every time I think about them. It's quite a genre-busting book too--epistolary novel? prose poem? social criticism or dramtatic monologue or autobiography? How about at least a little bit of all of them? The penultimate chapter, focused mainly around the life of death of Dodie's sometime writing partner Sam D'Allesandro, is one of the most moving pieces of literature that I've read in awhile, taking account of the significance of a life without ever (as far as I can tell) sentimentalizing it or refusing its contradictions. I don't know how she manages to look so "unwinkingly" (as Spicer might have said) at what happens there--all I could do was blink. The last chapter might seen a bit of a let down after that--or else like that last bit of the roller coaster ride when you're glad you're no longer flying upside down. Guilty pleasures abound--it's great reading for anybody who loves horror movies, sex, repression, shock, pornography, and maybe even better reading for people who think that they hate them. Exploitation and social analysis were supposed to be opposites.... It's a book that's fun in the best way, serious in the worst way, and so unbeliavable that you know every bit of it is true. When I write about it next I'll try to be flattering. Mark Wallace /----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | | | mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu | | GWU: | | http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw | | EPC: | | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace | |____________________________________________________________________________| ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:47:53 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit this is what I love about this list. nothing is so simple as to say "Id like to compile a list of archives" but we also have to examine the gutstrings of what makes such assumptions tick. as one who has spent a lot of time in the dusty archives, as well as exhibitions of such archives, I know that I would never have seen such gems as kruchenykh's 4 color chapbooks printed on butcher paper using gelatine lithography (hectography?) if it wasnt for this borgesian obsession of collecting the gems of babel. archives have their place in a larger context of media & event & in my mind are becoming inseparable from the archival & digestive nature of the internet. joel is right in assuming that Im interested in finding new contacts for sales, for distribution, but this is within the guild of publishing, & Xexoxial has exisited on sales only for probably 10 years, surviving in the same way that Meow speaks of, printing in small editions on demand, but keeping titles in print. in this way weve been able to promote a couple hundred publications, tapes, & other media. the notion that the library & the archives is the final resting place, or even the motive of publishing is a bankrupt one; there is no replacing the process & society of the text with something so quantifiable. also I wonder about the intimation Joel makes that the list isnt the place for the circulation of such information as collecting contact info for archives, when it seems to me to be part & parcel of the larger do it ourself complex that I assume we are participating in. regardless, keep the back channels coming, Im keeping track of it all, & maybe something usable will come out of it. miekal ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:15:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "J. Kuszai" Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Miekal, I should make myself clear. I think the list is the place for distribution of that information, but simply that 1) the listing of names of third parties who may not want to be listed might be unfair. At least in terms of the generation of junk-mail. Mailing lists are touchy. I wish Rite-Aid would take me off their list. But, as "occupant," I have more control over what appeared in my mailbox. Not everyone on the Special Collections list should be consideried a "friendly" and therefore nurturing relations with them might be smarter than flaunting names as commodities in and of themselves. As far as 2) backchannel preferences, I'd rather have it here on this list. My commentary was directed a couple of individuals who occasionally it appears have nothing better to do than make rather drab ironic comment in a snickering and rather aggressive manner. Sometimes I think this overt hostility causes the list to hollow itself out, with only a few voices coming through the din. Amazing as it might seem, the space created by suggesting that people post announcements, etc., actually does bring in other voices. WHile these are hardly the combative intellectual struggles elsewise marked by list behavior, they do help give the list a real sense of meaning-in-time, which is why a full non-digested form of list subscription is different,say, from reading the archives. For me it should be both, if possible, and nothing, if neither- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 13:07:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Libraries, archives, the living and the dead MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The various points made about "special collections" are good ones... I am responding immediately to today's posts from Joseph Conte and Joel K., which i've just read. As a poet with a chapbook just out, and an editor for some years of a poetry magazine, and a library professional at major universities for 20 years, let me wade in with one or two observations. I'm grateful for the chance to make these points, because they are important, and i don't think enuff people are in touch with this point of view... The original query (from Meikal And??) and all responses assume that work outside the academic mainstream will only be acquired for "special collections." This is indeed the current state of affairs, in large part. But it need not be, nor should it be. Public and academic libraries **should** collect the best work being done for their general collections. If they did so, they would be acquiring from Meow and O-Blek and Texture and Chax and all the producers of fine books and chapbooks of poetry that really matters. Not just (sometimes, and with nudging) Sun & Moon. So while the point about archives feeling tomb-like to us active practitioners, is a valid one, that ain't the only important role for libraries. This would *expand* not contract the active market for publishers, as very few readers who can afford to buy would *stop* purchasing from the publisher....It would expand readership, both among new readers and among those who (like myself) can seldom afford to send away, because great though the bargain is for a Meow chap i'll need that $5 in two weeks at the end of the pay-period.. I do what i can to ask libraries to purchase the real good work being produced--give 'em specific titles that i wish to use. This works fine at my current employer, Emory University, which is rotten with money from coke-running, admittedly. It will have somewhat more mixed results in other contexts. But it is possible to begin to alter the character of general library collections. A project currently in the works would be a newsletter targeted at selectors in libraries, with short reviews of new stuff available...Essentially a Kirkus Reviews for the real poetry of our time. with a disentombador, mark ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:20:05 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 1) I would like to join the backchannel list. 2) Library sales make larger press runs possible 3) If all of us were to sign a pact not to give away more than 10% of any press run, could we sell more? Many have created an expectation in the market that all product is free. As this continues so does the unsalability market wide. Especially if one is doing it themselves. 4) I always clamp down on the compositors and chain stores to make the press profitable. Those areas esp. the second are much more negotiable than people know. 5) The ISBN price can be ludicrous & still get orders. 6) PS press has beautiful handcrafted hardcover books for library sales & collectors that make a large section of the soft covers paid for before publication. This is where I would like to expand & keep a few writer/bookbinders eating this winter. Be well David Baratier mailto:baratier@megsinet.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 12:55:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:47:53 +0000 from Miekal, I didn't see the archive at Brown on your list. The Harris Collection is one of the biggest around, including anything US or Canadian that's in any way "poetry". Mail address is: Harris Collection John Hay Library - Box A Brown University Providence, RI 02912 - Henry "Jesse Ventura" Gould trying really hard & writing a hundred times on the blackboard: "I will not be a meanie to Joel Kuszai I will not be a meanie to Joel Kuszai" - trying really hard to be nice & not criticize anybody or anything in a way that might be funny because we are all good buddies here just tryin to pump some poetic fluids down the old archive waste aqueduct... just loving to be around poets 100% of the time & groove on the good vibes except for certain drab individuals who remain slurping over the edge of the pail... ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 13:16:51 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: mesostic / 13 ply MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit mesostic for dick higgins closeD exceptIon cirCuit Keep cHimes wIring beGin Good radIos situatioN burleSque __________________ words extracted from "foew&ombwhnw" by dick higgins ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 14:55:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU Subject: Brion Gysin and Hank Lazer . . . . . . have never been seen in the same room together, have they? Aha! My point exactly. Actually my point is to send communal thanks to everyone on the list who posted, f/c and b/c, information in response to my question about Gysin--very helpful, y'all. And my second point is that, since someone recently plugged Hank Lazer's *Early Days of the Lang Dynasty*, I'll take the chance to plug his equally fine and pleasureable *3 of 10* (Chax, 1996). Acquiring it will give you the opportunity to send a few $ in the direction of the incorrigible Chuckster the Huckster Alexander down (up?) there in Tucson. Alan PS: And Joan Retallack's *How To Do Things With Words* just in / out from Sun and Moon. Deeply ommatophoric. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:47:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: CharSSmith@AOL.COM Subject: Patrick Pritchett's ARK DIVE Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Announcing the publication of Arcturus Chaplet # 1: Patrick Pritchett: ARK DIVE an elegy in memory of Ronald Johnson 4 x 6 1/2, letterpress, single sheet of Zerkall Book sewn in Fabriano Ingres covers, $4.00 Patrick Pritchett's poems and reviews have appeared in New American Writing, Rhizome, River City, non, American Book Review, and Exquisite Corpse, among others. He makes his home in Boulder, CO. Handmade Arcturus Chaplets will be published irregularly throughout the year. Think of them as broadsides in codex form. Second in the series will be "[syzygos]," a recent poem by Kenneth Irby. Also available: Gustaf Sobin, A WORLD OF LETTERS ISBN 0-9661505-1-1, 16 page letterpress chapbook, $8.00 Available from Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710; 800-869-7553; http://www.spdbooks.org; e-mail: spd@spdbooks.org (ARK DIVE will arrive at SPD by next week.) or from the press, checks payable to: Charles Smith CA residents, please add 7.25% sales tax Arcturus Editions 2135 Irvin Way Sacramento, CA 95822 charssmith@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 14:50:20 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Marie Schmid Subject: Re: Query on Salsa In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Howdy all you salseros out there! Does anyone know the name of the improvised, half-spoken, half-chanted lyric that salsa singers such as Celia Cruz open with in performance? I believe it's called the "inspiracion," but am not sure. . . Also, does anyone know of any good studies on salsa where I might find a reference to/description of such a thing? Thanks in advance for your help. Feel free to backchannel responses. Julie Schmid Department of English University of Iowa 308 EPB Iowa City, IA 52245 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 16:33:34 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Erik Sweet Subject: Jimmy Schuyler's Underroos Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Is he the master of the lamplight line or what? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:55:30 -0500 Reply-To: mgk3k@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive In-Reply-To: <36411D2C.1368F1DF@nycap.rr.com> from "Edward Fristrom" at Nov 4, 98 11:36:13 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Edward Fristrom asked about SUNYA's Little Magazine: > Rumor has it > though that the new CD is on its way. What rough beast comes snorkling > up the Hudson? Hmmm?) I'm contributing a piece to the next Little Magazine CD-ROM, and have been told that it should be out early next year; provisional title for the disk is, I believe, "An Anthology of Emergent Hypermedia." Dimitri Anastasopoulos is the current editor and the person to contact for details. Matt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 22:13:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: Bernadette Mayer talking about Sonnets MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Some thing people on this list may be interested in -- B. Mayer, interviewed by me on the sonnet, rhyme, and other stuff, on line at www.writenet.org. Hit the "Poets on Poetry" link. You'll see a pix of Bernadette at a reading she gave recently at No Moore, the interview, plus the opportunity to download a W.A.V. file of Bernadette Mayer reading her poem "Sonnet" from _Another Smashed Pinecone_. Download takes about 4 minutes. --daniel ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 06:01:50 -0000 Reply-To: suantrai@iol.ie Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" Subject: 20/20 Vision Comments: To: jvk20@hermes.cam.ac.uk, british-poets@mailbase.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Wild Honey Press is pleased to announce the publication of _20/20 Vision_ by Pete Smith. _20/20 Vision_ is 20 pp, 14cm x 14cm, card cover, hand sewn, £3.50/$5. Available from WHP 16a Ballyman Rd., Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. (e-mail suantrai@iol.ie) Or from Peter Riley (Books) 27 Sturton Street, Cambridge CB1 2QG United Kingdom. (e-mail: priley@dircon.co.uk) Smith is an English ex-non-pat living at Pinantan Lake in the South Central Interior of British Columbia. An active member of the Kamloops Poets' factory - scout & sundry duties with Hub City, their soon-coming magazine. Has published "Blending: A Suite" (after hours press, Kamloops 1984); "The Rhorschach Bunker" an essay-review (Agenda, London, Spring 1986); [after this I'm adding just now] poems & brief reviews forthcoming in The Gig #1 (Toronto, November 1998) & Hub City #1 (Kamloops, December 1990). Here's an extract: Of sorts. Flags at half and pistols at twenty. Beech-mast still pelts down. The pace stretching our short days. Evening out the stress bumps. The tenor of morning an oratorio. Another key where vibrato widens. Spilt silt trickle spate estuary. Semis, demis and demi-semis all a-quavering. Just because there's a period doesn't mean an end. The idea of body doesn't remove clothes. Where there's a will there's a fisticuffs. Way out west; way up north; weighed down. A National Day of Morning: noon at midnight. Mist of discharge fogs a dawn. I half-doubt Thomas would have rhymed that. It's bigger than a frisbee, bigger than New York. If a poem had enough combustion. Eiderdown. Dander up. Relaxation always a middling. The reflexologist said, "You remind me of myself." The twentieth line presages an abyss, of sorts. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 22:45:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Emily Grossman Subject: Barbara Guest Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Was wondering if anyone knew of any good critical writing on Barbara Guest's work? Not sure where to begin to look. Thanks, Emily ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 00:58:27 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: It's the same story since the beginning of creation... In-Reply-To: <199811041436.JAA80978@pimout4-int.prodigy.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >The easy Yankee's victory parade Hey, something I didnt know about baseball! Which one is the easy Yankee? I'm guessing David Wells. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 09:43:15 -0500 Reply-To: Andrew D Epstein Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew D Epstein Subject: Re: MLA In-Reply-To: <01J3QEAUC05U03U3YE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I thought I'd chime in with an announcement about an MLA panel I'm on that might interest list members. It's "New York School Interactions: Demystifying the Cult of Personality" and will be on Monday, 12/28, at 7:15-8:30 in Plaza Room A. It will include: -- "Sibling Bond and Rivalry: Ashbery, O'Hara and the Heritage of American Pragmatism," Andrew Epstein -- "The Suicide Note as Lunch Conversation: Amiri Baraka and Frank O'Hara in New York," Susan Jennifer Vanderborg -- "Saying it Sooner: The Pedagogy of the NY School," Thomas Dowe -- Respondent: Stephen Paul Miller Hope to see some of you there! Andrew ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 07:47:03 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Burt Hatlen Organization: University of Maine Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 2 Nov 1998 to 3 Nov 1998 (#1998-113) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit all that compulsory listafarian sarcasm aside, I think that a paper on "now" in Milton and Wordsworth sounds fascinating; exactly the sort of thing that would have interested Zukofsky and Oppen, with their devotion to the little words. Burt Hatlen ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 10:07:57 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chicago Review Subject: Chicago Review Sale Offers Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ** Back issue sale ** "Contemporary Poetry & Poetics: A Special Issue" (Fall 1997) Only $4 each. Contributors include: Amiri Baraka Anne Carson Alan Golding Mark Halliday Michael Heller Brenda Hillman Paul Hoover Susan Howe Barbara Jordan Derek Mahon Jed Rasula John Shoptaw Keith Tuma This issue didn't circulate as widely as I'd hoped. I think it would interest both non-academic and academic readers of poetry. It includes essays and poems. Particularly interesting are Alan Golding on "New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries" and Susan Howe's poem "Arisbe" (from her forthcoming book Pierce Arrow). Also, if you order our forthcoming issue (with special sections on Bunting and Peter Dale Scott) for $8, I'll include the first two issues of the 1998 volume free. Those issues--44:1 & 44:2--may be ordered separately at half price ($3 each). I realize author names don't mean much, but here are some of the contributors: 44:1 Paul Carroll Paul Hoover Tom Pickard Michael Anania Craig Watson Juliana Spahr & Interview w/ Robert Duncan 44:2 Linh Dinh Martin Corless-Smith John Koethe Colin Simms Paul Vangelisti Catherine Wagner Bill Griffiths Jody Gladding Ronald Johnson & John Taggart essay on George Oppen Please make checks payable to Chicago Review, and send to the address below. I'm happy to answer queries about all other back issues, too. Thanks, Andrew Rathmann, Editor -------------- Chicago Review 5801 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago IL 60637-1794 ph/fax 773.702.0887 chicago-review@uchicago.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:53:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Poetry/Translation Conference MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The translation/poetry conference scheduled for the week-end of November 13-15 includes so much of interest and importance to poets that I am forwarding the preliminary schedule. Speakers and readers include a great range of poets and translators including Serge Gavronsky, Eleni Sikelianos, Michael Heller, Vladimir Druk, Caroline Bergvall, Robert Fagles, Katharine Washburn, Richard Kostelanetz, and Allen Mandelbaum. I am taking these names at random from a list of more than a hundred writers who will be giving readings and making presentations during the conference. If you would like more information please contact me at efoster@stevens-tech.edu or 201-216-5397. The conference will be at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. The registration center will be on the third floor of the Morton-Peirce-Kidde complex -- the three linked buildings on the northeast corner of Sixth and River Streets, seven blocks north of the Hoboken PATH station (one subway stop from Manhattan) and the Hoboken ferry terminal. The complex is also two blocks east of the Sixth and Washington bus stop (frequent service from Port Authority). Those who drive can park in the Stevens "Navy Lot" on the south east corner of Sixth and River Streets. It's very easy to reach the campus. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- ======================================================================= FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13th Registration: 2:00-5:00 p.m. 3rd floor Morton-Peirce-Kidde Session One: Mallarme' 3:00-5:00 p.m. - Room 204, Stevens Library Chair: Ed Foster (Stevens Institute of Technology) Serge Gavronsky (Barnard College), "Mallarme' in the U.S.A." Stephen Ratcliffe (Mills College), on his book Mallarme' (1998); Christopher Sawyer-Lauanno (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "Mallarme' in Spanish" Henry Weinfield (University of Notre Dame), "Ceding the Initiative to Words: Mallarme', the Poetic Process, and Translation" . 5:00-6:45 p. m. - Dinner . GENERAL MEETING (Sessions Two and Three) 7:00 p.m. "Skyline Room," 4th floor, Howe Center Session Two: Armand Schwerner: The Poet as Translator - The Translator as Poet Chair: Burt Kimmelman (New Jersey Institute of Technology) Willard Gingerich (St. John's University) Michael Heller (New York University) Thomas Lavazzi (Savannah State University) Stephen Paul Miller (St. John's University) Kathryn VanSpanckeren (University of Tampa) to be followed immediately by: Session Three: The Talisman Project: The Chinese, Greek, Russian, and Turkish Anthologies Chair: Ed Foster (Stevens Institute of Technology) Alex Cigale (New Jersey Institute of Technology) Zhang Er John High (San Francisco State University) Vadim Mesyats (Russian/American Cultural Exchange Program) Murat Nemet-Nejat Kristin Prevallet Leonard Schwartz (Bard College) Eleni Sikelianos (The Poetry Project) Mary Winegarden (San Francisco State University) Linsey Watton (Bard College) . SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14th Registration: 9:00-5:00 p.m. 3rd floor Morton-Peirce-Kidde Breakfast: 9:00-10:00 - 390 Kidde 9:45-11:15 a.m. Session Four: Poems for the Millenium Chair: Carl Whithaus (Stevens Institute of Technology) Readings from and discussion of Poems for the Millenium, edited by Jerone Rothenberg and Pierre Joris with Pierre Joris (State University of New York, Albany); Murat Nemet-Nejat; Nicole Payrafitte; Hiroaki Sato Session Five: Portugese Chair: Paulo Lemos Horta (University of Toronto); Monique Balbuena, reading her translations of Carlito Azevedo; Catarina Edinger (William Paterson University), "The Translator's Responsibility: Translations of Twentieth-Century Writers to and from Portugese"; Jeffrey Ruth (City University of New York), on The Lusiads; Alexis Levitin (State University of New York, Plattsburg), "Clarice Lispector: The Stylistics of Love"; Paulo Lemos Horta (University of Toronto), reading from his translations of Fernando Pessoa Session Six: Theory I Chair: Piotr Gwiazda (New York University); Lauretta C. Clough (University of Maryland), "Academic Translation as Genre: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu"; Piotr Gwiazda (New York University), "Literary Translation and the Question of Hospitality"; Kathryn A. Kopple, "Mother's Tongue: Deleuze's Symptomatology and XUL in Translation" Session Seven: Russian I Chair: Ekaterina Sukhanova; Kristin Peterson (Ohio State University), "An Evening with Evgeny Yevtushenko"; Sylvia Maizell, reading from her trans-lation of Joseph Brodsky; Larissa Shmailo, reading from her translation of Joseph Brodsky's Landscape with Flood; Ekaterina Sukhanova, reading from her translations of Sergej Zalygin Session Eight: Greek and Latin Chair: Joel Feimer (Mercy College); Rachel Hadas (Rutgers University), reading from her translations from ancient Greek; Charles Ross (Purdue University), reading from his translation of Statius's Thebiad; Kristina J. Chew (University of St. Thomas), "Restoring the Classics: Translating the World of Virgil's Georgics" and reading from her translations of the Georgics . 11:15-12:45 p.m. Session Nine: Artaud, Beauvoir, Celan Chair: Holly Hahhr (Stevens Institute of Technology); Pierre Joris (State University of New York, Albany), reading from his translations of Celan; Sandy Flitterman (Rutgers University), "The Errant Phoneme: Artaud and Language"; Luise van Flotow (University of Ottawa), "Simone de Beauvoir" Session Ten: XUL: Experiences and Experiments in Translating Argentine Poetry Chair: Kathryn A. Kopple Readings from and discussion of XUL with Ernes-to Gros-man; Kathryn A. Kopple; Gregary Y. Racz (Long Island University), "Endless Revision: The Process of Finalizing 'Nonsense' Verse"; Reinaldo Laddaga Session Eleven: Russian II Chair: Julia Kunina; Henry Gould, reading from his translations of Mandelstam, Shvarts, Kunina; Ina Bliznetsona and Isabella Mizrachi reading their translations of Emily Dickinson; readings by Russian poets Julia Kunina and Alexander Aleynik Session Twelve: Renaissance I Chair: Earl Jeffrey Richards (Wuppertal University); Diane Marks (Brooklyn Collge), "Charles d'Orleans: Interpreter of Thought"; John S. Pendergast (Virginia Commonwealth University), "Politics and Bible Translation in Early Modern England"; Carl Whithaus (Graduate Center, CUNY), "Trans-lating Dissent: Gender and Style in Elizabeth Cary's Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall Perron and History of Edward II" Session Thirteen: Readings: Roumanian, Polish, Dutch Chair: Adam J. Sorkin (Penn State University); A Reading by poets Carmen Firan and Iona Ieronim with translations by Adam J. Sorkin (Penn State University); Piotr Gwiazda (New York University), reading from his translations of Kazimierz Brakoniecki, Tomasz Jastrun, Bronislaw Maj; Duncan Dobbleman, discussing and reading from his translations of Paul Van Ostaijen . 12:45-1:15 p.m. - SPECIAL SESSIONS Session Fourteen: Translating for the Theater and Film "Translating Theater: The Challenge of Producing a Stable Text" with Phyllis Zatlin (Rutgers University), Marion Holt, and student actors Session Fifteen "Subtitling Foreign Film on Video - A Demonstration" John Incledon (Albright College) (See also Professor Incledon's workshop, listed below) . 1:15-2:45 p.m. Session Sixteen: Writing from The Edge Chair: Pat Rosal (Sarah Lawrence University); Cynthia Crane (University of Cincinnati), "The Collaborative Translating of 'Mischling Stories'"; Jennifer Dick, reading from her translations of Jean-Louis Giovannoni and Raphale George; Rosette C. Lamont (Sarah Lawrence College), "Writing from the Edge of Being" (with readings from her translations of Charlotte Dembo and Gis-laine Dunant); Kamil Turowski, reading his translation of The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto" Session Seventeen: Symbolists: Mallarme' and Merrill Chair: Edward Foster (Stevens Institute of Technology); Elaine L. Corts, reading her translations of Stuart Merrill; Edward Foster (Stevens Institute of Technology), "Maybe English, Maybe French: Stuart Merrill Abandons America (or Was It France?)"; Laird Hunt, reading from his translations of Stuart Merrill; William Marsh, reading from his translation of Mallarme''s Un Tombeau d'Anatole Session Eighteen: Russian III Chair: John High (San Francisco State University); Mark Herman, "Translating for Singing: The Songs of Bulat Okudzhava"; Alexander Genis, "Wallace Stevens: The Experience of Translation"; Ian Probstein, "West-East: Approaches to the Translation of Poetry"; Julia Trubikhina (New York University), "'Abusive Fidelty' or Faithful Abuse? Nabokov's Literalness, and Western and Russian Translation Theories" Session Nineteen: Renaissance II Chair: Carl Whithaus (Stevens Institute of Technology); Earl Jeffrey Richards (Wuppertal University), "What Is Gained and What Is Lost: Modern Translations of Chris-tine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies"; Jill Claretta Robbins, reading from her translations of Ceccoli, Nuccoli, and Tasso; Charles Ross (Purdue University, reading from his translation of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato Session Twenty: Readings: Central/South America Chair: Susan Levin (Stevens Institute of Technology); Chris Brandt, readings from Brandt's translation of Carmen Valle's Wild Animals Between Waking and Dreaming (with the original work read by the author); Kathryn Kopple, reading from her translations of Mercedes Roff, with the original works read by the author; Marisol Wexman, reading from her own works . 2:45-4:15 p.m. Session Twenty-One: Russian IV Chair: Vadim Mesyats (Russian/American Program); readings by Russian poets Vladimir Gandelsman, Alexander Aleynik, Vladimir Druk, and Vadim Mesyats; Irina Mashinshaia, reading from her translations of Craig Czury (with the poems read by the poet in English) Session Twenty-Two: Eustache Deschamps Chair: Gale Sigal (Wake Forest University); Ian Laurie (Flinders University. emeritus), "Translating Poetry as a Profession: Eustache Deschamps c. 1340-1404"' Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (Stevens Institute of Technology) and David Curzon (United Nations), reading translations of Deschamps' poetry Session Twenty-Three: Spanish Chair: Patricia Santoro (St. Peter's College); James Graham, on Roque Dalton; Kathleen O'Connor (Houghton College), "Rubn Daro: Translating the Feel of El Modernismo" and reading her translation of Daro's "Los motiuos del lobo"; Ruth V. Crispin, reading from her translations of Pedro Salinas Session Twenty-Four: In Our Time Chair: Susan Levin (Stevens Institute of Technology); Caroline Bergvall, "Translation and Translatability in Contemporary French and American Literature"; Joseph Donahue (University of Washington), "Stickney Goes to India; Fenollosa Goes to Japan"; Craig D. Dworkin (Princeton University), "One Saint in Five Acts" (on Gertrude Stein) Session Twenty-Five: Chinese: Chair: Zhang Er; Paul Rakita Goldin (University of Pennsylvania), "A Note on Paronomasia and the Problem of Translating Ancient Chinese Philosophy"; Zhang Er, reading from her poetry with translations by Leonard Schwatrtz (Bard College); Helen Chau Hu (California State University, Long Beach), "Cognitive Measures in the Translating of Imagery (with particular reference to translating Dickinson and Emily Bront into Chinese)"; Jian Zhang (Suffolk Community College), "Application of Reading Transaction Theory to Literary Translation (with particular reference to Can Xue)" . 4:15-5:00 p.m. WORKSHOPS: Afrikaans (Carol Lasker) Ancient Chinese (Paul Rakita Goldin) Modern Chinese (Zhang Er) French (Holly Haahr) German (Kevin J. Ruth) Greek (Eleni Sikelianos) Hebrew (Chanah Bloch) Hindi and Gujrati (Preety Sengupta) Italian (T.B.A.) Portugese (Catarina Edinger and Jeffrey Ruth) Russian (John High and Vadim Mesyats) Sanskrit (Andrew Schelling) Spanish (T.B.A.) Turkish (Murat Nemet-Nejat) Urdu (Mahwash Shoaib?) "Drafting final drafts" with Carmen Firan and Adam J. Sorkin (Penn State University) "Subtitling Foreign Film on Video" (John Albright) . 5:00-6:45 - Dinner . GENERAL MEETING: Keynote Address and Session Twenty-Six: 7:00 p.m. Grand Hall, Stevens Library Keynote Address Allen Mandelbaum (W. R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University) Session Twenty-Six: In Celebration of World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Kathari-ne Wash-burn and John S. Major Chair: Katharine Washburn Vyt Bakaitis David Curzon (United Nations) Greg Delanty Robert Fagles (Princeton University) Rachel Hadas (Rutgers University) Edmund Keely (Princeton University) Judith Kroll (University of Texas) Rika Lesser (Yale University) Charles Martin Mark Rudman (New York University) Raymond Scheindlin (Jewish Theological Seminary) Andrew Schelling (Naropa Institute) Richard Sieburth (New York University) Louis Simpson David Slavitt Carolyn Tipton . SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15th Registration: 9:00-2:00 p.m. 3rd floor Morton-Peirce-Kidde Breakfast: 10:00-11:00 - 390 Kidde 11:00 - 12:30 p.m. Session Twenty-Seven: Hebrew Chair: Chaim Vogt-Moykopf (University of Montreal); Chanah Bloch (Mills College), "Between Cultures, or, a Jew at the Opera"; Chanah Bloch (Mills College), reading from her translations of Yehuda Amichai; Aminadav Dykman, "Translating Poetry - The Specifics of the Hebrew Tradition" Session Twenty-Eight: Readings Chair: Steve Johnson (Stevens Institute of Technology); M. G. Prasad (Stevens Institute of Technology), reading from his translations from poetry in Kannada; Preety Sengupta, reading translations of her own work; Mahwash Shoaib, reading translations of Kishwar Naheed; Andrew Schelling (Naropa Institute), discussing his translations from Sanskrit Session Twenty-Nine: Theory II Chair: Ed Foster (Stevens Institute of Technology); Peter DeDomenico, reading and discussing his translation of Gaston Bachelard; William Marton (University of Chicago), "The Invisible Art: Typography as Translation" . 12:30-1:00 p. m. - Special Session Session Thirty-Two: Richard Kostelanetz . 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Session Thirty: German Chair: Chaim Vogt-Moykopf (University of Montral); Kevin J. Ruth (Newark Academy), "Poetry of War and Identity: Problems in German-English Translation (Valery, Veiter, Eich, Celan)"; Susan Bernofsky (Bard College), reading her translation of Robert Wal-ser's Der "Ruber" Roman; Elisabeth D. Kuhn (Virginia Commonwealth University), "Linguistic Tools in Poetry Translation: Towards Keeping the Music Alive" Session Thirty-One: Walter Benjamin Chair: Ed Fioster (Stevens Institute of Technology); Linda Belau, Translat-ing Allegory: Reading Melancholy in Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva"; Susan Benofsky (Bard College), "Walter Benjamin and German Translation Theory"; Lina Gorchakova (Bucknell University), "Walter Benjamin's Romantic Affinities. The Influence of the Early Romantic Conception of Language on Walter Benjamin's Translation Theory" Session Thirty-Two: Russian V Chair: John High (San Francisco State University); Andrey Gritsman, "Language, Sensibility, and Russian-American Poetry Translation Experience"; Zarema Kumakhova, "The Metamorphosis of Young Ladies into Young Gentlemen; or, The Fate of One Chekhov Translation"'; Ekaterina Sukhanova, "Boris Pasternak's Translations of Shakespeare" Session Thirty-Three: Readings Chair: Pat Rosal (Sarah Lawrence University); Luisa Balacco, discussing and reading from her translation of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"; Marisol Wexman, reading from her translations of Anne Sexton into Spanish Session Thirty-Four: Readings Chair: Holly Haahr (Stevens Institute of Technology); Caroline Bergvall, reading from her translations of Nicole Brossard; Geneva Elizabeth Chao, reading from her translation of Philippe Jacotet, Chistal et Fune; . 2:30 - 4:00 p.m. Session Thirty-Five: Closing Session Murat Nemet-Nejat Charles Ross (Purdue University) Henry Weinfield (University of Notre Dame) Earl Jeffrey Richards (Wuppertal University) . ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:10:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fred Muratori Subject: PD Plug In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In case anyone's interested, a couple of pieces from a sporadically narrative serial-prose-poem I've been writing are on today's Poetry Daily (http://www.poems.com) website. I'm still a bit surprised myself, since they aren't much in keeping with what's usually found there. With apologies for the crass self-advert, Fred M. ******************************************************** Fred Muratori (fmm1@cornell.edu) Reference Services Division Olin * Kroch * Uris Libraries Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 WWW: http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html ********************************************************* ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:23:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Re: PD Plug In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Fred Muratori wrote: > With apologies for the crass self-advert, Well, if you hadn't posted this, Fred, I was going to do it. A nice read. -Gabe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:23:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: shana Subject: Re: Poetry/Translation Conference In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Wow, the translation conference sounds amazing--I wish I received this information before I told my boss I wasn't taking any time off in November... Anyway, I highly recommend attending the Russian III workshop and hearing Julia Trubikhina present on Nabakov. I had the privilege of having her as an adjunct for a Russian History/Lit course, and she was incredible. It was an especially intense experience because I took the class right after Brodsky's death. Shana Skaletsky shana@bway.net www.bway.net/~shana "In the blank space below specify how long you have been awake and why you were taken by surprise."--Dan Pagis ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:39:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: shana Subject: shameless self-plug MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII No zines to peddle, just a targeted e-list concerning my pet project. I'm running the ever so popular jewishlit list on onelist.I'll waste no more bandwidth here--go to http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/jewishlit if you want to know more. It doesn't directly apply to poetics, but since I run it, there will be talk about Amichai, which leads to translations of his work by Chana Bloch and the Stephen Mills Machine, that could lead to a certain quote from WCW, which could lead to anti-semitism talk about Pound, and that's all for today. Shana "In the blank space below specify how long you have been awake and why you were taken by surprise."--Dan Pagis ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:54:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Translation conference MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Ed Foster: Will proceedings be available from this wonderful conference for those of us who can't attend? Joel Kuszai: Would there be any cahnce that some of these papers could be posted in a special section on the EPC? Kent ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:12:34 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: RaeA100900@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Self-Promotion Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hello List, Here's another self-promotion. I'm reading in NYC with Marjorie Welish on Sat. the 14th at the Hear series (Double Happiness) at 4:00. I also have a new book out - True - from Atelos press in Berkeley. Rae Armantrout ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:15:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: Translation conference In-Reply-To: <54B51665353@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Yes, _Talisman_ will do a special double-issue with poems, translations, and papers from the conference. That issue will be published shortly after the double-issue history of american poetry 1970-2000, which should be in print in july. For various reasons, we do have to do the history issue first, but we will get the translation issue in print as soon after that as possible. On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote: > Ed Foster: > > Will proceedings be available from this wonderful conference > for those of us who can't attend? Joel Kuszai: Would there be any > cahnce that some of these papers could be posted in a special section > on the EPC? > > Kent > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 10:38:34 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: Classicist Pigs MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain One is pickled, if not entirely nicked, to read this proost of poor, dear Gudding. I for won cried many tiers of ingratitude, & had to be led off from my cranny in order to recoop. Yes, let me be the most to interrogate this sad tail, & correct any interniceties that may have dreaded their way to the Listing. Although Gadding may have sturgled, I have never once, I've gurgled & roomed. Or roamed, I should say, with all sartres of fere companiouns. But for Peetie's sake let's git to the Point of the Prickett. I will never kick an experimental pot I will soundly defend herhim. Appartently, L'il Gidding thought I was licking one while I was actually having a drink with another, which I do. Nevermore, further, have I repatriated the teeth of Poesia Experimentosis. I have several of the teeth, actually, & am pasting them to the Last Post-Haste. Gidding, menwhile, havf been streeling wif issues of parsonal backsides, all of which are HARD, hard mind you; yet lowly do I swing unto you that I am a naked sool & would never caul im a plig altho it's true I do wight. The Pope I have abjured as he well news, & that, along with a refairaunce ("mickery") to part of my personnal ethnacity, I take as offense, if not de Fence, & am forwarding a report to the committee. Until then, come to my panel on frowning & divulgence, at the pestfest convention of modernest lingis. & Apoplexologies to Charles, for including texts of previous massages in servoral poosts I've looned. MDC Gabriel Gudding wrote, >Let me be the first to agree with Mark DuCharme that I am right. > >I am a clacketing magpie. etc. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:07:20 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: The Letters of Mina Harker MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain I have to second Mark here. Any work that's sexy, intellectually stimulating, makes knowing references to horror films, AND is formally inventive, is aces in my book. Need I point out that Dodie's book is also an intertext of, & in some ways, a critical response to, Bram Stoker's _Dracula_. & It's also a vivid account of the San Francisco literary scene, circa late '80s/early '90s. Mark DuCharme Mark Wallace wrote: > Hello listfolks: > > I just wanted to note, in case it hasn't been done already, that >Dodie Bellamy's LETTERS FROM MINA HARKER, published this year by Hard >Press, really seems to me one of the best books of the year. Energetic, >outrageous, precise, and so funny that there are certain lines that I >laugh AGAIN every time I think about them. It's quite a genre-busting book >too--epistolary novel? prose poem? social criticism or dramtatic monologue >or autobiography? How about at least a little bit of all of them? ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:26:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Dracula MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Thurs. Nov. 5, Mark DuCharme wrote: >Dodie's book is also an intertext of, & in some ways, a critical >response to, Bram Stoker's _Dracula_. & It's also a vivid account of >the San Francisco literary scene, circa late '80s/early'90s." Sounds delightful. In the SF lit scene of 80s/90s, who's Dracula? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:41:16 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Billy Little Subject: Re: JOEL OPPENHEIMER SYMPOSIUM Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Any reports ? billy little 4 song st. nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0 Go ahead and say something true before the big turd eats You You can say any last thing in Your poem. -Alice Notley ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:25:52 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: Bellamy & Buuck at Canessa Park Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dodie Bellamy and David Buuck will read at Canessa Park Gallery--not this Sunday, but next Sunday--November 15 at 3:00 p.m. 708 Montgomery Street (at Columbus), San Francisco. $5 cover. David Buuck is an editor of Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, and Dodie Bellamy is a contributor to Tripwire #2. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:40:30 -0500 Reply-To: gps12@columbia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Re: Query on Salsa In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Julie, Celia Cruz opens her shows with the word "Aaaahzuuuucar!" ("sugar"), & repeats it in performance. I don't know about the general word for this, though. > Does anyone know the name of the improvised, half-spoken, half-chanted > lyric that salsa singers such as Celia Cruz open with in performance? I > believe it's called the "inspiracion," but am not sure. . . ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 20:31:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Scott Pound Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 2 Nov 1998 to 3 Nov 1998 (#1998-113) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >all that compulsory listafarian sarcasm aside, I think that a paper on >"now" in Milton and Wordsworth sounds fascinating; exactly the sort of >thing that would have interested Zukofsky and Oppen, with their >devotion to the little words. > >Burt Hatlen Thanks to Burt Hatlen for saying this. I "totally" agree. I am working on an essay on the word "and" in Pound's _Cantos_. no joke. no relation, Scott Pound ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 19:31:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: joel lewis Subject: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" *** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:28:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Travis Ortiz Subject: Announcing TRUE by Rae Armantrout MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit TRUE by Rae Armantrout Atelos is pleased to announce the publication of TRUE by Rae Armantrout. About the book: Rae Armantrout’s TRUE is a memoir of the poet’s childhood and youth; it tells of the encounters with reality out of which she has formed her sense of self and of things, her regard for the world, and her work as a poet. One reads this book for the intelligence of Armantrout’s sensibility, for the tenacity and wiliness of her imagination, and for the surprising strangeness of the familiar American social landscape in which she grew up. But readers of Armantrout’s volumes of poetry will also read this book for what it reveals about her approach to the world. The fact that it consists of diverse and often completely contradictory elements is what keeps it real and makes it true. About the author: Rae Armantrout’s first volume of poetry, Extremities, was published in 1978, and since then five more volumes (The Invention of Hunger, Precedence, Necromance, Made to Seem, and Writing The Plot About Sets) have appeared in English, and Couverture, a book of her selected poems translated by Denis Dormoy, has been published in France. Her poems have appeared in numerous influential magazines (from This and Temblor to The Iowa Review and The Los Angeles Times Book Review) as well as anthologies such as In the American Tree (ed. Ron Silliman, National Poetry Foundation, 1986) and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (ed. Paul Hoover, W. W. Norton & Co., 1994). Rae Armantrout has taught writing at the University of California since 1981. She lives in San Diego. About the project: Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip’s Road. It is devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate poetry from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact. All the works published as part of the Atelos project are commissioned specifically for it, and each is involved in some way with crossing traditional genre boundaries, including, for example, those that would separate theory from practice, poetry from prose, essay from drama, the visual image from the verbal, the literary from the non-literary, and so forth. The Atelos project when complete will consist of 50 volumes; BAD HISTORY is volume 2. The project directors and editors are Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz. Ordering information: TRUE may be ordered from Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1403; phone 510-524-1668 or toll-free 800-869-7553; e-mail: spd@igc.apc.org Title: TRUE Contact: Lyn Hejinian: 510-548-1817 Author: Rae Armantrout Travis Ortiz: 510-310-4486 Price: $12.95 fax: 510-704-8350 Pages: 72 Atelos PO Box 5814 ISBN: 1-891190-03-2 Berkeley, CA 94705-0814 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:40:47 +1100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "d.j. huppatz" Subject: webpage/journal update Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear Listfolk ANNOUNCING an update to the TEXTBASE webpage featuring experimental writing & visual art projects from MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. The new edition of the TEXTBASE journal, CHANCE, is through the "journal" button, then "issue 3". CHANCE is our first fully integrated collaborative issue, with a large mix of poetic fragments composed into one long piece via a chance operation. Any comments/criticism/inquiries appreciated. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: I have hard copies of the last two issues of the journal, CUTUP and CHANCE, which i'm willing to send to interested parties. This is a free offer but swaps for your journal/chapbook/whatever would be great. Backchannel a name & address. dan huppatz melbourne ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 04:44:55 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Organization: Re*Map Subject: TALISMAN MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit sorry for the "personal" tho others may be interested-- Dear Ed Foster: when is the new issue of Talisman coming out--I haven't heard from you in a year! yrs, Todd Baron ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 12:05:08 +0200 Reply-To: robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lunds universitet Subject: Re: RongRong the Archive mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii content-transfer-encoding: 7bit > What possible motive > could there be for "innovative" writing to be housed in a glass case in > an inaccessible location for the readers of eighty years hence to marvel > at the audacity of? I think your answer is inherent in your question, Joseph -- if there's something worth marvelling at, ought we not to want it to be available for those who want to marvel later? I'm glad somebody preserved copies of the old magazines I've read in libraries, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Your own work with the DLB has been part of the same tremendously valuable work of archiving the audacious, in a way, and I'm as grateful for the librarians archiving avant-mags as I am for what you did with DLB #193. Bob Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 22:26:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Garrett Kalleberg Subject: The Transcendental Friend No. 6 Comments: To: Poetics List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" My loss, by sickness - Was it Loss? Or that Ethereal Gain One earns by measuring the Grave - Then - measuring the Sun - - Emily Dickinson, 574 The Transcendental Friend, Issue No. 6, November 1998 http://www.morningred.com/friend The medicinal issue of The Transcendental Friend features an article in the Critical Dictionary by Alan Gilbert, titled "Prescriptive," followed by a sort of illustrated companion in a brief section called Medicine. The Sixth Chapter in the Bestiary offers a horse story from the 13th Century called Le Vair Palefroi, presented by Laird Hunt. Rosetta, writing out of literature, presents a selection of the writings of one Robert Larsen, edited by G. Kalleberg & E. Tage Larsen. Kevin Killian's "Cut" resumes with the second of three installments in Schizmata. Jonathan Skinner presents the work of French poet Gherasim Luca in translation in Report. Garrett Kalleberg Garrett Kalleberg mailto:editor@morningred.com The Transcendental Friend can be found at: http://www.morningred.com/friend ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 01:33:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: CharSSmith@AOL.COM Subject: Notus 9 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit if anyone has a copy of Notus 9, would you please contact me b/c? thanks, Charles Smith ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:52:19 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: R I Caddel Subject: help (fwd) Comments: To: british n irish poets , poetics MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: MULTIPART/ALTERNATIVE; BOUNDARY="-559023410-1903590565-910356739=:17370" This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. Send mail to mime@docserver.cac.washington.edu for more info. ---559023410-1903590565-910356739=:17370 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=iso-8859-1 Content-ID: Replies to Jayne Fenton-Keane direct please, not to me! RC ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 1997 14:37:14 +1000 From: Jayne Fenton-Keane To: R.I.Caddel@Durham.ac.uk Subject: help 6/11/98 Hi I'm not sure if you can help me but I have to start somewhere! I am an Australia n poet thinking of doing a world tour between April and august 1999. Can you hel p me with contacts, places to read & possibly run workshops, people who might be willing to put me up. I am willing to reciprocate the arrangement for anybody w anting to visit the Gold Coast in Qld, where I live. I will provide more details if this request finds a friendly home. regards jayne fenton keane ---559023410-1903590565-910356739=:17370 Content-Type: TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Content-ID: Content-Description:
6/11/98
 
Hi
I'm not sure = if you can help=20 me but I have to start somewhere! I am an=20 Australian poet thinking of doing a world tour between April and august = 1999.=20 Can you help me with contacts, places to read & possibly run = workshops,=20 people who might be willing to put me up. I am willing to reciprocate = the=20 arrangement for anybody wanting to visit the Gold Coast in Qld, where I = live. I=20 will provide more details if this request finds a friendly = home.
regards
jayne fenton=20 keane
---559023410-1903590565-910356739=:17370-- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:43:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: My Disco-Ball of Wrath In-Reply-To: <19981105183835.11893.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII John I _am_ not wroth with the rattlebrained Dippy DuCharme nor his sidekick either Brenda Floribunda the excessive paranoiac. Is it really my opinion there is something fat and abominable banging around in the fata morgana of his mind? Maybe so maybe so No I am frankly saw in a canyon and there was an herd of about two dogs in it running from wall to wall to wall, purblind rats with mange. Who was among them? That's right Dippy. I heard the rattle of bracelets and turned. Yappy of dogs behind me. I put the yappy of dogs behind me. You think I would not smote him I would smote him yip. I would smote him with my heart, buh: big flapping heartbag of coins right in his face, legs of dippy collapsing like an cheap exchequer table it's true. puh. His words are a herd of invalids? Yes he writes like a minivan? That's true yes. Remove his stapes? Abrade his pockmarks? Stomp on lungs? Crack like chicken? John I am not wroth with that intestinal obstruction Dippy causing colic vomiting and constipation no. But I would smote him for a nickel. Smack him like a spondee. These are not menat to be malicious spiteful comments: these are not meant to be anything bat a statement of my support for the defensible nonDippy Rigoberta Menchu of Bolder Colorattle without whom we could all be wroth at the little things. Dixi, Dippy. Pax tecum, and maybe some talcum on that weak foot of yours. (The trochaic one). You irrefutable dirigible -- which is not to say Dippy's full of hotair oh no not hot air. On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote: > One is tickled, if not entirely nicked, to read dear Gudding. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 06:13:39 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: stephen ellis Subject: Re: Notus 9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Charles, re: Notus 9, I have one. Stephen Ellis oasia50@hotmail.com >From owner-poetics@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu Thu Nov 5 22:33:32 1998 >Received: (qmail 20674 invoked from network); 6 Nov 1998 06:33:30 -0000 >Received: from listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu (128.205.7.35) > by defer.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 6 Nov 1998 06:33:30 -0000 >Received: from LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU by LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8d) with spool id 43295900 for > POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 01:33:27 -0500 >Received: (qmail 25412 invoked from network); 6 Nov 1998 06:33:26 -0000 >Received: from imo21.mx.aol.com (198.81.17.65) by listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu > with SMTP; 6 Nov 1998 06:33:26 -0000 >Received: from CharSSmith@aol.com by imo21.mx.aol.com (IMOv16.10) id TFDJa17824 > for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 01:33:03 > -0500 (EST) >Mime-Version: 1.0 >Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII >Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit >X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows 95 sub 214 >Message-ID: <8f3a3c0d.3642981f@aol.com> >Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 01:33:03 EST >Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group >Sender: UB Poetics discussion group >From: CharSSmith@AOL.COM >Subject: Notus 9 >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > >if anyone has a copy of Notus 9, would you please contact me b/c? > >thanks, > >Charles Smith > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:27:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "B. Taylor" Subject: Re: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known as Milky Ways in the U.S. > >*** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars > >LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a >particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million >chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers >Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of >the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new >car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story >concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a >mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in >Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys >when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that >should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:27:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: ITSYNCCAST, 3rdness publication MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII OUT NOW: ITSYNCASST, the "sequal" to SYNTACTICS $6 - payable to me [John Lowther] 2996 Hermance Dr. NE; Atlanta, GA 30319 88 pgs. Poetry, Art & Statement, featuring: Guy Bennett, Jackson Mac Low, Nico Vassilakis, Tracy Grinnell, H.T., Brian Strang, Guy R. Beining, Brian Kim Stefans, Emily Grossman, Tim Fletcher, Mark Prejsnar, William Marsh, Paul Vangelisti, Steve Fried and May Ganz + "Olivia & Viola" 3rdness will bring out another magazine around the turn of the year, Canticsyst, which will feature Norma Cole, Martha Ronk, Anne Tardos, Mark Wallace, Douglas Messerli, Scott Macleod, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Gina Entrebe, Randy Prunty and Charles Henri Ford - query if interested the 1st 3rdness chapbook, Mark Prejsnar's BURNING FLAGS is also available for $5 - i hope to issue another chap with CANTICSYST but *am not looking for chapbook submissions* after canticsyst will come another magazine to please all of you who cannot abide the sifting of names - watch for announcements "the price of fixity is unintelligibility" - Schiller .out )L ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:34:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Re: help (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_000A_01BE09DD.F41FCDE0" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_000A_01BE09DD.F41FCDE0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable For anyone, including this poet, I would suggest trying Woodland Pattern = Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisc. as a possibility. I know Ric Caddel has = read there, as well as Charles Bernstein, Robert Duncan, Helen Adam, and = the list goes on and on and on. The book center is second to none in = its holdings, and Anne Kingsbery and Karl Gartung are fantastic people. = Once upon a time I lived around the corner and I sorely miss it. =20 -----Original Message----- From: R I Caddel To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU = Date: Friday, November 06, 1998 4:53 AM Subject: help (fwd) =20 =20 6/11/98 =20 Hi I'm not sure if you can help me but I have to start somewhere! I am = an Australian poet thinking of doing a world tour between April and = august 1999. Can you help me with contacts, places to read & possibly = run workshops, people who might be willing to put me up. I am willing to = reciprocate the arrangement for anybody wanting to visit the Gold Coast = in Qld, where I live. I will provide more details if this request finds = a friendly home. regards jayne fenton keane ------=_NextPart_000_000A_01BE09DD.F41FCDE0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
For anyone, including this poet, I = would suggest=20 trying Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisc. as a = possibility. =20 I know Ric Caddel has read there, as well as Charles Bernstein, Robert = Duncan,=20 Helen Adam, and the list goes on and on and on.  The book center is = second=20 to none in its holdings, and Anne Kingsbery and Karl Gartung are = fantastic=20 people.  Once upon a time I lived around the corner and I sorely = miss=20 it. 
-----Original = Message-----
From:=20 R I Caddel <R.I.Caddel@DURHAM.AC.UK>To:=20 POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.B= UFFALO.EDU=20 <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.B= UFFALO.EDU>
Date:=20 Friday, November 06, 1998 4:53 AM
Subject: help=20 (fwd)

6/11/98
 
Hi
I'm not = sure if you can=20 help me but I have to start somewhere! I=20 am an Australian poet thinking of doing a world tour between April = and=20 august 1999. Can you help me with contacts, places to read & = possibly=20 run workshops, people who might be willing to put me up. I am = willing to=20 reciprocate the arrangement for anybody wanting to visit the Gold = Coast in=20 Qld, where I live. I will provide more details if this request finds = a=20 friendly home.
regards
jayne fenton=20 keane
------=_NextPart_000_000A_01BE09DD.F41FCDE0-- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:09:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Not exactly though, surely. I remember thick chocolate that would break off in pieces, a lot of runny toffee and a lot less of that fudgy stuff that Milky Ways have. "A Mars a Day Helps You Work Rest and Play" as they used to say in the good old days in rainy Liverpool or Dublin before the climate turned Mediterranean. I know this is very trivial but I think it would be wrong to accept the direct translation. It's not the same thing at all. On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, B. Taylor wrote: > It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known > as Milky Ways in the U.S. > > > > >*** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars > > > >LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a > >particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million > >chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers > >Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of > >the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new > >car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story > >concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a > >mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in > >Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys > >when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that > >should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:28:52 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Roger Day Subject: Re: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Just cross-referenced this with a colleague of mine in the US. Mars bars in the UK are same product (give or take a few ingredients for the US market). In other words, and as trivial as is may seem, Mars Bars in the UK are known as Mars Bars in the US, modulo the aforementioned differences. At 06/11/98 15:09:26, Mairead Byrne wrote: # Not exactly though, surely. I remember thick chocolate that would break # off in pieces, a lot of runny toffee and a lot less of that fudgy stuff # that Milky Ways have. "A Mars a Day Helps You Work Rest and Play" as they # used to say in the good old days in rainy Liverpool or Dublin before the # climate turned Mediterranean. I know this is very trivial but I think it # would be wrong to accept the direct translation. It's not the same thing # at all. # # On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, B. Taylor wrote: # # > It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known # > as Milky Ways in the U.S. # > # > > # > >*** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars # > > # > >LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a # > >particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million # > >chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers # > >Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of # > >the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new # > >car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story # > >concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a # > >mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in # > >Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys # > >when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that # > >should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### # > # Roger ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:50:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: sylvester pollet Subject: Re: JOEL OPPENHEIMER SYMPOSIUM In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" OK, some highpoints: Oct. 29 Creeley reading. He opened with some reminiscences of Joel at Black Mt. & later, then read/spoke on some of the poems from The Dutiful Son--The Tide, The Bath, The Lover. Wonderful to hear them read in Creeley's voice, with his attention to rhythm & line-breaks. Then he read some of his own work, including the long poem Histoire de Floride (which he called his version of Russell Banks' Continental Drift). He concluded with Joel's Sirventes for a Sad Occasion. Next morning, after opening the day's sessions, Creeley said " I'm honored to be here, and I'd be here even if no one else was." That catches the spirit of the event, I'd say. I had run into Creeley the first afternoon, at Joel's gravesite. The stone, a rough pink granite wedge, has a bronze plaque with the poem Legend on it. Joel died in Henniker NH Oct. 11, 1988 so this conference was to mark 10 years. Most, maybe all, participants had also been friends, or students, of Joel's, & two sons were there as well. But the premise of the conference was that it was time to stop telling Joel stories, and to begin according the critical/scholarly attention that would gain his work its rightful place in the canon. (Yes, they used that word repeatedly.) So, Bertholf on Ritual & Romance in the Later Poetry, Blevins on Chaos theory, Ed Foster on Op, Bronk , and the end of American Space, David Landrey On Joel's Voice (including Village Voice), then a couple of more reminiscence-based ones, Patrick Meanor, Portrait of the Poet in J's later Poetry, and Michael Stephens on Joel & St. Marks Poetry Project (but more of what he read from a long piece was really on meeting Joel, & the times). Bertholf seemed unofficial respondent to all papers, but others like Sam Abrams also added much to the NYC days, while Lyman Gilmore & Don Melander (organizer) filled in the NH days. Gilmore's bio is just out, I bought it but MaJo's reading it first. Also bought J's Collected Later Poems, ed Bertholf, Buffalo 1997. I read a poem of mine to kick off the final panel discussions (written in 1988, pub. Exquisite Corpse 36): Joel's Occasional So it goes-- my father's words-- gone now, and now Joel gone, that voice rasp and flow, load of coal down a steel chute into the darkness and coming back not even a bucketful a tin can like anybody's father: ash, bone-flakes, clinkers. Nothing left but whatever the gene-pool can salvage and of course the voice, that voice. Sylvester Pollet ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:37:14 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eric Blanres Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:28:52 +0000 from Would like to point out, however, that if you eat a Mars Bar in Greenwich at 12 noon on Nov. 6th in an even year, facing SSW, with one hand tied behind your back, cross-eyed, the Mars Bar transmogrifies immediately into a Venus Ice Cream Sandwich. Try it, you'll like it! [O, Fudge - I see we have to wait until next millennium...] - Eric Blarnes "Say, how about them Mets?" - Beaumont & Fletcher (in unison) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:03 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Roger Day Subject: Re: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In Yorkshire - or in other parts of the UK for all I know - chippies sometimes dip Mars bars in flour, then batter, then deep-fry them. Nice. At 06/11/98 15:37:14, Eric Blanres wrote: # Would like to point out, however, that if you eat a Mars Bar in Greenwich # at 12 noon on Nov. 6th in an even year, facing SSW, with one hand tied # behind your back, cross-eyed, the Mars Bar transmogrifies immediately # into a Venus Ice Cream Sandwich. Try it, you'll like it! [O, Fudge - I see # we have to wait until next millennium...] # # - Eric Blarnes # "Say, how about them Mets?" # - Beaumont & Fletcher (in unison) # Roger ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:55:41 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:03 +0000 from On Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:03 +0000 Roger Day said: >In Yorkshire - or in other parts of the UK for all I know - chippies >sometimes dip Mars bars in flour, then batter, then deep-fry them. Nice. Ah, that British cuisine! Magnifique! - Eric B. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:35:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: f.y.i. Comments: To: Roger Day In-Reply-To: <802566B4.00550B02.00@noteslong.long.harlequin.co.uk> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Hmm: that's quite a different thing to saying that Mars Bars on one side of the Atlantic are Milky Ways on the other. So Mars Bars on one side of the Atlantic are actually Mars Bars on the other side of the Atlantic. That leaves us simply with the question of the special ingredients. And why. On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Roger Day wrote: > Just cross-referenced this with a colleague of mine in the US. Mars bars in > the UK are same product (give or take a few ingredients for the US market). > > In other words, and as trivial as is may seem, Mars Bars in the UK are > known as Mars Bars in the US, modulo the aforementioned differences. > > At 06/11/98 15:09:26, Mairead Byrne wrote: > # Not exactly though, surely. I remember thick chocolate that would break > # off in pieces, a lot of runny toffee and a lot less of that fudgy stuff > # that Milky Ways have. "A Mars a Day Helps You Work Rest and Play" as > they > # used to say in the good old days in rainy Liverpool or Dublin before the > # climate turned Mediterranean. I know this is very trivial but I think > it > # would be wrong to accept the direct translation. It's not the same > thing > # at all. > # > # On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, B. Taylor wrote: > # > # > It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are > known > # > as Milky Ways in the U.S. > # > > # > > > # > >*** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars > # > > > # > >LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a > # > >particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million > # > >chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers > # > >Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of > # > >the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new > # > >car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story > # > >concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a > # > >mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in > # > >Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys > # > >when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that > # > >should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### > # > > # > > Roger > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:35:27 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: james perez Subject: Re: where archives, Poetics and jazz all meet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain referring to the current, why put it in an archive discussion... well the reason for me would be: sorry I wasn't living in San Francisco in the 60s(not even born)/70s or the East Village in the 80s or even Buffalo in the 90s(?) and a lot of these things had very small fragile runs can argue that these things weren't for me exactly because I wasn't there, but that's not good enough but in the interest of keeping the work out of the glass cabinets I would introduce the jazz tradition of fakebooks... I'm sure most of us here aren't in it to make dime, and some of us (?) are outright hostile when it comes to copyrights, so I charge someone significantly in the know to try and build a ring bound photocopy collection of significant hard-to-gets, kind of an indie anthology of "ephemera" that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (my last fakebook cost around $30, but half the fun was the way it was kept under the counter and that everything in it was written by hand) I think the idea of this or that poem being a "standard," as jazz would put it, is problematic, but Poetics is small enough a community that it could have some kind of consensus...you could break it by decades or location should it start to get unwieldy if it comes together, I'll help distribute in DC (will sell them from under my bed) jamie.p ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:38:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: <802566B4.005712B4.00@noteslong.long.harlequin.co.uk> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT No No No No No No No No No No No On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Roger Day wrote: > In Yorkshire - or in other parts of the UK for all I know - chippies > sometimes dip Mars bars in flour, then batter, then deep-fry them. Nice. > > At 06/11/98 15:37:14, Eric Blanres wrote: > # Would like to point out, however, that if you eat a Mars Bar in > Greenwich > # at 12 noon on Nov. 6th in an even year, facing SSW, with one hand tied > # behind your back, cross-eyed, the Mars Bar transmogrifies immediately > # into a Venus Ice Cream Sandwich. Try it, you'll like it! [O, Fudge - I > see > # we have to wait until next millennium...] > # > # - Eric Blarnes > # "Say, how about them Mets?" > # - Beaumont & Fletcher (in unison) > # > > Roger > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:39:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: JOEL OPPENHEIMER SYMPOSIUM thanks so much, sylvester, for the report. i do wish i had been able to be there, especially now that i learn how rich an experience it was. yes, reading joel's work in retrospect, i for realize how incredibly fine he is! yes there needs to be a lot more critical work done on him, and by the way a lot less of the sort of nonsense i find in the recent issue of ABR on joel. burt ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:43:15 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Roger Day Subject: Re: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii At 06/11/98 16:35:15, Mairead Byrne wrote: # Hmm: that's quite a different thing to saying that Mars Bars on one side # of the Atlantic are Milky Ways on the other. So Mars Bars on one side of # the Atlantic are actually Mars Bars on the other side of the Atlantic. # That leaves us simply with the question of the special ingredients. And # why. Not so much speicial, according to my source. US chocolate apparently contains vanilla, and the whole confectionery experience is less sweet. Quite why this is, my source is, of neccessity, silent on, not being on the inside track as it were. UK chocolate, in general, contains vegetable oils, which is why the EU wanted UK chocolate to be declassified. Mainland european chocolate is, er, mostly correspond. UK Mars Bars were decreased in size recently - the older ones were ice-berg sized chunks of sugar-stuff. Roger Speicial Chocolate Correspondent. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:32:52 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Trank Subject: Naropa Writing Events Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Two great events with Naropa's Writing and Poetics Department: 1. This weekend, Friday and Saturday, November 6 & 7 - Writing and Poetics Student Arts Concert:Poetry and Prose students will read their work, beginning at 8pm at Naropa's Performing Arts Center, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO. FREE 2. Saturday, November 14 - Bombay Gin Annual Benefit with performances by Anne Waldman and Steven Taylor, Naropa Jazz Ensemble, a silent auction (lots of goodies from local businesses, artists, etc.), food and drink. $7/advance tix, $8/at the door (food and drink included in the price of the ticket). All proceeds go to the publishing of the 25th commemorative edition of Bombay Gin. Information for both of these events: 303. 546. 3508. See you there!! Lisa Trank ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:41:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Blau DuPlessis Organization: Temple University Subject: Re: Self-Promotion In-Reply-To: <3297014e.3641ea92@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I will vouch for the fact that Rae's book TRUE is a great and subtle and witty and fascinating read, before I pass to three points of RAchel's self-promotion, as follows 1) The feminist Memoir Project, co-edited by DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, published by Three Rivers/ Crown/ Random House--31 various poignant, kick-butt, frank, funny, serious memoirs by 2nd wave activists--in order that the particularities of social activist lives not be lost 2) RENGA: Draft 32 about to come out from a great new chapbook press here in Philly called BeautifulSwimmer and 3) I learn to my fascination that the Oppen letters is being remaindered by Duke UP--get a copy for about 1/3 of list price. (Since they never bothered to put it in Books In Print under Oppen, I can imagine why they have so many copies) but it is a great read in poetics, published in 1990, and edited by that same RAchel. over and out ========================= Rachel Blau DuPlessis Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 215-204-1810 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:52:45 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shemurph@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Self-Promotion Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Rachel, Do you have further details on how to obtain the Oppen Letters - thanks for that tip. Sheila Murphy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:06:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: TALISMAN In-Reply-To: <36427EC7.2A33@earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII the new talisman (the armand schwerner issue) is now, or soon will be, in bookstores. individual issues are going in the mail now. as it happens i just got back from the jersey city post office to mail 370 more copies. anyone who wants to subscribe: the rate is now $14/two issues. #18, the lewis warsh issue, was published in august, and #20, the maureen owen issue, is scheduled for the spring. that will be followed by 21/22, the special double-issue on history of american poetry 1970-2000, which will be published in july, and then by 23/24, the special double-issue on translation, which will draw heavily on next week's conference and which should be published next fall. the talisman address is p.o. box 3157, jersey city, nj 07303-3157. On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Todd Baron /*/ ReMap wrote: > sorry for the "personal" tho others may be interested-- > > > Dear Ed Foster: > > when is the new issue of Talisman coming out--I haven't heard from you > in a year! > > yrs, > > Todd Baron > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:18:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: TALISMAN Comments: To: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap In-Reply-To: <36427EC7.2A33@earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII i should also mention the new talisman book, published last monday: _reality prime_ by walter lowenfels. -- his selected writings as edited by joel lewis (who is also responsible for the introduction, which i think will be for many years the primary source for anyone interested in lowenfels). american publishers allowed lowenfels to go out of print, completely. a shameful fact. lowenfels is a key figure in the history of american poetry in our time. joel's book includes both major work from lowenfels' avant-garde years in paris and his political poetry. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:21:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen Kelley Subject: Re: Self-Promotion MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit & please post to the list, not back channel. Shemurph@AOL.COM wrote: > Rachel, > > Do you have further details on how to obtain the Oppen Letters - thanks for > that tip. > > Sheila Murphy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:44:48 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Zauhar Subject: Re: JOEL OPPENHEIMER SYMPOSIUM In-Reply-To: <009CED02.85E8B400.189@admin.njit.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT wrote: > thanks so much, sylvester, for the report. i do wish i had been able to be > there, especially now that i learn how rich an experience it was. > > yes, reading joel's work in retrospect, i for realize how incredibly fine > he is! yes there needs to be a lot more critical work done on him, and > by the way a lot less of the sort of nonsense i find in the recent issue > of ABR on joel. > > burt Yes, thanks to Sylvester Pollet from me too: Question: haven't seen the recent ABR, but I know a few people there, so I have to ask, what sort of nonsense did they put in there? Dave Zauhar ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:01:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: louis stroffolino Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII i would expect nothing less from the son of the woman who wrote "a kid will eat the middle of an oreo first" "the big fig newton" and "oh fab..."------------- On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, B. Taylor wrote: > It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known > as Milky Ways in the U.S. > > > > >*** UK man accused of stealing 1.5 mln Mars bars > > > >LONDON (Reuters) - Supervisor Martin Keys seems to have had a > >particularly sweet tooth - he is on trial for stealing 1.5 million > >chocolate Mars bars worth 500,000 pounds (US$829,000). Newspapers > >Thursday said Keys, accused of plotting to steal eight truck loads of > >the bars, made so much money he paid 21,000 pounds in cash for a new > >car and put down a 52,000 pound cash deposit on a house. "This story > >concerns chocolate. The theft of chocolate. A lot of chocolate - a > >mountain of chocolate," prosecutor Simon Brand told the court in > >Gloucester, southwest England. The finger of suspicion fell on Keys > >when a truck arrived at the warehouse and found most of the bars that > >should have been on the shelves had vanished. ### > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:15:43 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: RaeA100900@AOL.COM Subject: address request Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hello again, I wonder if anyone out there has an e mail address for Claudia Rankine, the contact person for the conference at Barnard. Rae Armantrout ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:59:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Safdie Joseph Subject: Spicer Poetics MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Seems like a while since we've actually talked about the reason this list exists -- besides, of course, the self-promos, the other-promos, the readings, the publications, etc., etc. Which I agree are necessary. But really . . . Mars Bars? So on the day of the great Spicer memorial reading in S.F., and because it's been talked about a lot in recent weeks, I'd like to ask the List about these scraps of a possible poetics from _After Lorca_: "Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to. . . . "I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger . . . "to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them . . . "not as an image or a picture but as something alive -- caught forever in the structure of words" I've always been amazed by the simple audacity of this proposition. On the face of it, it seems a long, long way from any sort of LangPo. Whether or not Jack's actual work exemplifies it is another question -- does Olson's work really exemplify "projective verse"? This would take us far afield. I'm mainly interested in the efficacy of the idea(s) themselves . . . ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:19:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Billy Little Subject: Re: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" in new york in august we kept our mars bars in the freezer, break them with a hammer, yum, cold and sweet, no gooey. the more delicate saw a slice off with a serrated knife, let the cool chocolate melting lubricate their murderous thoughts billy little 4 song st. nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0 Go ahead and say something true before the big turd eats You You can say any last thing in Your poem. -Alice Notley ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:19:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Billy Little Subject: Re: Spicer Poetics Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" wcw's work exemplifies projective verse, paul blackburn's work, amiri baraka's work, susan howe's larry timewell's, kevin davies work maybe marcel marceau exemplifies what spicer proposed, charlie chaplin billy little 4 song st. nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0 Go ahead and say something true before the big turd eats You You can say any last thing in Your poem. -Alice Notley ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 01:28:56 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known >as Milky Ways in the U.S. They're called Mars Bars in Canada. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 06:15:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to." Actually, Joe, these words are as close to a definition of LangPo as such as I've ever come across. Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 12:04:02 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lawrence Upton." Subject: Re: f.y.i. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "A Mars a day mars a day" From: B. Taylor Date: 06 November 1998 14:27 |It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known |as Milky Ways in the U.S. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lawrence Upton's website: http://members.spree.com/sip/lizard/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "WORD SCORE UTTERANCE CHOREOGRAPHY in verbal and visual poetry" edited by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton Writers Forum, London, 1998; 156 pp; ISBN 0 86162 750 4 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 09:52:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: JOEL OPPENHEIMER SYMPOSIUM Dave, In the new ABR is a quite cavalier and ultimately mindless review of Joel's late poems by Sparrow whom I enjoy as a poet but as a critic (if the word can be used in the present context) I find frustrating to say the least; his was a non-review comprised of some kidding around and woefully little treatment of the poems. I must say that I am also dismayed that ABR allowed this piece, which was, while being funny especiallly if you know Sparrow's work etc., really vapid. I have taken comfort in ABR as being a forum for serious and learned discourse about the avant-garde, but now I can't help but wonder a teensy-bit about that. Burt ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 10:48:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: joel lewis Subject: f.y.i. (place your bets) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" West Indian enters race to be UK Poet laureate By Paul Majendie LONDON, Nov 6 (Reuters) - West Indian poet and Nobel prize-winner Derek Walcott on Friday entered the race to replace the late Ted Hughes as Britain's next poet laureate. The salary for the nation's official poet on state occasions -- 100 pounds ($166) and a case of wine a year -- is certainly not the big attraction of the lifelong job. But the nobility of the tradition appeals. ``I rather like the idea of those duty poems,'' Walcott, from the West Indian island of St Lucia, told Friday's Daily Telegraph. ``The very idea I could be laureate is amazing. I always thought the British would keep it to themselves,'' he said. He insisted he was entitled to be considered. ``The qualification is the depth of love for the country you write about.'' Walcott, whose grandmothers were both slaves but also had one grandfather who was a white colonial, said: ``We are all inheritors of the English language.'' But he draws the line at ever accepting a knighthood: ``It's not me. I don't want to be part of some aristocracy.'' Just one week after Hughes died of cancer, bookmakers made Andrew Motion, a professor of creative writing at East Anglia university, the 6-4 favourite to be the next Poet Laureate. He had already put himself in the running last year with a poem commemorating Princess Diana after she was killed in a Paris car crash. Walcott is not the only foreign challenger for a quintessentially British post. Ireland's Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney gets an 8-1 quote from the bookmakers. Among the outsiders is Australian Les Murray. Another intriguing name being bandied around in literary circles is Murray Lachlan Young, the pop poet who clinched a 1 million pound record deal last year. ``He has the Byronic looks if not the gravitas,'' The Finanial Times, reflecting on the surprisingly strong field in the esoteric poetry stakes, said of Young. Walcott is not a great fan of the U.S. system whereby a poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress is appointed for two years and paid an annual salary of $35,000. ``Here it is for life, it has a validity, a sense of tradition,'' he said. But it can carry risks as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, found out to his cost in 1673. He was asked to write a poem about King Charles II but instead produced a lampoon that speculated about the monarch's sexual shortcomings. Wilmot was forced to flee into exile. ^REUTERS@ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 11:11:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: f.y.i. In-Reply-To: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT In Hawaii they're called Anti-Pineapple Chunks. On Sat, 7 Nov 1998, George Bowering wrote: > >It's important to note that what are called Mars Bars in the U.K. are known > >as Milky Ways in the U.S. > > They're called Mars Bars in Canada. > > > > > George Bowering. > , > 2499 West 37th Ave., > Vancouver, B.C., > Canada V6M 1P4 > > fax: 1-604-266-9000 > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 10:21:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Subject: Matias Viegener Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Does anyone have a current email for Matias? Thanks! B-C Elizabeth Outlet Magazine -&- Double Lucy Books P.O. Box 9013, Berkeley, California 94709 U.S.A. http://users.lanminds.com/~dblelucy ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 13:39:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: What sticks to the real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ron--It's interesting to me that you feel this to be so. For me, the Spicer lines certainly evoke a stronger sense of the intransigence of an extra-linguistic "real" than I usually associate with Langpo and its various statements of poetics. Take, for example, the following, from the Sapir epigraph to your essay "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World": "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group." I could probably find a stronger example if I had more time to look, but even if we grant that there's a lot hanging on that qualifier "to a large extent," the emphasis here seems different than in the Spicer. It seems clear that your essay was meant as a corrective to the too-easy and too-prevalent assumption of linguistic transparency, but this sort of "corrective" impulse was common to many of the polemics that arose out of the initial l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e moment--indeed it often found much more virulent expression than it does in my example. (I seem to remember one formulation that went along the lines language control = thought control = reality control.) The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other. Again, I can see how the distinction I'm trying to make might disappear into a question of emphasis, but it still seems to me that the emphasis is significant. Steve At 06:15 AM 11/7/98 -0500, you wrote: >"Words are what sticks to the real. >We use them to push the real, >to drag the real into the poem. >They are what we hold on with, >nothing else. They are as valuable >in themselves as rope >with nothing to be tied to." > >Actually, Joe, these words are as close to a definition of LangPo as such as >I've ever come across. > >Ron > > Steve Shoemaker Visiting Assistant Professor English Department Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109 shoemask@wfu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 12:33:58 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: My Life (Hejinian's that is) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am looking for recommendations of good critical work done on Lyn Hejinian's _My Life_. Even if you wrote it yourself, I wanna know about it (come on, don't be shy). Also another plug for the new issue of Hambone: I'm currently reading an expansive critical piece on "the space age jazz poet" Sun Ra written by Brent Edwards which examines, among other things, the relationship of mid-century Black experimental poetics to musical traditions. Also included: new work by Martha Ronk, Lydia Davis, and Harryette Mullen. Some of my faves. Note: I ordered my copy directly from Nathaniel Mackey and he responded almost immediately. More copies of Lipstick Eleven going out today. Thanks for all your orders! Kathy Lou Schultz ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 13:26:01 -0800 Reply-To: griffinbaker@bc.sympatico.ca Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Baker Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Do these lines appear in _After Lorca_? > >"Words are what sticks to the real. > >We use them to push the real, > >to drag the real into the poem. > >They are what we hold on with, > >nothing else. They are as valuable > >in themselves as rope > >with nothing to be tied to." Since what's quoted here apparently as verse apppears instead as prose in one of the letters in _After Lorca_, hasn't this passage already become unstuck from the real Spicer? "Most of my friends love words too well," this Jack writes, in a letter to a dead man. Construing the passage simply as any simple poetics seems naive. But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent assumption today is the reverse: language is completely opaque. Mark Baker ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 17:40:21 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: virus MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit anyone out there with an apple computer: Since I don't use outside disks on this computer I know I got a strain of the first known apple worm either from an attachment from this list or a person from this list. It's called auto start 9805. It cannot be seen on the hard drive unless the computer is booted with extensions off. Yes, kids it's invisible. Sometimes (ie rarely) it can be seen as "DEL Printer Spooler" or variations containing the words "Printer Spooler" in the systems menu. Or update your software with the most recent version from the website of the company you use to find it. Symantec 4.5.1 from before late July of 98 does not recognize this virus without the update. Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 18:06:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On 7 Nov. Steve Shoemaker wrote: >The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the >world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a >kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other." Steve: Just a thought to add to your post, to which I hope Ron responds because the issue you pose is interesting. My thought is something of a qualifcation to yours: One of the qualities of Spicer that most appeals to me is how speculative and notational his very sophisticated thought is. In fact, I'm not sure, really, to what extent one can speak of a Spicer "Poetics," if by that term one means a system of thought that puts itself forth as internally consistent and confident in terms of its proposals. The pursuit of a poetry that shows "the mind in control of its language," for example, an oft-repeated quote from Watten (?) which could stand as a kind of epigraphic call to arms of the old Language circle, encapsulates a poetics that is aggressively confident and relatively technocratic. But Spicer's attitude (tho he was certainly not an unconfident poet!) is very different, inasmuch as his idea of dictation implies a mind not really in control of language at all! In fact, I think one can find much in JS that points to his "poetics" as largely affirmation that the poetic act and vocation is outside of, and irrelevant to, theorization. One of the aspects of JS's thought that would support this is, actually, his "consistently" ambiguous and even contradictory stance regarding the language/world, self/other conundrum. When one considers Spicer's poetically charged staements about "poetics" in the poetry, letters, and talks, it often seems he is proposing, as you suggest, that there is an "outside" that is "non-linguistic," other and blank in the sense of the human menaings we ascribe to it. But at the same time, Spicer proposes that language comes to us from that very "blank" outside, that language is a part of the Outside no less than are rocks in a field, and that it is the palpable filament that connects us to the Other and weaves us into it, so that one could say the Outside was never "other" in the first place. The poet, as he said, is a radio through which the outside speaks; but a radio is also a piece of furniture in the room-- inside the room , not outside. The mystery of the poetic act, the "practice of the Outside," is the mystery that there is no outside of "Outside." So what I would differ with in your post is the notion that Spicer has a "position" that makes him different from the "Language" poets (if they exist anymore?). What makes Spicer different is that he _doesn't have_ a position that allows us to comfortably place him in a geneology or spectrum of poetics. And in these times when it's so easy to draw parallels and make schools and trace allegiances, maybe that's why he is more and more attracting the interest of poets. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 18:29:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: (Fwd) genre of virtual document MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT The other day I forwarded a message from the Russian critic Mikhail Epstein. I recently also received this and I thought some on the List would find it interesting. Selections from "Fugitive Sects" are available in _New England Review_, vol. 18, No.2 (Spring, 1997): 70-100. Kent ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:27:18 +0300 To: "KENT JOHNSON" From: russmne@emory.edu (Mikhail N.Epstein) Subject: genre of virtual document Dear Kent: here is a fragment of the letter I sent to the American publisher of "Fugitive Sects" who asked me what's the genre of the book: ---------------------- I think for the purpose of promotion, the genre of the book can be defined as broadly as possible, including "intellectual fiction," "religious fiction" or whatever. On a deeper level, I believe, this is not a fiction but what can be called "virtual document". Fiction departs from reality to the fields of imagination whereas "Sects" move into opposite direction, to make their "fiction" part of reality where they arose as possibilities. This is a rare genre: Rosicrucians emerged in this way - from a virtual document, an anonymous text "Fama Fraternitatis" (Account of the Brotherhood, 1614)- to become later one the most powerful mystical movements. Kabbalah was also founded by a virtual document - the book " Zoha"r written by Moses de Leon in the late 13th century. The third example: Pseudo-Dyonisius Areopagite ( 5 -6 th cc.) and apophatic theology generated by his pseudo-epigraphic treatises. I believe the virtual document will become one of the leading genres of 21 c., because reality itself is increasingly virtualized, and the difference between "faked" and "real" becomes less and less significant. That's why our time is sometimes called "New Middle Ages" - the golden age for fictions becoming flesh and blood of history. Yours, Misha ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 20:02:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: What sticks to the real In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 7 Nov 1998 13:39:03 -0500 from >>"Words are what sticks to the real. >>We use them to push the real, >>to drag the real into the poem. >>They are what we hold on with, >>nothing else. They are as valuable >>in themselves as rope >>with nothing to be tied to." Another thing to think of here is a kind of irony: Spicer's simile - that words are what we hold onto, as valuable IN THEMSELVES only as much as rope is with nothing to be tied to - this simile is valuable IN ITSELF purely for its wit - pure useless wit (not in my awkward rephrasing - but in itself) - so it sort of undercuts the thrust of the argument - but only a little - Henry G. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:26:33 -0500 Reply-To: daniel7@IDT.NET Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Zimmerman Organization: Bard-O Subject: Re: Ethics in Writing MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit dbkk@SIRIUS.COM wrote: > > Hi, this is Dodie. I'm going to be teaching Ethics inWriting to > undergraduate English majors. I want to cover all the things that get tail > feathers ruffled on this list: racism, essentialism, privacy issues, > ownership, censorship, Ezra Pound or someone similarly problematic and > those issues, exclusion, the problematic use of the word "we"--also need to > talk a bit about legal issues. > > My question is, does anyone have any advice--important essays, books, etc. > that would be accessible/interesting to undergraduates? > > A friend of mine did a search of Aristotle and Ethics on the classics web > and sent me her findings. It was brain-death for me, but a starting point. > Particularly interesting was the stuff about slaves having no rights . . . > > Thanks for any input. Dodie, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok Paperback Reissue edition (December 1989) Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679724702 [worth a close look] The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard M. Weaver Paperback Reprint edition (July 1985) Hermagoras Pr; ISBN: 0961180021 [very conservative/traditional, but a classic; 1st publ. 1953] Rhetoric of American Politics: a Study of Documents by William R. Smith Hardcover (June 1969) Greenwood Publishing Group; ISBN: 0837114950 [very expensive: $75.00! good to put on reserve] In my English Comp. II classes, I use Miller, Robert K., ed. The Informed Argument: A Multidisciplinary Reader and Guide. 5th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. ISBN: 0-15-503809-5 I use these texts [even some in Miller] as background for discussing the kinds of issues you mention, rather than using contemporary discussions alone -- a decision based on three years' participation in an Ethics Project at my college to help integrate that aspect of General Education into curricula beyond the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities. Good luck with the course! Best, Dan Zimmerman Middlesex County College Edison, NJ Learn more about 1-ClickSM ordering Availability: T ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:25:01 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit When I give this quote some thought, it leads me to wonder why the argument always worries the language<=>reality bone, especially since it doesn't really matter whether the real is really there, as Kent noted earlier. For me the more interesting end is writer/reader<=>language. I feel that is what Spicer describes here with the tactile/sensual images. tom bell henry gould wrote: > > >>"Words are what sticks to the real. > >>We use them to push the real, > >>to drag the real into the poem. > >>They are what we hold on with, > >>nothing else. They are as valuable > >>in themselves as rope > >>with nothing to be tied to." > > Another thing to think of here is a kind of irony: Spicer's simile - that > words are what we hold onto, as valuable IN THEMSELVES only as much as rope is > with nothing to be tied to - this simile is valuable IN ITSELF purely for > its wit - pure useless wit (not in my awkward rephrasing - but in itself) - > so it sort of undercuts the thrust of the argument - but only a little - > > Henry G. -- <><><><> <><>,...,., Y Y N M /\` J K HHH ZOOOOZ MM LLLL GOOOG [ ] SPACER http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:02:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: What sticks to the real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kent--What you say of Spicer is interesting, but I didn't really mean that to say that he had a "position." I was responding to Ron's response to those *particular lines*, and the truth is that I don't know Spicer's work well enough to venture any broader speculation. It may be that I found in those lines something that's ultimately more important to me than it was to Spicer. But when you say this: >Spicer proposes that language comes to us from >that very "blank" outside, that language is a part of the Outside no >less than are rocks in a field, and that it is the palpable filament >that connects us to the Other and weaves us into it, so that one >could say the Outside was never "other" in the first place. I'm not sure I get what you mean. Or at least it seems to me that that Other was there *before* language as we know it. The most recent evidence seems to suggest that we started speaking around half a million years ago, but we were walking around on those "rocks" long before that. Steve Shoemaker Visiting Assistant Professor English Department Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109 shoemask@wfu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:06:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: What sticks to the real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Tom--To me, it does *matter* (pun intended) that "the real is really there." As Oppen said, poetry (and I would expand this to say also *language*) is concerned with a fact it did not create: the world. At 10:25 PM 11/7/98 -0600, you wrote: >When I give this quote some thought, it leads me to wonder why the >argument always worries the language<=>reality bone, especially since it >doesn't really matter whether the real is really there, as Kent noted >earlier. For me the more interesting end is writer/reader<=>language. >I feel that is what Spicer describes here with the tactile/sensual >images. > >tom bell > > Steve Shoemaker Visiting Assistant Professor English Department Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109 shoemask@wfu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:16:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: What sticks to the real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Mark--As I recall Ron's essay--and I haven't had a chance to reread it-- he wasn't talking about linguists, or philosophers of language, or even English majors. More like "mass market novels" on the order of *Jaws* and movies with faulty sub-titles... > >But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide >a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption >of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist >or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. >Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent >assumption today is the reverse: language is completely >opaque. > > >Mark Baker > > Steve Shoemaker Visiting Assistant Professor English Department Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109 shoemask@wfu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 23:05:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: What sticks to the real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" >Words are what sticks to the real "Real" is a word. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 11:02:42 +0200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT Subject: Re: What sticks to the real In-Reply-To: <199811080702.XAA17639@magpie.prod.itd.earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 7 Nov 1998, Leonard Brink wrote: > >Words are what sticks to the real > > "Real" is a word. Really? ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 07:06:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Lapis Press Does anyone know where Lapis Press is located and how to get in touch with it? Also, does anyone know when the first volume(s) of Cid Corman's book(s) of poems titled "Of" was(were) published? Thanks so much. Please do backchannel if you like: Burt Kimmelman Department of Humanities and Social Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 973.596.3376 (p) 973.642.4689 (f) kimmelman@admin.njit.edu (e) http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma (i) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 08:31:48 -0500 Reply-To: daniel7@IDT.NET Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Zimmerman Organization: Bard-O Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "I am reminded of a phrase quoted to me by a friend which was supposed to have been a remark of Jung's, although my friend confessed that he could never find the source of the quotation and may even have dreamed it. In any case, I pass it on to you--the old man is reputed to have said, '_Meine Herre, vergessen Sie nicht das Unbewusste ist auch draussen_' [Gentlemen, do not forget that the unconscious is also on the outside]!" --June Singer, _Boundaries of the Soul_. Anchor, 1973: 227. In "The Practice of Outside," Robin Blaser writes that "The guide here is not the poet of a limited biographical occasion because he is guided toward the disclosure of a tied and retied heart, a manhood entangled with the world. The disclosure must not be reduced to psyche . . . [but rather] . . . once when Pythagoras was asked what Chronos is, he answered that it is the psyche of the universe" (_Collected Books_ 281-282); . . . The dictation or emptying out allows the unknown, as iut is experientially and technically present to what we know, to enter and use the words, where it has been all along--strangely" (310). [I.e., as you say, Kent, "no outside of "Outside."] Dan KENT JOHNSON wrote: > > On 7 Nov. Steve Shoemaker wrote: > > >The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the > >world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a > >kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other." > > Steve: > > Just a thought to add to your post, to which I hope Ron > responds because the issue you pose is interesting. My thought > is something of a qualifcation to yours: One of the qualities of > Spicer that most appeals to me is how speculative and notational his > very sophisticated thought is. In fact, I'm not sure, really, to what > extent one can speak of a Spicer "Poetics," if by that term one > means a system of thought that puts itself forth as internally > consistent and confident in terms of its proposals. The pursuit of > a poetry that shows "the mind in control of its language," for > example, an oft-repeated quote from Watten (?) which could > stand as a kind of epigraphic call to arms of the old Language > circle, encapsulates a poetics that is aggressively confident and > relatively technocratic. But Spicer's attitude (tho he was certainly > not an unconfident poet!) is very different, inasmuch as his idea of > dictation implies a mind not really in control of language at all! In > fact, I think one can find much in JS that points to his "poetics" > as largely affirmation that the poetic act and vocation is > outside of, and irrelevant to, theorization. > > One of the aspects of JS's thought that would support this is, > actually, his "consistently" ambiguous and even contradictory stance > regarding the language/world, self/other conundrum. When one > considers Spicer's poetically charged staements about "poetics" in > the poetry, letters, and talks, it often seems he is proposing, as > you suggest, that there is an "outside" that is "non-linguistic," > other and blank in the sense of the human menaings we ascribe to it. > But at the same time, Spicer proposes that language comes to us from > that very "blank" outside, that language is a part of the Outside no > less than are rocks in a field, and that it is the palpable filament > that connects us to the Other and weaves us into it, so that one > could say the Outside was never "other" in the first place. The poet, > as he said, is a radio through which the outside speaks; but a radio > is also a piece of furniture in the room-- inside the room , not > outside. The mystery of the poetic act, the "practice of the > Outside," is the mystery that there is no outside of "Outside." > > So what I would differ with in your post is the notion that Spicer > has a "position" that makes him different from the "Language" poets > (if they exist anymore?). What makes Spicer different is that he > _doesn't have_ a position that allows us to comfortably place him in > a geneology or spectrum of poetics. And in these times when it's so > easy to draw parallels and make schools and trace allegiances, maybe > that's why he is more and more attracting the interest of poets. > > Kent ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 06:19:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tosh Subject: Re: Lapis Press Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I think Lapis Press is gone. If I am wrong... sorry about that! ----------------- Tosh Berman TamTam Books ---------------- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 06:42:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Organization: Sun Moon Books Subject: Re: Lapis Press MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lapis Press no longer exists. Douglas Messerli Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT wrote: > > Does anyone know where Lapis Press is located and how to get in touch with > it? > Also, does anyone know when the first volume(s) of Cid Corman's book(s) > of poems titled "Of" was(were) published? > > Thanks so much. > Please do backchannel if you like: > > Burt Kimmelman > Department of Humanities and Social Sciences > New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 > 973.596.3376 (p) 973.642.4689 (f) > kimmelman@admin.njit.edu (e) http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma (i) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 11:04:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: What sticks to the real In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:25:01 -0600 from >> >> >>"Words are what sticks to the real. >> >>We use them to push the real, >> >>to drag the real into the poem. >> >>They are what we hold on with, >> >>nothing else. They are as valuable >> >>in themselves as rope >> >>with nothing to be tied to." >> >> Another thing to think of here is a kind of irony: Spicer's simile - that >> words are what we hold onto, as valuable IN THEMSELVES only as much as rope >is >> with nothing to be tied to - this simile is valuable IN ITSELF purely for >> its wit - pure useless wit (not in my awkward rephrasing - but in itself) - >> so it sort of undercuts the thrust of the argument - but only a little - ON THE OTHER HAND, neither the wit nor the words exist in isolation, "purely" - since there would be no wit to this simile without a relation to some truth about the "real". Wit without a point is like a rope tied to nothing at both ends that breaks anyway. - Henry G. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 10:43:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On 8 Nov., Steve Shoemaker said: >...the truth is that I don't know Spicer's work well enough to >venture any broader speculation. Steve: My personal feeling is that the more one reads Spicer, the more necessary it becomes to "speculate" as a means to "understand." This is the path to understanding that Blaser's great essay takes, an essay unlike any other I've read-- one taht truly opens up the mystery of a work rather than cataloguing it and explaining it down. We are initiates all. Further on you say: >...it seems to me that that Other was there *before* language as we >know it. The most recent evidence seems to suggest that we started >speaking around half a million years ago, but we were walking around >on those "rocks" long before that. This is true. But I would prefer to think of the Other as always unfolding. "Rocks" weren't always there either. Language "appears" into the Other like rocks did long before it. And if I can go back and comment on something else you said in the previous post: >The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the >world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a >kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other. Important to say that Spicer's "poetics" is indeed impelled by the desire to constitute a world-- a communitas (a "city") of readers and lovers and friends which is realized through that Otherness of language. Spicer's, really, is one of the most "world-constituting" bodies of poetry that we have. But here, too, taht paradoxical interpenetration of worlds is at work: The "real" space of human beings fully owes its being to an "outside" realm whose mysteries are beyond and not for us. So in this sense that in Spicer a ghostliness always inhabits the real... I haven't seen the analogy drawn in terms of JS before, but there is something ancient and "classical" about this, I think (therefore I speculate): the many-godded and ghosted world of the Greeks, where the passions and folly of the human sphere are enacted on hte stage of an "Outside" theater for the amusement of the gods and the ghosts. Poor us, Spicer seems to be saying, it's all we can here aspire to. But at least we're in contact with the infinite. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 11:32:42 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Les Plooster Subject: Re: Announcing TRUE by Rae Armantrout "One reads this book for . . . " I'll pretend I didn't read that. Les Plooster ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 10:23:55 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain It seems to me the difference is not just one of emphasis. If you're wrestling with the "world-*constituting*" dimension of language then aren't you ultimately wrestling with language as access to that very "non-linguistic Other"-- whose "world" (which is admittedly a vague term) one ultimately shares THROUGH language? I assume this is at least part of what Ron meant. Mark DuCharme Steve Shoemaker wrote: >The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the >world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a kind of >wrestling with a non-linguistic Other. Again, I can see how the distinction >I'm trying to make might disappear into a question of emphasis, but it >still seems to me that the emphasis is significant. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 23:03:24 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Organization: Re*Map Subject: Re: Lapis Press MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lapis went under went--gulp--Sam Francis--who operated it--did. Tod Baron ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:49:35 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: My trip to NYC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I will be starting at Larry's in Columbus (high street near OSU) with a shove-off on Monday the 9th. I hope to catch up with you at the readings and afterwards for libations and revelry. The solid stops are: Nov. 14 -- Philly. Highwire Gallery, 139 N. 2nd St., (Old City) with Ethel Rackin, Chris Stroffolino, & Tom Devaney. Starts exactly at 7:30PM. Nov. 15 -- NYC. Zinc Bar, 90 West Houston Street off Laguardia Pl. with Sean Killian & Gena Mason. Starts around 7:30PM. Nov. 19-- Albany, NY. At Cafe Web, 1040 Madison Ave near the Norma Jean Madison Theater. David Baratier. Starts at 7:30 PM Nov. 21st-- Boston. The Bookcellar (Cambridge, Porter Square) with Dan Bouchard. Starts at 7:00 p.m. If you aren't sure you can make it send me your number & I'll call from wherever I land. I'll be checking mail until Tuesday night. Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 15:21:47 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: My Disco-Ball of Wrath MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain >These are not menat [sic] to be malicious spiteful comments.... Really? Well do a favor to the List & myself and spare us malicious & spiteful comments when you do have them. Sincerely, P.D. Smote-Wat Chair, Department of S.U.V. Studies University of North Umbrage ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 19:46:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: Radio Days with Jennifer and Alan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Radio Days with Jennifer and Alan She maneuvered her dirty hungry twat into my waiting mouth; yellow liquid dribbled from her hole, as everything turned fecal across the microphones and consoles. My eager tongue slavishly licked whatever she had to offer; her full breasts and penetrating nipples graced my eyes with harsh smells. I fingered her filthy hole with my full hand - she did the same to me, and we swallowed the remnants of each other's dinners, inhaling odors and flu- ids. Earphones and statics shorted out the last words ever on the radio while hot Jenny and I double fisted. Her thick clit penetrated me as my big dick rubbed raw inside her, pierced and swollen into a bent erection looking for a way out. Her cum covered my face; I licked mine from her crack, burrowing my face deep within her. My hair entangled in her intes- tinal outpouring; I gagged in abject ecstasy as the reading shuddered to a halt, the moderator beside herself. Jenn and I were covered with each other's vomit, reswallowing, regurgitating familiar interiors, memories of meals eaten naked together. Food and menses floated my balls together be- tween her teeth; they tore into me, as tainted blood mixed Jen and Al together forever and ever. (written without the use of the _eight forbidden words_ listed by the station.) __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:51:10 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Organization: Re*Map Subject: Re: Radio Days with Jennifer and Alan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit A. Jenn Sondheim wrote: > > - > > Radio Days with Jennifer and Alan > > She maneuvered her dirty hungry twat into my waiting mouth; yellow liquid > dribbled from her hole, as everything turned fecal across the microphones > and consoles. My eager tongue slavishly licked whatever she had to offer; > her full breasts and penetrating nipples graced my eyes > station.) > > __________________________________________________________________________ well--without sounding the "censor" what the fuck was that? ReMap ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 22:00:26 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Dlugonski Subject: Re: From the Pacific Northwest MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Attended a good reading tonight (at Powells in downtown Portland), folks from the Pacirfic Northwestern Spiritual Poetry Anthology (from Charles Potts' Tsunami Inc., http://www.wics.com/~tsunami)-- Potts, Sharon Doubiago, Dennis Held , Eric Wegner, host Barbara Lamorticella and myself, dan raphael. The more i read this anthology the richer experience i get. Editor Charles Potts' crosscut s manyt expectations about 'spiritual' or 'regional' poetry, working from the perspective of a 30+ year veteran of small press poetry. working from his childhood roots in the idaho/eastern washington dimension, working inside the mind of a visonary writer/perceiver. Good review of the book at Caffeine Destiny--a fine e-mag based in Portland that's open to hearing form a variety of folks--http://www.teleport.com/~denning/caffdestiny.html. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 23:56:08 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kent Shaw Subject: for those in the St. Louis area MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This Wednesday, Left Bank Books and UM-St. Louis Litmag present:*** :::::::: Donald Finkle, Howard Schwartz, Steven Schreiner, and Jennifer MacKenzie :::::::: (reading poetry)** (1)Please insert bright marquee lights around names; (2)repeat parenthetical after each one. Thank you. **General note for those unsure of how poetry in St. Louis is read: For a man like Donald Finkle, it's read quietly, with a microphone that just barely hints at a voice that just barely hints that he's using words that barely hint at a poem. Becuase, of course, the best poem is the one whose words turn into a sleek steel sculpture, and that moves inside you. Moving, that is, into Howard Schwartz telling you one of his Jewish Folktales that taste, to me, like the potato soup my stepmom made me for dinner every night. But then, perhaps there was a tragedy, some fatal element I hadn't quite found in the soup, but could find at the table, or brought in with the bowls, or just waiting on some bookshelf where Steven Schreiner's poems were whispering sterility & finality together (becuase they both sound so similar, or familiar). And that's when I find that the whispering wasn't the poems, it was the seductive tone of Jennifer MacKenzie telling me honeymoon secrets that sound like two feet walking through autumn leaves. ***And for those who need to know more: Left Bank Books: 399 N. Euclid in CWE. Wednesday, November 11, 7PM b/c for more. Kent Shaw. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 22:14:20 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: re : radio days Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At first I thought this was a back-channel update from Bowering! (Mailed from The Good Ole Days, of course, and delayed--and this is all too plausible--for 30 years by Canada Post). Alan, I have been warned--often--by Johnny Otis of KPFA, that there are 7 forbidden radio words. You tell of 8. Could it be that California really is more permissive? If so, I wonder what that one word can be? (b-c me if you know). At any rate, thanks for letting all but 8 words hang quite far out. Let me recommend--to you, and fellow-listers--pp.82-83 (in Chapter 9) of the in-the-bookstores but also online (at Coach House Books website) B&B novel _Piccolo Mondo_ as our best match for this scatalogical generosity (except ours is not scatological). David B ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 22:27:07 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: re : PacNorWest/ Charlie Potts Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dan Dlugonski's update from PacNorWets mentions Charlie Potts, and I wanted to draw to the List's attention Potts' double novel, _The Yellow Christ_ and _Shit Crackers_, vivid and immediate writing that is largely constituted of a record of the poetry scene in SF and Berkeley in the mid-late 60s. Sorry not to recall the publisher's name. This item could be o.p. by now. But if anyone has any leads as to where copies may be available, please let us know. David ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 01:23:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: Re: re : radio days In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The words are SHIT PISS FUCK MOTHERFUCKER COCK COCKSUCKER TIT CUNT ASSHOLE and I've wanted to add MOLLYCODDLE Ah well, back to the drawn-board. Alan ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 23:36:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: What words stick to IS "real" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Spicer: Words are what sticks to the real Brink: "Real" is a word Hertzberg: Really? (Brink:) That's a loaded question. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 02:57:22 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: Re: What words stick to IS "real" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Spicer: Words are what sticks to the real Brink: "Real" is a word Hertzberg: Really? Brink: That's a loaded question. I'm loaded was that a question Be well Davkd Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 01:51:01 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: Re: BOMBAY GIN - call for submissions MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lisa, I would like to submit part of Dark Journey (a work in constatnt process) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm but am not sure how to do so or if it is useable because of the format. Let me know if you have any interest. tom bell trbell@home.com LIsa Birman wrote: > > BOMBAY GIN, the annual NNMNNL MMNMMNK \\\/ <><>,...,., J K HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW MM LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 02:58:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: J's stupid theory of poetics (to A) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - but I meant it but she meant it but they meant it because it was easy for them to say because they were speaking from the hearts because nanotech s/ms sprung like bees from the clover into the of the clay - into the heart of the matrix because the eight forbidden words were an excuse for the truth because the seven forbidden words were named for the days of the week because there are five vowels of truth and there are twenty-one consonants of lies the vowels are of truth because the vowels are breathed from the body the consonants are of lies because they hold the breath back restrain the breath stop the hands from clenching, fingers from spreading wide because they sieve the vowels but they meant it but she meant it but she meant it with her whole heart and very soul s/ms in the eyes and hands s/ms in the fingers and ears hearing the consonants trying to get through trying to gettt through consonants are s/ms - consonants are linkages couplings she knew they thought vowels linked and coupled vowels breathed breathed blood - distension and fissure the vowels paid no attention to the vowels paid no attention - too busy with the body blood and sacrifice of the body - s/m incisions cuts - scars - wounds - breakthrough - consonant inscription - consonants run rampant but she meant it - the way they ran rampant busy with meaning - way they made meaning she meant to make it run _______________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:20:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Re: My Disco-Ball of Wrath In-Reply-To: <19981108232147.29271.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 8 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote: > Really? Well do a favor to the List & myself and spare us malicious & > spiteful comments when you do have them. 1). I resent the above implication that my skillful attack on your post-langpo position was mere senseless wit. My deepest apoplexies. 2). When I asked the air if I truly believe "there is something fat and abominable banging around in the fata morgana of [your] mind," I only mean to insinuate you've not, in your life, thought very carefully. 3). When -- almost as an afterthought! -- I insist that "I would smote [you] for a nickel," I am allowing the weight of the reader's humanity to repose in the fictivity presented by the auxiliary "would": this is Not ad hominem! 4). Finally, I fundamentally resent the implication that I would in fact, as I put it, "smack [you] like a spondee." 5). I am not coming unhinged, nor do I believe you are standing directly behind me. 6). That it is now a fact of legend you look like a hyppogryph is something somebody should have mentioned to you long ago. 7). If you decide to address the above considered assertions, I hope you steer clear of cheap shots. Warmly, Risibly, & Yours in the Spirit of Vaudeville, Gabe > > Sincerely, > > P.D. Smote-Wat > Chair, Department of S.U.V. Studies > University of North Umbrage > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:56:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Lapis Press / Cid Corman My heartfelt thanks to the many of you who have leapt to my aid regarding Lapis Press and Cid Corman. Thank God for this list! I do hope I can reciprocate some time. Burt Burt Kimmelman Department of Humanities and Social Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 973.596.3376 (p) 973.642.4689 (f) kimmelman@admin.njit.edu (e) http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma (i) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:40:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Kuszai Subject: A suggestion- MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It has been suggested again recently that one of the purposes of this list is to post announcements of events and new publications. As one reader of this list, I would like to hear MORE reviews of publications and more reporting and commentary on events (readings, conferences). Imagine the "Scene Reports" section from the old days of Maximum Rock n Roll. Or the eye-on-society pages of your local newspaper. There are many announcements made about upcoming events, but rarely is there any follow-up. Just a thought! LA Boys: what happened at the Ribot Conference? I tried to go, but got lost in traffic, and ended up in long beach. "What's your cell-phone?" Buffalo Gang: what goes on in the old neighborhood? What's up in Philly, talkers? Boston? More about New York! DC? Anyone home? Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Desert Wanderer ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:46:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: daniel bouchard Subject: Re: A suggestion- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 08:40 AM 11/9/98 -0500, you wrote: >What's up in .... >Boston? >Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Dear sir, I thank you for your interest in things generally. I just returned from Paris. On Saturday (11/21) David Baratier and I will be read (& be reading) at the BookCellar Cafe, on Massachusetts Avenue, in Porter Square, Cambridge. David Baratier is in the race for poet laureate of England. I am doing what I can. Do come. - db <<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Daniel Bouchard The MIT Press Journals Five Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 bouchard@mit.edu phone: 617.258.0588 fax: 617.258.5028 >>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:48:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: daniel bouchard Subject: another important reading announcement Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Also in Cambridge, this Thursday (11/12), Kenward Elmslie is reading at MIT, Bartos Theater (20 Ames Street). <<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Daniel Bouchard The MIT Press Journals Five Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 bouchard@mit.edu phone: 617.258.0588 fax: 617.258.5028 >>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:52:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: What sticks to the real In-Reply-To: <36451D1D.2EF39521@home.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Words are somewhat more than what sticks to the real. Obviously. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:25:07 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: Re: BOMBAY GIN - call for submissions MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit sorry Thomas Bell wrote: > > Lisa, > > I would like to submit part of Dark Journey (a work in constatnt > process) > http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm > > but am not sure how to do so or if it is useable because of the format. > Let me know if you have any interest. > > tom bell > trbell@home.com > > LIsa Birman wrote: > > > > BOMBAY GIN, the annual > NNMNNL MMNMMNK \\\/ <><>,...,., > J K HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW MM > LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER > > http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm > http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm > http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm > http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm > http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm > http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm > http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm -- NNMNNL MMNMMNK \\\/ <><>,...,., J K HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW MM LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:00:03 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: Jack Spicer commemorated Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" My highly subjective take on this occasion at SF's Yerba Buena Center needs to be fleshed out by a Listee better able to identify the readers...Dodie? Kevin? Arriving slightly late due to a delay on Bart that held up Creelea Henderson, one of my two pre-reading dinner companions (the other being CH's S.O., Brent Cunningham), we found to our dismay the box-office person claiming the event was sold out. "Take my left arm," I said to Brent; and, "take my right arm," I told Creelea. I informed the house manager that I could not get up the (long) flight of stairs w/o this help. Since he knows me pretty well, he didn't swallow this for an instant; but he did allow the farce to continue. And once inside the glass-box room that was our venue, two of us found seats and one, a wall to lean against. I observed further persons finding portions of the floor to sit on. Never say "never"! The room was not having the most efficient use made of it, thank goodness. Instead of banked, raked or ranked seating, there were small round tables with two to four chairs at each. I sat near the front, so did not do my usual head-count, but I estimate attendance at 60. An unprepossessing white wine was being dispensed from a bar in one corner--free! (or, as someone said, no, it was the poetry that was for free). The atmosphere was festive, sort of. There was an easy buzz of conversation, thanks to the seating arrangements and the prior knowledge these persons had of one another. Whereas I am often the oldest person at any reading I go to these years, I was far from that this time. If Spicer were alive today, he'd be 74, and a number of his peers were present. The books which were in part the object of the occasion, _Poet, Be Like God_ and the Jack Spicer Lectures (do I have the title right? That book, at any rate) were stacked on the table I sat at, each volume emitting its aura of a good meal waiting to be et. The authors of the first, Kevin Killian and Lew Ellingham, were present--KK MC'ing the evening--with his customary charm: heartfeltness, slight swagger, and spunky cheek--but, sadly, not the editor of the other, Peter Gizzi, who contracted some horrible lung-bug in France, and was resting at home in Santa Cruz (Poets, stay State-side!). Since I can recall the names of only some of the speakers, I will not exhaust myself only to sound invidious, and I am going to hope that KK or Dodie B will post a PS to this, listing them. One by one, we stood up, went to the mike, gave some account of our acquaintance with Jack, and then read a couple of his poems. Fourteen or fifteen of us did this. The order of our coming and going rested on the chronology of Spicer's composition, something KK is laudably familiar with. Ariel Parkinson, for instance, opened the evening, because she was to read a very early poem of Jack's. Her address I found moving, because she went so far back with Jack (and Robert Duncan, also), and because she said "I have been painting their poetry all my life. That is why I am not better-known as a painter." As we know, Spicer played with the notion of a spirit-life, messages from the dead, etc, and there was some uneasiness, I suspect, that we were commenting on a dead one who might well be listening. In any case, there were several joking remarks along those lines. One speaker said "Jack Spicer _is_ alive and well, but he's at the Oakland Coliseum tonight, listening to Rosemary Clooney." The anecdote I liked best--or can remember best--was told by Ernie Edwards. He must have been 15 years or so Spicer's junior? Taken to Gino & Carlo's, the North Beach bar where the Spicer Kreisl convened nightly, "to meet a poet," EE liked it so well that he became a regular, often driving Spicer home (through the Broadway tunnel to Polk St) when much the worse for wear. One night, Spicer invited him in for a drink. "It was a disaster area, no housekeeping at all, greasy dishes stacked in the kitchen sink." At some point, needing to pee, he asked where the toilet was. "There's the sink," said Jack. "Oh, but first, let me get a glass out of there for your wine." Eventually, EE told us, they went to bed--"but I'm not going to tell you what we did." The readers I liked best were Joanne Kyger, inimitably (non)theatrical, and--new to me--Nemi Frost, who was, as a visual artist, not expected to read well at all, eh? She was brilliant. She prefaced her reading with an account of the anarchist monopoly games she, JS and friends would play while drinking martinis. Nemi F looked impossibly young to have been _there, then_ . Felicitations! --Joanne, btw, as the evening wore on, began a barrage of Terribly Rude Remarks from her table, keeping alive a good old SF tradition. To hear this poetry read by fifteen or so quite various voices was to realize, again, how solid was Spicer's gift. On the page, it can look impossibly quirked, but those words fit many mouths. We ended at 9:20, time to mix, catch up on old friends.--for me, there were persons I hadnt seen in 30 years : David and Hilda Burton, for instance. Or 25 years : e.g., Sarah Howard. Or 10 years : e.g., Jeannie Lance. Others present (apart from those reading) included Steve Vincent, Norma Cole, Douglas Powell, Tom Marshall, Bob Gluck, Donald Yurevich, Kush and his camcorder, Steve Farmer, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Bev Dahlen, Fran Herndon, and persons who deserve a better memory than mine in such accounting. Sorry, dear friend! And thanks, Dodie and Kevin, for your enterprise and hard work! You are the boon and the blessing of Bay Area cutting-edge poetry. Tallying the names makes me realize how many I would have expected to be there, weren't. But--where would they have sat? There should be a Next Time, in a bigger space, with attendance compulsory for all Bay Area poets. It should go on all day and all night. And maybe it could include writing about the poetry. I don't think such would have felt appropriate at what was more-or-less an agape-fest--too distancing. Yes, and Robin Blaser and George Stanley and Stan Persky shoulfd be flown in from Vancouver. Where is the philanthropist who will start the Jack Spicer Memorial Foundation? David Bromige. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:45:38 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: A suggestion- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 8:40 AM 11/9/98, J Kuszai wrote: >It has been suggested again recently that one of the purposes of this >list is to post announcements of events and new publications. As one >reader of this list, I would like to hear MORE reviews of publications >and more reporting and commentary on events (readings, conferences). >Imagine the "Scene Reports" section from the old days of Maximum Rock n >Roll. Or the eye-on-society pages of your local newspaper. There are >many announcements made about upcoming events, but rarely is there any >follow-up. Just a thought! > >LA Boys: what happened at the Ribot Conference? I tried to go, but got >lost in traffic, and ended up in long beach. "What's your cell-phone?" >Buffalo Gang: what goes on in the old neighborhood? >What's up in Philly, talkers? >Boston? >More about New York! >DC? Anyone home? > >Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated. >Sincerely, > >Desert Wanderer yeah, and what brave soul will review the hannah weiner event? (not moi, i'm mildly sick on my return from said event.) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:43:39 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: A suggestion-Things Are Happening in Austin... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain In AUSTIN, Texas, NY City poet Joshua Beckman read from his new APR award-winning book, Things Are Happening. The event took place in the living room at chez moi and Hoa's. Several of Ms. Nguyen's students appeared on-time though we were nearly an hour late to begin, waiting on local artists Philip Trussel, Sharon Roos, RJ Koelher and Peggy Kelley to arrive. Also present was Roberto Tejada who, with me, guarded the Red Hook in the ice box (they call 'em ice boxes in Tejas). Once the cold ones vanished and the younger guests departed, my birthday gift of Heradura tequila was passed around. Scott Thomsen came late (his wife was out-of-town) but we enjoyed making him uncomfortable with discussion of Chinese birth signs (you closet astrologists would have appreciated the conversation). Trussell quizzed me about Gerrit Lansing and asked me what the "Blue" is when I said "out of the blue." We puzzled over that a while and agreed to its significance. Friday, Joshua, Roberto, Hoa, R's roommate Cameron and myself met at the Austin Museum of Art for an exhibit by Cindy Sherman and Mark Todd. Some of you may know the former's work, with photos of the photographer in varying poses that expose the social muscle-flexes of the mostly male-made movie industry. Todd's work, Badlands, addressed the Protestant--as in Protest--elements of Far West mythos in the guise of serial killers and other modern day heretics. His thematic projection is quite interesting, even if the form suffers with the tried-and-true blow-up media-formatting of nervous, newsprint-pixelated paintings. Later, we went to Thai Soon for Phad Thai, then on to Waterloo Ice House for whiskey and beer. Then we dashed to the Gingerman and finally Club de Ville, where we sipped our drinks and slid into that woozy conversation zone known only to late-nite drinkers. Hoa made omlettes and potatoes the next morning (I did the dishes). It rained. We discussed poetry with Joshua, a damn good poet and a Scorpion to boot. We traded books, exchanged gossip. I read fragments of poetry, poor him. Sulfur arrived with Kenward Elmslie's 70 I Remembers for Gerrit and I thought of the "Blue" again. Joshua left today. He's driving cross country. Maybe he'll see one of you next. Dale >At 8:40 AM 11/9/98, J Kuszai wrote: >>It has been suggested again recently that one of the purposes of this >>list is to post announcements of events and new publications. As one >>reader of this list, I would like to hear MORE reviews of publications >>and more reporting and commentary on events (readings, conferences). >>Imagine the "Scene Reports" section from the old days of Maximum Rock n >>Roll. Or the eye-on-society pages of your local newspaper. There are >>many announcements made about upcoming events, but rarely is there any >>follow-up. Just a thought! >> >>LA Boys: what happened at the Ribot Conference? I tried to go, but got >>lost in traffic, and ended up in long beach. "What's your cell-phone?" >>Buffalo Gang: what goes on in the old neighborhood? >>What's up in Philly, talkers? >>Boston? >>More about New York! >>DC? Anyone home? >> >>Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated. >>Sincerely, >> >>Desert Wanderer > >yeah, and what brave soul will review the hannah weiner event? (not moi, >i'm mildly sick on my return from said event.) > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:51 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: mesostic / 14 ply MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit mesostic for dick higgins heaD I Character looKing Her I slidinG Game I Noticing claSp __________________ words extracted from "foew&ombwhnw" by dick higgins the first 17 mesostics for dick higgins http://net22.com/qazingulaza/joglars/mesostics/index.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 20:18:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: What sticks to my shoe Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ah, yes, this thread has deconstructed in usual list-fashion, and that's ok. Words are all. I'll spare you any impassioned pleas for the rocks, and keep my pagan rites secret, the way they oughta be... steve ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:11:26 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Balestrieri Subject: linguistic transparency Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mark Baker wrote: "But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent assumption today is the reverse: language is completely opaque." I spent my English major education at the University of Wisconson-Milwaukee where the vast majority of my fellow E-majors believed in linguistic transparency, and not a few professors as well. I had a fellow student wave a copy of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in my face while she yelled, "this IS Maya Angelou, this IS Maya Angelou"! My experience was that I had to battle constantly to get people to even listen to the idea that language wasn't a window with "reality" on the other side. I still do, now that I spend my days with English majors who toil away in Silicon Valley. Pete ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:39:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: What sticks to the real MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable After reading David's post about the Spicer Memorial event, I took a nap and had a sort of dream. I was there, with David and Lappo and George and Guido and the girl who is number 27 or whatever at Gino and Carlo's. It was the late morning, and we had been there for a few hours and already it was becoming apparent that David was not the drinker he brags on the List to be and that Guido and I would have to help him climb the stairs to the memorial event. George, it was clear, would have to be left behind period. My memory is somewhat hazy of the dream (with exception of the very vivid ending) but here is a reconstruction: (Beatles playing in the background on jukebox so we are shouting) David Bromige: Yeah yeah yeah. Speculating to understand and being an intitate and all that... Look the the guy why he would piss into the dishes in his own sink for crissakes! Kent Johnson: Look David, with the idea of speculating to "understand" I didn't mean that there is a "prior" body of meaning or knowledge waiting hidden in the Spicer corpus (at least not one put there by the poet). Rather, it's that Spicer's writing is an opening into a certain way of being with language that accepts incompletion and uncertainty as the bottomless truth of any meaning or knowledge. I mean we are intitiates in that sense, in that the poetry openly invites us to participate in the writing and rewriting of its knowledge. DB: Oh Fuck _me_. Do you realize how stupid that sounds? You keep talking like that and you'll miss out on your whole goddamned life! Take the stupid cotton out of yer mouth and stop being so grim... Kent Johnson: Obviously, that idea I mentioned right before you said "Fuck me" has made a million rounds by now, to the point of becoming almost "certain truth".... I mean, I'm not trying to tack some dying theoretical fashion onto him. Because in Spicer there's a difference-- it's not that the bottom drops out of language into nothingness: There is an Otherness that is there, the "ghostly" realm that the words are tied to. DB: Oh blah blah blah blah. Let me tell you something. I knew Jack Spicer. And you Mr. Johnson are no Jack Spicer. George Bowering: You can (hic) say that again! You don't even look like him! Hah! I mean who do (hic) ya think this guy was a saint or somethink? And me (hic) am I a ghost or what? Oh hey hey hey look the bottom just dropped out of the language in my glass. ha ha ha ha... the language of (hic) my glass! It's transparent, get it? ha. Kent Johnson: No, not a saint, but what American poet before or since him (with the exception of Emily Dickinson) practices this listening to otherness with such _mystical_ fervor and self-effacement? Do we have in American poetry a more mystical poet than Spicer? It seems to me that it's right to read him as well avant his times in terms of his "theoretical" attitudes, but he is also a throwback: he is our Sor Juana de la Cruz, our San Juan, a kind of neo-Platonist Derridean if such a Centaur is possible. (At this mention of the word "centaur" something disturbing happened. The girl who is number 27 raised her hand and pointed with trembling finger in the direction of David Bromige, so upset that all the Falstaff she had ingested sprang like a long projectile from her mouth. And to my horror, as if I were with Dante in the Inferno itself, this is what I saw: The dual-authors of the pornographic novella Piccolo Mondo had fused into a single form: Here was the furry and cloven-hoofed body of George Bowering, but only the bottom part. The top part, or torso, if you will, was that of David Bromige. It was very strange. For some reason Bromige suddenly had outrageously huge sideburns, ones so large as to make Matthew Arnold=92s look like peach fuzz. Great, spongy, flopping things which fell down his jowls below the line of his shoulders. As he frolicked with Bowering=92s long and skinny sex (or I suppose it was his as much as Bowering=92s), his sideburns made a wind sound, bringing to Gino and Carlo's an air of such malodour that I cannot describe it. What the fuck is that fucking smell, shouted a burly longshoreman at the bar. And then I woke up. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:53:30 +0900 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Kimball Subject: Poetries of Canada MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Poetries of Canada -- a special edition of The East Village Poetry Web -- edited by Jack Kimball & David Bromige In North America: Japan: A "first stab" at a permanent online resource anthologizing 45 living poets and artists. Lots to read and look at. Of course, the work ranges spectacularly: -- a 45-minute (when read aloud) manifesto, "the dangerous prevalence of imagination," by Toronto-based Darren Wershler-Henry; -- pen-and-ink-calligraphed, xeroxed and typewritten manuscripts from Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert; -- the Web textcraft of "Osmose" by Montrealer Char Davies, a "fully immersive" recreation of artspace on exhibit at The National Gallery in Ottawa. Full list of contributors: George Stanley; Maxine Gadd; Opal Nations; Lissa Wolsak; David McFadden; Lisa Robertson; Naomi Foyle; Gregg Simpson; Steven Ross Smith; Erin Moure; Fred Wah; Jamie Reid; Barry McKinnon; Harold Rhenisch; Victor Coleman; Ryan Whyte; Renee Rodin; Norma Cole; Dave Cull; Roger Hogg; Steve McCaffery; David Bromige; Gerry Gilbert; Karen Mac Cormack; Meredith Quartermain; Louis Cabri; George Bowering; Angela Bowering; Jeff Derksen; Robert Young; John Newlove; Clint Burnham; Billy Little; Frank Davey; Lionel Kearns; Darren Wershler-Henry; Douglas Barbour; Robin Blaser; Char Davies; Lillian Necakov; Jim Andrews; damian lopes; Ted Warnell; Patricia Seaman. You're welcome to visit, bookmark and revisit often. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:11:28 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: R M Daley Subject: Re: Damon: A suggestion:weiner reading In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII message from a youngin (even under 30 even) who attended inconspicuously who never saw hannah weiner nor most of the tribute's readers (before) 1)...appreciated james sherry's (?- slow to bad memory) gentle rebuttal of all the 'she's crazy' talk floating around - here in sanfran (oh and surely, more centrally available hereon this listserv) spicer mania abounds - lots of reference to his use of 'dictation' a la hd or yeats even, but never really a consideration of it as 'crazy' - whatever getsya by, right? - dictation, voices, acrobatics (prevalent in NYC parks) projections of words on a cat, these are all personally public events and so it seems that calling them (or he or she) crazy insnae insane crazy, especially when in the context of the writing, well seems kind of useless and maybe of an hysterical-woman thing that need not continue to grace the halls of contemp. poetry (especially as a kind of explanatory device, like a handicap/gift that makes the writing necessary, and therefore categorizable, as crazy talk or something) 2)really enjoyed all the stories and photos - brave move - quite generous, especially schneeman's bra/dream-hannah catcher and very glad to see the films - weiner's reading was amazing, did she do much public appearancing for her later stuff? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 20:20:45 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: Re: linguistic transparency MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Transparent or opaque, let the words fly, if it's real and attached or attracting people. How do you make language effective, evocative or reflective of the attentiveness that apparantly writers provide? The transparent/opaque syllogistic/non-syllogistic arguments are only postures provided to secure minor movements within a tradition of language mobility and mutation from song to pop hyper-consumer idealism. The greater threat to the Poem or its prose variants is the seductive appeal of the Image; scopic, total and relentless. Models of consciousness are involved here, internal and external projections of ourselves onto inner and outer spaces. > Mark Baker wrote: > "But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide > a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption > of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist > or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. > Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent > assumption today is the reverse: language is completely > opaque." > > I spent my English major education at the University of > Wisconson-Milwaukee where the vast majority of my fellow E-majors > believed in linguistic transparency, and not a few professors as well. > I had a fellow student wave a copy of "I Know Why the Caged Bird > Sings" in my face while she yelled, "this IS Maya Angelou, this IS > Maya Angelou"! My experience was that I had to battle constantly to > get people to even listen to the idea that language wasn't a window > with "reality" on the other side. I still do, now that I spend my days > with English majors who toil away in Silicon Valley. > > Pete ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 20:19:57 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: meow, meow MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Anyone having writing in which "projections of words on a cat" are involved should please see the editors of Lipstick Eleven immediately. (And you think I'm kidding!) Kathy Lou p-r-r-r RM Daley wrote: lots of reference to his use of 'dictation' a la hd or yeats even, but never really a consideration of it as 'crazy' - whatever getsya by, right? - dictation, voices, acrobatics (prevalent in NYC parks) projections of words on a cat, these are all personally public events and so it seems that calling them (or he or she) crazy insnae insane crazy, especially when in the context of the writing, well seems kind of useless and maybe of an hysterical-woman thing that need not continue to grace the halls of contemp. poetry (especially as a kind of explanatory device, like a handicap/gift that makes the writing necessary, and therefore categorizable, as crazy talk or something) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 23:16:03 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: Poetries of Canada MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit d e l i c a c y ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 00:26:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand Subject: Re: another important reading announcement WHAT TIME is kenward elmslie reading daniel!?! e ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 23:14:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Dlugonski Subject: re : PacNorWest/ Charlie Potts MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Yes, Valga Krusa fine wild history. the other night during an intoxicating party i tried to describe it as an american 60s finnegans wake. someone at the part where potts was was given a copy of valga krusa, so he still has copies (book was done by litmus editons.) this gives me change ot correct my previous email, potts web site is http:// www.wwics/~tsunami.com, e mail tsunami@wwics.com, snail at po box 100, walla walla 99362. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 02:12:55 -0500 Reply-To: Tom Orange Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: a suggestion hannah event In-Reply-To: <199811100503.AAA05880@juliet.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 R M Daley: > message from a youngin (even under 30 even) who attended inconspicuously > who never saw hannah weiner nor most of the tribute's readers (before) ditto largely from yr reporter here, even an odd under but over 30. and yes to finally have faces voices bodies to put to some of those names. here's my tally, woefully incomplete as my attentiveness to scribbling fluctuated over the course of the 3+ hours. others invited to please fill in gaps and/or correct errors oversights &c as needed. ..lee ann brown.. biographical statement by hw from silent teachers remembered sequal ..andrew levy.. ..charles alexander.. ..bruce andrews.. from we speak silent incl. turpitudimous and bruce introduces ..abigail child.. collaborations/letters w. hw ..tina darragh.. dream published by n. johnson -? ..lewis warsh.. from the fast, day 4 or 5 ..kenneth goldsmith.. his own text after hw ..carolee schneeman.. slides, visual aides, anecdotes c. 1960s and early 70s, from the garment days to early clairvoyance ..bob harrison.. ..michael heller.. anecdotes, unpub 1964 collaboration with hw growing out of their workshops with kenneth kock ..peter inman.. ..jackson mac low w/anne tardos present-regrets.. from the fast day 6 and code poems ..sharon matlin.. ..hw's brother.. ..henry hills.. two films, titles -? ..nick piombino.. from weeks ..maria damon.. from the zero one, md collab. with mikel and after hw, md (un)finished correspondence w/hw ..joan retallack.. anecdotes via the waldrops, from written in the zero one and nijole's house ..barbara rosenbaum.. journal entries involving hw c. 1989-90 ..james sherry.. difficulties publishing hw's work, assessing her "madness" ..ron silliman.. letter -? ..todd -? ..alan davies.. ..lee ann brown.. collaborations w/ hw ..charles bernstein.. from an unpub 1990 mss entitled pages, poem by cb about hw and cb's son ..lab/cb.. joint reading interesting to see what people do within the genre of the five-minute (give or take fifteen) tribute presentation: hw's own texts, work written with her, work inspired by her, anecdotes and recollections. to see the choices of hw texts people read, and the way they read them, the play of voices say mac low reading hw as opposed to bernstein reading hw (who sounded most/least like themselves?) -- the extent to which this antiphony or dialog can reiterate the multivoicedness of hw's texts. hw's brother's presentation was quite moving (as were several others that spoke to the difficulties of living working w/her, as family or friend or protege), heller's and schneeman's the most interesting for their historical value. the films were terrific, seeing "language boys" c. late 1970s cut in w/hw rooftop reading, the image and especially sound editing being a marvelous translation of hw's work. lots learned, lots of questions raised: ..1) did people who knew her before the 1960s see harbingers of the clairvoyance or reason to suspect an unusual mental life? or was there a clear line of demarcation circa the writing of the fast? ..2) is there much unpublished work remaining out there, what's the quality like, and are we likely to see it? ..3) i noticed a resemblance, formally, the look on the page, between, say, spoke, and dennis tedlock's translations of zuni indian texts. coincidencental? good to finally meet maria damon, chris alexander and linda russo whom i hope to see in a few weekends in buffalo. the toronto gang in the form of scott pound and peter jaeger + swedish buffalo poetics immigrants were missed due to clutch trouble. dan farrell and sianne ngai vamoosed. thus following indian food w/ brian kim stefans and tom mediadios, festivities at james sherry's, then thirsts to quench. respectfully submitted....t. tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:26:37 +0200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fredrik Hertzberg Subject: Re: linguistic transparency In-Reply-To: <004C3D36.1826@intuit.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 18:11 9.11.1998 -0800, you wrote: > Mark Baker wrote: > "But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide > a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption > of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist > or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. > Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent > assumption today is the reverse: language is completely > opaque." But even though it's assumed it doesn't follow that it's acted upon. Though it's politically correct and all that, do you really think people act as if language were opaque? I think there's a distinction between sense and sensibility there - reason tells me but I can't help it, I'll have another Coke. What I think is part of the problem is the too sharp distinction between opaque and transparent- this idea seems influenced by Saussure's notion of the arbitrary relation between signfier and signified. It creates the illusion of a materiality that is totally opaque. Materiality should rather I think be thought of as semipermeable or something, some kind of liquid, Coke? We can always swim through the materiality, and do swim in various ways. To say that it's impenetrable (like Paul the Man used to) is to pretend one isn't inscribed into language, that it's a foreign object. Isn't that a hypocritical position? Fred ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:33:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Hannah Weiner notes Comments: To: Poetics List MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit HAPPY BIRTHDAY HANNAH! Simply listing the 30 or so folks who read or spoke or showed films, slides or dream hoops at the 70th birthday memorial celebration of Hannah Weiner can't possibly convey what a remarkable and special event took place at St. Marks Church last Saturday. The celebration was organized by Andrew Levy, Lee Ann Brown and Charles Bernstein, three poets who really get what the word community suggests, and was framed by their own contributions, Andrew leading off with a reading of his piece from the Poetry Project Newsletter. There were 70 people present at the beginning and maybe 80 at the very end three and one-half hours later, as lots of people came and went over the course of the event. At one point I counted over 100. Hearing Hannah's work read by most of the 30 speakers over such an extended period of time (and, I believe, with only one piece repeated during the entire afternoon) was itself a total immersion, and it was evident constantly just how deeply her work has seeped into so many of our reading/writing/thinking styles. Some of the moments that stuck out for me: Bruce Andrews' reading of "Bruce Introduces" -- "Hannah can't embarrass me with this anymore so I'll have to do it myself" -- a fabulous articulation of tough guy voices in Hannah's work. Abigail Childs' reading from a correspondence with Hannah, working out the details of a collaboration I wish that I'd seen. Both Hannah's style and her total commitment to craft and detail completely evident. Tina Darragh getting exactly right how Hannah's voice would change on the phone in an instant and become totally business-like if you just asked the right question. Lewis Warsh's reading of Hannah's birthday poem from The Fast. And pleading for someone to bring Clairvoyant Journal back into print. Phill Niblock's and Henry Hills' films of Hannah. Hannah seemingly decades younger in Niblock's 1974 version reading from Clairvoyant Journal than in Henry's 1981 Plagiarism, which however included very young versions of Charles Bernstein (with an "Art Garfunkel" afro that made the audience gasp), James Sherry and Bruce Andrews. Carolee Schneeman's slideshow of old photos -- her and Paul Blackburn waiting for Hannah at a Be-In, Hannah cooking dinner "sane as a button" in the 60s, etc -- and especially Schneeman's dream hoop that contained several bras designed by Hannah during her early 1960s careers as a lingerie designer, to which Carolee added pink Christmas tree lights. Carolee described meeting Hannah as the result of a planned performance piece in which, at a very late moment before the event, the sponsors indicated that the performers could not, in fact, appear nude, so that she went to Maidenform to ask about "experimental underwear" and the folks at Maidenform said "you must meet Hannah Weiner." Michael Heller's account of Kenneth Koch's 1964 writing class that included Hannah, Ceravolo, Kathy Fraser, Heller himself, Towle and about 10 other immediately recognizable names, as well as a later period in Europe (Greece?) where Hannah came and worked on what became the Code Poems. An account of the coast guard's willing participation in one of the events and of Hannah's "street events." Sharon Matlin's lengthy fictional memoir of "Elizabeth." Matlin and Barbara Rosenthal spoke pointedly about the role and the problems faced by the isolated woman artist. Maurice Finegold, Hannah's brother, describing Hannah at a much earlier age, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, then writing her honors thesis on Graham Greene at Radcliffe, how his family reacted to Hannah's psychotic episodes. How the rabbi at her service was unable to figure out what to do with her books, how to incorporate that, but how they then found the memorial material up on the EPC website and used a lot from that. Maria Damon's reading of her "belated" reply to a letter Hannah sent several months before her death, an account of all the current critical material now being produced about Hannah. James Sherry speaking of Hannah's attention to detail, spending 40 hours going over EVERY line of Little Books/Indians to make sure it was exactly correct. Lee Ann Brown and Charles Bernstein performing Hannah's work in two voices to complete the occasion. These notes scribed from material written in a Square Deal Marble Memo notebook (80 sheets, 4.5x3.25 inches), much like the ones in which Hannah composed Little Books/Indians. Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:28:32 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner notes Comments: To: Poetics List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Big thanks to Ron for the account of Hannah Weiner's tribute. From those here, who also loved her worked and knew her and wished we could've been there. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:06:31 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian N Clements Subject: RLP Books on Amazon.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Just a note to let you know that two Rancho Loco Press publications--_Best Texas Writing 1_ and Jack Myers' _Human Being_--are now orderable through the online book giant, Amazon.com. Just log into the Amazon.com site (www.amazon.com) and do a book search for either title. Ordering information will appear as if by magic! :) (Note that it is quicker to search for Jack's book by using both his name and the book title since there are so many books with "Human Being" in the title.) You can still also order Best Texas Writing nationwide through Borders Books. Best, Brian Clements for Rancho Loco Press __________________________ rancho-loco-press@airmail.net Rancho Loco Press 1920 Abrams Parkway #382 Dallas TX 75214-3915 by no means an orderly Dantescan rising / but as the winds veer Joe Ahearn ---------------------------- joeah@mail.airmail.net ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:23:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Katherine Lederer Subject: E X P L O S I V E # 6 In-Reply-To: <19981109214339.13263.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Announcing the publication of E X P L O S I V E M A G A Z I N E # 6 featuring new work by: Jenna Roper Harmon Camille Guthrie Robyn Schiff Dale Smith John Arizza Jackson Mac Low Anselm Berrigan Magdalena Zurawski Nava Fader Susan Schultz Nanos Valaoritis Individually printed covers by David Larsen / Poetry Comics by Dave Morice from a new location on the upper West Side: Katy Lederer, ed. 216 W. 104th Street, 1C NY, NY 10025 $5 per issue / $15 for 3 Make checks payable to Katy Lederer ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:39:26 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: transparencies MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Isn't it that poets expect language to do more? Either defeat the arbitrariness of the sign or heighten this arbitrariness, but never just leave conventional language alone. Hence poets can be more "naive" than philosophers of language or even "English majors." Pound's theory of language is pretty naive, if you think about it for a few minutes. (though L (R) J is even more naive). Spicer was sophisticated in his understanding of language, but still clinging to this ideal of establishing a more genuine connection between language and the real, as though language weren't always hopelessly conventional. The oppositions transparent/opaque motivated/conventional are not identical, though they bear on overlapping concerns. Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:39:25 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner notes In-Reply-To: <000a01be0c9d$f9236dc0$573ffea9@oemcomputer> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" just to 2nd (and 3rd!) ron's enthusiasm for the hannah weiner event, which both kass and i found amazing (and an amazing way to conduct biography)... and to express appreciation to charles, lee ann, and andy for putting it all together... great meeting so many of you ftf for the first time, and seeing so many of you again... in all, too marvelous for words... /// joe ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:05:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: Central Park magazine Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit does anyone know if Central Park, edited by Stephen-Paul Martin (and/or others?) is still being published? its not on a recent Selby's list Randy Prunty ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:16:18 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner notes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" yes, to add to the general enthusiasm, it was a wonderful event, i learned a lot, met some groovy folks, and reconnected w/ previously known groovy folks. did anyone mention fiona templeton's astonishing performance? looked like she was channeling hannah, or at least concentrating very hard on receiving words from elsewhere...xo, md At 8:39 AM 11/10/98, Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote: >just to 2nd (and 3rd!) ron's enthusiasm for the hannah weiner event, which >both kass and i found amazing (and an amazing way to conduct biography)... >and to express appreciation to charles, lee ann, and andy for putting it >all together... > >great meeting so many of you ftf for the first time, and seeing so many of >you again... in all, too marvelous for words... > >/// > >joe ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:00:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Re: transparencies In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:39:26 -0600 from On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:39:26 -0600 MAYHEW said: >Isn't it that poets expect language to do more? Either defeat the >arbitrariness of the sign or heighten this arbitrariness, but never just >leave conventional language alone. Hence poets can be more "naive" than >philosophers of language or even "English majors." Pound's theory of >language is pretty naive, if you think about it for a few minutes. (though >L (R) J is even more naive). Spicer was sophisticated in his >understanding of language, but still clinging to this ideal of >establishing a more genuine connection between language and the real, as >though language weren't always hopelessly conventional. I would say it's a good bet that theories & philosophies of language are more conventional than language is. This idea of language as either opaque/transparent "window" on reality - an utterly abstract counter, hopelessly limited to whatever argument is being proposed. As if reality were simple & shared by all (not just the theorists even) in the same ways, and language either "looks out" on it or doesn't. I like Stevens' concept of poetry as the "violence" of the imagination pushing back, resisting, the violence of (contemporary) reality. So a metaphor is a kind talking at a slant - an alienation effect - in order to protect a threatened domain of (perhaps only imagined) reality. For Stevens, both "reality" & "imagination" were - REAL, existing. To go back to Spicer's image of language in itself alone as an untied rope - he's acknowledging the realness of the real while defending (via the metaphor) poetry's right to connect with it in its own way. Now Joe Safdie raised the issue of whether this wasn't a very different attitude that that of the language poets; Ron Silliman disagreed. I think you could look at the project of the language poets as taking that "alienation effect" - poetry pressing back against the real - to a certain limit. The controversy (unfairly imposed on the langpos perhaps - transferred from postmodernism debates) over the status of the real seems to have this tendency to go down a blind alley - arguing whether your resistance - ie. your self-enclosed "deconstructed" non-referential language - can still really be called resistance if you deny the very existence of your antagonist. It's easy for a boxer to go into the ring and say "there's no such thing as the other guy" - until he throws a punch. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:20:32 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Bill Luoma at Penny Lane MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain For an unemployed poet, Bill Luoma carries himself with real sang froid. Did you know that Luoma in Finnish means something like: "the stream that in spring runs very fast then dries up in summer"? That, at any rate, is a line from his remarkable elegy to his father, "Dear Dad," which he read last night at Penny Lane here in Boulder. A series of epistolary evocations of their life together, this poem moves with great eloquence, pathos and humor, assembling a snapshot collage that is by turns deeply affectionate, wryly bitter, and amazingly light on its feet. Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. Patrick Pritchett ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:44:42 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher Reiner Subject: L.A. Reading on Sunday Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hey, Southern Californians-- L.A. Books presents a reading by Cydney Chadwick and Elizabeth Treadwell. Sunday, November 15, at 4:00 p.m., at Cafe Balcony, 12431 Rochester Avenue (near Santa Monica Blvd. and Centinella). Cydney Chadwick is the author of seven books of fictions and prose poems, the most recent of which is _Inside the Hours_. Her work has appeared in _The Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Amercian Poetry, 1994/1995_ and _The Poet's Calendar for the Millennium_, both from Sun & Moon Press. She is the 1998 winner of the New American Fiction Award, and a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction. Several of her stories are being made into a film by an independent filmmaker in Australia. She lives about forty miles north of San Francisco, in the countryside of Sonoma County. Elizabeth Treadwell's _The Erratix & Other Stories_ is just out from Texture Press. A collection of her prose poems, _Populace_, is forthcoming from Avec Books, and is excerpted in _An Avec Sampler 2_ (1998). Her previous books are the novel _Eleanor Ramsey: the Queen of Cups_ (San Francisco State University, 1997) and the chapbook _Eve Doe (becoming an epic poem)_ (Double Lucy, 1997). She teaches Composition and Creative Writing at a variety of institutions and is the editor and publisher of _Outlet_ magazine and Double Lucy Books. L.A. Books website: http://www.litpress.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:02:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: My address and phone MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov 10, Patrick Pritchett said: >Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. Since flaunting one's wares is not only permitted but encouraged on this List I would like to say: I, too, am a very nice guy. Please, invite me to your town to read. Kent Johnson 1147 W. Lincoln Blvd. Freeport, IL 61032 tel. 815-232-7506 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:14:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: daniel bouchard Subject: Re: My address and phone Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Am investigating potential reading series in my town. Unaware till now that very nice guy's were available. Will keep Bill and Kent in mind as things progress. No one but very nice guys need apply. Would like very nice gals too but don't want to appear lecherous in saying so. Lechery smacks of not very nice guys. At 11:02 AM 11/10/98 -0500, you wrote: >On Nov 10, Patrick Pritchett said: > >>Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. > >Since flaunting one's wares is not only permitted but encouraged >on this List I would like to say: > >I, too, am a very nice guy. Please, invite me to your town to read. > >Kent Johnson >1147 W. Lincoln Blvd. >Freeport, IL 61032 >tel. 815-232-7506 > <<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Daniel Bouchard The MIT Press Journals Five Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 bouchard@mit.edu phone: 617.258.0588 fax: 617.258.5028 >>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:17:49 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: Re: My address and phone MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Kent: Please come to Our Town to read. We have a very good airport bar and lounge (Texas-sized Bud Lites come with any shot free between 1 and 7). I am setting up the Nice Guy Reading Series for early next year. Maybe we can double-bill you and David Bromige? In deed, I had a dream in which you, myself and David met on an airport runway, greeting each other in a Group Hug while the wind of passing jets blew against our faces. As we strolled arm-in-arm toward the bar we composed a Nice-Guy Manifesto, descrying all the insulting Rogues and Spicerian Meanies who make us a little self-conscious. As I recall, you puked in B's lap, as your detachable angel wings fluttered, lifting you forward into smoky air and smoke-laced light. Ah, Adieu, until we meet again... Nice Guys Rule! >On Nov 10, Patrick Pritchett said: > >>Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. > >Since flaunting one's wares is not only permitted but encouraged >on this List I would like to say: > >I, too, am a very nice guy. Please, invite me to your town to read. > >Kent Johnson >1147 W. Lincoln Blvd. >Freeport, IL 61032 >tel. 815-232-7506 > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:32:01 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: The New Web, Inc. Subject: Sometimes good guys don't wear white MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. Since I have never met Kent I can only go on heresay but if I were to meet him, if he were to have me out to read, I would be willing to vouch for him. Since flaunting one's wares is not only permitted but encouraged on this List I would like to say: Also, I, too, am a very nice guy. I toot my horn but at a tolerable rate. If it is a criteria, similar to Bill, I also am unemployed and in tremendous spirits. Please, invite me to your town to read. Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:40:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Stevens and Spicer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov. 10, Henry Gould wrote: >I like Stevens' concept of poetry as the "violence" of the >imagination pushing back, resisting, the violence of (contemporary) >reality... For Stevens, both "reality" and "imagination" were - >REAL, existing. To go back to Spicer's image of language in itself >alone as an untied rope - he's acknowledging the realness of the >real while defending (via the metaphor) poetry's right to connect >with it in its own way. For Stevens, Reality and Imagination are both Real, but also separate. You could think of his poetry, in a sense, as a kind of apartheid solution to the problem of being. The imagination builds a circling wall with lovely shards of glass along the top to keep the natives out. For Spicer, poetry doesn't so much, I'd say, have a "right" to connect to the Real-- it is the very purpose of poetry to do so, to be impure, to be a town of huts full of different voices and stories. Or at least to try to do so. To connect. Compare Stevens' sonorous verse (it's beautiful; I love to read it) to Spicer's jagged, carefully dissonant songs (personally, I love them more). In Spicer, Poetry is the boat to make the crossing; in Stevens, it is the moat to keep the castle. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:22:46 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: William Marsh Subject: Re: A suggestion- In-Reply-To: <3646F0BA.3042@earthlink.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" joel k asks: >LA Boys: what happened at the Ribot Conference? I tried to go, but got lost in traffic, and ended up in long beach. "What's your cell-phone?" i'll bite on Ribot, though i ain't no LA Boy / made the trek from San D on I-5 -- caught a little random traffic but not too bad / can't say much about opening night reception (attended the Arshile 10 reading at Beyond Baroque which went concurrently) , but heard second-handedly from the if not over sixty at least nearing 60 crowd that the under thirty or perhaps just past had demonstrated in part their generational difference by canting idiolects of largely different swangs, ie, talking different if not "thinking different" /which came up the second day, saturday (conference day) via Apple's running billboard ad which Standard Schaefer had on approach passed and then brought up as i think synecdochic evidence for the REAL value-droppings which LA folks have to contend with daily in efforts to outsmart, maybe out-flank, the spectacle / generational angst and anxiety of influence were running, if maybe on a treadmill, themes, and the "what next" question had its heels firmly planted on that slipperyest of slopes / Paul Vangelisti, Douglas Messerli, Martha Ronk, Guy Bennett, those whose names i apologize for not remembering, had much good things to say, most particularly as with others regarding readability and accessibility which for poets more than other artists evidently usher greater worries and misgivings / visual artists i found out take very little stock in the term "innovative" / Cathy Wagner and i agreed that the Internet has maybe more than "communication" in mind for all of us, though group conversation focused more on how (h)email might affect the evolution of writing itself, and a few agreed that immediacy (thanks Joel) of transport makes for maybe a more active collaborative conjunction-forming network, though it remains odd that what binds the so-called younger is the so-called lack of collective agenda, that being debatable right down to its core, and so it was / the Halloween night Masked Ball is something of a blur so please someone fill that in, but its conclusion sent John Lowther, Cathy W, Standard S, Paul V, Emily Grossman, Tracy Grinnell, Will Alexander (appearing late), Jacques Debrot (that charming orator), myself, some whose names (but not faces) i again apologize for forgetting, to the Firehouse or Firestarter or Fire____ bar across the street from the Furama Hotel on Lincoln Blvd, where some sat in a booth and told ghost stories while others gathered around the pool table to prove that poets can "call their shots" as well as the best of them / what happened after the table shut down i can't report / thanks to those who organized for the gratis copy of *Ribot* -- best candy in the t-or-t bag for sure , bill 884-3414 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - William Marsh | PBrain | http://bmarsh.dtai.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:19:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Re: linguistic transparency MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Peter-- I was also a presence on that scene at UW-M. Unfortunately, the Middle-Western Poet syndrome was in full swing there at that time, and the ghosts of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandberg walked by day and night in those halls. Certain resident poets--(imagine a black bar across the eyes as we view them from secret cameras) believed that Dave Etter was a great poet, and that it was good to celebrate corn fields and golden sunsets and Grandma Moses and eatin' apple pie in Woolworths, and working with your hands in the steel mills and bein' spit 'n whittle and bein' anti-intallekshule 'bout what poets do, cause heck I ain't no thinker I'm a poet ( an honest-to-god-quote from one of these writers in residence), and I ain't no sissy neither 'cause I write pomes with guns in 'em. (A far cry from the writing seminars at Hopkins, where I'd gotten my degree.) Yes, it was a different world there. Sometimes I suspected it had something to do with drinking too much lake water. Fortunately, one floor up was the center for modern studies with Herb Blau and Ihab Hassan--a great corrective if you got the blues. And even better was to hike across the bridge on Locust street to Woodland Pattern Book center and spend the day reading chapbooks and the evening listening to Helen Adam or Robert Duncan read in the flesh. Let's hear it for linguistic transparency! Rah Rah! The fog comes in on little cat's feet...But actually L.T. isn't all that transparent either. -----Original Message----- From: Peter Balestrieri To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Monday, November 09, 1998 8:02 PM Subject: linguistic transparency > Mark Baker wrote: > "But maybe not as naive as the need for LANGUAGE poets to provide > a corrective to the "too-easy and too-prevalent assumption > of linguistic transparency." Name one 20th-century linguist > or philosopher of language who assumed anything like this. > Name one English major who assumed it. The easy and prevalent > assumption today is the reverse: language is completely > opaque." > > I spent my English major education at the University of > Wisconson-Milwaukee where the vast majority of my fellow E-majors > believed in linguistic transparency, and not a few professors as well. > I had a fellow student wave a copy of "I Know Why the Caged Bird > Sings" in my face while she yelled, "this IS Maya Angelou, this IS > Maya Angelou"! My experience was that I had to battle constantly to > get people to even listen to the idea that language wasn't a window > with "reality" on the other side. I still do, now that I spend my days > with English majors who toil away in Silicon Valley. > > Pete > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:41:44 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: Re: Jack Spicer commemorated Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:00:03 -0800 >From: david bromige >Subject: Jack Spicer commemorated > >My highly subjective take on this occasion at SF's Yerba Buena Center needs >to be fleshed out by a Listee better able to identify the readers...Dodie? >Kevin? Actually, David, the readers were posted to the list when we advertised it. Here's who was intended to be at the event: Kevin Killian Peter Gizzi Jim Alexander David Bromige Wesley Day Ernie Edwards Lew Ellingham Gerald Fabian Nemi Frost Larry Kearney Joanne Kyger Alvin William Moore Mary Rice Moore John Norton Ariel Parkinson James Schevill Richard Tagett Peter, Jim Alexander, and Mary Rice Moore weren't able to make it, however. There were a couple of people who knew Spicer in the audience--such as Catherine Mulholland--whom Kevin had never met and whom, sadly, he didn't learn about until the next day when he and Lew were deconstructing the event. >Arriving slightly late due to a delay on Bart that held up Creelea >Henderson, one of my two pre-reading dinner companions (the other being >CH's S.O., Brent Cunningham), we found to our dismay the box-office person >claiming the event was sold out. "Take my left arm," I said to Brent; and, >"take my right arm," I told Creelea. I informed the house manager that I >could not get up the (long) flight of stairs w/o this help. I must say, you were very effective at acting feeble, David--too so--I was worried about you until Kevin clued me in. As far as the difficulties at Yerba Buena, they have very strict fire codes there and as it was we let in more people than the Nazi house manager found tolerable. Natasha, our co-curator, had to fight with him to get as many people in there that there were. It's a pity that people had to be turned away. We were going to work towards a larger space at Yerba Buena, but due to various mishaps I won't go into, that didn't happen. When the evening was over, I went up to the house manager, took his hand, smiled, and said, "That wasn't so bad, was it?" He didn't say a word, just glared at me. One of the readers was talking about Dada, and I thought that having the old-school Bohemians in the space age design of the Yerba Buena lounge had more than a bit of Dada effect. >The readers I liked best were Joanne Kyger, inimitably (non)theatrical, >and--new to me--Nemi Frost, who was, as a visual artist, not expected to >read well at all, eh? She was brilliant. She prefaced her reading with an >account of the anarchist monopoly games she, JS and friends would play >while drinking martinis. One of the best perks of being the Wife of the Biographer has been getting to hang out with Nemi--went to the opening of the Museum of Modern Art with her, over to her apartment for drinks, out to dinner and to an art opening in Marin, to her own opening at a designer showcase (Diane Feinstein showed up in a red power suit) and each time was a blast. Nemi knows how to enjoy life. After the event, Kush, who taped it, was talking about doing a Spicer video screening--showing clips from the Yerba Buena event as well as the 1986(?) Spicer conference at New College. What do you think of that idea? Thanks for writing in about the event, David. We'll be sure to attach it to grants as a "review." Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:56:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: Sometimes good guys don't wear white Comments: To: David Baratier In-Reply-To: <364983BE.549728CD@megsinet.net> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I would desperately like to join in all this fun but can't because of an advisory notice I received from .... from ... oh yeah it wasn't signed, reminding me to stick to the purpose of the list. On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, David Baratier wrote: > Bill is a very nice guy. Please, invite him to your town to read. > > Since I have never met Kent I can only go on heresay but if I were to > meet him, if he were to have me out to read, I would be willing to vouch > for him. > > Since flaunting one's wares is not only permitted but encouraged > on this List I would like to say: > > Also, I, too, am a very nice guy. I toot my horn but at a tolerable > rate. If it is a criteria, similar to Bill, I also am unemployed and in > tremendous spirits. Please, invite me to your town to read. > > Be well > > David Baratier > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:48:01 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: Stevens and Spicer In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:40:12 -0500 from On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:40:12 -0500 KENT JOHNSON said: > >For Stevens, Reality and Imagination are both Real, but also >separate. You could think of his poetry, in a sense, as a kind of >apartheid solution to the problem of being. The imagination builds a >circling wall with lovely shards of glass along the top to keep >the natives out. > >For Spicer, poetry doesn't so much, I'd say, have a "right" to >connect to the Real-- it is the very purpose of poetry to do so, to >be impure, to be a town of huts full of different voices and stories. >Or at least to try to do so. To connect. > >Compare Stevens' sonorous verse (it's beautiful; I love to read it) >to Spicer's jagged, carefully dissonant songs (personally, I love >them more). > >In Spicer, Poetry is the boat to make the crossing; in Stevens, it is >the moat to keep the castle. Stevens created his own idiom & liked to explore the idea of an imaginative dimension where there is freedom to see reality for the first time - in all its harshness and beauty. For this he is criticized as an elitist aesthete even unto Kent today. Kent, a boat may not necessarily be purely functional, designed to ferry us from the huts over here to the huts over there (those huts, full of "different voices" - but nobody should try to sound TOO different - people might accuse you of puttin' on high-falutin' "verse airs"). In fact some people build boats just to float on the water, just to drift downtream, on a whim. Somebody wrote somewhere (was it J?) that the whole wide world was saved by a guy who built a boat - back in em Diluvian days. - henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:02:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Nice guys MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov. 10, Dan Bouchard wrote: >Am investigating potential reading series in my town. Unaware >till now that very nice guy's were available. Will keep Bill and >Kent in mind as things progress. No one but very nice guys need >apply. Would like very nice gals too but don't want to appear >lecherous in saying so. Lechery smacks of not very nice guys. In that case, Dan, you should probably scratch my name from your list of "nice guys" Kent ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:25:07 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Organization: Re*Map Subject: Re: A suggestion- MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit hey Joel: traffic IS what we do in LA! TODD B. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:27:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: Stevens and Spicer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov. 10, Henry Gould said: >For this he [Stevens] is criticized as an elitist aesthete even unto >Kent today. Now Henry, don't get so riled up there old chap. I didn't mean to say I had anything against Stevens, though admittedly my Apartheid figure of speech probably gave that impression. Even though he was a racist pig. (Well, OK, Spicer too, so I shouldn't have raised that hot potato.) No, I _love_ Stevens. I was just trying to say that there is a pretty big ontological and epistemological (I love using those big-boy words) difference. And if I like Spicer more than Stevens it's probably related to the fact that I like Ives more than Brahms. But I like Brahms too. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:45:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner notes In-Reply-To: <000a01be0c9d$f9236dc0$573ffea9@oemcomputer> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Thanks to those who have so far given reports on Hannah Weiner: A 70th Birthday Memorial Tribute, which was held on Saturday, Nov. 7, at the Parish Hall of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in NYC, from 4:15 to 7:30. For now, I just want to post a full list of the participants, and the order of the program, as a way of commemorating this event. I hope, at some later point, to say more (I feel much too much inside the event still to write about it in detail now). But on behalf of Lee Ann Brown, Andrew Levy and myself (the organizers) we want to thank all these participants and also to the many people who came, and especially the Poetry Project, and in particular Marcella Durand, Ed Friedman, John Fisk (who made a complete audio recording of the event) and Anselm Berrigan for their help. Andrew Levy Charles Alexander Bruce Andrews Abigail Child Maria Damon Tina Darragh Lewis Warsh Kenneth Goldsmith Slides presented by Lee Ann Brown Carollee Schneemann with slides Bob Harrison Michael Heller Maurice Finegold (Hannah’s brother) Phill Niblock mid-70s film of Hannah Weiner reading her work Henry Hills’s 1982 film Plagarism, with Weiners, Bernstein, Andrews, & Sherry Peter Inman Jackson Mac Low (for himself and Anne Tardos) Sharon Mattlin Nick Piombino Joan Retallack Barbara Rosenthal James Sherry Ron Silliman Fiona Templeton Tod Thilleman Bob Perelman Alan Davies Lee Ann Brown Charles Bernstein Brown and Bernstein: concluding two-voice reading from The Clairvoyant Journal ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:58:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand Subject: Re: My address and phone >I, too, am a very nice guy. Please, invite me to your town to read. >Kent Johnson ... sure, sure, that was what you said right before the pigeon in your fake greenery crapped in my purse. the only good thing i could say about you was at least you didn't blow your nose on my raincoat like bowering (those canadians... you can take the canadian out of the field, but you can't take the field out of the canadian...) and rachel is full of hoooey. she told me (back when she was still speaking to me) that bowering didn't even bother with the sleeve, but just used her ARM. you ask me, i did that woman a favor getting bowering off her hands (or arm). but that's the way it always is, nice girls finish last... the ones you help hate you most. i think i'm going to go fry oatcakes, yodel, and write a sad poem. eat your heart out levinsky, you've eaten the last homemade fried oatcake you'll ever get out of me, you hussy! e ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:03:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand Subject: Re: Sometimes good guys don't wear white Comments: To: baratier@megsinet.net dare i throw my hat into the ring?... i am partially employed, am pretty bitchy (i mean, screw the oatcakes. you think i'm giving ANYONE any?) and i love to wear tight sequined chartreuse dresses, hum Story Weather evocatively, and read my tone poems while doing my interpretive dancing. and, like sandy dennis, if i can't do my interpretive dancing, i don't want to dance at all. i'll just lounge across the piano, drink absinthe, pick at the side seam on the chartreuse gown, and read my tone poems anyway. so there. e ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:04:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: Nice guys In-Reply-To: <5C4757B1078@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT o ye of the rampant hormones and male chub-clubbiness I hope ye all get messages from the man at the top (on top?) On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote: > On Nov. 10, Dan Bouchard wrote: > > >Am investigating potential reading series in my town. Unaware > >till now that very nice guy's were available. Will keep Bill and > >Kent in mind as things progress. No one but very nice guys need > >apply. Would like very nice gals too but don't want to appear > >lecherous in saying so. Lechery smacks of not very nice guys. > > In that case, Dan, you should probably scratch my name from your > list of "nice guys" > > Kent > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:12:15 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris McCreary Subject: Re: ITSYNCCAST, 3rdness publication Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hi-- Can you pass this message on to John Lowther? I've obviously not followed yr publishing plans closely enough-- On Oct. 13, I mailed a check for a copy of Syntactics, some poems of my own, and a copy of the magazine that I co-edit, ixnay, to you at an address in Decatur, not Atlanta. Can you please let me know if this envelope made it to you somehow? (I got the address & issue price off a flyer for Syntactics that's probably about a year old...) Thanks in advance for getting back to me. --Chris McCreary 1164 S. 10th St. Phila PA 19147 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:46:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: The man on top MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov. 10, Mairead Byrne said: >o ye of the rampant hormones and male chub-clubbiness I hope ye all >get messages from the man at the top (on top?) Mairead: I hope I do too! If it's a message inviting me to Buffalo _to read_, that is. If he does invite me, that man up there, I will even let him be on top. In fact, _anybody_ out there: If you invite me to read, I'll let _you_ be on top! So far the only invite I've got is from Brown, but that's not till February, so even there, it's almost like they're trying to put it off as long as they can... C'mon you all, what's the matter with me, do I have crabs or somethin? It looks to me like every single person on thsi list has readings lined up here and there and everywhere! You have my address and you have my phone number. INvite me and I pledge to you: even the rocks and the trees will dance. $1000 plus expenses. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:04:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: shana Subject: Re: The man on top In-Reply-To: <5C6309B2379@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote: > > Mairead: > I hope I do too! If it's a message inviting me to Buffalo _to read_, > that is. If he does invite me, that man up there, I will even let him > be on top. In fact, _anybody_ out there: If you invite me to read, > I'll let _you_ be on top! Okay, Kent. That's your problem right there. I am only using you for your mind, you know. Being on top would change our whole relationship. > > So far the only invite I've got is from Brown, but that's not till > February, so even there, it's almost like they're trying to put it > off as long as they can... C'mon you all, what's the matter with me, > do I have crabs or somethin? I know from Freeport, IL (roots in Chicago 'burbs)--I don't think they've discovered crabs yet out in them thar village. And if you did have crabs, that would be reason no. 2 "Why Kent Johnson Shouldn't Be On Top." It looks to me like every single > person on thsi list has readings lined up here and there and > everywhere! You have my address and you have my phone number. INvite > me and I pledge to you: even the rocks and the trees will dance. > $1000 plus expenses. > Kent > I have no readings scheduled. I was born during the Carter administration, after the Hues Corporation released "Rock the Boat," does that make me too young to have readings scheduled? Confidential to NYC-- Does anyone know anything about the open readings that occasionally take place at Oasis Lounge on St. Marks and A? Has anyone been to any of them? Is it pseudo-stuff? Or is it good? shana "In the blank space below specify how long you have been awake and why you were taken by surprise."--Dan Pagis ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:14:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris McCreary Subject: Re: ITSYNCCAST, 3rdness publication Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit (Sorry for the back channel to the list... my shame is boundless...) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:18:38 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pete Neufeld Subject: Does anyone know MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" of someone who organizes readings in Fresno? I'd appreciate any information. Thanks, Pete (pbn@kvn.com) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:24:11 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: A very nice guy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII What's next, 'will read for food' ? Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:07:10 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: back to Spicer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Serendipitously came across an interesting piece by Paul Vangelisti on Spicer's _After Lorca_. He focuses more on the relation of writer/reader to their play with language than on the "reality" issue: Paul Vangelisti, "Collage as language: further thoughts on 'Events'," in Katherine Hoffman, Collage:critical views, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1989, "[collage] grew out of an urge (however fictively or artificially realized) to base art in physical reality, in the language contemporary reality was speaking to me [quotes Spicer on deire for "the moon in my(Spicer's) poems tp be a real moon. which could suddenly be covered with a cloud...a moon utterly independent of images]." Vangelisti then goes on to describe his own experiences working with collage poetry and the effect this had on him - essentially he describes a move from "acertain 'tragic' ethos or stance for which the desire to write verse preordained me" to "the salvage in _Portfolio is precisely comic, an assemblage of social and personal contexts within which poetic language may be renewed...in choosing to play with this phenomenon, I find my poetry redefining itself..." tom bell NNMNNL MMNMMNK \\\/ <><>,...,., J K HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW MM LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:32:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: Taslima Nasrin Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Steve Lacy has asked us to forward the following: Taslima Nasrin is an important and wonderful writer. We have collaborated on an opera: "The Cry" which has been performed 14 times in 6 countries and is continuing. She is a spokeswoman for oppressed people all over the world, and is a winner of the Kharov Peace Prize. She is in danger of being lynched in her own country. Your protest to the government of Bangladesh is urgently needed. Some people & Organizations to contact: Embassy of the People's Republic of Bangladesh His Excellency Ambassador K.M. Shehabuddin 2201 Wisconsin Ave. NW Suite 300 Washington D.C. 20007 USA (202) 342-8372 to 8376 fax: (202) 333-4971 email: BanglaEmb@aol.com The Permanent Mission of Bangladesh to United Nations 821 United Nations Plaza, 8th floor New York, NY 10017 (212) 867-3434 fax: (212) 972-4038 email: bgdun@undp.org Ambassade du Bangladesh en France 5 Square Petrarque 75016 Paris, France 01 4651 9033 01 4651 9830 01 4651 9865 telecopie: 01 4651 9035 If possible, start a petition! Thanks ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:29:54 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: schuchat Subject: finishing last or whenever MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit although I am told I am more or less a nice guy, I would just as soon not be invited to read, in most towns that I can think of, at least for the foreseeable future. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:01:00 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: Noah De Lissovoy info Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" This is Dodie Bellamy. I've lost touch with Noah since he moved back to LA. Can anybody backchannel me how to reach him? Thanks. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:31:02 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: The man on top MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Kent and All, I'm starting a crass lecherous guy reading series in my living room. All the guys "on top," not to mention all you bottoms out there, are graciously invited. The fee for bottoms is $50 (you pay me). Kathy Lou KENT JOHNSON wrote: > > On Nov. 10, Mairead Byrne said: > > >o ye of the rampant hormones and male chub-clubbiness I hope ye all > >get messages from the man at the top (on top?) > > Mairead: > I hope I do too! If it's a message inviting me to Buffalo _to read_, > that is. If he does invite me, that man up there, I will even let him > be on top. In fact, _anybody_ out there: If you invite me to read, > I'll let _you_ be on top! > > So far the only invite I've got is from Brown, but that's not till > February, so even there, it's almost like they're trying to put it > off as long as they can... C'mon you all, what's the matter with me, > do I have crabs or somethin? It looks to me like every single > person on thsi list has readings lined up here and there and > everywhere! You have my address and you have my phone number. INvite > me and I pledge to you: even the rocks and the trees will dance. > $1000 plus expenses. > Kent ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:35:57 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: More on Hejinian MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Okay Kids, I only received two responses to my query about critical material on _My Life_. (Thank you blessed souls!) More? I'm planning to use this book in a class I'm teaching at San Francisco State for the winter term, but have found it's backordered everywhere and not even available at the publisher. Help, Douglas! Is it true? I'd hate to xerox and deprive Sun & Moon of the sales. Suggestions appreciated. Thanks everyone, Kathy Lou Schultz ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 19:07:37 -0800 Reply-To: "W. Freind" Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "W. Freind" Subject: Elizabeth Treadwell In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII You out there? I lost your address. (Apologies to the list.) Bill Freind ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:51:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: joel lewis Subject: f.y.i. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" *** Britons may enjoy all-night millennium pub session LONDON (Reuters) - Britons may be allowed to celebrate the coming of the new millennium with an unprecedented all-night session in the pub, the government said Monday. The Home Office said it proposed to relax the tight rules on licensing hours which until now have meant landlords calling "Time" shortly after the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" at midnight on New Year's Eve. One possibility was to allow carousing to continue until 4 a.m.; the other to allow pubs to stay open until 11 am - opening time on Jan. 1. "The Government's preferred option is an all-night relaxation of licensing hours on New Year's Eve," the ministry said, adding any change will not take effect until the end of 1999. ### *** Ducks fail to quack Polish market LONDON (Reuters) - Most people would agree that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. But not, apparently, the Poles. A British firm that won a contract to supply breeding ducks to Polish farmers was asked by Warsaw to have them examined first at an independent Polish test station. The request was less straightforward than it seemed - there are no duck-testing facilities in Poland. Nor, by the way, was there any explanation, in a British parliamentary report, of how to test a duck. The Trade and Industry Committee concluded that wily Polish bureaucrats were simply trying to protect a state-subsidized Polish duck-breeding farm from foreign competition. ### *** Pizza over porn in Belgium BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Pizza is more puzzling than pornography to people using a Belgian toll-free helpline service. Scoot, an interactive information service accessible by phone or through the Internet, said the majority of the million callers who have used the service asked, "Where can I get a pizza tonight?" While many Internet-only search engines are flooded with sex-related questions and referrals to pornography sites, only 1.7% of the calls to Scoot were about sex or eroticism. After pizza, the next most popular topics on Scoot were questions about travel destinations and party locations. ### ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:21:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: My address and phone In-Reply-To: <5C2779E65E7@student.highland.cc.il.us> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I, too, am a very nice guy. Please, invite me to your town to read. > >Kent Johnson Maria D. told me that Kent told her that too, and then look what happened! George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:21:38 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: My address and phone In-Reply-To: <199811101958.OAA20395@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >and rachel is full of hoooey. she told me (back when she was still speaking >to me) that bowering didn't even bother with the sleeve, but just used >her ARM. you ask me, i did that woman a favor getting bowering off her >hands (or arm). but that's the way it always is, nice girls finish >last... the ones you help hate you most. Now, what you are seeing here, if you can read the truth lurking beneath the apparent, are the words of a woman spurned. I am crazy about Rachel's arm, and I was going to give Eliza a chance, but then I took off my Ray-Bans and what did I see? A tattoo--a tattoo that spelled the name that only those who know Bromige VERY WELL would be familiar with. Hell, even I didnt know it for the first 15 years I knew Brom. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:22:23 +0200 Reply-To: robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lunds universitet Subject: Re: Stevens and Spicer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:40:12 -0500 KENT JOHNSON said: > >For Stevens, Reality and Imagination are both Real, but also >separate. You could think of his poetry, in a sense, as a kind of >apartheid solution to the problem of being. The imagination builds a >circling wall with lovely shards of glass along the top to keep >the natives out. Not sure this is quite right, although I have got to hand it to Kent for the image-making -- Stevens as the owner of a well-kept and pleasant Colonial compound, Spicer as the Soweto-Laureate. As for the separation of the imagination and the real in Stevens, though -- there are pleny of ways the two connect for him, and I'm not sure the wall is quite the right image. In "The Anecdote of the Jar," for example, there's a kind of meeting of the two -- a meeting on unequal terms, but still a kind of meeting: I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. The act of the imagination organizes a slovenly world, rather than cutting us off from it. That's different from Spicer, who embraces the what Stevens calls the "slovenly," but it isn't exactly a wall that's made. If we want to stick with the apartheid-imagery, maybe we could call the imagination an armored police car going out into the shantytowns of the real. (Or, if we want to be sympathetic, we could call the imagination Stevens' Nelson Mandela, the austere figure whose actions bring order to the disordered). Well, whatever. The point Kent makes about the different attitude to a chaotic reality in Spicer and Stevens seems exactly right to me, but the wall image seems too static -- the imagination seems more like an action than a barrier in Stevens, at least to this reader. Bob -- Robert Archambeau Lund University (Sweden) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:11:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: nice poets would a-touring go Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hmm, maybe it's time to dust this one off & share. When I was teaching, I got dozens of letters almost like this one. I myself never wrote one, of course. . . _How To Write For A Reading_ Terence Dactyl Laurel at Bay Phenobarbidol California Dear Professor Quatrain, I am the author of more than 17 (but probably no more than 18) volumes of poetry and prose (_Sickness Unto Death & Other Yarns_ ,_The Worm in the Bud is My Buddy_ ), have published in a wide range (_Lonely Megaphone_ , _Fichte Review_ ) of journals and magazines, and have given readings from my own works at college campuses all over the country. How are you? Your name was passed along by Anthony Anapest, who speaks of you with considerable warmth. And of course your article on the use of the syzygy in Bosnian folk-poetry is well-known to me, and Volume 83 of _The Comparative Pedant_ is beside me as I write, open to pages 16-92. Keep up the good work! You may well wonder that I, a total stranger, should write to you. What could he possibly want of me, you are probably asking yourself at this very moment. Well, let me put you out of your misery! It just so happens that I'm to be in your neighborhood between either March 6-8, March 17-23, or September 11-12, on urgent business, and would be willing while there to make your acquaintance and to read on your campus. I customarily do this for a large sum of money but seeing that I'm going to be there anyway I will consider a pittance many would deem humiliating. It's not as though I'm not used to it, after all. This society treats its artists shamefully. It has to defend its cliches against the real news. I'm well aware there are stories going the rounds about how I actually loathe giving readings, how I hate meeting professors and students, how flying gives me claustrophobia and airports, agoraphobia, and that I have a speech impediment *[btw,I, db, do]*, and that this would prevent anyone understanding my poems even if they were written to be read aloud. So what. Him who striveth unceasingly upward, him alone can we get to fix the roof. I never flirted with that fellow's wife, either. Her hand cramped up and she couldn't let go of mine. Listen, it's unthinkable that you should invite Anapest and not invite me! Dr. Quatrain, I urge you to think long and hard about this matter. No one wants to be the laughing-stock of posterity, does he? I've read at a lot better places than Milltown State. More than 17, certainly. Let me assure you there's no trace of ego left in me. Not I, but the wind that blows through me : what I stand for must be served. Every day men die miserably for want of the news. In this respect, I urge you to get my name right on the publicity. Last time I read, a considerable crowd showed up, hoping to hear _Crocodile_ Dactyl. Latecomers kept interrupting to ask when I was going to play my Bushman's Mouth-harp. As you ought to know, I perform unaided--the work requires no props. Unless, that is, a college wishes to pay the expenses of my friend Dexter, who juggles Indian clubs during my haiku sequence. But I'm not at all sure I want to read that sequence again. I'm not even sure that I haven't lost it. Let me just shuffle through these papers one more time....Ah, here it is....No, I don't believe I'll read this....Or maybe I will. Tell you what, I'll wait and see how the mood takes me. Tell you what, when I get there, you can help me decide. Need I say how much I look forward to talking with you? And your good lady, who will get to meet a real poet at last? I only wish I could be there longer. I could stay long enough to conduct a workshop next day for the additional $50. *[this is written in 1976]* . I could stay overnight with you. I hear you've got a great place. Wonderful what one can do with a little tenure, isn't it? Funny thing, though--I don't suppose Shakespeare or Dante had tenure. But then, they didn't know a hell of a lot about Bosnian folk-poetry either. So,we'll have plenty to talk about. If you think, though, that poets are too creepy to have around the house--understandably, after what Anapest did to your front door--I can always sleep on the floor in your graduate assistant's loft beside the El in my neckbrace down in the industrial district. I'll enclose a pamphlet of my latest poems. You'll notice that they read down as well as across. Watch out for the staples! If I don't read at Milltown, I want this back. In concluding, I wish you all the best in your exacting profession. Wisdom goes hand in hand with age, and I hear you are quite old. I know you will want to see justice done before you die. For God's sake, Quatrain! All I want is what you paid Anapest--it can't have been as much as he says. But perhaps you are already dead. If so, please have the common courtesy to pass this along to the Committee on Visiting Writers. To whom I would like to say, sincerely, that I know what fine work each of you has been doing in recent years. Everything I said to Quatrain goes double for you. I realize you're probably junior faculty who regard this as one more duty dumped upon you because you can't say No until you get tenure. Look, why not simply give the entire semester's allotment to me? Look at the trouble you'll be saved. But of course, you'll probably want to give it all to a "name" like Theodore Thoroughgood or Paul Skald or Booby Bounty--Bobby, I mean--who'll do the same old gig they always do-_after all, that's what the rubes want, right? But perhaps you have the intellectual honesty to resist the easy way out. However, if this letter turns up at the bottom of a stack of departmental memos two years from now, I know I will libe as a guilty start in your heart. Truly yours, Terence Dacytl, Poet. ++++++++++ I apologize for the length. But I wanted to give what help I can, in regard to what not to do. +++++++++ ========= +++++++++ In regard to the skandalous Bowering, he sold me one of his old books once and inside at the end of the longest poem a hand had scribbled, "I love you forever", and then either "Rachel" or "Maria" or "Eliza". (the penmanship was bad, as though the writer was medicated). Btw, there was never a tattoo with my codename inscribed, upon that woman. A rare S American butterfly happened to perch on that woman's naked shoulder as Bowering was dawdling by, eyeing that woman. db3 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 07:23:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Katherine Lederer Subject: EXPLOSIVE LET ME TRY THIS AGAIN In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Announcing the publication of E X P L O S I V E M A G A Z I N E # 6 featuring new work by: Jenna Roper Harmon Camille Guthrie Robyn Schiff Dale Smith John Arizza Jackson Mac Low Anselm Berrigan Magdalena Zurawski Nava Fader Susan Schultz Nanos Valaoritis Individually printed covers by David Larsen Poetry Comics by Dave Morice from a new location on the upper West Side: Katy Lederer, ed. 216 W. 104th Street, 1C NY, NY 10025 $5 per issue / $15 for 3 Make checks payable to Katy Lederer ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 08:05:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: stevens again It's amusing to watch Stevens packaged in these cute little ideologically- correct nutshells based on a quick summary of his point-of-view. Stevens' whole life's work in poetry is a continual musing ABOUT the relations between reality & imagination - not a fixed attitude or a program. You can read all kinds of things into his lexicon, his biases & snobbery - you can throw in loaded words like "apartheid" etc. - basically imposing your personal taste on what was originally a discussion about the status of the "real" in language and poetry. As Mr. Shoemaker pointed out, it's another topic deconstructed in good poetics-list fashion. Why are we hashing over old cliches & obviousities about Stevens? He's only one poet among many. What does any of this have to do with current practice? I'm not saying it isn't relevant - it would just be nice if someone pointed out some connections. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 08:30:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: louis stroffolino Subject: COMMUNITY CHEST In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hey, wow--Ron Silliman writes that CB, LAB and AL, "know the meaning of community". Amazing, really. I guess they are learn-ed poets unlike the rest of us dumb-fucks. I assume of course they also know the spelling of heirarchy and clique. But seriously--- is Mr. Silliman conceding that "community" has only ONE meaning? And what kind of meaning is that? Now, one doesn't have to think of all the crimes committed in the name of "community" to applaud such flambouyant Sillimany rhetoric that would make Bill Gates (and the speaker formerly known as Newt) proud. yours in community, chris -------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:31:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Kent, come to Kornell In-Reply-To: <5C6309B2379@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Kent, We wouldn't mind if you came to Kornell to read, but we One couldn't pay you, Two could give you no room, Three no board, Four only a partial audience, Five show you lovely ithaka, Six would probably have to walk the hill up to campus in sleet, Seven walk down in rain, Eight slip in a gorge, Nine endure verbal cumin, cognitive curry, but no meat and potatoes, none. Gabe On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote: > On Nov. 10, Mairead Byrne said: > > >o ye of the rampant hormones and male chub-clubbiness I hope ye all > >get messages from the man at the top (on top?) > > Mairead: > I hope I do too! If it's a message inviting me to Buffalo _to read_, > that is. If he does invite me, that man up there, I will even let him > be on top. In fact, _anybody_ out there: If you invite me to read, > I'll let _you_ be on top! > > So far the only invite I've got is from Brown, but that's not till > February, so even there, it's almost like they're trying to put it > off as long as they can... C'mon you all, what's the matter with me, > do I have crabs or somethin? It looks to me like every single > person on thsi list has readings lined up here and there and > everywhere! You have my address and you have my phone number. INvite > me and I pledge to you: even the rocks and the trees will dance. > $1000 plus expenses. > Kent > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:39:38 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: schuchat Subject: Re: nice poets would a-touring go MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit not merely the amounts of money, but Professor Quatrain's speciality mark this letter as seriously out of date. no doubt today, with his expertise in Bosnian folk poetry, Quatrain would be far too busy consulting, appearing on CNN, assisting his academic colleagues in Sarajevo to reconstruct their lives after I forget how many years of war and what, is it two years now, of tenuously enforced peace, and of course publishing in the New York Review etc. what would be the contemporary equivalent? not Jane Austen studies. is there any academic endeavor in the humanities today that would carry the same aroma of irrelevance, obscurantism, pedantry, sheer mustiness, that Bosnia folk poetry seemed to have whenever this delightful peace was penned? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:38:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pattie McCarthy Subject: New Poetry Magazine (via Philadelphia) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit The editors of the new, Philadelphia-based poetry magazine p H are pleased to announce the publication of issue #1, earShot, featuring : New Poetry by: Gregg Biglieri Ann Simon Rod Smith Cole Swenson and Ryan Whyte experimental fiction by Pamela Lu, a poetic metaphysicalspeculation and color copy of a postcard collage by Bill Luoma, and a review of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's RENGA: Draft 32, by Nicole Markotic. To order, or for more information/samples, please E-mail: Kjvarrone@aol.com. Copies of the issue are available for $3 (postage included). (Pls make checks payable to Pattie McCarthy). ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:35:22 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pattie McCarthy Subject: some news from Philadelphia --publication announcement Comments: cc: bcole@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, rdupless@vm.temple.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Announcement of publications: BeautifulSwimmer Press, a Philadelphia-based poetry imprint is pleased to announce the publication of its first two chapbooks: RENGA: Draft 32, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & POSTCARDS, by Barbara Cole Both chapbooks are staple bound and printed on 80lb Poseidon paper. RENGA: Draft 32, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, is 56 pgs and features a double cover: 100lb white cover stock with handwritten author's notes to the poem printed on it. The notes are overlaid with a 30lb onion skin/vellum with the poem's title and author printed on it. The following is an exerpt from RENGA: Draft 32: Snarled light, snap, bare. Of golden glass light trees, of Knots to which one is apprenticed, of split splints intransigent, no beginning beginning. :: no beginning but emptiness full, fulling in-betweens. What twisting ribbon (time? or light? or words?) is it Aglows Astripe? :: That glows, stripes and branches, while bursts of gold-glass light snarls complicate "the tangle of it." ********* POSTCARDS, by Barbara Cole, is 24 pages and features a full-color cover illustration by Julia Kuhl, a New York artist and book illustrator who contributes monthly to the New Yorker magazine. She created the illustration specifically for Barbara's book. The following is an excerpt from POSTCARDS: in my dreams the water is coming. the dead calm when it is done but nicer than that sounds. so we become mothers to each other. know the task at hand: keep climbing. expand the view. I may regret having to choose but I do not regret making decisions. this is not a tragedy we're making---with a clear climax and everything left dead in the end. at some point the curtain must fall. and who better to decide when the play is over? the idea of living rooms has always appealed to me. the smell of candles burning and a tapestry on the wall. the bringing together of threads. by definition the weave is never singular. The chapbooks are $8 each (postage included), or BOTH for 15 (Postage included) For orders or information, please E-mail : BeautSwim@aol.com, or write BeautifulSwimmer Press c/o Pattie McCarthy 20 Scott Court Wayne, PA 19087 (Please make all checks payable to Pattie McCarthy). ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 06:48:15 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Billy Little Subject: Re: Some guys don't list bars nbst(some planet) bars Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" do you feel your poeticks would be different if there never was a chocolate would an anthology of diabetic poets be revealing? during the occupation gis traded chocolate bars for poems in homes for gnomes for poems in bed for gnomesses they traded silk(sic) stocking for poems in back of taxis they traded orange segments or piece of coal chewing gum poem crazed warriors wanted poems whispered to the sunflower to the zucchini to the jerusalem artichokes whispered in the full moon w/accordionist accompanying the bugler pocket full of chocolate billy little 4 song st. nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0 Go ahead and say something true before the big turd eats You You can say any last thing in Your poem. -Alice Notley ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:45:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: lee ann brown Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner 70th Birthday Memorial Tribute Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sorry you're sick, Maria! Thanks for coming all that way and for your letter to Hannah- and Thanks, R M Daley, for commenting on the Hannah Weiner tribute- I thought it was amazing. Good point about Spicer and the hystericization of women's "visions." I also appreciated James' remarks, especially about her exacting specifications about getting into print what she had on the page, much of that being exactly as she saw it (literally). But I think Hannah saw her experience of clairvoyance as central to her work process since the 70's - and that cannot be ignored. I'd love to know where the ">projections of words on a cat" came in too- I don't remember that and would like to. . . you mean on Carolee Scheemann's slides of young, pony-tailed Hannah holding her cat up towards the camera to be photographed? And like Bromige's comment abt the Spicer event- the thing that interested me perhaps the most was what works of Hannah's people chose to read and how it manifested in different mouths- I'll try to say more later -I'm still kinda reeling from it all... Meanwhile, As an extra bonus: Here's a poem that Bernadette Mayer & Phil Good sent to be read - Hannah in the First Person Hello, I would like you to come over and smoke my peace pipe Could you come over and buy me some frozen yogurt? I think I should put my sweater on; the voices told me so. hi I think I'm a fish who has memories I went for a swim at the Hudson Guild Farm's lower pond making funny sounds I made Bernadette's car spin around I wore a fur coat I had pinochet arrested Hannah the fashion designer turned poet Who wrote so many words including the ones seen on foreheads sweaters in the summer ouch 123, is it better than synesthesia? Bernadette said, I caused everything including for us to... no I cant say this welcome everyone to all the things you can remember take acid and get l00% loaded Yes, and write it down, be experimental I am the clarvoyant poet the woman helping the AIM movement poet breath in the peace pipe seen words strange wonderful text Hannah Weiner friend of finding meaning in the phenomenal hannah banana hannah banana hannah banana hannah banan hannah bana hannah ba -Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good 11-98 Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A Lee Ann Brown Tender Buttons PO Box 13, Cooper Station New York, NY 10276 212.529.6154 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:03:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Last Call, Cornell Hire MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII There have been very few applications for the new poetry hire at Cornell. If you know of anyone who has a book and who doesn't have a job, please TELL THEM. And tell them also to get their dossiers in the mail, with writing sample, cv, the whole bit. It doesn't matter if you're langpo, dingpo, or pungchow: all they want is a good writer who'll be able to teach grads and undergrads a variety of ways to write and to think about language, or to chew a cud if it helps them write interestingly. I would avoid statements about the nature of reality in your cover letters. We have a very lively, open, and friendly department. Unlike, god knows, many places. Please get the word out: a job's a job. Gaga ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:52:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: COMMUNITY CHEST In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Chris, sweetheart, You and I may be dumb-fucks, but from here in the isolation of Bumfuck NC, I find that cranky posts like yours and others keep my life going. Which makes me believe that you wouldn't dis community so easily from here. The Poetics list is my one of my communities; my city block is another, but they have terrible taste. It's a nice luxury to attack an event for cliquishness -- we don't even _have_ enough interesting poets around here to make a clique. Whence the bitterness, anyway? I know, I know, it's ALWAYS CB et al." Finger in every damn pie. I feel the same way sometimes. But assuming "the Clement Greenberg of language poetry" (isn't that what somebody said? -- I love that) is going to stick around doing his poetic/ promotional/ memorial/ editorial thing, what's it to you? Chris S. wrote: > Hey, wow--Ron Silliman writes that CB, LAB and AL, "know the meaning > of community". Amazing, really. I guess they are learn-ed poets > unlike the rest of us dumb-fucks. I assume of course they also know > the spelling of heirarchy and clique. (He may know how to spell hierarchy...) Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg Duke University kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Program in Writing and Rhetoric (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:31:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Judy Roitman's *Diamond Notebook* (fwrd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: nonce@iname.com Subject: Judy Roitman's Diamond Notebooks nominative press collective announces Judy Roitman's *Diamond Notebooks* 40+ printed pages, saddle-stapled booklet, available for $7 prepaid to me: Christopher Alexander 19 Hodge Avenue #9 Buffalo NY 14222 *NOTE NEW ADDRESS ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:30:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII This exchange sure suggests something that the list could ponder with profit... Even David's reply to Chris's outburst drags in some of the same ressentiment...(fingers in pies, cannibal cliches) Maybe this is the answer to RS's by now infamous challenge: the reason there are no recognizeable groupings of younger poets on the U.S. scene is, they're all too busy resenting their slightly-elder compatriots in this madly fuming way! That seems to use up most of their verve. God help us if someone on the poetry scene (whose work is interesting) ever REALLY snags a modicum of success!!! (..is discussed in the NYR of Books, say). I'll bet the long knives will really come out then! I guess this is why we need the Kent Johnson Really Nice Guy Clubs of America, Inc.!! If i can shake off for a moment the relentlessly facetious tone of the list, which has infected me so, i do indeed think this is an important sociological pattern. The rage against one's slightly-more-visible colleagues is fascinatin' .... Very wasteful, to be sure. Was it David B. who some time ago mentioned the old joke (which seems very pertinent regarding poetry communities as well): when the Left form a firing squad they stand in a circle?? m. On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, David Kellogg wrote: > Chris, sweetheart, > > You and I may be dumb-fucks, but from here in the isolation of Bumfuck NC, > I find that cranky posts like yours and others keep my life going. Which > makes me believe that you wouldn't dis community so easily from > here. The Poetics list is my one of my communities; my city block is > another, but they have terrible taste. It's a nice luxury to attack an > event for cliquishness -- we don't even _have_ enough interesting poets > around here to make a clique. > > Whence the bitterness, anyway? > > I know, I know, it's ALWAYS CB et al." Finger in every damn pie. I feel > the same way sometimes. But assuming "the Clement Greenberg of language > poetry" (isn't that what somebody said? -- I love that) is going to stick > around doing his poetic/ promotional/ memorial/ editorial thing, what's it > to you? > > Chris S. wrote: > > > Hey, wow--Ron Silliman writes that CB, LAB and AL, "know the meaning > > of community". Amazing, really. I guess they are learn-ed poets > > unlike the rest of us dumb-fucks. I assume of course they also know > > the spelling of heirarchy and clique. > > (He may know how to spell hierarchy...) > > Cheers, > David > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > David Kellogg Duke University > kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Program in Writing and Rhetoric > (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 > FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:40:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re cog nize MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit There are recognizable groupings of younger poets in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Austin, Atlanta, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, not to speak of Iowa City, Buffalo, and Providence. I mean, aren't there? I know why Ron from time to time makes the claim that there is no one following up the great work of his generation -- but Mark, why are you claiming it? Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:54:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: David Kellogg, This is Feld on Bernstein MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 1). "...Charles Bernstein, a sort of Clement Greenberg of the Language poets..." 2). "Bernstein is well-informed, jargony, willful, and impossibly self-important." 3). "(Reading him is like having Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames rematerialize across the years.)" 4). "His essayistic style can be eerily like that of a corporate annual report's...." 5). "It was the novelist Dawn Powell who in her journals once noted that the avant-garde are usually would-be academics who, without enough wind in their sails, usually end up as stuffed shirts...." ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:54:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: groupies, gropings, groupings MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit As if the only way writing could make a difference -- make a meaning -- was if its writers appeared as an army massed along the horizon -- on the periphery. Anyway I omitted Honolulu, Boulder and a dozen other US cities not to speak of groups of younger writers in Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto etc etc etc. Enough of us doing the CIA's work for them! Everybody stay secret a little while longer -- Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:54:10 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Re: RENGA 32 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Sorry to respond to the List - my email program ain't working right. Pattie - please send me Rachel's RENGA 32. Address:2617 Juniper Avenue, Boulder, CO 80304. Check will go in the mail tomorrow. Thanks! Patrick Pritchett ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:53:31 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Re: Re cog nize In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:40:38 -0500 from On Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:40:38 -0500 Jordan Davis said: >There are recognizable groupings of younger poets in San Francisco, New >York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Austin, Atlanta, San Diego, Los >Angeles, Chicago, not to speak of Iowa City, Buffalo, and Providence. I >mean, aren't there? I know why Ron from time to time makes the claim that >there is no one following up the great work of his generation -- but Mark, >why are you claiming it? Yeah! The Providence grouping is about to publish a zillion-page anthology entitled "Under the Old Millennium Stream" - including substantial works by "young" poets Jack Spandrift, Merv Griffin, Eric Blarnes, Nari A. Wun, and many, many others! We are the coming ginkos! - Lorene Champietre ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:01:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: David Kellogg, This is Feld on Bernstein MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Gabriel Gudding >1). "...Charles Bernstein, a sort of Clement Greenberg of the Language >poets..." > >2). "Bernstein is well-informed, jargony, willful, and impossibly >self-important." > >3). "(Reading him is like having Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames rematerialize >across the years.)" > >4). "His essayistic style can be eerily like that of a corporate annual >report's...." > >5). "It was the novelist Dawn Powell who in her journals once noted that >the avant-garde are usually would-be academics who, without enough wind in >their sails, usually end up as stuffed shirts...." I'll take the first two. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:10:53 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: More on Hejinian Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" front channel if possible; i too am teaching this text and want to suggest some 2ndary materials to my students. md At 6:35 PM 11/10/98, Kathy Lou Schultz wrote: >Okay Kids, >I only received two responses to my query about critical material on _My >Life_. (Thank you blessed souls!) More? > >I'm planning to use this book in a class I'm teaching at San Francisco >State for the winter term, but have found it's backordered everywhere >and not even available at the publisher. Help, Douglas! Is it true? I'd >hate to xerox and deprive Sun & Moon of the sales. Suggestions >appreciated. > >Thanks everyone, >Kathy Lou Schultz ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:11:29 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: Last Call, Cornell Hire Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" is this job only for assistant profs? At 10:03 AM 11/11/98, Gabriel Gudding wrote: >There have been very few applications for the new poetry hire at Cornell. > >If you know of anyone who has a book and who doesn't have a job, please >TELL THEM. > >And tell them also to get their dossiers in the mail, with writing >sample, cv, the whole bit. > >It doesn't matter if you're langpo, dingpo, or pungchow: all they want is >a good writer who'll be able to teach grads and undergrads a variety of >ways to write and to think about language, or to chew a cud if it helps >them write interestingly. > >I would avoid statements about the nature of reality in your cover >letters. > >We have a very lively, open, and friendly department. Unlike, god knows, >many places. Please get the word out: a job's a job. Gaga ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:35:29 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: WENDY KRAMER Organization: N/A Subject: nyc people! may i borrow "code poems" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit hello, out there it's wendy kramer. does anyone in new york city have a copy of hannah weiner's Code Poems that i could borrow? please backchannel gratefully in advance wendy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:32:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: the theory of fuzzy sets In-Reply-To: <01be0d89$a17c2160$38c754a6@blwczoty> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reasonable challenge. i think RS means a group with as much of a program as **HIS** had...Also, one which incorporates (to his satisfaction) a further extension of the poetix and the politix of his grouping. But i agree with you, and am suitably chastened. abashedly, m. On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Jordan Davis wrote: > There are recognizable groupings of younger poets in San Francisco, New > York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Austin, Atlanta, San Diego, Los > Angeles, Chicago, not to speak of Iowa City, Buffalo, and Providence. I > mean, aren't there? I know why Ron from time to time makes the claim that > there is no one following up the great work of his generation -- but Mark, > why are you claiming it? > > Jordan > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:33:48 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Re: More on Hejinian MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Hank Lazer's essay/review of _My Life_ appears in _Opposing Poetries, Vol. II_. Also, in a 1991 issue of Contemporary Literature (can't recall the vol. # offhand) there's a piece by David Jarraway (who may be on this list) on same. Both are excellent considerations of LH's work. Patrick Pritchett ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:51:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy sets In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Reasonable challenge. > >i think RS means a group with as much of a program as **HIS** had...Also, >one which incorporates (to his satisfaction) a further extension of the >poetix and the politix of his grouping. But i agree with you, and am >suitably chastened. > >abashedly, > >m. > Just coming back on line today & here is the tail end of discussion about groups of young poets in odd places (what about Lawrence KS?) in the name of fuzzy sets. My oh my. What makes a poet young? a group a group? a program (this evening Miss Veronica Lake will be replaced in the role of the Swan Queen by Miss Betty Boop) a program? If a program is promised but doesn't exactly happen that way does it count? If you promise a program but wander off because something interesting seems to have come up do you have to get with the program anyway? Judy the olde codger, far older in dog-years than her father. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Judy Roitman | "Whoppers Whoppers Whoppers! Math, University of Kansas | memory fails Lawrence, KS 66045 | these are the days." 785-864-4630 | fax: 785-864-5255 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note new area code ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:35:54 -0500 Reply-To: gps12@columbia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Re: nyc people! may i borrow "code poems" In-Reply-To: <36483310.411A@erols.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Wendee! I have one you can borrow. Also, Eep!, I still have that copy of JAB for you. --Gary > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of WENDY KRAMER > Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 1998 7:35 AM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: nyc people! may i borrow "code poems" > > > hello, out there it's wendy kramer. does anyone in new york city have > a copy of hannah weiner's Code Poems that i could borrow? > > please backchannel > > gratefully in advance > > wendy > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:10:39 -0400 Reply-To: efristr1@nycap.rr.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Fristrom Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mark Prejsnar wrote: > This exchange sure suggests something that the list could ponder with > profit... > > Even David's reply to Chris's outburst drags in some of the same > ressentiment...(fingers in pies, cannibal cliches) > > Maybe this is the answer to RS's by now infamous challenge: the > reason > there are no recognizeable groupings of younger poets on the U.S. > scene > is, they're all too busy resenting their slightly-elder compatriots in > > this madly fuming way! That seems to use up most of their verve. Speaking as a member of said groupless younger poets of america (is that a recognizeable group?), I find it difficult to see this as a serious pattern, the fuming part that is. I'm not saying we don't fume. I'm saying we don't all fume about elder compatriots. We fume about my slightly-younger compatriots. We fume about slightly besides-myselves-compatriots and we fume about whoever it was we were last year or in the last ten minutes. And me, I fume when my espresso machine doesn't make foam properly. I do think there is a kind of grouplessness however. Perhaps not in a bad way. . . certainly not in a way worth complaining about. The difference struck me, a couple of weeks ago when I went to Joris and Rothernberg's Poetry for the Millenium reading out here in Albany. It struck me that in this ecclectic and diverse reading, I was surprised by the fact that most of the people THERE (as opposed to most of the people in the anthology) knew each other fairly well. Pierre, Rothenberg, Chuck Stein, Don Byrd, Robert Kelly, etc. and people were talking afterward, reminiscing how some of them knew each other from as far back as high school. This is not a sign of cliquishness, I don't think. Poetry readings naturally follow some kind of network of affinities and proximities. There's travel expenses, to think about. Who you can live with, to think about. It was a fine reading all around. Frankly, though, I can't see myself as having these affinities. I might in ten or twenty years, but I'm not even sure there's people I went to high school with who I'd WANT to hang out with in twenty or thirty more years. Parodoxically, I think the grouplessness of young poets (if it exists) is as much a result of having MORE networks to meet poets, to talk about poetry with people, than there used to be. For that matter, there may just be more poets. There are more college poetry workshops and conferences (which are not all homogenizing. . .) which you can fly around the country to go to--which means you meet a lot of poets but they aren't necessarily the folk from your home town. Then there's the internet, which means you don't need a band of poets to make a publishing cell--you can just go on line and publish if all you want to see is that--yourself published. Don't need to ask for any favors. Don't need to grant any in return. Makes things remarkably fluid. Something lost? Sure. Lots. Not much security in group or place. (If there ever was). Something gained too though. I don't think I want to have a Community with a capital C--not the way most represent it (if it exists, or ever did, really). I like loose affinities, temporary convergences, listservs, strange attractors. Still a member of the late capitalist cult of the individual, Ted ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:02:37 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy sets In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII What about Lawrence, Kansas? Where the citizens translate John Ashbery into Ancient Greek to recite in choral festivals? Where 8 foot tall boys throw balls into 10 foot tall hoops? We do probably have more subscribers to the list, per capita, then anywhere else. (Maybe Iowa City is in the running.) Jonathan Mayhew Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045 jmayhew@ukans.edu (785) 864-3851 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:16:10 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: More on Hejinian i sent something backchannel and then deleted it after sending. maybe kathy can forward it to the list. (sorry. but i don't have time to re-keystroke it at present.) burt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:22:28 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: David Kellogg, This is Feld on Bernstein In-Reply-To: <01be0d8c$97d5b420$49cc0398@DKellogg.Dukeedu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > >>1). "...Charles Bernstein, a sort of Clement Greenberg of the Language >>poets..." 1. Ross Feld, a fart of cement spleenurge for Marge Scott's hopes. . . >>2). "Bernstein is well-informed, jargony, willful, and impossibly >>self-important." 2. Feld is mostly locked in stewing, hasn't read a poet he likes in decades, faux-virtuoso and spillful, impossibly Cincinnati, awaiting the apocalypse to usher in American pose-try. >>3). "(Reading him is like having Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames rematerialize >>across the years.)" 3. Reading him is like having Richard Howard's curios barked at as icons. >>4). "His essayistic style can be eerily like that of a corporate annual >>report's...." 4. His essayistic style is a Soccer Dad in December, ready to forfeit to get his ass out of the rain. >>5). "It was the novelist Dawn Powell who in her journals once noted that >>the avant-garde are usually would-be academics who, without enough wind in >>their sails, usually end up as stuffed shirts...." It was Keith Tuma who said that he wished he didn't have to work either. >I'll take the first two. I'll say that I'm tired of having this essay pass for critique or wit. RF's surly little noodle is neither, though at least the attack on Rothenberg and Joris is offered some context. Buffalo's beef deserves a better slice off the flank. CB's successful and his prose academic? (That's the point, save your dollars, campers.) Lions and tigers and fieldmice! (Shows you how much academic prose Feld has been reading too.) I suppose it's not as bad as the woman in the same number who pronounces Loy anti-semitic and then refuses to explain or defend the charge. KT ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:26:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: the theory of fuzzy ron In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Judy Roitman wrote: If you promise a program > but wander off because something interesting seems to have come up do you > have to get with the program anyway? > That's where the "fuzzy" comes in... By the by, you should note that all the stuff yer making fun of, i attribute to RS, not myself. So (whether i'm being accurate or not) i think you should go mock *him* !! fuzzily, m. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:28:39 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: Re: David Kellogg, This is Feld on Bernstein In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII By the way, who is "the novelist Dawn Powell"? Who is Feld? He is identified only as a novelist and poet in the contributors note in _Parnassus_. Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:33:14 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy sets MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit It was George Bataille, and in his wake, Maurice Blanchot, who wrote about the "community of those who have no community." A fitting place it seems to me, tougher to handle than any old or young buddy netwrok. Pierre ======================== Pierre Joris joris@csc.albany.edu http://www.albany.edu/~joris/ 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 tel: 518 426 0433 fax: 518 426 3722 ======================== Through the living the road of the dead — Ungaretti ======================== ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:43:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy ron In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Judy Roitman wrote: > > If you promise a program >> but wander off because something interesting seems to have come up do you >> have to get with the program anyway? >> > > >That's where the "fuzzy" comes in... > >By the by, you should note that all the stuff yer making fun of, i >attribute to RS, not myself. So (whether i'm being accurate or not) i >think you should go mock *him* !! > >fuzzily, >m. Hi, Mark. I wasn't mocking you. Your message just happens to have been the one I saw just before replying. (a private message) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Judy Roitman | "Whoppers Whoppers Whoppers! Math, University of Kansas | memory fails Lawrence, KS 66045 | these are the days." 785-864-4630 | fax: 785-864-5255 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note new area code ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:15:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Latta Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy sets In-Reply-To: <3649BC4C.F2A39520@csc.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On 11 Nov 1998 Pierre Joris wrote: > It was George Bataille, and in his wake, Maurice Blanchot, who wrote about > the "community of those who have no community." A fitting place it seems to > me, tougher to handle than any old or young buddy netwrok. > Willful outsiders, yes. I like to think in terms of ecological systems, those communities, and points of overlap and mesh. Any field biologist will tell you that the places of highest interest are always found on the edges of things--the hedgerow, the tidal pool, the estuary, the canopy. John Latta ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:17:06 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Erik Sweet Subject: Robots in Poetry/community Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I am wondering why in all the talk about community all you peoples out there will not recognize the "community " of robot poets out there? I mean, I have a robot in my house right now cleaning my oven and it is upset as hell about poets not recognizing what robots have contributed to the whole of poetry. Erik Sweet, Albany, New York. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:21:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "P.Standard Schaefer" Subject: Re: the theory of fuzzy sets Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In a message dated 98-11-11 13:16:14 EST, you write: << Willful outsiders, yes. I like to think in terms of ecological systems, those communities, and points of overlap and mesh. Any field biologist will tell you that the places of highest interest are always found on the edges of things--the hedgerow, the tidal pool, the estuary, the canopy. >> I'm partial to Spicer's UMVERTS, people with no place to turn. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:34:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: targeting Silliman and Bernstein Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" You dont make an omelet w/o cracking some eggs. For CB and RS (and the half-generation-older Bowering in Canada) to push thru what they did, certain character traits were required, Ross Feld--whoever YOU may be. The amount of work each did--in their writings both critical and poetic--but also as tireless organizers, advocates, encouragers, teachers,collaborators, anthologists--inspires awe in me, which takes precedence over envy of their energies and well-earned reputations (and huge fortune, in Bowering's case). If it bugs you, go thou & do likewise. Otherwise, where's your gratitude? Isn't this List a great notion? Of CB's? Ain't this community? Because Ron S remarks an instance of community in NYC, does he need to list all the other instances, Chris? Godknows this List needs your feistiness--the world needs it!--hey man, you _know_ I'm your fan--but sheesh.... I guess the resentment is only to be expected. The figures who preceded the generation with whom I felt affiliated, who towered over us a spell, did not forever meet with our unqualified approval. From below (so to speak), their armor appeared impenetrable. Knives wouldnt serve; plastique alone might do the job. Let's have a moment of silence to remember that parricide is commonly botched. (Was it Harold Bloom who didn't put it that way?) I like the listing of places where there is active poetry community, of youngsters or otherwise. This is the best answer, eh? I'm glad Roitman and Mayhew reminded us of Lawrence, KS; I was about to do so myself. --Was Seattle mentioned? San Diego? Tucson? (I erased those posts too quickly). We had one here in west Sonoma Co for quite a while, not allied by a shared vision of the poem, but by isolation and its geography; it aged and wearied, and the young who we needed to carry it on, well I don't know where they are. I miss it,--although I had plenty of complaints about it when it existed. David ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:04:30 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: need address MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain for Elizabeth Robinson of Berkeley. Snail mail preferred. Back-channel, please. Thanks, Patrick Pritchett ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:35:19 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Left Hand Reading Series, etc. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Wednesday, November 18, at 9:00 PM, the Left Hand Reading Series will present ANNE WALDMAN & MICHAEL FRIEDMAN. Left Hand Books is located at 1825 Pearl Street in Boulder, btwn 18th & 19th Streets. For more info, call Mark DuCharme at 303-938-9346 or Patrick Pritchett at 303-444-5963. "We got game." *Other Events in Boulder for November* American Poet Greats Lecture Series presents LISA JARNOT speaking on Robert Duncan's _The Opening of the Field_ at Boulder Bookstore, Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 7:30 PM. Hosted by Jim Cohn. "He who does not enter the dance, mistakes the Event." KENWARD ELMSLIE will appear at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art on Thursday, Nov. 19 at 7:00 PM. "Barcalounger Madness. Oh, to be in Tunbridge Wells." ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:44:56 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: ken|n|ing Subject: Re: More on Hejinian Comments: To: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Lisa Samuels has a piece arguing for My Life's canonization in MLA, forget vol. or no. but is fairly recent. Also, Rosmarie Waldrop in Poetics Journal #5, I think, "Chinese Windmills Turn Horizontally" And it is very much out of print & tough to lay hands on -- I've been trying for a month or so without luck. Patrick F. Durgin | | k e n n i n g````````````````|`````````````````````````````````` a newsletter of contemporary |poetry, poetics, and non-fiction writing |418 Brown St. #10 Iowa City, IA 52245 USA ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:02:18 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Re: More on Hejinian MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Also, Juliana Spahr did a piece on LH's work in a recent volume of DLB - I forget now which one. Joseph Conte, please to refresh? Almost helpful, PP ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:10:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Timothy Liu Subject: First Annual Asian American Writer's Awards Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain On Monday, November 16 at 8 p.m., the Asian American Writer's Workshop will hold its first awards night, honoring Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge (for ENDICRONOLOGY) and Lois-Ann Yamanaka for work published in 1997. Other guests and readers will include David Henry Hwang, Jessica Hagedorn, Lawrence Chua, Indira Ganesan and Timothy Liu. The event will take place at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in NYC, and a few remaining tickets can be purchased by calling 212-228-6718. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:19:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: hannah, community, generation Comments: cc: bernstei@bway.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII near the end of charles' presentation, he read and commented on a line from hannah's work that spoke to the relation of a poetics to the "new" or "next generation." i failed to note the exact wording or the source -- charles do you have these handy? thanks, t. tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:23 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Trank Subject: Kenward Elmslie Reading at Naropa Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ATTENTION!! KENWARD ELMSLIE will also be appearing at Naropa on Saturday, November 21 at 8pm, Shambhala Hall, 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO. FREE ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:49:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: stevens again MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On 11 Nov. Henry Gould wrote: >It's amazing to watch Stevens packaged in these cute little >ideologically-correct nutshells based on a quick summary of his >point-of-view. Stevens' whole life's work in poetry is a continual >musing ABOUT the relations between reality and imagination - not a >fixed attitude or program. Henry: I agree with that last sentence as it stands, but would say that even though Stevens' musings don't amount to any kind of set polemic, they certainly do reveal certain philosophical predispositions that shape the poetry in interesting ways-- not to mention the often didactic aphorisms of _The Necessary Angel_. Yes, my "apartheid" trope was merely cute and ridiculously reductive. But the fact of the matter is that I have suffered what appears to be a nervous breakdown becasue of this List, and being nettlesome and nutty with ideological nutshells is a way of dealing with it. Be that as it may, I virtually love you Henry, so I want you to realize, and badly, that I am not just a simpleton so presumptuous as to dismiss Stevens as a George Berkeley wannabe. A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Prosody and the Outside: Some Notes on Rakosi and Stevens.," which was printed in _Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet_, edited by Michael Heller. (_Contemporary Literature_ was going to print it too, but I wouldn't add a totally unnecessary section they were insisting on, so screw them.) In this essay I propose in a rather impressive way (though with sufficient qualifications to give myself a way out if necessary) that the closures of Stevens' prosody are an enactment of his privileging of imaginative space over and against the "outside." Here is a section that leads into that discussion so to give you an idea of what lay behind my rather zany Stevens/Spicer comparison of yesterday. I hope those of you still reading will not mind the unusual act of quoting one's own old grad-student prose: "...To an important extent, such personal and poetic relationships [between Stevens and Rakosi] make sense in light of a significant affinity Stevens _does_ share with major poets in the Poundian or "ideogrammic" line. For Stevens, as with poets like Williams, Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Creeley, and Rakosi, poetry is, centrally, an agency of epistemological investigation, where composition moves beyond narrative summaries of personal experience or emotional state to become a reflexive engagement with the mutual mediations of language and thought. Nevertheless, the underlying philosophical _premises_ of the investigation, as well as the results, are fundamentally different in Stevens than they are in the other poets mentioned above: In Stevens - and in line with the idealist foundations of symbolist poetics - experiential phenomena are beholden to, and encompassed by, the mind's creative acts; in the poets of the ideogrammic tradition, mind commits itself to, and finds a place within, the given configurations of phenomenal experience.If Stevens epitomizes hte Coleridgean ideal of the imagination dispensing value and form to an unordered reality, poets in the "anti-Symbolist" tradition see poetic possibility as immanent in what is "other." As Albert Gelpi puts it, in the one "consciousness commits object to subject"; in the latter, consciousness commits subject to object." etc... Now I'm sure that the above is run through with all sorts of ideology I am blind to. But I _have_ tried to think about these things in ways beyond nutshell tossing. OK, you Angus bull? Kent ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:29:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Blau DuPlessis Organization: Temple University Subject: Re: Self-Promotion In-Reply-To: <36434C33.4FB2C0CA@bayarea.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Thans to Sehila and Karen for asking more about the Oppen letters. You can call the order to 1-888-651-0122 or FAX the order to 1-888- 651-0124. The item number is Dupgep and the price is $7.25 with a charge of $4.00 for one or two copies, but only .50 for copies after that. I think $4. is steep, but it brings the total to only about half of what it was at list, and believe me--it's a great read. I'd love to hear any reactions. Duke is waiting to hear from the Poetic Folk. warm regards to listees, Rachel ========================= Rachel Blau DuPlessis Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 215-204-1810 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 15:30:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Melanie Bookout Subject: Re: David Kellogg, This is Feld on Bernstein In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:22 PM 11/11/98 -0600, you wrote: >> >>>1). "...Charles Bernstein, a sort of Clement Greenberg of the Language >>>poets..." > >1. Ross Feld, a fart of cement spleenurge for Marge Scott's hopes. . . > >>>2). "Bernstein is well-informed, jargony, willful, and impossibly >>>self-important." > >2. Feld is mostly locked in stewing, hasn't read a poet he likes in >decades, faux-virtuoso and spillful, impossibly Cincinnati, awaiting the >apocalypse to usher in American pose-try. > > >>>3). "(Reading him is like having Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames rematerialize >>>across the years.)" > >3. Reading him is like having Richard Howard's curios barked at as icons. > >>>4). "His essayistic style can be eerily like that of a corporate annual >>>report's...." > >4. His essayistic style is a Soccer Dad in December, ready to forfeit to >get his ass out of the rain. > > >>>5). "It was the novelist Dawn Powell who in her journals once noted that >>>the avant-garde are usually would-be academics who, without enough wind in >>>their sails, usually end up as stuffed shirts...." > >It was Keith Tuma who said that he wished he didn't have to work either. > > >>I'll take the first two. > >I'll say that I'm tired of having this essay pass for critique or wit. >RF's surly little noodle is neither, though at least the attack on >Rothenberg and Joris is offered some context. Buffalo's beef deserves a >better slice off the flank. CB's successful and his prose academic? >(That's the point, save your dollars, campers.) Lions and tigers and >fieldmice! (Shows you how much academic prose Feld has been reading too.) >I suppose it's not as bad as the woman in the same number who pronounces >Loy anti-semitic and then refuses to explain or defend the charge. > >KT > >And to Mr. Tuma, many thanks. Melanie Bookout ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 15:35:07 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: stevens again In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:49:07 -0500 from Well sent, old Kent. & you know I love you too, & my abrasiveness on occasion is not personal, but preposterotestosteronal, in a eunucyclic way, & persnickety - I know how nice you are, & what an old lech & young Reader you are, & etc. etc. & you know I donated my virtual body to science & forgot to include SASE, so forgive me. We could honk about S-v-s all day, & I might say well most of his poems seem to be trying dramatically to clear a space of old debris to SEE what's really immanent out dere, so anyway, whatever whichaway you wanna ideogrammatize your Names of the Modernist Heroes is fine with me. - Henry "the Plasma" Gould ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:25:38 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: LH's My Life (Kathy forgive me for not asking you first but I can't keystroke all this again and people wanted to have the info.) From: MX%"kathylou@worldnet.att.net" "Kathy Lou Schultz" 11-NOV-1998 13:55:17.18 To: MX%"kimmelman@admin.njit.edu" CC: Subj: Re: my life Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:54:11 -0800 From: Kathy Lou Schultz X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win95; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: my life Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Burt you're a prince among men. Thanks! KL Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT wrote: > > kathy, > > do you have these (culled from the MLA Bibliography): > > by LH: > The Rejection of Closure, in Writing/Talks. Perelman, Bob (ed), > So Illinois UP, 1985. > > Spahr, Juliana. Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life. > American Literature. 68(1):139-59. 1996 Mar. Durham, NC. > > Dworkin, Craig Douglas. Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, > and Lyn Hejinian's My Life. > Hejinian's Contemporary Literature. 36(1):58-81. 1995 Spring. Madison, WI. > > Jarraway, David R. > My Life through the Eighties: The Exemplary LANGUAGE of Lyn Hejinian. > Contemporary Literature. 33(2):319-36. 1992 Summer. Madison, WI. > > Clark, Hilary. > The Mnemonics of Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life. > Biography-An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. 14(4):315-35. 1991 Fall. > > Gillespie, Dennis Patrick. > Augustine and America: Five Contemporary Autobiographical Works. > Dissertation Abstracts International. 49(7):1801A-1802A. 1989 Jan. > > Good luck, > > Burt Kimmelman > Department of Humanities and Social Sciences > New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102 > 973.596.3376 (p) 973.642.4689 (f) > kimmelman@admin.njit.edu (e) http://eies.njit.edu/~kimmelma (i) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:28:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: louis stroffolino Subject: Re: COMMUNITY CHEST In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I guess the humour gets lost. Did it really come off cranky? (David kellogg) Was it really an "outburst"? Did it really bespeak resentment? (Mark Presjnar and David Bromige?) I must come off like an ungrateful ogre (by the way david k. the proper spelling is "click") or killjoy or something.... I like people, and am glad to see them digging each other (thus saith the politician) and really have nothing against the community that gathered in honor of HW.... I guess I was trying to use Ron's comment--which I found (unintentionally?) funny--as a jumping off point to discuss what people mean by community... So it backfires. So it doesn't goad Silliman into responding So "Community" remains a vaguely defined word.... chris ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:06:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Free reading=Interview MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Gabe: I will waive my usual $1000 reading fee IF you will set me up with an interview for the Poetry position at your university. It is unusual for me to even _come down_ on my honorarium fee (it creates tensions with my agent), so I hope you and others there in the city-state of Ithaca will see that this is quite a deal. In fact, I will even use, to get there, the wax wings my father made for me, so no transportation costs either. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:48:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: hannah weiner tribute Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I just went through poetics archive of messages to see what people have said about the event. It was quite a treat to be there and participate and see everyone and meet new people. One thing striking was how getting the multidirectional presentations of Hannah offered such a rounded picture of her in words, images, and sound. Thanks to all of you who were part of that -- organizers, presenters, and audience. charles ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:30:56 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: help quick sos on usop In-Reply-To: <009CF118.619A619C.349@admin.njit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" hi all, i've misplaced my info on how to order the United States of Poetry video, which my students want (holiday season coming up and all). does anyone have the 800 number for KQED or KPFA or whoever did it? thanks. class meets tmw at 11:15 central time. bests to all --md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:07:55 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pattie McCarthy Subject: Re: New Poetry Magazine (via Philadelphia) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit if interested in ordering the first issue of p H the snail-mail address is : p H c/o Pattie McCarthy 20 Scott Ct Wayne PA 19087 or e mail : Kjvarrone@aol.com thanks & apologies for the omission of this information earlier --Pattie .... The editors of the new, Philadelphia-based poetry magazine p H are pleased to announce the publication of issue #1, earShot, featuring : New Poetry by: Gregg Biglieri Ann Simon Rod Smith Cole Swenson and Ryan Whyte experimental fiction by Pamela Lu, a poetic metaphysicalspeculation and color copy of a postcard collage by Bill Luoma, and a review of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's RENGA: Draft 32, by Nicole Markotic. To order, or for more information/samples, please E-mail: Kjvarrone@aol.com. Copies of the issue are available for $3 (postage included). (Pls make checks payable to Pattie McCarthy). ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:53:05 -0800 Reply-To: ttheatre@sirius.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen and Trevor Organization: Tea Theatre Subject: Re: First Annual Asian American Writer's Awards MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To jump on the heels of this one, Mei-mei's book, Endocrinology, is available through Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Also, Kelsey St. Press has recently published Mei-mei's newest book, Four Year Old Girl, which represents about 10 years of her writing. It really is a major book, and also available from SPD. Richard Tuttle did the cover art. Timothy Liu wrote: > > On Monday, November 16 at 8 p.m., the Asian American Writer's > Workshop will hold its first awards night, honoring Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge > (for ENDICRONOLOGY) and Lois-Ann Yamanaka for work published in > 1997. Other guests and readers will include David Henry Hwang, > Jessica Hagedorn, Lawrence Chua, Indira Ganesan and Timothy Liu. The > event will take place at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in NYC, and a > few remaining tickets can be purchased by calling 212-228-6718. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:45:05 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: groupies, gropings, groupings MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit if anything this thread about answering to ron s's missive why be there nobody as significant as the language pod needs to be turned on its head ron should be begging to have the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-a-s-a-u-r-o-u-s to be relevant among all the many collectives of poetics active now active now ezra proletarian ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:03:19 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: hw yet to appear MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit just wanted to insert into the hannah thread, dont remember who, but someone wondered what hannah work was yet to appear: we've a set of visual neologisms that hannah gave xexoxial years ago. they never appeared because she wanted them to appear as round cards, & being the lowtech nomoney outfit that we are, were never able to figure out how to die cut such a thing-- so anyway Im working them up for the web theyre called ABAZOO at the time she gave them to us they were unpublished, perhaps leeann or someone else out there might know if they have appeared in the meantime. also if anyone has an idea how to produce a deck of nine (I believe) round cards, xexoxial would love to copublish it... miekal ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:44:15 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Who says there are no recognizable groups of younger poets in the U.S.? San Francisco is a hotbed of activity of "younger" poets (are we talking under 45 here?). Also, what about NYC? Buffalo? LA? and anyone else I've forgotten to mention. Many magazines and presses in SF are generating a lot of interest and energy, e.g. Double Lucy/Outlet, Tripwire, Idiom, my own Lipstick Eleven, etc. and etc. "Group," I recognize thee! Kathy Lou ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:45:05 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: Re cog nize MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ditto! KLS Jordan Davis wrote: > > There are recognizable groupings of younger poets in San Francisco, New > York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Austin, Atlanta, San Diego, Los > Angeles, Chicago, not to speak of Iowa City, Buffalo, and Providence. I > mean, aren't there? I know why Ron from time to time makes the claim that > there is no one following up the great work of his generation -- but Mark, > why are you claiming it? > > Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:12:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Hejinian front channel MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thank you each and every one (Joel, Ted, Lisa, Patrick, Patrick, and etc.)! For this list's pleasure, a compilation of work on _My Life_ to add to Burt's Hherculean effort. This list is lovely, lovely, lovely. Kathy Lou Wakoski's review of My Life Sulfur 8, p.205-208 an article by craig dworkin in contemporary literature 36 #1 (pp 58-81) Pierre Joris. . . his gloss on_My Life_ in Poems for the Millenium has some good quotes from Michael Davidson Hank Lazer's essay/review of _My Life_ appears in _Opposing Poetries, Vol. II_. Also, in a 1991 issue of Contemporary Literature (can't recall the vol. # offhand) there's a piece by David Jarraway Rosmarie Waldrop in Poetics Journal #5, I think, "Chinese Windmills Turn Horizontally" Juliana Spahr did a piece on LH's work in a recent volume of DLB Modern Language Studies, Spring 1997, the "Poetry and the Problem of Beauty" issue. "Eight Justifications for Canonizing My Life" by Lisa Samuels ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:17:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Wheeler Subject: CalArts and -------------- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On behalf of all those in New Hampshire tending ailing ma's in underground houses a thousand thanks for the Hannah Weiner tribute recaps. And a question. Would someone with knowledge of CalArts' program(s) backchannel me? A former student is considering applying and I've got a question about the set-up. Many thanks. Susan Susan Wheeler susan.wheeler@nyu.edu voice/fax (212) 254-3984 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:15:34 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Safdie Joseph Subject: Re: Hejinian front channel Comments: To: Kathy Lou Schultz MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Kathy Lou -- only because I didn't see it already, and only because I want to be invited to your new reading series, there's also a few pages by Marjorie Perloff in her _Writing Poetry in the Age of Media_ on "My Life" (in chapter 5) -- that might be easiest of all to find in the library near you. I've been collocating -- in the manner of more academic lists -- the responses to my query on Spicer's stray remarks in "After Lorca" and will summarize them in a short post tomorrow. (Of course, the List, as is its wont, has since deconstructed the original inquiry and gone on to much more weighty considerations on the anxiety of being or not being included in current "groups" -- which is obviously what is "sticking to the real" in most people's minds here.) If I were still running reading series, however, I would include in my invitation to Kent a demand that he share whatever he's been smoking lately. Really wonderful posts, Kent! All I can offer in return is a sneak peek at my new critique of Walter Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseilles" . . . ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:18:32 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: nude venutians Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit ok so this post is not really about nude venutians but since I got your attention I would like to ask my question about Central Park magazine again. is it still in existence? if so, anyone have an address? Stephen-Paul Martin still the editor? I'm stooping to such low measures because my first post a day or two ago drew no response and I can't believe that out of all the people on this list that no one is familar with the Central Park status. As soon as someone clues me in, I promise to make up for this by posting some brilliant statement of ... let's see... the foregrinding of language in ...no, the spoken word v. the broken... no, well I'll say something incredibly worth it! part of the youngish cleek from Atlanta Randy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:28:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Weiss Subject: Re: nude venutians In-Reply-To: <5649c9c8.364a6fa8@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Stephen-Paul Martin tells me that Central Park is dormant at present, but he doesn't entirely rule out future activity. Certainly not in the near future. At 12:18 AM 11/12/98 EST, you wrote: >ok so this post is not really about nude venutians but since I got your >attention I would like to ask my question about Central Park magazine again. >is it still in existence? if so, anyone have an address? Stephen-Paul Martin >still the editor? > >I'm stooping to such low measures because my first post a day or two ago drew >no response and I can't believe that out of all the people on this list that >no one is familar with the Central Park status. > >As soon as someone clues me in, I promise to make up for this by posting some >brilliant statement of ... let's see... the foregrinding of language in ...no, >the spoken word v. the broken... no, well I'll say something incredibly worth >it! > >part of the youngish cleek from Atlanta >Randy > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:56:38 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Bennett Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) - And a very very-very nice chap. -----Original Message----- From: Kathy Lou Schultz To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: 12 November 1998 02:45 Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) >Who says there are no recognizable groups of younger poets in the U.S.? >San Francisco is a hotbed of activity of "younger" poets (are we talking >under 45 here?). Also, what about NYC? Buffalo? LA? and anyone else I've >forgotten to mention. Me? You forgot to mention me. I've been 45 for some time now. I sort of got stuck at 45 when I realised that people talk about under 45 and over 45, deftly avoiding the little group in the middle. I rather like being in this "Never-never Land" of my own design. It avoids the responsibility of having to be thrusting to achieve as a younger poet, and the weighty responsibility of maintaining a reputation into old age (46+). So I define myself as a group, and as you all know 45 year old poets are really very very-very nice chaps, and as I will be in CA early in the new Year, and looking for gigs, (oops sorry venues where I can share my intellectual meandering with like minded nice people) I would be grateful for any back channel advice. Thanks Jim A very very-very nice chap.Click on this link to vote for my site. http://conline.net/vote.mv?id=1780 Click on this link to visit my site. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1127/ "Poetry is what the future makes of it." John Garner ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 08:24:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: Re: nude venutians that never landed in Central Park Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Ok, I received front and back channel info about Central Park. Bottom line for me is that they currently are not considering unsolicited work. now to make up for my shameful ways, (using the word "nude" but not delivering) I will say something brilliant that will have listifarians talking about for years ... ..............the word "pate" is too emotionally provacative for any self- respecting experimentalist to use without diluting its fervor with irony. Randy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 08:59:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Clay Subject: Publication party Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" For those of you paying for your sins by being anywhere near Lower Manhattan on Friday the 13th please stop by Granary Books for a publication party for 10, count 'em, TEN NEW BOOKS! Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee. "Log Rhythms." Steve Clay & Rodney Phillips. "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing: A Sourcebook of Information." (Co-published with the New York Public Library). Robert Creeley & Max Gimblett. "The Dogs of Auckland". (Published by the Holloway Press of Auckland, New Zealand). Lyn Hejinian & Emilie Clark. "The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill." Franz Kamin & Felix Furtwangler. "The Man Who Was Always Standing There." Stefan Klima. "Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature." Bernadette Mayer. "Two Haloed Mourners." Wendy Miller. "Everyday Colors." David Rathman. "Roar Shocks." The party is from 6 to 8 PM. A great majority of those being published will be in attendance. Granary Books is located at 568 Broadway (corner of Prince St., immediately across the street from the Soho Guggenheim) room 403. See you, Steve ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:17:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: fuming MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hey there: Well, I guess I've got to pitch in for Chris Stroffolino this time around, albeit it may be true that the tone Chris was after maybe didn't quite get over to the virtual page. But I suppose my problem is less with the idea of Charles, Ron and Lee Ann and whoever having an understanding of "community" but with the implication of Mark Prejsnar's statement that what Ron is looking further is a "further extension of the poetics and program of his generation, etc"--Mark, I'm quoting you badly here, not having the original in front of me, but I think that's the gist of what you said, and I think therein lies the problem. All of Ron's commentary (see for instance the recent Philly Talks exchange, for instance) always returns to the same problem--that the model that he and others followed has NOT be taken up by the writers who came after, and that somehow that is a grave failing. Now, I like Ron's poetry and much of his criticism a great deal, but the idea that his work should be the model for future generations of poets (and that any who don't follow his model have failed) seems presumtuous to say the least, and may I venture to say so, the sort of Marxist paternalism that at this point in time seems one of the great weaknesses of the "language poetry" project as Ron has conceived of it (and I'll add, by the way, that other "language poets" have NOT necessarily so conceived of it, that is to say, Ron's sense of what "language poetry" was about by no means needs to be taken as everybody's sense of what it was about). I appreciate Ron's ability to serve as a useful goad, and will even concede that goading is a pretty important function of criticism, although in this instance the "conformity or punishment" implications seem to me the problem rather than the solution. But indeed, it is true, recent work has NOT "further extended the poetics of Ron Silliman." But that fact seems to me at this point STILL a positive development--while at the same time I admire Ron's poetry. So Chris, rave on baby. Mark Wallace /----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | | | mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu | | GWU: | | http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw | | EPC: | | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace | |____________________________________________________________________________| ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 07:33:35 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: if you're in Tucson, come over Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" CHAX PRESS is hosting a reception/celebration for the publication of LISA COOPER's first full-length book of poetry & CALLING IT HOME at Chax Press Studio Saturday, Nov. 14, from 2-6pm Chax Press is at 101 W. Sixth St. in Tucson, and that is on Sixth St., about 2 blocks west of Stone Avenue, on the south side of the street. Entry to the studio is on the west side of the building. Refreshments will be available Books will definitely be available. The book is also for sale at Antigone Books on 4th Ave. in Tucson, and from SPD. Retail price is $12 You may order directly from Chax Press 101 W. Sixth St., no. 6 Tucson, AZ 85701-1000 Other Chax Press books, like the equally new CHROMATIC DEFACEMENT, by Phillip Foss, will also be available at the reception. Two earlier chapbooks by Lisa Cooper, THE BALLAD IN MEMORY and TILT RAIL, will be available, too. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:42:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: question - Alfred Leslie In-Reply-To: <001d01be060c$0f6e1780$4968d8cb@ahadada.gol.com> from "jesse glass" at Nov 1, 98 06:54:01 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Could anyone familiar with Alfred Leslie backchannel me? I have a question about a biographical detail rather than his paintings. Thanks. -m. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:48:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Melanie Bookout Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) In-Reply-To: <364A4B7F.454A@worldnet.att.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I would add New Orleans, too. Melanie Bookout At 06:44 PM 11/11/98 -0800, you wrote: >Who says there are no recognizable groups of younger poets in the U.S.? >San Francisco is a hotbed of activity of "younger" poets (are we talking >under 45 here?). Also, what about NYC? Buffalo? LA? and anyone else I've >forgotten to mention. >Many magazines and presses in SF are generating a lot of interest and >energy, e.g. Double Lucy/Outlet, Tripwire, Idiom, my own Lipstick >Eleven, etc. and etc. "Group," I recognize thee! >Kathy Lou > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:23:10 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Franco Subject: KENWARD ELMSLIE READING AT MIT 11-12-98 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Kenward Elmslie reads & sings Nov 12th 7pm Bartos Theater MIT [20 Ames st. near Kend. Sq T] FREE best to all MF ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:20:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: are you poet of the problem? Poesia is found at the confluence of two streams, one originating in the study and the other in the dance-hall. In the Middle Ages the center of feudalism, where this confluence was ultimately "authorized", was the Latin Mass inside the church and the Mystery Plays - the popular version - outside, in the walled town. Now we live in the Modern Age, and the closed feudal cosmic order is gone, and the "missing mass" occupies a divided center, a political controversy between the working class and property, between the dispossessed and the "possessed". The terms of order to be established between democracy and property (since aristocracy is out the door) has been the central political issue since 1989, at least in the "developed" world, and are being worked out in different ways in Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, North America. The possibility that these terms might ultimately be subsumed under idealist, religious, traditional or spiritual meanings does not displace the fact that the political question or crisis is at the center of world realities. So where is the confluence of Poesia now in relation to this political matrix? Many are those who would overlay or equate the seeming "uselessness" of Poesia with political marginality; Poesia's hermeticism then becomes a mark of both political and artistic authenticity. Many also are those philistines who would attack Poesia's right to be itself, who take the medieval maxim that Poesia is a branch of rhetoric in an obtuse sense, and look for the obvious allegiances or sentiments that will teach them where to stand. They ought to have learned from their peasant forebears that dancing is a subtle art and laughter comes at an acute angle. Poesia has never been marginal; as Signor Wallace Stevens wrote somewhere, reality is essentially poetic, Poesia tries to express some affluence, some scent, of the essential poetry of life, even money has a certain poetry, lyricism is inherent in a child's walking... yet to answer those whose bread is power and whose question for Poesia is, where is your power - look to the subtle rhetoric of those who would address the question of the missing mass - who look to the Mardi Gras of Jubilee, the just apportionment and stewardship of commonwealth. And in the Babel of groups and allegiances in the discourse of the discoursers, Poesia may be outside all the outsides, in a tongue you understand, but barely. - Signor Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:24:31 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: Re: are you poet of the problem? In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Spare us the mixed metaphors, the Wallace Stevensese, and the canned history. The middle ages was also Dante, the Troubadors, the medieval epic, etc... I don't know what the dance hall has to do with any of this. Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:44:58 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: hannah, community, generation Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" that was from we speak silent, i think. or silent teachers/remembered sequel; an epigraph to the poem FE, (if memory serves?) At 2:19 PM 11/11/98, Tom Orange wrote: >near the end of charles' presentation, he read and commented on a line >from hannah's work that spoke to the relation of a poetics to the "new" or >"next generation." i failed to note the exact wording or the source >-- charles do you have these handy? > >thanks, > >t. >tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 05:57:39 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.16.19981112102700.362727e8@mail.fwi.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I think I missed part of this conversation, having poetics mail stopped while I was out of town. But my sense of the original concern here is that it was not about the absence of recognizable groups of younger poets, rather the absence of a sense of a poetic or something else that distinguished them as groups sharing certain ideas about poetry, culture, etc. Now I'm absolutely NOT saying there is such an absence, but I am saying that, rather than simply avowing the presence of "recognizable groups of younger poets" in New Orleans, Buffalo, LA, New York, or anywhere, I'd rather read about what distinguishes these groups -- what makes each of them a group, how do they perceive themselves as significantly different from other groups, what constitutes their range of concerns as a group, etc. charles At 09:48 AM 11/12/98 -0500, you wrote: >I would add New Orleans, too. > >Melanie Bookout > > >At 06:44 PM 11/11/98 -0800, you wrote: >>Who says there are no recognizable groups of younger poets in the U.S.? >>San Francisco is a hotbed of activity of "younger" poets (are we talking >>under 45 here?). Also, what about NYC? Buffalo? LA? and anyone else I've >>forgotten to mention. >>Many magazines and presses in SF are generating a lot of interest and >>energy, e.g. Double Lucy/Outlet, Tripwire, Idiom, my own Lipstick >>Eleven, etc. and etc. "Group," I recognize thee! >>Kathy Lou >> >> > > charles alexander :: poet and book artist :: chax@theriver.com chax press :: alexander writing/design/publishing books by artists' hands :: web sites built with care and vision http://alexwritdespub.com/chax :: http://alexwritdespub.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:08:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Re: Free reading=Interview In-Reply-To: <5E088DC392E@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Dear Kent: I am forwarding your note to those on the hiring committee, just so they can see how eager you are, how earnest, how much you care -- how much, indeed, you want to help us. Let me be, furthermore, the first to tell you that _you don't need an agent_: you pocket that money, spend it on yourself, rest those wax wings and take a jetplane somewhere pretty, 'mano. They will I'm sure contact you no need to worry, no need to have me your trusty compadre secure you the much coveted backstage entrance no. No sir once they read your note they'll be rattling your fax machine yes sir. With you in cahoots, Gaga ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:12:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Re: Silliman et. al. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Just briefly, I'd like to concur with Mark's comments & add that it would certainly be a defect of Silliman's work, & of LangPo generally, if it didn't permit interpretations & imaginative rereadings other than those Silliman himself authorizes. Secondly, the intense commitment of the Language poets to the idea of community was formed partly in reaction to a polarized literary enviornment that no longer exists today after the decline of the New Criticism. In fact, the hostility of LangPo's reception still conceals its deep indebtedness to the New American Poetry -- for example, Silliman's own indebtedness to the present moment "I do this, I do that" poem -- & as a result places impossible demands on emerging poets to be innovative in a way that the Language Writer's themselves never were. --j ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:09:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: GROBERTS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII They survey them New Names Green River Creek Basin Cow Ridge River Formation Long Lake Lake Long Point Bed Anvil Points, Garden Gulch Mountain Points Creek Members ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:21:42 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Unrecognizable poetry groups Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" There's no recognizable group of poets, young or old, here and so without objection I appoint myself herewith and hereby the Godfather of the Silicon Valley poetry Mafia. Anyone living in Santa Clara County who wants to do poetry had better "wet my beak" by submitting some poems or I'll have to send someone out to break their kneecaps. John Galt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:31:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: Re: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19981103055739.0068c508@theriver.com> from "Charles Alexander" at Nov 3, 98 05:57:39 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit According to Charles Alexander: > >I'd rather read about what distinguishes these groups -- what >makes each of them a group, how do they perceive themselves as >significantly different from other groups, what constitutes their range >of concerns as a group, etc. > > charles > > Yes, absolutely, but there's no magic document(s) which might serve as touchstones, - no "Projective Verse," no "The New Sentence," - in part b/c of a skepticism among many younger poets regarding such documents - there are however conversations going on - in and out of print - between groups of younger writers in the various venues mentioned and these conversations do provide some answers to your questions. It's just that, there's a lot of work involved in following all these conversations closely enough to locate commonalities with which one might draw lines of progression, articulate "schools" - all the things by which canonicities are determined (and I'm not putting any value on such determinations per se). I've tried to make some statements which talk generally about "younger poets" in PhillyTalks 6 and in the editors note to COMBO 1. Others have obviously done more than me. But, not to put too dramatic a point on it, I think the various communities of younger poets I'm in contact with - Philly, NYC, Boston, a few West Coast folks - are at this point liminal communities "betwixt and between all fixed points of classification...not institutionalized or preordained" as Victor Turner would say. No wonder then that our usual ways of thinking about poetry, and even thinking about *groups of poets*, just don't function very well as axioms of the new, the good, the interesting, the revolutionary, etc. So, I would say, all of us should just keep paying attention, I have a lot of faith that clear articulations will surface, though of course they'll all be lies as they've always been, and, to me, won't be as interesting as what's happening now. -m. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:49:55 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: click click Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Since the list has moved onto cliquishness (and I'm not sure I do know how to spell that word) . . . I do wish I had the rose-colored glasses of Kathy Lou, my life would be happier. But, I do think that the recent renaissance of publishing by younger writers in the SF Bay Area is very exciting. One of the unofficial projects of Small Press Traffic since I took it over was to create bridges between various communities--between the more established writers and the younger writers, between those who went to SF State, New College, Berkeley, etc.--to allow a space where a larger more fluid community could come together. For instance, just a few years ago, one hardly ever saw a younger poet at older poets' parties, but now the younger poets are in, everybody wants them around--and everybody wants to read with them. Sometimes it's hard for me to keep up with the demand of older poets wanting younger poets to read with. This is great--and I think the energy has been productive in both directions. All this new publishing activity--and there's more Kathy Lou mentioned--is great too. It shows a strong, healthy community that's existing outside any specific institution, such as a creative writing department. So many people graduate from these programs and drop off the face of the earth. It's vital to have some place for people to go after they get out of school--or to go instead of graduate school. However, as much as people complain about hierarchies, I think they crave them. And when one goes against that, when one refuses to act like the Queen of Sheeba, people will project unimportance on one. On another issue--got together with a friend from New York last night, a very political writer and she was rather disturbed about a conference at Columbia on women's avant-garde writing. She said the people who'd been invited are Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, Jorie Graham, and Majorie Perloff--all priviledged, well-to-do white women, as she saw it. Is this the case? Dodie Bellamy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 12:59:51 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: are you poet of the problem? In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:24:31 -0600 from On Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:24:31 -0600 MAYHEW said: >Spare us the mixed metaphors, the Wallace Stevensese, and the canned >history. The middle ages was also Dante, the Troubadors, the medieval >epic, etc... I don't know what the dance hall has to do with any of this. > Dante, the troubadours & the medieval epic all came out of the dance hall, if you really want to know. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:54:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Mr. Feld, I presume Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Harking back to a previous discussion, I could swear that the panel on Spicer I remember from a Chicago MLA conference more than a decade ago included the same Mr. Feld, who was just about as enlightening on that occasion -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 15:48:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hannah J Sassaman Subject: CrossConnect Release MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <-----------x C r o s s C o n n e c t WEB #11 x--------------> http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect Volume 4, Issue #2 is now available <------------x-c-o-n-n-e-c-t--------------> Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction and Artwork x-----------><----------X features include: Linh Dinh, a selection from _Drunkard Boxing_ (Singing Horse Press), and Debra Correnti's short story "Civil Service."-- along with new work by Fred Wah, Ron Silliman, Andrew Levy, Rebekah Grossman, Mike Magee, Lisa Baker, Walter Keady, Marek Lugowski, John Parras, Dennis Aufiery and more... C r o s s C o n n e c t Literary Review http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect email for guidelines: xconnect@ccat.sas.upenn.edu open submission period NOW, for our Spring Issue #12, March/April '99 <--------------------x-----------------------> CrossConnect is published in association with the K e l l y W r i t e r s H o u s e University of Pennsylvania ***************************************************************************** Hannah Jane Sassaman Assistant Editor, CrossConnect Sophomore, University of Pennsylvania Majors in Theatre Arts and English School Address: Home Address: 4009 Pine St. 42 Framingham Lane Philadelphia, PA 19104 Pittsford, NY 14534 Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine. -- Tallulah Bankhead ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:06:02 +0000 Reply-To: arshile@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Salerno Organization: Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts Subject: Re: Mr. Feld, I presume MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Colleagues: Ross Feld is the author of numerous works of prose fiction, as well as the outstanding book of poems from Jargon Society entitled PLUM POEMS (1972). A must read for this who claim to know what they are talking about. P.S. Anyone kind enough to mail me a copy of Feld's piece in Parnassus will receive in return an Arshile #10 and my gratitude. Please backchannel. Mark Salerno ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:15:00 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: third time's the charm Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" and on the continuing bibliography of Hejinian critique -- last weekend I chaired the panel on poetry and poetics at the annual PAMLA conference (held at Claremont this year) -- Jeff Grey read from his work on Nathaniel Mackey (which will appear in the forthcoming CALLALOO special number on Mackey); George economou read from the poetry of Armand Schwerner (Armand had been scheduled to speak on the panel, but was unable to attend due to illness); And Ann-Marie Mikkelsen, a graduate student at U of Claifornia, Irvine, gave a quite good talk on Lyn Hejinian, "Lyn Hejinian's Poetics of 'Landscape' and the New World of Poetry." Mikkelsen will chair next year's panel,,, the conference will be in Portland,,,, watch for the call for papers in early Spring -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:23:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Re: Mr. Feld, I presume Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:09:36 -0800 >To: arshile@earthlink.net >From: Aldon Nielsen >Subject: Re: Mr. Feld, I presume > >as did many another, I first learned of Mr. Feld by way of his prose volume titled _Only Shorter_. Despite the title's reliance upon one of the oldest jokes known to man, that book, and others that followed, gave every indication of being written by somebody who gave some thought to what he was writing -- whereas this recent essay and other critical writings over the years seem to be written by somebody who thinks he knows what he's talking about -- almost invariably a dangerous sign -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 15:25:23 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher Subject: and the winners are--- In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19981112105439.00761df4@popmail.lmu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ---well i don't know, but the 2 november _publishers weekly_ lists the following as this year's "best books" of poetry (chosen by someone name of michael scharf): _last chance for the tarzan holler_, by thylias moss (braziller) _hay_, by paul muldoon (fsg) _mysteries of small houses_, by alice notley (penguin) _from the devotions_, by carl phillips (graywolf) _the bird catcher_, by marie ponsot (knopf) _an anthology of new (american) poets_, ed. lisa jarnot, leonard schwartz and chris stroffolino (talisman) of course pw speaks to the business of publishing---to those who market, sell, and distribute books... anyway, there it is... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:42:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Billy Little Subject: Re: hw yet to appear Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > >also if anyone has an idea how to produce a deck of nine (I believe) >round cards, xexoxial would love to copublish it... > > >miekal could they be icing on cookies and eaten billy little 4 song st. nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0 Go ahead and say something true before the big turd eats You You can say any last thing in Your poem. -Alice Notley ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:52:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU Subject: And yet more on Hejinian . . . To: POETI --CMS Alan Golding Prof. of English, Univ. of Louisville 502-852-6801; acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu Subject: And yet more on Hejinian . . . Kathy Lou--Well, you've gotten all the stuff that I would have posted, but maybe I can save you (and others) some time by pointing out that Rosmarie Waldrop's piece on Lyn is in Temblor # 10, not Poetics # 5. When I teach LH, I find her own essays very useful: not just "The Rejection of Closure," which I guess pretty much everyone (here) knows, but also: "The Person and Description," Poetics Journal 9 (1991): 166-70. "Strangeness," Poetics Journal 8 (1989): 32-45. "Two Stein Talks," Temblor 3 (1986): 128-39. (The title echoed in a Stephen Ratcliffe piece on LH, "Two Hejinian Talks," Temblor 6 (1987): 141-47.) "If Written Is Writing," in the Andrews/Bernstein LANGUAGE book. To the other critical pieces already posted, I'd add Peter Quartermain, "Syllable as Music: LH's Writing Is An Aid To Memory," Sagetrieb 11.3 (1992): 17-31. John Shoptaw, "Hejinian Meditations: Lives of The Cell," Journal X 1.1 (1996): 57-83. I think Marnie Parsons has some pp. on Lyn in Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry (U of Toronto P, 1994). And there's a very useful and pretty recent interview conducted by Larry McCaffery and Brian McHale; I wish I could remember or had a ref. for which of McCaffery's zillion books this is in, but it has some kind of obvious title or subtitle like "Conversations with Postmodern Writers." It also has a very thorough bibliography attached. And and: there's also LH's part in the coauthored "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto," Social Text 19/20 (1988): 261-75. Say it ain't so that *My Life* can't be gotten. I'm supposed to be teaching it next semester too. Douglas! Help!! Enough awready, Alan PS: I frontchanneled all this thinking it might be of interest to others on the list. If I'm wrong, apologiae. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:59:26 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark W Scroggins Subject: Re: And yet more on Hejinian . . . In-Reply-To: <19981112.165221.ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Always get in touch with Sun & Moon directly when you're teaching My Life--I've been given this runaround by pointy-headed campus bookstores several times now, and every time it's turned out the book is alive, well, & available. Mark Scroggins ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 17:02:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark W Scroggins Subject: new publications... In-Reply-To: <19981112.165221.ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Oh yeah, and lest I forget, since we're supposed to be announcing these things: University of Alabama Press has just published my (way too) big critical study, _Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge_. I'm pretty diffident about what's inside, but the cover design's worth the price of the book! Hank Lazer should be announcing some sort of special deal for this volume and others in Alabama's new "Modern and Contemporary Poetics" series for list members in the near future. Mark Scroggins ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 15:28:59 -0700 Reply-To: LMullen@vines.ColoState.EDU Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Laura Mullen Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Nov 1998 to 11 Nov 1998 (#1998-121) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii fuming & foaming: the groupies-- continuing "the great work of His generation." Perhaps a list of younger poets (hardly listless) & their prices? Yrs. dearly aiming--in the circle--to please ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 14:38:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Weiss Subject: query Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Richard Elman was in the habit of sending unique copies of poems to friends and acquaintances. His estate has asked me to help gather these. Anyone who has any such please backchannel. I'd also be grateful for suggestions of other places to post this. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 17:34:07 -0500 Reply-To: BANDREWS@prodigy.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: BETSY ANDREWS Subject: Did anyone say "reification?" The revolution will, unfortunately, be canonized MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Let us for a moment ponder the problematics of "groupings": hegemony of a particular kind of poetics; rigidity of form, function and meaning that aforementioned hegemony entails; eventual lack of cross-fertilization between "groupings" that leads to deadening of aforementioned poetics and deadening of ears of those in particular grouping; fact that members of grouping end up talking only to each other; and last but not least, the racism, classism, sexisms and all other isms that necessarily are a function of groupings in a society built upon racism, sexisms and classism. I think canons can be useful, but let's be real about what we're discussing. Mutual support is gorgeous. But if we write manifestos, god forbid we start taking them seriously. Here's a basic summary, named for a cozy little writer's colony in your large intestine. (Pub. in Wash. Rev., oct/nov 96, thanks Joe R.) THE CRYPTS OF LIEBERKUHN (Library of Congress, 9 april 96, National Poetry Month) my idea of hell? monument and blossom the train that gets you there that makes you nauseous orange carpet pressed against all vaulted windows Capitol a postcard lacking nerve we fall from poetry like head hairs off the anxious rotunda from chthonian restroom pulls apart 5 ft the large intestine 20 ft the small an almost-half-of-every-second pause in the beating heart what supplies the face with blood but mask of exclamation secrets hard nd soft like birdegg musselshell spiderweb honeycomb behind these fleshy folds called lips ten thousand ruffians in spit the alphabet's genesis vitamins multiple choice the face that chews and swallows ethereal and toothed is cutting ripping grinding pointed questions at the self here's one: will you give me 30 of your seconds I'll draft a bloodmap through my body heavens writ in slick and gristle half-moons valving duodenum a lucky charm a couple of cups of piss rhythm involution a digest its retractions sweet salt bitter sour stations of the cross between the host and visitation between tongue and groove my supper I came here for the wine and dip elastic clause that we call jaw snaps like the devil I flush anti-vanguardist, betsy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:53:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Excuse me, Mark Scroggins MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT On Nov. 12, Mark Scroggins said: >University of Alabama Press has just published my (way too) big >critical study, _Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge_. I'm >pretty diffident about what's inside, but the cover design's worth >the price of the book! Uh, Mark, that is one of the oddest ways of promoting a book of one's own that I have ever seen. You are "diffident" about the contents?? Write back, good man, and tell us you think this is "a book full of fascinating insights that anyone with an interest in Zukofsky should not be without" or something like that. By the way, I don't think there was ever any discussion at all on the List about another book anyone with an interest in Zukofsky should not be without: _Upper Limit Music_, a collection of essays on LZ ed. by Mark Scroggins himself and also published by Alabama. In fact, I feel compelled to say (I don't know why; I suppose I am simply moved by the moment to do so) that this book contains an essay written by me and which I don't feel diffident about at all. No, because it is an absolutely brilliant and original piece of work, my essay is, though not half as brilliant (seriously) as I am sure Mark's new book is. Congrats, Mark! Kent ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 18:10:26 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: Re: hw yet to appear MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Billy Little wrote: > > > > >also if anyone has an idea how to produce a deck of nine (I believe) > >round cards, xexoxial would love to copublish it... > > > > > >miekal > > could they be icing on cookies and eaten If you like the taste of toner. Epicureography? Miekal -The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms- [glossary of neologisms collected around the network since 1985, submit yours....] http://www.net22.com/neologisms/ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 17:38:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Safdie Joseph Subject: A summary of what sticks MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Colleagues: Because the Spicer remarks I quoted last week from _After Lorca_ have always been important to me, I was gratified to see a somewhat full discussion of some of them. First I'd like to say, with Dale, that all arguments of transparency/opaqueness are ultimately besides the point and it's the poetry itself that has to move us or not, by flying. Yes, of course! And yet . . . this is a poetics list, made up of people who like to think about such things. So first, the lines again (this time in their original prose): "Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to. . . . "I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger . . . to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them . . . not as an image or a picture but as something alive -- caught forever in the structure of words" (No one mentioned this part of the quote -- the middle line here to me is HUGELY important and interesting to me). Anyway, following were the "highlights" (as I saw them, of course): -- Ron Silliman, responding to a comment of mine, said, somewhat mysteriously, that those first lines WERE a good definition of "langpo." -- Steve Shoemaker disagreed, and went on to say, among other things: "The Spicer lines here seem less concerned with the world-*constituting* dimension of language than with language as a kind of wrestling with a non-linguistic Other." (Later respondents disagreed with him). -- Mark Baker noted that I had broken the lines into verse (did that change their meaning, Mark?) and said that the easy and prevalent assumption today was that language was not transparent, but opaque. (Later respondents disagreed with him). -- In the first of several indefatigable posts mainly responding to Steve, Kent Johnson said 1) that Spicer had no one "poetics" (agreed, certainly), 2) that "the practice of Outside," to use Robin's title, meant that "the poetic act and vocation is outside of, and irrelevant to, theorization" (not sure about this) and that furthermore, 3) the Outside wasn't really "other" and wasn't really non-linguistic either and we were swimming in it and it was swimming in us (he actually said it a lot better than that, and later brought in the absolutely essential GHOSTLINESS in Spicer, and explained where it came from). (The question of which was more "real," words or stones, then arose and was perhaps the moment many people tuned out; Doctor Johnson's kicking the stone was obliquely referred to. I've always preferred another story when this issue arises, the one in John Cage's _Silence_ about the Zen master Suzuki being at a philosophical conference about "reality", saying nothing for two days, and then answering the question "Dr. Suzuki, is this table real?" with "Of COURSE it's real!") -- Dan Zimmerman then referred to Robin's great essay directly, and made clear, with Kent (and Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the Invisible_, which Robin used extensively) that the Outside was in us and we were in it, and implied that if we didn't "feel" this we might want to reassess things, because Chronos is the psyche of the Universe (which is a fairly astonishing way to look at things, if you think about it). -- Ed Foster said that words were obviously more than what sticks to the real, thus seeming not to enter into the spirit of things. -- John Mayhew brought us back to Spicer's genuine desire to establish a more genuine connection between language and the real, however we thought about such issues as the signifier and the signified or the encrusted habits of everyday linguistic usage . . . . . . which I really think is the point! That there IS a real (no matter how variously interpreted), that there IS language, that we could be doing worse things besides figuring out how to get that real into that language . . . I'm sorry to have written such a long post here. I'll close with a nice quote from Walter Benjamin: "To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of trance, as to that of creation. We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein -- is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose?" (from Hashish in Marseilles) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 21:28:07 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: CharSSmith@AOL.COM Subject: Re: and the winners are--- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit 2 out of 6 sounds like a healthy batting average to me -- cs << ---well i don't know, but the 2 november _publishers weekly_ lists the following as this year's "best books" of poetry (chosen by someone name of michael scharf): _last chance for the tarzan holler_, by thylias moss (braziller) _hay_, by paul muldoon (fsg) _mysteries of small houses_, by alice notley (penguin) _from the devotions_, by carl phillips (graywolf) _the bird catcher_, by marie ponsot (knopf) _an anthology of new (american) poets_, ed. lisa jarnot, leonard schwartz and chris stroffolino (talisman) of course pw speaks to the business of publishing---to those who market, sell, and distribute books... anyway, there it is... >> ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 19:10:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: "getting the real into words" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" but doesn't this way of saying continue the separation?? there is something out there, it is not apart from language, language is not apart from "it", quotation marks are not apart from it -- words are material, are real, as real as the brick at the end of Dr. Johnson's foot, as real as the brick walking beside Dr. Johnson -- but isn't the very fact of reference , the very about of aboutness, a matter of speaking in relation, of uttering material language that is placed in a relationship of significance to all the other reality -- are there acts of language that "contain" reality? that have gotten the real into themselves, which would imply that there are words that have not got the real in them? really? perhaps one reason it has been important for some to argue that others have denied the existence of "the real" is that it allows for maintaining exactly the separation they accuse others of having made? It is a rather large leap from "there is, for us, no unmediated experience of a prehuman real" to "there's no there there" -- but by arguing that Prof. X doesn't believe there is an outside, I place myself in the position of claiming to have access to an outside beyond words which I can then "get into words" -- but I ramble, and now I have to ramble to Santa Barbara -- will see where these threads have gotten us when I return -- bless us all, every one ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 19:12:51 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: meant to ask this in the preceding Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" have just seen a note regarding a new collection of poetry by Ray Bremser, titled "The Conquerors" -- from Water Row Press -- which I hope means that Bremser himself is still around and communicating -- Does anyone know anything of ray bremser, his current state, whether he answers his mail, etc.????? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:52:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Katherine Lederer Subject: Reduced rates on student loans (but you have to call them) In-Reply-To: <19981109214339.13263.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" -----Original Message----- From: Miller, Stephen Posted At: Monday, November 02, 1998 10:19 AM Posted To: Bulletin Board (NYC) Conversation: Reduced student loans rates (but you must call!) Subject: Reduced student loans rates (but you must call!) Congress recently passed a bill that lowers the interest rate on student loans from a fixed 8.23% to 7.46% at present, but variable up to 8.23% for the life of the loan. This is good for existing loans, too, as long as you give them a call to get it changed. The number to do this is if you have not already is: 1-888-758-9730 (Loan Consolidation Center) The phone call only takes ten to fifteen minutes. You must contact them by Jan 31, 1999 to qualify. **Please pass on this message to anyone else you know who might be blessed with student debt. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:13:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hannah J Sassaman Subject: Re: Reduced rates on student loans (but you have to call them) In-Reply-To: from "Katherine Lederer" at Nov 12, 98 10:52:26 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Eeep -- sorry guys, was trying to bounce that to someone else. (expecting pebbles to fly in her direction) Let me know what you think of this issue of CrossConnect! (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect) Also, if Rae Armantrout is on this account, I loved your reading tonight at the Writers House at Penn, and would like to contact you. Let me know. Hannah Sassaman ***************************************************************************** Hannah Jane Sassaman Assistant Editor, CrossConnect Sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania Major in Theatre Arts and English http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~hannahjs School Address: Home Address: 4009 Pine St. 42 Framingham Lane Philadelphia, PA 19104 Pittsford, NY 14534 Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine. -- Tallulah Bankhead ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:34:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Max Winter Subject: recognizance MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit There are poets in Dallas, Texas who are currently unrecognizable, so much has happened. Any time you have more than one poet, you have a "group of poets." If you have more than one group of poets in the same space, this is known as a "set." Several sets of poets in different spaces in the same larger space, i.e. a city or even a larger town, may constitute a heading, perhaps a Dewey Decimal category. Please address all questions or problems to the appropriate officer. You will see signs telling you where to go. Thank you for your patience. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 20:39:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Safdie Joseph Subject: Re: "getting the real into words" Comments: To: Aldon Nielsen MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Aldon asks: are there acts of language that "contain" reality? that have gotten the real into themselves, which would imply that there are words that have not got the real in them? I say yes really? yes -- they are what we call "great poems" and the people who form and make such acts of language are great poets (I'm aware that these terms ruffle some postmodernist feathers, but I can't find others -- WCW, in an early essay, said there was nothing worth aiming for but greatness, and I think we all KNOW what he was talking about, even though that word is out of favor now) Aldon also asks: but doesn't this way of saying continue the separation?? and to that, and to the rest of his very intelligent speculations, I can offer no response -- if such "ways of saying" perpetuate the separation, they aren't meant to -- separation kills Still kicking that stone . . . Joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 21:57:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Quartermain Subject: puff, puff, puff! Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Well! given puffery as the order of the day, don't forget my own staggeringly insightful and beeyootifully written essay in the same book, and let me mention too my own and others' BRILLIANT work in Charles Bernstein's stupendous Close Listening (is that what it's called?). PQ At 04:53 PM 11/12/98 -0500, Kent Johnson wrote: >By the way, I don't think there was ever any discussion at all on the >List about another book anyone with an interest in Zukofsky should >not be without: _Upper Limit Music_, a collection of essays on LZ >ed. by Mark Scroggins himself and also published by Alabama. In fact, >I feel compelled to say (I don't know why; I suppose I am simply >moved by the moment to do so) that this book contains an essay >written by me and which I don't feel diffident about at all. No, >because it is an absolutely brilliant and original piece of work, my >essay is, though not half as brilliant (seriously) as I am sure >Mark's new book is. > + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Peter Quartermain 846 Keefer Street Vancouver B.C. Canada V6A 1Y7 Voice : 604 255 8274 Fax: 255 8204 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 01:22:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand Subject: Re: Free reading=Interview dear gabriel (aka gaga) why aren't you forwarding MY note to the hiring committee too? i think you are just jealous of my chartreuse sequinned dress. i think you wish YOU could write a sad poem while yodeling. perhaps you've even tried to commit interpretive dance whilst yodelling AND writing sad poetry. and failed. how sad. i don't want to depress you more, or send you into ever more burning throes of envy, but sometimes, while i'm doing a reading, i make sweet, loon-like hooting sounds by squeezing my palms together rhythmically. it is very alluring. that is how i got bromige to tell me his very most secret nickname. e ps and tell your hiring committee that i will not give private demonstrations for anything less than a paid guest lectureship and $100 up front (no installments). and they can't take pictures. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:56:43 -0800 Reply-To: griffinbaker@bc.sympatico.ca Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Baker Subject: Re: A summary of what sticks MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > -- Mark Baker noted that I had broken > the lines into verse (did that > change their meaning, Mark?) Not their meaning, Joe, but their pretentiousness: they looked like a solemn ars poetica, written in pretty boring free verse, when in prose they look just pretty boring, like that stirring final phrase ("something alive -- caught forever in the structure of words") that I can imagine some textbook called Why Read Poetry concludes its Introduction to Students with. Mark Baker ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 06:21:19 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Organization: Sun Moon Books Subject: Re: And yet more on Hejinian . . . Comments: cc: djmess@sunmoon.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MY LIFE is temporarily out of stock. We will be reprinting before the end of the year. Douglas Messerli Sun & Moon Press Mark W Scroggins wrote: > > Always get in touch with Sun & Moon directly when you're teaching My > Life--I've been given this runaround by pointy-headed campus bookstores > several times now, and every time it's turned out the book is alive, well, > & available. > > Mark Scroggins ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 07:34:18 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: james perez Subject: re green-ber(g)-nstein MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain somebody on another list I'm on just wrote this >>Yes! I read some MakeUp interview where they talked for something like four or five paragraphs about how Clement Greenberg was a CIA plant and how the New York School was responsible for all these post-war social evils, mostly involving drawing the public away from content-based art....<< other than being just plain funny-to-me, I thought it would add an interesting twist to the whole cg=cb idea...cuz after all I've always though cb was some kind of mole, I just don't know who he's workin for (or his/their final intentions) jamie.p ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:45:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mairead Byrne Subject: Re: re green-ber(g)-nstein In-Reply-To: <19981113153419.24737.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I think you're onto something here because it was just as I was getting down to probing the question of "secret ingredients" with our man in the U.K. (Operation Mars Bar) that I got that horrid message from the Man on Top. I may be silen...... On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, james perez wrote: > somebody on another list I'm on just wrote this > > >>Yes! I read some MakeUp interview where they talked for something like > four or five paragraphs about how Clement Greenberg was a CIA plant and > how the New York School was responsible for all these post-war social > evils, mostly involving drawing the public away from content-based > art....<< > > other than being just plain funny-to-me, I thought it would add an > interesting twist to the whole cg=cb idea...cuz after all I've always > though cb was some kind of mole, I just don't know who he's workin for > (or his/their final intentions) > > jamie.p > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:58:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: "getting the real into words" In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19981112191045.00755d24@popmail.lmu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ay ay ay ay. it's the _mind_ does all that squeezing in&out in&out. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Judy Roitman | "Whoppers Whoppers Whoppers! Math, University of Kansas | memory fails Lawrence, KS 66045 | these are the days." 785-864-4630 | fax: 785-864-5255 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note new area code ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:05:59 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM Subject: and the winners are--- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Joe Amato forwarded the list of the best books of poetry of 1998 as compiled by Publishers Weekly: >_last chance for the tarzan holler_, by thylias moss (braziller) > >_hay_, by paul muldoon (fsg) > >_mysteries of small houses_, by alice notley (penguin) > >_from the devotions_, by carl phillips (graywolf) > >_the bird catcher_, by marie ponsot (knopf) > >_an anthology of new (american) poets_, ed. lisa jarnot, leonard schwartz >and chris stroffolino (talisman) There are a lot of books I haven't gotten up to reading yet, but here are some that genuinely excited me in 1998: "Free Space Comix" by Brian Kim Stefans (Roof) and "Multiple Poses" by Colin Smith (Tsunami Editions) . . . If I could do a tenth of what these 2 boys can do I'd be patting myself on the back all the time even in my sleep. If you haven't read these books go out and find them now. I babble about them constantly like St Paul after leaving Tarsus. Ditto for "Debbie: an Epic" by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books), and "Maxfield Parrish" by Eileen Myles (Black Sparrow), but now I can't remember if they were published this year or last. "Moving Borders" (ed. M. M. Sloan, Talisman House) was for me the signal anthology experience of the year. "Routine Disruptions" by Kenward Elmslie (Coffee House)--though it leaves out a lot of my favorite poems by Elmslie I keep reading it again and again. The three first books from the new Atelos Books are each, in their different ways, so excellent "Bad History" (Watten) "The I and the You" (Jean Day) and Rae Armantrout's incredible memoir "True" Peter Gizzi's "Artificial Heart" from Burning Deck has a title I'm not crazy about, but what's inside is gorgeous. Also want to mention a quintet of great books by SF Bay Area writers, "Mortal City" by Jocelyn Saidenberg (Parentheses Writing Series); "Dura" by Myung Mi Kim (Sun & Moon); "Dark," by Hoa Nguyen (okay, excuse me Austin people, but I don't want to accept that Hoa Nguyen has left us and moved to Texas); Laura Moriarty's "Spicer City" which has made San Francisco a fun place to live in again; and "Not Right Now" (Second Story Books) by Renee Gladman which I have raved about on this List before. I'm forgetting lots of others so please, someone, pick up this thread and remind me, what have been *your* favorites in 1998? Kevin Killian Oh my goodness, how could I forget the novel of the century "The Letters of Mina Harker" AND the best biography of the year "Poet Be Like God"? So you see, it's too early in the morning for me to be making up lists. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:17:04 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: ken|n|ing Subject: Re: and the winners are--- Comments: To: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Kevin & the rest -- a few choices for favorite book of poems this year: Andrew Levy Elephant Surveillance to Thought Liz Waldner Homing Devices Katy Lederer Music No Staves Yedda Morrison The Marriage of the Well-Built Head Lyn Hejinian A Book from A Border Comedy -- and as for the most-anticipated . . . Nathaniel Mackey Atet A.D. & Whatsaid Serif -- others, anyone? | | k e n n i n g````````````````|`````````````````````````````````` a newsletter of contemporary |poetry, poetics, and non-fiction writing |418 Brown St. #10 Iowa City, IA 52245 USA ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:32:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: Re: and the winners are--- In-Reply-To: from "ken|n|ing" at Nov 13, 98 10:17:04 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Just received Mackey's *Whatsaid Serif* and it is incredibly good. Hopefully the special issue of Callaloo will drive home the point that he's as important as anyone writing right now. For those who like Whatsiad Serif by all means pick up Nate's CD "Strick" where songs 16-25 are read with musical collaboration (that is, if you haven't already). As for other best book cabdidates, well, it's not quite this year but Michael Gizzi's '97 *No Both* was great and I'm anxious to read Bob Perelman's The Future of Memory straight through. I'll second the thumbs up on Levy's "Elephant" too. -m. According to ken|n|ing: > > Kevin & the rest -- a few choices for favorite book of poems > this year: Andrew Levy > Elephant Surveillance to Thought > Liz Waldner > Homing Devices > Katy Lederer > Music No Staves > Yedda Morrison > The Marriage of the Well-Built Head > Lyn Hejinian > A Book from A Border Comedy > -- and as for the most-anticipated . . . > Nathaniel Mackey > Atet A.D. & > Whatsaid Serif > > -- others, anyone? > > | > | > k e n n i n g````````````````|`````````````````````````````````` > a newsletter of contemporary |poetry, poetics, and non-fiction writing > |418 Brown St. #10 Iowa City, IA 52245 USA > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:37:07 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" Subject: Re: and the winners are--- MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain My own list of great recent "arrivals" would include Elizabeth Robinson's _Other Veins, Absent Roots_ and Hoa Nguyen's _Dark_. Patrick Pritchett ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:45:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Ghosts at a party MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Joe Safdie's summary of the Spicer discussion is very helpful and smart. Aldon Nielsen's remarks on it very interesting and smart too. And Mark Baker's dismissal of Spicer as boring and academic is astonishingly funny. If I could say just a couple of things before running back home to clean the house for my wife's 40th birtday surprise party tomorrow, to which EVERYONE on this List is invited (you have my address from a post of the other day) even though no one on this List invites ME anywhere: 1) I have to correct Joe's statement that I "explained" where Spicer's "ghostliness" came from. I have no idea, really, where the ghosts _truly_ come from or what is theeir nature, and if I did it would take all the fun out of things. 2) I actually thought that my comment about rocks and language was the most interesting thing I said in the Spicer exchange, whetehr or not that means the comment was interesting in itself: The idea, that is, that just because rocks have been around longer than language doesn't make the latter any less real than the former. Each has _entered_ the real and taken its place within it. So has air and light (maybe these "real" substances bear a closer "resemblance" to language than rocks). In other words, there is no basis, so far as I can see, for regarding lnaguage as something "inside" and rocks and light and air as the Other that is "outside" and more actual and Real. The substance of rocks and light and air, stars and so on, inhabits us and makes us what we are and language swirls around inside all that stuff which is inside and outside us. Which means, to me, as I said before, that there is an Outside but that there is no outside of Outside, which is perhaps a terryfying thought if it is so. This woudl be what makes the ghosts very real, thoough as I said, where they come from and what they truly are is another question. And If you're coming to the party, be there no later than 8:15! There will be a stage for Blabbering. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 16:39:50 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: Ghosts at a party In-Reply-To: <60A3189060A@student.highland.cc.il.us> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kent, you are hereby invited to Chax Press this Saturday to celebrate the publication of a new book by Lisa Cooper. Chax Press is at 101 W. Sixth St, in Tucson. You may wear formal or informal attire, prepare baked goods or come as Laura Riding, Louis Zukofsky, or John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- preferably all three. You may of course always come as yourself, or have someone else come and claim to be Kent Johnson. If you get this far, or if you want to postpone your trip for a few days, you are invited to my house for thanksgiving dinner. Call Chax Press at 520-620-1626 for directions. Happy Surprise 40th to your wife! I hope everyone within 100 miles of you who is on this list shows up. and, for some insights on language and the real, based in part on 20th Century linguistics, and on the notion of what constitutes a "performative" utterance (at least I think that a bit of language that accomplishes or performs something might be considered 'real' in one sense or another), there is a fascinating essay in the great first issue of SHARK. Sorry I don't have the details of authorship or contact with the magazine and its editors (Lytle Shaw & Emily Clark), but I left that issue at home today. charles >If I could say just a couple of things before running back home to >clean the house for my wife's 40th birtday surprise party tomorrow, >to which EVERYONE on this List is invited (you have my address from a >post of the other day) even though no one on this List invites ME >anywhere: > >1) I have to correct Joe's statement that I "explained" where >Spicer's "ghostliness" came from. I have no idea, really, where the >ghosts _truly_ come from or what is theeir nature, and if I did it >would take all the fun out of things. > >2) I actually thought that my comment about rocks and language was >the most interesting thing I said in the Spicer exchange, whetehr or >not that means the comment was interesting in itself: The idea, that >is, that just because rocks have been around longer than language >doesn't make the latter any less real than the former. Each has >_entered_ the real and taken its place within it. So has air >and light (maybe these "real" substances bear a closer "resemblance" >to language than rocks). In other words, there is no basis, so far as >I can see, for regarding lnaguage as something "inside" and rocks and >light and air as the Other that is "outside" and more actual and >Real. The substance of rocks and light and air, stars and so on, >inhabits us and makes us what we are and language swirls around >inside all that stuff which is inside and outside us. Which means, to >me, as I said before, that there is an Outside but that there is no >outside of Outside, which is perhaps a terryfying thought if it is >so. This woudl be what makes the ghosts very real, thoough as I said, >where they come from and what they truly are is another question. > >And If you're coming to the party, be there no later than 8:15! There >will be a stage for Blabbering. > >Kent > > charles alexander :: poet and book artist :: chax@theriver.com chax press :: alexander writing/design/publishing books by artists' hands :: web sites built with care and vision http://alexwritdespub.com/chax :: http://alexwritdespub.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:26:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Surprise! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Charles: My parents live in Green Valley, about 20 miles south of Tucson. I will be visiting them over the Thanksgiving holidays. I will be at your door with a tray of relish on the evening of the 25th. Thank you and Surprise! Kent ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:04:14 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "s. kaipa" Subject: KENNING, Interlope, & films! In-Reply-To: <60ADDD9158C@student.highland.cc.il.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII For those of you who reside in or around the Iowa City area: KENNING & Interlope magazines, in collaboration with 4 Chicago film makers will be hosting a poetry reading and film screening. This marvelous event will start at 8pm at 714 Kirkwod Ave, corner of Dodge. Poets: Tina Celona, Patrick F. Durgin, Jen Hofer, Summi Kaipa, and Emily Wilson Film-makers: Ken Eisenstein, David Gatten, Sarah Jane Lapp, and Heather Seybolt KENNING & Interlope will be available for purchase--as well as the chapbooks of Tina Celona, Patrick F. Durgin, and Jen Hofer. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:00:13 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: POG event, Tuesday, Nov 17, 7pm, Dinnerware MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit November 17, Tuesday Douglas Barbour & Stephen Scobie, poets/performers Barbara Penn, visual artist Dinnerware Contemporary Artists Gallery 135 E. Congress Street, Tucson 7pm suggested contribution at the door: $5 (no one turned away!) DOUGLAS BARBOUR Douglas Barbour has written more than 15 books or pamphlets of poetry and literary criticism, and has edited eight other books. His Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour, was awarded the Stephan Stephannson Award, a major Canadian poetry award. His poems have been published in 18 anthologies and over 50 journals in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Britain. He has given poetry readings in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Hungary, New Zealand, Sweden, and West Germany. One critic says of Barbour’s work: "Barbour works at the boundaries of the lyric mode and this results in compelled poems that make for compelling reading. . . . These are the poems of a writer who listens to the works of others, and whose listening makes possible poetic structures that are remarkable for their intellectual vitality and immediacy. . . . Story for a Saskatchewan Night is such a pleasure to read because Barbour composes with the trained ear of a musician who's got something to say before the lights go out forever." Roy Miki, Canadian Literature 131 (Winter 1991). STEPHEN SCOBIE Stephen Scobie’s McAlmon’s Chinese Opera won the Canadian Governor-General's Award for Poetry (equivalent to the National Book Award in the United States). Scobie has also been awarded the Prix Gabrielle Roy, for Excellence in Canadian Criticism, and has been chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His more than 25 books of poetry and literary criticism include McAlmon's Chinese Opera, Expecting Rain, Dunino, The City That Dreams, Taking the Gate: a Journey through Scotland, bpNichol: What History Teaches, Alias Bob Dylan, Earthquakes and Explorations : Language / Cubism / Poetry, and many more. What theCritics say: "Disarmingly readable, alarmingly bold.... " Margaret Avison "Scobie ... has provided a new wisdom book for the Apocrypha." George Woodcock "Stephen Scobie is a poet of scrupulous, playful exactitude, and writes with the deceptive simplicity of a master of his craft." Heather Spears "Whatever Scobie writes demands attention." NeWest ReView Barbour and Scobie work together as the Sound Poetry ensemble, Re: Sounding, and have performed as such in Canada, the U.S., Austria, Denmark, Sweden, West Germany [1985], Germany [1993] and Australia & New Zealand [1995] (major appearances include the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival in New York, 1980, the annual conference, Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien, E.V., Grainau, West Germany, 1985, NZ*SAGAS, Laufen, Germany, 1993, the triennial conference, European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Graz, Austria, 1993, Poetry and History Conference, University of Stirling, 1996, EyeRhymes, Edmonton, 1997). BARBARA PENN Barbara Penn received her MFA in Painting at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Arizona, where for four years she directed the Two-Dimensional Foundations Program. Penn uses literary and poetic themes, integral to her paintings, combined media constructions, and installations, and incites issues of domesticity, gender, and the progression of women’s roles over time. Her work has been featured in one person shows, both regionally and internationally, including shows in Scottsdale, Tucson, Chicago, San Francisco, and Berlin. In 1997 Penn participated in a group exhibition entitled LANGUAGE AS OBJECT: EMILY DICKINSON AND CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, where her installations accompanied works by Joseph Cornell, Judy Chicago, Roni Horn, Lesley Dill, and others. Reviews of her work have appeared in ARTWEEK, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and DIE TAGESZEITZUNG (Berlin). In September of 1996 Penn was awarded an artist’s residency in Julin, Poland. Other awards include a Skowhegan Fellowship, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and a Yaddo Fellowship. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:14:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Weiss Subject: Re: POG event, Tuesday, Nov 17, 7pm, Dinnerware In-Reply-To: <000001be0f2f$76470d00$0628c5a9@default> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Tenney--wish I could be there. I passed thru Tucson last week, called but got no answer. Am told you're once more up to your ears in diapers. Congrats. Also picked up your chapbook One Block Over, which I liked a lot. All the best. At 11:00 AM 11/13/98 -0700, you wrote: >November 17, Tuesday > >Douglas Barbour & Stephen Scobie, poets/performers >Barbara Penn, visual artist > >Dinnerware Contemporary Artists Gallery >135 E. Congress Street, Tucson >7pm > >suggested contribution at the door: $5 (no one turned away!) > >DOUGLAS BARBOUR > >Douglas Barbour has written more than 15 books or pamphlets of poetry and >literary criticism, and has edited eight other books. His Visible Visions: >The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour, was awarded the Stephan Stephannson >Award, a major Canadian poetry award. His poems have been published in 18 >anthologies and over 50 journals in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, >and Britain. He has given poetry readings in Australia, Austria, Canada, >Denmark, Great Britain, Hungary, New Zealand, Sweden, and West Germany. > >One critic says of Barbour=92s work: >"Barbour works at the boundaries of the lyric mode and this results in >compelled poems that make for compelling reading. . . . These are the poems >of a writer who listens to the works of others, and whose listening makes >possible poetic structures that are remarkable for their intellectual >vitality and immediacy. . . . Story for a Saskatchewan Night is such a >pleasure to read because Barbour composes with the trained ear of a >musician who's got something to say before the lights go out forever." > Roy Miki, Canadian Literature 131 (Winter 1991). > > >STEPHEN SCOBIE > >Stephen Scobie=92s McAlmon=92s Chinese Opera won the Canadian >Governor-General's Award for Poetry (equivalent to the National Book Award >in the United States). Scobie has also been awarded the Prix Gabrielle Roy, >for Excellence in Canadian Criticism, and has been chosen to be a Fellow of >the Royal Society of Canada. His more than 25 books of poetry and literary >criticism include McAlmon's Chinese Opera, Expecting Rain, Dunino, The City >That Dreams, Taking the Gate: a Journey through Scotland, bpNichol: What >History Teaches, Alias Bob Dylan, Earthquakes and Explorations : Language / >Cubism / Poetry, and many more. > >What theCritics say: > >"Disarmingly readable, alarmingly bold.... " > Margaret Avison > >"Scobie ... has provided a new wisdom book for the Apocrypha." > George Woodcock > >"Stephen Scobie is a poet of scrupulous, playful exactitude, and writes >with the deceptive simplicity of a master of his craft." > Heather Spears > >"Whatever Scobie writes demands attention." > NeWest ReView > > > >Barbour and Scobie work together as the Sound Poetry ensemble, Re: >Sounding, and have performed as such in Canada, the U.S., Austria, Denmark, >Sweden, West Germany [1985], Germany [1993] and Australia & New Zealand >[1995] (major appearances include the 12th International Sound Poetry >Festival in New York, 1980, the annual conference, Gesellschaft f=FCr >Kanada-Studien, E.V., Grainau, West Germany, 1985, NZ*SAGAS, Laufen, >Germany, 1993, the triennial conference, European Association for >Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Graz, Austria, 1993, Poetry >and History Conference, University of Stirling, 1996, EyeRhymes, Edmonton, >1997). > > > >BARBARA PENN > >Barbara Penn received her MFA in Painting at the University of California, >Berkeley. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of >Arizona, where for four years she directed the Two-Dimensional Foundations >Program. Penn uses literary and poetic themes, integral to her paintings, >combined media constructions, and installations, and incites issues of >domesticity, gender, and the progression of women=92s roles over time. Her >work has been featured in one person shows, both regionally and >internationally, including shows in Scottsdale, Tucson, Chicago, San >Francisco, and Berlin. In 1997 Penn participated in a group exhibition >entitled LANGUAGE AS OBJECT: EMILY DICKINSON AND CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART, >funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, where her installations >accompanied works by Joseph Cornell, Judy Chicago, Roni Horn, Lesley Dill, >and others. Reviews of her work have appeared in ARTWEEK, the SAN FRANCISCO >CHRONICLE, and DIE TAGESZEITZUNG (Berlin). In September of 1996 Penn was >awarded an artist=92s residency in Julin, Poland. Other awards include a >Skowhegan Fellowship, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and a Yaddo Fellowship. > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:18:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Weiss Subject: ooops Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I'll get it right some day. Sorry, Tenney. Sorry, list. But it is a very good chapbook, available from Chax Press. And a nice piece of design (no surprise), Charles. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:34:14 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: Irby on Duncan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Announcing: Poetics seminar: Wed. November 18, 5 p.m. Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, Lawrence, featuring Ken Irby, "The Poetry and Poetics of Robert Duncan." Readings available through the Hall Center. Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:13:27 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Ray Bremser Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In response to my last post I have received independent postings stating that Bremser had died just recently. Since these came from different sources, it is probably true. Bremser has written some intriguing works in between, and during, his bouts with himself. Let's hope there will be a collected works soon -- meantime, here's the info. I had received about his most recent book: The Conquerors Sudbury, MA Water Row Press 1998 $20.00 61 pp pbk Has anyone actually seen this book yet??? for that mater, has anyone read Bonnie Bremser's disturbing but beautiful book, Troia? will be back Tuesday -- if I don't see you at Kent's wife's birthday party, maybe I'll see you "outside." everybody stay safe! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:14:51 -0500 Reply-To: Tom Orange Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: After they've seen the Pah'ree Commune (iteee) In-Reply-To: <199811130516.AAA25117@juliet.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII michael, jacques, charles, mark et al: been grappling with these notions of community and extended milieu for a piece i'm almost finished with, and have found some interesting argumnets in an essay collection called /living the global city/ (ed. john eade, routledge 1997) that may help us work thru some of these notions. e.g.: "to understand community, therefore, a break has to be made with an intellectual tradition which was shaped by our nineteenth-century forebearers and which associated community with a disappearing world of traditional solidarities and values. . . . community is in the process of being disembedded, therefore, to the extent that we identify its reconstitution on a non-local, non-spatialy bounded basis" (24-25). in place of community comes the notion of "extended milieux" which "not only transcend the surroundings of specific locales, but...inhabit space by meaningfully integrating (geographically) distant places into a biographical situation. this implies the structuring of people's lives around more than one focus, as well as the immediate impact of distant places on the place of bodily presence. in extended milieux 'here' and 'there' do not equal 'near' and 'far', that is 'familiar' and 'unfamiliar'. familiarity thus is no longer solely related to the person's immediate physical environment in 'readiness at hand'. it extends to distant familiar places and their interwovenness in a uniquely personal way" (70). this more accurately describes for me the dispersed network of relations that i, like michael i think, find myself in. my "biographical situation" affords me the opportunity to drive to nyc for the hannah weiner tribute, where, for example, i miss meeting up with my toronto friends, re-visit nyc friends from the last time i was there -- all of whom, additionally, have engaged with the philly people -- meet new buffalo people with whom i have been in touch before, meet that prof in minnesota whose posts here i've been reading for years now, etc... t. tmorange@julian.uwo.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:16:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabriel Gudding Subject: Re: Free reading=Interview In-Reply-To: <199811130622.BAA12912@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Eliza McGrand wrote: > dear gabriel (aka gaga) > > why aren't you forwarding MY note to the hiring committee too? i think > you are just jealous of my chartreuse sequinned dress. i think you wish > YOU could write a sad poem while yodeling. Dear Sir, I am now sitting at my dinky laptop. I think I can with certainty convey to you my aunt's wishes that you drop this matter at once. Vile threats and puling guffaws will not sway us, nor can you frighten me with the gruesome and deep holes in your face, one of which I'm pretty sure you use as a mouth. > perhaps you've even tried to commit interpretive dance whilst yodelling > AND writing sad poetry. and failed. how sad. You will recall that I remember your sequinned dress and commented when last you wore it that it looks like the instrument panel of an airline cockpit during a three-engine flame-out. Please never wear it again. > i don't want to depress you more, or send you into ever more burning throes > of envy, but sometimes, while i'm doing a reading, i make sweet, loon-like > hooting sounds by squeezing my palms together rhythmically. The act you describe here reminds me of one physiologists call TENESMUS. You will need to look this up. "Gaiety," Stevens said, "in poetry is a precious characteristic, but it should be a characteristic of the diction, not of palm farting." I will pass along your note to the Biological Warfare department, your laser dress might give them a few ideas about bioluminescing bombs maybe. Yours in abject poor taste, Gaga ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:56:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Linda Russo Subject: Re: Hannah Weiner Notes Comments: cc: tmorange@julian.uwo.ca MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit p.s. to Tom Orange your question re "Fe" is answered herein: Saturday November 7, 1998 : Hannah Weiner Tribute : St. Mark's Place Church collaborative response by LooRusso and Chris Alexander In more-or-less alphabetical order (in fact - a matter which I did not attune to until Ron Silliman followed James Sherry although Lewis Warsh had presented much earlier) individuals, introduced by the event's coordinators Charles Bernstein and Lee Ann Brown, proceeded to the podium of the crowded hall to read Hannah's work, to betray their own memories, to respond. Actually, the participants didn't present in alphabetical order, so far as I could tell. Afterward there was some discussion amongst my circle [of attendees] as to whether reading one's own work was an appropriate response? It was a wonderful tribute. That the appropriateness of a response somehow expired after a certain length of time? Certainly one wouldn't want to invalidate poetic responses to Hannah's work - I'm sure the latter will continue to be the most prominent, if not in fact the most important form of address to HW - however, there was some question, esp. with regard to writers who didn't seem to have 'a lot to say' about her (e.g., on whom she'd "had a big influence for about two months"). But perhaps one would be the 'lot to say' themselves, as evidence of Hannah's influence - her way of saying providing one with a way to say one's (other) (nether) world. On the nother hand, why *should* self-interest (or just "interest," as it would have been called by the cynical neoclassicals) be separated from one's interest in the work of another artist? It rarely is that in my own case (I might concur if I had the slightest idea what 'I' am talking about), certainly. Just so long as it doesn't come to eclipse the interest =in the work of another artist=. ENOUGH OF THAT QUIET. Nonetheless, individuals were infrequently boring. Jackson Mac Low read beautifully from The Code Poems approx.: follow me will you lead? will you follow? I will follow intoned the last poem - taking on a very different significance under the circumstances. Many read from The Fast and some read from Weeks, Clairvoyant Journal, and Silent Teachers Remember Sequel; Jackson Mac Low read from The Code Poems and described what sounded to have been an amazing performance in a Central Park bandshell, in which Hannah enlisted the U.S. Coast Guard to present in flag code the 3 letters that run adjacent to the poem-text which she read. Others read letters they received from Hannah, Sharon Matlin read a short story that referred to itself in the end as an "essay" in which Hannah appeared as "Elizabeth," a curious Anglification, especially since the author referred to 'herself' in the text as "Sharon," (there was some speculation afterward as to whether the boyfriend "Richard" was indeed Bruce Andrews, though not because he played significantly in other works presented, but perhaps because he was glanced at often), Tina Darragh shared a dream, Fiona Templeton thought in the manner of Hannah out loud, Barbara Rosenthal read excessively from her own journals wherever they made reference to Hannah (or her apartment), revealing a shocking portrait of her (who?) as calculating and cold. Maria Damon, apologizing again for not having known HW (ach, Maria so worried) read her belated response (written a few days ago) beautiful, under the circumstances, in it's (should read "its") quotidian detail - e.g., responding to Hannah's queries about the weather in Minneapolis, etc. Also nice because she presented a very human 'Academic' face (& the only one at that). Many, in fact, remembered near-[or apparently outright] harassing phone calls and other such near-intolerable behaviors, a view which, in isolation, might romanticize the artists as sufferer and sufferee had not others presented her as intelligent, generous and responsive. Charles B. spoke of HW with great affection and read three pages, apparently written just after her mother's death, from a notebook/manuscript Hannah had given to him some years ago. Among those present and unaccounted for in our response: Charles Alexander, Alan Davies, Bruce Andrews (no he was accounted for), Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino, P. Inman, (Bernadette Mayer [oft mentioned in _Clairvoyant J-s_] pulled a Barbara Guest, appearing in the program but not in fact), Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher; Ann Tardos was home with a bad cold. There are others too. sorry. Happily, though not altogether happy judging from his tone, James Sherry delivered the coup against a tendency in some participants to romanticize or overemphasize HW's schizophrenia or her mysticism - variants of reducing her to another hysterical woman; a position I'm sure some found strident, but I personally found moving, the act of a concerned friend. In the 60s according to Carolee Schneeman who brought some of the bras (& these were most decidedly bras though it's often said that Hannah designed "lingerie") Hannah had designed, for example, Hannah, the only of a group of artists with a day job, would make large dinners on payday, - oh that's who that was she had this big plastic ring with bras attached that was supposed to facilitate some kind of communication with Hannah (?) (well it was a circle and it did have red twinkle-lights) and showed some wonderful slides of her as a youth - and in collaboration with Abigail Child she HANNAH was revealed to be, again, generous ("change whatever you want"), responsible and responsive. Ron Silliman read a very Clairvoyant letter from HW. Hannah's brother, Maurice Finegold, eulogized as well, a touching antithesis. I found his presence very moving as well - here was a person who, knowing little-to-nothing of the 'avant garde' poetry scene, took the chance of coming (from Boston, a lovely train ride) (trains are lovely) together with us in tribute to her; as much, presumably, to find a part of her life closed to the family, as to share with us some details of her family life. Yes he was great. A very courageous person, I must say. Bringing with him only an index card. Those words that spoke loudest, though, were the renderings of Hannah's own work, including a film of Hannah reading from and composing Clairvoyant Journal, and another with footage of herself on a roof in a fur hat reading from Ten Little Indian Notebooks (?) choppy-chop spliced (as they say in the bidness) with footage of youths Bruce Andrews reading from a manuscript in an alley, James Sherry on the street or a fire escape gossiping, and Charles Bernstein speaking and gesticulating argumentatively (same eyes he had lots of hair then). I must say (and said to Charles afterward) the footage of these three young "language boys" was degrading (just kidding! it would read "delightful" but for the glee of the collaborate-saboteur). I do hope we'll get a chance to see Harry Hill's films in Buffalo? BE MORE ASSERTIVE. Charles read "fe" from Silent Teachers, Remembered Sequel which includes the lines "we must integrate into the next generation." Charles and Lee Ann Brown (who'd advised as step one in a how-to-read-hannah "it's funny") closed the tribute with a great and emotional performance of a few pages from The Clairvoyant Journal. I can't add anything to this ending: The affair came to a close after so many hours, how many it does not matter in New York on a Saturday night it did not matter (we were hungry then we ate), commemorating her 70th birthday a year after her death it was, true to its form it was a sad occasion for more than a few attendees. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:29:09 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Seattle Hat Trick Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Interesting readings three days in a row next week, here in the warm, sunny Northwest US - talk with your travel agent today. Will Alexander/Laynie Browne Thursday November 19 7:30 in the back room of the Speakeasy Cafe at Second & Bell in the continually upgrading Denney Regrade Maria Damon, Diane Glancy, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mark Novak Friday November 20th at Elliott Bay Books in historically seedy Pioneer Square Staggered Thirds: Pieces for three voices by Gregory Hischak, Anna Mockler, Doug Nufer Saturday November 21 8:00 in the back room of the Speakeasy Cafe at Second & Bell in stylish Belltown See you all there then. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:28:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Maghoolaghan chapbook? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Coming back home after a few weeks away, I can't find a post that I was sure I'd kept about a recent chapbook by Mike Maghoolaghan. Could whoever sent that out originally please send me information on it again. Thanks. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 13:09:16 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Robert Manery by way of Dorothy Trujillo " Subject: KSW Upcoming Events Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kootenay School of Writing 112 West Hastings St. Vancouver BC 688-6001 Upcoming Events Gerry Gilbert Saturday November 14, 8 pm Free Gerry Gilbert is the author of over thirty books of poetry, most recently Sex and the Single Mushroom and Azure Blues. Milieu will be publsihed as a book and a CD-ROM by Coach House Books. Gilbert is the host of radiofreerainforest on Co-op Radio and the editor of BC Monthly. Tom Raworth and Deanna Ferguson Tuesday November 17, 8 pm $5/$3 Legendary U.K. poet, teacher, artist Tom Raworth brings his lightning delivery to Vancouver for the second time. Raworth's writing career spans four decades and over forty books, most recently Clean & Well Lit: selected poems 1987 - 1995 (Roof Books 1996) and Silent Rows (The Figures 1995).He founded, with Barry Hall, the influential Goliard Press in 1965 (which became Cape Goliard Press in 1967). He is a contributing editor to DOC(K)S (Ajaccio, Corsica) and to PAGINAS (Tenerife, Spain). Deanna Ferguson is the author of The Relative Minor (Tsunami 1993) and of numerous chapbooks including Sidewinder, Democratique, Edith and Enid, ddilemma, Goth and Small Holdings. Her work is also included in the anthology Out of Everywhere (Reality Street Editions 1996) edited by Maggie O'Sullivan. Mark Nowak, Maria Damon and Juan Felipe Herrera Sunday November 22, 8pm. $5/$3. Mark Nowak is editor of the journal Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics as well as Theodore Enslin's Now, and Then: Selected Poems (National Poetry Foundation) & co-editor (with Diane Glancy) of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours from Coffee House Press (forthcoming, 1999). His "microethnography" Zwyczaj is out in American Anthropologist. His first book, Revenants, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Maria Damon is author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (University of Minnesota Press) and essays in Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, the Charles Bernstein edited Close Listening: Poetry and Performed Word (Oxford University Press) and elsewhere. Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of Laughing Out Loud, I Fly (BIlingual Poems for Children) and Cilantro Facials: The Big Book of Latina and Chicano Toons & Comedy. He teaches cultural studies, creative writing and Chicano teatro at CSU-Fresno. Doug Henwood (Talk) Tuesday November 24, 8pm $5/$3 Doug Henwood is the author of the State of the USA Atlas and Wall Street. He is a frequent contributor to the Nation and is the editor of Left Business Observer. Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor of the Wall Street Journal wrote to Henwood, "You are scum...it's tragic that you exist." With such an endoursement we are quite fortunate to be able to hear Henwood's commentary on current economic machinations. KSW would like to acknowledge the support of Edgecombe Realty/ Robson Central, the B.C. Arts Council, the British Council and the Canada Council. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 23:09:53 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Bennett Subject: Welcome to Liverpool A free poetry event - David Bateman Jim Bennett Poets David Bateman and Jim Bennett at the Everyman Bistro, Liverpool. U.K. 8pm on Thursday 26th November Third Room, Everyman Bistro. Everyone welcome. Some open mike time available. ____________________________________________________________ Jim Bennett is still looking for venues for readings West Coast USA in Jan and July 99. ____________________________________________________________ Click on this link to vote for my site. http://conline.net/vote.mv?id=1780 Click on this link to visit my site. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1127/ "Poetry is what the future makes of it." John Garner ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 00:34:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: joel lewis Subject: hello, people in d.c. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Yes, i will be leaving my post in new jersey to give a reading this sunday(november 15th) @ 3pm at the "in your ear series" at the d.c. arts center, 24 38 18th St NW in Adams Morgan. in your ear" reading series at the DC arts center. I'll reading with two DC poets, Allison Cobb and Ethan Fugate. as they say, "hope to see you there" joel lewis ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 02:57:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: caul, cowl, wimple MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - caul, cowl, wimple /dev/null fur tha choldrin /dev/null fur tha choldrin torid frum shoftid sends end pusotouns tarnid tuwerds cuul pegis end grephocs duong thi wurk end brongong thi gorl tu thi frunt uf thi thietir frum thi beck uf thi thietir elung woth thi buy frum binieth thi fluur tu thi tup uf thi fluur duwn thi hied uf thi steors whiri fluwirs eri cerroid tu ell thi stegi curnirs end plecid on diip sheduws uf meonly bleck rusis ceaght shoftong pusotouns es lonks tarnid end shettirid end driems wurkid herd et brongong thi gorl on tu thi loght frum thi derkniss wholi o lovid on thi derkniss thi buy uf thi budy on thi derkniss uf fluwirs end sends siipong duwn binieth thi drewn carteons clusong on un thi stegi whiri thi sheduws uf choldrin ran herd ontu sheduws uf uthir tarnid choldrin wholi thi pegi clockid pusotouns end shoftid ots lengaegi es lonks fulluwid lonks end thi cuul carten upinid Sat Nov 14 02:47:29 EST 1998 and Sat Nov 14 02:47:33 EST 1998 or Sat Nov 14 02:47:35 EST 1998 and Sat Nov 14 02:47:38 EST 1998 if Sat Nov 14 02:47:41 EST 1998 or Sat Nov 14 02:47:43 EST 1998 and Sat Nov 14 02:47:45 EST 1998 or burn the bairn darkly the cool curtain opened _______________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 09:46:25 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: Awkward Ubutronics Subject: y2k pedagogy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit splinter groups activate networks ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 13:21:17 -0500 Reply-To: BANDREWS@prodigy.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: BETSY ANDREWS Subject: Re: hello, people in d.c. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I know Allison Cobb's work quite well. She's definately worth hearing. ---------- > From: joel lewis > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: hello, people in d.c. > Date: Saturday, November 14, 1998 12:34 AM > > Yes, i will be leaving my post in new jersey to give a reading this > sunday(november 15th) @ 3pm at the "in your ear series" at the d.c. arts > center, 24 38 18th St NW in Adams Morgan. in your ear" reading series at > the DC > arts center. I'll reading with two DC poets, Allison Cobb and Ethan > Fugate. > > as they say, "hope to see you there" > > joel lewis ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 08:10:19 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: The Real and the Social MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain "Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to. . . ." . . . Says Spicer. Language reveals the "real." It reveals "us," the writer. Spicer suggests here revelation rather than description or explanation. If Langpo takes anything from Spicer, it is like forcing squares into circles. . . Stroffolino's post the other day encouraged a lot of talk about the elders. Mark Wallace's even-headed post was encouraging and insightful. And yes, I acknowledge the work done by Bernstein, Silliman, Hejinian, et. al. But work alone does not demand respect. Ultimately, it's the poem that counts, and anyone should challenge a poetics that divorces the "real" from the word and then draws on Spicer's beautiful energy as another instrument to justify a bankrupt project. Bankrupt? I guess that depends. There are other complex elements at work here, and I certainly will contradict myself by saying that Langpo does offer some very necessary critiques of the relationship of language to power. But on the whole, Langpo does not "make it new" to borrow Pound's phrase. Its roots are in NY School and Black Mountain avant garde's of the 60's. Langpo simply materialized the subject matter. None of the weird Jungian mythos. No Spirit, no Archers, Water-bearers or Rams. Instead of cosmology, the social is the only given reality. Proof is truth. Empiricism. None of the weird Neo-Platonic reality of the "real." And today I realize that Pound's demand that we make poetry "new" is a dead concept. Young poets should not be held to an outdated Modernist standard. In fact, Make it Old. Respond to the pressures that face us today, not to the limiting baggage of a 60's materialism. Revelation anyway is always new, whatever the means of its evocation. Words have power when connected to the varied energies an Ancient would have known as a god. Agaom, Spicer says this below. He wasn't a language poet. I don't think... "I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger . . . to make things visible rather than to make pictures of them . . . not as an image or a picture but as something alive -- caught forever in the structure of words" And having said this I know there are others, many others, who don't think of poetry in the way I am suggesting. Chain's poetics (not to pick on that much-maligned zine) is admittedly not interested in a good Poem, with a capital P. Many of the works in the most recent issue juxtapose senses of social reality through various aesthetic formal mutations. But the majority of those pieces describe or explain. I'm sure there are some pieces that will contradict what I'm saying, but there is no revelation in Chain. I think I can say that. The 'social' is investigated at the expense of revealing the 'real.' Okay. Enough of that. Not to convert anyone, god forbid. But to spit it ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 13:40:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: the real; or, Dale's real Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Real is also a word. The real is also a piece of language, and is always a version. Real is the word where his mother held on as she dipped him in the river. Aporia is synonymn for real. Aporeal. Real is a baseball bat to beat the others, all the others, with. A flag planted in a hill of corpses, that is the real. Real as in really impressive or Really an idiot? They are really dead. Really in Heaven. Really among the Muslim blest. Really in Bardo. When Theodore Thoroughgood spotted Serena Rapt at a poetry reading, he came up to her and told her, 'You know, it really meant a lot to me, that time Allen and you and me went to bed together. It was a real revelation.' In reporting this to me, Serena, now 51, added, 'I was just a confused girl of 17 at the time. What does he think he's talking about?' Theodore, one of America's major poets. When one asks what the real roots of Language writing really are, and comes up with the New American Poetry in order to make a real that invalidates real innovation on the part of the former, one really ought to extend the thought and ask what the roots of the New American Poetry were, and surely some real answers would be Williams, H.D., Pound, Apollinaire, Raymond Rousell, Rilke, Whitehead, Koehler, Sauer....Which eminences in their turn had their derivations--which, if they invalidate one generation, should invalidate all. Really! And if it be realler to scorn 'make it new' nevertheless if a poem only repeat what has been done before word-for-word will it hold our attention? Really? I would really rather be getting these lectures straight from Tom Clark his really eminent self than from a really rather inchoate disciple. Couldn't you get Tom to post us a few, Dale, while you take time out to continue digesting his cooking? Tom is a real journalist and can opinionate so that I know what I find disagreeable about his opinions. You go all over the place and about all I can discern is the closed mind with which you started out. Really. Dad. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 13:44:12 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen Kelley Subject: Re: The Real and the Social MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I didn't realize one of our younger poets had figured out what the real is--and after all us old poets figured it couldn't be summed up so simply. Kudos. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 17:19:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Jenn Sondheim" Subject: credo MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - credo I could write this turning alphabet around, b for a, a for b, or back- wards, or through other local or global substitutions, perhaps there'd be new sounds out of old, swarms of sado-masochisms governing unwieldy words. or blanks, moments of silence to be filled in, or other conundrums. then there might be numbers and I'd think about teaching the shape of the world. and I'd worry into what it all means, the teaching, the shape of the world, the substitutions, the sado-masochisms. a rift would open and here I'd further insert myself, slowly, so as not to break or abrade the skin. in the rift I'd begin to write, hands somewhat over my head; every- thing has to fit. it would be a piece about the meaning, and this would be the result. so this is a text of the would-be, and not what you are read- ing, but what you would be reading, and this would-be relates to the mean- ing, but not to the shape of the world, or rather, it is only of the world and its shape. _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 14:30:18 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: Dad MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain David, check it out. There are others, besides Tom Clark, who actually think about the poem in ways that are disagreeable to you, really. I'm giving my opinions. Joe Safdie is some one else on this list who shares some of them. He's more patient in his articulation than I am at times, more clear. Tom would think I'm much too generous and too far off the path on the subject of revelation and poetics, I'm sure. He'd think I should call you an old foagy. For me, what is at issue, is fundamental, and should be discussed, and not poo-pooed away. Not to deny the position of a materialist poetics, but to question it, so that as practioners of this craft we can articulate our motiviations to one another. This is a public domain. So, sometimes I sound like a fool, as I am want, in public. I don't care. But I can only take a comparison to TC, although you mean to in a chastizing manner, as a compliment. You ol ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 16:25:34 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: fuming MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Although I did feel the tone of Chris's post was over the line, I have to agree with Mark Wallace here (as, I think, Mark Prejsnar probably would). It seems to me that what Ron & other Language Poets did in part was precisely to choose not to extend the poetics of their immediate predecessors. One can argue whether this was a good thing or not, but obviously it was one of the things that pissed off a lot of those same poetic predecessors about the language "project." Obviously many of the poets of the generation to which Chris, Mark, Mark & I belong are fairly sympathetic to the poetics of Silliman & others in the language camp-- while reserving for ourselves the right to be something other than "recruits." To whatever extent Ron disapproves, if it's true, I think that's ironic, & I think it's too bad. Then again, I've seen that sort of attitude coming from elder poets of very different aesthetics than Ron's-- I don't think it's anything unique to Langpo or to Ron. Mark DuCharme > Hey there: > > Well, I guess I've got to pitch in for Chris Stroffolino this time >around, albeit it may be true that the tone Chris was after maybe didn't >quite get over to the virtual page. But I suppose my problem is less with >the idea of Charles, Ron and Lee Ann and whoever having an understanding >of "community" but with the implication of Mark Prejsnar's statement that >what Ron is looking further is a "further extension of the poetics and >program of his generation, etc"--Mark, I'm quoting you badly here, not >having the original in front of me, but I think that's the gist of what >you said, and I think therein lies the problem. All of Ron's commentary >(see for instance the recent Philly Talks exchange, for instance) always >returns to the same problem--that the model that he and others followed >has NOT be taken up by the writers who came after, and that somehow that >is a grave failing. Now, I like Ron's poetry and much of his criticism a >great deal, but the idea that his work should be the model for future >generations of poets (and that any who don't follow his model have failed) >seems presumtuous to say the least, and may I venture to say so, the sort >of Marxist paternalism that at this point in time seems one of the great >weaknesses of the "language poetry" project as Ron has conceived of it >(and I'll add, by the way, that other "language poets" have NOT >necessarily so conceived of it, that is to say, Ron's sense of what >"language poetry" was about by no means needs to be taken as everybody's >sense of what it was about). I appreciate Ron's ability to serve as a >useful goad, and will even concede that goading is a pretty important >function of criticism, although in this instance the "conformity or >punishment" implications seem to me the problem rather than the solution. >But indeed, it is true, recent work has NOT "further extended the poetics >of Ron Silliman." But that fact seems to me at this point STILL a positive >development--while at the same time I admire Ron's poetry. > > So Chris, rave on baby. > > Mark Wallace > > >/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ >| | >| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu | >| GWU: | >| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw | >| EPC: | >| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace | >|____________________________________________________________________________| > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 20:05:42 -0500 Reply-To: mcx@bellatlantic.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: michael corbin Subject: Re: fuming MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------A8C63EA4E981F003A1FAD05C" --------------A8C63EA4E981F003A1FAD05C Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > So it fires. > So it doesn't goad > > responding /// "Community" remains a vaguely defined word.... > History is hard. Particularly the dialectical materialist kind. And you add to it the desire for an aesthetic truth telling. As opposition. From the (his) day job. Like (it) life matter'd, being down with the poetic struggle. And all that. So you pusch people away, even when it means risking being alone. Or the folie a deux.communitee But then, you are being service'd. By poetree. In the service of. Salute. In goading there is hope. And may be that is being. mc --------------A8C63EA4E981F003A1FAD05C Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit  
  







 So it        fires.
   So it doesn't goad 



 



responding /// "Community" remains a vaguely defined word....



 


History is hard. Particularly the dialectical materialist kind.


And you add to it the desire for an aesthetic truth telling. As opposition.
>From the (his) day job.


Like (it)  life matter'd, being down with the poetic struggle.
And all that.


So you pusch people away, even when it means risking being alone.


Or the folie a deux.communitee


But then, you are being service'd. By poetree. In the service of. Salute.


In goading there is hope.


And may  be that is being.


mc

 

--------------A8C63EA4E981F003A1FAD05C--
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 14 Nov 1998 10:41:20 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marcella Durand 
Subject:      more operations
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Thanks Hoa--

Yes, upon reading this whole thread, I was thinking of how toxic waste =
dumps & other environmental horrors are regularly placed in =
african-american areas-community-towns, creating cancer clusters and in =
some cases, ghost towns. An issue of "E" magazine a couple of months ago =
documents this quite extensively if anyone needs outside proof. These =
dumps are created with local gov't approval.

For a local (well, NYC) battle, check out Red Hook, where inhabitants =
are battling yet another incinerator. Also, the Harlem sewage plant, oh, =
um, "park"
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 09:50:22 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      file (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


     1  the shape of the world


    18  start here
    35  you see only what is early
    52  start here
    69  from any direction on the disk, indexed to any other
    86  encased between numerical header and the end-of-file sign
   103  start here
   120  which may wrap around, or how does it jump from one to the other
   137  if not indexed
   154  start here all at once, jennifer has all the time in the world
   171  start here, where the space spans an inch
   188  more or less, where the head resides, gone now
   205  start here, where the head appears
   222  you see only what is early
   239  index! index!
   256  start here
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 09:37:16 CST6CDT
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hank Lazer 
Organization: The University of Alabama
Subject:      e-address?

Does anyone have a current e-mail address (or ground mail address)
for Laura Moriarity?  Please back-channel.  Thanks.

Hank Lazer
hlazer@as.ua.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 08:30:03 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      Re: The Real and the Social
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Joe, Hi... I turned 31 on Nov 3rd. This whole "older poets/younger
poets" thing is such bullshit. I have affinities for certain people's
work or being and I gravitate towards them. Some one older than me has
been working at poetry longer than me and knows some things I don't. But
on the list this dichotomy is set up like a god-given category. It's
such a drag. Bromige and a few others can't understand why the young
don't worship them. It's because, to me, they're drips.



And Bromige, Jeez, I know. Where did that blast come from? I contacted
him backchannel last summer asking if I could reprint something he said
on the list (I was only kidding, goading him a little bit due to a Kent
Johnson thread then going on). He replied, without irony and very
serious, that I could publish whatever I'd like if I aplogized to the
List for calling him a coward in a post last winter! I wrote him back
and said something like, But David, you are a coward. Then, talking to
Irby a few weeks later, I felt I was beeing a jerk, contacted him and
tried to make ammends. I guess it didn't work.



I will send Hoa's book this week. I thought you had a copy already.
Don't worry about the money. Just have Ellis send me your chapbook when
it's done, or any other book you may have...



Well, I'm working this weekend and should go. I did join the Pound List,
but there's not much going on. I get the Poetics List in Digest now, so
it's not as obsessive and time consuming. And yes. Olson and the cosmos.
What else is there but Everything. Henri Corbin, I'm sure you know, goes
straight to the heart of that invisible angelogy.



Okay, I really must go. Thanks for the kind note. Hope all's well,



Dale

>

>Hey, youngster! (How old are you, anyway?) Good to hear from you about
these

>topics. Where is it that Olson says "I find the current substitution of
the

>Social for the Cosmos repellent" (or something like that). I live by
those

>words!

>

>Was your first post before this one directed to Bromige alone? Did he
send

>you some sort of denigrating post comparing you to Tom? What an
asshole! I

>mean, I like when he's clever as much as anyone else, but he really has
his

>head up his ass!

>

>Is there anyway I can get Hoa's book that has been praised so highly
lately?

>I'll even pay for it!

>

>Still wanting to see "Happiness" -- I'll get to it eventually . . .

>

>Wet, soggy, disgusting here -- but you've had your share of weather
this

>year, I know!

>

>Best,

>

>Joe

>_____

>

>"Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to

>drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing

>else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be

>tied to. . . ."

>

>. . . Says Spicer. Language reveals the "real." It reveals "us," the

>writer. Spicer suggests here revelation rather than description or

>explanation. If Langpo takes anything from Spicer, it is like forcing

>squares into circles. . .

>

>Stroffolino's post the other day encouraged a lot of talk about the

>elders. Mark Wallace's even-headed post was encouraging and

>insightful. And yes, I acknowledge the work done by Bernstein,

>Silliman, Hejinian, et. al. But work alone does not demand respect.

>Ultimately, it's the poem that counts, and anyone should challenge a

>poetics that divorces the "real" from the word and then draws on

>Spicer's beautiful energy as another instrument to justify a bankrupt

>project. Bankrupt? I guess that depends. There are other complex

>elements at work here, and I certainly will contradict myself by

>saying that Langpo does offer some very necessary critiques of the

>relationship of language to power. But on the whole, Langpo does not

>"make it new" to borrow Pound's phrase. Its roots are in NY School and

>Black Mountain avant garde's of the 60's. Langpo simply materialized

>the subject matter. None of the weird Jungian mythos. No Spirit, no

>Archers, Water-bearers or Rams. Instead of cosmology, the social is

>the only given reality. Proof is truth. Empiricism. None of the weird

>Neo-Platonic reality of the "real."

>

>And today I realize that Pound's demand that we make poetry "new" is a

>dead concept. Young poets should not be held to an outdated Modernist

>standard. In fact, Make it Old. Respond to the pressures that face us

>today, not to the limiting baggage of a 60's materialism. Revelation

>anyway is always new, whatever the means of its evocation. Words have

>power when connected to the varied energies an Ancient would have

>known as a god.

>

>Agaom, Spicer says this below. He wasn't a language poet. I don't

>think...

>

>

>"I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that

>has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger . . . to make things

>visible rather than to make pictures of them . . . not as an image or

>a picture but as something alive -- caught forever in the structure of

>words"

>

>And having said this I know there are others, many others, who don't

>think of poetry in the way I am suggesting. Chain's poetics (not to

>pick on that much-maligned zine) is admittedly not interested in a

>good Poem, with a capital P. Many of the works in the most recent

>issue juxtapose senses of social reality through various aesthetic

>formal mutations. But the majority of those pieces describe or

>explain. I'm sure there are some pieces that will contradict what I'm

>saying, but there is no revelation in Chain. I think I can say that.

>The 'social' is investigated at the expense of revealing the 'real.'

>

>Okay. Enough of that. Not to convert anyone, god forbid. But to spit

>it

>

>______________________________________________________

>Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

>



______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 09:01:01 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      Oops
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Big Back-Channel Mistake. Whew.



But while I'm at it I would re-emphasize how ridiculous the
Older/Younger categories are. Any category, for that matter.



On another note, Bromige mentioned Sauer in a note yesterday. His
studies in 16th century North American Explorations are probably some of
the best works written on the subject. He compares 16th c. relations of
the New World and compares the word with the physical geography of the
land as it is found today. He is a lucid writer and very exact and
empirical in his study. He is a rationalist and a scientist.



But to understand something like Cabeza de Vaca's experience and
transformation in the Southewestern United States, you have to find
other measures in addition to the erudite and revealing Sauer. Beatriz
Pastor and Rolanda Adorno offer some solid, structural critiques. Haniel
Long wrote a sympathetic treatment of de Vaca's spiritual
transformation. Williams offers his version of Encounter in his
wonderful book, I'm sure you all know, In The American Grain. That kind
of imaginative projection is ultimately a way of locating the "real."
Looking at something from all sides rather than from the accepted
version of "reality." And the study of Encounter narratives by alien
intruders is very interesting because so much of what we think we know
is complicated by the circumstances of 16th c. Eurpopean religious and
philosophical assumptions transposed onto a region that speaks another
language entirely, sees the world differently.



So, yes, thanks David for mentioning Sauer. He is one of the great
luminaries I rarely hear anyone speak about...









______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 12:51:54 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Re: The Real and the Social
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

The surprise 40th B-day party for my wife was a success!

David Bromige's reply to Dale Smith is suprisingly unsuccessful. It
starts off with a typically thrilling Bromigean whoosh, proposing
wonderfully clever and impressive things about language and the Real,
goes on to make a fairly compelling case for poetic rupture as the
deep thread of tradition and continuity within the poetics of
linguistic rapture, and ends with an ad hominem barrage in
the holiday spirit of imperial hypocrites sliming away about weapons
of mass destruction. Which is not to say that I am comparing David to
Clinton and Dale to Saddam, because I'm not.

By the way, did anyone see the big article in the NYT yesterday about
the hullabaloo at the Academy of American Poets? Really interesting.

Anyway, back to the point of my post: I, for the record,
completely disagree with David's comments about Dale. In fact, I
would like to say that I don't know what the bloody hell DB is
blabbering about there at the end. Dale is not "inchoate," he's
contentious and candid in his critiques when he makes them. I
find myself often disagreeing with him and sometimes a lot, but also
almost always impressed by his intelligence and grateful for the
spots of turbulence his posts can provide-- for sometimes the
ride gets featureless and boring. (Spots of turbulence like in the
feisty spunk of his hip magazine-- to which, having said that it's
hip, I promise before you all to never submit my work so that
you will see I am not sucking up.)

There's no need to answer dissenting voices on this List with such
grim outbursts as David's, even if David is (really) more learned
than most of us and  even if it _were_ true that Tom Clark had
successfully infiltrated the List via ventriloquized acolytes. If
anything, I think that when reactions like David's come, they betray
that a kind of nerve has been plucked. Don't you?

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 13:43:10 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      Re : Dale's real
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Dear Frances, I am engaged in a discussion of the term "real" on the
Buffalo List. A snotnose named Dale Smith who worships Tom Clark has
troubled the list before with halfbaked notions, and this time he writes in
claiming a grasp of the real that nullifies those of a number of
others.Basically, I wrote in saying Draw a circle inside the real. Then
call whats inside, the real, and whats outside, the false real. Everybody
does this but some of us dont forget the steps.

But he doesnt understand how to debate ideas. He is ad hominem. He only
grasps affinities. He thinks I challenge him because I dislike him. Well,
he was rude to me--quite unprovoked by me--from the start. But I have tried
hard to keep the focus each time on the issue, not the personality. What I
challenge are his presentations of certain ideas. I guess he just doesnt
have the education to grasp this (he studied with Tom Clark at New
College). And of course, baffled as to how to rebut, he calls me rude names
in the most childish fashion. Several folk have b-c'd to say they believe
he's abusing alchohol. he writes like he is. But perhaps that's just
natural talent.  I really dont think we're going to see poetry coming out
of a mind as closed as his.

His poetic model seems to be poet-as-bad-boy-bandito, for instance he
steals text from the I'net w/o permish, flares up when challenged, lies for
the hell of it (he admitted on the List that he solicited work from me but
didnt mean it), and gets his friends in trouble (he posted to the list
something by a chum of his and ours , Joe Safdie, that I expect Joe would
sooner have kept private). He is so like Tom in other ways, too (we recall
how Tom got Bob Grenier in trouble by publishing a private remark)--you
will recall that Tom never replied to my point-by-point deconstruction of
his would-be assassination of Langpoets espec Barrett in Poetry Flash in
85). He writes that on the topic I have my head up my ass but as I will
tell him, thats the place to find this topic. Hasta la Vista, Dave.

Oops!
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 13:59:49 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      plucking kent's nerve
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I agree  with Kent that the first part of my letter is superior to the last
part. If memory serves him aright, he will recall Dale began ad hominem
with me some months ago.* . At least I laid out my argument before turning
to the inchoateness of Dale's writing (and is this to be ad hominem?). I
think it inchoate to address the matter of the real w/o taking into account
the simplest problems, which was why I addressd this issue in my response.
Yes, when definitions of the real appear, here or elsewhere, a nerve of
interest is always plucked chez moi. Et tu, Kent?--or are you plucked into
song by personality clashes?

Btw, neither am I drawing a comparison between me and Clinton, and Dale and
Saddam. Nor do I think Kent is anything like Jack Spicer. Really. Nor Hen
ry Kissinger. Not the least bit.        David


* and now we have the transparent oops i meant to b-c this as furthering
his ad hominem attacks. hence my answer in kind.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 14:21:40 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      apologies
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

        I see it was Joe Safdie who said I had my head up my asshole, not
Dale. Dale said I was a coward and a drip. I hear they are both graduating
middle school next spring.  David
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 14:14:59 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jay Schwartz 
Subject:      Re: apologies
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Can you please take this personal battle off the List to the tidewaters of
the backchannel????
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 15:01:54 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Safdie Joseph 
Subject:      Re: apologies
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

This is the second time in the last two months that some ill-considered
remarks of mine meant to be private have been inadvertently broadcast to the
list as a whole, causing me extreme embarrassment and very probably the
ill-will and enmity for all time of the individuals involved.

All e-mail is of course potentially public property, and I would warn anyone
on this list or others of that one unassailable fact.

I'd like to state publicly, as I have privately, that David Bromige's
accomplishments in the poetry world are immense, and that the great majority
of his posts on this list have been the occasion of great delight.

I'm going off the list for an extended period of time. I'd appreciate
hearing from anyone backchannel (joseph.safdie@lwtc.ctc.edu) about any
subjects that may be of mutual poetic interest. Happily or sadly, most
people now know what those are.

Joe Safdie
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 18:40:23 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      inchoate
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Maybe I'm cynical but I'm suspicious of "accidental" front channeling of
ad hominem attacks.  I will never apologize for an opinion that was
accidentally broadcast by someone else.  If it is yr opinion stand by it,
however crudely expressed.

Dale's writing is indeed inchoate; for example he chastizes the Language
Poets for failing to make it new, then in the next paragraph decides that
this demand for novelty is not such a good idea after all. He pretends to
respect poets, then says their project is bankrupt, because it neglects
the "poem."

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 05:27:59 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      grow DOWN
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

an older poet once said "some
day, too, you'll
be an older poet"

Big Deal!

I leave for two days and come back to a battle that sounds more
likely to be at home on TV than on the list--and to some 110 messages!

Grow UP!


Todd Baron
(remap)
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 22:35:36 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Max Winter 
Subject:      a quote
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

"We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is..."

w. stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"


=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 22:36:40 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Katherine Lederer 
Subject:      A Spectacular Chapbook by Juliana Spahr
In-Reply-To:  <19981114223019.12031.qmail@hotmail.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Announcing the publication of

                S P I D E R W A S P   O R   L I T E R A R Y   C R I T I C I S M

                                                        by Juliana Spahr


From the introduction:

In 1986 Ron Silliman's pivotal anthology In the American Tree has an
introduction that begins, "'I HATE SPEECH.' Thus capitalized, these words
in an essay entitled 'On Speech,' the second of five short critical pieces
by Robert Grenier in the first issue of This, the magazine he cofounded
with Barrett Watten in winter, 1971, announced a breach--a new moment in
American writing" (xv).

In 1996 Bob Perelman notes that the phrase, "in hindsight, was an important
literary gesture ... important in its positing of literary space."

I don't want to make too much of these isolated moments other than to use
them as indicators of how the critical discussion about contemporary poetry
uses a rhetoric of categorization and separation whether by editors of
anthologies or by critic-participants. Contemporary poetry is presented
again and again as a series of separate and distinct subcultures. Both
these examples are creation myths that literalize the name avant-garde.
[....]

The essay goes on to disuss writings by, among others, Lisa Jarnot, Jena
Osman, and Joan Retallack.


        * * *

S P I D E R W A S P   O R   L I T E R A R Y   C R I T I C I S M   is the
second in the Spectacular Chapbooks Series. The first is   S O N G S   &
S C O R E S   by Tina Celona. Complete with pretty-paper covers, each sells
for $6.

Mail orders to:  Spectacular Books, Katy Lederer, ed. * 216 W. 104th
Street, 1C * NY, NY 10025

Forthcoming titles by Josh May, Ishmael Klein, Lyn Hejinian, Martin
Corless-Smith, Leslie Scalapino, Prageeta Sharma and others.

Signed and numbered sets are available:  $50 for the series, which will
consist of ten editions when complete. (International orders: include $1
postage per book/ $5 for sets)
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 23:57:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael W Bibby 
Subject:      black british poetry
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

some students in my contemporary lit seminar want to do their research
papers on black british poetry, esp. dub poetry (e.g., Linton Kwesi
Johnson and Jean "Binta" Breeze)--i've referred them to articles by
Alastair Niven, Fred D'Aguiar, and Patrica Waugh, and Anne Walmsey's book
on the Carribean Artists Movement--anyone on the list have other
references i could turn them on to?

thanks!

Michael Bibby
Department of English
Shippensburg University
1871 Old Main Drive
Shippensburg, PA  17257
(717) 532-1723
mwbibb@ark.ship.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 22:41:25 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      re : fuming
Mime-Version: 1.0
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I realize I can never perceive Ron Silliman's authorship from the p-o-v of
poets now in their 30s. But I can testify on this Thread. I am not posting
today as Ron's apologist; he is more capable of that, than I. Mark
duCharme's post, Mark Wallace's, even Chris Stroffolini's, though I found
the tone misleading at first,would make sense of a predicament I well
recall experiencing myself, that of dealing with the expectations laid upon
one--with the best will in the world--by senior poets one admires or
respects.For us, these were particularly  Creeley, Levertov and Duncan,
whose encouragement we enjoyed, and whose strictures we sometimes resented,
and although I write "we," often enough I felt alone. Back then, I would
have been glad enough to obey, had I only the talent. But it is always
impossible. The picture that held them captive had changed--we were
captives of another, much different, presentation.

I must say, I wouldn't know how to extend or further or develop Silliman's
work, w/o first taking a giant step back, leaving the details and
abstracting the overall effect. That is, for anyone today, but Ron, to
write books like Ron's, doesnt seem the most useful way to proceed. To
develop his egalitarian stance in some other way, though : I believe I see
this in Mark Wallace's poetry, and not at all to its detriment. Or to
develop his notional systems--or those of Jackson Mac Low--to develop these
_or_ to qualify them--in ways that put a sufficient distance between
themselves, and their precursors, looks like another extension that several
are doing.

Don't you think it is this Ron hopes for, and nothing slavish? I am sure he
knows that the New never, never comes from the predicted direction, "for
[us] who love to be astonished" (Hejinian). Sometimes the only way to honor
those who helped one, is to make forms as unpopular as at first theirs
were. When _Ketjak_ or _Opera Works_ appeared, poetry was still relatively
popular, in no small measure in its avant-garde mode. There were people in
considerable numbers to find the new work ugly, inhuman, insectoidal,
offensive thanks to its doing the job of announcing (by embodiment rather
than declaration) 'It's changed, it's not the same.' In other words, by
bearing the message of change encoded in their forms, these poets reaped
their whirlwind of hostility and resentment, that, if directed anywhere,
ought to be directed at society, the real topic. At society, and at the
culture. I would agree that this era makes that less likely, because as a
people we are becoming inured to surface qualities of offensiveness, and
because far fewer find the time to read poetry--or the courage ("I can't
_afford_ to look at my life; I might have to change it and I can't _afford_
that!") and that prevents any deeper, more alarming offensiveness from
being their experience.

But if Ron means there should be an articulation, among current
practitioners in their 30s, of the theory of current practice that is the
equal of Language poetry's theoretical push, I myself would hear that as
"weigh what effort we put into poetry" and let that be the challenge : for
after all, conditions have altered so much; books are harder to produce and
circulate now, than in 1970-85. On the other hand, the computer is
virtually universal, and online zines proliferate. And : Langpo never had a
List.

I can hear my mother's voice telling me that none of this is really my
business, and I am sure she is right. But somehow that makes addressing it,
irresistible.  David
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 22:55:00 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      a p.s. to re : fuming
Mime-Version: 1.0
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>But if Ron means there should be an articulation, among current
>practitioners in their 30s, of the theory of current practice that is the
>equal of Language poetry's theoretical push, I myself would hear that as
>"weigh what effort we put into poetry" and let that be the challenge : for
>after all, conditions have altered so much; books are harder to produce
>and circulate now, than in 1970-85. On the other hand, the computer is
>virtually universal, and online zines proliferate. And : Langpo never had
>a List.

The thought here feels gnarled. Let me ted it out a little. "...that is the
equal of Language poetry's theoretical push, I myself would hear that as
"weigh what effort we put into poetry"--and let that be the challenge,
rather than to take it that that effort specifically has to be spent in
articulating and circulating theory. For after all, conditions have altered
so much; books are harder to produce and circulate now, but meanwhile, the
computer is virtually universal, and online zines proliferate. The sort of
debate we are hopeful of, here, where theory often finds articulation in a
disguised mode, may be replacing the Langpo procedures of the 70s and  80s.
Langpo never had a List."
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 23:09:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      sheesh, the moment my back is turned!
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Listafarians, speaking as Todd Baron, what's gotten into you?! I can't
leave you alone for a mere two days w/o you going ballistic! Look at the
livingroom! Don't you ever think of your mother,,,uh, father,,,uh, me,
Todd? If you werent over 16, I'd ground you both.. uh, all three... uh, how
many so far have posted on this Thread....? I say Snip it, and let's return
to our real business, which is....uh, well....
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 00:20:04 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      Arshile Reading in San Francisco
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The cast of characters for this reading has been posted a couple of times
before. There's been some talk on the list about a lack of
progression/connection from one generation to the next, but this program
that began with Carl Rakosi and Barbara Guest and included Edmund
Berrigan, Jocelyn Saidenburg and the generation in between, with other
young poets, e.g. Shannon Welch, in attendance pretty much belies that
theory. (Also in attendance: Marjorie Perloff & John Tranter).
Unfortunately, Mark Salerno, who is a very fine poet in his own write,in
addition to being the editor of Arshile (which, by the way, rhymes with
"marshall"), did not read. The poems of Elizabeth Wilis were, for me, the
highlight of the evening.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1998 21:29:48 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         John Cayley 
Subject:      FROM: Enzo Minarelli
Comments: To: british-poets@mailbase.ac.uk, lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu,
          jrothenb@ucsd.edu, jrothenberg@home.com, jrothenb@ucsd.edu
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Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 21:33:33 +0100
From: Enzo Minarelli <3vitre@iii.it>


VIDEO SOUND POETRY FESTIVAL

III INTERNATIONAL MEETING of VIDEOPOETRY RESEARCH


Archivio 3ViTre di Polipoesia
Link project

Link, via Fioravanti 14, Bologna
9-10 december 1998



two nights of official program
CD-Rom
Web Site http://www.iii.it/3ViTre - News Group
One-man videoshows Richard Kostelanetz and Klaus Peter Dencker pioneers
of videopoetry research
videoperformance-videopoesia ad libitum
workshop
sound environment
Official list: videoselection
(Vpoe-Videopoetry) (Vperf-Videoperformance)

1   Akenaton “Poème numeriques”, 15’, 1997, Ajaccio, France. (Vpoe)
2   Mark Sutherland “tvi (a video/poetry book)” 30’, 1994, Toronto,
Canada. (Vpoe)
3  Dmitry Bulatov “Russian Folk Noism Fables” {S=(n*&)}, 5’13”-4’09”,
1993-95, Kaliningrad, Russia. (Vpoe)
4   Ginestra Calzolari “Rousing”, 3’, 1997, Bologna, Italy. (Vperf)
5  Fatmi Mounir “Deux poèmes pour mourir” 18’, 1997, Rabat, Morocco.
(Vpoe)
6   Xavier Sabater “Cristo y tres tiros”, 6’, 1992, Barcelona, Spain.
(Vpoe)
7   Jurgen Olbrich “O ton - Monolog für die kunst” 18’, 1987, Kassel,
Germany. (Vpoe)
8  Anna Homler “Pharmacia Poetica” 5’, 1992, Los Angeles, U.S.A.. (Vpoe)

9  Nobuo Kubota “N.K. at the Western Front”, 20’, 1990, Toronto, Canada.

(Vperf)
10  Magnús Palsson “Eye talk” 20’, 1998,  Reykjavik, Iceland. (Vpoe)
11  Fabio Doctorovich “Aswtz” 3’, 1997, Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Vpoe)
12  Eduardo Kac “Reversed Mirror” 7’, 1996, Chicago, U.S.A.. (Vpoe)
13  Philadelpho Menezes “Nomi impropri”, 2’30”, 1996-97, São Paulo,
Brazil. (Vpoe)

Videoperformance list /videopoesia ad libitum:

1   Giovanna Colacevich “Omaggio a Kafka”  30’, 1997,  Roma, Italy.
(Vperf)
2   Zoro Babel/Niki Bell “Im Gegenteil”  30’, 1997, Munich,
Germany.      (Vperf)
3   Fernando Aguiar “Manipula(c)ção” 18’, 1994, NASA, Santiago de
Compostela, Spagna-Lisbona, Portugal. (Vperf)
4   Rod Summers “It’s a secret” 6’12”,1998, Maastricht, Holland. (Vpoe)
5   Giancarlo Pavanello “Poesia Critica” 11’, 1996-97, Milano, Italy.
(Vpoe)
6   Joel Hubaut “Strip-tease color” 25’, 1997, Hérouville, France.
(Vperf)
7   Paul Dutton “P.D. at C.u.b.a.-Cultur Münster”, 60’, 1994, Toronto,
Canada. (Vperf)
8  Corrado Cicciarelli “Ombre” 4’,1997, Genova, Italy. (Vpoe)
9  Mauro Dal Fior “Suite not for  Cage” 21’, 1997, Verona, Italy.
(Vperf)
10  Endre Szkaorsi “Funeral oration” 5’12”, 1993, Budapest, Hungary.
(Vpoe)
11  Démosthène Agrafiotis “24, Pidéo-Voésie” 20’, 1993, Atene, Greece.
(Vpoe)
12  Rita degli Esposti-John Gian “Poesia Totale”, 31’, 1997, Locarno,
Switzerland. (Vperf)

Special effects inside the ad libitum section:

1   Kirstern Justesen (Denmark)
“TV-Presentations”  60’ 1985-96  /  “Ice Walk” 30’, 1992, Copenaghen.
(Vperf)

2   Clemente Padin (Uruguay)
“No estan muertos....” 15’, 1996, Santiago del Cile, Cile. (Vperf)
“Missing Miss” 5’, 1993, Montevideo, Uruguay. (Vperf)

3  Sarenco, Tot Brossa, Verona, 40’, 1997-98. (Vperf)

4 Eric Andersen (Denmark)
“Opus 1961” 52’, 1997-98 Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. (Vperf)

5 Mexican videopoetry edited by Araceli Zuñiga (Mexico)
* Eduardo M. Vélez ‘Nao’ 3’, ‘Lup’ 3’, ‘Zap’ 3’, Mexico City, 1998.
* Juan José Díaz Infante ‘Música de Cámara’ 27’, Mexico City, 1998.
* Ximena Cuevas ‘Para quererte’ 3’ - ‘Corazón’ sangrante’, 3’, Mexico
City 1998.
* Angel Cosmos ‘Popfnetic’, 3’, Mexico City, 1993.
* Antonio del Rivero ‘Icono’, 3’, Mexico City, 1998.
* Marisa Boullosa ‘Poema de Joan Brossa’, 3’, Barcelona, 1998.
* Pilar Rodríguez ‘Ella es frontera’ 25’ - ‘La idea que habitamos’ 18’,
Mexico City, 1998.
* Cristina Casanova Seuma ‘Argument’, 2’, Barcelona, 1997.




CD-Roms’ spot

1  CD-Rom ALIRE, Doc(k)s 1997, France. (Vpoe)

2  Komninos Zervos “Cyberpoetry Underground” 1997,
London-England/Queesland-Australia.

3   Philadelpho Menezes-Wilton Azevedo “InterPoesia”, 1997, PUC, São
Paulo, Brazil.

4   International Anthology of Digital Poetry edited by Eduardo Kac,
1996-97 New Media Editions, Chicago, U.S.A..



 “ PIONEERS OF THE VIDEOPOETRY RESEARCH”
One-man videoshosw
Richard Kostelanetz (U.S.A.)
Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany)

Richard Kostelanetz (U.S.A.)
“Onomatopoeia” 22’, 1990, New York, U.S.A.. (Vpoe)
“Invocations” 61’, 1988, New York-Stockolm, U.S.A.-Sweden. (Vpoe)

Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany)
“Raush” 8’11”, 1970-71, SWF, Saarbrucken. (Vpoe)
“Starfighter” 4’27”, 1970-71, SWF, Saarbrucken. (Vpoe)
“Astronaut” 4’02”, 1970-71, SWF, Saarbrucken. (Vpoe)


VIDEO-SONIC ENVIRONMENT
UNA TANTUM

Luca Patella
“Quel che muta, riposa - è fatica seguire gli stessi ed esserne
guidati”,
1997, Rome, Italy.



Workshops about/into/with/for/between/ VIDEOPOETRY
by Archivio 3Vitre di Polipoesia

*Analysis-showing of videopoems
*How to produce a videopoem
*Storyboards of videopoems
*The passage from a written-sound poem to videopoetry
*Videopoetry theory

--
Archivio 3ViTre di Polipoesia
Enzo Minarelli
c.p.152     44042 Cento Italia
ph.fax +39.(0)51.901719
cellulare 0335.693.4077
email:  3ViTre@iii.it
http://www.iii.it/3vitre

______________________________________________________________________

Eduardo Kac
Assistant Professor of Art and Technology
Art and Technology Department
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Avenue, Room 414
Chicago IL 60603
Phone: (312) 345-3567
Fax: (312) 345-3565
E-mail: ekac@artic.edu

http://www.ekac.org

______________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 06:50:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Writing like Ron
Comments: To: Poetics List 
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"That is, for anyone today, but Ron, to write books like Ron's, doesnt seem
the most useful way to proceed."

And Ron even wonders about that.

Although, in support of David's point, I'll repeat something I said on a
panel under the big tent at Naropa a few years ago -- "whoever writes like
me in 50 years is not my friend" -- and it's true.

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 08:02:53 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      conference note

  Here are some brief comments on the Translation Conference sponsored by
Talisman & Stevens Institute in Hoboken last weekend. There were many
simultaneous panels & I concentrated mainly on the Russian ones.  High
points there were Julia Kunina's talk on Nabokov's theories of translation
and some remarks by NY-based Moscow poet Andrey Gritsman on his approach
to English/Russian & Russian/English trans. procedures.  One statement of
his struck me.  He was emphasizing the importance of investigating the
poet's "sensibility" - for which there is no single equivalent word in
Russian - & the poet's general "artistic approach" to language; and said
that - in the context of the increasing multi-lingual activity among poets
today -  in a sense, "the language doesn't matter".  "I know this
is sort of heretical statement"... etc.

I think what Gritsman was pointing out is that "artistic approach" to
language is a special activity - implying that the artist uses language(s)
as tools to get across a complex of effects.  The specific language or
actual verbal texture is not the poem itself; the poem is these things
organized in a conceptual-dramatic movement or whole (dangerous word).
In this sense he meant "the language doesn't matter" - the multilingual
poet crosses from one to another, getting across certain effects.

Now of course there is another side - which includes the idiomatic & local
& slang meanings which to a large extent supply the richness of any particular
language!  The local knowledge.  But I think Gritsman's point about the
uniqueness of the "artistic approach" is very important - after all, it's the
artistic approach which isolates & highlights local meanings for the sake of
further meanings & effects.

This whole area was brought home further for me by the long series of readings
at the main session Saturday night in celebration of a new World Poetry
anthology.  There were a lot of very fine & often hilarious short readings
of translations from the ancient Greeks to the present, and the DRAMATIC
nature of poetry - the organizing of linguistic elements not so much for
a beautiful texture or exploratory meditation but as the most powerful &
efficient way to express specific situations - this seemed a dominant factor,
at least to me.

Other conference highlights for me were Caroline Bergvall's fascinating
paper on untranslatability as a theme in a lot of American poets - focusing
on some remarkable work by Joan Retallack.  I have some reservations about
Bergvall's extended thesis - also it seems a little ironic that Americans -
the most mono-linguistic of societies (though that's changing) - would
thematize the "stutter" or the knot of incommunicability in speech - maybe
Americans should try a little harder first... - it was a wonderful paper
nonetheless, as was Craig Dworkin's unpacking of the subtexts and puns
leading the detective-reader on in a funny "detective story" parody by
Gertrude Stein.  The detective must be a multilinguist of necessity to
follow Stein's clues.

Just a few of the highlights of a very valuable conference - Ed Foster & co.
deserve a big hand for getting it all together -

Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 15:31:22 +0200
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         nicholas grindell 
Subject:      translation conference
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

could anyone add to henry gould's report?
like he said, so many parallel panels...
i got the programme but unfortunately
couldn't attend due to geographical
constraints (hoboken's a long way from berlin)
all information would be much appreciated
and thanks henry for your post.

greetings

nicholas grindell
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 10:06:26 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: apologies
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
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Please don't -- Monday morning needs good chuckles!  Thank You Thank You!

On Sun, 15 Nov 1998, Jay Schwartz wrote:

> Can you please take this personal battle off the List to the tidewaters of
> the backchannel????
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:28:03 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jordan Davis 
Subject:      Writing like Jordan
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Ron --

Do you think Marianne Moore's increased interest in public relations as her
career outlived modernism had anything to do with what is generally
perceived as a slide into sentimentality in her later work?

-- Jordan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:33:29 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Edward Foster 
Subject:      Re: translation conference
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

it's true there was so much happening (as many as five or six readings or
presentations at the same time) that it is impossible to summarize the
conference. there was in fact supposed to be a closing session, but it was
abandoned on the grounds that there had so much it would be impossible to
do everything justice. in my case there were all sorts of official duties
and so even less opportunity to hear all but a small part. among the many
that i had to miss, but of which i've been told much were the five russian
sessions, directed by john high and vadim mesyats, with an amazing number
of well known poets -- druk, kunina, etc. pierre joris's presentation on
celan is said to have been very strong, but i had to miss it (at that
moment being assigned to get pizza for 200 poets and translators). i did,
however, hear murat nemet-nejat talk about benjamin and spicer, and in my
mind murat now becomes a spicerite. (susan bernofsky also spoke on
benjamin, drawing a line from german romaniticism to him; murat then drew
the line from benjamin to spicer. this may not sit well with some people
on this listserv, but i think the argument is 100% correct.) and carolyn
bergvall and tim davis did a fine (but much too short) reading with stacey
doris giving the background to the translations. and laird hunt read a
translation of stuart merrill that must be better even than the original
french. henry weinfield and elaine corts read from their very different
versions of merrill, both fascinating, and henry, serge gavronsky,
christopher sawyer-laucanno, and stephen ratcliffe (speaking from very
different points of the compass) made it clear the twentieth century
has begun to exhaust mallarme. raymond scheindlin's translation of _job_
was a great discovery. and andrew schelling powerfully read his
translations from sakskrit. and eleni sikelianos powerfully read her
translations from greek. and kristin prevalett powerfully read her
translation from russian. lindsay watton powerfully read his. and
rachel hadas and vyt bakaitis and rika lesser and . . . . there were plays
performed in new translations from spanish. Readings from _poems from the
millenium_ and _XUL. another important discovery: rosette c. lamont,
translator of charlotte delbo's _auschwitz and after_. (lamont teaches at
sarah lawrence, but i think i'll kidnap her to teach at my university; she
must be wonderful in a classroom.) and sandy flitterman-lewis on artaud,
bill martin on book design as translation, adam sorkin on romanian poets,
david curzon translating deschamps, leonard schwartz reading with zhang er
(who then did the chinese workshop), chana bloch (!!!). . . . -- And
truly, i've only begun. there really couldn't be a final session; no one
could put it all in perspective and be fair to everyone. i've mentioned
maybe a fifth or a tenth of what happened. burt kimmelman's panel on
armand schwerner, presented in conjunction with the new _talisman_ issue
on schwerner. -- caroline bergvall reading nicole brossard. -- the
portuguese writers and translators who, like the russians, found rooms and
carried their discussions and readings way beyond the schedule (and, for
some of the russians, on through the night and into the next morning).
BUT two things that do have to be mentioned: the great overriding presence
of allen mandelbaum, who was there for most of the conference, gave the
keynote address on saturday, and kept reminding people of the seriousness
of what was happening. And, second, the translations which will result
from the conference and of which there will apparently be many.

some of the papers and translations from the conference will be published
in a special double-issue of _talisman_. anyone who did not attend the
conference but would like to have work considered for that issue should
send it to talisman at p.o. box 3157, jersey city, nj 07303-3157.

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, nicholas grindell wrote:

> could anyone add to henry gould's report?
> like he said, so many parallel panels...
> i got the programme but unfortunately
> couldn't attend due to geographical
> constraints (hoboken's a long way from berlin)
> all information would be much appreciated
> and thanks henry for your post.
>
> greetings
>
> nicholas grindell
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:42:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Edward Foster 
Subject:      Re: translation conference
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

horrible (!!!) mistake. i meant to say the twentieth century has NOT begun
to exhaust mallarme -- not, repeat NOT NOT NOT.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:52:02 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Edward Foster 
Subject:      Re: translation conference
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

CORRECT VERSION WITH THE "NOT" PROPERLY INSERTED

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Edward Foster wrote:

> it's true there was so much happening (as many as five or six readings or
> presentations at the same time) that it is impossible to summarize the
> conference. there was in fact supposed to be a closing session, but it was
> abandoned on the grounds that there had so much it would be impossible to
> do everything justice. in my case there were all sorts of official duties
> and so even less opportunity to hear all but a small part. among the many
> that i had to miss, but of which i've been told much were the five russian
> sessions, directed by john high and vadim mesyats, with an amazing number
> of well known poets -- druk, kunina, etc. pierre joris's presentation on
> celan is said to have been very strong, but i had to miss it (at that
> moment being assigned to get pizza for 200 poets and translators). i did,
> however, hear murat nemet-nejat talk about benjamin and spicer, and in my
> mind murat now becomes a spicerite. (susan bernofsky also spoke on
> benjamin, drawing a line from german romaniticism to him; murat then drew
> the line from benjamin to spicer. this may not sit well with some people
> on this listserv, but i think the argument is 100% correct.) and carolyn
> bergvall and tim davis did a fine (but much too short) reading with stacey
> doris giving the background to the translations. and laird hunt read a
> translation of stuart merrill that must be better even than the original
> french. henry weinfield and elaine corts read from their very different
> versions of merrill, both fascinating, and henry, serge gavronsky,
> christopher sawyer-laucanno, and stephen ratcliffe (speaking from very
> different points of the compass) made it clear the twentieth century
> has NOT begun to exhaust mallarme. raymond scheindlin's trans, of _job_
> was a great discovery. and andrew schelling powerfully read his
> translations from sakskrit. and eleni sikelianos powerfully read her
> translations from greek. and kristin prevalett powerfully read her
> translation from russian. lindsay watton powerfully read his. and
> rachel hadas and vyt bakaitis and rika lesser and . . . . there were plays
> performed in new translations from spanish. Readings from _poems from the
> millenium_ and _XUL. another important discovery: rosette c. lamont,
> translator of charlotte delbo's _auschwitz and after_. (lamont teaches at
> sarah lawrence, but i think i'll kidnap her to teach at my university; she
> must be wonderful in a classroom.) and sandy flitterman-lewis on artaud,
> bill martin on book design as translation, adam sorkin on romanian poets,
> david curzon translating deschamps, leonard schwartz reading with zhang er
> (who then did the chinese workshop), chana bloch (!!!). . . . -- And
> truly, i've only begun. there really couldn't be a final session; no one
> could put it all in perspective and be fair to everyone. i've mentioned
> maybe a fifth or a tenth of what happened. burt kimmelman's panel on
> armand schwerner, presented in conjunction with the new _talisman_ issue
> on schwerner. -- caroline bergvall reading nicole brossard. -- the
> portuguese writers and translators who, like the russians, found rooms and
> carried their discussions and readings way beyond the schedule (and, for
> some of the russians, on through the night and into the next morning).
> BUT two things that do have to be mentioned: the great overriding presence
> of allen mandelbaum, who was there for most of the conference, gave the
> keynote address on saturday, and kept reminding people of the seriousness
> of what was happening. And, second, the translations which will result
> from the conference and of which there will apparently be many.
>
> some of the papers and translations from the conference will be published
> in a special double-issue of _talisman_. anyone who did not attend the
> conference but would like to have work considered for that issue should
> send it to talisman at p.o. box 3157, jersey city, nj 07303-3157.
>
> On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, nicholas grindell wrote:
>
> > could anyone add to henry gould's report?
> > like he said, so many parallel panels...
> > i got the programme but unfortunately
> > couldn't attend due to geographical
> > constraints (hoboken's a long way from berlin)
> > all information would be much appreciated
> > and thanks henry for your post.
> >
> > greetings
> >
> > nicholas grindell
> >
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 12:16:26 -0500
Reply-To:     levitsk@ibm.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Rachel Levitsky 
Subject:      Great Ladies of Poetry
Comments: To: Easter8@aol.com, mbpratt@earthlink.net, rgladman@sfaids.ucsf.edu,
          snellro@hotmail.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

New York Times

          November 14, 1998


          Poets Leaving Academy to Protest Absence
          of Minorities

          By DINITIA SMITH

               EW YORK -- Two prominent American poets, both of them
               women, have resigned as chancellors from the Academy of
          American Poets, a venerable body at the symbolic center of the
American
          poetry establishment, to protest the absence of blacks and
other minority
          groups on the academy's board of chancellors. The chancellors,
Carolyn
          Kizer and Maxine Kumin, both of whom have lobbied to admit
minorities
          to the board, submitted their resignations to academy
president Jonathan
          Galassi this week.

          "There's never been a black woman chancellor," Ms. Kizer, who
won a
          Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1985, said in a telephone
interview. Ms. Kizer
          said she was also upset by a larger problem, which she defined
as "the
          insularity among the chancellors, and the lack of women."

          "I don't like the way the collection of chancellors sets
itself apart from the
          mainstream," Ms. Kumin, who won a Pulitzer in 1974, said in an
          interview. "I don't want to see it identified with elitism.
It's very much an
          East Coast group."

          The academy, which was founded in 1934 by Marie Bullock and is
based
          in Soho, at 584 Broadway, at Prince Street, promotes poetry
nationally.
          Its 12-member board of chancellors exists mainly to administer
the
          Tanning Prize, at $100,000 the country's largest literary
award, and a
          smaller prize, the Academy Fellowship, of $20,000.

          The board includes some of the country's best known and most
influential
          poets, including John Ashbery, Richard Howard, John Hollander,
Jorie
          Graham, Donald Justice, J.D. McClatchy, Mark Strand, Mona Van
          Duyn, David Wagoner and W.S. Merwin. This year the board
awarded
          the Tanning Prize to A.R. Ammons.

          "They always go to the same person again and again," said Ms.
Kizer,
          meaning, she said, that the prize is frequently awarded to
white male
          poets.

          When the first Tanning Prize was awarded in 1994, Ms. Kizer
said she
          lobbied for it to go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American
poet.
          The chancellors awarded the prize instead to W.S. Merwin, and
were
          criticized because Merwin is a chancellor himself. In 1996,
Adrienne Rich
          won the prize. The other winners have been James Tate and
Anthony
          Hecht.

          Since 1946, when the academy began awarding its annual
fellowship, the
          prize has been given to only two African-American poets, Jay
Wright and
          Robert Hayden. Of the 64 Fellowships that have been awarded,
14 have
          gone to women. There have been 57 chancellors in all. There
has never
          been a black chancellor, but there have been 12 women on the
board.

          Ms. Kumin said that as vacancies have occurred she has lobbied
for the
          poet Lucille Clifton, who is black, to be elected. "We've just
been out
          voted," she said.

          Galassi, president of the academy and editor in chief of
Farrar, Straus &
          Giroux, said of the resignations of Ms. Kumin and Ms. Kizer:
"I was very
          sorry that they are doing this at a time when we are in the
process of
          putting our governing structure through review."

          He said that he would not accept the resignations and that he
would try to
          persuade both poets to remain as chancellors to help him
instate changes
          at the academy.

          Galassi said the academy was in the process of assembling an
ad hoc
          committee that "will look at the constitution of the
chancellors." "The
          academy has been in the process of broadening for four or five
years, and
          before that," he said. "We started the National Poetry Month.
We are
          starting a Poetry Book Club, an online poetry classroom.
They're all
          outreach programs. They are very inclusive."

          "We want to be an organization for everyone," he added.

          William Wadsworth, the academy's executive director, added
that the
          lack of women and minority groups on the board "has always
been a
          controversial aspect of the academy."

          This year, German writer Fred Viebahn, who is married to Rita
Dove, a
          black poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States,
attacked the
          academy in the International Quarterly for what he said was
"unapologetic
          racial 'purity' and gross gender imbalance."

          Viebahn pointed out that the academy had received $250,000
from the
          Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in 1997, and
criticized the
          National Endowment for the Arts for awarding the academy
$95,000 this
          year despite what he called a "tradition of race 'purity' in
its highest
          ranks."

          Galassi called the charge "totally unfair."

          "If you look at what the academy is doing, and who is working
there, I
          just don't think you can say it's exclusionary," he said. "But
even the
          appearance of being exclusionary is unfortunate and needs to
be
          addressed. And that's what we're in the process of doing."

          The academy's board of directors controls the day-to-day
running of the
          institution; the chancellors are mainly responsible for the
two prizes. The
          board has 26 members and only one of them, Jamaica Kincaid, is
black.
          Seven are women. Until 1987, there were no blacks or Jews on
the
          board. That year, when Lyn Chase, an heiress to the Folger
coffee
          fortune, became president of the board, she began recruiting
Jews and
          blacks.

          Wadsworth pointed out that the academy's full-time staff of 10
has
          several minority group members and administers 160 college
prizes and
          awards, worth about $92,000, a number of which go to women and
          minorities. Among the prizes the academy staff gives are the
Walt
          Whitman Award, which is $5,000 along with book distribution
worth
          $35,000. It administers two other book publication awards, the
James
          Laughlin Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize.

          "The chancellors sound like they are the universally
recognized
          spokespersons for the world of poetry," said Ms. Dove, who has
served
          as a judge for the academy's Walt Whitman award and has taken
part in
          many academy functions. "To have an academy where minorities
and
          women are underrepresented or not represented does send a
subliminal
          message to the world that there may not be minorities who are
poets or
          many women who are poets."

          Ms. Dove said she had no interest in being a chancellor
herself. "The
          message the makeup of the board is sending is the message that
we are
          the ones who hold the power," said Ms. Dove, "and it's a
closed club."
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 12:22:29 -0500
Reply-To:     levitsk@ibm.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Rachel Levitsky 
Subject:      Re: Great Ladies of Poetry
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I honestly don't know how some of my personal business got spliced into
the article I tried to forward to the list.  Please forgive and ignore.
Here's a second attempt.

From: "The New York Times"


         November 14, 1998


          Poets Leaving Academy to Protest Absence
          of Minorities

          By DINITIA SMITH

               EW YORK -- Two prominent American poets, both of them
               women, have resigned as chancellors from the Academy of
          American Poets, a venerable body at the symbolic center of the
American
          poetry establishment, to protest the absence of blacks and
other minority
          groups on the academy's board of chancellors. The chancellors,
Carolyn
          Kizer and Maxine Kumin, both of whom have lobbied to admit
minorities
          to the board, submitted their resignations to academy
president Jonathan
          Galassi this week.

          "There's never been a black woman chancellor," Ms. Kizer, who
won a
          Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1985, said in a telephone
interview. Ms. Kizer
          said she was also upset by a larger problem, which she defined
as "the
          insularity among the chancellors, and the lack of women."

          "I don't like the way the collection of chancellors sets
itself apart from the
          mainstream," Ms. Kumin, who won a Pulitzer in 1974, said in an
          interview. "I don't want to see it identified with elitism.
It's very much an
          East Coast group."

          The academy, which was founded in 1934 by Marie Bullock and is
based
          in Soho, at 584 Broadway, at Prince Street, promotes poetry
nationally.
          Its 12-member board of chancellors exists mainly to administer
the
          Tanning Prize, at $100,000 the country's largest literary
award, and a
          smaller prize, the Academy Fellowship, of $20,000.

          The board includes some of the country's best known and most
influential
          poets, including John Ashbery, Richard Howard, John Hollander,
Jorie
          Graham, Donald Justice, J.D. McClatchy, Mark Strand, Mona Van
          Duyn, David Wagoner and W.S. Merwin. This year the board
awarded
          the Tanning Prize to A.R. Ammons.

          "They always go to the same person again and again," said Ms.
Kizer,
          meaning, she said, that the prize is frequently awarded to
white male
          poets.

          When the first Tanning Prize was awarded in 1994, Ms. Kizer
said she
          lobbied for it to go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American
poet.
          The chancellors awarded the prize instead to W.S. Merwin, and
were
          criticized because Merwin is a chancellor himself. In 1996,
Adrienne Rich
          won the prize. The other winners have been James Tate and
Anthony
          Hecht.

          Since 1946, when the academy began awarding its annual
fellowship, the
          prize has been given to only two African-American poets, Jay
Wright and
          Robert Hayden. Of the 64 Fellowships that have been awarded,
14 have
          gone to women. There have been 57 chancellors in all. There
has never
          been a black chancellor, but there have been 12 women on the
board.

          Ms. Kumin said that as vacancies have occurred she has lobbied
for the
          poet Lucille Clifton, who is black, to be elected. "We've just
been out
          voted," she said.

          Galassi, president of the academy and editor in chief of
Farrar, Straus &
          Giroux, said of the resignations of Ms. Kumin and Ms. Kizer:
"I was very
          sorry that they are doing this at a time when we are in the
process of
          putting our governing structure through review."

          He said that he would not accept the resignations and that he
would try to
          persuade both poets to remain as chancellors to help him
instate changes
          at the academy.

          Galassi said the academy was in the process of assembling an
ad hoc
          committee that "will look at the constitution of the
chancellors." "The
          academy has been in the process of broadening for four or five
years, and
          before that," he said. "We started the National Poetry Month.
We are
          starting a Poetry Book Club, an online poetry classroom.
They're all
          outreach programs. They are very inclusive."

          "We want to be an organization for everyone," he added.

          William Wadsworth, the academy's executive director, added
that the
          lack of women and minority groups on the board "has always
been a
          controversial aspect of the academy."

          This year, German writer Fred Viebahn, who is married to Rita
Dove, a
          black poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States,
attacked the
          academy in the International Quarterly for what he said was
"unapologetic
          racial 'purity' and gross gender imbalance."

          Viebahn pointed out that the academy had received $250,000
from the
          Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in 1997, and
criticized the
          National Endowment for the Arts for awarding the academy
$95,000 this
          year despite what he called a "tradition of race 'purity' in
its highest
          ranks."

          Galassi called the charge "totally unfair."

          "If you look at what the academy is doing, and who is working
there, I
          just don't think you can say it's exclusionary," he said. "But
even the
          appearance of being exclusionary is unfortunate and needs to
be
          addressed. And that's what we're in the process of doing."

          The academy's board of directors controls the day-to-day
running of the
          institution; the chancellors are mainly responsible for the
two prizes. The
          board has 26 members and only one of them, Jamaica Kincaid, is
black.
          Seven are women. Until 1987, there were no blacks or Jews on
the
          board. That year, when Lyn Chase, an heiress to the Folger
coffee
          fortune, became president of the board, she began recruiting
Jews and
          blacks.

          Wadsworth pointed out that the academy's full-time staff of 10
has
          several minority group members and administers 160 college
prizes and
          awards, worth about $92,000, a number of which go to women and
          minorities. Among the prizes the academy staff gives are the
Walt
          Whitman Award, which is $5,000 along with book distribution
worth
          $35,000. It administers two other book publication awards, the
James
          Laughlin Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize.

          "The chancellors sound like they are the universally
recognized
          spokespersons for the world of poetry," said Ms. Dove, who has
served
          as a judge for the academy's Walt Whitman award and has taken
part in
          many academy functions. "To have an academy where minorities
and
          women are underrepresented or not represented does send a
subliminal
          message to the world that there may not be minorities who are
poets or
          many women who are poets."

          Ms. Dove said she had no interest in being a chancellor
herself. "The
          message the makeup of the board is sending is the message that
we are
          the ones who hold the power," said Ms. Dove, "and it's a
closed club."
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 10:36:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         J Kuszai 
Subject:      scene report--San Diego's Trip to LA
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

maybe this channel is permanently doomed to bear the collective angst
about having to be together. What else can describe the negative trend
in recent threads? Remember, this is a moderated list and personal and
private debates do not contribute anything to our proposed discussion
list purposes (please see the Welcome Message). The forwarding of
private communication to the public list is certainly a violation of
most standards of electronic conduct, and if you have a problem with
that, you might want to notify your system operator, or ISP.
PAID ADVERTISEMENT
*       *       *
                                                                                [boring utopian dream-writing]                                                                          Jack Louden

Community No Nine

perhaps it has been hashed and rehashed, but I wanted say a couple
things about the community topic (which returns almost as frequently as
the anxiety about Lango's undoing influence on younger critters, who
under materialist pressure from economic anxieties, are too busy to
think about a philosophy of language--and seeing how they are apolitical
do or kno-nothings--lazily therefore they are stuck with their crummy
inheritance).

the great thing about going to school, being in a "program," whether
university or "experimental college" setting, is just that-- it's a
program. There are usually readings every week, and a social system as
much about (or more) about the social than any sense of developing any
kind of revolutionary movement to upturn the glorious bygone dads and
moms of the previous era. Even in the "program" or "school", communities
make not for a limited ideological program, but instead the literal
social background out of which any conversations will occur. In most
places, the ability meet with other poets or poetasters, is a pretty big
deal. I don't think there would be the possibility for such an
ideological program if the habituated institutions of the "reading
series" wasn't already established.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                *                                                       *                                                       *
PROFILE                                                                         OUR TRIP TO LA                                                                                                  San Diego, A Scene Report
         I knew it would take travelling somewhere to make San Diego my home. I
was lucky enough to spend the day with Joe Ross as he and Laura were
willing to ride with me on an expedition to the L.A.Books-sponsored
reading featuring Cydney Chadwick and Elizabeth Treadwell. As has now
been well-reported, once two weeks before I got lost and ended up in
Long Beach, so this was my first trip to L.A. since moving here and it
couldn't have been a better event to have attended, or a better group of
people to have been nestled among in the poetry-perfect space of the
Balcony Cafe just off Santa Monica in west L.A.
  I met Joe and Laura in the heart of Hillcrest at a cafe and we were in
LA with time to spare. As many of you will know, Joe is responsible for
putting together the community that will be here for years to come--and
not just in poetry and literary arts, but for all of the arts citywide.
His commitment to the city, it's peoples of magnificent diversity, and
their expressions through the arts--it's Singular--from what I
understand, he accomplished similar things in D.C....what else can I
say? He alone is a reason to cling to this bizzare bizarre known at
SoCal. It was exciting to hear of all that is going on, despite the evil
corporate Baseball highwayrobbery of the city that just occurred with
the last "election."
  Beyond the Page, the reading series run by Joe, Stephen Cope, and
Alicia Cohen, is a model for how communities can come together as
cooperative co-assistants and produce a venue for public consumption--a
model for community action and development that isn't ground in
ideological axings of difference of opinion or taste. Of course what
they have developed here is new; it is growing and will grow more. You,
generous reader, might imagine how humbling it is to be thrown out into
a strange land and be surrounded by the motivation to make it happen
where it wouldn't otherwise. (like San Diego itself)  There is something
to what is happening here that excites me to work harder.
  When we got to L.A. we went to see Douglass Messerli at Sun & Moon and
luckily found him there, hard at work on his own writing, but willing to
spend some time with us as I browsed the shelves and found the most
amazing bargains in the reduced-sale shelf. A visit to see him at the
Sun& Moon space is a necessary part of any trip to Southern California.
I always learn a lot from talking to him, and his advice [re:publishing]
to "keep it small" is buoyed by the kind of work he has been able to
sustain, the inspiration it provides. But I also learn how tenuous these
things are. If I had taken for granted the availability of certain
books, such as Hejinian's MYLIFE or other Sun& moon books, no longer.
And while we were there he gave an offhand list of books that would
require reprinting; a budget beyond the current available means. He
noted the coming of this mammoth landmark Drama anthology, which sounds
exciting indeed. Before we left him to his work, he showed us a few
pictures of some of the most endearing and lovely characters you might
ever know. I wish we could have talked with him longer. He expressed
regrets about missing the reading, noting his long-standing support of
Cydney's writing. I got the sense he was trying to take it easy.
Working, but also kind of enjoying the fact of being able to work on his
own writing, he showed us the notebooks he was working from. And his
eagerness to return to his work was so clear from the energy with which
he talked about it. That man works so hard!
  The hosts of the reading series, Guy Bennett, Chris Reiner and
Standard Schaefer, were very welcoming. And with Bill Marsh also in the
audience and travelling home with us, we formed a San Diego section of
the cafe. It was my first time meeting many of the people there,
including Cydney and Elizabeth, who had travelled down from the Bay
Area. The room is small, smaller than the Ear Inn. About the size of the
backroom of the Ear Inn, without the front room and without the clinking
and smashing sounds. No booze, just coffee and nice pastries, etc. There
were many people there I didn't meet, so I can't give a list of the
attendees, but they included Noah de L., Dennis Phillips, and Franklin
Bruno, who I had met in San Diego months before (that long?).
Elizabeth's sister was there, as was a friend of hers (who turned out to
be someone I went to college with) now working as a screenwriter. Just
like on TV! There were many other people there; I was told that it was a
pretty good turnout. The room was nicely packed. It was an engrossing
reading and everyone behaved.
  Cydney read first. I had heard her once before, at the New Coast
conferece. Everything was so new to me then. This was a good amount of
work to hear her read. She read some very wryly humorous pieces, some of
which were lost on us, I think. It seemed that Bill and Joe and Laura
were making lots of giggling sounds, and I was embarrassed to be from
San Diego! Seriously, I got the sense that in a perhaps less-intense
audience, these pieces might cause uproarious hilarity. Reportage of
other audience reactions to Cydney Chadwick would be greatly
appreciated. She read with a very interesting - i dunno what to call it
- "rhythmic lilt" or perhaps it has something to do with a unique
pausing or "halting" at certain points. A series of "one-liners" in a
linked narrative succession. The rhythm of this was very intersting and
being new to her work, I would probably seek it out for further study.
  Elizabeth Treadwell read next and she also read some prose and parts
of her long work "Eve Doe." She is the editor of Outlet and also has
done chapbooks (I believe). While I am not familiar with her work, I
will certainly do my homework ex post facto. Her prose pieces seemed to
rework historical materials in often extreme schemes. Stella, Dorothy
Wordsworth, and more. Of all of it, the first sections of "Eve Doe" were
for me the most compelling. Again, any Bay Area reportage on these two
writers would be much appreciated by this reader.
  Afterwards we went to what can only be described as Family Place in
Santa Monica. Bill and I had potato rajas tacos (which looked like
little coasters with happy food dancing on top)--- yum yum yum. It was
great to spend a few moments with the gang before driving back to SD. I
felt like a little boy, dancing around the streets. I had a really good
time at the reading. I felt spoiled in Buffalo. I would miss readings
frequently near the end of my time there. I was exhausted by it all. I
felt that the experience of going to LA and the reading gave me a
renewed sense of voluntarist community actions and a reading a is a good
symbol of that. I was grateful to even know about it.
  We drove back to Iva Bittova and later Beck's One Foot in the Grave.
When I got home Bubby and Moby were waiting patiently, but clearly
hungry. I fed them and they raced back and forth across the apt, doing
their own happy dance.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 12:26:26 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" 
Subject:      NdjenFerno - New from Vatic Hum
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Now available from Vatic Hum:

NDJENFERNO
by Lindsay Hill
$8.95

"When reading the NdjenFerno of Lindsay Hill one feels as if scorched by a
mesmeric fire leaping from aboriginal flint.  A lingual focus not unlike
those first practitioners of the invisible, those vatic wanderers who
poetically uttered rays, magnetically in keeping with those powers one finds
ensconced in the carvings inside the Apollo cave in Namibia, some 30,000
years later."

        - Will Alexander

"It would seem appropriate for these murderous lyrics to be half-spoken,
half-sung by a demonic rhythm-and-bluesman in some post-apocalyptic border
town. This is a book about that ultimate border between violence and
meaning, illuminating the truth of Benjamin's definition of history as an
accumulation of wreckage. Hill talks a high-tension lingo stripped of tense
and person, denuding & freshly wounding time & subjectivity. Here, each line
is a compressed scream, an ecstatic crossing between last & first things, a
neo-medieval chorus line of skeletons dancing ..."

        - Andrw Joron

Vatic Hum is published by John Noto. PO Box 42083, San Francisco, CA  94142
NDJENFERNO may be ordered from SPD in Berkeley at 800-869-7553.

IMHO, one of the most exciting books of poetry to appear in quite some time.

Patrick Pritchett
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 12:43:41 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "s. kaipa" 
Subject:      Re: Great Ladies of Poetry
Comments: To: Rachel Levitsky 
In-Reply-To:  <36505F54.2FF3@ibm.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Rachel--

Thanks for posting this.  I've been hearing about this on the Iowa
front--where the likes of Merwin and Strand are revered (no doubt, we all
ask why).

I think it's important that we notice how reactionary poetry, even poetry,
can be.

Sordid.


--Summi
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 13:47:18 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      no doubt

No doubt we all ask why
in unison
in order to climb up they say
we must put down

and when that doesn't work
alas
we must always fall back
to kissing ass.


- Jack Spandrift
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 14:12:48 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "P.Standard Schaefer" 
Subject:      RIBOT: oldnewgenerations
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Paul Vangelisti, editor of RIBOT asked me to make the following information
available.  It seems a pretty good timing to as the new issue contains a
substantial number of younger, newer, not well-known poets alongside heavies
like Mohammed Dibb, Carl Rakosie, the Waldrops, Sorrentino, Barbara Guest,
Nathaniel Tarn and others.  A slight west coast tilt to the younger ones:
Jeff Clark, Warren Liu, Garrett Caples, Tracy Grinnel, Cathy Wagner, Franlin
Bruno, Emily Grossman, Noah de Lissovoy among many others like Gwyn McVay ,
Brian Lucas, John Lowther, Joshua Harmon.

Those of you who have complained about the over-sights in the recent Talisman
anthology of young lions (and lionesses) might find the issue a healthy
addendum.  Seems to me a slightly less New York bent to this issuen than one
might expect.  I think also an almost alarming diversity.  Not sure how much
"language" seems to have figured in the minds of young writers like Noah de
Lissovoy or Cathy Wagner.

Ribot 6:  Over Sixy Under Thirty is now available at bookstores.

It is distributed by Consortium Books, but is also available directly from
Paul Vangelisit.  Just send a check for $10 written to RIBOT:   PO Box 65798,
Los Angeles CA 90065.

Vangelisti can be reached at pvangel@earthlink.net

Ten bucks is not cheap, I know, but the journal is so handsome, so well-
designed that it has wom several awards and I think it will prove worth while.
Art work by Louise Bourgeois

People wishing to get more bang/whimper for their buck might check out the LA
Books web-site where you will see how to get Rhizome, Ribot, Witz, the Seeing
Eye Chapbooks and two Litterol Books (one new from Ray Di Palma, one new from
George Albon) for one low price.   www.litpress.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 14:32:21 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jordan Davis 
Subject:      mos doubt
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The journalist exists to add errors to the public relations firm's text.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 14:42:00 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      re mos doubt

Public relations is oracular, not textual.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:48:21 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tosh 
Subject:      Re: RIBOT: oldnewgenerations
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>
>Ten bucks is not cheap, I know, but the journal is so handsome, so well-
>designed that it has wom several awards and I think it will prove worth while.
>Art work by Louise Bourgeois
>

Oh, I think it is worth every dollar. It is a handsome journal/book.  Now
if it was being sold for three or four dollars - that would be a shame!

-----------------
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
----------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 15:00:04 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: black british poetry
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

hey there m bibby --anything by gordon rolehr's usually pretty good, don't
you think? tho' he deals mostly w/ caribbean. the person to contact, of
course, is mike eldridge.  i'm assuming you know of the anthologies, Dub
Poetry, Voiceprint, etc. most of which, again, deal w/ caribbean, but
there's some overlap w/ black brits?  good to hear from you thru poetix!
--md

At 11:57 PM -0500 11/15/98, Michael W Bibby wrote:
>some students in my contemporary lit seminar want to do their research
>papers on black british poetry, esp. dub poetry (e.g., Linton Kwesi
>Johnson and Jean "Binta" Breeze)--i've referred them to articles by
>Alastair Niven, Fred D'Aguiar, and Patrica Waugh, and Anne Walmsey's book
>on the Carribean Artists Movement--anyone on the list have other
>references i could turn them on to?
>
>thanks!
>
>Michael Bibby
>Department of English
>Shippensburg University
>1871 Old Main Drive
>Shippensburg, PA  17257
>(717) 532-1723
>mwbibb@ark.ship.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 16:18:31 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Erik Sweet 
Subject:      Re: Backchannel this baby talk!
Mime-Version: 1.0
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both of you need to knock this wanker shit off...
You are both right!
ooops

Erik Sweet
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 17:53:36 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jordan Davis 
Subject:      wanna see my Ray Liotta impression?
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Public relations has more than one weapon: word-of-mouth, street cred,
institutional certification, the well-placed press release, mutual
reinforcement. As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster. But you
know, to the sociologist gangs are just group formations, unless of course
the sociologist gets in the way. Not to speculate about the gang-like
behavior of sociologists. Or to impugn public relations firms, or
journalists. We all showed up to find a poetry so derivative as to be
unintelligible held up for a praise that oxidized to ridicule as we looked
at it. Eyebeams. As Peter Culley said the other day, or something like it:
the power that goes along with the near-total anonymity of poetry is not to
be underestimated. Neither underestimate the poetry of power's anonymity.
Code of silence = hose down the streets for glossy night shots. I'd say more
about behavior in New York but the set's on lock down.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 17:17:06 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Bad Boys
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Jordan Davis is Bad.

Henry Gould is Bad.

Don't you love to see dem two Bad Boys flashing their blades?

Send out the PR clips. Hose down the streets.

It's West Side Story time!
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 19:14:32 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      coup de des / loop de loop / doesn't abolish exhaustion
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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but the idea that the 20th century HAS begun to exhaust Mallarme is much
more interesting.  As would be the notion, here in late 1998, that
Mallarme may have also begun to exhaust the 20th century.  either have
not begun to century the exhaust, or the twentieth Mallarme.

didn't it start with the attempt to reproduce in French the sensation of
reading Browning and Shelley with less than perfect English?

there are chinese poets today who work to produce in Chinese the effect
of early 20th century American poets who sought, in their own work, to
produce in English the effects they drew from their understanding of
chinese poetry.

but hey, speaking utterly gratuitiously, I don't think David Bromige is
the Rush Limbaugh of poetry, and if you want to privilege Mallarme over
Stuart Merrill, to return to the "sujet" at hand, you should remember
that one was trying to produce a personally experienced effect
accurately, while the other sought to produce an equivalent of something
he understand for a new market, uh, audience.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 19:28:09 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Erik Sweet 
Subject:      The fight is on!
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

I for one enjoy both the posts from Dale Smith and David Bromige-

I especially loved when Bromige visted Albany last year and gave one of the
most interesting talks on collage I have heard- He was kind and giving, a
highlight visit of that year, (along with Paul "I love that guy! " Metcalf.)
Brought to you of course by Don Byrd and Pierre Joris...

What I don't like is to see such nastiness between two people...

I say cut it out because the posts don't really reflect the true greatness
of both poets...

Name-calling!!!!!! it works sometimes...but all the negativity make me mad!!!

Only joking about the "wankers" part- too much British Comedy!
trying to lighten up the tension...

Lover, Sweet-Erik
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 05:03:25 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      Re: RIBOT: oldnewgenerationsfinallyhereatlast
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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P.Standard Schaefer wrote:
>
> Paul Vangelisti, editor of RIBOT asked me to make the following information
> available.  It seems a pretty good timing to as the new issue contains a
> substantial number of younger, newer, not well-known poets alongside heavies

what's also refreshing is that (I insist!) RiBot is really unlike any
other publication--at this time--and that the art is not simply
illustration--nor
tyhe poets' poems.

Todd Baron
(ReMap)
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 20:17:11 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Daniel Kane 
Subject:      Bernadette Mayer workshop, 1971-72 or thereabouts
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I'm working on a dissertation here at NYU -- a literary history of reading
series of the Lower East Side, 1962-1972, starting at Les Deux Megots,
going on to Le Metro, and ending with the first few years of the Poetry
Project at St. Mark's Church.  I'm thinking about ending the whole thing
with a discussion on B. Mayer's workshop, and would really appreciate it
if people on this list (C. Bernstein, N. Piombino, et al) could
backchannel me at dkane@panix.com if they are willing / interested
in being interviewed about their experiences at the Poetry Project, the
Mayer workshop, and so on.  Of course, if anyone has the time to recommend
contacting people outside of this list, I'd appreciate that.  Thanks.

--Daniel Kane
dkane@panix.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 06:50:31 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      MUSICalifornia
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Here's a folkie questions (rocky, too) (sixties) (er) musical:

I'm looking for a recording of TIM BUCKLEY (circa 1968 approx.)  singing
his SONG OF THE SIRENS (or TO the Sirens--I think). Anyone know what cd
it might be on?

This Mortal Coil covered it on their 1st album--

I'm in a minstrel mood.

Todd Baron
(ReMap)
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 21:59:02 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Re: wanna see my Ray Liotta impression?
In-Reply-To:  Message of Mon, 16 Nov 1998 17:53:36 -0500 from 

There's a certain poetry in ridicule.  When parody acted out the script
prepared for it (just kidding - uh--too late).  Or the laughter of the
laughsters as their heads grew donkey's ears, all together now.  Somebody
tell me where the wind comes from - somebody in Manhattan.  We must be
getting closer, we're laughing so hard it's ridiculous.  The idiom or
something. Hu-ha hu-ho hu-ee-hee-hee damn Mitch.

Then silence will plop - and so on.

Doan you cross dat Jordan!
He de Saint Tumblin More ta Henry's Fat Aces!
He dat doubtin half to touch da flash!
He done rise ev-time Henry boy git goin - to cut him down!
Look out now!  Da Scholar Prince a ol London Town done crost dat fat ol King!
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 19:17:57 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      Inchoate, a Beginning
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

David, baby, you're bumming me out. But I'm surprised, flattered really,
that you had the energy to sustain so many eloquent and witty posts on
Sunday. Kudos!

And searching for words better yoked than my own, (to express the
unfocused miasma writhing inside me), I found this, congealed in the
gooey art of Whitman:

          Endless unfolding of words of ages!
          And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

          A word of the faith that never balks,
          Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time
                 absolutely.

          It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,

          I accept Reality and dare not question it,
          Materialism first and last imbuing.

And later, still in Song of Myself, he writes:

          It is time to explain myself--let us stand up.

          What is known I strip away,
          I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.


And, well, finally... How could I not quote from section 51:

          Do I contradict myself?
          Very well then I contradict myself,
          (I am large, I contain multitudes.)



______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 22:29:54 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      On a positive note
Comments: To: Poetics List 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
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One great book of late has been Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips' _A Secret
Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures  in Writing, 1960-1980_
published jointly by the New York Public Library and Granary Books, intro by
Jerry Rothenberg.

This is the catalog to the big exhibit that was displayed at the NYPL
earlier this year and it's given me lots to think about, as it's a generally
excellent history of the two decades that it covers (and then some, as it
goes in places much further back). It was great to see copies of some fine
old journals that I used to own (I long ago got into the habit of retaining
only those mags in which I had work, save for those rarest of rare journals
for which I felt the need to have a complete run [e.g. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
Roof, How(ever), Temblor, This, Hills], a decision forced upon me by the
sheer limits of my living quarters). And to see others that I'd only heard
of (Floating Bear!) for the very first time.

One of the things it's made me think about has been the dramatic contrast
between the world proposed by all these journals, from Beatitude to J to
Vort to El Corno Emplumado, and the claustrophobic drawing room vision of
poetry that the Academy of American Poets presents itself to be, even in its
most liberal guise. In point of fact, Bombay Gin will have more to do with
the future of poetry than the question of representation on that board which
still only has one member under the age of 60.

The anthology isn't perfect, of course, but one problem it had to deal with
was the number of editors (myself for one) who didn't take NYPL's requests
for a subscription all that seriously, since Tottel's never got beyond 150
or 200 copies in circulation. But this anthology *is* perfect evidence for
the proposition that a publication of 200 copies can have a serious impact
if it just gets into the right hands. Clay and Phillips are just those
hands.

www.granarybooks.com would be one way to obtain the volume. The price,
$27.95, is extremely affordable for what is genuinely a must-have book.

Ron Silliman
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 22:07:36 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "s. kaipa" 
Subject:      Query
In-Reply-To:  <002e01be11da$8ce652c0$1c4afea9@oemcomputer>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Does anyone have a mailing address for Linda Reinfeld?

Thanks,

Summi
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 22:28:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Bernstein 
Subject:      Olivier Cadiot in New York
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

French Poet Olivier Cadiot will be reading
with Stacy Doris, Chet Weiner and Charles Bernstein on translations
at the Knitting Factory
(Old Office) 74 Leonard Street in Manhattan
on Friday, Nov. 20, 7pm
as part of the French Touch Festival
NOTE: tickets are listed as $15 for all events for the day
but if you *tell * the box office you want the READING ONLY
you can get in for $5 plus a free drink (this offer will not be posted).
*
Also reading, same bill : French fiction writer Benoit Duteurtre
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 01:12:07 -0500
Reply-To:     shana 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         shana 
Subject:      Re: MUSICalifornia
Comments: To: toddbaron@earthlink.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU 
Date: Monday, November 16, 1998 9:45 PM
Subject: MUSICalifornia


>Here's a folkie questions (rocky, too) (sixties) (er) musical:
>
>I'm looking for a recording of TIM BUCKLEY (circa 1968 approx.)  singing
>his SONG OF THE SIRENS (or TO the Sirens--I think). Anyone know what cd
>it might be on?


_Starsailor_ is the name of the album, released in the early seventies, I
think.

>
>This Mortal Coil covered it on their 1st album--
>

And you can also find Buckley singing "Song to the Siren" on the super duper
secret 4th CD of This Mortal Coil's boxed set--it contains the original
artists singing all the songs covered by This Mortal Coil.

Oh, and This Mortal Coil covered Buckley's "Morning-Glory" on their album
_Filigree and Shadow_ (the original is on _Goodbye and Hello_.

Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
shana

"How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake.
Grace. Love.Take care of us. Please."--C.K.Williams
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1998 23:19:50 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Ron Silliman, David Bromige, Mark Wallace, Chris Stroffolino & I are in
agreement that it would not be useful for poets, say, in their 30s (as
Chris, Mark & I are) to write like Ron Silliman-- assuming this were
possible.

David Bromige's post makes some very good points, & I want to make it
clear that I in no way am comparing the "oedipal" climate of our time to
that of the time in which Ron, David & other Language poets emerged.
It's not the same; furthermore, it was worse then for young poets who
"deviated from the path," I have no doubt.  In my opinion a number of
the Language Poets have been generous, or at least reasonably friendly
toward, the work of poets my age, including those who could be seen as
deviant.  This, I assume, goes for Ron as well-- although I don't know
him personally-- the subject of our recent posts notwithstanding.

David writes so eloquently: "To develop [Ron's] egalitarian stance in
some other way, though : I believe I see this in Mark Wallace's poetry,
and not at all to its detriment. Or to develop his notional systems--or
those of Jackson Mac Low--to develop these _or_ to qualify them--in ways
that put a sufficient distance between themselves, and their precursors,
looks like another extension that several
are doing.

Don't you think it is this Ron hopes for, and nothing slavish?"

Yes, David, I do.

Yet at the same time you will sympathize with younger poets, who are not
themselves unthoughtful in their response to previous generations, & not
unserious in their aims (although time always will be the judge of who
or what will last), feeling annoyed, or rather, feeling that mixture of
annoyance & respect which can itself be more irritating.

The literary inheritance of our generation includes Language poetry but
is larger than it-- as Ron & David of all people know, & as Chris for
one is certainly very conscious of.  My own sense is that to acknowledge
the Language poets as precursors & to work in a way that proceeds out of
that-- while also making use of whatever else is there that one cares
for-- is precisely one way in which to accomplish the sort of deviant
extention we are all in agreement we want.  So I was quite surprised to
learn that, according to Chris & Mark, Ron wouldn't agree (something
which Ron himself subsequently contradicted).  I say I was surprised, &
perhaps I was not forthright about that in my previous post, but then
again I am out here in Boulder away from it all, & David hasn't read
here in several months, & Ron hasn't read here in a couple of years, & I
may not know about Ron's attitude.

As for whether it is any of David's business, it isn't, but I for one
don't mind his butting in, so long as he does so graciously & with humor
as he always does.

Mark DuCharme

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 06:21:46 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <19981117071950.29338.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote:

> Ron Silliman, David Bromige, Mark Wallace, Chris Stroffolino & I are in
> agreement ...

Lily Tomlin, Buster Keaton, MY GOOD FRIEND PINKY, the early Robin
Williams, and ... LIL OL' _ME_ ... are all rather witty!

-- Perry Importanz
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 07:42:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <19981117071950.29338.qmail@hotmail.com> from "Mark DuCharme" at
              Nov 16, 98 11:19:50 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
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According to Mark DuCharme:
>
> The literary inheritance of our generation includes Language poetry but
> is larger than it-- as Ron & David of all people know, & as Chris for
> one is certainly very conscious of.  My own sense is that to acknowledge
> the Language poets as precursors & to work in a way that proceeds out of
> that-- while also making use of whatever else is there that one cares
> for-- is precisely one way in which to accomplish the sort of deviant
> extention we are all in agreement we want.

I think this is right on, Mark.  One difficulty of discussing the novelty
of younger writers in relation to lang po is that those involved in the
discussion may not be hearing all the registers - that is, may not be
aware of influences, echos, mediations coming from outside lang po and
it's direct predecesors in NAP.  To take the first example that comes to
mind, my own sense of the possibilities of rhyme has been very much
influenced by hip-hop - here, at least in some cases, rhyme is not an
adherence to the strictures of form but a kind of improvisational
("free-style") joke:

        I always roam the forest just like a Brontosaurus
        Born in the month of May so my sign is Taurus
        I kick you in the face like my fuckin' name was Chuck Norris

                                -Busta Rhymes

Masculinist posturing aside (and this too is a kind of joke, Busta Rhymes
being the trickster par excellence) this sort of off-the-cuff rhyming
really interests me: it challenges notions of what poetic rhyming is, what
it's supposed to do, challenges notions of craft (Robert Lowell he ain't).
And here, rather than being backgrounded, rhyme is foregrounded: in order
to rhyme he simply lies (Busta Rhymes does not "always roam the forest"
nor is this precisely metaphor in the traditional sense).  What you have
then is an implicit admission of the artifice of it all, to me quite
interesting.  One can make comparisons to, say, Bernstein's recent work w/
rhyme but they're certainly not the same.  And to get back to my original
point, this kind of thing winds up (albeit in a very alienated form) in my
own work.  How to account for that when one's only point of reference is
lang po?

-m.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:03:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Sylvester Pollet 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <199811171242.HAA47742@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Mark, I'm older than Methusaleh, and I recognize this as jump-rope rhyme.
Sylvester


>And here, rather than being backgrounded, rhyme is foregrounded: in order
>to rhyme he simply lies (Busta Rhymes does not "always roam the forest"
>nor is this precisely metaphor in the traditional sense).  What you have
>then is an implicit admission of the artifice of it all, to me quite
>interesting.  One can make comparisons to, say, Bernstein's recent work w/
>rhyme but they're certainly not the same.  And to get back to my original
>point, this kind of thing winds up (albeit in a very alienated form) in my
>own work.  How to account for that when one's only point of reference is
>lang po?
>
>-m.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:16:44 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
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Mike Magee writes:  "Those involved in the
discussion may not be hearing all the registers - that is, may not be
aware of influences, echos, mediations coming from outside lang po and
it's direct predecesors in NAP."  Exactly;  the anxiety & defensiveness
running through this thread is somewhat exasperating --  in what sense is
Silliman's work really an obstacle?  Jeff Clark does miraculous things with
Michaux & Desnos via the comix, Cathy Wagner's poetry uses Bernadette Mayers'
stuff (filtered through the mass market magazine) in a strikingly original
way, Jordan Davis takes something like Koch's _When the Sun Tries to Go On_ &
really runs with it, and how are Damon Krukowski, Brian Schorn, Standard
Schaefer, Tim Davis, Brenda Coultas, Mary Burger, etc., etc., hung up on the
New Sentence?  In fact you only have to check out the generations issue of
_Ribot_ to see how fresh -- sexy, funny, & experimental -- a lot of the very
newest poetry can be -- it has nothing to apologise for or explain away.  --
Added to which, there are emerging internationalist influences that just don't
fit the paradigm some contributors to this thread have been struggling with &
against, & which make the hand wringing here seem a little parochial -- as
evidenced once again by  _Ribot_, as well as by Douglas Messerli's terrific
new mag _Mr Knife, Miss Fork_, _FAUCHEUSE_, _Raddle Moon's_ French issue, _Big
Allis's_  British & Irish special feature  -- to name only a very few
examples.   -- All of which, finally, leads me to ask, who are Silliman's
imitators exactly?  Frankly, I don't see a lot of emerging poets (anybody?)
writing like him -- if anyone, it's Bruce Andrews' work that seems to figure
as the biggest Langpo influence on new writing.

Oh, by the way, I appreciated  Greg Gudding's deflating a few pretensions --
as if somehow Silliman, Du Charme, Bromige, etc. had definitively framed the
discussion for the rest of us.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:31:51 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:   from "Sylvester Pollet"
              at Nov 17, 98 09:03:30 am
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 According to Sylvester Pollet: >
> Mark, I'm older than Methusaleh, and I recognize this as jump-rope
rhyme.
> Sylvester


Yes, absolutely - hip-hop comes out of an African American tradition in
which jump-rope rhymes are an important part of creative developent and
self-expression, right?  In the interview I (Mike by the way, not Mark)
did w/ Harryette Mullen she says,

"And then there was all the sort of playground, jump-rope rhyme, circle
games.  I mean all of the games that we played were - at least that the
girls played - were very verbal games that involved rhyming along with
some sort of physical activity, you know, show your motion and jumping
rope and little Sally Walker and all of that.  And then we had, in the
interplay between the girls and the boys,  and what the boys did with one
another - the sort of dozens, capping, signifying, verbal duels - you
know, when people begin to be sort of pre-adolescent there’s all this kind
of pseudo-courtship, formulaic exchanges that people have, you know,
‘What’s cookin’ good lookin’?’ and, you know, the girl says, ‘Ain’t
nothin’ cookin’ but the beans in the pot, and they wouldn’t be if the
water wasn’t hot’. You know, we knew to say that, so, we would…and then,
every now and then someone would invent a new rhyme, you know, and that
would be incorporated into everybody’s collective repertoire.  So I think
that that was just the sort of environment that we were all growing up
in."

So, yeah, I think you're right to hear that in those Busta Rhymes lines as
well.  But the point is, do you hear it in Silliman, Andrews, Hejinian or
whoever you'd like to name?  If not, then this is an instance where
influence has come from outside of the tradition which tends to dominate
this list (and I mean that neutrally).  So if it's come circuitously via
jump-rope games that's fine but doesn't, I think, invalidate my original
point.      -m.


>
> >And here, rather than being backgrounded, rhyme is foregrounded: in order
> >to rhyme he simply lies (Busta Rhymes does not "always roam the forest"
> >nor is this precisely metaphor in the traditional sense).  What you have
> >then is an implicit admission of the artifice of it all, to me quite
> >interesting.  One can make comparisons to, say, Bernstein's recent work w/
> >rhyme but they're certainly not the same.  And to get back to my original
> >point, this kind of thing winds up (albeit in a very alienated form) in my
> >own work.  How to account for that when one's only point of reference is
> >lang po?
> >
> >-m.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 07:35:11 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
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Yes, and also Calypso, and before that way back to the mid-17th century to
Butler's Hudibras, which was a standard and much-imitated clasic down to
the early 2oth century. The point being not that hiphoppers read late
baroque poetry, but that there's only so many ways to swing a rhyme.

At 09:03 AM 11/17/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Mark, I'm older than Methusaleh, and I recognize this as jump-rope rhyme.
>Sylvester
>
>
>>And here, rather than being backgrounded, rhyme is foregrounded: in order
>>to rhyme he simply lies (Busta Rhymes does not "always roam the forest"
>>nor is this precisely metaphor in the traditional sense).  What you have
>>then is an implicit admission of the artifice of it all, to me quite
>>interesting.  One can make comparisons to, say, Bernstein's recent work w/
>>rhyme but they're certainly not the same.  And to get back to my original
>>point, this kind of thing winds up (albeit in a very alienated form) in my
>>own work.  How to account for that when one's only point of reference is
>>lang po?
>>
>>-m.
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:27:10 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Bernstein 
Subject:      Cadiot: Corrected Time
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Olivier Cadiot
at the Knitting Factory / 74 Leonard Street  / Friday, Nov. 20,

**8:30pm**

(the 7pm time on the pervious notice is for Benoit Duteurtre; Cadiot begins at
8:30pm)
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:22:45 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <92116ffb.3651854c@aol.com>
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personally, i find these anxieties (of influence, i suppose) even more
exaxperating (i think) than jacques suggests, not b/c i haven't learned
from any number of poets and poetries, but b/c the way these anxieties seem
to play themselves out in these parts, i'm always left feeling as though
what's at stake is a kind of us/them divide, neither half of which do i
feel compelled to align mself with entire... which is to say, i appreciate
jacques' provocation...

look:  i'm 43---not under 30, not over 60, not new, not young, not old, and
not anthologized (though a "protected category" according to these job
forms i've been filling out of late)... one of my parents was not born in
the usa... i didn't grow up here in chicago, or in nyc, or san fran, or
la... i didn't major in english as an undergrad... and though i now (and
hopefully, in the future) teach english, untenured, in academe, i spent my
twenties working for industry... for a portion of my life i wasn't "middle
class" or even "lower class," and i've never been "rich"... i spent my
childhood in suburbia, but e.g., for the past seven years anyway, have
lived in a city... i enjoy the city, but i love the country too---esp. the
mountains (which is to say, i'm not happy with illinois flatland)... if
it's not too self-conscious to say so, my work in toto doesn't respond to
the designations langpo, or vizpo, or 'talisman poetry' (if there were such
a thing), or mainstream, or midwest (someone please correct me if such
self-evaluation is wrong-headed)... though of course i see elements of
numerous aesthetics and regions at work in what i do, and though of course,
from a more active political standpoint, most days i feel the need to
defend the small over the large, insofar as distribution access etc go...

in fact i gauge my "community," however fraught, more in terms of people
than in terms of poems... though it's nice when the two seem to come
together, and aggravating when the two seem in opposition...

so while i really do enjoy this list, and really am intrigued by various
claims made, i would suspect list discussion would be even more to the
point if it were to allow (however) for folks (like me, i guess) who find
themselves largely un-allied, more fluid vis-a-vis specific aesthetic and
"community" arguments/controversies generally set forth (dangers of
pluralism notwithstanding)... and i can't believe i'm the only person who
feels this way... in all, it's a pesky issue to raise---but the list is
more various than one might conclude from reading through certain threads...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:50:42 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
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I'm with Joe on this one. I never felt I could *be a Language Poet myself,
though I admire work by Howe, Silliman, Coolidge, Hejinian, Bernstein,
Armantrout, Bromige, etc... I'm more of a fourth generation New York
School acolyte, though I've spent only a few days in New York. Coming from
California, I'm attracted to West Coast poets as well, but I've been in
exile in the mid-west for most of my adult life, living in West Lafayette
Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, St. Louis, and now Lawrence, KS. (after 2 years
in Ithaca NY in the mid 1980s). I never took myself seriously enough as a
poet to feel anxiety around group affiliation or precursor envy. I am
happily derivative of whoever I have read most recently. I'm thinking of
taking up the drums...


Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:03:41 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Steven Marks 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
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un-allied, un-aligned and un-alloyed
will sell out to lowest bidder
prices start at 45 years

Steven


On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:

> for folks (like me, i guess) who find
> themselves largely un-allied...
>
> ... and i can't believe i'm the only person who
> feels this way...
>
> best,
>
> joe
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:25:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
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>I'm with Joe on this one. I never felt I could *be a Language Poet myself,
>though I admire work by Howe, Silliman, Coolidge, Hejinian, Bernstein,
>Armantrout, Bromige, etc... I'm more of a fourth generation New York
>School acolyte, though I've spent only a few days in New York. Coming from
>California, I'm attracted to West Coast poets as well, but I've been in
>exile in the mid-west for most of my adult life, living in West Lafayette
>Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, St. Louis, and now Lawrence, KS. (after 2 years
>in Ithaca NY in the mid 1980s). I never took myself seriously enough as a
>poet to feel anxiety around group affiliation or precursor envy. I am
>happily derivative of whoever I have read most recently. I'm thinking of
>taking up the drums...
>
>
>Jonathan


Not being as clever as J. Mayhew I'm not very successful at being
consciously derivative.  But those I'm unconsciously derivative of I tend
not to categorize (has anyone noticed, by the way, how few women if any --
I haven't kept careful track -- have been cited in this thread as
influential?), tend to learn from whoever I learn from -- some young, some
old, some widely published some hardly (like me) published at all... .
With all deep gratitude (I mean this) for those who have consciously and
even self-consciously articulated what has made possible things that were
not or barely possible before articulation (when 16 I wanted to move
outside syntax but with no-one to Show Me The Way could not do it for
another 25 or so years --- nearly a codger, amn't I) find talk of schools &
the notion of consciously adhering to a declared movement, well, somewhat
strange.  Maybe it is permanent outsider status.  Don't know.

Cheers to all.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:32:38 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "tracy s. ruggles" 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
Mime-version: 1.0
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I'm going to chime in with my 2 cents here: I'm just as happy, too,
about deriving from anywhere and everywhere, and not just poetry.  The
whole idea of schools and poetic lineage is all fun and good and helps
me position myself before I write, but in the dirty business of actually
grinding out some words, I've got to be on my game, agile, aware, clear
and present.  You can't play drums by reading notes.  It's got to be in
your blood.

look at me: i'm 29 -- under 30 for only a few more months.  i feel
young.  both my parents were born in texas, and their parents, too.  i
grew up in houston of all places, only read cummings in high school.
didn't even know barthelme was teaching at UofH until I moved to Boulder
in my 20's.  i haven't ever been rich either, but haven't been poor.
i've suffered from the "I'm a boring white male with no history, why do
I write?" myth.  my work doesn't seem to respond to any line of poets as
such, but more to my "search for truth".  i find clark coolidge's
writing intensely spiritual.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the fireworks as of late.  It doesn't detract
from my enjoyment of this list at all.  I consider it my favorite online
"community".  I've belonged to this one longer than any other...

Does anyone have a convincing argument as to why anyone should try to
advance (in their work) any one single poetic heritage?  If anything,
the dominant idea of our times is to consolidate and transcend the
multi-nodal ideas of the middle of our century.  I don't know where it
will take us, it might dead end, who knows.  But it's interesting,
nonetheless.

--trace--


On Tuesday/17.November.1998 8.50.42am, MAYHEW wrote:
>
    [ ... ]
>
> I am happily derivative of whoever I have read most recently. I'm
> thinking of taking up the drums...
>
>
> Jonathan
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:51:39 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Sylvester Pollet 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <199811171431.JAA51032@dept.english.upenn.edu>
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Mike, very sorry on name, only the m showed on reply form, I guess. I'm
glad to read that part of the interview. That's the stuff I was alluding
to, & I always loved the sound of it & the wacky invention. The one I'm
thinking of has the alliterative tradition mixed in, Can't get the words
right, but the one that goes something like "My name is Barbara and I come
from Brooklyn and my boyfriend's name is Brian and we eat baloney." That's
embarassingly rough, but my wife, who jumped them in NYC, isn't here at the
moment. By all means, keep on jumping! And who cares about dominators? Who
believes that? Maybe the Acad. of Amer. Bigshots. Sylvester
>
>Yes, absolutely - hip-hop comes out of an African American tradition in
>which jump-rope rhymes are an important part of creative developent and
>self-expression, right?  In the interview I (Mike by the way, not Mark)
>did w/ Harryette Mullen she says,
>
>"And then there was all the sort of playground, jump-rope rhyme, circle
>games.  I mean all of the games that we played were - at least that the
>girls played - were very verbal games that involved rhyming along with
>some sort of physical activity, you know, show your motion and jumping
>rope and little Sally Walker and all of that.  And then we had, in the
>interplay between the girls and the boys,  and what the boys did with one
>another - the sort of dozens, capping, signifying, verbal duels - you
>know, when people begin to be sort of pre-adolescent there s all this kind
>of pseudo-courtship, formulaic exchanges that people have, you know,
> What s cookin  good lookin ?  and, you know, the girl says,  Ain t
>nothin  cookin  but the beans in the pot, and they wouldn t be if the
>water wasn t hot . You know, we knew to say that, so, we would and then,
>every now and then someone would invent a new rhyme, you know, and that
>would be incorporated into everybody s collective repertoire.  So I think
>that that was just the sort of environment that we were all growing up
>in."
>
>So, yeah, I think you're right to hear that in those Busta Rhymes lines as
>well.  But the point is, do you hear it in Silliman, Andrews, Hejinian or
>whoever you'd like to name?  If not, then this is an instance where
>influence has come from outside of the tradition which tends to dominate
>this list (and I mean that neutrally).  So if it's come circuitously via
>jump-rope games that's fine but doesn't, I think, invalidate my original
>point.      -m.
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:51:31 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  Message of Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:22:45 -0600 from
              

Jordan's referring to a friend of his(?) statement about the power of
anonymity in poetry maybe relates to this thread... as I've probably blabbed
here in years past, I wrote something about this called School of Anonymous
once... for me the idea was reinforced by the World Poetry anthology reading at
 the Translation conference & other things there.  My thought is that the
resources of poetry are sort of verbally-physiologically anonymous on a
certain level.  That is, poetry in essence is a sort of "piping up" or
"talking back" or EMPHASIS using creative means - individual or trend
styles & refinements build on this somatic center - but I guess my point is
that all the focus on the differences or specifics perhaps obscures the
fact that it's these basic ANONYMOUS energies that actually COME TO THE FORE
in a good performance, whether it's Catullus or Virgil or some Swedish 18th-
century satirist (one of the best acts at the conference).  Empowered speech -
speech empowered with wit, drama, feeling, vision.

blabbity-blab-blab blab down the road we go...

- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:11:17 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      A couple things
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Regarding this thing concerning "literary inheritance," I don't think
there's been any mention on the List about David Lehman's _The Last
Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets_, which is a
marvelously entertaining critical history focusing on Ashbery,
O'Hara, Koch and Schuyler, but also bringing in many
others for discussion, including a number of folks on this List--
particularly in the Epilogue, where Lehman has bitter-sweet things to
say about "Language poetry" (Charles Bernstein, for example, is not
really a Language poet, he is a "New York poet in disguise); Silliman
and others have written "impressive and noble works," but the
typical Languagae poem is more often than not "an autopsy performed
on a cadaver," and obviously not in the exquisite corpse sense of it.

But don't let any of this get you down. Lehman's book is really the
best and funnest book ever written on "post-war" Am. poetry. It's all
about giving in to influence and resisting being influenced, so if
you are a twenty or thirty-something  post-Language poet I think it
is a must read!

The other thinkg I wanted to note that I don't remember seeing any
mention about is the new issue of Jack Kimball's great East Village
Poetry Web, whcih is a fantastic anthology of contemporary Canadian
poetry, with some listmates there too and a number of folks famously
excluded from phallic father Silliman's _In the American Tree_.
Wondering, actually, if this would be the first book-length
anthology of "innovative" poetry on the web?

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:20:11 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: Great Ladies of Poetry

second summi -- many thanks to you rachel.

i would add an interesting (and scary) note to this.  For all of you out
there who would say "oh, there's no sexism in the ruling ranks of poetry"
i suggest you check a couple of the Well Known Journals from library --
the something-or-another reviews, the university spokesmags, etc.  turn
to the adverts/announcements.  now, for contests where entries are anonymous,
which can be weeded out by entrance requirments listed ("send X no. of poems
without name on pages, and a master list with name, address, and poem titles"
or explicit description of anonymous entry policy) go to later edition and
read winners.  you will find about 1/2 or more are women.

go to contests where entries explicitly ownered (i.e. "print name on top
right corner of each entry," or no announcement of entry anonymity) and
hey presto, do you know what you will find?  gros predominance of male
winners.

harken back to your workshop and poetry class days -- MANY more women in
class than men, no?

now, go to table of contents of WKJ's... usual is a 1/10 ratio of male
poets to female poets.  i was at a dinner with editor of pretty well
known lit. vehicle.  as a good poetry citizen and woman does, i mentioned
this problem to him.  "no, our journal is not like that at all...!"  he
had proofs for upcoming edition with him, and got them out to prove his
point.  in increasing silence, we read... male poet's name after male
poet's name... occasional woman poet inserted in that famous ratio, 1/10.

i know i've had problems getting submissions from women at various times, and
other editors tell me same thing.  but i work with a web zine, and have heard
some guesses that women are just not on the net in as great a number.  so
we've specifically campaigned to reach out to women, putting our info on
mailing lists and bboards focused on women and women's issues.  last issue
i did, i didn't think about ratio when i was picking work (focused on a
theme that was appearing throughout submissions) and suddenly, as i typed
up the list of poems/poets for TOC for my editor jordie, over half the
poets were women -- a really exciting moment.  and i realized that we are
getting at least a half/half ratio these days without trying, for the most
part.

anyone have any war stories from print about this?  from chapbook publishing?

e

=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:33:17 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
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I'd like to join the group of people named Mark.
-- Mark Marks
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 10:50:53 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      framing and fuming and writing like Ron/ we passed several days.
              Don't tell me they're gone!
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Rush Limbaugh II here.....No, don't touch that knob...the Joe Amato/Kass
Fleish post voices a position that I heartily endorse, and have for a long
time.*. I had n o presumption--pace Jacques Debrot--to propose any final
frame for this Thread. My positions are always conjectural. It was not _my_
notion that Ron's writing is, besides what else it is, an 'obstacle'...but
had picked up that view of it from other posts to the List. I.e., there
were posts from those for whom it _did_ have an obstacular quality. It was
this perception I intended to address.

Btw, (and my usage is a guilty party here), what _is_ "writing like Ron"?
When Ron writes the next book of the Alphabet, will he be writing like Ron
because the new work will manifestly echo his previous books, or will his
departure therefrom be obscured because it will be being written by Ron? By
'writing like Ron,' does one mean 'Ketjak-like,' or something wider, namely
'anything Ron writes is Ron-like writing' ?  "If Silliman made his next
book sound as though Sam Beckett had written it, would it still be Ron-like
writing?" "And at what future point?"

As a somewhat outside observer, I observe that the debate splits between
those for whom the obstacular is front-burner, and those who perceive no
obstacle at all...along a curve where various modifications of each
persuasion are to be found. (Looking at the discussion from the p-o-v of
achieving consensus.) I haven't volume 193 of the DLB handy (didn't have a
spare $130 lying around here), but isn't the Watten piece in there written
by Jacques Debrot? It would be interesting, possibly, to hear your sense,
Jacques, of whether Watten's writing and his defense thereof, also
constitute--even intentionally--a 'beautiful obstacle' [I think I am
echoing Antin on Cage here] for those who come after?

David


* am uneasy, therefore, as ever, to see my name in a list of Language
writers...as though some claim is being made in behalf of my writing, that
the facts won't support. There is/was a tendency, and within that tendency,
a movement. To the tendency, I admit--it was there from the outset in the
60s. En passant this made my work of some interest to the movement, and I
found my best readers--and critics--among the group, and a reciprocity grew
from that, and friendships. All that aside, Coolidge strikes me as much
more a Langpo than myself, as do Michael Palmer and Michael Davidson, so
that I am surprised to see their names often omitted from such groupings,
espec when my name is included..But I realize that my part in this
discussion, as an advocate, I suppose, for Ron, is probably the reason why.
db3
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:42:16 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
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I meant to say earlier that Mike Magee's taking up the possibility of inter-
generic influence is a crucial one.  When I write now I always have
reproductions of Carroll Dunham's paintings, or Basquiat's, or Ingrid Calame's
stuff nearby for inspiration & permission.  -- If you haven't seen her work,
Calame's titles only hint at how wonderful her daffy abstractions are -- _ZAP-
glunk_, _OM splink_, _EUnstz_ . . . .
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:01:39 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Zauhar 
Subject:      Re: Harry Mathews (fwd)
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Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

For those of you in Chicagoland. This just came up in my mailbox
(apologies if this came off Poetics and I inadvertantly deleted it, only
to discover it anew and repost it now).

Trying hard not to write just "Another typical Silliman sentence,"

Dave Zauhar
---------- Forwarded message ----------

Thursday November 19th at 8 pm, Great Expectations Bookstore in Evanston
will host a reading by American writer Harry Mathews.  Mathews is touring
to support a collection he's recently edited,  _OuLiPo Laboratory_, a
compendium of writings by the OuLiPo writers, an organization of authors
dedicated to formal experiment in literature. The OuLiPo included among its
members, along with Mathews, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino,
and Jacques Roubaud.  Mathews's own work will be available as well,
including a couple of his best works, _Cigarettes_ and _The Journalist_,
recently returned to print by Dalkey Archive Press.  It's good to see his
writing back in print, giving people unfamiliar with his work a chance to
become acquainted with someone  who I think is one of the most interesting
American writers of the century.  As well as Mathews's books, all Dalkey
Archive titles, including books by many members of the OuLiPo, will be
available at 20% off.

The store is at 911 Foster Street in Evanston, between Sherman and Ridge,
just past the L tracks (just beneath the Foster stop on the Purple Line).
Feel free to call 847 864 3881 with any questions.
Thanks; hope to see you there!
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 14:08:43 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      overdue address listing for cuisinart

i've gotten a bunch of requests about this and it is getting embarrassing.
a few months ago, Creative Coalition of ARtists (CCA) -- which hosts ezine
"The Free Cuisinart," got bollixed up with web address.  we've moved
to new address -- www.ccofa.org -- and you can get cuis, and archives of
cuis, there.  not up on indexers yet since move is still too new.

sorry everyone...

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:18:41 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      a couple of points/lehman contest
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

"an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis supplied]. Let
us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with rendundancy. "An
autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more intriguing
piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even better.
Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?

+++++++++++

Thanks, Kent, for the plug re Jack's _The East Village_ , #4, which is
viewable at   http://www.theeastvillage.org    . There are more Canadian
poets in Canada and the USA than were dreamed of in our anthology, and Jack
intends to include some of these in future issues. The Listmates Kent
alludes to, include Lissa Wolsak, G Bowering, Billy Little, Jamie Reid,
David McFadden (are you still there, David?--give us a sign!), Harold
Rhenisch (now ex-List?), Louis Cabri, Ryan White, Norma Cole, Douglas
Barbour, and maybe others--I believe lurker-like List-lives are being led
by such as Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Karen Mac Cormack and Steve
McCaffery, and possibly more. Victor Coleman claims to have been ejected
from the List. Could this be true?

David
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:11:27 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

>Oh, by the way, I appreciated  Greg Gudding's deflating a few
pretensions --
>as if somehow Silliman, Du Charme, Bromige, etc. had definitively
framed the
>discussion for the rest of us.


Well first of all this was a response to a thread to which all of the
above named had posted, & an attempt to stress that there was less dis
agreement than some of the above may have thought.  I am sorry if, in my
haste to get to what I was saying in my post, I may have, quite
unintentionally, ruffled any egos.  I certainly was not intending to say
that *_ANY_* of the above had or could "frame" such a general & public
discussion with any of the finality with which you imply.  As for
Gudding, I suspect he may have had other motives.  & Further comment on
that, politeness forbids.

MDC



______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:15:20 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Zauhar 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

All this talk of Busta Rhymes etc reminds me of a passage in David
Lehman's new and problematic _The Last Avant-Garde_. Lehman talks about an
interview he once conducted w/ Ashbery wherein DL asked about the
influence of the surrealists on his work. Ashbery responded, "not the
actual surrealists, but hybrid ones like Reverdy and Max Jacob."
        This is how the typscript came back, inadvertantly suggesting the
previously under-examined influence of hip hop on Ashbery's work.

LEHMAN: How about Sir Realist?
ASHBERY: Not the actual Sir Realist, but hybrid ones like Reverend D and
        Max Jack Hoe.

Dave Zauhar

Dave Zauhar
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:36:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Language as pillow (A Question)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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In the wake of David Bromige's denial that he is a "Language poet," I
have some questions that seem relevant to this "Influence"
discussion:

Is there _anybody_ out there writing poetry today who still calls him
or herself (or wishes to be called so by others) a "Language poet"?
To what extent is this term still operational beyond being a fluffy
pillow for young poets with Bloomian anxieties to punch?

Isn't Language poetry really now a body decomposing in the
mausoleum where also rest the bones of Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism,
Surrealism, Projectivism, Objectivism, and so on RIP?

And to say that no, it's diferent because there are still living
poets around who once aggresively pushed the moniker is _not_ an
argument. There are still plenty of old "Olsonites" around too, but
who is talking about the anxieties caused by "Projectivism"?

I'm bemused by the angst that has surfaced in this discussion-- as it
has surfaced a number of times here before.

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:37:53 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Zauhar 
Subject:      Re: A couple things
In-Reply-To:  <66BA142074E@student.highland.cc.il.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote:

> Regarding this thing concerning "literary inheritance," I don't think
> there's been any mention on the List about David Lehman's _The Last
> Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets_, which is a
> marvelously entertaining critical history focusing on Ashbery,
> O'Hara, Koch and Schuyler,
>snip>
> But don't let any of this get you down. Lehman's book is really the
> best and funnest book ever written on "post-war" Am. poetry. It's all
> about giving in to influence and resisting being influenced, so if
> you are a twenty or thirty-something  post-Language poet I think it
> is a must read!

I posted something to the list just before reading Kent's note, and I'm
with him: the book has it's moments. I called it problematic because, for
one thing, Lehman will do things like describe the NYP's as rejecting the
conventional methods and models and orthodoxies of 50s poetry and
criticism, and then w/in a paragraph DL will be offering a reading of the
same NYP's in an almost New Critical idiom. A slight problem, to be sure,
and to be fair his chapter on Schuyler is quite interesting, second only
to Schuyler's own diaries and poems among the things I've read about JS.
        Like Kent said, I wish I'd read something like this in college.
Also: some great photograph's I've never seen before, many from the great
Rudy Burckhardt.

Dangerously close to my 5-post limit

David Zauhar
University of Illinois at Chicago

"And I remember somebody leaning up against the dirt wall of the
hillside, deriding William Carlos Williams, when suddenly there was a loud
roaring, crunching noise and a chunk of the hill fell off and covered the
person up to his neck. The person, being a young classical poet fresh from
NYU, begun screaming that he was being buried alive.  Fortunately, the
landslide stopped and we dug him out and dusted him off. That was the last
time he said anything against William Carlos Williams. The next day he
began reading _Journey to Love_ rather feverishly."

--Richard Brautigan.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:48:58 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         ShaunAnne Tangney Humanities 
Subject:      Re: Great Ladies of Poetry
In-Reply-To:  <199811171820.NAA11478@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Eliza McGrand wrote:

> second summi -- many thanks to you rachel.
>
> i would add an interesting (and scary) note to this.  For all of you out
> there who would say "oh, there's no sexism in the ruling ranks of poetry"
> i suggest you check a couple of the Well Known Journals from library --
>  the something-or-another reviews, the university spokesmags, etc.  turn
> to the adverts/announcements.  now, for contests where entries are anonymous,
> which can be weeded out by entrance requirments listed ("send X no. of poems
> without name on pages, and a master list with name, address, and poem titles"
> or explicit description of anonymous entry policy) go to later edition and
> read winners.  you will find about 1/2 or more are women.

> go to contests where entries explicitly ownered (i.e. "print name on top
> right corner of each entry," or no announcement of entry anonymity) and
> hey presto, do you know what you will find?  gros predominance of male
> winners.
>

i am the faculty advisor for our university's literary magazine (the
_Coup_), and we enlist a panel of judges to read the entries, and we do a
blind judging--no names on the work.  last year _all_ of the winning
entries were by women.  just this week the magazine was taken to task in
the school newspaper by a woman who has begun an "underground" lit.mag.  i
quote the newspaper: "DeVere was primarily upset by last years _Coup_
because all the selected literature happened to be by women authors.  She
said it could not be sheer coincidence that all the males who submitted
literature had no talent."
now obviously this is a student who is a little hot-headed and is trying
to be melodramatic, but --the pattern remains, doesn't it?  we were as
fair as fari could be, and in fact i was not so secretly pleased to see so
many women writers in print...but alas...even here at tiny minot state
university we are taken to task...

--shaunanne tangney
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 15:00:09 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

We have very high dues.  Plus a large entrance fee for former nonmarks.
But believe me, it's worth it.

mark p.



On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Mairead Byrne wrote:

> I'd like to join the group of people named Mark.
> -- Mark Marks
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 03:20:25 -0400
Reply-To:     efristr1@nycap.rr.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Edward Fristrom 
Subject:      Re: a couple of points/lehman contest
MIME-Version: 1.0
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              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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david bromige wrote:

> "an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis
> supplied]. Let
> us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with
> rendundancy. "An
> autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more
> intriguing
> piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even
> better.
> Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
> formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?

An autopsy performed on voice, piano and strings.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 14:48:35 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Post Mortem
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
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Speaking of  the "Language School," Lehman writes:

"It is academic not only in the practical sense that its
practitioners hold teaching appointments but equally because the
noble experiment on language turns out soemtimes to resemble an
autopsy performed on a cadaver." (The Last Avant-Garde, p.370)

Now, the "autopsy performed on a cadaver" phrase may indeed be
unintentionally redundant as David B. says; on the other hand, one
might regard Lehman's sentence as being inhabited by a sly conceit:
that the autopsy is not performed on the "cadaver/poem" but on the
dead and more encompassing body of the "Language School." itself. In
other words, an _auto-autopsy_, which seems to me even more
fetching than "an autopsy on a living tiger."

For our own purposes, as we gather today and circle, as is our
habit, around the Tower of Babel of List, we might extend the
conceit in the following way: The scent of the cadaver of Language
poetry has infested and drugged the minds of young post-Language
poets and turned them, oddly, into the scalpels, hemostats and
tweezers which the cadaver of Language deploys (in a hideous act of
dissection) upon its own rotting corpse.

And that's a Lunch Poem.

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 15:50:37 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: framing and fuming and writing like Ron/ we passed several
              days.
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Re:  Watten, you're asking me, David, whether I find his work & his defense of
it an obstacle?  At the risk of sending a response that might belong back-
channel, I'll say only that the Watten that really interests me is not the
Watten that most people would think of immediately (which I realize looks back
to your point about what it means to write like Silliman) -- "my" Watten, in
any case, is not _Complete Thought_, _Progress_ or _Under Erasure_, but the
early things -- _Opera-Works_, _Decay_ -- & the more recent _Conduit_ -- work
that hasn't been particularly noticed -- that might even belong to the New
York School (Bolinas Branch).  When I'm not writing in the capacity of
explicating work for a general audience -- as with the _DLB_ -- I feel free of
course to use/think about Watten's writing in an entirely idiosyncratic way --
for instance he has  enabled me to begin to look at possible literary uses for
Conceptual art -- that's to say, he's at one pole & Tan Lin's take on
Conceptualism is at another & I've found that thinking about the 2 of them
together can be productive & generative.  Watten's essays in _Total Syntax_
also strike me as a kind of art writing & their form is at least as
interesting as the arguments he actually makes, so he, in some ways, invites
deviant readings -- & misreadings -- that I find compelling & -- in spite of
what he perhaps intends (?) -- not at all doctrinaire.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:53:35 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: a couple of points/lehman contest
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Or keep the last four:  "A ballet performed on a cadaver"
                                "An autopsy performed on Uncle Tom"



At 11:18 AM 11/17/98 -0800, you wrote:
>"an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis supplied]. Let
>us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with rendundancy. "An
>autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more intriguing
>piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even better.
>Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
>formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
>
>+++++++++++
>
>Thanks, Kent, for the plug re Jack's _The East Village_ , #4, which is
>viewable at   http://www.theeastvillage.org    . There are more Canadian
>poets in Canada and the USA than were dreamed of in our anthology, and Jack
>intends to include some of these in future issues. The Listmates Kent
>alludes to, include Lissa Wolsak, G Bowering, Billy Little, Jamie Reid,
>David McFadden (are you still there, David?--give us a sign!), Harold
>Rhenisch (now ex-List?), Louis Cabri, Ryan White, Norma Cole, Douglas
>Barbour, and maybe others--I believe lurker-like List-lives are being led
>by such as Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Karen Mac Cormack and Steve
>McCaffery, and possibly more. Victor Coleman claims to have been ejected
>from the List. Could this be true?
>
>David
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 15:16:42 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Post Mortem
In-Reply-To:  <66E406D3F7D@student.highland.cc.il.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I haven't read Lehman's book yet, but find this quotation obnoxious
Obviously he *has to disqualify Language poetry--otherwise he'd have had
to call his book "the next to the last avant-garde," not a very catchy
title!

Lehman, from other things I've read of him, is 2nd generation New York
school poet as Neo-conservative literary entrepeneur. His book on Paul de
Man (of whom I am no fan)  plays into the fashionable "let's bash
postmodern university professors"  school. His "best American poetry"
series promotes blandness--the book is the same no matter who the Famous
Poet editor is any particular year.

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 22:25:50 +0200
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         nicholas grindell 
Subject:      a frayed knot
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>david bromige wrote:
>
>> "an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis
>> supplied]. Let
>> us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with
>> rendundancy. "An
>> autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more
>> intriguing
>> piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even
>> better.
>> Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
>> formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
>
>An autopsy performed on voice, piano and strings.

An autopsy performed on a shoestring.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:20:55 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Aldon Nielsen 
Subject:      Re: framing and fuming and writing like Ron/ we passed several
              days.              Don't tell me they're gone!
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I was on the point of writing to ask Bromige what he had in mind with this
comment about a "frame" for a "thread," but then I remembered that he is in
fact the author of _THREADS_, avant la net?
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 15:25:03 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Thomas Bell 
Organization: @Home Network
Subject:      Re: Fuming and unaffiliated
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Joe,

     I appreciate your words here and suspect a large proportion of the
list is made up of us unaffiliateds who might for one reason or another
be cautious about posting.  One of the things the list has taught me is
to say what I want to say despite my meager and ancient background in
language and literature.  I am a relatively old (55) man who lives in
relative isolation (from books, universities, kindreds) and whose
exposure to any formal (or informal) education in language and literaure
is ancient history,

     I think the issue of anxieties of influence has (minimally) two
aspects: "ethical" and "poetic" if the two can be untangled.  As far as
"ethical" or "contra-societal"  is concerned, I can identify influences
all the way back to Ginsberg - if only you were alive then you would
know.  Recently I find myslf under the influence of Paul Vangelisti's
notes in _Collage to the effect that a "poet" does not need to always be
a tragic figure but can let the comic in and out on paper and Ron's
statement in the EPC paper that "poetics" is  really engagement with the
word and life.  "Poetic-cally" influences can't be as easily untangled
as I think the tendency is to pick up pieces when one finds something
that works and learning how it works.  This may just be a bow to
pragmatism and avoidance of theory but I think it is realistic.

tom bell

Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:
>
> personally, i find these anxieties (of influence, i suppose) even more
> exaxperating (i think)
>
> so while i really do enjoy this list, and really am intrigued by various
> claims made, i would suspect list discussion would be even more to the
> point if it were to allow (however) for folks (like me, i guess) who find
> themselves largely un-allied, more fluid vis-a-vis specific aesthetic and
> "community" arguments/controversies generally set forth (dangers of
> pluralism notwithstanding)... and i can't believe i'm the only person who
> feels this way... in all, it's a pesky issue to raise---but the list is
> more various than one might conclude from reading through certain threads...
>
> best,
>
> joe

--
NNMNNL        MMNMMNK            \\\/                     <><>,...,.,
 J    K            HHH            ZOOOOZ    ZEUS'WRATHHTARW        MM
  LLLL  STOPG          [    EMPTY                            ] SPACER

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/2562/Dark-Journey/Dark.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/Waysout.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/petals/petals.htm
http://members.home.net/trbell/motheran.htm
http://members.home.net/trbell/start.htm
http://home.talkcity.com/EaselSt/trbell/Blackwho.htm
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 16:37:23 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Schultz 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Would David Zauhar or other listees care to comment further on the new Lehman
book--its "problematics," especially?
Just curious, as I haven't yet read the thing.

Susan Schultz
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:40:51 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "J. Fuhrman" 
Subject:      sf reading
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

>
>#################################
>
>JEFFREY MCDANIEL, poet recently featured
 in Best American Poetry and on NPR's "Talk of the Nation,"
 veteran of many National Slam Teams
 and 1998 author of FORGIVENESS PARADE (Manic D Press).
>
>AND!
>
>CAMILLE ROY, writer and performer of plays, poetry, and fiction, most
>recently SWARM from San Francisco's Black Star Series.  She's "brilliant
>and horny as William S. Burroughs with his consciousness way raised"
>(GIRLFRIENDS magazine).
>
>#################################
>COME SEE SOME *REAL POETS*
>#################################
>
>THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH, 1998
>
>8 PM           ADOBE BOOKSHOP
>               3166 16TH ST. (btwn. Valencia and Guerrero)
>FREE!          SF, CA 94110
>
>#################################
>
>COME ONE, COME ALL!  THURS. NOV. 19TH!
>       *PLUS*  WATCH THIS SPACE FOR DETAILS ON OUR DEC. 3RD READING.
>
>#################################
>
>9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9
>
>9X9 INDUSTRIES               http://www.stilton.com/nine/
>                                           nine@stilton.com
>
>WE *STILL* DON'T LIKE POEMS
>THAT ARE LIKE POEMS!
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:39:56 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "tracy s. ruggles" 
Subject:      Re: a frayed knot
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

On Tuesday/17.November.1998 12.25.50pm, nicholas grindell wrote:
>
> >david bromige wrote:
> >
> >> "an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis
> >> supplied]. Let
> >> us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with
> >> rendundancy. "An
> >> autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more
> >> intriguing
> >> piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even
> >> better.
> >> Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
> >> formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
> >
> >An autopsy performed on voice, piano and strings.
>
> An autopsy performed on a shoestring.

An autopsy performed pre-formed by an auto spy.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 14:46:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      My autopsy
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

I don't think anyone's going to volunteer to be labeled a "language poet"
if that's going to be equated with necrophilia of some kind.
But if you accept the autopsy that the significant contribution of
Language Poetry (and maybe Surrealism for that matter) is that language
becomes more of a primary than a secondary consideration in poetry as a
result of it, then it continues to have a tremendous, if sometimes
indirect, influence.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:44:28 -0500
Reply-To:     aaron armstrong skomra 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         aaron armstrong skomra 
Subject:      another Mayer Question
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

!

does anyone know of any articles on / reviews of Mayer that they can point
me to?

thanks

backchannel
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 19:03:01 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <19981117191127.5580.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote:

> >Oh, by the way, I appreciated  Greg Gudding's deflating a few
> pretensions --
> >as if somehow Silliman, Du Charme, Bromige, etc. had definitively
> framed the
> >discussion for the rest of us.

>
> Well first of all this was a response to a thread to which all of the
> above named had posted, & an attempt to stress that there was less dis
> agreement than some of the above may have thought.  I am sorry if, in my
> haste to get to what I was saying in my post, I may have, quite
> unintentionally, ruffled any egos.

1).  I think the point that Greg Gudding was trying to make is simply
that, as per the above, the only ego that was "ruffled" by what Mack
DuCharme wrote was Mack DuCharme's.

gg
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:17:16 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      More on "last avant garde"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I looked at the Lehman book for about an hour in the bookstore and was
decidedly underwhelmed. The style is glib and journalistic; those of us
who are already steeped in New York school poetry wouldn't learn much from
it. He seems to have a general reader in mind:  perhaps someone vaguely
interested in poetry who doesn't know anything about O'Hara, Asbhery,
etc..  would read it with some profit.  Perhaps it is the academic in me
that wants more substance. (I hope it is the poet in me as well!)  Would
it have killed him to write a chapter on Barbara Guest?  Or to have
treated 2nd generation figures more charitably and expansively?

Estoy bastante decepcionado, Kent...

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 19:18:10 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      La Escuela de Nueva York
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On 17 November, Jonathan Mayhew wrote:

>I looked at the Lehman book for about an hour in the bookstore and
>was decidedly underwhelmed. The style is glib and journalistic...

>Estoy bastante decepcionado, Kent...

Lamento que sientas decepcion, Jonathan. Shamefully, I must
admit that the chatty, breezy read is one of the things that appeals
to me about Lehman's book, so rare in discussions of poetry. (Come to
think of it, breeziness is one of the things that appeals to me about
O'Hara and Koch and Schuyler too!) And the book is full of they did
this, they did that histories that in many cases wonderfully
illuminate the poetry. Lehman does a great job in weaving the lives
into the poetry and vice versa. What poetic is more implicated in the
everyday than that of "the NY School"? Well, OK, the SF Renaissance,
and the Beats too... But the great gossipy stuff in the book-- I'll
bet even you didn't know about some of the stuff in there. Don't you
enjoy poetry world gossip? No puedo mentirle a esta querida Lista: A
mi si me gusta!!

The comments on Language poetry Lehman makes I find more than thin.
Academic this, academic that, blah, blah, old, old. Yes, my comments
on young smart poets becoming the unwitting scalpels and clamps that
a now-museumed tradition wields on itself in a kind of avant-garde
"This is my Body: Take eat" are much more interesting and to the
point than Lehman's. But so what? It's still a really good read. I
hope that when the book on the Language poets is written it is fun to
read too. God knows we can always use some fun.

No te parece?

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 19:17:04 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Kent Shaw 
Subject:      critical references to Larry Levis
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
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I was hoping someone could backchannel to me any critical works they've seen
talking about Larry Levis.

Thank you,
Kent.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 19:30:25 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Listen, Kent
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Kent:

I will back-channel you a whole file-full of critical works on Larry
Levis if you will stop using my name.

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:48:39 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Cool new book
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Well, not *really* new. Anyhow, it's
_Formless_ by Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind Krauss.
From MIT/Zone books.

Opens with a quote from Bataille on *informe* or the formless,
posits the formless as "persistent within a history of modernism that
has
always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery."

If you like art criticism, it's a fun read, including entries on Robert
Smithson,
Robert Morris, Eva Hesse & my personal favorite, Cy Twombly. An
interesting
alternative to the form vs. content argument. And a really physically
beautiful
book.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 23:01:50 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: Listen, Kent

kent

for some reason you imagine i am rapt about the work of larry levis.  i
am not.  i would like the unexpurgated memoirs of jane russell, the ones
with the pictures.  and 20 hours of don rickles videos shot live in los
vegas.  this is not negotiable.

kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 00:49:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Sean Casey 
Subject:      wieners/anderson reading
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

whoops...

The Wieners/Anderson reading is in Providence,
on the Brown campus.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 03:17:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      fop-l
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

fellow poeticitizens -


I want to mention again (since I think I've written about this before),
that I co-moderate a list devoted to writing, fop-l, fiction of philoso-
phy, that is primarily the basis for the presentation of new work. (Not
poetics, but some theory of all sorts, I suppose including poetics, as
well as texts of all sorts, ranging from poetry to the phenomenology of
disability to my own avataristic meanderings, etc.) At present, there are
about a hundred people on it, and we're always looking for writers. There
is not a great deal of discussion, but a fair amount of back-channel. So
I'd like to invite anyone who might be interested to join; you can sub by
writing to listserv@listserv.vm.cc.purdue.edu, saying subscribe fop-l
firstname lastname in the body of the post.

I originally started the list about four and a half years ago, as a way to
discuss 'difficult' work - Jabes and Blanchot for example. It quickly took
off as a presentation list instead, and, with some exceptions, has
remained as such. Some of the membership overlaps with Poetics subscribers
- but the focus is entirely different.

Anyway, join and participate if you feel inclined -

Alan
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 06:37:46 -0500
Reply-To:     daniel7@IDT.NET
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Daniel Zimmerman 
Organization: Bard-O
Subject:      Re: a couple of points/lehman contest
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david bromige wrote:
>
> "an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis supplied]. Let
> us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with rendundancy. "An
> autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more intriguing
> piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even better.
> Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
> formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
>
>
An autopsy performed on a past you.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 06:10:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Listen, Guantanamo
In-Reply-To:  <199811180401.XAA17044@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

guantanamo,

1). your mention of jack russels brought to mind the very fine time i had
    riding with you on horseback in ranchlight high in the utah mountains

2). and how thought arrived concerning the alpines and lupines and the
    small terrier my horse had just punted: that should the wounded canine

3). perish in these refreshing meadows, i would make a small pilgrimage
    to the place where it was hoof-struck and trace its lolling Z-shaped

4). retreat across the prolix culvert and onto the sun-sunned culvert bridge
    where it drug itself to bask its pulped head and bark no more. thanks for

5). this memory.

guantanamo





On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Eliza McGrand wrote:

> kent
>
> for some reason you imagine i am rapt about the work of larry levis.  i
> am not.  i would like the unexpurgated memoirs of jane russell, the ones
> with the pictures.  and 20 hours of don rickles videos shot live in los
> vegas.  this is not negotiable.
>
> kent
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 07:18:48 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Sylvester's jump rope influence
In-Reply-To:   from "Sylvester Pollet"
              at Nov 17, 98 12:51:39 pm
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According to Sylvester Pollet:
>
> Mike, very sorry on name, only the m showed on reply form, I guess. I'm
> glad to read that part of the interview. That's the stuff I was alluding
> to, & I always loved the sound of it & the wacky invention. The one I'm
> thinking of has the alliterative tradition mixed in, Can't get the words
> right, but the one that goes something like "My name is Barbara and I come
> from Brooklyn and my boyfriend's name is Brian and we eat baloney." That's
> embarassingly rough, but my wife, who jumped them in NYC, isn't here at the
> moment. By all means, keep on jumping! And who cares about dominators? Who
> believes that? Maybe the Acad. of Amer. Bigshots. Sylvester
> >
>

Sylvester, if I'm hearing it right, this is the jump rope game where,
after doing the "my name is..." section there's a call & response which
goes like this:

"Mm, she thinks she's bad..."

"Correction, baby, I *know* I'm bad..."

"Mm, she thinks she's bad..."

etc.  really great rhythmicly.   -m.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 08:44:51 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Listen, Kent
In-Reply-To:  <672F3014D7D@student.highland.cc.il.us>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

I no longer wish to be part of the group named Mark or Mack.  I petition
for membership of the group named Kent.

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote:

> Kent:
>
> I will back-channel you a whole file-full of critical works on Larry
> Levis if you will stop using my name.
>
> Kent
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 08:13:59 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: schools of lemons

Nothing stinks like the cadaver of a breeze.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1998 20:04:25 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      More Waterloo News
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

To respect the mission of this list, I must report a reading I attended
Sunday night. Hoa Nguyen's class read their work at Peggy Kelley's Yoga
Studio on South Lamar Blvd as a finale to their meetings together. There
was a shrine up front, with candles and incense lit for Ted Berrigan
(whose Birthday it was) and Keats and Pound, as well as others living
and dead too far away to attend. Roberto and I sat on yoga-rugs,
drinking beers, rubbing our hands together instead of applauding because
"meditation" was "going on" in a room next to us.

Pat Booker read a long, "made-up" correspondence between Olson and
Pound, set in Austin, TX.  He pitched the gnarled, hard-edged,
joustingly hateful Pound-voice through an energy both sympathetic and
critical. His Olson had more to fight, and therefore, explain; more son
in this case, than Fathar. It was like meeting old friends in a heaven
where no one talked back.

Melissa Milios, a recent graduate of the Univ. of N. Carolina, was
surprised to find palm trees in Texas.  Kelly Kingman walked "soggy in
these skins / my shiny lot . . . thinking my phrases / should be
greetingcard / quotable / to give people on / days they celebrate who
they are / that they breathe/were born." Hoa wrote "Shop and see fresh
goat cheese / Opulence is puffy paint," then chastized me on the sly,
reading, "How can I freak out on you / gone to New Orleans / Onion Creek
has gone amok." And the coolest 15-year-old in poetry, Elisa McCool,
read, "the honey roasted peanuts are a / 'Symbol of Freedom' / I will
bring some wings for you / if you would like."

All of this, and more, being very wonderful and indicative of another
"avant-garde," one that reads Tom Clark _and_ Charles Bernstein.

Dale

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:44:19 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Alerity of Outfluence
In-Reply-To:  <66E406D3F7D@student.highland.cc.il.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

The violence of Kent's imagery and words here is fascinating.  Very good
example of how *perturbed* people on the this list are, by *THAT group*!!

As he himself says, in a post just previous, there is something here that
people are havin' a problem working thru....a weird and
defensive/aggressive ressentiment.  Honestly, except for some fine early
appreciations of Blake and other romantix, i've always thought H. Bloom
was a silly kook.  As i watch people trying to come to terms with their
anxieties regarding *that group*, though, i begin to wonder.  Oddly
however there are many fine poets (young, enfeebled, whatever) who just
get on with their work, and aren't concerned with needing to exaggeratedly
dis or dismiss the L'sters.  So i guess we aren't living in a bloomian
universe after all.  Whew!  that's a relief!

--just another mark


On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote:

> Speaking of  the "Language School," Lehman writes:
>
> "It is academic not only in the practical sense that its
> practitioners hold teaching appointments but equally because the
> noble experiment on language turns out soemtimes to resemble an
> autopsy performed on a cadaver." (The Last Avant-Garde, p.370)
>
> Now, the "autopsy performed on a cadaver" phrase may indeed be
> unintentionally redundant as David B. says; on the other hand, one
> might regard Lehman's sentence as being inhabited by a sly conceit:
> that the autopsy is not performed on the "cadaver/poem" but on the
> dead and more encompassing body of the "Language School." itself. In
> other words, an _auto-autopsy_, which seems to me even more
> fetching than "an autopsy on a living tiger."
>
> For our own purposes, as we gather today and circle, as is our
> habit, around the Tower of Babel of List, we might extend the
> conceit in the following way: The scent of the cadaver of Language
> poetry has infested and drugged the minds of young post-Language
> poets and turned them, oddly, into the scalpels, hemostats and
> tweezers which the cadaver of Language deploys (in a hideous act of
> dissection) upon its own rotting corpse.
>
> And that's a Lunch Poem.
>
> Kent
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:32:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pete Landers 
Organization: Xerox Corp.
Subject:      Re: Great Ladies of Poetry
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Eliza,

So very true. It takes more than a few years to affect change. I just
wanted to point out New American Writing which I have always respected
because 1. it doesn't have this problem and 2. the writing is great. As
mags like this take over, the others will follow. Anything
institutionalized will take longer to follow, of course.

Pete Landers
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:22:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pete Landers 
Organization: Xerox Corp.
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Influences. It doesn't help to be too self-concious about them. Read
what you like, write how you want to. I'm sure Mr. Silliman would agree
with that. After all, that's what he did. What differs is that he and
Mr. Bernstein and others also wrote about what they read, not from the
PoV of how it influences them, but as readers appreciating Ms. Stein,
Mr. Coolidge, etc. They didn't write like critics, but a group of
critics has sprung up who write the way they did. The people who
contributed to that magazine were doing what they wanted to do. I guess
that's the real coup.

Pete Landers

BTW, I'll have to sign off the list for a week, then I'll be back once I
have my email set up in the new location, Portland OR. Anyone who needs
to contact me, this addy is good for only a few more days.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 10:00:11 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: another Mayer Question
Comments: To: aaron armstrong skomra 
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

frontchannel please! it'd be great to get a compilation like the ones we've
just gotten on hejinian; great teaching resources. thanks to one and
all.--md

At 6:44 PM -0500 11/17/98, aaron armstrong skomra wrote:
>!
>
>does anyone know of any articles on / reviews of Mayer that they can point
>me to?
>
>thanks
>
>backchannel
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:59:46 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Steven Clay 
Subject:      Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

HelveticaGranary Books

announces the publication of

Log Rhythms

by Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein


In Log Rhythms, Susan Bee sets and illustrates a long serial poem by
Charles

Bernstein, offering a running visual dialog with the poem's textual

acrobatics.  Bee has created a visual counter-text for Bernstein's
poems in

four previous books  Little Orphan Anagram (Granary), The Occurrence of
Tune

(Segue), Fool's Gold (Chax), and The Nude Formalism (Sun & Moon). In
this

work, Bee's illustrations comment on and extend the many far-flung
motifs of the

poem, from a list of "Bob's" businesses to fractured and re-sung
nursery

rhymes ("Oh, do you know the muffled man?").  At times dark, at times
dizzyingly

demented, swerving from the wildly comic to the searingly political,
from the

whimsical to the elegiac, Bee and Bernstein explore the psychopathology
of

everyday life with what The New York Times calls (in reference to
Little

Orphan Anagram) "real visual =E9clat".


Log Rhythms is printed in black and white. The illustrations were first
made

with brush, ink, and wash combined with collage and then printed offset
by Brad Freeman on Warren's Lustro Dull. Cover design by Susan Bee and
Philip Gallo, laser-printed in color at the Hermetic Press.


The edition consists of 500 copies; 8 1/4 x 11"; ?? pages.


The price is $25 till December 15; $35 thereafter


Residents of the state of New York add 8 1/4% sales tax

Shipping is $3 (U.S. & Canada) $6 (everywhere else).



ISBN 1-887123-25-3


Granary Books

568 Broadway #403

New York, NY 10012 USA


sclay@interport.net

www.granarybooks.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 10:52:07 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Inspitoonshal Sexism
In-Reply-To:  <199811171820.NAA11478@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Eliza McGrand wrote:

        > i would add an interesting (and scary) note to this.  For all of
                you out
        > there who would say "oh, there's no sexism in the ruling ranks of
                poetry"

Do). Eliza, thanks for this post, this is a great post.  Let me relate to
     you, again with perverse indiscretion, _Epoch_'s freaky relationship to
     female authors.

Re). Epoch's one of your WKJs.  Anyone familiar with it will notice that few
     to barely any women get published in it.  The odd thing is this:

Mi). The Editorial Staff is Well Aware of This.  And they are even trying to
     fix this.  But they just can't HEP themselves:  issue after issue they
     choose male contributors, and much of the fiction has a decidedly macho
     tone: bears guns and the army.

The mind is a sesquiplicated thing.


-Guantanamo Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 11:41:15 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Howe on P[ei]rce
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

In the MLA's otherwise depressing journal _Profession_ (1998), just
arrived in my
mailbox, is a short peice by Susan Howe on Chas. S.  Peirce that might be
of interest to those studying relations between pragmatism and cont.
American poetry.

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 11:49:59 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" 
Subject:      Readings in Boulder
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

RANDY ROARK & LAURA WRIGHT (of this List)
will read from their work at Penny Lane, in Boulder
Monday, November 23, at 9:00 PM.

Hosted by Tom Peters.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:18:19 -0600
Reply-To:     David Zauhar 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Zauhar 
Subject:      Re: . . . & writing (un)like Ron (Lehman's Last Avant G.)
In-Reply-To:  <7ce8a34.3651ec93@aol.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Susan Schultz wrote:

> Would David Zauhar or other listees care to comment further on the new Lehman
> book--its "problematics," especially?
> Just curious, as I haven't yet read the thing.
>
> Susan Schultz
>
J. Mayhew has a pretty good sense of what's wrong with it. For me, the
biggest fault is its "Great Man" approach to literary history (gender
specificity sadly accurate). It wouldn't have killed DL to include a
chapter of Guest, for instance, and I would have liked to have seen more
on the second generation (though given his narrative, he would have
oversimplified that one, too, treating the boys from Tulsa as the central
figures and ignoring Waldman, Mayer, etc).
        It wouldn't have killed him to do this, BUT it would have killed
his narrative, and that to me is a bigger problem. He has these poets
whose work stepped outside the bounds of established convention, but he
treats them the same way he would if he were writing a book on, say, the
Fugitives.  He can't write about Guest, for instance, because that would
wreck the nice conceit he devolops about the 4 "major" NYP's. As Lehman
writes, "Writing about this quartet of poets, one is struck by how often a
useful generalization fits three of the four principals, with O'Hara the
one constant in all" (41). Thus, three of them went to Harvard (Schuyler
went to Bethany of West Virginia); three of them were in the navy (Koch in
the army), three were gay (not Koch, again) & so forth. If Guest, Denby,
etc., were included, there goes that nice little trope.
        That said, like Kent Johnson, I don't mind the breezy journalistic
style. I have lower standards for books I'm reading on the el going to and
coming from work, and at night as I fall asleep. It's not up to the
standards of one of the books he compares his efforts to: Shattuck's _The
Banquet Years_, but hey, I got it from a library. Not like I paid $27.50
for it. And these are all factors that influence my assessment of a book
every bit as much as general notions of "quality."

Dave Zauhar
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 10:04:44 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      A Fable for Our Time
In-Reply-To:  <199811172242.OAA15675@crow.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Leonard Brink wrote:

> I don't think anyone's going to volunteer to be labeled a "language poet"
> if that's going to be equated with necrophilia of some kind.
> But if you accept the autopsy that the significant contribution of
> Language Poetry (and maybe Surrealism for that matter) is that language
> becomes more of a primary than a secondary consideration in poetry as a
> result of it, then it continues to have a tremendous, if sometimes
> indirect, influence.
>

Girls and boyz,

Once upon a time there was a group.  And a nice little group it was too.
They disliked the war in vietnam and US imperialism and sexism and other
such things.  They used to get together and read Stein and Zukofsky, all
dressed up in black in cheap urban lofts (or so the story goes).  One day
one of this nice group said, We should have a name!  to show that we are
not hung up on abstract brougeois notions of individualism..And another
jumped up and clapped his hands and said, i'll make the costumes!  And so
it was: this nice group now had a name.  They even published a sort-of
manifesto in Social Text and no one claimed that they didn't mean it and
were only mocking the empty rhetoric of postmodernism....

Well, despite or because or in absolutely no relation to the fact that
they were a group, and had A Name, many of these poets wrote very fine
poems (and various other things, not always entirely distinguishable from
poems). And after 15 years or so they no longer got together quite so
often, and much of what they had done had had real impact on writing and
reading and talking in the world.  And so they really weren't a group any
longer but a loose network of friends and comrades.

The group had ceased to be a group and had become A Label.

Few people want to label themselves: not many of us wd. think it natural
to encounter a poet who said, hi!  i'm a romantic (or surrealist, or
dadaist, or augustan). So as these post-groupites got on with their work,
people who didn't like interesting and challenging form took up The Label,
and began to use it quite extensively, to deride anyone who was not as
conservative as they.

And so it was that The Name, now the Label, ceased to be very useful.
(For one thing the people who used it seldom **read** the work of these
poets very much)

And everyone lived happily ever after  (wonder what happened to those
costumes???!!)


Uncle Mark
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:54:43 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         joel lewis 
Subject:      f.y.i.
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

UK's favourite cook cracks success with eggs


            LONDON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The television chef who got a
roasting last month for teaching Britons how to boil an egg has
in fact cracked a recipe for success.
            Egg sales have soared by 1.3 million a day since Delia
Smith, Britain's best-selling cookery writer, launched her back
to basics television show six weeks ago, egg producers said on
Wednesday.
            Smith, who a few years ago turned cranberries from an exotic
fruit into an everyday staple in British supermarkets, was
initially attacked by some of her celebrity cook rivals for
insulting the intelligence of viewers with her detailed
instructions on making toast, boiling eggs and cooking
omelettes.
            But the 10 percent increase in egg sales suggests she is
more in touch with the nation's notoriously bad cooks than more
adventurous television chefs.
            ``Whatever Delia turns her hands to become immensely
popular, and we're delighted she chose eggs,'' said Garham Muir,
marketing manager at Stonegate Farmers.
            A recent opinion poll highlighted the limitations of Britons
in the kitchen. Of those who said they cook, 36 percent listed
making sandwiches as their main cookery skills, and 31 percent
cited toast.
 ^REUTERS@
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 19:11:09 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Bernstein 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

free poetics
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 00:47:15 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Sean Casey 
Subject:      wieners/anderson reading
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

--
impossible object presents:

beth anderson & john wieners
and students

Thurs. Nov. 19
Russell Lab, T.F. Green building
5 Young Orchard Avenue,
across from the Young Orchard Apts
--


and also, in nyc:


> ecstatic peace
> presents:
> friday november 20 1998
>
> thurston moore - acoustic/electric
> w/ dj olive
>
> diadal (rita ackermann/jutta koether/david nuss)
>
> william hooker - lee ranaldo - christian marclay
>
> ===============
> saturday november 21 1998
>
> thurston moore - acoustic/electric
> w/ dj olive
>
> jackie-o motherfucker
>
> william hooker - lee ranaldo - christian marclay
>
> gerard malanga - films
>
> IIIIIIIIII
> @ the cooler
> 416 w. 14 bet. 9th & washington - nyc
> 9pm
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:32:10 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Sylvester's jump rope influence
In-Reply-To:  <199811181218.HAA23608@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I remember it as "A my name is Alice and I come from..." all the way to
Zelda, I guess, but none of the little girls on my block ever got that far.
The version Mike reports was unknown in Flatbush in the 40s and 50s.
There are, by the way, folklore collections of these things and other
children's games, done in the US and UK. Wish I could remember more
details, but shouldn't be hard to track down. They seem to transcend
ethnicity, although there are thousands of local and ethnic variants. I
watched little Guatemalan kids in Antigua learning some really complex rope
games from Japanese women who had come to study Spanish. I'd guess that the
Japanese rhymes suffered some adjustments in Cakchikel. (I assume without
knowing that the jump-rope arrived in Japan with the US occupation.)
These things have legs. Somewhere in my library is a book of Eskimo
cats-cradle patterns.

At 07:18 AM 11/18/98 -0500, you wrote:
>According to Sylvester Pollet:
>>
>> Mike, very sorry on name, only the m showed on reply form, I guess. I'm
>> glad to read that part of the interview. That's the stuff I was alluding
>> to, & I always loved the sound of it & the wacky invention. The one I'm
>> thinking of has the alliterative tradition mixed in, Can't get the words
>> right, but the one that goes something like "My name is Barbara and I come
>> from Brooklyn and my boyfriend's name is Brian and we eat baloney." That's
>> embarassingly rough, but my wife, who jumped them in NYC, isn't here at the
>> moment. By all means, keep on jumping! And who cares about dominators? Who
>> believes that? Maybe the Acad. of Amer. Bigshots. Sylvester
>> >
>>
>
>Sylvester, if I'm hearing it right, this is the jump rope game where,
>after doing the "my name is..." section there's a call & response which
>goes like this:
>
>"Mm, she thinks she's bad..."
>
>"Correction, baby, I *know* I'm bad..."
>
>"Mm, she thinks she's bad..."
>
>etc.  really great rhythmicly.   -m.
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:38:14 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Alerity of Outfluence
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Yeah, I always assumed that Bloom's silly extension of Freud was a
reflection  of the tenure system, in which the rise of the young is
entirely conditional on their acceptance by the old and the old have to
kick off or be kicked off for the younger to reach the top. It never
occurred to me that WCW similarly stood in my way.

Yet Another Mark

At 09:44 AM 11/18/98 -0500, you wrote:
>The violence of Kent's imagery and words here is fascinating.  Very good
>example of how *perturbed* people on the this list are, by *THAT group*!!
>
>As he himself says, in a post just previous, there is something here that
>people are havin' a problem working thru....a weird and
>defensive/aggressive ressentiment.  Honestly, except for some fine early
>appreciations of Blake and other romantix, i've always thought H. Bloom
>was a silly kook.  As i watch people trying to come to terms with their
>anxieties regarding *that group*, though, i begin to wonder.  Oddly
>however there are many fine poets (young, enfeebled, whatever) who just
>get on with their work, and aren't concerned with needing to exaggeratedly
>dis or dismiss the L'sters.  So i guess we aren't living in a bloomian
>universe after all.  Whew!  that's a relief!
>
>--just another mark
>
>
>On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote:
>
>> Speaking of  the "Language School," Lehman writes:
>>
>> "It is academic not only in the practical sense that its
>> practitioners hold teaching appointments but equally because the
>> noble experiment on language turns out soemtimes to resemble an
>> autopsy performed on a cadaver." (The Last Avant-Garde, p.370)
>>
>> Now, the "autopsy performed on a cadaver" phrase may indeed be
>> unintentionally redundant as David B. says; on the other hand, one
>> might regard Lehman's sentence as being inhabited by a sly conceit:
>> that the autopsy is not performed on the "cadaver/poem" but on the
>> dead and more encompassing body of the "Language School." itself. In
>> other words, an _auto-autopsy_, which seems to me even more
>> fetching than "an autopsy on a living tiger."
>>
>> For our own purposes, as we gather today and circle, as is our
>> habit, around the Tower of Babel of List, we might extend the
>> conceit in the following way: The scent of the cadaver of Language
>> poetry has infested and drugged the minds of young post-Language
>> poets and turned them, oddly, into the scalpels, hemostats and
>> tweezers which the cadaver of Language deploys (in a hideous act of
>> dissection) upon its own rotting corpse.
>>
>> And that's a Lunch Poem.
>>
>> Kent
>>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:40:01 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Fuming & writing like Ron (Deviant Extensions)
In-Reply-To:  <3652D829.13728473@sdsp.mc.xerox.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Not entirely true. I was being taught by post-structuralist types by 1964.

At 09:22 AM 11/18/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Influences. It doesn't help to be too self-concious about them. Read
>what you like, write how you want to. I'm sure Mr. Silliman would agree
>with that. After all, that's what he did. What differs is that he and
>Mr. Bernstein and others also wrote about what they read, not from the
>PoV of how it influences them, but as readers appreciating Ms. Stein,
>Mr. Coolidge, etc. They didn't write like critics, but a group of
>critics has sprung up who write the way they did. The people who
>contributed to that magazine were doing what they wanted to do. I guess
>that's the real coup.
>
>Pete Landers
>
>BTW, I'll have to sign off the list for a week, then I'll be back once I
>have my email set up in the new location, Portland OR. Anyone who needs
>to contact me, this addy is good for only a few more days.
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 18:43:33 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Alerity of Outfluence
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981118163814.00aa3730@mail.earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I've always liked David Antin's hilarious commentary on H. Bloom's theory.
Mark W's guess as to the likely source of his theory--the tenure
system--is a brilliant hunch.  It explains why academics have been so
enamored of Bloom's anxiety of influence.

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 19:46:47 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: your mail
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.1.32.19981118191109.006a59f4@bway.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I would have paid...

On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Charles Bernstein wrote:

> free poetics
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:46:50 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: A Fable for Our Time
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

And here I thought it was an advertizing gimmick.

At 10:04 AM 11/18/98 -0500, you wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Leonard Brink wrote:
>
>> I don't think anyone's going to volunteer to be labeled a "language poet"
>> if that's going to be equated with necrophilia of some kind.
>> But if you accept the autopsy that the significant contribution of
>> Language Poetry (and maybe Surrealism for that matter) is that language
>> becomes more of a primary than a secondary consideration in poetry as a
>> result of it, then it continues to have a tremendous, if sometimes
>> indirect, influence.
>>
>
>Girls and boyz,
>
>Once upon a time there was a group.  And a nice little group it was too.
>They disliked the war in vietnam and US imperialism and sexism and other
>such things.  They used to get together and read Stein and Zukofsky, all
>dressed up in black in cheap urban lofts (or so the story goes).  One day
>one of this nice group said, We should have a name!  to show that we are
>not hung up on abstract brougeois notions of individualism..And another
>jumped up and clapped his hands and said, i'll make the costumes!  And so
>it was: this nice group now had a name.  They even published a sort-of
>manifesto in Social Text and no one claimed that they didn't mean it and
>were only mocking the empty rhetoric of postmodernism....
>
>Well, despite or because or in absolutely no relation to the fact that
>they were a group, and had A Name, many of these poets wrote very fine
>poems (and various other things, not always entirely distinguishable from
>poems). And after 15 years or so they no longer got together quite so
>often, and much of what they had done had had real impact on writing and
>reading and talking in the world.  And so they really weren't a group any
>longer but a loose network of friends and comrades.
>
>The group had ceased to be a group and had become A Label.
>
>Few people want to label themselves: not many of us wd. think it natural
>to encounter a poet who said, hi!  i'm a romantic (or surrealist, or
>dadaist, or augustan). So as these post-groupites got on with their work,
>people who didn't like interesting and challenging form took up The Label,
>and began to use it quite extensively, to deride anyone who was not as
>conservative as they.
>
>And so it was that The Name, now the Label, ceased to be very useful.
>(For one thing the people who used it seldom **read** the work of these
>poets very much)
>
>And everyone lived happily ever after  (wonder what happened to those
>costumes???!!)
>
>
>Uncle Mark
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 17:01:40 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      jump rope
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

With the help of Amazon I've refreshed my memory. They list 30-odd titles
each under the categories "jump rope rhymes" and "children folklore." I
particularly remember _The Lore and Language of Children," by Iona and
Peter Opie, out of print but I think readily available, as pioneer work in
the field.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 20:09:25 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Thompson 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>free poetics

where?
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 20:07:54 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      since maria asked for front-channel
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I replied to aaron armstrong skomra's query re B Mayer articles thusly:

I wrote a lengthy review of MEMORY which appeared in THE SOHO WEEKLY
NEWS in June or July 1976, shortly after it was published.  SOHO WEEKLY
NEWS was a downtown competitor to the Village Voice during the mid-70s,
I think it went under in the early 80s but don't remember very well.  a
library with a newspaper collection (New York Public?) might very well
have it, on microfilm or otherwise.  I don't have access to a copy of my
review at the moment, but it might be worth your while to look for it --
it was one of the first discussions of B Mayer for a relatively wide
audience.  it is certainly one of the earliest reviews of her work.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 20:46:27 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ramez Qureshi 
Subject:      No Subject
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

free poetics
how?
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 20:52:43 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: Listen, Kent

dear mairead

really, don't you know, the HOT group is the group whose initials (as i
have pointed out berfore on this list) are "DB" -- think about it...

david baratier
daniel bouchard
david bromige
doug barbour
dodie bellamy
...

need i go on?  are we all so naive that we actually BELIEVE any of these
"DB"'s exist?  i mean, come on.  they are all a multiple projection from
one single personality...

DREW BARRYMORE!

come out drew, you don't have to hide anymore: all is forgiven and no one
wants those silver place settings or oriental rugs back anymore... you
can have them and welcome to them, we just miss you.

e
ps
ignore what bowering said about your bra; he is a swine as rachel and
i can attest.
and maria.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 21:19:47 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: Listen, Kent
In-Reply-To:  <199811190152.UAA00130@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

it does my heart good to see the younger generation taking off from where
some of us seem to have left off.  not to mention *what* some of us have
left off; last time i saw bromige, he was bra-less in kimmage.  swoon or
swine, what do you think.

At 8:52 PM -0500 11/18/98, Eliza McGrand wrote:
>dear mairead
>
>really, don't you know, the HOT group is the group whose initials (as i
>have pointed out berfore on this list) are "DB" -- think about it...
>
>david baratier
>daniel bouchard
>david bromige
>doug barbour
>dodie bellamy
>...
>
>need i go on?  are we all so naive that we actually BELIEVE any of these
>"DB"'s exist?  i mean, come on.  they are all a multiple projection from
>one single personality...
>
>DREW BARRYMORE!
>
>come out drew, you don't have to hide anymore: all is forgiven and no one
>wants those silver place settings or oriental rugs back anymore... you
>can have them and welcome to them, we just miss you.
>
>e
>ps
>ignore what bowering said about your bra; he is a swine as rachel and
>i can attest.
>and maria.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 21:36:27 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Uncle Mark's Fables (the L word)
Comments: To: Poetics List 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

It was the issue of Poetry Flash in '79 that first used the term "language
poets," in articles by Steve Abbott and Alan Soldofsky. Soldofsky clearly
wanted some sort of term so that he could peg the group and then dismiss it.
He associated it with narcissism using Christopher Lasch as his authority on
the subject. Steve, in contrast, was just looking for something to hang a
special issue around. But what everybody remembered was Soldofsky's attack,
and so the L word was born in the first act of language bashing.

This parallels the formation of other group names that were imposed from the
outside: Herb Caen's coinage of "beatnik," the use of the term "fauvists,"
etc. Even the Objectivists have cringed at a term given to them by Zukofsky,
which does (after all) carry with it a suggested approach to the text.

The so-called LPs had been doing various work in various ways for many years
perfectly content not to have a name or anything that would reify something
that was far more transitory and experiential. Grenier's "On Speech" was 9
years old at the time; talks had been going in SF for 3 years; the Grand
Piano series for four; Tottel's 9 years.  When the L word was brought it,
everybody immediately disowned it. That got to the point that an old
roommate of mine, Tinker Greene, used to joke that the first sign of a
language poet was denial that they were in fact a language poet. But that
denial was in fact a sign of a larger (or deeper -- pick your spatial
metaphor) discomfort. You can't ask a really stupid question like "how is
Rae Armantrout a language poet?" unless you already have a whole set of
preconceptions in mind that tells you (always already) how to read LP. That
Rae's work, or Bromige's, or whomever would somehow seem problematic really
tells you about the problem of the category, not the work at hand. Everybody
was reading Rae's work with passion, everybody was reading David's work with
passion, nobody was worrying about borders.

The collective essay for Social Text came several years later (1982 to be
exact) after a series of articles (including some by Mr. Clark and Mr.
Codrescu) in the SF Chronicle, Partisan Review, New Criterion etc had made a
concerted and sustained effort to attack the idea of community in poetry and
the concept that poets might talk and write about their work in any other
than a purely joking fashion. If anything, the language bashers served as a
very effective (if unpleasant) PR firm, but they never had any interest in
historical accuracy (that wasn't the point they were trying to make) and the
legacy of their term "sticking" is worth thinking about.

These problems of categories really do get in the way of the reading. The
Spicer Circle, Black Mountain (including a writer like Levertov who never
set foot on campus so far as I can tell), the beats, the NY School
(including of course folks like Tom C who have spent precious little time in
that city), the SF Renaissance, etc etc etc. How do you read a Joanne Kyger
who was a student of Hugh Kenner's,. married to Snyder, a deep friend of
John Weiners, the only woman in the Spicer circle, the archtypal Bolinas
poet, a deep influence on Bob Grenier and several of the Naropa poets? The
same way you read a language poet: one word at a time.

Ron

--------------------------


On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Leonard Brink wrote:

> I don't think anyone's going to volunteer to be labeled a "language poet"
> if that's going to be equated with necrophilia of some kind.
> But if you accept the autopsy that the significant contribution of
> Language Poetry (and maybe Surrealism for that matter) is that language
> becomes more of a primary than a secondary consideration in poetry as a
> result of it, then it continues to have a tremendous, if sometimes
> indirect, influence.
>

Girls and boyz,

Once upon a time there was a group.  And a nice little group it was too.
They disliked the war in vietnam and US imperialism and sexism and other
such things.  They used to get together and read Stein and Zukofsky, all
dressed up in black in cheap urban lofts (or so the story goes).  One day
one of this nice group said, We should have a name!  to show that we are
not hung up on abstract brougeois notions of individualism..And another
jumped up and clapped his hands and said, i'll make the costumes!  And so
it was: this nice group now had a name.  They even published a sort-of
manifesto in Social Text and no one claimed that they didn't mean it and
were only mocking the empty rhetoric of postmodernism....

Well, despite or because or in absolutely no relation to the fact that
they were a group, and had A Name, many of these poets wrote very fine
poems (and various other things, not always entirely distinguishable from
poems). And after 15 years or so they no longer got together quite so
often, and much of what they had done had had real impact on writing and
reading and talking in the world.  And so they really weren't a group any
longer but a loose network of friends and comrades.

The group had ceased to be a group and had become A Label.

Few people want to label themselves: not many of us wd. think it natural
to encounter a poet who said, hi!  i'm a romantic (or surrealist, or
dadaist, or augustan). So as these post-groupites got on with their work,
people who didn't like interesting and challenging form took up The Label,
and began to use it quite extensively, to deride anyone who was not as
conservative as they.

And so it was that The Name, now the Label, ceased to be very useful.
(For one thing the people who used it seldom **read** the work of these
poets very much)

And everyone lived happily ever after  (wonder what happened to those
costumes???!!)


Uncle Mark
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 01:51:13 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      error?
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Hi - I may have sent out the wrong address for subbing to fop-l -
it's listserv@vm.cc.purdue.edu saying subscribe fop-l firstname lastname
in the text.

Thanks, Alan
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 22:59:56 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Herb Levy 
Subject:      Clamourous Alphabet, Martin Bartlett CD Launch,
              & other shameless promotion
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Three things:

I'm just now listening to the preliminary CD for ,
a collaboration between Vancouver poet Catriona Strang &
clarinetist/composer Francois Houle.  Some of you have heard them do some
of these pieces in various poetical contexts, including at the Robin Blaser
conference in Vancouver a few years back.  The disc is really good.  If
design & production are completed on schedule, the disc released by late
January & I'll certaily announce the release here.

This Saturday, 21 November at 7:30 pm at the Western Front, I'll be in
Vancouver BC, for a CD launch for a recent release of interactive computer
music by the Canadian composer Martin Bartlett, about whom David Bromige
has reminisced about on this very list.  Please stop by & say hi if you're
in the area, there'll be free food & drink. (There's a charge for the
concert following, though.)

I've also just sent out a flyer on the year-end Periplum CD deal &
listening to the Strang/Houle disc reminded me that poetics list people
have been interested in the music previously, so below is a quick list of
what's available.

+ Suspended Music - new music by Pauline Oliveros & Ellen Fullman performed
in concert by the collaborative forces of Deep Listening Band & Fullman's
Long String Instrument (100 feet long).

+ Burning Water - interactive computer music by the late Vancouver composer
Martin Bartlett, with performances by Peter Hannan - alto recorder, George
E Lewis - trombone, & Frances-Marie Uitti - cello.

+ Catacombs of Yucatan - music for unique hand-made electro-acoustic
instruments (shmoos harp, pendulyre, too flutter, fayfer harp & more),
includes a half-hour Horspiel/radio work built around oral histories
concerning a Minnesota dance hall during the Depression.

+ Archipelago - Ambient/improv band with Jeff Greinke, Lesli Dalaba, Dennis
Rea, and several percussionists.  As close to a pop genre as the label's
likely to get.

Through the end of 1998 CDs are US$14 including postage for one disc, or
any three discs are US$35 including postage.  Checks to Periplum, P O Box
95678, Seattle WA 98145.  Back channel any questions, etc.

Bests,

Herb


Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 03:00:42 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Schultz 
Subject:      Re: cd offer from H=A=W=A=I=`=I
Comments: To: plyons@hawaii.edu, REDFLEAxxx@aol.com, sschultz@hawaii.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

I'll be proclaiming the arrival of TINFISH 7 very soon, with work from the
USA, Australia, and New Zealand, but for now I'd like to announce the arrival
of a spoken word cd from Hawai`i, Joe Balaz's _Electric Laulau_.  Balaz
performs pidgin poems, often with a musical background (including some do-
wop), addressing issues of money, land, development, and language (including
"Da History of Pigeon").  It's a very fine piece of work.  You can find a
sample at http://joebalaz.iuma.com.  The cd's sell for $15 in the stores, but
you can purchase them for $10 from Paul Lyons (his email is
plyons@hawaii.edu).  Lyons will be reviewing the cd for TINFISH 8, but for now
he writes that it "is essential listening for anyone interested in the current
eruption of the literary arts in Hawai`i.  Served up on its own eclectic,
irreverent terms, the pieces come at you from wacky angles, with layers of
parody, inside mimicries of local, academic, and colonial thought, and
provocations that work on the gut."

Susan Schultz
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 01:02:10 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Stephen Cope 
Subject:      Re: another Mayer Question
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Peter Baker has a brief chapter on Mayer in his book _Obdurate Brilliance_
that is definitely worth checking out. There's numerous reviews around
also, but I don't have a list of them handy. Perhaps look into older
volumes of the Poetry Project Newsletter?

Stephen

>!
>
>does anyone know of any articles on / reviews of Mayer that they can point
>me to?
>
>thanks
>
>backchannel
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 01:07:58 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Stephen Cope 
Subject:      Re: another Mayer Question
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I might also mention that, at the Page Mothers Conference here (UCSD) in
March, I will be on a panel with Peter Gizzi, Juliana Spahr, Lee Ann Brown,
and Leslie Scalapino dedicated to Mayer's work (her papers, which are
astounding, have been recently acquired by the Archive for New Poetry).

And, while I'm at it: I'm looking into proposing, for the conference at
Barnard, a panel on contemporary epistolarity (some of my own work
centering around Mayer's _The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in
Letters_). If anyone is interested, or knows interested parties etc, do
backchannel. The work need not be around epistolary novels or such, but
could deal with phenemenon of the letter in literary discourse in general,
or the letter-poem, etc.

Let me know,

Best,

Stephen
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 01:46:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      Re: and the winners are---
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>My own list of great recent "arrivals" would include Elizabeth Robinson's
>_Other Veins, Absent Roots_ and Hoa Nguyen's _Dark_.

Have you seen Ondaatje's _Handwriting_?




George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:04:27 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Roger Day 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

I really have to object to this stereotypification...

At 18/11/98 21:54:43, joel lewis  wrote:
#  UK's favourite cook cracks success with eggs
#
#
#              LONDON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The television chef who got a
#  roasting last month for teaching Britons how to boil an egg has
#  in fact cracked a recipe for success.
#              Egg sales have soared by 1.3 million a day since Delia
#  Smith, Britain's best-selling cookery writer, launched her back
#  to basics television show six weeks ago, egg producers said on
#  Wednesday.
#              Smith, who a few years ago turned cranberries from an exotic
#  fruit into an everyday staple in British supermarkets, was
#  initially attacked by some of her celebrity cook rivals for
#  insulting the intelligence of viewers with her detailed
#  instructions on making toast, boiling eggs and cooking
#  omelettes.
#              But the 10 percent increase in egg sales suggests she is
#  more in touch with the nation's notoriously bad cooks than more
#  adventurous television chefs.
#              ``Whatever Delia turns her hands to become immensely
#  popular, and we're delighted she chose eggs,'' said Garham Muir,
#  marketing manager at Stonegate Farmers.
#              A recent opinion poll highlighted the limitations of Britons
#  in the kitchen. Of those who said they cook, 36 percent listed
#  making sandwiches as their main cookery skills, and 31 percent
#  cited toast.
#   ^REUTERS@

I like St Delia, but haven't they heard of Mars Bars? Or Spam?

Spam, spam, spam....


Roger
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 02:27:34 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      free poetics
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

        free for all
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:32:54 -0000
Reply-To:     suantrai@iol.ie
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" 
Subject:      Re: a couple of points/lehman contest
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

> david bromige wrote:
> >
> > "an autopsy," mind you, "performed _on a cadaver_" [emphasis supplied].
Let
> > us hope all of Lehman's book is not similarly plagued with rendundancy.
"An
> > autopsy performed on a living monad" would be a slightly more
intriguing
> > piece of language. "An autopsy performed on a living tiger" : even
better.
> > Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
> > formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
> >


an autopsy performed ex cathedra
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 02:16:19 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jim Andrews 
Subject:      Enigma n
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Enigma n awaits you. A poetry toy, experiment in the poetry of motion, anagrammatic
enigmatron.

http://speakeasy.org/~jandrews/vispo/meaning.html or
http://www.islandnet.com/~jandrews/mocambo/meaning.html

Ted Warnell commented on the piece at Zine n,
http://www.logicnet.com/ted.warnell/zinen/index.htm in a piece featuring great new
work by Komninos Zervos (Australia) and Reiner Strasser (Germany).

Enigma n requires a 4.0 browser; it's in dynamic html.

Regards,
Jim Andrews
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 03:51:16 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      Martin Bartlett
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

When I reminisced about him, did I mention the terrific coincidence that
there can be found, in the novel Matthews and I wrote with The Bowerings,
_Piccolo Mondo_ , a character named Barton Martlett. (This book in online
in its entirety if you go to : Coach House Books. ) This character is,
sadly, only a spear-carrier, in the little world of our book. I believe he
walks on in chap 6, then in chap 25, but where in between? He should have
been developed. But we had already been seven years at it.

Martin Bartlett was a one-off self-creation of unremitting charm, energy,
impulse, verbal--& enunciatory--skills (how his voice could boom) and great
prescience in matters musical. We once broke into a church together so that
he might play the organ. He expected to be arrested. Later, he got into
Mills, then later again, he got into a Vancouver non-profit (I _think_),
The Western Front, helping to run its many (mostly or all in the arts)
activities and projects. And became the musical equivalent of a L=A=N poet.
If you know what that means...and disagree, say so, please. I can't speak
of his composition and performances nearly as well as--if he'll do it--Herb
Levy.

I guess the Poetix-posting-justification is "Upper Limit, Song" as Zukofsky
said.

I look fwd to listening to the CD Herb Levy tells us about.

David
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 07:25:24 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.

they HAVE heard of spam -- that's just the point!

e
ps
they have also heard of blood pudding, steak and kidney pie, grilled kidneys,
kippers, sardines on toast, the english method of eating toast (cold),
etc.

psps
there is a passage in, i believe, a p.d. james novel describing the "fry up"
of an english family -- little rat footprints sunk deep into the grease
in the pan about to be used to fry...
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:08:26 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Ganick 
Subject:      poetry & consciousness
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

on a new tack from some of the recent discussion
on this list, i’d like to bring up a topic that,
as someone interested in language-centered poetry
since i started writing in 1972, and publishing
potes & poets press in 1981, has been of prime concern
to me.  it is the relationship of language and consciousness.

one of the main positive revolutions of l-poetry,
revealed under a close reading of some of the
important texts of writers in the initial stages of
l-poetry’s development, is the unusual use of
grammatical structures.  but we all know that in some
sense. look at the work of bruce andrews or the early
work of lyn hejinian, barrett watten, charles bernstein
and others.

what interests me is that these structures ultimately
have resonance in consciousness, and have the power to
change consciousness.  that language and consciousness
are related is something many philosophers write about,
and we all know how a well-written novel with an exciting
plot can ‘grip’ the reader  what i’m saying is that
l-poetry gives an entirely new and still-to-this-day
unprecedented take on this subject.

i get the poetics list in digest form, so may be slow
in responding, however would be interested in any
discussion of this issue.

peter ganick
potes & poets / a.bacus
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:43:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: poetry & consciousness
In-Reply-To:  <4.1.19981119080221.0096b610@mail.htfdw1.ct.home.com> from "Peter
              Ganick" at Nov 19, 98 08:08:26 am
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I would agree with Peter's assertion that the poets he names - Andrews,
Hejinian, Watten, Bernstein - have a deep concern w/ "the relationship of
language and consciousness" and that they scxrutinize the way that
*grammar* specifically informs that consciousness; but I would have to,
respectfully, disagree with the statement that,

"l-poetry gives an entirely new and still-to-this-day
 unprecedented take on this subject."

l-poetry's take on the subject is new insofar as it is, in the 70's,
expressing the point via a new set of socially specific terms peculiar to
the 70's, perhaps.  But from the perspective of intellectual history, it's
not their invention.  There's of course the French theoretical tradition
they're drawing on - but, more important to me personally, they get it
through Stein who get's it from William James.  James of course is
completely preoccupied with the issue of "consciousness" ("stream of
consciousness" being his term) and he talks about the relation of grammar
to consciousness in terms which people familiar with Lang Po will find
readily familiar:

"certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical expectations
fulfilled, stand for a good part of our impression that a sentence has a
meaning and is dominated by the Unity of One Thought.  Nonsense in
grammatical form sounds half-rational; sense with grammatical sequence
upset sounds nonsensical; e.g., 'Elba the Napolean English faith had
banished broken to he Saint because Helena at.'"

James suggests the creative possibilities of this connection between
grammar and consciousness in saying,

"any collocation of words may make sense...if only one does not doubt
their belonging together...The 'meaning' of a word taken thus dynamically
in a sentence may be quite different from its meaning when taken
statically  or without context."

and the much quoted,

"We ought to say a feeling of *and*, a feeling of *if*, a feeling of
*but*, and a feeling of *by*, quite as readily as we say a feeling of
*blue* or a feeling of *cold*.  Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit
become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that
language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use."

This is 1890.  And I think it's very much in the neighborhood of Lang Po's
central assertions.    -m.


 According
to Peter Ganick: > > on a new tack from some of the recent discussion
> on this list, i’d like to bring up a topic that,
> as someone interested in language-centered poetry
> since i started writing in 1972, and publishing
> potes & poets press in 1981, has been of prime concern
> to me.  it is the relationship of language and consciousness.
>
> one of the main positive revolutions of l-poetry,
> revealed under a close reading of some of the
> important texts of writers in the initial stages of
> l-poetry’s development, is the unusual use of
> grammatical structures.  but we all know that in some
> sense. look at the work of bruce andrews or the early
> work of lyn hejinian, barrett watten, charles bernstein
> and others.
>
> what interests me is that these structures ultimately
> have resonance in consciousness, and have the power to
> change consciousness.  that language and consciousness
> are related is something many philosophers write about,
> and we all know how a well-written novel with an exciting
> plot can ‘grip’ the reader  what i’m saying is that
> l-poetry gives an entirely new and still-to-this-day
> unprecedented take on this subject.
>
> i get the poetics list in digest form, so may be slow
> in responding, however would be interested in any
> discussion of this issue.
>
> peter ganick
> potes & poets / a.bacus
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:07:37 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      free poetics

The oracular "free poetics" can be interpreted in a lot of ways.  I would
take it as a call to the POETICS LIST - to free itself up for more direct
dialogue on poetics issues per se.  How?  Less "personality", less
grandstanding, less personal squabbling, less off-the-cuff "creative
writing".  I'm not referring to the Sondheim productions or other poems
sent occasionally to the list - this is fine with me.  Here's my recipe
for a freed-up list:

1. Dialogue.  By dialogue I mean the responders to an
initial post would have the courtesy to hold back their tangential comments
until people have responded to the main points of a post.  It's the
snide jabs or nit-picky irrelevancies that "deconstruct" a discussion.
Not that messages are not fertile with OTHER issues - I'm just saying we
should hold fire until a voice is responded to directly, in kind, to the
question.

2. Publication announcements, event announcements, calls for submissions
etc.

3. Queries, poet contacts, etc.

I'm in the ambiguous spot of being one of the big offenders in this
area - one of the select few of constant babblers who clog up the list
- but I have also participated for a long time in my erratic way in the
more regular activities.  I'm personally bored myself with the same old
voices & tricks that keep poetics from being "free", & would be glad to
hear MORE voices on more EXTENDED & focused talk about poetry.
Believe me, I would shut up for this.

I realize I will now be hit on as a humorless hypocrite & people will
pipe up to say that jokes & free-for-all are what makes the list interesting,
okay.  But if it's ALL jokes & antics & irrelevancies & ego-trips of people
that would rather interrupt an attempt at discussion with their own agendas,
maybe there needs to be a sub-poetics humor list, for those who would rather
focus on that kind of interplay.  I will not be joining that list.  Not today
anyway - maybe tomorrow.  - Henry Gould

p.s. sometimes satire is the best & most interesting way to respond - to
puncture a tire, etc.  But it's also a cheap shot.

p.p.s. I like the nice short FUNNY posts.  They are a great addition to the
list.  What I don't like is extended irrelevant grandstanding (I know, I know).
& grudging non-apologies.

p.p.p.s.  nor I'm I saying this should be a hyper-smartass show-off-your-brain
show-off-your-connections list.  But how many "beginners" would want to write
to a list that seems balanced between insider snobbery, sour attacks, and
off the wall extended soliloquies?  Joel K. is right - let there be
"community".
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 09:07:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Sylvester Pollet 
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.1.32.19981118191109.006a59f4@bway.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 7:11 PM -0500 11/18/98, Charles Bernstein wrote:
>free poetics

Free all prisoners of metrics!
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:42:39 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: free poetics
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I too like short funny posts, Henry.  As for not responding to tangential
points till everyone has responded to the main point, this implies that we
know the difference.  Sometimes the tangential point is more important to
respond to than what the poster wanted to have as his/her main point.


Jonathan "Mark"  Mayhew
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 09:47:39 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry 
Subject:      Re: free poetics
In-Reply-To:  Message of Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:42:39 -0600 from
              

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:42:39 -0600 MAYHEW said:
>I too like short funny posts, Henry.  As for not responding to tangential
>points till everyone has responded to the main point, this implies that we
>know the difference.  Sometimes the tangential point is more important to
>respond to than what the poster wanted to have as his/her main point.
>
You're right; obviously this is not an exact science.  But often, OFTEN,
somebody will raise some interesting issues - for the purpose of
discussing those issue, hopefully - & be immediately ambushed by the
quick-responders & carried off to THEIR territory.  - HG
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:15:08 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pierre Joris 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; x-mac-type="54455854";
              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Eliza McGrand wrote:

> they HAVE heard of spam -- that's just the point!
>
> e
> ps
> they have also heard of blood pudding, steak and kidney pie, grilled kidneys,
> kippers, sardines on toast, the english method of eating toast (cold),
> etc.
>
> psps
> there is a passage in, i believe, a p.d. james novel describing the "fry up"
> of an english family -- little rat footprints sunk deep into the grease
> in the pan about to be used to fry...

Jonathan Williams has some lovely works dealing with a few other Britfood
favorites such as Dead Baby, Spotted Dick, Toad in the Hole...

Pierre


--
========================
Pierre Joris
joris@csc.albany.edu
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202
tel: 518 426 0433
fax: 518 426 3722
========================
Through the living the road of the dead
— Ungaretti
========================
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:12:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         shana 
Subject:      Re: a couple of points/lehman contest
Comments: To: "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" 
In-Reply-To:  <199811191032.KAA17172@mail.iol.ie>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy wrote:

> > > Can we have a contest to see who comes up with the liveliest
> > > formulation--keep the first 3 words, vary the rest?
> > >
>
>
> an autopsy performed ex cathedra

coming into all this at the 9th inning...

an autopsy performed on an exhumed candelabra


shana
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:20:08 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         daniel bouchard 
Subject:      boston reading
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Poetry Readers in the Boston Area!!

This Sunday (Sunday... Sunday... Sunday..... !

        One day only (only... only... only... !


MICHAEL FRANCO & MICHAEL GIZZI


Sunday November 22
6 PM

WATERSTONE'S BOOKS
Newbury & Exeter Streets
Boston



<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Daniel Bouchard
The MIT Press Journals
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142

bouchard@mit.edu
phone: 617.258.0588
  fax: 617.258.5028
>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:27:19 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         daniel bouchard 
Subject:      cambridge reading *
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Cambridge is located between Boston (birthplace of Ben Franklin) and
Arlington (birthplace of Robert Creeley).

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

w/

David Baratier & Daniel Bouchard

7 PM

Bookcellar Cafe
1971 Massachusetts Ave
(617) 864-9625

a few steps north of the Porter Square T stop

Call them or me for directions.



<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Daniel Bouchard
The MIT Press Journals
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142

bouchard@mit.edu
phone: 617.258.0588
  fax: 617.258.5028
>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:33:44 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Re: Uncle Mark's Fables (the L word)
In-Reply-To:  <000301be1365$6a824720$5b53fea9@oemcomputer>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

i was glad to read RS's slight factual correction of certain claims made
in  my "fable."

*one thing which i believe is *often* lost sight of, is the limiting
character of the famous L word; i believe that many who like Ron are
considered principles in the historical development of the group have been
using it for a long time, out of the general sense that collectivities and
groupings are a good thing, and so it remains important to remind our
hyperindividualist culture that this loose network of groupings *did* have
a collective character, and that that was a deliberate choice.

*but i'm glad to see Ron stress the other side: that "schools" are very
often named by their reactionary enemies, that this one was, and that
there are many thngs about using The Label that are limiting and
problematic.

*a happy jaunt thru the archive will convince anyone that the Label is
used mostly by people wishing to express their hostility and fear toward
this group

*and that, generally speaking, the more often a poster uses it, the more
conservative that poet is

*and, girls and boyz, that's why your uncle mark has sworn off using the
demon phrase *altogether*


marcus the fabulist
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 15:38:36 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Roger Day 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

At 19/11/98 14:15:08, Pierre Joris  wrote:
#  Eliza McGrand wrote:
#
#  > they HAVE heard of spam -- that's just the point!
#  >
#  > e
#  > ps
#  > they have also heard of blood pudding, steak and kidney pie, grilled
kidneys,
#  > kippers, sardines on toast, the english method of eating toast (cold),
#  > etc.
#  >
#  > psps
#  > there is a passage in, i believe, a p.d. james novel describing the
"fry up"
#  > of an english family -- little rat footprints sunk deep into the
grease
#  > in the pan about to be used to fry...
#
#  Jonathan Williams has some lovely works dealing with a few other
Britfood
#  favorites such as Dead Baby, Spotted Dick, Toad in the Hole...
#
#  Pierre

Just the sort stereowhatsits I, as a whinging pom, was, er, whinging
about...whoops, another frivolous post :)

Roger
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:49:31 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         charles alexander 
Subject:      demons & re:sounding
In-Reply-To:  
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>*and, girls and boyz, that's why your uncle mark has sworn off using the
>demon phrase *altogether*


with "language poetry," "experimental," "avant-garde," "progressive," and
"innovative" all marked off our lists, we might actually have to talk about
the poetry. I don't know if this would "free poetics" or not


on another matter entirely:
for all those who can make it, six different poets will read/perform
original works commissioned by the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry
Series (organized by Sheila Murphy & Bev Carver), now in its 12th season.
Performers include Jeannine Savard, Jed Allen, Roberta Burnett, Eva
Jungermann, Doug Barbour, and Stephen Scobie. This occurs  at 8:00 p.m. in
the upper and lower galleries of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts.

Barbour and Scobie (collectively known as Re:Sounding) read and performed
sound poetry and other works in the POG series in Tucson two nights ago and
were marvelous. I understand they are headed to the west coast next. Don't
miss them.


charles
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 11:01:48 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Franco 
Subject:      GIZZI & FRANCO READING IN BOSTON
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Michaels Gizzi & Franco will read at Waterstone's Books on Sunday the 22nd of
Nov. 6pm. FREE
Waterstone's is at the corner of Newbury & Exiter Streets, Boston.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1998 11:59:36 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Timothy Liu 
Subject:      Friedman/Liu/Sewell at Posman Books
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Jeff Friedman, Timothy Liu and Lisa Sewell will be reading this Sunday
afternoon (3:00 p.m.) at Posman Books (One University Place) from their
most recent books published respectively by Carnegie Mellon, Copper
Canyon Press and Alice James Books in celebration of independent
publishing. Admission is free.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 08:06:35 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "tracy s. ruggles" 
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On Wednesday/18.November.1998 4.11.09pm, Charles Bernstein wrote:
>
> free poetics
>

My attempt to free it:

        I respect foe
        I cope freest

    fierce poets            TREE
    poetic reefs

secrete of pi                OF
steeper foci

    pet of cerise            SPICE
    pet so fierce

secret of pie: COST-FREE PIE!

        creep if toes        TOP
        pose if erect

    feet copiers            FECES

    (see: optic ref
    see: epic fort)            IRE
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:21:16 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Andrew Rathmann 
Subject:      Re: Howe on P[ei]rce
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Susan Howe's piece in _Profession_ is a version of a talk she recently gave
at the University of Chicago.  (Perhaps she's delivered it elsewhere,
too...)  Regrettably, the talk included quite a few additional slides of
the Peirce manuscripts, which are not in the published article.  It seems
that Howe's forthcoming book will make reference to the philosopher, whose
biography and writing practices are close to the "antinomian" tradition
that Howe has tried to delineate.

It surprises me that there isn't more discussion of her poems on the list,
since she would seem to be the most distinguished "experimental" poet now
writing; indeed, the point was made at Chicago that, among academic
audiences, she is almost certainly the most talked-about contemporary U.S.
poet.  So a writer of beautiful but almost totally opaque poems is now the
favorite of academic readers.  Doesn't this weaken the usual distinction
between "mainstream" and "marginal," and the "poetics" customarily
associated with each?  Perhaps a better distinction would be between
"academic" and..."popular"? "autonomous"?  But it was also suggested at
Chicago that Howe is in fact much less academic than other "experimental"
writers such as those associated with Language writing (think of her
religiosity, or her ear for sonorous language).  This complicates things
further, I think.  No one who wasn't already a noted poet, for example,
could have gotten _The Birth-mark_ accepted by a university press.  This
implies a certain amount of condescension among academics, of course, who
don't feel that poets need be taken entirely seriously; but it also
suggests that Howe is not really in line with the academy.

These are the sorts of observations that have struck me lately.  I wonder
whether list-members could provide others.

Andrew Rathmann

ps I'd be interested to hear, privately, from others working on Susan Howe.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:24:41 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Nemet-Nejat
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Would anyone be able to provide an e-mail address for
Murat Nemet-Nejat?

Thanks,
Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:33:03 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Howe on P[ei]rce
In-Reply-To:  
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I don't know if Howe is less academic than other comparable poets, or if
this is a meaningful category.  Ironically, her piece in Profession was
the most "scholarly" thing in the whole issue, the only article that
actually involved archival research!  So I don't think anyone can safely
condescend to her.

The list doesn't tend to discuss individual figures in great depth or
detail.  The attention span needed to read Howe is longer than a typical
thread lasts here.  I don't find her work opaque* though. It just requires
close attention over an extended period of time.


Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 11:43:06 -0500
Reply-To:     gps12@columbia.edu
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gary Sullivan 
Subject:      BOOK PARTY
In-Reply-To:  
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Detour, Roof & The Figures invite you
to celebrate their latest publications
at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 74 Grand Street
(between Wooster & Greene, in Soho)
December 3, 1998, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Books by Mitch Highfill, Ron Padgett,
Bob Perelman, Laurie Price, Michael Price,
Kit Robinson, & Geoffrey Young will be
on the premises, as will their authors.

REFRESHMENTS SERVED

ps: those who've ordered these Detour Books
they'll be available December 2
at which time I'll send them out
Rachel Levitsky's book (part of the four
I've been putting together for this
series) is LATE!! Aiii!! My apologies
my eyes are bigger than my formatting capabilities
it will be available in early January
& there'll be other book parties, soon enough
thanks,
Gary
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 09:15:54 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.
In-Reply-To:  <365427EC.9E8FCA1@csc.albany.edu>
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I once stayed in a pension in Edinburgh that included a full English
breakfast for the price of the bed. One night I returned at dawn from
Fringe poetry stuff and collapsed into bed, missing breakfast as a result.
When I awoke at 4 my landlady informed me that she had kept breakfast for
me, and I was duly appreciative of the plate of cold, semi-petrified fried
eggs, sausage and toast. I don't think the lady was having fun with me--she
seriously thought that the food was edible.
I will, however, rise to the defense of blood pudding, kidneys and kippers,
albeit not to the English preparation thereof. The French, among others, do
the first two quite well, and kippers properly cured are a noble fish.

At 10:15 AM 11/19/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Eliza McGrand wrote:
>
>> they HAVE heard of spam -- that's just the point!
>>
>> e
>> ps
>> they have also heard of blood pudding, steak and kidney pie, grilled
kidneys,
>> kippers, sardines on toast, the english method of eating toast (cold),
>> etc.
>>
>> psps
>> there is a passage in, i believe, a p.d. james novel describing the "fry
up"
>> of an english family -- little rat footprints sunk deep into the grease
>> in the pan about to be used to fry...
>
>Jonathan Williams has some lovely works dealing with a few other Britfood
>favorites such as Dead Baby, Spotted Dick, Toad in the Hole...
>
>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
>Pierre Joris
>joris@csc.albany.edu
>http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
>6 Madison Place
>Albany NY 12202
>tel: 518 426 0433
>fax: 518 426 3722
>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>Through the living the road of the dead
>=97 Ungaretti
>=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, 19 Nov 1998 17:33:51 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Roger Day 
Subject:      Re: f.y.i.
Mime-Version: 1.0
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At 19/11/98 17:15:54, Mark Weiss  wrote:
#  I once stayed in a pension in Edinburgh that included a full English
#  breakfast for the price of the bed. One night I returned at dawn from
#  Fringe poetry stuff and collapsed into bed, missing breakfast as a
result.
#  When I awoke at 4 my landlady informed me that she had kept breakfast
for
#  me, and I was duly appreciative of the plate of cold, semi-petrified
fried
#  eggs, sausage and toast. I don't think the lady was having fun with
me--she
#  seriously thought that the food was edible.

Pension? That'll be a Bed And Breakfast (in UK parlance) - you paid for it,
so you have to eat it :)

Roger
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 12:35:59 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         louis stroffolino 
Subject:      Re: BOOK PARTY
Comments: To: Gary Sullivan 
In-Reply-To:  <001501be13db$af015be0$bce23b80@montgomery.hist.columbia.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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   Hey Gary, I thought Bob Perelman told me this was at the Seque space.
   So, now I'm confused............
    c

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Gary Sullivan wrote:

> Detour, Roof & The Figures invite you
> to celebrate their latest publications
> at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 74 Grand Street
> (between Wooster & Greene, in Soho)
> December 3, 1998, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.
>
> Books by Mitch Highfill, Ron Padgett,
> Bob Perelman, Laurie Price, Michael Price,
> Kit Robinson, & Geoffrey Young will be
> on the premises, as will their authors.
>
> REFRESHMENTS SERVED
>
> ps: those who've ordered these Detour Books
> they'll be available December 2
> at which time I'll send them out
> Rachel Levitsky's book (part of the four
> I've been putting together for this
> series) is LATE!! Aiii!! My apologies
> my eyes are bigger than my formatting capabilities
> it will be available in early January
> & there'll be other book parties, soon enough
> thanks,
> Gary
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 12:42:33 -0500
Reply-To:     gps12@columbia.edu
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gary Sullivan 
Subject:      Re: BOOK PARTY
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Well, this announcement comes directly from info on postcards Geoff sent me
to send out (& post, here). Maybe Perelman's reading at Segue prior or
after? I dunno,

but this info is what I take to be "it"

Gary

>    Hey Gary, I thought Bob Perelman told me this was at the Seque space.
>    So, now I'm confused............
>     c
>
> On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Gary Sullivan wrote:
>
> > Detour, Roof & The Figures invite you
> > to celebrate their latest publications
> > at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 74 Grand Street
> > (between Wooster & Greene, in Soho)
> > December 3, 1998, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.
> >
> > Books by Mitch Highfill, Ron Padgett,
> > Bob Perelman, Laurie Price, Michael Price,
> > Kit Robinson, & Geoffrey Young will be
> > on the premises, as will their authors.
> >
> > REFRESHMENTS SERVED
> >
> > ps: those who've ordered these Detour Books
> > they'll be available December 2
> > at which time I'll send them out
> > Rachel Levitsky's book (part of the four
> > I've been putting together for this
> > series) is LATE!! Aiii!! My apologies
> > my eyes are bigger than my formatting capabilities
> > it will be available in early January
> > & there'll be other book parties, soon enough
> > thanks,
> > Gary
> >
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:09:03 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      the beauty of opacity
In-Reply-To:  
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On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Andrew Rathmann wrote:

So a writer of beautiful but almost totally opaque poems is now the
> favorite of academic readers.  Doesn't this weaken the usual distinction
> between "mainstream" and "marginal," and the "poetics" customarily
> associated with each?


1. Go to **almost** any university or college; take a look at how
frequently the books of Pinsky, Merwin, Graham, and others pushed by major
trade houses are used, show up in the reshelving areas of the library,
show up in the poetry section of the university book store...

*NOW see how often Howe's books appear in those places, or seem to be in
use...

*i think you'll find (unless, non-academic that i am, i'm VERY mistaken)
that Howe is not "a favorite" in academe.  She is still very much an
outsider.  Far too much is made of the idea that poets WANT to be
"avant-garde" and outsiders, or cherish this role...Maybe that says
something about the poets who believe it.  But i certainly don't think
such status is any more "authentic" or desirable than being lionized: they
both no doubt carry with 'em difficulties.  And so, i am not insisting
that Howe is an outsider, in order to bolster her rep.  (..though in fact
i'm second to none in loving her work and thinking she is central to U.S.
poetry..) I just think a post like the one above is typical of the loss of
perspective we see so often...Much like the pundits who've so often said
(here and elsewhere) that Silliman, Bernstein, Andrews, Hejinian etc. are
"hegemonic" or something.  Simply shows how little time these commentators
spend looking outside their particular small ponds....

2. what is this about "almost totally opaque"!!??  Remarkably lucid, it
seems to me.  OK if you have problems with poetry that isn't
paraphraseable, the (relatively few) pages in a number of her long poems
that fly apart into a cascade of audiovizpo scherzo slashings, might seem
"opaque," but i'd argue that that's not the right word: just as soon say
that Bartok is opaque because he sometimes makes great technical demands
on the audience's sustained attention....Demanding, in fact, seems a good
word.  Opaque, let alone almost totally, seems to me all wrong...

uncle mark
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:05:23 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: Howe on P[ei]rce
In-Reply-To:  Message of Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:21:16 -0600 from
              

Susan Howe is a scholar-poet, at home in the world of texts and annotations
and history as historical record, born & bred in a Boston academic milieu,
which might be one reason she is popular in academic circles, though perhaps
Andrew R. exaggerates the extent of that somewhat.  I am going to dig up her
essay on Peirce; my guess is she is interested in his grand "original" &
Cambridge MA
relation to the universe - "antinomian" seems an anachronistic description -
as I (mis)understand it, "antinomianism" was a "heretical"-sectarian
religious position when theological absolutism was under attack (17th cent.) -
Peirce himself comes out of Boston transcendentalist roots, which I guess you
could call "antinomian" in some way if there was anything to be "nomian"
against any more in the days of Emerson -  but I would guess Peirce would
be closer to the Catholic church in regard to the universality of ultimate
"truths" than to the personal experiential testimonies of the antinomians -
antinomian experience of the divine would probably fall under "firstness"
for Peirce rather than the comprehensive dimension of "thirdness" -
just a wild guess, perhaps way off - Henry G.

antinomian divine experience - thirdness experienced as firstness ??

Peirce & New England antinomians - a sort of "originary" cultural
phenomenon - like Olson's project in a way - the quest for originary
relation to reality as an "American" cultural expression (as opposed to
any prior "explanations" of anything) - Howe a late version of the
colonial effort to redefine the categories of everything from a new
place - a quest for authority (power?) - a New England Yankee tradition -
the southerners - Poe, New Critics - always hated & feared this - always
looked for the irony, the EUROPEAN roots - Eliot their avatar -
Frost the reified version of it - Pound "outgrew" it into insane exile -
Stein expressed it - Stevens expressed it - the New England thing -
Dickinson the Shakespeare of it - "self-reliance" - a-historical pioneer
element always subject to parody - heroic becomes hubris, etc. - & eccentricity
- crotchety New Englanders -
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:39:04 -0500
Reply-To:     John Latta 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         John Latta 
Subject:      Re: the beauty of opacity
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
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 Mark Prejsnar wrote:

>
> 1. Go to **almost** any university or college; take a look at how
> frequently the books of Pinsky, Merwin, Graham, and others pushed by major
> trade houses are used, show up in the reshelving areas of the library,
> show up in the poetry section of the university book store...
>
> *NOW see how often Howe's books appear in those places, or seem to be in
> use...
>

Here's a quick count via the MLA Bibliography:

35 Susan Howe citations (includes a number of 1990 Talisman pieces,
includes interviews, doesn't include Howe-author'd things)

22 Robert Pinsky citations (includes the inimical "The Horatian Poeticss
of Ezra Pound and Robert Pinsky," includes interviews but not Pinsky-writ
stuff)

There's something of a bandwagon effect in academia, and the Howe-wagon is
undeniably rolling.

This doesn't necessarily contradict Mark.

This doesn't necessarily prove much of anything.


John Latta
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:47:45 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Aldon Nielsen 
Subject:      Re: A Fable for Our Time
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enojoyed Uncle Mark's fable greatly, which I suppose may mark me as a mark,
but need to twitch the tale in one respect --

whatever the people in the loft may have decided about their name on that
great getting up morning in the loft, the fact is that they came to be
known by a name that was applied to them, as a pejorative, from the outside --

look to the seventies "poetry wars" in POETRY FLASH to follow the trail --
while the loftifarians were describing their work as "language-centered" or
even "language realism"  -- it was somebody who did not like them who first
called them, at least in print, "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets" --

your nephew,
aldon
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:03:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: the beauty of opacity
Comments: To: lattaj@umich.edu
In-Reply-To:   from "John Latta" at Nov 19,
              98 01:39:04 pm
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 According
to John Latta: > > Here's a quick count via the MLA Bibliography:
>
> 35 Susan Howe citations (includes a number of 1990 Talisman pieces,
> includes interviews, doesn't include Howe-author'd things)
>
> 22 Robert Pinsky citations (includes the inimical "The Horatian Poeticss
> of Ezra Pound and Robert Pinsky," includes interviews but not
> Pinsky-writ stuff)
>There's something of a bandwagon effect in academia, and the Howe-wagon
>is undeniably rolling.

I think there's some use to this sort of tally, John - at least a point of
reference so we're not just blurting out unfounded opinions about who's
more influential blah blah blah.  & I agree too that this doesn't negate
Mark P's statement - a survey of the bookshelves is always worthwhile.
But I think there's another way to look at it, much more dear to me, which
has to do with your idea that the "Howe-wagon is rolling" - here's my
thought, which has to do with the way in which social change actually
comes about (as opposed to social stagnation): the sourpusses will note
that Pinsky gets to be on PBS and such, votes on prominant prizes, dines
with the president, whatever else.  And there are many people who will
tell you they like Pinsky's work, perhaps some on this list.  But how many
people would really go to bat for Pinsky? - I mean *really* go to bat for
him, as in, lay something on the line, take some sort of risk to stand up
for his poetry and poetics?  I would guess not too many.  Whereas, me, I'd
really go to bat for Susan Howe - if push came to shove, I'd risk tenure
and all the rest to support her work (i.e., if it came up in an interview
and some conservative knucklehead said, "You really like Susan Howe's
work" I would defend it vigorously even if it seemed apparent that I'd
lose the job).  In my more masculinist moments - please note the irony - I
feel like I'd really knock someone the fuck out in support of The
Birth-Mark or Singularities.  Do you see what I'm getting at?  The culture
doesn't change because someone wishy-washily gives a thumbs up to Robert
Pinsky.  Pinsky is the *end* of a certain kind of poetry, ending with a
wimper, which is why I tend not to get bent out of shape by the press he
gets or the bookshelves he occupies.

-m.

 According
to John Latta: > > Here's a quick count via the MLA Bibliography:
>
> 35 Susan Howe citations (includes a number of 1990 Talisman pieces,
> includes interviews, doesn't include Howe-author'd things)
>
> 22 Robert Pinsky citations (includes the inimical "The Horatian Poeticss
> of Ezra Pound and Robert Pinsky," includes interviews but not Pinsky-writ
> stuff)
>
> There's something of a bandwagon effect in academia, and the Howe-wagon is
> undeniably rolling.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:02:36 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Dear Uncle Mark and Cousin Ron
MIME-Version: 1.0
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The fable, Mark, was charming, but I need to say that my
cadaver of Language conceit seems to have been wrongly taken as
an attack on "Language poetry." (We all know what happens to people
who attack Language poetry--why would I be so crazy as to do that?)
And  I completely agree with Ron that Language poetry was
always an Idea and never _really_ an organic Body in the first place.

But wakes and funerals can be held for Ideas. That sentimental adieu
stage has not quite come yet for the Idea of Language, which still
sputters and writhes, like Damiens the regicide, on the plank.
The autopsy is taking, apparently, quite a long time.

But I want to make clear that the violence of the matter has nothing
to do with anything in the axiological sense. Nor does the utter
reality of the dissection, or, better said, _vivisection_ (the
"reality" of which is, admittedly an abstraction, though no less
real, as Lenin would say, for that) have anything to do with my
personal predilections in poetry which are quite catholic and with a
definite slant to that tradition which the Idea of Language has most
certainly enriched. I am _not_ an enemy of Language. (In fact I
happened to write and publish one of the very early defenses of
Langpo, gave a very sympathetic paper on its "auto-critical"
production at the MLA, etc.)

Still, I maintain that my autopsy-dissection conceit is valid and
full of promise as an heuristic device. Mark and Ron apparently don't
think so and that is fine. But how could they? How could they "get
it" if they truly believe that the vivisection and mummification
rituals carried out on the viscera of "Language"  _as we speak_ are
primarily acts of New Criterion-types still chanting in evil
circle around the Body-Idea of Language? Can Mark (and, as I read
him, Ron) _really_ be serious in asserting that any review of the
literature will show that the Name of Language is conjured many times
more by its reactionary Others than it is by the extended relations
in the family tree? Why, go to the Archives of this List and tell me
that that is true! Who are writing the University Press books on
Language? The essays in the big-name journals? Giving the talks at
the MLA? Who?  The enemies with blood vendetta against Our Family?
Not at all.

There is the dustbin of literary history the reactionaries would like
to sweep the Idea of Language into, and there is the Canon, which
_demands_ dissection before entombment in the Mausoleum/Museum of
Movements. It's painful to watch it happen, especially when the
dissection is carried out on itself by the still-breathing Body/Idea
proper, as it subliminally calls forth to the plank (through the
strange and enticing aromas of its decay-in-life) the instruments of
vivisection it itself has so lovingly laid: The Scalpel-acolytes
who both love and hate the Name of the Father and now slice and label
His viscera in an image of the coming Death they also darkly desire;
the Bone Saw-academics who are taken by their finger-grip handles and
sawed back and forth across the Idea's ribs to expose its still
beating Heart, which we see now, is of the same shape and color as
the heart of any Movement resting at last and at peace in its
well-wrought urn.

Why is this so hard to accept? What I'm evoking is the perfectly
natural life/death process of the "avant-garde," no less natural and
inevitable than death is for the individual human being. Read
Foucault on the Author Function. Not as fun to read as Lehman's book,
but very relevant and illuminating of this admittedly macabre vision
I am sharing with you.

And I know that after Henry's post today I shouldn't be
speaking like this, in the creative writing way, but I _am_ talking
here about Poetics, which everyone knows, of course, is not a field
of daisies.

Now I am going to return to my translations of the Bolivian poet
Jaime Saenz, who, like all of us, was both enamored with and
terrified by death.

Kent
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:02:09 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Re: A Fable for Our Time
In-Reply-To:  Message of Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:47:45 -0800 from
              

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998 10:47:45 -0800 Aldon Nielsen said:
>
>look to the seventies "poetry wars" in POETRY FLASH to follow the trail --
>while the loftifarians were describing their work as "language-centered" or
>even "language realism"  -- it was somebody who did not like them who first
>called them, at least in print, "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets" --

But doesn't it seem appropriately ironic that some poets who distinguished
themselves by their focus on "language" (as if that were a distinguishing
mark & not true of all poets) would suffer the word-as-stick-on-label?
- Henry G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:07:55 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Re: Dear Uncle Mark and Cousin Ron
In-Reply-To:  Message of Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:02:36 -0500 from
              

Kent, you have my permission to keep talking, Gunga Din. - Henry Din
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:12:40 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      PS
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I posted my last before seeing the discussion on Howe's academic
"bandwagon."

Ah, my point exactly.

Uncle Remus
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 11:29:38 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Aldon Nielsen 
Subject:      the late nephew
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well, I see Ron had already filled in the information about the origins of
the "L-word" --

I'll add, then, what I still consider thge best definition of a "language
poet" ever offered -- it was offered by Ron in a talk in San Francisco at
an MLA, and I have offered it here before --

Ron said on that occasion that a language poet was anyone who had ever been
accused of being one.

on related threads --

When tabulating MLA bib. entries it's important to note the nature of the
entry -- as was pointed out, a substantial number of the entries for Susan
Howe refer to the same issue of TALISMAN -- not that Mr. Pinsky or anyone
else might not also be the subject of a special issue -- but having a
special section of TALISMAN devoted to your work won't exactly make you the
darling of us academics on its own --

Alan Golding may recall the stir among the creative writing contingent at
the 20th century conference the year that both Howe and Jerome McGann spoke
-- any number of attendees tried to make the argument that Howe writes the
way she does so that academics like McGann will write about her --

what's interesting to me in all this is not so much the question of who is
or is not "academic" -- what I'm curious about is how the term "academic"
operates in these discussions -- it would appear that, for some, to attract
the attention of critics within the academy is nearly as bad a thing as to
be ignored by critics within the academy -- which would make the position
of poetry within the academy perhaps even worse than we already think it is --
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:41:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Re: Dear Uncle Mark and Cousin Ron
In-Reply-To:  <69C7D4A2FE9@student.highland.cc.il.us>
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On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, KENT JOHNSON wrote:

> Can Mark (and, as I read
> him, Ron) _really_ be serious in asserting that any review of the
> literature will show that the Name of Language is conjured many times
> more by its reactionary Others than it is by the extended relations
> in the family tree?

Yep.

--mp
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:47:40 -0500
Reply-To:     John Latta 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         John Latta 
Subject:      Re: the beauty of opacity
In-Reply-To:  <199811191903.OAA35918@dept.english.upenn.edu>
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  Michael Magee wrote:


> I think there's some use to this sort of tally, John - at least a point of
> reference so we're not just blurting out unfounded opinions about who's
> more influential blah blah blah.  & I agree too that this doesn't negate
> Mark P's statement - a survey of the bookshelves is always worthwhile.
> But I think there's another way to look at it, much more dear to me, which
> has to do with your idea that the "Howe-wagon is rolling" - here's my
> thought, which has to do with the way in which social change actually
> comes about (as opposed to social stagnation): the sourpusses will note
> that Pinsky gets to be on PBS and such, votes on prominant prizes, dines
> with the president, whatever else.  And there are many people who will
> tell you they like Pinsky's work, perhaps some on this list.  But how many
> people would really go to bat for Pinsky? - I mean *really* go to bat for
> him, as in, lay something on the line, take some sort of risk to stand up
> for his poetry and poetics?  I would guess not too many.  Whereas, me, I'd
> really go to bat for Susan Howe - if push came to shove, I'd risk tenure
> and all the rest to support her work (i.e., if it came up in an interview
> and some conservative knucklehead said, "You really like Susan Howe's
> work" I would defend it vigorously even if it seemed apparent that I'd
> lose the job).  In my more masculinist moments - please note the irony - I
> feel like I'd really knock someone the fuck out in support of The
> Birth-Mark or Singularities.  Do you see what I'm getting at?  The culture
> doesn't change because someone wishy-washily gives a thumbs up to Robert
> Pinsky.  Pinsky is the *end* of a certain kind of poetry, ending with a
> wimper, which is why I tend not to get bent out of shape by the press he
> gets or the bookshelves he occupies.


Michael:

Well, sure. Reputations are made by advocacy and it's hard to be a yes-man
for something nobody's saying no to, or for something for which there's a
reigning vague indifference perfect for laureateship. Without knowing the
poetry particularly well, I feel the same way about Pinsky; he's part of
that middle mediocre-at-best muddle I'd just as soon avoid, like most
movies, most store-bought breads. But: the thing I find worrisome in the
general Howe-fervor is how, despite the calisthenics and bravado seemingly
involved, easy it is to gain footing on a rolling wagon. It's the "this
year's model" fears I have about scholarship in these days of marketable
everything. And "feistiness" and "difficulty" may well be as marketable as
bread.

I meant to say inimitable.

John
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:48:10 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         KENT JOHNSON 
Organization: Highland Community College
Subject:      Re: the late nephew
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On Nov. 18, Aldon Nielsen said:

>what's interesting to me in all this is not so much the question of
>who is or is not "academic" -- what I'm curious about is how the
>term "academic" operates in these discussions -- it would appear
>that, for some, to attract the attention of critics within the
>academy is nearly as bad a thing as to be ignored by critics within
>the academy -- which would make the position of poetry within the
>academy perhaps even worse than we already think it is --

Hmmm... Unless this doubled bind is merely a mundane sort of paradox,
like the cadaver on the plank, a gaping grimace of sexual joy on its
face.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 11:58:16 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Billy Little 
Subject:      200 lined up in the rain
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it was standing room only when the Kootenay School of Writing hosted the
reading of Deanna Ferguson and Tom Raworth. Deanna so cruelly cool, so
matter of fact in her passion. Outside the gallery while she read two
people were gunned down in a drive by shooting.  Andrew's introductions
were touching unrehearsed. Canada's top poet Gerry Gilbert recorded the
session for broadcast later in the week on his Radio Free Rainforest. Gerry
Creede straining to catch every phoneme of the electrical stream the drole
english master produced so forcefully yet restrainedly dazzling.
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk proved to be the stage manager when she teasingly
instructed the readers to read fast and read loud we like it that way.
Rhoda Rosenberg, Michael Barnholden, Clint Burnham, Philip McCrum, traded
bon mots at the refreshment stand. Jamie Reed breezed in from UBC where he
was having an educational revelation. Everyone at the very least left with
an infatuation for the words Tom never used poem, he read sections from
meadow casually brilliant
in my humble understanding.  He'll be reading at Cecil Green house at UBC
next tuesday, make time for it..

billy little
4 song st.
nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0

Go ahead and say something true
before the big turd eats You
You can say any last thing in Your poem.

-Alice Notley
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 12:35:59 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Aldon Nielsen 
Subject:      Merwin's Folding Cliffs
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Any of you listers in Hawaii read this narrative poem by Merwin that I see
looming from the store shelves?
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:44:18 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      p s
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>s--one realizes that the original movement has had broadened its
>definitions broadened,


inadequate editing here--please disregard the 2nd 'broadened'. Thanks. db3
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:40:47 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      the second death of the L=A=N Author
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

A post of mine some months ago might be revived in new format now :


Stage         Imagism       Objectivism       New American Poets   L=A=N poetry

Forming       1909-1911       1925-28          1947-1949           1969-1971

Manifesto     1912            1930             1950                1972

Original-Group
Cohesiveness  1912-1929       1930-1934        1950-1975          1972-1992

These dates are of course highly arguable, and may, where verifiable, be
slightly off (I have not taken the trouble to look them up).  By the time
of Amygisme, 1913, the Imagist movement was arguably over. However, I am
respecting the close association continuing between EP and WCW, Bill Bird's
publishing, Marianne Moore's editing of The Dial, etc.

The interrupted Objectivist (non)movement can be seen to enjoy a 2nd life
with the publications of the 60s.

Once poets not in the originating group enter the picture -- v. Anselm
Hollo's inclusion in later editions of _The New American Poetry_ , or (in a
media source I've forgotten) the naming of Leslie Scalapino, Anne
Lauterbach and Paul Hoover as Language Poets--one realizes that the
original movement has had broadened its definitions broadened, if only in
under-informed minds, to the point of dispersal. (Understand I am not
disparaging the work of these 4 poets; that is not the point here; NAP and
Langpo are fortunate to have them as ex officio members).

While there is no reason for history to repeat itself, it often does, and
the 20-year span of Imagism,and the 25-year span of the NAP, match up
closely with the 23-year span of L=A=N.

Of course, EP, HD and WCW & other of their peers continued to use this or
that Imagist device through all their days. But it was redndantly odd to
refer to any of these in 1938 as "Imagists."  And to me there is a like
redundancy in referring in 1979 to Duncan, Creeley, Levertov, Ashbery as
"New American Poets."
They were still exploring devices the NAP revolution had given them (that
they had given to the revolution), yes; but their poetic identities had
become such that the group label was now painfully inadequate.

This is how I feel now about L=A=N; that it has active extension in the
recent writing of its progenitors, there is no question, despite, say, the
radical change in Perelman's poetic. What one needs to question is what can
be gained, today, by regarding L=A=N poetry as anything but an historical
event? Bernstein, Andrews, Silliman, Hejinian, Watten, et al, have entered
a period where their distinctness each from each becomes primary.

When non-originating poets attempted Imagism in the 1930s et seq; when
non-o poets attempted NAP means in the 1970s; and when non-o poets attempt
L=A=N moves in the 90s, the results are seldom laudable--unless admixed
with much else. Times change : poetic movements are born from the necessity
to face that; in their beginning is also their end. Where are the detestors
of the poetry of Chris Stroffolino, Mark Wallace, Mark duCharme, Peter
Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis, Jennifer Moxley, Steve Farmer, Lisa Robertson,
Deanna Ferguson, Lissa Wolsak, Jeff Derksen, Darren Wershler-Henry...(and
one could go on and on in the pleasurable rounding up of equally attractive
poets) ? Where are their detractors, one of whom will give them the group
identity they may or may not want? (Ron might have mentioned 'Cubisme'
also; and the 'Kitchen Sink' school. etc).

David
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 15:48:12 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: poetry & consciousness
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Great post on what Henry James said.  But the l-poets put the theory
into practice.  That to me is their (huge) contribution.  I hope others
add to this thread as I can't because I don't know enough about langpo.
And don't have time right now.  If people do get this thread into high
gear, I do hope people will present examples of specific language poets
doing specific things with grammar.  So many have done so many different
things that I no longer know who did what.  It's all a blur of
interesting techniques to me.  Has any critic work out exactly what
techniques language poets have used, and analyzed them?  I mean, in some
methodical way.  Many have noted various techniques in passing while
discussing various poets.  Anyway, Peter, thanks for bringing all this
up.

                                                          --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 15:17:33 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: the late nephew
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.32.19981119112935.0077c080@popmail.lmu.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>
>I'll add, then, what I still consider thge best definition of a "language
>poet" ever offered -- it was offered by Ron in a talk in San Francisco at
>an MLA, and I have offered it here before --
>
>Ron said on that occasion that a language poet was anyone who had ever been
>accused of being one.
>

Jeez, Aldon, does that mean I'm a Language poet even tho I don't want to
be? Is there no way I can get out of it? Is there a statute of limitations?
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 21:39:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Irby on Duncan
Comments: To: Poetics List 
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Can somebody who was there (preferably) report on what Ken Irby said in his
talk on Robert Duncan in Lawrence last Tuesday? I'd be very grateful,

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 18:55:29 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Rachel Loden 
Subject:      my poet laureate can beat up your poet laureate
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New quartet a-bornin'?

Busta Rhymes wrote:

> I always roam the forest just like a Brontosaurus
> Born in the month of May so my sign is Taurus
> I kick you in the face like my fuckin' name was Chuck Norris

Michael Magee wrote:

> In my more masculinist moments - please note the irony - I
> feel like I'd really knock someone the fuck out in support of The
> Birth-Mark or Singularities.

Ted Berrigan wrote:

> Orange cavities of dreams stir inside "The Poems"
> Whatever is going to happen is already happening
> Some people prefer "the interior monologue"
> I like to beat people up

Paging Tom Mandel . . . white courtesy telephone, please . . .

Rachel "The Body" Loden
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1998 23:00:28 -0500
Reply-To:     mcx@bellatlantic.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         michael corbin 
Subject:      Re: Dear Uncle Mark and Cousin Ron
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KENT JOHNSON wrote:

>  which still
> sputters and writhes, like Damiens the regicide, on the plank.
>
>

But it is the king's multiple bodies mon cheri. Damiens desire and mine,
ours and otherwise. It is the ours and otherwise. Our otherwise.

mc
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 08:48:14 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      tata
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just a noitce of "strangeness" and wonder:

I come home--and daily check the list--in a day's time I get 50-65 hits
on the list---but each evening they taper off--

I notice that!
I do.

SO MUCH writing on this list seems to take place from

a) "bac" east
2) during "the day"
c) what the hell do most of you people do that you have so  much time on
yr hands?

#) It is a wonderful life.

Todd Baron
(ReMap)

ps: A strong rec. to read the Serge Gainsbough book that TAM TAM has
just published. Tosh Berman has brough a wonderful text +back+ into
print!
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 01:59:12 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: the second death of the L=A=N Author
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Imagism and Objectivism as coherent movements, rather than as practice,
have receded so far into history as to have become difficult to see in
context. I have never seen NAP referred to as a movement anywhere but on
this list. To the best of my memory it was an anthology that attempted to
be a taxonomy of poetry that was in some sense outside. The groupings it
defined overlapped to an extent but were usually at each others' throats,
socially and theoretically. They look a lot more similar from the vantage
point of this moment than they did at the time. Language poetry has had
some influence on a lot of poets who don't identify with it and has
displayed some affinities with a lot of poets who arrived at some similar
theoretical and tactical stances before or independently of LP. One eminent
poet of unquestionable avant garde credentials who will remain unnamed
because he doesn't like to be brought into these controversies once turned
down inclusion in an important anthology because the editor thought he
should be there to represent "deep image." He preferred his independence,
no matter how useful cooptation might be. Much of the rest, David, is hype.

At 02:40 PM 11/19/98 -0800, you wrote:
>A post of mine some months ago might be revived in new format now :
>
>
>Stage         Imagism       Objectivism       New American Poets   L=A=N
poetry
>
>Forming       1909-1911       1925-28          1947-1949           1969-1971
>
>Manifesto     1912            1930             1950                1972
>
>Original-Group
>Cohesiveness  1912-1929       1930-1934        1950-1975          1972-1992
>
>These dates are of course highly arguable, and may, where verifiable, be
>slightly off (I have not taken the trouble to look them up).  By the time
>of Amygisme, 1913, the Imagist movement was arguably over. However, I am
>respecting the close association continuing between EP and WCW, Bill Bird's
>publishing, Marianne Moore's editing of The Dial, etc.
>
>The interrupted Objectivist (non)movement can be seen to enjoy a 2nd life
>with the publications of the 60s.
>
>Once poets not in the originating group enter the picture -- v. Anselm
>Hollo's inclusion in later editions of _The New American Poetry_ , or (in a
>media source I've forgotten) the naming of Leslie Scalapino, Anne
>Lauterbach and Paul Hoover as Language Poets--one realizes that the
>original movement has had broadened its definitions broadened, if only in
>under-informed minds, to the point of dispersal. (Understand I am not
>disparaging the work of these 4 poets; that is not the point here; NAP and
>Langpo are fortunate to have them as ex officio members).
>
>While there is no reason for history to repeat itself, it often does, and
>the 20-year span of Imagism,and the 25-year span of the NAP, match up
>closely with the 23-year span of L=A=N.
>
>Of course, EP, HD and WCW & other of their peers continued to use this or
>that Imagist device through all their days. But it was redndantly odd to
>refer to any of these in 1938 as "Imagists."  And to me there is a like
>redundancy in referring in 1979 to Duncan, Creeley, Levertov, Ashbery as
>"New American Poets."
>They were still exploring devices the NAP revolution had given them (that
>they had given to the revolution), yes; but their poetic identities had
>become such that the group label was now painfully inadequate.
>
>This is how I feel now about L=A=N; that it has active extension in the
>recent writing of its progenitors, there is no question, despite, say, the
>radical change in Perelman's poetic. What one needs to question is what can
>be gained, today, by regarding L=A=N poetry as anything but an historical
>event? Bernstein, Andrews, Silliman, Hejinian, Watten, et al, have entered
>a period where their distinctness each from each becomes primary.
>
>When non-originating poets attempted Imagism in the 1930s et seq; when
>non-o poets attempted NAP means in the 1970s; and when non-o poets attempt
>L=A=N moves in the 90s, the results are seldom laudable--unless admixed
>with much else. Times change : poetic movements are born from the necessity
>to face that; in their beginning is also their end. Where are the detestors
>of the poetry of Chris Stroffolino, Mark Wallace, Mark duCharme, Peter
>Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis, Jennifer Moxley, Steve Farmer, Lisa Robertson,
>Deanna Ferguson, Lissa Wolsak, Jeff Derksen, Darren Wershler-Henry...(and
>one could go on and on in the pleasurable rounding up of equally attractive
>poets) ? Where are their detractors, one of whom will give them the group
>identity they may or may not want? (Ron might have mentioned 'Cubisme'
>also; and the 'Kitchen Sink' school. etc).
>
>David
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 05:43:38 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: the second death of the L=A=N Author
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Odd, when I first looked at this I thought, LAN, local area network, the
neighborhood aspect of the Internet, people like myself and jodi.org or
hmmm.. maybe Steve Duffy or Miekal And, working the Net towards a differ-
ent language which owes nothing to the GUAGE following, as far as I can
tell - there are other forms of freedom, interesting not so tied into the
academy maybe, or maybe otherwise, but then the chart's crystal, already
tied into place like a hieroglyph body, I mean the fact that there could
be one. Which is good, I'd want to see Byron there somehow, since Don Juan
_was_ an influence, or Chatterton's trip to London, I almost wrote Vegas
for the lot it through at him. So if there are LAN authors dying or sick
out there, maybe it's cause the GAUGE has broken, no longer measures, as
the words reach across worlds, epistmologies, dynamicisms, and I don't
mean vorticism come alive, but things that tear into one, that leave the
safety of language altogether. Maybe LANs are unsafe, already WAN, wide-
area-network - tie them together, you've got an internet, log in and
capitalize the I, whoever you are, shifting across Jacobson in the nite...

Alan
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 05:47:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      correction
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

well, I meant that London threw at him, and I meant epistemology, how
these words fly out, look perfect until the equally perfect glare hits the
screen and what was lucid becomes uninterpretable.

Alan
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:41:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Ganick 
Subject:      Re: poetry and consciousness
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

michael...

i had forgotten temporarily about the french tradition (which
i certainly know about well and should have recalled) and
did not know about the james connection at all (thanks for
that, i'll investigate further)...but as an apologist for the L=
school and wanting to find something distinctive and in-
novative in their efforts, perhaps the thing that distinguishes
them is the 'group' effort aspect they embodied...the sense that
the whole is greater than the sum of the parts...stein cer-
tainly altered grammar/consciousness (maybe more radically
than some L=poets even), but the late 60s (which i lived
through in college) was a time when the 'group' concept was
first started -- the beatles, the rolling stones, the byrds were
the start of something that people take for granted now...
(believe me, i'm not trying to pull older/newer poet on you
either...i only listen to 90s modern rock now...how many times
can one find 'all you need is love' exciting, though it is a good
message...

more on this later...back to the digest...

peter ganick
potes & poets press / a.bacus
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 07:05:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      A Defense of Cheap Shots
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Henry Gould wrote:
> p.s. sometimes satire is the best & most interesting way to respond - to
> puncture a tire, etc.  But it's also a cheap shot.

1).  What are the beauties of a cheap shot?  The cheap shot is unjust, it
     breaks the rules, yet it remains relevant.  It is therefore a perfect
     device: its illegal status makes it easily dismissable -- therefore
     releasing the opponent from the burden of response!

2).  It also provides the opponent with the ammunition of Indignation and
     Moral Righteousness: these are very fun weapons.  What a gift!

3).   Look what I have given Mark DuCharme!  Look what I have given Eliza
      McGrand!: should they choose to look now at their
      armamentaria, they'll notice gleaming there the new hurky cudgels of
      moral indignation and flustered righteousness.  Call me Benefactor.

4).  Murk has already picked up these great cudgels: Let him fear my
     atlatl. I will fear his Jimmy Swaggart cudgel if he fears my ligneous
     atlatl.

> I realize I will now be hit on as a humorless hypocrite & people will
> pipe up to say that jokes & free-for-all are what makes the list interesting,
> okay.

5).  What can I do but hit you?  The alliance of poetry (and, more
     broadly, satire and letters in general) with antics, jokes, laughter &
     irrelevancies has been and will remain probably THE sustaining timber
     under the boardwalk of English letters.

> maybe there needs to be a sub-poetics humor list, for those who would rather
> focus on that kind of interplay.  I will not be joining that list.  Not today
> anyway - maybe tomorrow.

6).  The latest list laureate du jour, Spicer, would have been on that
     list.  As would Vachel Lindsay.  Both knew the importance of
     vaudeville, of verbal slapstick.

7).  Death and death again to the High Seriousness & Stupidity of
     Earnestness that has infested "poetics"; death to serious thought.
     Thought should be loose.  A Donkey Death to "free poetics" if its gonna
     be chained to the rotting beached whale of Literary High Seriousness.

8).  Slapstick, let us remember, is not violence: it is the parody of
     violence and the satire of the pompous.  If there weren't some Raging
     Pomposities committed here in the name of "Poetics" I wouldn't be
     going on at length about what it means to hit people, god help me.

Guantanamo Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 08:01:47 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Re: A Defense of Cheap Shots
In-Reply-To:  Message of Fri, 20 Nov 1998 07:05:42 -0500 from 

Dear Guantanamo,
I agree witch youse 100%, & admit my complaints was vague & scattershot.
Your posts is welcomed by this postee.  Satire is triesta with a T.
Mutt I have still concoined wid da way a tread is oftten dishipated
& smoithered by the shame 5-6 constanto-posters (me amongst dem) aroun
the shame ol isshues (who the Greatest 3 Language Poets Are & When Did
They Succeed & When Did Their Influence Begun to Filter Troo Da Filters
of Da Youngun Grateful Uns fer ex.) & have shimple shugestion that
peoples reshpond to perticular main argscements of initial posht
rawther than devolvulate into extshtended blather of Litwayway
Eunuchs Inc. an let some adem lurkers open them beanstuffers.

- Ezra Pound, standing in for the "higgler", a.k.a Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 08:52:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: my poet laureate can beat up your poet laureate
In-Reply-To:  <3654DA20.63FFFAFA@concentric.net> from "Rachel Loden" at Nov 19,
              98 06:55:29 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Wow, I could do a lot worse than wake up one morning and find myself
implicitly compared to both Busta Rhymes and Ted Berrigan - thanks Rachel!
(even if the only common denominator is that we all once mentioned
kicking ass....hmmm...)    -m.


According to Rachel Loden:
>
> New quartet a-bornin'?
>
> Busta Rhymes wrote:
>
> > I always roam the forest just like a Brontosaurus
> > Born in the month of May so my sign is Taurus
> > I kick you in the face like my fuckin' name was Chuck Norris
>
> Michael Magee wrote:
>
> > In my more masculinist moments - please note the irony - I
> > feel like I'd really knock someone the fuck out in support of The
> > Birth-Mark or Singularities.
>
> Ted Berrigan wrote:
>
> > Orange cavities of dreams stir inside "The Poems"
> > Whatever is going to happen is already happening
> > Some people prefer "the interior monologue"
> > I like to beat people up
>
> Paging Tom Mandel . . . white courtesy telephone, please . . .
>
> Rachel "The Body" Loden
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 09:13:32 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
Mime-Version: 1.0
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By the term "changed consciousness," is what is being meant a psychological
effect somehow in excess of aesthetic experience? One that is not, in other
words, circumscribed by ART?  If so, the problem is, it seems to me, that
without a theory of the mind subtending it -- like the Surrealists perhaps --
the term doesn't have any real specificity.  In visionary poetry, like
Blake's, Duncan's, Bob Kaufman's, or Hannah Weiner's, the reader is more of a
*witness* to a particular vision than a full participant in it.  But the term
"changed consciousness" implies something different -- there is a kind of
equality between the writer's & the reader's experience -- that is, it's a
matter, as Bob Grumman suggests, of the writer finding an effective
"technique."  But to say that such a technique  "changes consciousness" is to
implicate a precise mental topology, isn't it, if it's not to be contained
wholly within, say, the aesthetic category of the sublime?  As for the L-
poets, they don't seem paticularly interested  in subjective psychological
experience -- in dreams, for instance, or in any form of automatism.  So what
exactly do the people using it in this thread mean by "changed consciousness?"
Is the consciousness that is being changed an ethical consciousness?
political? psychological? spiritual? . . .
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:36:40 +0200
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         nicholas grindell 
Subject:      Re: tata
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>ps: A strong rec. to read the Serge Gainsbough book that TAM TAM has
>just published. Tosh Berman has brough a wonderful text +back+ into
>print!

what's it called? (if it's not a translation of his 1980 scatalogical conte
parabolique "evguenie sokolov" then i'd like to recommend that too)

greetings
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 10:43:40 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Kathleen Crown 
Subject:      Susan Howe thread
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A few thoughts on the Susan Howe thread (thanks to Andrew for bringing it up!):

If academics are paying attention to Susan Howe's work, they seem to be more
comfortable with some aspects of it--the archival/historical dimension, the visual
elements, the formalist experimentation--than others (eg, the visionary
antinomianism).  You don't see much attention paid to how these formal and historical
issues connect to her perhaps more radical and disturbing concepts--such as the
linguistic operations involved in registering traumatic experience ("mystic speech"),
or her narrators' ecstatic, "unstable I-witnessings," which demand new theories of the
sources and limits of poetic agency.

Also, it seems to me that Howe's work has benefited from feminist poetry criticism's
increasing unwillingness to work within one or the other of the categories we hear so
much about here:  "marginal," "mainstream," etc.  Lynn Keller discusses Howe's work in
_Forms of Exansion_ next to that of poets like Rita Dove, while Maeera Shreiber and
Yopie Prins include statements by Howe as well as by Marilyn Hacker in their recent
collection, _Dwelling in Possibility_.  I suppose this could be considered as merely a
sign of Howe's absoprtion into mainstream criticism, but I take a more optimistic view.
(I've written more about this in my review essay, "Feminism, Poetry, and the Public
Sphere," forthcoming in _Contemporary Literature_).

To add another recently published Howe item to the MLA biblio--thought it's hardly a
"mainstream" academic publication:  I guest edited a special issue of _Women's Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal_ based on the 1997 MLA sessions on "The Contemporary Long
Poem:  Feminist Intersections and Experiments."  One event was a roundtable
conversation with Susan Howe, Sharon Doubiago, Harryette Mullen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
Aldon Nielsen, Karen Brennan, Laura Hinton, Cynthia Hogue, Donna Hollenberg, Jenny
Goodman, Jeanne Heuving, and Kathleen Fraser.  The transcript of this conversation,
along with my MLA paper on Howe, appears in the _Women's Studies_ issue, which just
came out this month.

I do not think we are seeing a "bandwagon" effect--Howe is a *scholarly* poet whose
work touches on many of the most important questions in contemporary poetics (eg,
relations among poetic form and politics, American history and poetic agency).  So it
does not surprise me that her work has excited so much academic interest, especially
among feminist critics. Of course, I would not want to see her work "included" as an
exceptional case or token example of an experimental poetics, thereby obscuring our
view of other exciting work that is now being done by other (and many younger) poets.
But the publications mentioned above indicate to me that that's *not* what's
happening.  --Kathy Crown
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 09:48:46 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
In-Reply-To:  <9a18a95f.3655790c@aol.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

from Jacques Debrot

>By the term "changed consciousness," is what is being meant a psychological
>effect somehow in excess of aesthetic experience? One that is not, in other
>words, circumscribed by ART?  If so, the problem is, it seems to me, that
>without a theory of the mind subtending it -- like the Surrealists perhaps --
>the term doesn't have any real specificity.  In visionary poetry, like
>Blake's, Duncan's, Bob Kaufman's, or Hannah Weiner's, the reader is more of a
>*witness* to a particular vision than a full participant in it.  But the term
>"changed consciousness" implies something different -- there is a kind of
>equality between the writer's & the reader's experience -- that is, it's a
>matter, as Bob Grumman suggests, of the writer finding an effective
>"technique."  But to say that such a technique  "changes consciousness" is to
>implicate a precise mental topology, isn't it, if it's not to be contained
>wholly within, say, the aesthetic category of the sublime?  As for the L-
>poets, they don't seem paticularly interested  in subjective psychological
>experience -- in dreams, for instance, or in any form of automatism.  So what
>exactly do the people using it in this thread mean by "changed consciousness?"
>Is the consciousness that is being changed an ethical consciousness?
>political? psychological? spiritual? . . .


Epistemological/ontological.  At least for me.

Using certain words as nouns already sets us up for something.  The
penumbra of  prepositions (which phrases take "of"? etc.) ditto.  And so on.

When a Zen teacher says "If you say this is a stick you are attached to
name and form, if you say this is not a stick you are attached to
emptiness" this is in (how large a?) part a comment on [note those word
"in" and "on" here] how "is" shapes the mind, how the linguistic category
"noun" shapes the mind.

"The" and "a" two more perpetrators.  And so on.

I suspect --- but not being a historian of these things can't say for sure,
perhaps others will comment --- that this is really the influence of
Buddhism on contemporary poetics.  Focus on this relationship is deeply
implicit in Buddhist practice.

But often not explicit, and certainly not prescriptive on poetics.  Poetics
that are [note the plural] corollaries of this concern seem fairly recent
(and of course do not necessarily have Buddhist sources).  The classical
East Asian poetry that we see in standard anthologies, even the
particularly Buddhist poetries that arise in various Buddhist canons, seem
to ignore these notions.  But again I am not a scholar of these things and
could easily --- hope to --- be wrong.




---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 09:51:10 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
In-Reply-To:  <9a18a95f.3655790c@aol.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

As if grammar isn't already enough of a problem, what about the thesis that
moving to an alphabet necessarily changes consciousness?  (For an eloquent
explication, see David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous.)



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:12:34 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Irby on Duncan
In-Reply-To:  <001501be142e$f6decbc0$8ae4fea9@oemcomputer>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

As organizer of the event, I'd be glad to report briefly.  It was an
informal presentation, Ken Irby spoke extemporaneously from notes. I have
a tape-recording of the presentation and subsequent discussion, which
centered on Duncan's notation, his prosody and oral performance, the
accessibility of his work, the role his essays played in creating an
audience for his work, Irby's personal reminiscences, and numerous other
topics.

On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Ron Silliman wrote:

> Can somebody who was there (preferably) report on what Ken Irby said in his
> talk on Robert Duncan in Lawrence last Tuesday? I'd be very grateful,
>
> Ron
>

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 09:32:33 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tosh 
Subject:      gainsbourg tata
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>>ps: A strong rec. to read the Serge Gainsbough book that TAM TAM has
>>just published. Tosh Berman has brough a wonderful text +back+ into
>>print!
>
>what's it called? (if it's not a translation of his 1980 scatalogical conte
>parabolique "evguenie sokolov" then i'd like to recommend that too)
>

Well, it is the same translation by John and Doreen Weightman. The
Weightman's also did the translation of Levi-Strauss' famous book on
Africa,  "Tropics... the name escapes me now!  There is also an
introduction by bart plantenga texturalizing Gainsbourg's place in French
contemporary culture and an afterword by Russell Mael of Sparks fame.  For
personal and practical reasons (I am the publisher) I love this book.

-----------------
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
----------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:38:35 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
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About the possibility of changing consciousness, Judy Roitman writes that the
term is, for her, "Epistemological/ontological.
Using certain words as nouns already sets us up for something.  The penumbra
of  prepositions (which phrases take "of"? etc.) ditto. . . . this is really
the influence of Buddhism on contemporary poetics.  Focus on this relationship
is deeply
implicit in Buddhist practice."  This is extremely interesting, & yes of
course it makes sense to speak about Cage as a poet of changed consciousness
-- or even, as Perloff argues, Wittgenstein in a sense as well.  & I can see
it playing out in your own work Judy:  "Making up *for*/  (always)//  turned
around.//  Bellies/  *inside* themselves// As if mind.//  Format." [Of course
I realize my quoting you in this way erases the surrounding white space the
poem somehow needs, sorry].  But I wonder if there is a conflict between
aesthetic experience & ontological or epistemological experience.  Aesthetic
experience seems to me conservative -- ordinarily a poem is successful (or
isn't) to the extent that it conforms to certain expectations that have
already been prepared in advance  -- expectations of taste, etc.  Radically
innovative work is at first invisible in a sense -- isn't recognized
immediately as *art* -- precisely because it doesn't conform to such
expectations -- but once the term art has been modified to permit this
recognition, radically innovative work, too, is implicated within, & receives
its value from, a tradition of received ideas, doesn't it? -- the very
opposite context than that from which you would expect an epistemological
inquiry to begin.  So, for instance, as soon as people start talking about
Cage's work as being "beautiful," is it still changing consciousness?  If I
can place your poem, Judy, within an aesthetic context -- evaluate it, for
instance, in terms of Creeley's work perhaps, or some of Grenier's things
(would this be right?) -- is my primary experience of the poem an ontological
one? Or if you, when writing the poem, had certain models in mind after which
you shaped your poem to conform, in what way can you say your writing
experience was one in which your consciousness was changed?

 -- Please pardon my obviously amateurish fumbling with these questions -- &
they are, in every sense, questions.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:46:41 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Schultz 
Subject:      Re: Merwin's Folding Cliffs
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Aldon--I bought a copy of these cliffs, but haven't yet cracked the spine.
Will let you know when I have.

Susan Schultz
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:32:36 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Andrew Rathmann 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
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Kathy Crown's description of academics' selective interest in Howe feels
largely right to me.  She suggests that the more compelling aspects of
Howe's work are the ones academics tend not to discuss.  But she might have
the wrong aspects in mind: trauma, witnessing, and agency are all quite
fashionable academic topics (it's true that they are usually linked to
narrative--but give the grad students time).  Nor do I think that academic
disinterest (or anyone's disinterest, for that matter) is ever explained by
something being too "radical and disturbing."  Usually it just doesn't fit
the discourses available to them at the moment.  But it does seem true that
radical formal experimentation is among the topics _most_ comfortable to
academic critics.  Experimental poets: take heed.

It's good that feminist critics like Keller don't respect the usual
insider/outsider rhetoric, and are willing to take a broader view of
poetry.  But doesn't the category "poetry" itself already include
everything that goes on in its name?  This is not a trivial point.

*

Robert Pinsky's name has been used more than once on this list as a kind of
abbreviation for poetic mediocrity.  I worry that this will dissuade
list-members who are unfamiliar with his work from reading it.  Many people
have found his poetry to be a source of pleasure.  I have found it so.  But
of course the context of the Poetics List renders opinions weightless.

Andrew Rathmann

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Chicago Review
The University of Chicago
5801 South Kenwood Avenue
Chicago IL 60637
ph/fax: (773) 702-0887
e-mail: chicago-review@uchicago.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:58:25 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         charles alexander 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>It's good that feminist critics like Keller don't respect the usual
>insider/outsider rhetoric, and are willing to take a broader view of
>poetry.  But doesn't the category "poetry" itself already include
>everything that goes on in its name?  This is not a trivial point.

Agreed that it does. But where does one go from there. I mean, ideally, it
would be great to see a criticism that included language poetry, visual
poetry, sound poetry, folk poetry, Robert Pinsky poetry, Brenda Hillman
poetry, etc. as equal participants in the field. But I don't know anyone
that is doing this kind of overall field work, and if they were, could they
possibly be as attentive as needed to the specifics of even any one subset
of the field. Plus, how could I possibly demand such a broad-based
criticism of anyone, when I know full well myself that there's plenty
within the field that I don't want to pay attention to?

So, no, it's not a trivial point. But what did you have in mind as the
importance of that point.


charles
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 13:04:11 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Generalization about academic critics seem facile in this context. After
all, more than a few academic critics are used to reading difficult texts,
are not theory phobic, and hence are perhaps more receptive to Howe than
they would be to Pinsky (these are my facile generalizations).

One the other hand, very few critics who are actually interested in poetic
form, radical or otherwise, in my experience. Perloff, Conte, and a few
others. This is not the dominant mode of criticism in English departments.
There are probably a half dozen feminists to every "formalist" in a
typical department.  (By formalist I DON'T mean New Critics.)

Who would you suggest as an abbreviation for poetic mediocrity? Pinsky
seems as good a candidate as any to me, frankly. He made his name not
through his poetry, but through the earnestsness of _The Situation of
Poetry_ By all means, check him out for yourselves, don't take anyone
else's word. It would be hard to find any poet who didn't offer some
pleasure to some reader.


Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:07:00 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

andrew, i think the discussion of how howe is rec'd, in order to be really
useful, would have to be broadened some---and probably to the inclusion of
poets other than howe... since the reception we're discussing has in part,
anyway, to do with academic institutions, permit me to digress...

you are teaching---adjuncting---at iit, right?... so is my wife/partner
kass fleisher (see "from" line, above)... in fact i teach there, and have
been teaching there for going on seven years now (full-time,
tenure-track)---my mailbox in 218 siegel is in the upper-right-hand corner
of the same grey steel assemblage of gopher slots in which your name (and
kass's) appears... i saw your name on poetics the other day and something
clicked---and when i went in and checked, sure enough there was a
"rathmann" on one of the gopher slots... a little discussion with our
office admin revealed that it's likely the very same *you*... and of course
i recognize your name from _chicago review_... so i've been meaning to post
you, and though this is an odd way to introduce mself, what the hell...
(and who knows?---maybe you recognized *my* name, but weren't sure how to
go about introducing yourself... i too have been timid in this regard on
occasion---really)...

now the distance from your mailbox to mine is approx. three feet... and for
all i know we two may very well have been standing in the same space at
iit---to my knowledge, we've never met... but in fact i've been trying to
steer clear of the place, and since i'm on a t/th (mostly evening)
schedule, and (according to our scheduling board) you would seem to be on a
m/w schedule, it's unlikely our paths will cross (though you and kass must
surely have crossed paths, b/c she's in on m/w afternoons---in fact you
must be sharing the "adjunct" office with her, which is right next to
mine... i'll have to ask her to seek you out)...

in any case, you haven't actually been asked, as an adjunct, to participate
in any faculty activity at iit---or have you?... a dept. meeting,
perhaps?... the xmas party? (i won't be in attendance, neither will
kass)... perhaps the annual fall humanities reception at _____'s house,
here in hyde park (where we live---do you live around here?)... would you
attend if you were asked? (have you?)... what do you think of the place?...

anyway... one might observe that this is the first time we two have met, so
to speak---*here*, *now*, or for you, *then* and *there*...

so what does this have to do with howe?---with any "formally innovative"
poet?---with any poet, in fact?... well for one, since i've been denied
tenure, and since the dept. saw fit to let andy levy go some three years
ago, that pretty much does it for tenure-track, full-time poets, or
scholars of poetry... there *is* one other person at iit who also teaches
poetry on occasion, and has an interest in same---but his position has been
earmarked, as it were, for rhetoric/composition consumption, as mine was
earmarked for technical and professional writing... thing is, my primary
work has been in poetry, and it's unlikely in the wake of my denial that
anyone will follow my lead ('teach this, write about that'---as i was told
seven years ago would be perfectly acceptable at iit)... i'm certain there
are other faculty at iit---in architecture perhaps, or design?---who know a
thing or two about things poetic... who knows?...

but my and andy's departure pretty much means that iit, for all intents and
purposes, and aside from the occasional adjunct hire, has given up formally
on poetry (among other things)---if it ever had an interest in it in the
first place... to confirm this, you need only have a look at the december
mla job list, the position description for my... position... you'll see
nary a nod in there toward "creative" or "literary" or "poetic" interests
or background... though of course administrators at iit would LOVE to see
the creative writing journal andy started, _bloo_, back in business...
they're just not willing to PAY for it...

and have you been to the iit library of late?... have you had a close look
at their so-called holdings, in poetry specifically?...

ok:  in all, what i'm trying to get across here (at the risk of being a bit
precious, and a bit too self-oriented) is that the nature of our
institution is such that two (of the possible three) people who might have
something substantive to say re susan howe, or any other *contemporary
poet*, are separated as much by the institutional constraint(s) of rank as
by the constant normative pressure of bottom-line thinking---i.e.,
programmatic curricular objectives (which latter btw resulted in iit's m/w,
t/th schedule---long story having to do with the iit's new
"interprofessional projects," and there has been much concern voiced
regarding a potentially two-shift faculty)... surely our (yours and mine)
institutional isolation doesn't exhaust the potential for a poetry *cadre*,
anymore than the formal absence of a poet on the faculty will prevent
poetry from being taught on occasion... and surely iit's dept. of
humanities is not alone here... but just as surely, one can grasp the
liminal status of poetry at iit simply by noting the degree to which the
institution itself simply doesn't give a good shit...

so when aldon alludes to the woeful status of poetry in the academy, i have
a hunch that this is the sort of thing he has in mind (though my
mind-reading abilities leave something to be desired)... the point is that
the relative neglect or relative proliferation of susan howe (e.g.) simply
must be situated within some larger, historical understanding of (for one)
"the" academic institution (quotations meant to connote variety)---thence
to various manifestations of english (or humanities) depts... i suspect,
once this is done, some odd twists and turns will emerge as to who is
reading what, and why... though of course local perturbations do not negate
drawing general conclusions, i think the issue itself cries out for
context...

anyway, hey---sorry for going on some about our shared context (to the
extent we share it)... it's nice to make your acquaintance, really...

best,

joe

nb the best thing i've ever read by pinsky is not a poem---it's his essay,
"nerds, technocrats, and enligtened spirits," in _tolstoy's dictaphone:
technology and the muse_, ed. sven birkerts (graywolf, 1996)... it
originally appeared in _doubletake_, as i recall...


~~~~~~~~~

Joe Amato
5040 S. Woodlawn Ave. #3N
Chicago, IL 60615-2829
773 536-0130

amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu
http://www.iit.edu/~amato
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:49:49 -0800
Reply-To:     kdegent@itsa.ucsf.edu
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Katie Degentesh 
Organization: 9x9 Industries
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

charles alexander wrote:
>
Ideally, it
> would be great to see a criticism that included language poetry, visual
> poetry, sound poetry, folk poetry, Robert Pinsky poetry, Brenda Hillman
> poetry, etc. as equal participants in the field. But I don't know anyone
> that is doing this kind of overall field work, and if they were, could they
> possibly be as attentive as needed to the specifics of even any one subset
> of the field. Plus, how could I possibly demand such a broad-based
> criticism of anyone, when I know full well myself that there's plenty
> within the field that I don't want to pay attention to?
>

I don't think it's going to be possible to see a criticism that includes
language, visual, sound, folk, and Pinsky poetry until we have poetry
readings that incorporate all of these poetic offshoots.  Poetry
readings in this day and age are as spintered and specific as musical
concerts -- but for some reason, while people who appreciate a
particular style of music are usually able to acknowledge the legitimacy
of other "brands," those who appreciate poetry generally cling to a more
rigid definition of it.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:29:38 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>About the possibility of changing consciousness, Judy Roitman writes that the
>term is, for her, "Epistemological/ontological.
>Using certain words as nouns already sets us up for something.  The penumbra
>of  prepositions (which phrases take "of"? etc.) ditto. . . . this is really
>the influence of Buddhism on contemporary poetics.  Focus on this relationship
>is deeply
>implicit in Buddhist practice."  This is extremely interesting, & yes of
>course it makes sense to speak about Cage as a poet of changed consciousness
>-- or even, as Perloff argues, Wittgenstein in a sense as well.  & I can see
>it playing out in your own work Judy:  "Making up *for*/  (always)//  turned
>around.//  Bellies/  *inside* themselves// As if mind.//  Format." [Of course
>I realize my quoting you in this way erases the surrounding white space the
>poem somehow needs, sorry].  But I wonder if there is a conflict between
>aesthetic experience & ontological or epistemological experience.  Aesthetic
>experience seems to me conservative -- ordinarily a poem is successful (or
>isn't) to the extent that it conforms to certain expectations that have
>already been prepared in advance  -- expectations of taste, etc.  Radically
>innovative work is at first invisible in a sense -- isn't recognized
>immediately as *art* -- precisely because it doesn't conform to such
>expectations -- but once the term art has been modified to permit this
>recognition, radically innovative work, too, is implicated within, & receives
>its value from, a tradition of received ideas, doesn't it? -- the very
>opposite context than that from which you would expect an epistemological
>inquiry to begin.  So, for instance, as soon as people start talking about
>Cage's work as being "beautiful," is it still changing consciousness?  If I
>can place your poem, Judy, within an aesthetic context -- evaluate it, for
>instance, in terms of Creeley's work perhaps, or some of Grenier's things
>(would this be right?) -- is my primary experience of the poem an ontological
>one? Or if you, when writing the poem, had certain models in mind after which
>you shaped your poem to conform, in what way can you say your writing
>experience was one in which your consciousness was changed?
>
> -- Please pardon my obviously amateurish fumbling with these questions -- &
>they are, in every sense, questions.



Far from amateurish fumbling, as you no doubt know.

A sense of consciousness changing/opening/reshaping seems more to the point
then beauty.  Not oppositional to it, just more fundamental, the _ground_
so to speak of beauty.  Whatever that is.  And I'm not sure I'm comfortable
with it (beauty) --- something a little off there, a little confining.

A shift of some kind, certainly.  Without that shift, why bother?

As for the contrast between what is expected and what is not, my own
experience at the periodic eclectic readings we have around here is that
all sorts of folks seem to get something from my work and other work like
it --- I am always surprised by this --- people who have not been trained
to expect that sort of thing.  So it is not so clear to me, the role that
expectations play.  I think everyone has had the experience of
seeing/hearing/reading something completely out of expectation and thinking
--- yes, that is what I was looking for all along.

On the other hand, some of the discussion at Irby's seminar Wednesday on
Duncan was exactly to the point of the need to construct an audience, to
clue them in to the terms of the work.  Perhaps this translates into "what
to expect."  I don't know.  Another thread in Irby's seminar was the
enormous range of Duncan's influence, the wide range of work of those he
deeply affected, none of whom, to put it in the words of this particular
e-exchange, could be said to imitate him to the point where "expecting
Duncan" would necessarily lead to "expecting [fill in your favorite Duncan
heir]".



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:37:47 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      executionisms
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

A. Jenn Sondheim wrote:
>
> Odd, when I first looked at this I thought, LAN, local area network, the
> neighborhood aspect of the Internet, people like myself and jodi.org or
> hmmm.. maybe Steve Duffy or Miekal And, working the Net towards a differ-
> ent language which owes nothing to the GUAGE following, as far as I can TELL


A L A N

I    KNOW      WHO      miekal and  IS BUT NOT   STEVE DUFFY    CAN
YOU  TURN      ME /  US     ONTO      THE       APPROPRIATE    URLS

?/?=!



&  surely you must detect a tiny hint of clark coolidge & bruce andrews
in my work tho in my only bid for l$a$n$g$u$a$g$e startdom way back in
78, my aleatoric review of John Cage's Empty Words was summerarily
rejected.



miekal


hey, when is that issue of perforations _on noise_ going to online?
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:43:53 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      alan's new description on the talker (after deliberation)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


alan's new description on the talker (after deliberation)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
.profile
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Entering Profile... Type up to 15 lines. When you are
finished, type a single "." on a line by itself.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1: so jennifer gaily splashed about in alan's blood
2: giving a light touch to the splayed limbs and naked brain
3: of alan's blood blahblah but now i will sing a opera
4: says jennifer, a opera a opera a opera, then sartre la-la
5: says 'if the jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent
6: him,' la-la, gaily splashing in alan's blood, jennifer replies
7: that she is an invention of the jew, alan, la-la la-la, and
8: she sings, jennifer sings, a gay a opera a opera a opera,
9: and alan and jennifer get all wet over that mean old sartre
10: la-la and there are many brains about blahblah, so jennifer,
11: now jennifer, gets him up, and the two of them "looking for
12: all the world like creatures from outer space" press closer,
13: still closer, and jennifer says but now I will sing a opera,
14: a gay a opera a opera a opera, and alan and jennifer are all
15: clean and red and white with perfect pale blue eyes
----------------------------------------------------------------------
.User profile information stored.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 16:35:20 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  Message of Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:58:25 -0700 from
              

On Fri, 20 Nov 1998 11:58:25 -0700 charles alexander said:
>
>Agreed that it does. But where does one go from there. I mean, ideally, it
>would be great to see a criticism that included language poetry, visual
>poetry, sound poetry, folk poetry, Robert Pinsky poetry, Brenda Hillman
>poetry, etc. as equal participants in the field. But I don't know anyone
>that is doing this kind of overall field work, and if they were, could they
>possibly be as attentive as needed to the specifics of even any one subset
>of the field. Plus, how could I possibly demand such a broad-based
>criticism of anyone, when I know full well myself that there's plenty
>within the field that I don't want to pay attention to?

I tried to address this issue somewhat in a Witz essay, "Sense of Being
Right". The idea was that "poetry wars" based on pure style differentiations
might be strategically useful for poets but are unethical for poetics,
and that a teleology of poetry - no matter how odd or self-reflexive
(that's how I tried to play it out in the essay) opens the way for
a poetics of inclusion & multiplicity. The problem, as I tried to point
out in the indie-crit war of many moons ago, is critical-academic-poet
cliques & monopolies that skew independent criticism. Nevertheless I
do NOT want to start another "war" on this issue - and think that this
list for example & other activities in this area are examples of a
gradually broadening idea of "poetry" which is happening now.
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 16:45:35 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Smith McDonough 
Subject:      electronic poetry journal announcement
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

poetrynow, an electronic poetry journal
http://www.poetrynow.org
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 17:16:43 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Katie Degentesh wrote:

  Poetry
> readings in this day and age are as spintered and specific as musical
> concerts


typos are very telling


--
-The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms-
[glossary of neologisms collected around the network since 1985, submit
yours....]
http://www.net22.com/neologisms/
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:07:43 -0800
Reply-To:     kdegent@itsa.ucsf.edu
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Katie Degentesh 
Organization: 9x9 Industries
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

yeah, can I submit "spintered" as a neologism?

miekal and wrote:
>
> Katie Degentesh wrote:
>
>   Poetry
> > readings in this day and age are as spintered and specific as musical
> > concerts
>
> typos are very telling
>
> --
> -The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms-
> [glossary of neologisms collected around the network since 1985, submit
> yours....]
> http://www.net22.com/neologisms/
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 17:33:02 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      Poetry readings in this day and age are as spintered...
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Katie Degentesh wrote:
>
> yeah, can I submit "spintered" as a neologism?
>
> miekal and wrote:
> >
> > Katie Degentesh wrote:
> >
> >   Poetry
> > > readings in this day and age are as spintered and specific as musical
> > > concerts


Youve used it in a sentence, now let's have the definition. [or for that
matter, any definitions anyone might have]
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:51:11 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      The River
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Kevin Killian recently mentioned a new book by poet Lewis MacAdams
entitled, The River. In addition to writing several fine books of
poems--City Money, The Poetry Room, A Bolinas Report, News From Niman
Farm--MacAdams published Mother magazine with Peter Schjeldahl (in
which appeared the famous John Cage interview with Ted Berrigan) and
Fathar, a journal edited with Duncan McNaughton. In recent years he
has lived in LA where he is an active political force in the struggle
over that city's water resources.

The River investigates the poet's vulnerable position as he stands up
to a powerful majority of city planners, engineers and newspaper
publishers. He notes with the journalistic eye of Ed Sanders the human
process of environmental activism on an indifferent city. To defend
his sometimes impolite and abrupt attacks on the polite defenders of
waste and greedy, capitalist structures, he reminds the reader of
Blake's epigram: "The tigers of wrath more powerful / than the horses
of instruction."

The Press attempts to discredit MacAdams with the typical methods of a
smear campaign: "With friends like Lewis MacAdams / the Los Angeles
River doesn't need any enemies." But with a paradoxical understanding
of political nature, MacAdams turns again to Blake who reminds us that
"Your friends on earth / are your enemies in heaven."

Although MacAdams objects to "the 1000's of storm drains / that
carried our garbage / down the river to the sea," he struggles with
being carried away "in a cloud of / fiery, self-righteous Anger."

       "A styrofoam cup spins

                     in a dust devil at my feet.

   I am as fanatical as a mullah, and twice as obsessed."

The lovely, the truly human and courageous strength of this small book
is his struggle to preserve, clean, and care for the LA River while
fighting against the self-righteousness that threatens to overwhelm
him from within. And of course, the constant threat of corporate
interests and politicians hover like vultures, waiting for him to
weaken:

You are hated--you can feel it
in the TV eye--by idiots and assholes,
slump-shouldered time servers and County weasels;
and their hatred is a cool, stiff breeze.
You struggle with self-righteousness
and you lose. Like your enemies,
you have your hate to keep you warm;
so your wife buys you a little laughing
Buddha down in Chinatown
to pop on your computer.
You are bent over the pressure
of simply being a moron. You are shrinking
from the weight of your own gravity.
You are becoming your old man
as the chain-saws in the background noise
start to fan out. First they will school you in your errors.
Then they will squash you like a bug.

MacAdams' determination in the face of rotten odds and his strength to
face himself head on in the poem make this a fascinating book. Contact
Blue Press:
436A 14th Street


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 23:02:19 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      debris (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Here is Steve Duffy's URLs - Alan


---------------------------------
krumm@btinternet.com

http://www.btinternet.com/~debris
http://www.debris.demon.co.uk/
---------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 22:20:30 +0100
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marjorie Perloff 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854";
              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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Coincidentally, Robert von Hallberg and I have been working on a
Dialogue on Poetic Value for a book of dialogues on various
controversial topics (none of the others about poetry) edited by Donald
Hall, who teaches at CalState Northridge.  Our two sample poets turned
out to be Howe and Pinsky and although I had no strong feelings when we
started out, I found, on actual analysis, that the Pinsky poem in
question "The History of my Heart" was just plain BAD--irritating, smug,
etc.  Bob, as you'll see when the book comes out, disagrees and makes a
good case FOR.  And he is less enthusiastic about Howe than I am.

No easy answers but doing this this dialogue convinced me yet again that
the only way to discuss these issues is to actually ANALYZE the work.
So when Andrew Rathmann and others write in that we should read both
Howe and Pinsky and be tolerant, I want to ask WHY?  Since when has
poetics been a question of tolerance?  Was Pound tolerant?  Was Stein?
Blake?  Samuel Johnson?  Wordsworth?  Walter Pater?  Virginia Woolf?
Cage?  Baraka?  Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.

So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!

Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 01:40:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      schools vs war vs snoring cat

referring briefly to mcgrand's wellk-nown (and oft expounded) theory
of too much to read for a moment sets the stage.  Consider "wars,"
with the notion of one poetic and type of poetry as somehow "better"
than others, more important, to be supported more, to exist at expense
of others, seems to me to buy awfully into binary opposition universe
and to be kind of pointless.

on the other hand, "schools" of poetry, or styles, or specific
directions, can have enormous power.  springing to my mind immediately
are WWI war poets.  a sudden break from poetry romanticizing war/going
along with the program.  comes/leads into (a sort of chicken egg
circle) critical evaluation of war.  enfolding from more naturalistic
line of thinking but containing within an odd movement toward a more
formal verse line as well as acceptance of free form.

where does this "school" thing go right? -- whre it gives writers a
new direction, gives soldiers and readers an understanding of new
dimension of war and writing and relation of poetry and art to
reality, social responsibility.  where a writer finds her/himself
writing in new way with broader body of base material because of what
writer reads and learns from this new burst of writing/style/direction.

where does it go wrong? -- when business turns into silly heirarchical
exercise, i.e. "who is the Grand Old Man of WWI poetry," where it is
used to sort out a hierarchy, i.e. "so-and-such is Of Course the Best
Young Writer/ Best Writer/Greatest Thinker of his generation."  where
participants and readers forget point, which is that of exploring and
writing wider and better, and get caught up in defining A School, and
who gets to get into that school, and why, and who is important in
that school and who isn't.  in short, turning it all into a boring
competitive high-schoolish circus.

the story plays out with each surge of new direction in writing.  i'm
reminded of it as i see listafarians debate the place of ron silliman
and who is REALLY a language poet and who REALLY writes Language
Poetry, when i read a silly dismissive essay in NYT on a writer based
solely on conception of what writers are Supposed To Be Doing At This
Point in Time versus what this irrelevant wastrel being critiqued is
doing.

in theoretical terms, when i see yet another cookie cutter
deconstructionist exposition that, rather than saying something new or
original, reads like a Good Little Brown Noser recitation of the
buzzwords de jour.  yes, how many times can i say "slippery text" and
"aporia" and "lacan" in one sentence...  it reminds me of 1987
conference on AIDS when all the doctors and speakers went into an
ecstatic frenzy over the confluence of the head of A.M.A. (or vice
head or something) and their own ability to say the words
"appropriate" and "inappropriate."  that shiver of pleasure,
confidence, of having scored, each time they were able to drop
"appropriate/inappropriate" into conversation, multiplied if important
functionary were within hearing range...

but artists are a slippery, sly, creative, anarchic bunch.  and no
sooner do we form one school, then masses of us trickle off and form
another, then another.  and some wild country bunch hangs out in
margin and does something mostly unrelated to rest and wildly
original.  which some people catch on to, and start using to shift
their own work in another direction.  and then one of them mutates and
does something else personally idiosyncratic.  and others hang about
nervously in bathrooms together, or in doorways or parking lots, and
mimick each other and start speaking gang-slang and playing with it.

resist classification!  down with the hierarchy!  arise writers, you
have only your chains to lose!  ... a collection plate will be sent
round at the end.  please give as generously as you can; remember, artists
are starving for YOUR freedom while you drive your volvo!
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 23:46:38 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Marjorie Perloff sez:
>Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
>Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
>start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
>in.
Amen. The "critical virtue [of] tolerance"(MP) suggests that "X" and "not
X" are identical. A tolerance which is truly distinct from intolerance
allows "not X" to be "Y."
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 02:55:59 -0500
Reply-To:     levitsk@ibm.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Rachel Levitsky 
Subject:      Re: Readings in Boulder
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi Pat,

Just wanted to say that I've heard great things about left hand and
Emailed with Bobbie West who said she had a great experience and Laura
seemed to really like her work.

I'm having adjustment troubles and as usual, girl troubles.  Girls being
by definition, trouble.  It's hard to be a dyke, you get whipped from
the outside and the inside.  At least my parents are finally supportive.

anyway much love,
Rachel
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 03:01:18 -0500
Reply-To:     levitsk@ibm.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Rachel Levitsky 
Subject:      not meant for you all
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

ARRRRRGGGGGGH.

Ignore my personal business again.

Since I can't seem to manage separately life from this list I'm going
off, like poor Joe Sadfie.  I'm also changing my email to

Democracy@mindspring.com

as of next week

it's been great, I'll miss you, please write and forget everything
personal you've ever learned about me.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 00:19:54 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
In-Reply-To:  <3655DD19.1FB776B6@earthlink.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Bravo!

At 10:20 PM 11/20/98 +0100, you wrote:
>Coincidentally, Robert von Hallberg and I have been working on a
>Dialogue on Poetic Value for a book of dialogues on various
>controversial topics (none of the others about poetry) edited by Donald
>Hall, who teaches at CalState Northridge.  Our two sample poets turned
>out to be Howe and Pinsky and although I had no strong feelings when we
>started out, I found, on actual analysis, that the Pinsky poem in
>question "The History of my Heart" was just plain BAD--irritating, smug,
>etc.  Bob, as you'll see when the book comes out, disagrees and makes a
>good case FOR.  And he is less enthusiastic about Howe than I am.
>
>No easy answers but doing this this dialogue convinced me yet again that
>the only way to discuss these issues is to actually ANALYZE the work.
>So when Andrew Rathmann and others write in that we should read both
>Howe and Pinsky and be tolerant, I want to ask WHY?  Since when has
>poetics been a question of tolerance?  Was Pound tolerant?  Was Stein?
>Blake?  Samuel Johnson?  Wordsworth?  Walter Pater?  Virginia Woolf?
>Cage?  Baraka?  Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
>Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
>start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
>in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
>unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
>TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
>they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
>political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
>to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>
>So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
>take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
>side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
>perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!
>
>Marjorie Perloff
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 06:17:45 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Ganick 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
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i guess what i meant, in reply to jacques debrot, by 'changing
consciousness' and by 'consciousness' in general, is the entire
realm of human experience being changed in some internal
sense...the positing of inner/outer experiences when applied
to people can be problematic, but for a writer/reader the text
becomes primary, and as such, a text can cause this 'change in
consciousness' -- an inner sense...

what i mean by 'inner' is anything that is personal, emotional,
psychological, cosmic, spiritual...these terms do apply to issues
that matter to writers/readers and for me have always had pre-
cedence over the so-called 'real' world...

eastern traditions (asian not east coast usa) usually involve a
clearer understanding of these matters than western traditions
...the buddhist and hindu traditions are in mind here...

how this applies to poetry specifically, is that, through deep
immersion in one's reading/writing experience, one can attain
a change in one's inner being...this seems simple to me, but i
could be wrong...

and, like bob g., i'd like to see those better schooled in grammar
dissect some more innovative texts to their students, rather than
just use the traditional forms...maybe we all need a good dose of
chomsky...

peter ganick
potes & poets press / a.bacus
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:07:46 +0200
Reply-To:     robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Archambeau 
Organization: Lunds universitet
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
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Marjorie Perloff wrote:

>
> So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
> take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
> side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
> perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!


Oyez, oyez.  When Nathan Wallace reviewed Rosmarie Waldrop and Reginald
Gibbons side by side I actually felt that there was hope for LitCrit.

Bob Archambeau
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 10:48:59 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Keith Tuma 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
In-Reply-To:  <3655DD19.1FB776B6@earthlink.net>
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As though explaining the idea of dancing
        Hook intelligence quick dactyl
Or the idea of some other thing
        Bats glance through a wood
Which everyone has known a little about
        bond between mad and made
Since they were children, which children learn themselves
        anonymous communities bond and free
With no explaining, but which children like
        Perception crumbles under character
Sometimes to hear the explanations of
        Present past of immanent future
I want to tell you something about our country
        Recollection moves across meaning
Or my idea of it:  explaining it
        Men shut their doors against setting
If not to you, to my idea of you
        Flocks roost before dark
That softness--feathery, protective, inward--
        Coveys nestle and settle
Muffling the quickness of the raptor's eye
        Meditation of a world's vast Memory
The gaze of liberty and independence
        Predominance pitched across history
Uneasy in groups and making groups uneasy
        Collision or collusion with history






*  Close Typing
RP EXPLANATION (w/ ...)/ SH ARTICULATION
APOLOGIES TO BOTH
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 11:18:01 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Randy Prunty 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
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In a message dated 11/21/98 9:45:08 AM Eastern Standard Time,
potepoet@HOME.COM writes:

<< i guess what i meant, in reply to jacques debrot, by 'changing
 consciousness' and by 'consciousness' in general, is the entire
 realm of human experience being changed in some internal
 sense...the positing of inner/outer experiences when applied
 to people can be problematic, but for a writer/reader the text
 becomes primary, and as such, a text can cause this 'change in
 consciousness' -- an inner sense...

 what i mean by 'inner' is anything that is personal, emotional,
 psychological, cosmic, spiritual...these terms do apply to issues
 that matter to writers/readers and for me have always had pre-
 cedence over the so-called 'real' world...

 eastern traditions (asian not east coast usa) usually involve a
 clearer understanding of these matters than western traditions
 ...the buddhist and hindu traditions are in mind here...

 how this applies to poetry specifically, is that, through deep
 immersion in one's reading/writing experience, one can attain
 a change in one's inner being...this seems simple to me, but i
 could be wrong...

 and, like bob g., i'd like to see those better schooled in grammar
 dissect some more innovative texts to their students, rather than
 just use the traditional forms...maybe we all need a good dose of
 chomsky...

 peter ganick
 potes & poets press / a.bacus >>

Ray DiPalma says "It's creating the FOCUS THAT GENERATES that concerns me".
This is the most interesting part of changed consciousness to me.  I'm
guessing we have all had times of "being in the zone" when we write.   Not
really stream of consciousness, but an easy flow of ideas.  and one creative
step can lead to the next.  and of course this is really fun in collaborative
work.  to me its like meditation.  a detached, but yet somehow focused,
attentiveness.    so there's a change in consciousness WHILE writing and then,
I like to think, that experience has some effect on my ...consciousness?
attentiveness? ... AFTER writing.  Which I guess is the political.

Randy
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 10:31:15 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe/Robert Pinsky thread
In-Reply-To:  <3656C865.1F7C@englund.lu.se>
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odd---kass and i just had a long-ish discussion the other day about
precisely the issue marjorie is raising...

yes, the need for judgment (and critique of same)---informed by what's been
happening theoretically and in cultural studies lo these last twenty
years---seems to me of great importance at the moment... in fact one of the
things i find most... refreshing about reading the litcritics of a
half-century ago is the ease with which they just say what they think about
a given work...

now we all know how problematic some of those judgment calls were, from the
pov of our 'enlightened' era... the challenge is for us to use our
smarts---all of our insight into, e.g., ideological machinery---and find
ways to distinguish among works that aim simply to entertain (which may be
fine in itself), and works whose reach exceeds their grasp (if you get my
drift)...

in fact there are already signs that a general awareness of this necessity
is beginning to sink in at the academic level... witness, e.g., tania
modleski's piece a week ago in _the chronicle of higher ed_ where she
discusses (finally, and imho long overdue) problems with romance fiction
[gasp!]... recall that modleski was among those (radway, others) who
championed an analysis of such fiction as giving voice to women's issues
(which they do, in fact---but they do other, less desirable things as
well)...

i've nothing against popular culture mself (quite the contrary---i was
weaned on it)---but there are all grades of pop culture, as there are all
grades of not-so-popular culture... the point isn't to deploy "taste," or
high/low distinctions---but, as marjorie suggests, to get into the work in
question, even as you get into its social/cultural/historical/biographical
contexts... this isn't to imply anything exhaustive (or even formally
intrinsic, meaning-wise), but this is certainly to imply something other
than a thumbs up/thumbs down binary (even ebert and siskel of late have had
to resort to modifiers---"two thumbs up, way up," or "two enthusiastic
thumbs up," or...---and btw, it's clear that the public just eats up this
sort of thing)... i assume, btw, that we may well find ourselves ultimately
at odds over what we value, and why---but it sure would be nice if everyone
were equipped, and willing, to discuss this latter through a more direct
understanding of the words on the page (or the images on the screen,
ETC.)...

and hey, i hope this isn't preaching to the choir, OR in any sense
reactionary, but:  if critics of whatever cast can't or won't distinguish
between that which is relatively lame vs. that which is not (aesthetically
as much as ideologically)---if they're not willing to find a way to say,
publicly and care-fully and w/o vitriole, what they think of what they
select (for review, analysis, whatever), which incl. even *why* they've
selected it---why then i believe the marketplace will continue to mass
produce facile versions of "taste" (and notions of taste), that it will
become harder and harder for challenging work (of whatever genre---i'm not
wedded to older notions of literacy) to reach a supportive audience (let
alone create an audience, as it were)... hence one of the functions of
criticism will continue to be held in abeyance...

and i guess that's a judgment call, too... but when you look, e.g., at the
recent merger of barnes & noble with the nation's largest distributor of
books, ingram, you've just got to believe that we're going to need
(academic, among other) critics who are willing to pass (again, careful,
thorough, anything but knee-jerk) judgment in order to help stem the tide
of sheer bullshit surrounding so much of the work that'll no doubt be
pitched at maximum intensities (and, i must add, at great cost to the
environment)...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 09:02:32 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Dale Smith 
Subject:      The River Redux
MIME-Version: 1.0
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The final line of my post on Lewis MacAdams' book, The River, got
chopped. Anyone interested in the book should send $6 to:



                         Blue Press

                         436A 14th Street

                         SF, CA 94103







______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 09:42:34 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: changing consciousness
In-Reply-To:  <4.1.19981121060637.0095f810@mail.htfdw1.ct.home.com>
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Reading and writing are by no means privileged. Change is a byproduct of
intense focus on almost anything. Note "byproduct." It's nice for him if my
carpenter has achieved enlightenment, but he'd better be sure that my house
stays up. And that's eastern (coast) tradition.

At 06:17 AM 11/21/98 -0500, you wrote:
>i guess what i meant, in reply to jacques debrot, by 'changing
>consciousness' and by 'consciousness' in general, is the entire
>realm of human experience being changed in some internal
>sense...the positing of inner/outer experiences when applied
>to people can be problematic, but for a writer/reader the text
>becomes primary, and as such, a text can cause this 'change in
>consciousness' -- an inner sense...
>
>what i mean by 'inner' is anything that is personal, emotional,
>psychological, cosmic, spiritual...these terms do apply to issues
>that matter to writers/readers and for me have always had pre-
>cedence over the so-called 'real' world...
>
>eastern traditions (asian not east coast usa) usually involve a
>clearer understanding of these matters than western traditions
>...the buddhist and hindu traditions are in mind here...
>
>how this applies to poetry specifically, is that, through deep
>immersion in one's reading/writing experience, one can attain
>a change in one's inner being...this seems simple to me, but i
>could be wrong...
>
>and, like bob g., i'd like to see those better schooled in grammar
>dissect some more innovative texts to their students, rather than
>just use the traditional forms...maybe we all need a good dose of
>chomsky...
>
>peter ganick
>potes & poets press / a.bacus
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 12:22:12 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      outtake from preparing _whether hotel_ for PERFORATIONS
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m i s p e l l e d
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:29:54 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hugh Steinberg 
Subject:      tolerance
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Tony Kushner has a pretty decent essay on tolerance.  He writes, "Tolerance
can be used to normalize an insupportable situation, or it can serve to
warn those groups which lack real power that they exist on sufferance, that
they are tolerated."

To what extent then is our work tolerated?  Exactly as much as it takes
part in a power structure that is hostile to what and how we write.  You
want to get an award from the Academy of American Poets, you better hope
you're tolerable.

If one is feeling pessimistic, it is easy to perceive the world of poetry
as one that consists of polarized and hostile camps, endlessly bickering
with one another (or operating in a sort of snooty ignorance of everything
else outside of their tiny and shrinking circles).  What thin glazing of
tolerance we tolerate mostly produces tokenism and toadyism, a superficial
engagement that does little for the art.

What choices do we have?  We can create our own institutions, magazines,
presses, communities, and circle the wagons.  Or we can work to undo that
hostility.

I agree with Marjorie that reading work by people outside one's clique is
important, not just to pat yourself on the head and feel good about the
utter brilliance of your work, but with a willingness to maybe learn
something, and to start a dialogue.  It means looking for intersections,
commonalities between our writing and those of others.  It is often
surprising to discover how many of them there are.

I also think its important that the big institutions, the funders, the
magazines that purport to show what's best in poetry, resist aesthetic (and
all other forms of) apartheid in their choice of poets and poetry.

It also means insisting upon a place at the table.  I hate having to use
euphemisms for the type of poetry we present at Small Press Traffic when
I'm working on a grant.  But I also understand how important it is to
communicate what we do to people who have no idea what we do, and to
communicate why what we do (the writers we present) are important.

Hugh Steinberg

Marjorie Perloff writes:

>No easy answers but doing this this dialogue convinced me yet again that
>the only way to discuss these issues is to actually ANALYZE the work.
>So when Andrew Rathmann and others write in that we should read both
>Howe and Pinsky and be tolerant, I want to ask WHY?  Since when has
>poetics been a question of tolerance?  Was Pound tolerant?  Was Stein?
>Blake?  Samuel Johnson?  Wordsworth?  Walter Pater?  Virginia Woolf?
>Cage?  Baraka?  Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
>Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
>start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
>in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
>unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
>TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
>they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
>political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
>to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>
>So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
>take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
>side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
>perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!
>
>Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 14:01:55 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ruth Danon 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
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I am new to this list and interested in this thread. A few years back we
poets at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies had a
conference called "A New Circle" The explicit presmise of the conference
was to bring poets of different stripes together to read and to talk about
their work. Among the poets ( listed in no particular order) were Rod
Smith, Pierre Joris, Michael Heller, Hugh Seidman, Paul Violi, Erica Hunt,
Andrew Levy, Rob Fitterman, Ben Friedlander, Maureen Seaton, Hermine
Meinhard, me, etc. It seemed clear to me that there was a real difference
between those who were willing to examine poetics -- granting a place for
reflection about what we do and why -- and those who were not. That
difference seemed more important than the particular "tribe" a poet
belonged to. But of course certain "tribes" are willing to examine their
own premises and certain are not.

Last week we had Harry Mathews reading from Oulipo Compendium with me and
Andrew Levy. What struck me is Harry's reiterated point that The Oulipo is
more a laboratory than a school or a movement.  I like that clarification.
Seems to me that many experiments are ways of getting at some process, some
ontology, some understanding of what  "playing" with language may open up.
These experiments do not necessarily result in artworks. Sometimes their
reason for being is simply to learn something about language.

This seems crucial when thinking about Marjorie Perloff's excellent points.
The texts we would choose to examine and compare might ought to be objects
that exist on a similar plane of premises. (forgive the awkwardness there)
What are we challenging when we challenge something -- premises or poems?
I've heard a poem or two by pinsky that I think are pretty fine -- but the
premises that govern his notion of poetry present real problems for me.

I also think of  a reading I heard Stanly Kunitz give just two months back.
Now what he read wasn't  langpo and not what I want to write, which isn't
langpo either,  but damn, the integrity in the work and the man --  what is
it the man said about the hair at the back of the head standing up?

Curious to hear what others might say.


----------
> From: Hugh Steinberg 
> To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
> Subject: tolerance
> Date: Sunday, November 22, 1998 12:29 PM
>
> Tony Kushner has a pretty decent essay on tolerance.  He writes,
"Tolerance
> can be used to normalize an insupportable situation, or it can serve to
> warn those groups which lack real power that they exist on sufferance,
that
> they are tolerated."
>
> To what extent then is our work tolerated?  Exactly as much as it takes
> part in a power structure that is hostile to what and how we write.  You
> want to get an award from the Academy of American Poets, you better hope
> you're tolerable.
>
> If one is feeling pessimistic, it is easy to perceive the world of poetry
> as one that consists of polarized and hostile camps, endlessly bickering
> with one another (or operating in a sort of snooty ignorance of
everything
> else outside of their tiny and shrinking circles).  What thin glazing of
> tolerance we tolerate mostly produces tokenism and toadyism, a
superficial
> engagement that does little for the art.
>
> What choices do we have?  We can create our own institutions, magazines,
> presses, communities, and circle the wagons.  Or we can work to undo that
> hostility.
>
> I agree with Marjorie that reading work by people outside one's clique is
> important, not just to pat yourself on the head and feel good about the
> utter brilliance of your work, but with a willingness to maybe learn
> something, and to start a dialogue.  It means looking for intersections,
> commonalities between our writing and those of others.  It is often
> surprising to discover how many of them there are.
>
> I also think its important that the big institutions, the funders, the
> magazines that purport to show what's best in poetry, resist aesthetic
(and
> all other forms of) apartheid in their choice of poets and poetry.
>
> It also means insisting upon a place at the table.  I hate having to use
> euphemisms for the type of poetry we present at Small Press Traffic when
> I'm working on a grant.  But I also understand how important it is to
> communicate what we do to people who have no idea what we do, and to
> communicate why what we do (the writers we present) are important.
>
> Hugh Steinberg
>
> Marjorie Perloff writes:
>
> >No easy answers but doing this this dialogue convinced me yet again that
> >the only way to discuss these issues is to actually ANALYZE the work.
> >So when Andrew Rathmann and others write in that we should read both
> >Howe and Pinsky and be tolerant, I want to ask WHY?  Since when has
> >poetics been a question of tolerance?  Was Pound tolerant?  Was Stein?
> >Blake?  Samuel Johnson?  Wordsworth?  Walter Pater?  Virginia Woolf?
> >Cage?  Baraka?  Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
> >Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
> >start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
> >in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
> >unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
> >TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
> >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
> >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
> >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
> >
> >So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
> >take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
> >side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
> >perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!
> >
> >Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 20:36:16 +0200
Reply-To:     robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Archambeau 
Organization: Lunds universitet
Subject:      Re: tolerance
MIME-Version: 1.0
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(Dr. Pedantic rises to the podium, coughing in the swirls of chalk dust
as he writes on the board):

Cecelia Bartoli and Bjork
Glenn Gould and Thelonious Monk
Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollack
Seamus Heaney and Lyn Hejinian

Okay, well, what's all that about?

In the same art form, there are different idioms, and to be intolerant
of real acheivements because of the idiom is narrow and absurd.

Which is not to say that it is a good idea to make no discriminations.

I mean, there are lousy singers in opera and alternative pop, lousy
pianists in classical and jazz music, lousy representational painters,
lousy abstract painters, lousy traditional poets, lousy avant poets,
along with the really interesting people in all categories.

As for discriminations.  Yes.  For the content of the work's character,
not for the color of its genre.

(Exit, pursued by an indifferent mob).
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 14:48:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

MP wrote:
> >But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
> >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
> >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
> >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.

1).  Actually, this isn't true.  Even a slight familiarity with American
literary criticism during the first half of the 19C will show that
without a turn toward a more tolerant kind of criticism, the burgeoning
of letters known as the American Renaissance would certainly not have
happened.

2).     In his _The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835_ (1936),
William Charvat declared the literature of American romanticism differed
markedly from that of the British Romantics, attributing the difference to
the influence of a radically judicial strain of, as he called it,
"Scotch-based" American criticism during that quarter decade. He insisted
that "though much of the evidence may suggest that American romanticism was
a later development of English romanticism, [this is in fact] [o]f course
not true, for our romantics have no real prototypes in English literature
of the preceding period.  But the contrast throws light on an important
fact.  Much of the best criticism of our period concerned the English
romantics.  It was judicial, not appreciative criticism.  The result was
that the elements of English romanticism not acceptable to the American
temperament were winnowed out."

3). Now, sixty years after Charvat's book, in a concise extension of his
research, M. D. Walhout has taken note of a "hermeneutical turn" in
American criticism between the years 1830 and 1860.  Walhout, in paying
particular attention to the reviewers George Allen and Edwin Percy
Whipple, traces the advent of a critical milieu which attempted to
"interpret" rather than judge authors.  Here then is a sea-change in the
nature of criticism used by American reviewers during the crucial first
years of a new era in American literature.   You can grock the Walhout in
the Oct 96 issue of the _Journal of the History of Ideas_.

4). Without this sea-change toward a more "tolerant," or at least a less
judicial, mode of criticism in the American critical milieu, we wouldn't
have (the early) _The Dial_, Whitman, half of Emerson, Dickinson, Jones
Very, tons of Fuller, and yada yada yada.  There wasn't much poundian
gaudium certaminis felt by many of these folks.

5). We'll always want to valorize our authors.  And poets have been
especially vulnerable to this tendency of critics to valorize their
meaningless little skirmishes.  This critical yawp against "Tolerance" is
nothing more than a romantic tic. Seeing all these folks as iconoclasts,
dissidents, and aesthetic saboteurs is very tempting and satisfies some
kind of melodramatic need we have: it gives us our little heroes, which
some of us desperately need.

6). But it just ain't so: tolerance has birthed more great poetry than
intolerance.  I don't read the very intolerant Little REview because of
its great poetry: I read it because its contrariness is so foolish it's
hilarious.  History has shown Pound a fool and a crank: he should have
spent less time being an intolerant bore and more time writing better poetry.


Guantanamo Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 14:05:12 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         jen hofer 
Subject:      kent shaw
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

i've lost your e-mail address & wanted to send you the cole swensen biblio.

backchannel if you still want it, & if not, thanks for your kind help.

jen.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 15:43:03 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is DEAD Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Gabriel Gudding wrote:

> 4). Without this sea-change toward a more "tolerant," or at least a less
> judicial, mode of criticism in the American critical milieu, we wouldn't
> have (the early) _The Dial_, Whitman, half of Emerson, Dickinson, Jones
> Very, tons of Fuller, and yada yada yada.  There wasn't much poundian
> gaudium certaminis felt by many of these folks.
>
> 5). We'll always want to valorize our authors.  And poets have been
> especially vulnerable to this tendency of critics to valorize their
> meaningless little skirmishes.  This critical yawp against "Tolerance" is
> nothing more than a romantic tic. Seeing all these folks as iconoclasts,
> dissidents, and aesthetic saboteurs is very tempting and satisfies some
> kind of melodramatic need we have: it gives us our little heroes, which
> some of us desperately need.
>
> 6). But it just ain't so: tolerance has birthed more great poetry than
> intolerance.  I don't read the very intolerant Little REview because of
> its great poetry: I read it because its contrariness is so foolish it's
> hilarious.  History has shown Pound a fool and a crank: he should have
> spent less time being an intolerant bore and more time writing better poetry.

7). Just to further elucidate an already brilliant point, I will say that
no renaissance owes its advent to intolerance: both the Elizabethan and
the American 19C renaissances were born of an extreme openness.


-- Gaga Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 15:48:16 -0500
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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Marjorie Perloff was using Pound along with a list of other 'opiniated'
and 'passionate' poets to make her point, not Pound's point. You should
leave Pound out of it unless you've got something substantive to say
about him. Its not that he needs defending as regards his poetic or
critical canon. His reputation is secure. But if he could answer your
post, I'm certain that you would find that he had far more substance
than you seem to imagine. Sometimes his literary tactics were aimed at
making a strong impression on an atrophied and closed literary society,
just as your opinions are heated in order to politic for a somewhat
tired yet "tolerant" furbelow of literary critical history. However, if
anything your little blast confirms Perloff's assessment and this is all
for the good.
Finally, you need a little perspective. This is a list of some six
hundred souls and the cumulative effect of all of us will probably not
represent a fraction of the impact that Pound has had on poetry. The
same could be said for the others on Perloff's list. What does that say
about the value of "confrontation" or whatever banality we're currently
puffing ourselves up with on this list.---Carlo Parcelli
   Gabriel Gudding wrote:
>
> MP wrote:
> > >But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
> > >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
> > >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
> > >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>
> 1).  Actually, this isn't true.  Even a slight familiarity with American
> literary criticism during the first half of the 19C will show that
> without a turn toward a more tolerant kind of criticism, the burgeoning
> of letters known as the American Renaissance would certainly not have
> happened.
>
> 2).     In his _The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835_ (1936),
> William Charvat declared the literature of American romanticism differed
> markedly from that of the British Romantics, attributing the difference to
> the influence of a radically judicial strain of, as he called it,
> "Scotch-based" American criticism during that quarter decade. He insisted
> that "though much of the evidence may suggest that American romanticism was
> a later development of English romanticism, [this is in fact] [o]f course
> not true, for our romantics have no real prototypes in English literature
> of the preceding period.  But the contrast throws light on an important
> fact.  Much of the best criticism of our period concerned the English
> romantics.  It was judicial, not appreciative criticism.  The result was
> that the elements of English romanticism not acceptable to the American
> temperament were winnowed out."
>
> 3). Now, sixty years after Charvat's book, in a concise extension of his
> research, M. D. Walhout has taken note of a "hermeneutical turn" in
> American criticism between the years 1830 and 1860.  Walhout, in paying
> particular attention to the reviewers George Allen and Edwin Percy
> Whipple, traces the advent of a critical milieu which attempted to
> "interpret" rather than judge authors.  Here then is a sea-change in the
> nature of criticism used by American reviewers during the crucial first
> years of a new era in American literature.   You can grock the Walhout in
> the Oct 96 issue of the _Journal of the History of Ideas_.
>
> 4). Without this sea-change toward a more "tolerant," or at least a less
> judicial, mode of criticism in the American critical milieu, we wouldn't
> have (the early) _The Dial_, Whitman, half of Emerson, Dickinson, Jones
> Very, tons of Fuller, and yada yada yada.  There wasn't much poundian
> gaudium certaminis felt by many of these folks.
>
> 5). We'll always want to valorize our authors.  And poets have been
> especially vulnerable to this tendency of critics to valorize their
> meaningless little skirmishes.  This critical yawp against "Tolerance" is
> nothing more than a romantic tic. Seeing all these folks as iconoclasts,
> dissidents, and aesthetic saboteurs is very tempting and satisfies some
> kind of melodramatic need we have: it gives us our little heroes, which
> some of us desperately need.
>
> 6). But it just ain't so: tolerance has birthed more great poetry than
> intolerance.  I don't read the very intolerant Little REview because of
> its great poetry: I read it because its contrariness is so foolish it's
> hilarious.  History has shown Pound a fool and a crank: he should have
> spent less time being an intolerant bore and more time writing better poetry.
>
> Guantanamo Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 12:55:07 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: free poetics
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

I couldn't agree more with the substance of Henry's remarks.
Grandstanding & personal attacks do nothing to further a discussion.
Can one be "satirical" (Henry's word) without being petty?  Can members
of this list honestly disagree, if that's what it comes to, on specific
points or even larger points of view, without letting such disagreement
degenerate into a cat fight?  Can we talk about poetics without trying
to be cute?  Can we listen to what others are saying?

Mark DuCharme

>The oracular "free poetics" can be interpreted in a lot of ways.  I
would
>take it as a call to the POETICS LIST - to free itself up for more
direct
>dialogue on poetics issues per se.  How?  Less "personality", less
>grandstanding, less personal squabbling, less off-the-cuff "creative
>writing".  I'm not referring to the Sondheim productions or other poems
>sent occasionally to the list - this is fine with me.  Here's my recipe
>for a freed-up list:
>
>1. Dialogue.  By dialogue I mean the responders to an
>initial post would have the courtesy to hold back their tangential
comments
>until people have responded to the main points of a post.  It's the
>snide jabs or nit-picky irrelevancies that "deconstruct" a discussion.
>Not that messages are not fertile with OTHER issues - I'm just saying
we
>should hold fire until a voice is responded to directly, in kind, to
the
>question.
>
>2. Publication announcements, event announcements, calls for
submissions
>etc.
>
>3. Queries, poet contacts, etc.
>
>I'm in the ambiguous spot of being one of the big offenders in this
>area - one of the select few of constant babblers who clog up the list
>- but I have also participated for a long time in my erratic way in the
>more regular activities.  I'm personally bored myself with the same old
>voices & tricks that keep poetics from being "free", & would be glad to
>hear MORE voices on more EXTENDED & focused talk about poetry.
>Believe me, I would shut up for this.
>
>I realize I will now be hit on as a humorless hypocrite & people will
>pipe up to say that jokes & free-for-all are what makes the list
interesting,
>okay.  But if it's ALL jokes & antics & irrelevancies & ego-trips of
people
>that would rather interrupt an attempt at discussion with their own
agendas,
>maybe there needs to be a sub-poetics humor list, for those who would
rather
>focus on that kind of interplay.  I will not be joining that list.  Not
today
>anyway - maybe tomorrow.  - Henry Gould
>
>p.s. sometimes satire is the best & most interesting way to respond -
to
>puncture a tire, etc.  But it's also a cheap shot.
>
>p.p.s. I like the nice short FUNNY posts.  They are a great addition to
the
>list.  What I don't like is extended irrelevant grandstanding (I know,
I know).
>& grudging non-apologies.
>
>p.p.p.s.  nor I'm I saying this should be a hyper-smartass
show-off-your-brain
>show-off-your-connections list.  But how many "beginners" would want to
write
>to a list that seems balanced between insider snobbery, sour attacks,
and
>off the wall extended soliloquies?  Joel K. is right - let there be
>"community".


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:14:21 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark W Scroggins 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Two questions to Gabriel Gudding:

1)  can you demonstrate _any_ connection whatsoever between the "more
tolerant milieu" in American criticism in the early part of the
nineteenth century and the achievement in poetry of
Emily Dickinson?  asserting such doesn't make it so--even if someone named
Walhout has already asserted it.

2)  can you clarify--with examples--what you mean by tolerance giving rise
to great poetry?  sure doesn't seem to work for Blake, Milton, Moore,
Pope, Dickinson (for that matter), etc.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 15:23:52 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
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gabriel:  i believe you're identifying some imprecision in the way
"tolerance" has been used here, on poetix... i.e., whether "tolerance"
means something like  "openness to generic variation or new genres" (e.g.),
or whether "tolerance" is to be taken as a vote for interpretation over and
against (to the extent interpreting may be over and against) judgment...

i'd like to think i'm tolerant of multiple genres (i say, i like to *think*
so)... but, e.g., i may be extremely intolerant of (what i deem) "poor
writing" across all genres (wouldn't want to leave my brain (in my) behind,
yknow, where it usually is)... of course i wouldn't use the word
"intolerant" in this case mself... i'd be more interested in establishing
the terms of what i like, why i like what i like, etc... and there may be
times, in fact, when i might find it less important to critique "poor
writing" in a given genre, than to celebrate the very fact of its existence
(i do not allude here solely to matters pedagogical, either)... broadly
speaking, judgment is a discursive matter, and so subject to all of the
slipperiness of discursive matters... esp. when i bump up against artifacts
that emerge from cultural conditions of which i have limited knowledge, or
esp. when i sense that my "status" (not ontologically, but socially) puts
me in a problematic relationship vis-a-vis said artifact, i may do well to
remain silent, listen, see if i can't hear a murmur unlike any i've heard
before...

one more thing, and i know you know this:  the literary playing field is
not, and probably never will be, a level one... i would imagine that, in
accounting for our judgments, we'd take this into account---somehow... i
can't, e.g., seem to come to terms with any number of artifacts w/o
understanding the extent to which they reflect nastier ideological motives
(you name it---_birth of a nation_, _triumph of the will_, pound's
_cantos_)... i just don't see the binary of in/tolerance taking us too far
along in a discussion of such complex issues... your word "judicial" has
itself curious overtones (esp. given the u.s. backdrop at the moment), but
as a start, it's a wee bit happier, provided it doesn't augur one of the
hoarier forms of "objectivity" or "style"...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 15:38:02 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      oh YEAH...
Mime-Version: 1.0
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oh and one MORE thing (and yes, marjorie is a dear friend, but it's not
about our friendship, no it's not):  please to note that i've altered my
subject line (above)... and my apologies---to marjorie---for having posted
my last one under that prior subject line...

i find it more than a bit disturbing that marjorie should post in a single
post, her first in quite a while, and that her post should be responded to
via a subject line UNLIKE ANY OTHER i've seen on poetix in---well, in a
good long while now, if ever... when's the last time anyone's name has been
used in this fashion?... i simply must mention here, and i know this will
rankle some, that there would seem to be, among other things, a gender
element to all of this...

and i mean, i didn't post in with a subject line reading GABRIEL GUDDING IS
WRONG, merely to be provocative (or whatever)... and i wouldn't...

so hey gabe, for what it's worth, please to observe what you've managed
here, pal...

///

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:53:37 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "s. kaipa" 
Subject:      Re: oh YEAH...
Comments: To: Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

When I read the Gudding post, I thought just that:  It has nothing to do
with tolerance in poetry unfortunately.  It has everything to do with
wanting to put "Marjorie Perloff is Wrong" in the subject line.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 18:11:04 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Mark, I will try to answer your questions below.

1). But first let me say that I am not very comfortable in the realm of
    reasonable explanations; I would rather stick to unsubstantiated and
    violently asserted opinions.

2). Second, My insultive rhetoric should not be taken personally: it's
    just a tic, a matter of style: call me Don Rickles redivivus.  I love
    Perloff, I love all the right people.

On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Mark W Scroggins wrote:

> Two questions to Gabriel Gudding:
>
> 1)  can you demonstrate _any_ connection whatsoever between the "more
> tolerant milieu" in American criticism in the early part of the
> nineteenth century and the achievement in poetry of
> Emily Dickinson?

No I cannot.  That was a flagrant hunch.  But I _can_ insist that Whipple
and others who were advocating a new interpretive criticism (in which the
critical act was first one of tolerance, second one of interpretation, and
third one of an assessment of how precisely the piece in question compares
to what came before).  Margaret Fuller was a notable advocate of this new
method.  And her role as an important editor and author during the period
is beyond question.

How do you Prove how or why Anyone writes what they do?, especially
Dickinson: It's a hunch.  Poets were not getting their manifestoes and
reviews, if written, published.  During that time very very few poets were
writing reviews of poetry: Poe being a notable exception.

> asserting such doesn't make it so--even if someone named
> Walhout has already asserted it.

All Walhout asserted was that a great many reviewers began approaching their
reviews hermeneutically and tolerantly rather than judgementally and
intolerantly.  I'm the one asserting the connections btw this new
critical milieu and the Am Ren: it's a hunch and let me be the first to
say that's all it is: my mention of Walhout and Charvat is not meant to,
in the words of Scroggins, constitute a furbelow; it's not some casuistic
blather, but a hunch.

> 2)  can you clarify--with examples--what you mean by tolerance giving rise
> to great poetry?  sure doesn't seem to work for Blake, Milton, Moore,
> Pope, Dickinson (for that matter), etc.

Man, I suspect the terms "great poetry" and "tolerance" are getting hazy
enough to preclude any HOPE of a fun brouhaha being the likely result of
this line of inquiry.  Which is my polite way of backing out of waht I
suspect is going to become a shotgun duel.

Guelph Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 15:39:26 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Hugh: Do what you have to to get the grants. But let's be clear about this:
Robert Pinsky and I do not merely inhabit different cliques. I think if he
were aware of my work and that of a good many others on and off this list
he would think that we were somehow failing to do what he does, which maybe
is a lot more tolerant than my judgement of him and his ilk, namely, that
they're so clueless that what they aspire to isn't poetry and as such is
irrelevant to the practice of poetry as I understand it. And even though on
occasion one's work may bear resemblance to what those guys and gals do the
premises on which it's based are worlds away. To put it differently, if I
bicker, say, with Ron Silliman it's a family argument. Those other guys
might as well be martians. And with these aliens there's not much hope for
peace.

At 10:29 AM 11/22/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Tony Kushner has a pretty decent essay on tolerance.  He writes, "Tolerance
>can be used to normalize an insupportable situation, or it can serve to
>warn those groups which lack real power that they exist on sufferance, that
>they are tolerated."
>
>To what extent then is our work tolerated?  Exactly as much as it takes
>part in a power structure that is hostile to what and how we write.  You
>want to get an award from the Academy of American Poets, you better hope
>you're tolerable.
>
>If one is feeling pessimistic, it is easy to perceive the world of poetry
>as one that consists of polarized and hostile camps, endlessly bickering
>with one another (or operating in a sort of snooty ignorance of everything
>else outside of their tiny and shrinking circles).  What thin glazing of
>tolerance we tolerate mostly produces tokenism and toadyism, a superficial
>engagement that does little for the art.
>
>What choices do we have?  We can create our own institutions, magazines,
>presses, communities, and circle the wagons.  Or we can work to undo that
>hostility.
>
>I agree with Marjorie that reading work by people outside one's clique is
>important, not just to pat yourself on the head and feel good about the
>utter brilliance of your work, but with a willingness to maybe learn
>something, and to start a dialogue.  It means looking for intersections,
>commonalities between our writing and those of others.  It is often
>surprising to discover how many of them there are.
>
>I also think its important that the big institutions, the funders, the
>magazines that purport to show what's best in poetry, resist aesthetic (and
>all other forms of) apartheid in their choice of poets and poetry.
>
>It also means insisting upon a place at the table.  I hate having to use
>euphemisms for the type of poetry we present at Small Press Traffic when
>I'm working on a grant.  But I also understand how important it is to
>communicate what we do to people who have no idea what we do, and to
>communicate why what we do (the writers we present) are important.
>
>Hugh Steinberg
>
>Marjorie Perloff writes:
>
>>No easy answers but doing this this dialogue convinced me yet again that
>>the only way to discuss these issues is to actually ANALYZE the work.
>>So when Andrew Rathmann and others write in that we should read both
>>Howe and Pinsky and be tolerant, I want to ask WHY?  Since when has
>>poetics been a question of tolerance?  Was Pound tolerant?  Was Stein?
>>Blake?  Samuel Johnson?  Wordsworth?  Walter Pater?  Virginia Woolf?
>>Cage?  Baraka?  Just remember Frank O'Hara's delightful dismissal of
>>Robert Lowell!  I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
>>start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
>>in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
>>unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
>>TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
>>they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
>>political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
>>to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>>
>>So--to come back to Pinsky--the only way to compare Howe to Pinsky is to
>>take passages of poetry (better yet, whole books) and study them side by
>>side.  As Peter Quartermain reminded readers of this List a while ago,
>>perhaps it's time for a little (pardon the term) Close Reading!
>>
>>Marjorie Perloff
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 18:47:00 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Joe.  I take your point, I take your very politely-put point (thank you).
The reasons I used that subject heading are these:

1). A major critic has just called for more intolerance in our world of
letters.

2). Intolerance is useless and goofy. The idea that great poetry is born of
opposition is Bloomian and tired and romantic.  No one who's recently
experienced intolerance -- either literary or otherwise -- is going to
relish the idea of its increase.

3). To associate a call for tolerance with "nominal multiculturalism" is
just bizarre: tolerance, in all pursuits, letters included, is necessary.
To insist we need less of it is foolish, deluded, and ignorant.  Should I
say otherwise?

4). What ought we do? MANUFACTURE intolerance? Somehow work to CREATE
more intolerance?

5). No writer, no decent human being, loves or sees intolerance as necessary.

6). I'm sure that the intolerance Blake or Milton (his thoughts on book
burning and murder notwithstanding!) faced was not relished by either: and
here we have someone whose professional life is probably VERY comfortable
advocating and Increase in Intolerance to a bunch of poets.  OF COURSE I'm
going to insist "Marjorie Perloff is wrong"!

7). She is.

Thank you for your kind post: I'm sorry that I cannot be kinder about the
ideas in Perloff's post.  Please be well, Gabe

On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:

> oh and one MORE thing (and yes, marjorie is a dear friend, but it's not
> about our friendship, no it's not):  please to note that i've altered my
> subject line (above)... and my apologies---to marjorie---for having posted
> my last one under that prior subject line...
>
> i find it more than a bit disturbing that marjorie should post in a single
> post, her first in quite a while, and that her post should be responded to
> via a subject line UNLIKE ANY OTHER i've seen on poetix in---well, in a
> good long while now, if ever... when's the last time anyone's name has been
> used in this fashion?... i simply must mention here, and i know this will
> rankle some, that there would seem to be, among other things, a gender
> element to all of this...
>
> and i mean, i didn't post in with a subject line reading GABRIEL GUDDING IS
> WRONG, merely to be provocative (or whatever)... and i wouldn't...
>
> so hey gabe, for what it's worth, please to observe what you've managed
> here, pal...
>
> ///
>
> joe
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 18:51:29 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: oh YEAH...
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

This is not true.  It has everything to do with insisting that Marjorie
Perloff is wrong: that is to say, her post and its contents is wrong; I
have explained in my initial post and in one just sent why I think she is
wrong.

A major critic has just called for an increase in intolerance and your
concerned about the subject line of my post???!!  Come on!

Guelph Gudding


 On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, s. kaipa wrote:

> When I read the Gudding post, I thought just that:  It has nothing to do
> with tolerance in poetry unfortunately.  It has everything to do with
> wanting to put "Marjorie Perloff is Wrong" in the subject line.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:07:21 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.1.32.19981118191109.006a59f4@bway.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>free poetics

Put me down for two boxes.





George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:07:25 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      Re: Martin Bartlett
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>I look fwd to listening to the CD Herb Levy tells us about.
>
>David

It is splendid. Also, it is amazing well engineered. Terrif music and a
well-made CD. Congrats to all! Now I wish I had a CD player in my car! I
could listen to Martin Bartlett AND Bobby Bland.





George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 16:22:27 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      Re: A Defense of Cheap Shots
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>Henry Gould wrote:
>> p.s. sometimes satire is the best & most interesting way to respond - to
>> puncture a tire, etc.  But it's also a cheap shot.

I still look back with fondness at the technique that Bromige and I and
FRank Davey and Mazine Gadd used in the early sixties. If we thought that
the poet who was reading was not kicking out the jams, we used to throw
puppies and kittens at him or her. It was always hard to continue reading
crap after getting puppies and kittens thrown at one.




George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 19:46:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Thompson 
Subject:      GABRIEL GUDDING IS RIGHT
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Where I come from, if you are tolerant, you are open-minded. If you are
intolerant, you are closed-minded.

I don't know where Marjorie Perloff comes from, but I'm going to keep my
mind open.

The rest of you can do what you want. Goodbye.

[That's tolerance for you.]

Gabriel Gudding is right.

GT
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 18:55:11 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
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gabe, thanx for your thoughtful reply...

here's the excerpt from marjorie's post:

>I want to suggest that, on the contrary, it's time to
>start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe
>in.  I think that a  decade of nominal multiculturalism has created an
>unfortunate situation where the main critical virtue seems to be
>TOLERANCE.  But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
>they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
>political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
>to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.

again, my mind-reading abilities not up to par, i can only plumb the above
for what i think it's saying... i wish, in fact, marjorie had not laid the
gist of her remarks here at the doorstep of "nominal multiculturalism"... i
assume her implied argument proceeds along the tried & true lines of canon
issues, how the (generally successful, in many ways) attempt to "represent"
difference (race/gender etc.) tends to sidestep sticky aesthetic
matters---how it's high time we got to these latter...

now, i've always seen the aesthetic, mself, as operating within (or out of)
a political-ideological situation... case in point, the 19th century (to
which you've made reference, gabe):  if in fact critics in the middle part
of the century *were* more judicious, thought better than to rush to judge,
this doesn't quite explain why women ended up on the short end of things...
which is to say, selection itself is already a judgment, the ideological is
already in place...

which of course complicates---substantively---any appeal for judgment
today... which appeal marjorie is making, and for that matter i'm making...

but read that quote above... "a bit intolerant"---to, presumably, that work
which we don't "believe in"... which is to say, in so many words, that work
which fails to "oppos[e]," "resist[]," or "discriminat[e]"...

i find the latter measured, but provocative indeed, esp. given marjorie's
use of "nominal multiculturalism" and "discriminat[e]" in the same
para---my hunch is that she KNOWS she's provoking, albeit one might argue
that this is a reactionary usage... but it's easy for me to "believe in"
work that "resists" tired complacencies, e.g., of form and identity... just
*for example*, though---i'm talking in the abstract...

i'll leave it to marjorie to work this out---i'm no apologist for her...
like i say, i'm her friend... i don't think she'd object to a *close
reading* of her post, though...

and here again, the spirit of her post (if one may be permitted such a
thing, nowadays) is directed at the matter of making aesthetic judgments,
of holding *ourselves* accountable for aesthetic evaluation (no?)... and in
this regard it think that what she's after in her post is vital, and
lacking... i wouldn't frame the issue (as i've said before) in terms of
that in/tolerance couple... though it's probably the case that andrew
rathmann used the term "tolerant" to refer to pinksy's poetry in order to
suggest that we learn to get inside different aesthetics prior to
evaluating them---the mark of an open critical mind---fact is that, taken
far enough, everything becomes of ostensibly equal value (or, if you will,
critical fodder)... how to balance an openness to genre, and aesthetics, in
the midst of our current, overdetermined, mass-produced public sphere?...

marjorie is asking simply that we risk something more (whatever you make of
her historical remarks, as it were---and note that she prefaces all of the
above with "[n]o easy answers")... i think mself that we *must* risk
something more, gabe, and that in fact we do so all the time, in our more
private lives...

ok, that's enough from me for a spell... thanx all for your patience///

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 19:13:29 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
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Who could be against tolerance?  Yet Gabe Gudding is wrong in this case.
Tolerating an officially lionized mediocrity like Pinsky is entirely
pointless.


Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 17:28:21 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
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I think there's some confusion here. This is not a civil rights issue. No
social class will be ground into the dirt because I feel strongly that
certain literateurs--whole villages of them--distort the genre by calling
themselves poets. The stakews just aren't thatr high. Nor is there a
necessary contagion from one kind of intolerance to the other.

At 06:47 PM 11/21/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Joe.  I take your point, I take your very politely-put point (thank you).
>The reasons I used that subject heading are these:
>
>1). A major critic has just called for more intolerance in our world of
>letters.
>
>2). Intolerance is useless and goofy. The idea that great poetry is born of
>opposition is Bloomian and tired and romantic.  No one who's recently
>experienced intolerance -- either literary or otherwise -- is going to
>relish the idea of its increase.
>
>3). To associate a call for tolerance with "nominal multiculturalism" is
>just bizarre: tolerance, in all pursuits, letters included, is necessary.
>To insist we need less of it is foolish, deluded, and ignorant.  Should I
>say otherwise?
>
>4). What ought we do? MANUFACTURE intolerance? Somehow work to CREATE
>more intolerance?
>
>5). No writer, no decent human being, loves or sees intolerance as necessary.
>
>6). I'm sure that the intolerance Blake or Milton (his thoughts on book
>burning and murder notwithstanding!) faced was not relished by either: and
>here we have someone whose professional life is probably VERY comfortable
>advocating and Increase in Intolerance to a bunch of poets.  OF COURSE I'm
>going to insist "Marjorie Perloff is wrong"!
>
>7). She is.
>
>Thank you for your kind post: I'm sorry that I cannot be kinder about the
>ideas in Perloff's post.  Please be well, Gabe
>
>On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:
>
>> oh and one MORE thing (and yes, marjorie is a dear friend, but it's not
>> about our friendship, no it's not):  please to note that i've altered my
>> subject line (above)... and my apologies---to marjorie---for having posted
>> my last one under that prior subject line...
>>
>> i find it more than a bit disturbing that marjorie should post in a single
>> post, her first in quite a while, and that her post should be responded to
>> via a subject line UNLIKE ANY OTHER i've seen on poetix in---well, in a
>> good long while now, if ever... when's the last time anyone's name has been
>> used in this fashion?... i simply must mention here, and i know this will
>> rankle some, that there would seem to be, among other things, a gender
>> element to all of this...
>>
>> and i mean, i didn't post in with a subject line reading GABRIEL GUDDING IS
>> WRONG, merely to be provocative (or whatever)... and i wouldn't...
>>
>> so hey gabe, for what it's worth, please to observe what you've managed
>> here, pal...
>>
>> ///
>>
>> joe
>>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 20:46:45 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Schultz 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff Has a Point
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For me, this issue of tolerance depends upon context.  I don't especially like
Pinsky or his friends, so I usually don't read them.  I much prefer Susan Howe
to Adrienne Rich, despite their complementary essays on Emily Dickinson.  But
several years ago I taught a graduate class to a group of returning students,
several of whom had been "away from poetry" for years.  I taught a wide rage
of authors, though I began from the mainstream and then moved out onto the
shoals and into the marshes I like.  Rita Dove was poet laureate at the time
and so I taught her book, as one of our concerns was public poetry.  Several
of the students reacted as if they'd just been fed for the first time in
weeks; they loved the poems and loved her work as laureate.  She almost
literally brought them back into the fold.  They would not have responded as
well as they did to Howe, I'm persuaded, if they hadn't gotten excited by
Dove.

So what am I to do?  Present them only with the texts that genuinely excite
me?  I don't think so.  As Susan Howe says on her Linebreak interview,
Americans unfortunately do not feast on difficulty; but in my experience, they
may crave it once they've encountered a poetry they better expect, that speaks
to them more immediately.  Give them what excites _them_ and then switch the
field.  That seems to work better in the classroom.

While I find Pinsky an embarrassment on TV, he does read poems on the Lehrer
hour because he is poet laureate.  This, it seems to me, is not a bad thing
entirely.

This kind of issue comes up a lot in Hawai`i, where there are lots of
different poetries and everybody bickering all the time.  Where people of
different ethnicities want to be the only ones to tell their own stories, for
better or for worse.  Hawai`i, which proclaims itself a "tolerant" state
isn't--I don't think tolerance happens naturally in nature.  But
multiculturalism here (where it's damn real) doesn't breed pure tolerance,
that's for sure.  It breeds contentiousness.  The literary world is often at
its own throat.  There's a lot of saying "you can't write about this or that,
but I can."  I'm not sure this is good for anyone's work, even if it does
encourage some kinds of honesty.

Poetry is synthetic.  Even Pound and Baraka, maybe _especially_ Pound and
Baraka synthesize, even when they hate doing it.  Synthesis is a kind of
tolerance, even if it sometimes comes with self-hatred.

In a place like Hawai`i, at least for someone like me, who is not _from_ here,
the act of synthesis is all I've got.  Susan Howe is synthetic--Marjorie
Perloff loves her work and Susan Howe prefers Stevens to Pound.  Does this
mean something?

So I like Marjorie Perloff's passion; I love the poets she loves (though she
says she can't abide Riding!); I prefer her poets to members of the Pinsky
team.  But I also cherish the notion of tolerance--perhaps because I have to.
It's always worth talking to each other--even when we have very little to say.

Susan Schultz
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 17:57:23 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff Has a Point
In-Reply-To:  
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I've been teaching poetry for a long time. When it's a workshop I always
explain at the beginning of the semester that I will only teach poetry that
I love--it's not my business to ruin, say, Sylvia Plath for them, and I
assume that they'll have lots of teachers with different passions to cover
that base. Many students have a hard time with my choices at first, but
they all seem to come out knowing how to read and learn from poetry that
once baffled them. That's what works in my classroom. What you do
apparently works in yours, but it's not the only way.

At 08:46 PM 11/21/98 EST, you wrote:
>For me, this issue of tolerance depends upon context.  I don't especially
like
>Pinsky or his friends, so I usually don't read them.  I much prefer Susan
Howe
>to Adrienne Rich, despite their complementary essays on Emily Dickinson.  But
>several years ago I taught a graduate class to a group of returning students,
>several of whom had been "away from poetry" for years.  I taught a wide rage
>of authors, though I began from the mainstream and then moved out onto the
>shoals and into the marshes I like.  Rita Dove was poet laureate at the time
>and so I taught her book, as one of our concerns was public poetry.  Several
>of the students reacted as if they'd just been fed for the first time in
>weeks; they loved the poems and loved her work as laureate.  She almost
>literally brought them back into the fold.  They would not have responded as
>well as they did to Howe, I'm persuaded, if they hadn't gotten excited by
>Dove.
>
>So what am I to do?  Present them only with the texts that genuinely excite
>me?  I don't think so.  As Susan Howe says on her Linebreak interview,
>Americans unfortunately do not feast on difficulty; but in my experience,
they
>may crave it once they've encountered a poetry they better expect, that
speaks
>to them more immediately.  Give them what excites _them_ and then switch the
>field.  That seems to work better in the classroom.
>
>While I find Pinsky an embarrassment on TV, he does read poems on the Lehrer
>hour because he is poet laureate.  This, it seems to me, is not a bad thing
>entirely.
>
>This kind of issue comes up a lot in Hawai`i, where there are lots of
>different poetries and everybody bickering all the time.  Where people of
>different ethnicities want to be the only ones to tell their own stories, for
>better or for worse.  Hawai`i, which proclaims itself a "tolerant" state
>isn't--I don't think tolerance happens naturally in nature.  But
>multiculturalism here (where it's damn real) doesn't breed pure tolerance,
>that's for sure.  It breeds contentiousness.  The literary world is often at
>its own throat.  There's a lot of saying "you can't write about this or that,
>but I can."  I'm not sure this is good for anyone's work, even if it does
>encourage some kinds of honesty.
>
>Poetry is synthetic.  Even Pound and Baraka, maybe _especially_ Pound and
>Baraka synthesize, even when they hate doing it.  Synthesis is a kind of
>tolerance, even if it sometimes comes with self-hatred.
>
>In a place like Hawai`i, at least for someone like me, who is not _from_
here,
>the act of synthesis is all I've got.  Susan Howe is synthetic--Marjorie
>Perloff loves her work and Susan Howe prefers Stevens to Pound.  Does this
>mean something?
>
>So I like Marjorie Perloff's passion; I love the poets she loves (though she
>says she can't abide Riding!); I prefer her poets to members of the Pinsky
>team.  But I also cherish the notion of tolerance--perhaps because I have to.
>It's always worth talking to each other--even when we have very little to
say.
>
>Susan Schultz
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 21:12:40 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff Has a Point
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981121175723.00ab2720@mail.earthlink.net>
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What constitutes difficulty? I, too, teach what I love, and this can range
from Coleridge to Coolidge, Di Prima to Di Palma. But difficulty is some-
thing else; there is difficult _language,_ of course, but one can locate
difficulty as well in Frost (no, I don't teach Frost). Emily D. for me is
a difficult poet. There's also something to be made for accessibilty; I
can't get E. S-V Millay out of my mind.

I tend to see poetry/poetics as a highly subject discursive field with
numerous attributions; negotiating the field is difficult itself, but it
seems problematic to teach even such-and-such a style as contemporary,
working in odd and awkward ways through exclusions. Baraka for me is
always relevant.

Then there are other difficult problems, of content and intention - which
create other ways to negotiate. What Silliman and Swift have to 'say'
about the city. Or the intentionality, such as it is, of Kimball and koan
poetics - there are relationships all over the place.

Writing can be a miracle - look at kennings again. And for Pinsky, I can
say, not having read him, he'd be good to look at in a class on the basis
of the institute of Laureate. Why not? This is the main emblem of poetry
and the social, however one feels about it. (But I'll wait until I have
the opportunity before stepping in _that._)

My god, language is _exciting,_ so many possibilities (sometimes I think,
like bones sticking out of a corpse). There's no reason to follow school
or fashion or make students into believers. And students are _made_ far
too often.

Alan and Jennifer
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 23:12:52 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         joel lewis 
Subject:      f.y.i.
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Dalya Alberge on the surprise decision by Oxford
      University Press to drop contemporary poets

                        =A9
     The poets Peter Porter, left, Carole Satyamurti and D J Enright were gi=
ven
                  no warning they were to be dropped


    Anger over dead poets society
  POETS were shocked to receive a curt letter from
  Oxford University Press yesterday informing them
  that the publishing house had decided to
  abandon its entire modern poetry list.

  There had been no warning. Even the poetry
  editor, who has run the list for 20 years, had been
  kept in the dark.

  The letter told the 40 poets on the list that the
  publishing-house was facing "tough conditions in
  some of our many markets" and that it was
  "increasingly difficult to give such specialisms the
  attention they deserve. We need to give priority to
  our core scholarly and educational publishing."

  The poet Peter Porter, who has been with OUP for
  30 years, said: "It's a bad day for serious literature
  when the most distinguished academic publishing
  house in Britain chooses to neglect contemporary
  literature. They probably think they can get by
  with endless Coleridge and Wordsworth. It's only
  contemporary poetry that's affected. They're not
  sacking Shakespeare."

  He said the decision has wider implications: "It is an
  indication that something in Britain is getting more
  and more frivolous. The only thing that matters is
  the bottom-line."

  The poet D J Enright, who has been with the
  publishing-house since 1979, said the poetry list
  had never cost much to run, particularly as the
  poetry editor was only employed one day a week:
  "That can't have cost them much. The poetry list
  more or less broke even. It seems it didn't make a
  sufficient contribution to the profits. They say they
  weren't able to give it promotional support, which
  it deserves. That seems to be the reason for
  destroying the list, which is ridiculous."

  The letter informed the poets that OUP will not be
  contracting or reprinting any further books on the
  list, although it will honour existing commitments. It
  mentions the possibility of "finding a good home for
  the list".

  Andrew Potter, OUP's director of music, trade
  paperback and Bibles, said the decision had
  been a hard one, but pointed out that 90 per
  cent of the list sold under 200 copies last year.
  Some collections sold less than a handful; more
  than half reached only double figures. "Very few
  cover their costs without a lot of subsidy," he said.
  "However successful some are, it just about breaks
  even. The university expects us to operate on
  commercial grounds, especially in this day and
  age."

  Mr Enright said: "There was no warning. It was
  presented as a fait accompli. Even the poetry
  editor didn't know. The first she knew was when
  there was a delay in putting through several books
  for publication next year. It's so pathetic. The
  money involved is peanuts. It's a good list, built up
  over many years."

  Another OUP poet, Carole Satyamurti, said: "This is
  the outrageous thing. I have a typescript ready. I
  had suspected something as the contract hadn't
  arrived. One doesn't expect OUP publishers to
  terminate their poetry list. It's extraordinary that a
  university-owned publisher doesn't realise that
  poetry is an ornament to their portfolio. It doesn't
  lose money. Their poetry list has been going since
  1918. With Faber, it's one of the two most
  established lists in the country."

  She was among many who pointed out that
  poetry has seen a resurgence of interest in recent
  years. "If a university-based publisher doesn't
  realise that some areas of literature are never
  going to make a profit, it's extremely dispiriting,"
  she said.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 13:08:34 -0400
Reply-To:     efristr1@nycap.rr.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Edward Fristrom 
Subject:      Re: GABRIEL GUDDING IS LEFT
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George Thompson wrote:

> Where I come from, if you are tolerant, you are open-minded. If you
> are
> intolerant, you are closed-minded.

Where I come from. "tolerance" does not denote open mindedness. . . If I
"tolerate" students or poets in my class, it does not mean I am open
minded toward them.  It means they are viruses, that, through repeated
exposure, I have grown immune to.  It means that I drink but I don't get
drunk.

--Ted

P.S. Usually, however, I avoid disputing the viruses and sobrieties
directly.  They inevitably want to set the terms of the debate.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 22:53:22 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "J. Fuhrman" 
Subject:      my poetry vs. your poetry (the robert pinsky wars)
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981121153926.00ab8100@mail.earthlink.net>
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Mark Weiss wrote:

 namely, that
> they're so clue less that what they aspire to isn't poetry and as such is
> irrelevant to the practice of poetry as I understand it. And even though on
> occasion one's work may bear resemblance to what those guys and gals do the
> premises on which it's based are worlds away. To put it differently, if I
> bicker, say, with Ron Silliman it's a family argument. Those other guys
> might as well be martians. And with these aliens there's not much hope
for.


Mark: What do you think Pinsky aspires to that's "not poetry?"
Personally, I don't  read much Pinsky because his somewhat odd elevated
tone bugs me and I miss the leaps of imagination I see in many other poets
works. Yet I respect Pinsky's goals in way. Unlike many contemporary
poets, his poems do have ideas in them (and a sense of history). I think I
might also like the idea of reinventing formalism. Pinsky seems rooted in
a tradition of"non-experimental verse" yet within that tradition
 he does carve out a voice that is unique to him.
        The point of all this-- Pinsky goals are very different from mine
but I think it's wrong to say that because his goals are different
from mine he's not interested in writing "real poetry." It's not that I am
saying we should ignore poets flaws (though Charles North in his new book
of essays makes a convincing case for this) but as readers we should make
an effort to accept more than one paradigm for poetry. What makes us poets
is our love of paradox, no? So why can't we love two poets whose ideas
about poetry contradict each other or contradict what we think of as our own.
Yes, poetry is in some ways always about ideas but its also and more
importantly about how ideas dissolve when confronted with the power of
their opposite.


Joanna Fuhrman
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 23:04:39 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Quartermain 
Subject:      Tolerance -- LONG and IRRITATED post
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Given the rapidity with which these threads switch and exhaust themselves (a
bit like the bites in _People_ magazine) I'm coming in on this a little late
(and a  little like an old fogey) but I'm, well, a little astonished and
dismayed by this one (these two?):
1. I cannot imagine any poet not feeling passionately, I mean PASSIONATELY,
about her/his writing. Why on earth else write? "Tolerance" doesn't fit that
bill. Poets have LOVES and HATES. Maybe that sounds incurably romantic to
many of the folk on this list, but it seems to me, for instance, that the
poetry of -- hmmm, Gertrud Schnackenberg (did I spell her name right?) is,
at the very least, largely a waste of my time. I have similarly vitriolic
and yes!  in! tol! er! ant!   feelings about the work of Robert Frost,
Robert Lowell, and Robert Pinsky. I once read a really interesting essay on
Frost by Bill Harmon in Parnassus -- a thoughtful and really very
interesting assessment of Frost's whole career, in which he cogently argued
for the great value of (some of) Frost's work, poems largely neglected by
anthologists and critics. So I went back and reread Frost (I bought my first
book by Frost, the old Jonathan Cape Collected Poems,  when I was 18, in
case you're curious, nearly fifty years ago) and worked through all three
volumes of Frost I've got, and, well, despite Harmon's best efforts, I
couldn't stand the stuff, despite all the accomplishment he sees and argues
for.
     I'm NOT trying to start an argument about Frost here, so don't get me
wrong. I'm trying to say something about how and what I and presumably some
of WE read, the decisions we make, the passions that get aroused. Frankly I
don't give a damn whether you like Frost (or Pinsky or Lowell, ar any other
Robert fort that matter) -- but that you recognise that your own passions
are at some point involved in your reading and rereading of those poets you
get news from. After all, if you get news from NO poets, then you're wasting
your time reading poetry. And if you get news from ALL of them, then the
news you get probably isn't worth the paper it's on or off. The poets who
don't engage my passions (e.g. Frost) as a general rule evoke the same sort
of response in me as my television -- thirty seconds after we turn it on,
we're some place else in the house, and it's talking to itself.
     "Tolerance"?  I'm not sure what that word means, actually. It's so damn
abstract (see point 2. below). For years and years I found that Wallace
Stevens left me utterly cold, couldn't "tolerate" him; but a lot of people I
respected and still respect did read him, talked about him, wrote about him.
So I guessed I was missing something. And so every damn year I'd pick up
some Stevens and read him, till I couldn't stand him anymore. And then one
day he clicked. I'm glad I persisted (I read him more regularly, I think,
than I read those whose work I loved -- and I do mean LOVED). I gained
thereby what I hitherto had lost. ... .
     But there were many compelling arguments about Stevens, and one does,
after all, pay attention to the world. I have yet to hear AMNY compelling
arguments about Pinsky (for instance). So I don't buy his books -- and in
fact just gave away (cleaning out my shelves) what little I had, along with
Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, and sundry others.  When Mr Pinsky
brings out a new book, well, I look at it in a bookshop. Does it engage me?
Hasn't done so yet.  That may very well be my loss, yes. hence the reading
in the bookshiop. But does this make me "tolerant"? "INtolerant"? What does
this damn word mean? What EXACTLY do people have in mind when they use this
(and similar) words?

     The last couple of weeks I've been rereading the works of Norman
Douglas. I must say he's a stuffed shirt and an old windbag. I get a certain
perverse sort of pleasure reading him, and dammit he does have a hell of a
lot of old lore tucked away in his beady big brain. But, as  Ruth Danon so
astutely said of someone else a little while back in this thread, "the
premises that govern his notion of [writing] present real problems for me."
But he teaches me something about writing, about syntax, tone management,
whatever. William Barnes learned from Philip "Festus" Bailey, but hated his
work.

    It seems to me that if you care about poetry at all, then (for as
Creeley reminds us, care includes a species of anxiety), you pay attention
to it in all its forms. But you don't LIKE it all, nor do you think it all
of equal value... And yes, you also do now and again get news from writers
whose work you don't like. You close your eyes to what you hate? If so, you
won't last very long, not in this difficult world. What DOES "tolerate" mean?

Which leads me to
2. I'm completely at a loss in this thread, because there seems to be a
notion that there's an "academic" view of Howe which is somehow "wrong."
Well, pardon me, but, er, aren't most of the people on this list, all 600 or
whatever, somehow or other "academic"s? Or are we all truck drivers and
managers of McDonald's? [And whaty difference would THAT make anyway, if we
were?] Could someone please tell me, WHAT IS AN ACADEMIC?  And how on earth
can you tell who and how many "academics" read Howe and why they read her?
I've been teaching in one university for nearly forty years, and have
written about Howe, and have taught the so-called Language Poets, since the
very early 1980s. No one else on the faculty of  the university where I work
reads these writers at all (so far as I know ---


OOOOPS! I know two geographers and one semiotician here who read her, as
well as a couple of pople in Fine Arts ---

), but the courses I teach in them every year are oversubscribed (and have
been for nearly twenty years, since 1980), and the library has a pretty good
collection of their books. .

    Well, I don't want to belabour the point, but it does bother me the way
everyone rushed off into grand abstractions. I could not understand ANY of
the discussion about the different ways people allegedly read and respond to
Howe, and neither can any of my students (readers of Howe) who followed this
particular thread.

Marjorie called for "close reading." I'd like to call for clear terms, a
definition- - derived through demonstrated reading practice -- of these
damnable abstractions everyone seems to like to toss around. Milton was
absolutely on the ball in Book Two of Paradise Lost when he located all
those abstractions so beloved of politicians, academics, and members of this
list, as the creations and engines of Hell.

End of long sermon (if you got this far!). Forgive me, please, but dammit,
could we try to pay attention to what we say?

Peter


>
 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
                             Peter Quartermain
                              846 Keefer Street
                                  Vancouver
                                     B.C.
                                 Canada V6A 1Y7
                             Voice : 604 255 8274
                               Fax:        255 8204

 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 02:01:21 +0000
Reply-To:     mdevaney@nebraskapress.unl.edu
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         mj devaney 
Organization: University of Nebraska Press
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Gabriel Gudding wrote:
>
> MP wrote:
> > >But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
> > >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
> > >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
> > >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>
> 1).  Actually, this isn't true.  Even a slight familiarity with American
> literary criticism during the first half of the 19C will show that
> without a turn toward a more tolerant kind of criticism, the burgeoning
> of letters known as the American Renaissance would certainly not have
> happened.

But then:

> 2).     In his _The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835_ (1936),
> William Charvat declared the literature of American romanticism differed
> markedly from that of the British Romantics, attributing the difference to
> the influence of a radically judicial strain of, as he called it,
> "Scotch-based" American criticism during that quarter decade.

Doesn't this support Marjorie's point, since American romanticism here
is defined in opposition to British romanticism?

--MJ Devaney
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 23:50:49 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: my poetry vs. your poetry (the robert pinsky wars)
In-Reply-To:  
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1. I refer you to Peter Quartermain's excellent post. I just spent three
hours designing and typesetting one very complex page of poetry for
junction Press' next book. Why in hell would anybody bother with that sort
of labor unless passion were involved?

2. A poem as I see it is always an experiment in search of a hypothesis,
and most tentatives fail. By that definition people who take no risks by
reproducing models of correct thought and feeling or canned form are simply
lying to themselves and others if they call the results poems. Poetry is a
dangerous practice--dangerous to the practitioner and dangerous to the
serious reader. One doesn't lightly enter into things which can change our
lives in unpredicatable ways. But if one is in the habit of doing so the
claims of charlatans and fools are to say the least annoying.

Not particularly sorry to be intemperate. Poetry is what I do when I'm
lucky enough to do it, and I pay a lot for the privilege.

At 10:53 PM 11/21/98 -0800, you wrote:

>Mark Weiss wrote:
>
> namely, that
>> they're so clue less that what they aspire to isn't poetry and as such is
>> irrelevant to the practice of poetry as I understand it. And even though on
>> occasion one's work may bear resemblance to what those guys and gals do the
>> premises on which it's based are worlds away. To put it differently, if I
>> bicker, say, with Ron Silliman it's a family argument. Those other guys
>> might as well be martians. And with these aliens there's not much hope
>for.
>
>
>Mark: What do you think Pinsky aspires to that's "not poetry?"
>Personally, I don't  read much Pinsky because his somewhat odd elevated
>tone bugs me and I miss the leaps of imagination I see in many other poets
>works. Yet I respect Pinsky's goals in way. Unlike many contemporary
>poets, his poems do have ideas in them (and a sense of history). I think I
>might also like the idea of reinventing formalism. Pinsky seems rooted in
>a tradition of"non-experimental verse" yet within that tradition
> he does carve out a voice that is unique to him.
>        The point of all this-- Pinsky goals are very different from mine
>but I think it's wrong to say that because his goals are different
>from mine he's not interested in writing "real poetry." It's not that I am
>saying we should ignore poets flaws (though Charles North in his new book
>of essays makes a convincing case for this) but as readers we should make
>an effort to accept more than one paradigm for poetry. What makes us poets
>is our love of paradox, no? So why can't we love two poets whose ideas
>about poetry contradict each other or contradict what we think of as our own.
>Yes, poetry is in some ways always about ideas but its also and more
>importantly about how ideas dissolve when confronted with the power of
>their opposite.
>
>
>Joanna Fuhrman
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 00:20:21 +0100
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marjorie Perloff 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
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Tolerance of other people is essential in any community that professes
to be democratic, yes.
But "tolerance" of poetries that one takes to be --as one member of the
List said--not poetry at all but just crap is a way of undercutting the
very poetry one believes in and has had a terrible effect of making
things bland and unimportant.  I would never put down a young poet who's
struggling to get somewhere because that's cruel and deflating but when
someone is as famous as Pinsky, our Poet Laureate, our McNeill-Lehrer
Newshour poet, or his British counterpart the late Ted Hughes--yes, I
think it's NECESSARY to be oppositional(and what's Romantic about it??)
because the very presence of bad and cliched language on the airways and
in print (we have enough of it already) deflates the other wonderful
material out there.  In other words, yes, I'd be thrilled if
McNeil-Lehrer had Susan Howe on that five minute spot rather than Pinsky
because there are actually viewers who would see and hear someone
outstanding and would change their image of poetry.  And yes, as someone
who loves Dante and can read it more or less in Italian, I do think it
needs to be said that Pinsky's Dante, which is praised far and wide, is
really a very weak version.  Otherwise, "Dante" becomes a pretty
uninteresting poet.

I realize I'd have to defend those views--and we all do--but isn't that
what criticism is all about?

It always makes me think of Frank O'Hara's "If they don't like poetry,
bully for them.  .The movies are good too.  Don't forcefeed."  That
would be my answer to Susan Schultz re Rita Dove.  No doubt it's true
that in a certain context, Rita Dove will speak to students more easily
than does Susan Howe, but then what does that "speaking" mean and why do
we want it for our students?  No one NEEDS poetry, after all.  And I'm
not sure--much as I usually agree with Susan and love her work--that
there's a ladder effect--i.e. from Dove up the scale to Howe etc.  It
CAN work the other way....

Marjorie P
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 03:45:32 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: oh YEAH...

i have to say henry, i don't agree with you and your position surprises me.
you have often written extended, silly riffs in various assumed persona that
make more sense and are funnier the more one is exposed to them, i.e. good
old jack spandrift who only really hits his stride after several extended
grandstanding funny rifts.  and sometimes indirection, implication, context,
and good old sarcasm and irony say more than any dry academic non-humorized
discussion could. .. and, isn't poetry, very often, entirely ABOUT the
implied, indirect, hinted at, context... asking hte many poets on this, a
list discussing what they do, not to post crit in their chosen and one would
have supposed valorized approach -- the indirect, etc. -- seems, well, wierd.
would i join a list on academic writing and then insist that no one can post
academic writing.

i think the glory of the poetics list, for me anyway, has been the rich and
fully fertilized mix of voices -- the funny, the short, the extended, the
conservative, the radical, the academic, the squirrelly writers ( i count
myself a hybrid of that both latter -- hey, you're not catching ME standing
firmly in the center of ANY group except the group that won't stand firmly
in the center of any group!), the superserious Professional Theoreticians,
scholars, etc. and any mix heretofore and implied and possibly implicated.

e
ps
jack spandrift says i'm right, so there.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 05:24:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Simon DeDeo 
Subject:      Pinsky & co. at BU
In-Reply-To:  <199811220503.AAA20418@smtp1.fas.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I've lost web access, so I've been unable to check the archives to see if
the reading up at BU this week was mentioned; I thought it worth
mentioning because of the discussion that seems to have erupted around
Pinksy versus Howe.

The most concise form of my reaction was that after about ten minutes of
attendence, I was unable to accurately discern who was reading fiction
(the fiction folk were there, as well as the poets) and who poetry,
although a friend of mine (on the list here as well) remarked that the
poetry could be identified by it's more "wacky" narrative.

Each poet or novelist passed by in delirious succession leaving almost no
trace, except for one reader, who I classified a poet based only upon the
rapidity with which he turned the pages. His poem had the choice line:

[The Virgin Mary] walking a tightrope, in high heels 
above the abyss.

This very well might have been Pinsky -- no programs were given. I do
caution that, after talking with Louise at Groliers, I discovered that BU
had a female poet (imagine, among all that souring testosterone); I forget
her name, but reading through her briefly did give a much better
impression. I saw no women read, and I was there for almost all of the
reading.

The entire enterprise was sustained by the uncritical acceptance of
anything that passed from the podium -- the audience, apart from John and
I, was older folk and BU undergraduates, with bound journals covered in
flower doodles, listening with rapt attention. The only breath of fresh
air came right at the end, with Derek Walcott reading a little (two
minute) chunk from Omeros, which came out years ago. Has he done anything
since? Or does he just harass his female undergraduates? I've never had a
poetry reading make me so unusefully angry.

If we had a little less tolerance, there would never have been an audience
in the first place for such obvious charlatans; they would not have been
able to sustain a complete lack of critical skill in a university setting,
and would have either have left off reading what they don't appriciate, or
made an honest attempt to come to terms with it. And the few people who
did attend would have hissed them off stage, instead of applauding after
each poem.

I am not suggesting that we destory our critical notion of tolerence. But
given what went on at BU -- a complete sham -- I think we at least need
valorize *something* -- a skill with words, perhaps? It's hard to come
down on anything definite. But I think that, given the profusion of poetry
in this era of easy access to distribution (web, small press), we live in
an age in dire need of limits to what we consider worth our time. It's
easy to feel sympathy with the second-rate talent scribbling away; to
empathize with the pompous men who cerimoniously declaimed their scrit
under the protection of a major university brand seal of approval is far
more difficult.

Where is the reading public? Distressed, no doubt, that all they get from
publishers is Rilke and Neruda (good poets, no doubt, although I know
neither of their languages, but poets that form the bulk of what gets
published) and a mass of undifferentied mush.

In counterpoint, there was an excellent Geoffery Hill reading on Wednesday
at Harvard; more reports later. Was anybody else there?

-- Simon DeDeo

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sdedeo/localpapers.html
sdedeo@fas.harvard.edu
lydianmode@ucsd.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 13:57:28 +0200
Reply-To:     robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Archambeau 
Organization: Lunds universitet
Subject:      Re: tolerance
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Everyone, I suppose, is getting a bit worn out by all this, but here's
my last 2 cents (or 1/12 of a kronor over here in Sweden).

I think Joe Amato is right when he says there seems to be some confusion
about what we mean when we talk about tolerance -- do we mean total
acceptance of everything, a kind of cool neutrality, or do we mean an
attempt at openness to different paradigms of poetry?

I don't think anybody is arguing that we should give up on making
judgements about what is interesting or provocative or glorious and what
is a load of cat shit (unless that's what Gabriel Gudding had in mind
when he praised 'hermeneutic' criticism) (in which case I disagree with
him entirely).

As to being open to different paradigms --  it seems that one ought to
try to do this, even when it gets frustrating (and yes, the 'mainstream'
is usually less tolerant that the fringe, but closed-mindedness can be
found everywhere) -- what Peter Quartermain said about finally
'clicking' with Stevens seems to me to be a perfect example of the
positive result that can (sometimes, not always) come from openness to
different paradigms.

I fail to see how listening for the news from elsewhere undermines 'our'
poetry.  Tolerating second-rate work within a paradigm you love just
because you feel the need to stick up for your own tribe seems like a
more reliable way to undercut your own position.



--
One small thing about Pinsky, our registered whipping boy (one of the
many useful roles a laureate plays).  Pinsky's record as a critic makes
it seem probable that Mark Weiss is off base when he says:


> I think if he
> were aware of my work and that of a good many others on and off this list
> he would think that we were somehow failing to do what he does,


I mean, Pinsky's record as a critic is a lot more various than you might
guess.  He probably isn't aware of what Mark is up to, and he probably
wouldn't love it so much he'd change his life if he encountered it, but
he has written sympathetically about poets quite different from himself
(Oppen, Ashbery and Creeley, for example).

Pinsky's criticism from the 70s, especially, is interesting in another
way: he tends to try hard to figure out what someone is up to, to
appreciate that poet's virtues (or condemn the vices, he does that,
too).  And then he ends by making a judgement about how useful this work
is for poetry.  His conclusions have been pretty different from mine,
but the method -- keeping an ear to the ground, regardless of idiom,
making judgements about the work on its own terms and then on HIS own
terms -- this is a damn good idea.

I'm off in the Volvo, down to the local fjord for some halibut and
Absolut.

Bob Archambeau
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:15:54 +0200
Reply-To:     robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Archambeau 
Organization: Lunds universitet
Subject:      Oxford UP/ACTION
Comments: cc: british-poets@mailbase.ac.uk
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Here's something NOT to tolerate:

It is important to let Oxford University Press know that people are
pissed off about them dropping contemporary poetry.  E-mail messages
tend not to mean much, but actual letters and faxes do make a bit of an
impact.

Here's the mailing address of the man who seems to be most immediately
concerned:


Andrew Potter
Oxford University Press
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP.

The general telephone number for OUP is: +44 (0) 1865 556767.


And the fax is: +44 (0) 1865 556646.


Let them know they ought to be ashamed of themselves.



Robert Archambeau
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 08:37:38 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Rhetorics
Comments: To: Poetics List 
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I don't get my news much from TV, so haven't caught Pinsky's act on PBS, but
I certainly have seen 10 or 15 poets in recent weeks do grand imitations of
someone inhaling deeply so as to capture the inner spirit of some word, so
it would appear to be having some visibility. Looks like an asthma attack of
the heart or some such. Would it be different if we had Susan Howe in that
role? I think it's arguable, not because Susan's not a better writer but
because it's role, as I gather from my secondary sources, is to stand
ineffably for The Poetic. What if it were Bob Holman or Patricia Smith or
Meikel And in that seat?

But I don't think you can have any sense of what a Susan Howe accomplishes
if you don't read a Pinsky, at least with an anthropological view of it. So
I do believe in the importance of checking in with that world, even if I
read it intolerantly.

By the bye, to acknowledge Peter Quartermain's grump about the trashing of
the "academy," that's a term whose history and meanings certainly could
stand a little unpacking. It is after all the same ideological state
apparatus that has so famously shat upon the likes of Andy Levy and Joe
Amato and literally hundreds of other good and competent people, and which
leads to the creation of institutions such as the Academy of American Poets,
but it also has other meanings as well. It is what enables and empowers
other folks: Peter, Charles B (the absent father in Buffalo, as somebody
referred to him recently), Bob Perelman, et al. I'd be curious to see what
the breakdown of jobs is on the Poetics List, all 700 folks, since I suspect
Peter's right that perhaps 500 are in some connection to the academy, but as
one of the other 200, no, Peter, it's nothing like 100%.

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 08:49:50 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
Comments: To: mj devaney 
In-Reply-To:  <36577071.2A86@nebraskapress.unl.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, mj devaney wrote:

> Gabriel Gudding wrote:
> >
> > MP wrote:
> > > >But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
> > > >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
> > > >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as it is
> > > >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
> >
> > 1).  Actually, this isn't true.  Even a slight familiarity with American
> > literary criticism during the first half of the 19C will show that
> > without a turn toward a more tolerant kind of criticism, the burgeoning
> > of letters known as the American Renaissance would certainly not have
> > happened.
>
> But then:
>
> > 2).     In his _The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835_ (1936),
> > William Charvat declared the literature of American romanticism differed
> > markedly from that of the British Romantics, attributing the difference to
> > the influence of a radically judicial strain of, as he called it,
> > "Scotch-based" American criticism during that quarter decade.
>
> Doesn't this support Marjorie's point, since American romanticism here
> is defined in opposition to British romanticism?
>
> --MJ Devaney

To beat a dead donkey thread: No, Charvat said this, Walhout bettered
Charvat's metaphor and research, and I'm saying that there is probably a
relation btw the new open critical milieu (which Walhout takes not of) and
that blossoming known as the Am Ren.  I'm not "praising" hermeneutical
criticism: I'm saying here's an instance of extreme critical openness and
isn't it interesting that it coincides with a fascinating explosion of
letters.  Dead donkey oh it dead.  I'm tired of these rifles.  Whey da
shotguns go? -- Gigi
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 09:20:17 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance Issue
In-Reply-To:  <36574AB1.F07000E5@earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Marjorie Perloff wrote:

> But "tolerance" of poetries that one takes to be --as one member of the
> List said--not poetry at all but just crap is a way of undercutting the
> very poetry one believes in and has had a terrible effect of making
> things bland and unimportant.

b). "Bland and unimportant"?  Let's please remember that a great deal of
great poetry, thank god, has identified itself as Unimportant, as minor
literature.  I stand here with Beckett: keep your importance.  Literature
fails when it tries to be important.  We're nobodies: you want to know
what's romantic about this oppositionalism?: it makes Importance, it
makes literary heroes, it makes schools (aka groups of cranks); and, just
as a side note, it makes, eventually, raunchy bad reading.

c).  It is not necessary to be "oppositional": all that's necessary
is to do what you do, to write how you write.  Despite what I think of
Pinsky's poetry, I think Bully For Him: Bully for Pinsky that he's
famous!

1). It's this oppositional myPoetry v yrPoery, Either/Or, Zero-sum
attitude that is so absolutely unnecessary.  The attempt to awaken such an
attitude in contemporary poets because it historically mirrors the lives
of former poet-cranks is a wowzer.

d).  Are we so pusillanimous that we cannot be sympathetically joyful
Pinksy is enjoying fame for his work?

e). Good for Pinsky. Fuck it: let's talk of all those who, in the words of
the great Patrick Kavanagh, had no tolerance and were kept from an
audience:

"Of a holy hearing audience....
I thank you and say how proud
That I have been by fate allowed
To stand here having the joyful chance
To claim my inheritance
For most have died the day before
The opening of that holy door."

                                                        -- Gigi
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:36:34 -0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jim Bennett 
Subject:      Reading
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A free poetry event -


David Bateman

Jim Bennett



Poets David Bateman and Jim Bennett
at the Everyman Bistro, Liverpool.


8pm on Thursday 26th November

Third Room, Everyman Bistro.



Everyone welcome.

Some open mike time available.

For information phone Jim on  0151 691 1111

__________________________________________________________________

Click on this link to vote for my site.  =
http://conline.net/vote.mv?id=3D1780

Click on this link to visit my site.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1127/

"Poetry is what the future makes of it."  John Garner



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A free poetry event -


David Bateman

Jim=20
Bennett



Poets David Bateman and Jim Bennett
at the =
Everyman=20
Bistro, Liverpool.


8pm on Thursday 26th November

Third =
Room,=20
Everyman Bistro.



Everyone welcome.

Some open mike =
time=20
available.

For information phone Jim on  0151 691=20
1111

_____________________________________________________________=
_____

Click=20
on this link to vote for my site.  http://conline.net/vote.mv?=
id=3D1780

Click=20
on this link to visit my site.
http://www.geociti=
es.com/Athens/Academy/1127/

"Poetry=20
is what the future makes of it."  John=20
Garner



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=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:13:22 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: my poetry vs. your poetry (the robert pinsky wars)
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Mark Weiss says, "A poem as I see it is always an experiment in search
of a hypothesis  and most tentatives fail. By that definition people who
take no risks by reproducing models of correct thought and feeling or
canned form are simply lying to themselves and others if they call the
results poems. Poetry is a dangerous practice--dangerous to the
practitioner and dangerous to the serious reader. One doesn't lightly
enter into things which can change our lives in unpredicatable ways. But
if one is in the habit of doing so the claims of charlatans and fools
are to say the least annoying."

I empathize with all this but as a Serious Taxonomizer I feel Mark is
distinguishing valuable from not-so-valuable and lesser poetry.  If a
carpenter throws together a house that protects someone from the rain
but not the cold, we don't say it isn't a house because it is
inferior, we say it is a lousy house.

A problem is that we have no single word for Serious Poetry.  Or maybe
what we need is one for inferior verse.  "Verse" is sometimes used but
I don't like it since it also indicate metrical writing.

I dunno.  I think I'd be content to call Pinsky's stuff poetry but not
craft-extending poetry, and be done with it.  I could never say it was
not poetry.

While I'm here, a few comments on the latest Perloff thread.

I LIKE names' being put in subject boxes.  It's human to like to have
people in mind as well as their ideas.  And I note that Gabriel
Gudding's post got quite a flurring (I meant "flurry" but sorta like
this "flurring") of attention I doubt it would have if he'd politely
avoided mentioning Perloff.

I think Perloff should have gone for "discrimination" (as she did,
finally, at the end of her first post) rather than "intolerance" as her
key term.  Tolerance/intolerance are too loaded and tricky to define.
I'm tolerant of all forms of poetry, for example, inasmuch as I don't
think they should be abolished.  I'm intolerant of them inasmuch as I
say bad things about them and would not allow them into any anthology I
edited.  (I often say that my motto would be, "Judgemental, but not
Intolerant.")

To me it is a truism that all poets (and all humans) work against what
they don't like and toward or with what they do like.

Perloff and everyone else with any sense is simply against bland
acceptance of everything.

Final note: there's no more difference between American and British
Romanticism than there is between New York Romanticism and New England
Romanticism.

                                                     --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:45:04 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Society of Unimportance
Comments: To: Edward Fristrom 
In-Reply-To:  <36584510.2766020D@nycap.rr.com>
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I no longer wish to part of the group named Mark or the group named Kent
or the group with initials DB, db, or any combination thereof.

I wish to inaugurate a truly unimportant group, of which naturally I am
not important enough to be the only member.  "No, no, no, I know I was not
important" -- we take our legend from the late great Patrick Kavanagh.

We may breach the bastions of importance with squibs, jokes, jots, asides,
darts, humphs, hee-haws, and upside down Spanish exclamation marks -- for
we will never square up, be rhetorical, take it like a man, tell it how it
is, argue our point, stand our ground, close ranks, squash butterflies or
like Nabokov catch and pin them. We WILL stand our round, however, but
never in the nightmare resuscitation of a 1950s Irish pub which the
Buffalo Poetics List threatens to become.

We will be tolerant as tolerance is marginally more fun than intolerance
(which hurts people) and you get to fall in love with
the most unlikely types -- just like I fell in love with Alan Dugan in
fact, he's quite unimportant too (though a lot less so than I am).

As well as being more fun, tolerance lets our silly little voices be
heard, as long as they don't go on TOO much.  I was miffed, I can tell
you, when I got that horrid anonymous dictum from the Man Above, and
bewildered when I got a horrid note from a Mary-Lou person with this
question in the subject line: "Ever read any poetry?  Just curious." I was
plunged all morning in the weird realization of just how saturated in poetry
my days have become, after all this time: you dabble in something and find
it has become your life.

So I'm the nobody Marjorie Perloff refers to when she says "No one needs
poetry, after all."

Mark Weiss says (re civic and poetic intolerance): "Nor is there a
necessary contagion from one kind of intolerance to the other."
Sure.  As long as we all remain truly unimportant people.

What is an academic, Peter Quartermain asks.  Someone who tolerates the
disciplinary institutions of education and who is in turn tolerated by
these institutions, dependent on a reasonable degree of collaboration in
terms of dutifulness and behavior?

Of all the typos, I liked Susan Schultz's best: "a wide rage of authors"
which seems to fit very snugly between wide range and wild rage.  Though I
like Peter Quartermain's "couple of pople" too.

I'm all in favor of gentleness and surprise.

Mairead
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 11:39:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      SUBMIT YOU DOG
In-Reply-To:  <000801be14d7$7fee4b40$cc712e80@bowen.ecn.purdue.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

1). The email rag SUBMIT YOU DOG is now accepting email submissions of
    poetry (and only poetry) for its December issue.

2). We have no editorial policy. That is to say, we print everything we
    receive, ordering the submissions alphabetically by author's last name.
    Those of you who will now charge us either with being alphabetically
    elitist (for ordering according to alphabetic order) or with being
    stupidly inclusive, please know that we care not one wit for either
    aesthetic aristocracy or literary Democracy: we're just lazy.

3). Each contributor gets three contributor's copies of the magazine. (We
    email it to you three times).

4). If you wish to submit or subscribe, email me, Gutenberg Gudding, at
    gwg6@cornell.edu.

5). We (I am but a co-editor) send this email rag off on or around the first
    of each month.

6). No attachments, please.  Just plain ASCII.

7). Nor finally do we buy any rights.  You keep your rights.

8). But, as always, you have the right to remain silent.

-- Gutenberg Gudding
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 08:59:17 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
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Okay, here's a question:

Yesterday morning my neighbor corralled me in the carport to ask about poetry.
Apparently she's always tried to write, but could never "get it to rhyme." Okay,
simple answer: "It doesn't have to. Write what you want."

She didn't ask me who she should read, but in perusing this thread, I wonder: if
she had said to me, *Hey, should I read this guy Pinsky, or this Susan Howe
chick?* what would I  have said? I think I would have leaned toward Pinsky,
throwing in a few caveats.

Coincidentally, tolerance is a big thread on the women's bodybuilding list I
subscribe to: fitness shows or bodybuilding contests: which is destroying the
fiber of our beloved sport? Heading on one post: "It's all good." Chalk one up to
hevily-muscled tolerance.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 09:11:50 +0100
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marjorie Perloff 
Subject:      Re: a second PS on the Pinsky thread
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In going to bat for Howe vs. Pinsky, I don't want to be misconstrued as
supporting the us-versus-them thread often on this list (e.g. Language
Poets versus Establishment poets etc.).  I especially admire people like
John Kinsella who want to try to reconfigure the "groups" and see if we
can't see links between unlikely poets and I've argued in print that it
makes no sense for the in-anthologies to feature Levertov but not
Ammons, when the latter is (a) not all that different, and (b) often a
better poet.

So, while I'm at it, and having been critical of Pinsky's Dante, let me
recommend strongly Jonathan Galassi's MONTALE, just out, which is truly
wonderful, has great notes and helpful commentary and should make a lot
of people enjoy this great Italian modernist!   And this is certainly a
"mainstream" publication by the editor of Farrar, Straus.

xxx
Marjorie
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 11:32:54 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      If I were Poet Laureate
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Ron Silliman wrote:


 What if it were Bob Holman or Patricia Smith or
> Meikel And in that seat?

1.  Everyone would be required to spelled "Miekal" correctly.

2.  Ezra Pound would be pardoned.

3.  The Universal Language movement would be resurrected, & grade school
children would be speaking Alwato.

4.  Poets would be required to spend long periods of time outside the
academy, integrating their words & theories into the lives of farmers,
street punks, construction workers & circus performers.

5.  Theory would validate actions, not supplant it.

6.  Synthenaesia would be marketed on street corners by ex-crackheads.

7.  The term "minor poets" would be excised forever from the canon.
Viva la Harry Kemp!

8.  Small press funding would be modelled after canada council's support
of lit in its heyday  (that be the 70's & 80's, right George?).

9.  Poetry would be Y2K compliant.


the honorable & dusty MeeCow Ond
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:48:17 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael W Bibby 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
In-Reply-To:  <36574AB1.F07000E5@earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I've been following the various permutations of this thread with great
interest and Majorie Perloff's recent response has prompted me to step out
of lurkdom and venture into the fray.  As an "academic" and teacher, I am
deeply concerned about this issue of "tolerance" vis a vis poetry/poetix.
Granted poets feel very passionately about their poetix and, naturally,
will "discriminate" in their choices of who they read, what they like,
what they use, etc.  But isn't it possible to also "study" poetry
without making the kinds of value judgements Perloff & others on this list
call for?  I'm thinking, for example, of work I've been doing on the role
of poetry in revolutionary movements.  By most of the measures articulated
in this list's thread on the subject, this poetry would be considered
"crap"--it's often not formally innovative (in the mod or postmod sense),
it's declamatory, agit-prop, and it's often not even carefully written.
But in contrast to what Perloff has just asserted, I would argue that some
people most definitely NEED this poetry--the campesinos in the FMLN of El
Salvador, the FRELIMO cadres of Mozambique, and the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua certainly *needed* poetry at various moments in their struggles.
This isn't to claim that these movements were "right" and, therefore,
their poems are "good"--rather, what interests me is the ways in which
poetry *does matter* to certain social groups during periods of
historical/political struggle.  There's a certain luxury involved in
claiming that poetry makes nothing happen or that no one needs
poetry--and it also strikes me that such claims serve to secure the
institutional and ideological status of Poetry as luxury, conserving it as
a right of the privileged.

Michael Bibby
Department of English
Shippensburg University
1871 Old Main Drive
Shippensburg, PA  17257
(717) 532-1723
mwbibb@ark.ship.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:02:48 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
In-Reply-To:  <365842E5.FB5C75C3@bayarea.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

what i would ask of pinsky---AS poet laureate---is that he work to promote
an (inclusive) understanding of poetry (which might not square well with
his own practice as a poet)... i think it would be nice for our laureates
to communicate a sense of how diverse poetry is, aesthetically *and*
ideologically, how poetry is not simply about the dozen or so names one
finds in the poetry section of waldenbooks, how poetry is not (as karen
notes) simply about rhyme or songwriting or greeting card verse, how poetry
is difficult and conflicted in fact, and anxiety-producing at times, how
poetry is a matter of often heated debate (as hereabouts), how so many
people give their lives to it, to the arts in general, and how so few of
the many who labor for so long end up with the privilege of being named
anything like "laureate"...

that's it---nothing more and nothing less... and that's a LOT, no?... but
once in a position of relative power, and sanctioned by the government no
less, i would think that what i'm asking of the poet laureate is
appropriate... if he wishes to opine re what he likes/dislikes, i
think---as laureate---his doing so must be accompanied by a heightened
awareness of his public privilege... that is, i would think he must come to
terms, as laureate, with just how fortunate he is in having been given such
public access (and yes, it's a job---but hey, what a job!)... i mean, heck,
there's some responsibility that comes of being ensconced in that
position... i certainly don't envy pinsky, or anyone, in that position, but
i *do* hold anyone in that position largely accountable for what's done
under its auspices...

pinsky-as-poet is, for me, an entirely different matter... or should be,
and pinsky should attempt to make it so... and btw, i'm not certain *what*
i think of pinsky's efforts to illustrate the "common person's" love of
poetry... it seems to me that this can reinforce all sorts of normative
views that really, in the end, continue to make poetry seem such a luxury,
a realm of human idiosyncracies (incl. e.g. "genius") as opposed to
something more elemental... but i don't wish here to start a debate about
*that*...

still, perhaps we should be directing some of our talk at what, exactly, it
means to have a "poet laureate" in the first place?... what
responsibilities should be placed upon such an individual?... i don't find
the laureate concept as such useless, however problematic, even if i'm
certain that any particular nomination will likely be saturated with
controversy...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:23:55 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         ken|n|ing 
Subject:      Kenning #3 / the autumn/winter 98 issue
Comments: To: "-->*<-- -- Lyn Hejinian" <70550.654@compuserve.com>,
          AERIALEDGE@aol.com, Andrea Troolin ,
          Dave Lofquist ,
          arteaga@altavista.net, BEAT-L@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU, bernstei@BWAY.NET,
          bluebed@hotmail.com, chax@theriver.com,
          DarraghM@gunet.georgetown.edu, "A. Morris" ,
          dfar@erols.com, djmess@CINENET.NET, duplij@physik.uni-kl.de,
          Easter8@aol.com, emily-d-wilson@uiowa.edu,
          ewaldner@emerald.tufts.edu, exact@world.std.com,
          joris@CSC.ALBANY.EDU, jtaylor@ideal.net.au, John Kinsella
          ,
          levyaa@is.nyu.edu, llerner@mindspring.com, mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU,
          MODERN_POETS-L@lists.missouri.edu, Moxley_Evans@compuserve.com,
          mtata@hotmail.com, poetryetc@listbot.com, pollet@maine.edu,
          potepoet@home.com, rescuefantasy@mailcity.com, SSSCHAEFER@aol.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

ANNOUNCING KENNING #3           THE AUTUMN/WINTER 1998 ISSUE
        $5.00/1         $9.50/2 ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION

NEW POETRY:  Daniel Bouchard    Standard Schaefer       Sheila Murphy
Charles Bernstein       John Lowther    Hoa Nguyen      Peter Ganick
Mark DuCharme   Lisa Jarnot     Ida Yoshinaga   Mark Prejsnar   Andrew
Levy    Gustaf Sobin    Ray DiPalma

POETICS:        Tina Darragh    John Taggart

NON FICTION:    Susan Smith Nash

INTERVIEW:      Nathaniel Mackey

REVIEWS:        Yedda Morrison's The Marriage of the Well-Built Head
Jordan Davis' Poem on a Train

*as of this announcement, Kenning 1 & 2 are out-of-print;  subscriptions
begin with issue #3.

**future issues include work by such authors as Lyn Hejinian, Leslie
Scalapino, Anselm Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Kathy Lou Schultz, Mac Wellman,
and many others.

***Kenning is a not-for-profit "newsletter" published independent of
institutional support or guidance.  contributions and mail-orders are
accepted at the address below.  please make checks payable to the editor,
Patrick F. Durgin.

****Kenning is published three times a year.  subscribers, excluding
institutions, receive the magazine in a loose-leaf format, as well as a
hand-printed portfolio to accommodate several stacks.  Note to
contributors, your copies are on the way.
                             |
                             |
k e n n i n g````````````````|``````````````````````````````````
a newsletter of contemporary |poetry,  poetics,  and  non-fiction writing
                             |418 Brown St. #10  Iowa City, IA 52245  USA
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:24:48 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

but michael b---and i take your point seriously---what you're calling for
is exactly what's BEEN happening for so long now... this is what cultural
studies has been doing, e.g.---looking at the value of various literary
(and increasingly non-literary) production in cultural terms, for how
consumption/reception of same supports/complicates specific sociocultural
issues (of representation, say, or in more activist terms, of identity)...

i think the point is that, as unpopular as it may be to say it, judgment of
an aesthetic sort is often lacking when the issue of cultural work is made
paramount... to the point at which one wonders, e.g., what literary
criticism may have to say to the *generative* issues that are at stake when
one sits down to write a poem in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful
marketplace that is so markedly un-receptive to that which challenges the
status quo (however it does so)... now, there has to be a direction in
which to take the aesthetic per se that's not simply reactionary, not
simply a return to new criticism... while at the same time i *like*
cultural studies, much of it, the provocation is that we find a way to
proceed---not around---but *through* those insights...

which is why, e.g., i mentioned the situation in women's romance fiction...
at the risk of being completely and obsessively redundant, let me cut &
paste here two items from my prior posts (on the assumption that the snow
squall of posts---mea culpa---may have buried these thoughts, and that,
again, this issue is sufficiently vital to repeat mself):

(1)
>witness, e.g., tania
>modleski's piece a week ago in _the chronicle of higher ed_ where she
>discusses (finally, and imho long overdue) problems with romance fiction
>[gasp!]... recall that modleski was among those (radway, others) who
>championed an analysis of such fiction as giving voice to women's issues
>(which they do, in fact---but they do other, less desirable things as
>well)...

addendum:  and if you're trying to write what is now called "literary
fiction"---well, you'll feel the influence of romance fiction that much
more, if only b/c you now find yourself in this category!...

(2)
>esp. when i bump up against artifacts
>that emerge from cultural conditions of which i have limited knowledge, or
>esp. when i sense that my "status" (not ontologically, but socially) puts
>me in a problematic relationship vis-a-vis said artifact, i may do well to
>remain silent, listen, see if i can't hear a murmur unlike any i've heard
>before...

the latter hits on the issue you raise, michael... i think, e.g., that we
must be esp. careful in *rushing* to judge a film like *smoke signals*
(which btw, i like a LOT, whatever its flaws---a judgment that i won't
unpack *here*)...

hope this makes sense, michael...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:42:39 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Rhetorics
In-Reply-To:  <000901be161d$472ac300$f6bffea9@oemcomputer>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

"Academic" in the context of poetry is a somewhat archaic synonym from the
50s thru 70s for Iowa School or, roughly speaking, "What Gets Published in
the New Yorker." It has nothing to do with how poets make their livings.
It's continued survival reflects the lack of a newer consensual term.
"Academic" poets, by the way, never called themselves such.

Ron: Pinsky's performance is rather the opposite of what you suspect. No
pretense to afflatus. More "anybody can do this, and it's good for you,
although not all that important." A bit like Mr. Rogers.

At 08:37 AM 11/22/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I don't get my news much from TV, so haven't caught Pinsky's act on PBS, but
>I certainly have seen 10 or 15 poets in recent weeks do grand imitations of
>someone inhaling deeply so as to capture the inner spirit of some word, so
>it would appear to be having some visibility. Looks like an asthma attack of
>the heart or some such. Would it be different if we had Susan Howe in that
>role? I think it's arguable, not because Susan's not a better writer but
>because it's role, as I gather from my secondary sources, is to stand
>ineffably for The Poetic. What if it were Bob Holman or Patricia Smith or
>Meikel And in that seat?
>
>But I don't think you can have any sense of what a Susan Howe accomplishes
>if you don't read a Pinsky, at least with an anthropological view of it. So
>I do believe in the importance of checking in with that world, even if I
>read it intolerantly.
>
>By the bye, to acknowledge Peter Quartermain's grump about the trashing of
>the "academy," that's a term whose history and meanings certainly could
>stand a little unpacking. It is after all the same ideological state
>apparatus that has so famously shat upon the likes of Andy Levy and Joe
>Amato and literally hundreds of other good and competent people, and which
>leads to the creation of institutions such as the Academy of American Poets,
>but it also has other meanings as well. It is what enables and empowers
>other folks: Peter, Charles B (the absent father in Buffalo, as somebody
>referred to him recently), Bob Perelman, et al. I'd be curious to see what
>the breakdown of jobs is on the Poetics List, all 700 folks, since I suspect
>Peter's right that perhaps 500 are in some connection to the academy, but as
>one of the other 200, no, Peter, it's nothing like 100%.
>
>Ron
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:47:00 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Marjorie Perloff is Wrong
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

One more: critical stance rarely engenders. It usually follows from
practice. But here's an uneducated hunch: in the period you target there
was a lot of sentiment for the establishnment of a national literary voice,
differentiated from the brits, for obvious reasons. Hence, perhaps,
whatever degree of tolerance there may have been.

At 08:49 AM 11/22/98 -0500, you wrote:
>On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, mj devaney wrote:
>
>> Gabriel Gudding wrote:
>> >
>> > MP wrote:
>> > > >But neither poetry nor criticism ever came out of tolerance;
>> > > >they are born out of opposition (to earlier poetries, rival poetries,
>> > > >political systems, forms of oppression), resistance, and --hard as
it is
>> > > >to use the word at the moment-- discrimination.
>> >
>> > 1).  Actually, this isn't true.  Even a slight familiarity with American
>> > literary criticism during the first half of the 19C will show that
>> > without a turn toward a more tolerant kind of criticism, the burgeoning
>> > of letters known as the American Renaissance would certainly not have
>> > happened.
>>
>> But then:
>>
>> > 2).     In his _The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835_
(1936),
>> > William Charvat declared the literature of American romanticism differed
>> > markedly from that of the British Romantics, attributing the
difference to
>> > the influence of a radically judicial strain of, as he called it,
>> > "Scotch-based" American criticism during that quarter decade.
>>
>> Doesn't this support Marjorie's point, since American romanticism here
>> is defined in opposition to British romanticism?
>>
>> --MJ Devaney
>
>To beat a dead donkey thread: No, Charvat said this, Walhout bettered
>Charvat's metaphor and research, and I'm saying that there is probably a
>relation btw the new open critical milieu (which Walhout takes not of) and
>that blossoming known as the Am Ren.  I'm not "praising" hermeneutical
>criticism: I'm saying here's an instance of extreme critical openness and
>isn't it interesting that it coincides with a fascinating explosion of
>letters.  Dead donkey oh it dead.  I'm tired of these rifles.  Whey da
>shotguns go? -- Gigi
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 13:53:33 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      pinsky, tolerance, u.s.w.
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the other tradition in which I am schooled, that is, the Confucian
concept of poetry, starts with the assumption that poetry is somehow
absolutely transparent, in that you can know the person who wrote it,
assuming you can read it, have the sympathy, education, etc, necessary
for the successful act of reading -- but the point being that the
person, their character, is all there and available, and nothing can
ultimately be hidden.  consequently poetry can be used, for example, to
select bureaucrats since by their writing you will know whether they
have, e.g., integrity, compassion, wisdom (also you can tell, by how
they follow the rules of versification, what their spoken accent in
Chinese is like but that's another issue).  poetry also makes it
possible to experience being another person, the writer of the poem,
e.g., the "lascivious" poems in the Book of Songs were good to read in
order to experience lascivious thoughts, so that one could recognize and
overcome them in daily life -- not for prurience but prophylaxis.

these assumptions don't fully accord with our own tradition in America
but for me they do make some sense and are useful.  whether there is
total transparency or not, there is a person in the poetry that can be
known.  no two so-called language poets that I have ever read are same,
for a simplistic example, and without much difficulty a reader can
identify one or another.

so, what does this matter?  reading Robert Pinsky enables the reader to
know Robert Pinsky, to know it is like to be Robert Pinsky.  if you
don't want to know Robert Pinsky you probably won't enjoy reading the
poetry.  if the reader can't be interested enough to distinguish between
Pinsky, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, that's okay too, you don't have to
be friends with everyone.  I don't remember ever having read any poems
by any of them, to be honest, whether I ever did or not, so whether I
really have standing to speak about Pinsky or not, I don't know.

the Confucian tradition also takes this transparency a little further,
because not only can the reader know the person, they can also know
their times, the world in which the poet wrote.  so there is something a
bout Pinsky that, because of his fame if nothing else, is necessarily of
value in knowing his/our times.  but it might not speak well for our
times.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 10:56:06 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Oh Yeah!
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I got you. Of course Howe and Oinsky are not the only choices. Niedecker
might have steered her in the right direction and been an easier first
swallow.

Just caught the Oinsky above. An accident, but I'll keep it.

At 08:59 AM 11/22/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Okay, here's a question:
>
>Yesterday morning my neighbor corralled me in the carport to ask about
poetry.
>Apparently she's always tried to write, but could never "get it to rhyme."
Okay,
>simple answer: "It doesn't have to. Write what you want."
>
>She didn't ask me who she should read, but in perusing this thread, I
wonder: if
>she had said to me, *Hey, should I read this guy Pinsky, or this Susan Howe
>chick?* what would I  have said? I think I would have leaned toward Pinsky,
>throwing in a few caveats.
>
>Coincidentally, tolerance is a big thread on the women's bodybuilding list I
>subscribe to: fitness shows or bodybuilding contests: which is destroying the
>fiber of our beloved sport? Heading on one post: "It's all good." Chalk
one up to
>hevily-muscled tolerance.
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 11:01:50 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
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Right. A given artfact in a different context is a different artifact. And
the same artifact can be the object of study of different disciplines.
Doesn't much impact the argument in this discipline and context.

At 12:48 PM 11/22/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I've been following the various permutations of this thread with great
>interest and Majorie Perloff's recent response has prompted me to step out
>of lurkdom and venture into the fray.  As an "academic" and teacher, I am
>deeply concerned about this issue of "tolerance" vis a vis poetry/poetix.
>Granted poets feel very passionately about their poetix and, naturally,
>will "discriminate" in their choices of who they read, what they like,
>what they use, etc.  But isn't it possible to also "study" poetry
>without making the kinds of value judgements Perloff & others on this list
>call for?  I'm thinking, for example, of work I've been doing on the role
>of poetry in revolutionary movements.  By most of the measures articulated
>in this list's thread on the subject, this poetry would be considered
>"crap"--it's often not formally innovative (in the mod or postmod sense),
>it's declamatory, agit-prop, and it's often not even carefully written.
>But in contrast to what Perloff has just asserted, I would argue that some
>people most definitely NEED this poetry--the campesinos in the FMLN of El
>Salvador, the FRELIMO cadres of Mozambique, and the Sandinistas in
>Nicaragua certainly *needed* poetry at various moments in their struggles.
>This isn't to claim that these movements were "right" and, therefore,
>their poems are "good"--rather, what interests me is the ways in which
>poetry *does matter* to certain social groups during periods of
>historical/political struggle.  There's a certain luxury involved in
>claiming that poetry makes nothing happen or that no one needs
>poetry--and it also strikes me that such claims serve to secure the
>institutional and ideological status of Poetry as luxury, conserving it as
>a right of the privileged.
>
>Michael Bibby
>Department of English
>Shippensburg University
>1871 Old Main Drive
>Shippensburg, PA  17257
>(717) 532-1723
>mwbibb@ark.ship.edu
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 11:21:05 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Christopher Reiner 
Subject:      tolerance
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I'd rather deal with the idea of advocacy--which, as an editor of a
journal of criticism and reviews, I've decided to advocate. I've never
published a bad review of a book in Witz...and I've gone back and forth
in my own mind about it, but I guess I'm more interested in why someone
likes a book than why they don't. Which is not to say I haven't learned a
lot from bad reviews (Pauline Kael's pans were usually more interesting
than her praises), but I think of Witz as an advocate for risky
contemporary writing. It's not a matter, for me, of tolerance vs.
intolerance. If you like something, you want to tell everybody, to hell
with restraint or objectivity. (And that doesn't mean you have to ignore
the weaknesses in the work.)

Oh, and when you do decide to write that review or essay...send it to Witz.

--Chris Reiner
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:39:01 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
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From:         Bob Grumman 
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Robert Archambeau thinks "Pinsky has written sympathetically about poets
quite different from himself (Oppen, Ashbery and Creeley, for example)."

Yow, yet another critic, like David Lehman, who has gotten all the way
to c in the alphabet of contemporary poets!

                                                              --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1998 03:50:54 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         WENDY KRAMER 
Organization: N/A
Subject:      follow me
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catching up on nov. list postings and want to add about hannah weiner
tribute...

yes jackson macklow's reading "follow me" in code pomes was striking
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 15:00:19 -0500
Reply-To:     soaring@ma.ultranet.com
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From:         Donald Wellman 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
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For me, "tolerance" comes into play when politics (in a fairly narrow
sense) comes into play. The poet laureate is a political appointment,
supposedly he should be "tolerant" and others should feel free to attack
or praise. "Academic" too is a politically charged word from the poetry
wars of the 50's. I'd like to think those wars were a reflection of the
broader cold war dynamic--that we need no longer defend an active
counter-tradtion (one opposed to the mainstream) and could instead
define work in relation to what it does. I would also like to think that
what "it" does bears some relation to the language form on the page, but
I am suspicious of any attempt to classify poetry by appearance alone. I
think to that degree at least a detente exists within the sphere of
literary politics.

Now it also so happens that those forms of tolerance and those notions
of freedom advanced above are part of a humanistic ideology. Feeling the
sometimes censorial brunt of that ideology, I am capable of making the
argument that I believe was at the heart of "The Politics of Poetic
Form," that one function of poetics is to test even the most seemingly
benign forms of emancipatory discourse. It is poetry that does that
testing that most interests me, that is my meaning of "what it does" --
as opposed to a lot of self-congratulatory hogwash about how great and
tolerant we have become. I get very risible when I see self praise of
any "us" --even when it appears on this list.

"Tolerance" has threaded itself into the language of poetry and science
as a way of coping with uncertainty and maintaining propriety. I'd
rather get a little naked about the facts of estrangement from time to
time -- that is the condition I would like to celebrate, but then I am
also entirely aware of how wearying that can be given the lack of any
criteria for the value of distraction, still I'd rather not wear the
weary face of tolerance myself -- that can be really harmful when I meet
a young poet excited by Rita Dove or whatever. At least Rita speaks for
someone and something other than a vast diffidence, even if she doesn't
speak to me. That young poet might be able to speak to me and in so far
as I appear only tolerant whoosh--no conversation.

don wellman
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 15:16:25 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Michael W Bibby 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
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Joe:

Point well taken--but:

Although you say that the cultural studies approach to poetry has been
"happening for so long now," I fail to see very much of it at all in
poetry studies.  In fact, the preponderance of critical work published in
the major academic journals and read at major conferences (e.g., MLA) I
feel tends to be of the judgmental type, and largely seems interested in
theorizing/analyzing the very issues of aesthetic criteria you address in
the second para. of your post.  I think, however, that more work needs to
be done on articulating aesthetics from the ground up (so to speak)--that
is, I would like to see more poetry studies devoted to *studying* what
values, modes, styles, attitudes, beliefs, etc. of specific social groups
form their specific aesthetics in particular historical moments.  In other
words, I would question whether there is an "aesthetics per se," and that
my problem is with universalizing what is ultimately local.  Which is not
to say that I want to chuck the concepts of valuation, judgement,
aesthetics--but simply that I'd like to localize them in ways that help me
appreciate how an aesthetix/poetix might have a *particular* value for
specific groups.  This necessarily calls for close reading--and certainly
of the kind Perloff advocates.  Someone else on the list (can't
recall right now who) cited Busta Rhymes and this led to a string of
musings about "jump-rope rhyme" and black vernacular expressive modes--yet
until very recently poetry criticism had little in the way of an adequate
critical apparatus to talk intelligently (rather than just dismissively)
about the "poetics" of such forms of expression until people started
trying to figure out what poetics was specific to these forms.  Obviously,
at some point, this kind of poetry studies may call for critical
judgement, but it seems to me more convincing because its judgement may be
based on values intrinsic to the social contexts for the poetry's
production, and hence, more respectful of its audiences, their needs,
their values, etc.

But ultimately my real concern is with the ways in which certain people
in certain times *need* poetry--and certain kinds of poetry.  The kind of
brechtian/poundian/olsonian avant-gardist poetry as defamiliarization
stuff might certainly serve the needs of certain social groups in certain
times--it obviously didn't mean much to the New Critical academics of the
40s and 50s, but it means much more to a professional class of poetry
critics today.  I just don't see any reason--as a teacher, student of
poetry, to universalize this poetix and see any other poetix as
"intolerable."

Michael Bibby
Department of English
Shippensburg University
1871 Old Main Drive
Shippensburg, PA  17257
(717) 532-1723
mwbibb@ark.ship.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 15:40:25 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Susan Schultz 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
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Dear Marjorie and others on the in/tolerance thread--

OK, I'll re-enter the fray--I'm not sure I agree that no one NEEDS poetry.  I
have students for whom the first experience in their lifetimes of reading a
poem "about them" (as they put it) is a transformative one, whether the poem
is by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joe Balaz, or other local or
Hawaiian writer--or Caribbean writer.  Literature matters in a place where
literature has historically been in import rather than a local industry.  Now
I may surely try to nudge students by showing them that there is poetry "out
there" that is less narrative in structure, less transparent in language,
than, say, Yamanaka's, but I'm not about to tell them that their reaction is
to something less aesthetically valuable than Susan Howe's work, much as I
(who perhaps do not need poetry as much--though I do, actually) prefer the
latter in my own experience.  As for Howe: I taught her last week to a group
of exceptionally fine undergraduate honors students.  They liked her work, but
they also honed in on the contradiction between her desire to give voice to
women and to Native Americans.  I mean, try telling a group of non-white
students, some of them native Hawaiian, that Mary Rowlandson is a heroic
figure.  They see the native Americans painted as "savage" and it's damn hard
to pull them back into the world where being a white woman lost in the
wilderness is a terrifying thing.  Or where being a woman writer is a radical
move.

That's why, to my mind, we must think of there being various kinds of
experiments and innovations.  Different people need different experiments, and
their needs change (often radically) over time.  It's instructive to see
"white writers" regarded as the "same old same old," no matter how radical
they are and minority writers presented as revolutionary when it's more a
question of content than of form.  Intolerance works in mysterious ways.

This is not to say that I don't make value judgments of my own.  It is to say
that I refuse (or try to refuse) to make them for others, especially when
their daily poetic requirements are so different from my own.  It does not
mean that I don't feel passionately about poets I care about; I just don't
want to deny that feeling to people whose passions are different.  It also
means that my priorities shift when I change my hats from teacher to critic to
writer (but that my hair remains mussed with the impress of all of them).

all my best, Susan Schultz
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 15:47:47 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Nuyopoman@AOL.COM
Subject:      Pinsky/Howe
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<< Joe Amato writes: to distinguish among works that aim simply to entertain
(which may be
fine in itself), and works whose reach exceeds their grasp (if you get my
drift)...>>

The dynamic “to entertain” is not intellectually inhibiting, but rather the
reverse, if you accept that poetry (“language in gear”) can’t be “simply”
anything. “Reach exceeding grasp” PLUS “entertaining” ah! there’s the
equation.

Where do you find that synapse zap? seems to be Marjorie’s rallying cry, “it's
time to
start being a bit intolerant and make the case for the poetry we believe in”
and how can we further it? Marjorie, do you give Howe a 9.8 and Pinsky a 3?

For me, I must tell you, my tastes aren’t always the same. Late at night I
squeeze into some ED, and in the morning it’s DJ Renegade.

Seeing how a poet moves from book to book as we grow older! exciting to see
poet grow or falter, crash against poetry’s possibilities, scratch onto shore
of one’s own whirring. I’ve been dead wrong about poets -- heard a poet read
who seemed standard victimization rash, only to check in a year later to hear
the perky vocab and personae flips that marked a real poet up there.

Hmm. I guess my question is, Is Poetry itself the agenda? Off this list, most
people I know think of Pinsky/Howe as being in same boat.

To be “intolerant” of someone’s poem, how do you do that?

Bob Holman
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 13:29:00 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Billy Little 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
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I'll second Chris' emotion, there aren't enough hours in the day to write
all the praise of new poets and masters, friends and strangers, wordsworths
and rilkes, i want people to know about these writings so they'll go out
and read them for themselves, a really bad book i might go out of my way to
publish a two line warning ala dotty parker, charlie's uncle, or who said
romance w/o finance aint got no chance, was it Prez? believing with Louis
B. Mayer? as long as you spell the name right it's all good publicity
Pinksky's propably chuckling over how much promotion he's been getting from
this list, some non=members just gazing over the archives subject lines
might imagine we think the laureate is the new creeley, and the
correspondance with howe the new mayan letters. is there any need to
rewrite that.

billy little
4 song st.
nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0
poemz@mars.ark.com

Go ahead and say something true
before the big turd eats You
You can say any last thing in Your poem.

-Alice Notley
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 15:44:37 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
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From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
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well this thread has most obviously hit a nerve in me...

michael, again, i won't tread in the in/tolerable waters, b/c that's not me...

when i used "aesthetic per se," i meant to denote emphasis... as opposed to
"politics per se"... i'm certainly not suggesting "aesthetics" is, in
actuality, completely bracketed  from "the world"... but i have to say,
michael---when you call me on this point, i begin to think that i'm dealing
more with a critic than with a poet... i mean zero insult in saying
this---i value good writers/writing of whatever genre---but i'm trying to
be candid, to tell you what i candidly think... had i written "politics per
se," would you have called me on *that*?... my hunch is no, but i may be
wrong... and can we really operate---as critics OR poets or whatever---as
though there are no differences twixt the aesthetic and the political, as
though at no point in time might we be able to discuss primarily one and
not the other?...

how do poems get written?...

also, i didn't mean to say that we've had, for years, tons o
cultural-studies influenced work in poetry... quite the contrary, as you
indicate... and some of the folks on this list (to name but two, maria d
and aldon n, apologies to the unnamed) have done some stellar work on
same...

but let me be a bit strident:  is the point now that cultural studies is to
turn its attention to poetry, finally, and do *only* what it's been doing
right along?... i'd like to think not, for all of the reasons posted prior,
and then some (and here i must observe that much of my own work is directed
at examining/enacting something quite a bit different---though i'd *never*
offer anything i do as a model for future work... which is to say, i have
vested interests in so asserting)...

still, i like your post, michael... when you write

>But ultimately my real concern is with the ways in which certain people
>in certain times *need* poetry--and certain kinds of poetry.

i want to ask, with some (rhetorical) urgency, "certain people in certain
times" refers to poets too, right?... you mean to say, among other things,
that we might look at the question of writing culture(s), using as an
example practicing poets?... but in any case, how would we go about
designating what's important enough to fall under our gaze?... would we
simply assign "importance" on the basis of what a specific group seems to
"need"? (i'm not arguing against doing so)... how would one go about
choosing said group?... at the same time, would we focus on aesthetic
criteria (will you allow me this latter?) that we find manageable
critically, and would this manageability speak to what's "important" for
those who are, as well as those who are not, poets?... i've found that many
critics develop and deploy such criteria almost tacitly (i.e., when they
*do* account for their choices)... and i've found that many poets i've
known do the same... but when you find that your life's work is difficult
to publish, is generally not grasped by your family, falls on deaf social
ears, etc. etc. etc.---well, you can ill afford NOT to know where you
stand, aesthetically OR politically... and this is a measure at times of
what *poets* deem important (---which, again, is not an either/or
proposition in any of its implications, but helps to draw out some of the
angst on this  list re more orthodox work... thing is, around here,
"orthodox" is sometimes misapplied [he sez] to more formally conventional
work that nonetheless poses its own challenges)...

this is what's going through my mind when i read your helpful post,
michael, and i think the provisional answers i'm seeking will have much to
do with what comes out of my pinkies when i sit down to write (poetry, i
mean)... i don't believe, either, that accounting for one's aesthetic
judgments is necessarily a matter of universalizing---no question that one
can remain constructively plural in appreciating and negotiating multiple
aesthetics (in context)... one issue has to do with how resilient one can
be at inhabiting multiple genres and inclinations---this is the case even
in a more political sense (e.g., i may hold to a cherished operating
construct---such as justice, in my case---through which i wish to work out
critical evaluation)... further, local value is never merely local in the
hands even of a great critic, i would venture---it's always a value-added
activity, if only b/c critics in general, as critics, operate from outside
of a particular (artistic) discourse... there may be sound political
reasons not to appreciate specific aesthetic qualities (the bind of
participating even as reader in a fascist-derived art form, say)---and
again, no doubt in my mind that those selfsame qualities may be desirable
in another context... yet all of this, all of it, still constitutes (among
other things), in its selectiveness and allegation of value---in a word,
judgment... it just can't be that we continue to interpret and remark and
comment (as scholars or critics) w/o at the same time exhibiting our likes
and dislikes (and i wish i'd written that last sentence w/o any residual
oppositionality, but to riff a bit on raymond williams, emergent forms that
provide opposition, and not merely alternative possibilities, are also of
value, esp. in a consumer culture such as ours)...

in any case, again---i would think it imperative that rendering judgment be
conducted with great care, as in any worthwhile reckoning... what i object
to is the apparent absence of (aesthetic) judgment, of the (almost
transcendental) critical move that takes us completely away from the
generative controversies of a given body of work to its (popular)
reception, with little discussion of how the work does the cultural work it
does, how it creates/reinforces (in its readership) specific experiences...
this must of necessity be a matter both of formal complexities (or lack of
same!) as well as cultural context---and i trust i'm not just 'western man'
speaking here... in fact the situation in romance fiction, to come back to
a fairly clearcut example, reveals that critics (critics who in fact *have*
spelled-out their political motivations) have *not* been asking the
aesthetic questions, as these relate to sociopolitical context---they were
more interested in salvaging a specific body of work that spoke to women
(fine in itself) w/o asking whether such work exploits zillions of women
through recourse to conventional narratives and narrative form... that is,
this latter constitutes the reading experience, which surely corresponds to
why such books get written (and published) in the first place...

btw, i entirely understand and appreciate christopher r's desire to hear
about what's good, as opposed to what's not-so-good... i would add only
that critique is a complicated affair, as i'm sure christopher is
well-aware, and that going after what's good is bound to be as messy, in
the long run, as going after what's bad... b/c if it's not just a matter of
how popular a work may be with _____, it's also not just a matter of how
*formally* innovative or complacent it may be, either...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 17:21:19 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Kathleen Crown 
Subject:      : Re: Marjorie Perloff Has a Point
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Susan Schultz's comments make a lot of sense to me, and I hope for more
"dialogues" of the kind that Marjorie Perloff describes. When I was
surveying recent books on feminism and contemporary poetry, I found that
the more inclusive books (such as Lynn Keller's) made the most valuable
observations.  The ones that got in the most trouble were those that
limited the work under consideration to a single poetics favored by the
author. For example, Kim Whitehead's book, _The Feminist Poetry
Movement_, discussed a stylistically narrow range of voice-based lyrics
(by Rich, Jordan, Anzaldua, etc).  This allowed her to make claims about
women poets' need first to "find a woman-self," next to experiment with
form and genre, and finally to return to personal experience (ie,
first-person lyric) to achieve a feminist or "coalitional voice." If
Whitehead had broadened her vision to include the work of such poets as
Fraser and Howe she could not have made those claims so easily.

Casting a wide net does not necessarily mean one relinquishes the
critical faculty. Indeed, it could just as easily be viewed as a
critical responsibility. I think Keller, for example, "discriminates"
among the wide range of poetry that she analyzes. Just because one wants
to make room for "everything possible for poetry" (as Rich put it at the
Poetry and Public Sphere conference) does not mean that "anything goes."

A note on what critics find compelling in Susan Howe's work: Andrew
points out that trauma & witness are hot topics now (though why not in
poetry? that's work that needs to be done). But what I see critics
shrinking from discussing in any detail is Howe's linkage of the
experiential, archival, and testimonial with a rhetoric of ecstasy,
vision, and possession. Howe argues for an suppressed but still
available enthusiastic legacy, which she sees as radically disturbing to
most academics (eg, the keepers of the manuscripts). --Kathy Crown

Susan Schultz wrote:

>So I like Marjorie Perloff's passion; I love the poets she loves
(though she
says she can't abide Riding!); I prefer her poets to members of the
Pinsky
team.  But I also cherish the notion of tolerance--perhaps because I
have to.
It's always worth talking to each other--even when we have very little
to say.



--------------BBDDE59142498F987E583655
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Susan Schultz's comments make a lot of sense to me, and I hope for
more "dialogues" of the kind that Marjorie Perloff describes. When I was
surveying recent books on feminism and contemporary poetry, I found that
the more inclusive books (such as Lynn Keller's) made the most valuable
observations.  The ones that got in the most trouble were those that
limited the work under consideration to a single poetics favored by the
author. For example, Kim Whitehead's book, _The Feminist Poetry Movement_,
discussed a stylistically narrow range of voice-based lyrics (by Rich,
Jordan, Anzaldua, etc).  This allowed her to make claims about women
poets' need first to "find a woman-self," next to experiment with form
and genre, and finally to return to personal experience (ie, first-person
lyric) to achieve a feminist or "coalitional voice." If Whitehead had broadened
her vision to include the work of such poets as Fraser and Howe she could
not have made those claims so easily.

Casting a wide net does not necessarily mean one relinquishes the critical
faculty. Indeed, it could just as easily be viewed as a critical responsibility.
I think Keller, for example, "discriminates" among the wide range of poetry
that she analyzes. Just because one wants to make room for "everything
possible for poetry" (as Rich put it at the Poetry and Public Sphere conference)
does not mean that "anything goes."

A note on what critics find compelling in Susan Howe's work: Andrew
points out that trauma & witness are hot topics now (though why not
in poetry? that's work that needs to be done). But what I see critics shrinking
from discussing in any detail is Howe's linkage of the experiential, archival,
and testimonial with a rhetoric of ecstasy, vision, and possession. Howe
argues for an suppressed but still available enthusiastic legacy, which
she sees as radically disturbing to most academics (eg, the keepers of
the manuscripts). --Kathy Crown

Susan Schultz wrote:

>So I like Marjorie Perloff's passion; I love the poets she loves
(though she

says she can't abide Riding!); I prefer her poets to members of
the Pinsky

team.  But I also cherish the notion of tolerance--perhaps
because I have to.

It's always worth talking to each other--even when we have very
little to say.

 

 

--------------BBDDE59142498F987E583655--
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 16:10:41 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Laura E. Wright" 
Subject:      boulder poetry
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Well, as Rachel accidentally informed us, we do have poetry in Boulder.
Here's some of what's been happening lately (sorry for the lack of
quotes, I neglected to take notes).

As part of the Museum of American Poetics' ongoing lecture series, Lisa
Jarnot gave a talk Tuesday (Nov. 17) on Robert Duncan. While the focus
was originally to have been on heroic figures in Duncan's life and work,
she decided instead to focus on _The Opening of the Field_  and ended up
covering both admirably.
        A tape of this talk should eventually be available on the Museum of
American Poetics Web Site (www.poetspath.com/)

        Wednesday night, we were graced with a reading by Michael Friedman and
Anne Waldman, the latest installment of the inimitable Left Hand Reading
Series. Michael read prose poems of a beautifully bizarre yet almost
quotidian nature. Anne read part of a recently-unearthed supposedly
ancient collaboration with Bill Berkson -- a wild lovely commentary on
growing up in New York, and a variety of new work, including an excerpt
from "Marriage, a poem" and a new section of Iovis that will soon be
scored
as opera.
        Many thanks to Mark DuCharme and Patrick Pritchett for keeping the Left
Hand series alive.
(And yes, Bobbie West's reading here was fabulous.)

--
Laura Wright, Library Assistant
Allen Ginsberg Library, The Naropa Institute
2130 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO 80302
(303) 546-3547
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Speech keeps strangling itself, but wisdom has not come."
                --Henri Michaux
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1998 19:00:34 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         WENDY KRAMER 
Organization: N/A
Subject:      debbie
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in response to the call for more reviews...

        It's difficult to write a positive review when you've been rendered
breathless by the reading. Wednesday night's reading at the Poetry
Project, with Kristin Prevallet and Lisa Robertson, left me mouthing for
words to describe what it was like. At the end of the week, my
condition's the same.
I emitted an "oh god" after Robertson finished her section "For Girls,
Grapes and Snow" ending with the line: "Good evening Modernism." from
Debbie: An epic and since then, what's left to say has been
embarrassing. I jumped up to buy the book before the crowd could beat
me, and sure enough, i heard later from other audience members that they
fought each other for the last copy.

        It's not that at some point I wasn't warned. I vaguely remember being
in buffalo a few years ago and receiving some sort of calling card with
the word "debbie" on it. (was lisa robertson in town? i think the card
was for a party). I remember a meow chapbook. but... either i hadnt read
the chapbook or i was thick. I went to the reading because Kristin
Prevallet was reading and she's my
friend so I made a point not to be thick and to remember to GO to the
reading.

        And Kristin Prevallet was marvelous. She read from Perturbation, My
Sister; from Lead, Glass, and Poppies, as well as from unpublished work
(someone will have to fill in what that work was called because,
although that was the most intriguing to me I don't remember titles). By
the end of her reading (she read first), I had pulled up to the edge of
my chair. What was it about that last piece she read that brought me to
the edge of my chair? (Again, I can't remember well, except that it
seemed like what had been happening in Perturbation and Lead, Glass, and
Poppies had somehow busted into something . .. I dunno,   more
literal??)  Again, I'm writing a gut reaction. Oh i remember part of it:
she began to read from a scrapbook of collages that she prefaced by
saying they were working collages, that is, not for display but a way to
organize her information. And me being excited by garbage in collage,
this was a most intriguing part.

        So, as i said, it's difficult to write when verbally stuttering. I
muttered and babbled at work the next few days, in the break room, in
the elevator, at my desk:   she wrote a goddamned epic!   it's called
debbie: an epic   (funny looks all around. a question from a co-worker:
why is there a mean-looking dog on the cover? i dunno i said  and then
later read again "Battle Cry" : "I saw a dog kill two birds in a park/ o
little world approximate, all soft/ things roar: each cruddy beast, each
bloated hour") .
        "My name is Debbie"  i quoted to no one in particular at my desk and
laughed. just busted up.

        And did i say  (no) that Lisa Robertson delivered her epic impeccably?
She did.
        I'm grateful for such a pome and such a poet.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 20:13:22 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      what is tolerance of thread?

Following up on Bob Holman's point, I think a good essay could be written
on the affinities between Howe and Pinsky.  There is the parochial effort
to express the "core" of "American" experience for which I would assume
many non-North Americans would have some difficulty finding the tolerance
required for any enjoyment of their work, but which in Schuchat's
Confucian terms probably represents the substance of their charm, their
"essence" as poets.  Their essence is their search for this essence.
Don't get me wrong: I consider the parochial to be the saving grace
of human civilization.  For Pinsky, it's the jersey Jewish boy groping
line-by-line toward the center of America; for Howe it's the old Boston
WASP groping stutter by stutter toward the periphery; they need each
other, just as "alternative" poetics needs the old-timey music.  We should
be grateful for the keepers of the fumes.

Poetry records the adventures of a particular language in history, & I
would guess that the prospectors of the early 21st century will not
exactly repeat the paradigm of "opposition", of a philistine exterior
and a sophic core, of a Longfellow vs a Dickinson or Whitman, in re-reading
late 20th century poetry in English.  I'm not sure what the paradigms
will be but they won't be that, exactly. Schuchat & Holman may be onto
something.  Transparency & confidence bespeak a poetic power that can
afford to be tolerant as it spreads its meanings far & wide.  - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:59:44 +1300
Reply-To:     beard@met.co.nz
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tom Beard 
Subject:      Re: Howe/Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <3655C7DD.62A7@itsa.ucsf.edu>
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> I don't think it's going to be possible to see a criticism
> that includes
> language, visual, sound, folk, and Pinsky poetry until we have poetry
> readings that incorporate all of these poetic offshoots.

But there are individual poets who include all of these strands into their
writing. An example might be Edwin Morgan (quoting from unreliable memory):

langpo:         Thoughts of a module; code poems
vizpo:          Three persian cats having a ball; Message clear
soundpo:        The Loch Ness monster's song
folkpo:         various dialect pieces
Pinskpo:                Instamatic poems; Strawberries; Glasgow Sonnets

The last category is a guess: I'm (s/gl)ad to say that I've never read
Pinsky, but the titles I mentioned are certainly in a conventional lyric
mode. Also, I'm not sure whether any of Morgan's poems, no matter how
language centred or "non-representational" they get, can be considered
"language poetry". He certainly doesn't seem to claim the same political
values for his techniques that "Classical" language poetry does: while there
are political purposes at times, he seems in the main to be pursuing play
and possibility.

You could probably also add gaypo & scifipo to the list, as well as several
categories that don't (yet) exist. Any model of criticism that can
accommodate all of Morgan's modes would have to be broad indeed.


        Cheers,
                Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 21:47:07 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      whistles & bangs down the hall

the angst over mr. pinsky's triumphs is akin to angst these days over slam
poetry.  on the one hand, one (presumably, as member of list devoted to
poetics) applauds outbreak of interest in poetry, any poetry.  as m. weiss
so ably put it, appreciation can move from one poet/poem to the next, not
a heirarchical ladder, but more like, really, spilled orange juice.  sticks
to all, trickles into all, soaks through all, and the scent remains.

but, is the appreciation for mr. pinsky, or for slam poetry (not that i am
equating the two) really an appreciation for poetry, and as such, subject
to trickle down/over/up/into effect?  or is it appreciation for trappings of
appearing to appreciate poetry?

example: vast arrays of self-described "poets" on web now at various poetry
sites, many of whom do not, in fact, want to be bothered with reading poetry.
they read greeting cards, each others poems.  but they don't subscribe to
poetry magazines, or get anthologies, or take classes, or study historical
evolution/shaping of poetry.  slam poetry -- most often of that ilk.  reading
of painfully unoriginal recirculated images and poses for dramatic effect.
occasional actual poet as i would define it, someone so personally and
intensely interested in poetry that not only do they ravenously read it, they
keep trying to write it, and write better, newer, sharper.

i am not prepared to take a fixed position on this yet, but sadly, my
suspicion is that the participants in slam poetry are not, for the large
part, going to really seriously take up intense and focused study and
writing of poetry.  pinsky-ites?  i think of bu program turning out long
tail of earnest male clones, a factory of pinskyians.  i'm not sure how
many of them will attain enough confidence and fire to let go of imitating,
and the received version of a poetic, enough to go off on their own.  is it
pinsky's fault?  i'm not sure.

i suspect a good teacher of writing, a good Important Writer, dislikes and
distrusts being copied enough that she/he discourages it and if in charge of
some official "class" or "group," will endeavor to send each writer off in
their own individual direction however opposed to I.W.'s own project it
might be.  i've had teachers who went out and started reading and writing
techniques of another writer just becuase i was so excited about it and they
wanted to encourage, rather than squash or mold me.  i may have written in
ways completely different than theirs, but if anything, they were amused
and excited by it.  mr. pinsky does seem to change and evolve.  will his
followers?  will he cease molding followers?  does he know he has followers?
can he HELP having followers?

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 21:52:35 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: Society of Unimportance

dear mairead

i would join your society of unimportance, except i refuse to be a member of
any group that will have members.  so, i sit slipping in and out of the edge
of your society cheerfully raising my glass in between bouts of a wild rage
of poetry.
e
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:57:37 +1300
Reply-To:     beard@met.co.nz
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tom Beard 
Subject:      Tolerance & the academy
In-Reply-To:  <000901be161d$472ac300$f6bffea9@oemcomputer>
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I see the word "tolerate" as very much double-edged, in the mode of
"condone", implying that one feels distaste for something but grudgingly
concedes that it has a right to exist. In this sense, it's more of an insult
to tolerate something than to honestly criticise it.

It reminds me of the days when I was first groping my way into poetry, when
I staggered through the limbo of weekend workshops and Poetry Society
readings. Everyone's too polite to say "I don't like that", so they ooh &
aah & nod their heads in gentle encouragement. It's a pleasant change when
someone considers one's writing worth the effort of criticising.


> I'd be curious to see what
> the breakdown of jobs is on the Poetics List, all 700 folks,
> since I suspect
> Peter's right that perhaps 500 are in some connection to the
> academy, but as
> one of the other 200, no, Peter, it's nothing like 100%.
>
> Ron

There's probably a continuum of academic affiliation (no, "continuum" is too
simple: it probably has at least two dimensions, possibly about 2.5). Some
points along the axis of literal academe:

        - never studied lit beyond high school
        - studied lit at varsity/college, as part of another major
        - majored in lit (or linguistics/cultural studies/etc)
        - post-grad education in the above
        - teacher and/or researcher in the above

Some points along another axis, which is often what people mean when they
say "academic", but is perhaps more accurately called "intellectual":

        - Never write/read poetry
        - Write/read only poetry that is "accessible"/conventional/populist
        - Write/read poetry of the workshop persuasion, perhaps a little bit
          of post-mod playfulness, but nothing too obscure (Jenny Bornholdt?)
        - Write/read poetry, criticism & theory that requires (or at least is
          enhanced by) some familiarity with post-structuralism
        - Exclusively write/read po/crit/theory that requires a solid grounding
          in theory; have been known to quote Lacan (in the original) to taxi
          drivers; once wrote an essay in which the word "reification" appeared
          three times in a sentence

I'd guess that most people on this list are towards the end of the second
list, and at least past the middle of the first. There are of course a
smattering of outliers: perhaps academics in other fields who have never
formally studied literature but who read Howe & Bernstein & Foucault &
Adorno in the bath; people with PhDs in cultural studies who think that all
poetry is boring; taxi drivers who read Lacan in the original but disagree
with everything he says.

If we're going to plot ourselves in some sort of po-space or cloud of
academic possibilities; I'd say that I'm someone who's in a fairly unusual
space, list-wise: I've never studied poetry formally since I was 16; I'm
academic in the sense that I have post-grad qualifications (in geophysics),
but I've moved from being an operational meteorologist into graphic design
(for which I have plenty of enthusiasm but zero qualifications); I've
stumbled my own way into poetry and even get published from time to time in
various odd places; I write criticism and am attracted to a quasi-scholarly
attitude; I'm an Armani-clad yuppie who likes underground culture &
experimental art; I'm intrigued by langpo & contemporary theory but am not
entirely sold on 'em (hell, I still like early Eliot, I still like Geoffrey
Hill); and this list is about the only contact I have with people who have
even _heard_ of Creeley or Benjamin or Hejinian. The vast majority of people
I know would consider me "academic" (or at the very least, "pretentious");
but I don't think I'd be academic by the standard of this list.

Phew, now that I've bored the list with that, I'll sink back into lurkage.


        Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 07:12:35 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      Re: need?
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"First there is need...then there is the way..."

                __Reznikoff
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 22:39:35 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Further
Comments: To: Poetics List 
Comments: cc: Mark Weiss 
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"Academic" in the context of poetry is a somewhat archaic synonym from the
50s through 70s for Iowa School or, roughly speaking, "What Gets Published
in
the New Yorker." It has nothing to do with how poets make their livings.
It's continued survival reflects the lack of a newer consensual term.
"Academic" poets, by the way, never called themselves such.

But, once Auden left, the Iowa City poets tended to be neglected by the Gnu
Yawker in favor of Louise Bogan's closer friends in the Lowell and
post-Lowell circle,
no. My own understanding of "Academic" as it was first used around the world
of poetry
is that it really referred to those poets (Warren, Lowell, etc.) who were
too cozy with
the New Critics, a group after all mostly composed of poets whose schtick
was to show that
they could out-professional everyone by means of close reading and the
development of
the so-called specialized reader.

The Writers Workshop was, more or less from the first, a mechanism for the
writers there to
free themselves of too much association with All That and one of the great
successes of the
workshop model was that it showed writers all across the country how to
survive in the
university in spite of cloistered poetics/politics of the N.C. crowd. So it
became the relief from
theory site on many a campus. When Syracuse a few years back wanted to
mandate theory
(a term with a far different meaning in the late 1980s than in the mid-50s)
as an undergraduate
requirement for English majors, the school had, as I understand it, to split
off the creative writing
program from the English dept. since they held enough votes to block it. So
the creative writing
department became the official No Theory Here locale for otherwise literate
types. The so-called
Naked Poetry types of the writing departments were a sharp contrast with the
decidely well-dressed
Brahmins.

It was precisely the return to close reading by many of the so-called
langpos in the 1970s that
sent various sorts (both of the Iowa City and also some of the more
rigorously anti-intellectual
New American types a la Clark and Codrescu) into conniptions.

But, as I believe Whalen once wrote of the Greeks,

"rooty toot toot,
we're the boys from the Institute"

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 22:56:52 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Citation
Comments: To: Poetics List 
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I should have noted that the first paragraph in that last posting was a
quotation from Mark Weiss's missive of earlier in the day.

Hey, Bob H, your friends perception about Susan H & Robert P is not wrong,

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 22:30:59 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Tolerance & the academy
In-Reply-To:  <006001be168d$07cf52a0$adc032ca@beard.met.co.nz>
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Tolerance as a concept is both negative and vacuous, negative because it
implies being able to withstand unpleasantness, and vacuous because it is
impossible to be tolerant in the abstract, without reference to some
specific thing. It's good to be intolerant of racism. "Zero tolerance" of
drugs, maybe not. Pinsky is a "tolerable" poet--mediocre but we can stand
him in small doses. I have a low tolerance for pain.  In each example
the word tolerance seems to mean something different.

As for the term academic, I always thought of it like the European
"academies," the kind that didn't let the impressionist painters show
their work.  Thus the salon des refusEs and the beginnings of the idea of
the avant-garde as oposed to the academic. This meaning of academic then
came to apply to universities--it seemed to fit Audenesque poets of the
1950s, given the fact we call higher education academia.

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 00:48:52 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Julu, Waiting on a Lounge Chair
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


Julu, Waiting on a Lounge Chair


.desc as waiting for you to .examine me ...
You are known as: julu as waiting for you to .examine me ...
.examine julu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ay, how would you describe me? you'd take a moment and look at
me, maybe when you log on or through the .w command and that
would excite you! more, you'd always ask for, beg for; nearing
the end, you might run an .examine julu, just to see what would
come up. i'd be waiting for something about warm pulsating walls
or rather i'd be waiting for someone in warm pulsating walls,
hoping for the concrete before the conclusion initiated by the
presence of a single or singular dot, isolated on a line by it-
self, hovered in the silence of a perfect conclusion. now you
know i am lingering about, waiting to see what you make of my
perfect description. you will want me and you will search my
name, hungering for more and more, writing me as you realize
that you and i were made for each other. it is a long way home
from there, but you and i know the way.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Listening to shouts and tells.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 20:54:38 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Katie Degentesh 
Subject:      Re: whistles & bangs down the hall
In-Reply-To:  <199811230247.VAA10439@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
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>occasional actual poet as i would define it, someone so personally and
>intensely interested in poetry that not only do they ravenously read it, they
>keep trying to write it, and write better, newer, sharper.


This "occasional actual poet" is as rare in creative writing programs,
Pinsky-led or "langpo" or otherwise, as it is in the slam poetry scene. The
fact of the matter is that there are now so many people interested in
something they call poetry (whether or not everyone else would define it as
such) that it's impossible for all of them to be "actual poets."  In any
genre, an actual poet is a rare thing.  "Intense and focused study and
writing" is not always -- or even usually -- enough to create one.  For
every "actual poet", there are going to be about a hundred semi-actualized
poets.  This is inescapable.  In fact, in some ways it's good, because at
least it creates an educated audience for the "actual poets." In this
"educated audience" I include most slam participants, who if nothing else
at least have a sense of how to judge a reader, if not always a poem.  All
we can do is be passionate, vehement, and verbal about pointing out
medicrities, likes and dislikes (this is, I believe, what we have been
referring to as "intolerance" -- that unfortunate buzz-word that pushed so
many PC buttons) while allowing others to do the same (tolerance).
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 01:36:25 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ramez Qureshi 
Subject:      anyone tolerate Reading?
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Forgive my ignorance, but i've just come across the British poet Peter
Reading. Is anyone familiar with his work? Offer comparisons to contemporary
American poets? Suggest how to approach him? etc.

much thanx,
RQ
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 00:55:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Angela Szeto 
Subject:      Travel business
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Hi Everyone -- I'm stopping over in Paris for two weeks on my way to Dubai
and I was wondering if anyone knew of anybody who needs someone (me! me!
me!) to housesit for them. I will be in Paris from about January 18 to
February 5 in the new year.

PLUS

If anyone has to come to Vancouver for Christmas and needs a place to stay,
I might have something for them.

Please backchannel

Regards,
Angela Szeto
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 07:35:32 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Perloff & The Rubicon of Stupidity
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
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1).  A canid's soppy-tongued thankyou to Henry Gould & Mairead Byrne, Eliza
     McGrand & Chris Reiner for so gently articulating what I could only
     bark.

2).  There is a fine line between Stupidity and Idiocy -- and I have
     crossed it.  Thus I continue:

3).  There are two kinds of critics: those who pave the way for Authors
     and those who pave the way for Anthologists.  Jorie Perloff, in her
     advocacy of THE IMPORTANT, proves herself, like Vendler and Bloom,
     to be one of the latter.

4).  A Prolegomenon to All Future Adversaries: if your argument is as
     powerful as the smell from your lap, you might defeat me.

     Good lord, I'm barking again.


-- Guttapercha Bunsen
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 05:19:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Weiss: My Thumbnail Sketch of Am Ren
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981122104700.00abb3d0@mail.earthlink.net>
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On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Mark Weiss wrote:

> One more: critical stance rarely engenders. It usually follows from
> practice. But here's an uneducated hunch: in the period you target there
> was a lot of sentiment for the establishnment of a national literary voice,
> differentiated from the brits, for obvious reasons. Hence, perhaps,
> whatever degree of tolerance there may have been.

Mark, I'm right there with you in everything you say, except your first
sentence: the relation between formal reception (critical milieu) and the
practice or creation of poetry should not be oversimplified for the sake
of a dictum ("critical stance rarely engenders").  In the case of
renaissances, an open critical stance is an integral part of literary
happenings.

I'm only targeting this period because there WAS such a very clear
relationship btw criticism and creation.  The push for a national literary
voice was one of THE MAIN facets of this criticism, and eventually it was
this push that brought about a new critical milieu: in many ways, I'm
saying, this push for a national literary voice brought about a need to
RE-EVALUATE criticism, and this re-evaluation of criticism was the nest in
which our tweety american chick of Whitman and Company was born.  Here's
how I would sketch it:

Americans grafted the British prophetic role of poetry upon their
German-influenced nationalistic hopes for America -- and considered poetry
the apex of American letters.

No other genre and no other art at that time could boast the same
expectations of it. The hopes that were placed upon and the role that was
given to poetry were extravagant.  To some extent, its failure to meet
this challenge contributed to poetry's eventual fall toward a secondary
role in American letters, explaining in part, in the words of the
contemporary historian Joseph Harrington, "why American poetry is not
American literature."

The constant fact of the crucial quarter century of Scots criticism is that
one can draw a distinct line between the poetics and the criticism of the
time: the poets were not contributing greatly to reviews, nor were critics
writing poetry; the reviewers were not minutely concerned with how to
create poetry, so much as how to judge it.

Finally, and most importantly, poetry, because of the high hopes placed
upon it, was considered the laggard of American letters: Even during the
debates about copyright in the 1840s, which brought about many comparisons
between the literary productions of America and England, it was poetry
that was considered the runt of the literary litter.

Oddly enough, given that the main audience of poets in America (for over
the quarter century preceding the great flourishing of letters known as
our Renaissance) was critics, few literary historians have considered what
influence this relationship had on American poetics -- and this is mainly
because these historians have assumed American poetics to be a slightly
distorted mirror image of British poetics.

Contrary to popular opinion, there was a HUGE difference btw American and
British romanticism: vast wonking differences.

Until the 1840s, the critic was seen as the arbiter of public taste; he
distrusted both the reading public's ability to choose appropriate works
for purchase, as well as the poet's ability to create suitable pieces for
the public.  I'm sorry, but it just cannot be denied that the poets of
antebellum America felt their poetry was opposed -- whether by a vague
almost demonic and unpoetic force, by professional critics, the reading
public, or by the incidental reviewer, journalist or editor.

I mean, some of the rhetoric against critics during the period prior to
the 1840s is JUST CRAZY.  But once the rhetoric clears, and you have a
few years of non-cantankerous get-along, you begin to hear from the early
Whitman and Thoreau and Fuller and others.

The historical correlations are extraordinary: so extraordinary that it
is almost impossible to graft onto them the same old tired rhetoric of
struggle and opposition being of themselves engendering factors.

I'ma get some coffee.

Gabe
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 02:38:30 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jim Andrews 
Subject:      Clemente Padin vispo and enigma n for ie4
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I've put together a pretty good webliography (though not complete, I suspect) on the
work of Clemente Padin available on the Web, and tonight put up nine works of his at
Vispo from Clemente's Visual Poems 67-70.

Also, I finished the Internet Explorer version of Enigma n this weekend. This is a
philosophical vispo toy that is written for philosophers and poets from age 4 up. It
is most interesting in Internet Explorer, rather than Netscape, but it works in both.

Both Clemente's fine work and Enigma n are reachable from
http://speakeasy.org/~jandrews

Jim Andrews
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 08:54:11 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pete Landers 
Organization: Xerox Corp.
Subject:      Re: Susan Howe thread/Pinsky
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There are some long, well reasoned, and probing comments on this thread.
My own theory as to how Howe finally got the recognition and attention
she deserved is far more simple. WWNorton took over distribution of New
Directions. I think other things changed hands in that deal, including
publication rights for some famous works that have long been New
Directions staples. But whatever else happened, ND had lots of money.
They looked around to see what had been going on now that they could
afford to do anyone's book. Ms. Howe was one, but there were others who
they added to their booklist.

It takes more than an established literary publisher to establish a poet
in the mainstream. It also takes good content, unique voice, rigor, and
an intellectual respect, to name a few characteristics. And it's not
like anyone has a list they check off. It's the total effect. But it
REALLY helps to have that ND name on the spine.

I know what my instant reaction to her work was. When the Montemora
supplement came out, Pythagorean Silences, I stored four on the back
shelves and took one up front. Cracked open to the first page as I
walked and... sat down and read it! Well... I had to work, so I bought
it.

Do you like King Arthur? Do you like Shakespeare? Do you like Emily? Do
you follow modern poetics? Do you argue or agree with long dead writers?
If yes to all, Susan Howe might just "take the top of your head off".

Pete

p.s. gotta unsub for a while till I have a new address. I don't work at
this address after today.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:48:04 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pete Landers 
Organization: Xerox Corp.
Subject:      Toleration
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A tolerance is a mathematical figure represent the extent to which
something can be wrong without adverse effect. Toleration is an attitude
whereby people permit one another to be different. Neither is
open-mindedness. Open-mindedness requires a putting aside of prejudice,
which is not necessary to be tolerant. For instance, I can decide
beforehand that all langpo is just high-fallutin' jibberish, but I can
tolerate it in my world.

At an open mike, toleration is essential. When you edit a magazine you
do not have to tolerate anything. Your choices may result in an
alienated readership, but they will be _your_ choices. Nobody is
interested in a magazine, for instance, that "tolerates" everyone.
Editors and critics are expected to have opinions. When they fail these
expectations, their usefulness falls into doubt. We compare our own
opinions to theirs and use the result when choosing what to read. For
instance, if Hoover/Chernoff accept a poem into NAW, you and I gauge
that against our opinions about what they will accept. While a literary
critic is not the same as a movie critic with her thumbs in up or down
positions, her choice of what to explore clearly indicates her
preferences.

Therefore, Ms. Perloff is doing her job when she is intolerant.

But I'd rather express this in terms my ex-in-laws can understand. I can
tolerate Pabst Blue Ribbon, but I won't drink it. I don't think ill of
people who do drink it. However, if a beermeister at Heineken tolerated
the flavor of Pabst in my Heineken, I would stop drinking it.

Any poet who claims to accept or admit everything as equal in the eyes
of poetry can't be speaking honestly. It takes a strong fortitude to sit
through the full open mike, but those of us who do not leave early stay
from courtesy, not toleration. We have taste, we just don't feel it is
necessary to express opinions of taste all the time. Other times,
opinions of taste are required.

Pete
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:22:41 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Kellogg 
Subject:      Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
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OK, I've got a big stake in this, as those who've read my work know.

In these Southern parts, I hear a lot of anti-tolerance talk, of the
following type: "They don't want me to just tolerate their perverted,
ungodly lifestyle, they want me to accept it and promote it."

Actually, tolerance would be just fine.

Marjorie wants to separate political from aesthetic tolerance, but don't
think such separation can or should be done, esp. since the operations of
the "academic" (which as Ron pointed out, has yet to be unpacked) mean that
poetry evaluation and poetry jobs go uneasily together.

Jonathan Mayhew may be right that the word "tolerance" is both negative and
vacuous, but our whole language for dealing with these issues is bankrupt --
whaddaya wanna do, not talk about it?

Jonathan, if Pinsky is a "mediocre poet," are those who actually enjoy his
work mediocre readers?  Mediocre intellects?  Mediocre people?

 I'm with Susan Schultz (hi Susan!) -- I'll passionately advocate my tastes,
but I'm not about to speak for another.

Cheers,
David
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Kellogg   Duke University
kellogg@acpub.duke.edu  Program in Writing and Rhetoric
(919) 660-4357    Durham, NC 27708
FAX (919) 660-4381  http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1998 23:38:40 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Haynes 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
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I am new to this list and so feel a bit self-conscious even posting this small
missive. This thread about tolerance, however, is quite fascinating to me and
I wanted to keep it alive. A while back I had a conversation with a poet
"friend" exchanging ideas about new directions and what we (perhaps
erroneously) labled avant-garde/experimental. I was talking about liking John
Asbery and her reaction was one of horror, saying she thought J.A. to be one
of the biggest fakes in poetic history, and that critics were but silly goofs
for even commenting on his work. She reacted in a very intense and personal
manner, citing how the real poetry was being shaped by the likes of Mary
Oliver, Mark Doty, and a few others. Not that I dislike the poets she named,
but rather I felt machinegunned by her reaction, which seemed to me at the
time anything but "tolerant." She has her opinion and it's the law. That's why
I am intrigued with Marjorie Perloff's idea of side-by-side comparison as a
mean toward "intolerance." One must have a modicum of tolerance to even
"compare" (if the reaction of my friend is any indication of how we so easily
and quickly get "set in our ways").

Bob Haynes
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:23:00 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael W Bibby 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
In-Reply-To:  
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This exchange, Joe, is helping me think through some issues crucial
to my work--so to respond:

On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:

> when i used "aesthetic per se," i meant to denote emphasis... as opposed to
> "politics per se"... i'm certainly not suggesting "aesthetics" is, in
> actuality, completely bracketed  from "the world"

I didn't mean to suggest that you were doing this, rather I wanted to note
something I felt was inherent in the phrase that pointed to a tendency to
think aesthetics as somehow outside or above the contingencies of the
world--

> ... but i have to say,
> michael---when you call me on this point, i begin to think that i'm dealing
> more with a critic than with a poet... i mean zero insult in saying
> this

None taken--and you're right here--I'm not a practicing poet--I'm a
teacher, student, critic--

> had i written "politics per
> se," would you have called me on *that*?

Well, yes, actually I would have--although, I prefer not to think of my
response on the "per se" as "calling" you on it--

> and can we really operate---as critics OR poets or whatever---as
> though there are no differences twixt the aesthetic and the political, as
> though at no point in time might we be able to discuss primarily one and
> not the other?...

Precisely not, and this insistence on the political nature of aesthetics
(and, perhaps, the aesthetic nature of politics) was what I have in mind--

> but let me be a bit strident:  is the point now that cultural studies is to
> turn its attention to poetry, finally, and do *only* what it's been doing
> right along?

Not at all--I didn't mean, by remarking on how little cultstds has
analyzed poetry/poetry production/poetry cultures, that it's high time it
did--rather my point was that Poetry Studies, as I see it being practiced
in the US, tends to be very invested in the business of discerning
aesthetic values, discriminating between what's good and what's bad, which
has, I believe, a tendency to stifle other methodologies, other
interests.  Ultimately I'm not very interested, as a
teacher/student (leaving out critic, which implies criticizing
[altho need not always]) in working out why Howe is better than
Pinsky--I'm personally more interested in figuring out why, for example,
certain social groups like Pinsky more and others like Howe.  Someone just
recently mentioned on the list that perhaps the Pinsky and the slam-po
phenoms appeal only to audiences "sense" of poetry and have very little to
do with "real" poetry--but *that's* also (but not *solely*) of interest to
me--the ways social groups perceive and/or articulate the "poetic."

> i want to ask, with some (rhetorical) urgency, "certain people in certain
> times" refers to poets too, right?... you mean to say, among other things,
> that we might look at the question of writing culture(s), using as an
> example practicing poets?...

Most definitely--

> but in any case, how would we go about
> designating what's important enough to fall under our gaze?... would we
> simply assign "importance" on the basis of what a specific group seems to
> "need"? (i'm not arguing against doing so)... how would one go about
> choosing said group?... at the same time, would we focus on aesthetic
> criteria (will you allow me this latter?) that we find manageable
> critically, and would this manageability speak to what's "important" for
> those who are, as well as those who are not, poets?...

Ah ha! and here I'm caught and we're back to making choices,
discriminating, being "intolerant" of one thing so we can look at another.
Naturally, judgement must play a role in the defining one's field of
study.  I'm not calling for the banishment of reasoned choices--I'm
suggesting that such choices need not be put in the service of advocating
one set of aesthetic criteria over and against another--but I'm also not
suggesting that there is never any place for the advocacy of a particular
set of aesthetic criteria.  Of course, poets do this all the time--they
have to because, as you suggest, that's basically how they come to define
what they do--they write to make language strange, for example, or to
capture the sound of a diasporic language, or whatever.  But my point is
that I don't feel I need, as a teacher/student, to come to the poet's work
with an Aesthetic already in place--rather I want to understand what the
poet's aesthetics are and understand how those aesthetics relate to her
discursive community(ies).

> further, local value is never merely local in the
> hands even of a great critic, i would venture---it's always a value-added
> activity, if only b/c critics in general, as critics, operate from outside
> of a particular (artistic) discourse...

True--and this poses some very difficult problems for the kind of work I
want to do--it's sorta the ethnographer's dilemma in a sense--and so, i
don't think one should try to ignore it, go around it, or dismiss
it--rather it seems more important to engage one's own value-system and
one's own situatedness head-on--

> it just can't be that we continue to interpret and remark and
> comment (as scholars or critics) w/o at the same time exhibiting our likes
> and dislikes (and i wish i'd written that last sentence w/o any residual
> oppositionality, but to riff a bit on raymond williams, emergent forms that
> provide opposition, and not merely alternative possibilities, are also of
> value, esp. in a consumer culture such as ours)...

True--but I'm just asking for a poetry studies that does less advocating
one's likes/dislikes (contra Perloff's suggestion which began this thread)
and more describing how poetry means/does in its various
communities--because it seems to me this makes possible more ways to teach
and appreciate more and more poetries--

> in any case, again---i would think it imperative that rendering judgment be
> conducted with great care, as in any worthwhile reckoning... what i object
> to is the apparent absence of (aesthetic) judgment, of the (almost
> transcendental) critical move that takes us completely away from the
> generative controversies of a given body of work to its (popular)
> reception, with little discussion of how the work does the cultural work it
> does, how it creates/reinforces (in its readership) specific experiences...
> this must of necessity be a matter both of formal complexities (or lack of
> same!) as well as cultural context

I agree--and it's through close reading that one understands and
appreciates what a poem does in its contexts--I would not at all advocate
a kind of superficial, topical cultural study of poetry--"this poem
advocates resistance to oppression because it says `off the pig' and
therefore it's a good poem *in its contexts*"--but I don't know many doing
the sort of cultural study of poetry I'm advocating who do that--certainly
Maria, Aldon, Cary Nelson, and James Sullivan don't.

but I've blabbed on far too long--

michael
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:07:43 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Alexander 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
In-Reply-To:  <3bd32807.3658e6d0@aol.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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At 11:38 PM 11/22/98 EST, you wrote:
>I was talking about liking John
>Asbery and her reaction was one of horror, saying she thought J.A. to be one
>of the biggest fakes in poetic history, and that critics were but silly goofs
>for even commenting on his work. She reacted in a very intense and personal
>manner, citing how the real poetry was being shaped by the likes of Mary
>Oliver, Mark Doty, and a few others.


Here's where reading has to come in (I hope). Not to disrespect your
friend, but I have known others, with similar opinions, who simply haven't
read enough of the work to have the right (in my opinion) to spout the
opinions above. My first questions to her would be -- What Ashbery  have
you read? Have you read other poets in Ashbery's circle or context that
offer illumination of such poetry? What in his work makes you think he's a
fake?  and on the other side -- What do you really like about Doty's
poetry? Oliver's?  -- and maybe get to questions eventually, like -- What
do you think Ashbery tells us about the relationship of individual and
world / speaker and audience / society and language / etc.? Do you think
Oliver's and Doty's implications about such matters are as interesting as
Ashbery's? Why? And I do think this line of questioning can be done in a
way which is not insulting or threatening to your friend or to people who
have espoused such ideas. Not that they will all let you get too far with
such questioning before they just walk away.

Just that, all too often, when I hear such blanket discountings, I have
found out, on probing, that whoever is saying them is repeating what a
favorite teacher or mentor told her or him, and often that it wasn't
original with that favorite teacher or mentor, either. So there's just a
lot of unquestioned assumptions out there. So I tend, in talking about
Pinsky or Gerald Stern or others I don't care a lot about, to simply say
that I've read only a little and I wasn't inclined to read any more -- the
work just didn't interest me very much. Whereas if I want to make such
assumptions as your friend is making, I'd better prepare myself to back
them up.

charles
charles alexander   ::   poet and book artist   ::   chax@theriver.com
chax press   ::   alexander writing/design/publishing
books by artists' hands   ::   web sites built with care and vision
http://alexwritdespub.com/chax   ::   http://alexwritdespub.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:26:12 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: A PS on the Tolerance issue
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
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michael, thanx for your post, helps much...

only thing i would add (and this is probably raising an issue that's been
raised too many times at this point) is that i took the gist of marjorie's
post to advocate both discrimination *and* close reading (i.e.,
discrimination on the basis of, among other things, close reading)...
implication being that there's critical work out there that tacitly offers
us in essence all sorts of discriminations *w/o* close reading---that
claims are often made in the absence of formal interrogation, and in the
service of a broader cultural view...

and perhaps this (!):  a prime reason that poets, all artists in fact, get
pissed at critics is b/c they feel that the urgencies with which they come
to their work are not at all present in critical discourse... i'm speaking
in the abstract, and what critics wish to do about this, well---that's part
of this thread, i guess... it's true, as you say, that a certain portion of
established critical practice, coming out of the old guard, too easily
dismisses such & such work as shoddy, or such & such work as a
masterpiece... but it's equally true that recent perpetual harping about
what's valuable (or not) to a specific group---and i'm not hinting at
"multiculturalism" here, though i do have cultural studies in mind---in the
absence of any sustained analysis of the work, risks a situation where
there is little distinguishing among reading experiences (what happens, in
effect, is that one charts, almost demographically, enthusiasms and
fascinations, but never really looks with a critical eye at how the work is
actually accomplishing such... work!)...

i feel obliged to aver (my but i go on!) that anyone who knows me knows i
mean nothing anti-theoretical in observing so... i get pissed mself at the
creative writers ron s mentions, who position themselves against theory
(and against any but more conventional forms of poetry, too)... but (i may
as well spell it out) some of the more emancipatory claims i've heard
(read) of late for cultural productions of one sort or another are falling
from the mouths of some of the most aesthetically conservative
literary-critical types (please don't ask me to name names)---folks who
would no doubt regard much of the writing with which this list is
preoccupied as enlightened blather (that is, if they were willing or
capable of regarding it at all---and here i simply *must* mention the
incredible amount of work marjorie has done in opening up academe to such
writing, and w/o losing sight of aesthetic issues)... and i take david k's
point, too, re the impossibility of entirely disengaging political and
aesthetic tolerance, for one, owing to intersections of intellectual
capital and the academic job market---but you'd still have to have some
knowledge, david (as you know), of what you mean by an political *and*
aesthetic "tolerance" so *engaged*...

(i still don't like this word, tolerance, in this context... when i think
of tolerance, i think of machine tolerances---allowable *deviations* from a
standard)...

i'd almost like to go on here, try to bring this discussion around to
questions of literacy... for my money, i see older (print) literacies in
the process of being displaced (and i can understand how this might be a
good thing, in some sense)---but what worries me is that i don't see much
rushing in to fill the void, other than various forms of marketplace savvy,
i mean... but that's another (probably pedagogical, probably long) story,
for another time...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 11:36:11 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Wendy Battin 
Subject:      CAPA--call for o.p. books
Comments: To: cap-l 
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Lately I've been discouraging people from submitting poetry
books to CAPA because we've were so far behind, but we've
recently been blessed with a couple of competent and energetic
work-study students to do scanning--hallelujah!.  If you hold
copyright to your out-of-print books and want them made available
on-line in the archive, contact me--**backchannel**, please, at
the address below.

CAPA is open to full-length books of poetry published in North America--
no vanity publications or previously unpublished collections, please.
Details available at the CAPA site, http://capa.conncoll.edu

Wendy

ps: Don't mail the books to me in Mystic--I don't want them
languishing here for 8 months while I'm away.  I'll post
the new snailmail address at the CAPA site later this week.
(I'll be able to make corrections and attend to problems
from Greece, as far as I know, but I'm still working out
the procedure.)

======================
Wendy Battin              wjbat@conncoll.edu

Contemporary American Poetry Archive
http://capa.conncoll.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 12:42:37 -0500
Reply-To:     Mark Prejsnar 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      neononanticounteracademicism
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981122104239.00ab2b90@mail.earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Mark Weiss wrote:

> "Academic" in the context of poetry is a somewhat archaic synonym from the
> 50s thru 70s for Iowa School or, roughly speaking, "What Gets Published in
> the New Yorker." It has nothing to do with how poets make their livings.
> It's continued survival reflects the lack of a newer consensual term.
> "Academic" poets, by the way, never called themselves such.
>
> Ron: Pinsky's performance is rather the opposite of what you suspect. No
> pretense to afflatus. More "anybody can do this, and it's good for you,
> although not all that important." A bit like Mr. Rogers.
>


The latter paragraph is wildly funny...Much appreciated.  But i wanna
bounce off of Mark's first paragraph, which is both amusing and accurate i
believe.

(By the way, Peter Q. and Ron S., not all the discussion of Susan Howe
vis-avis academe, had anything to do with *putting down* academics; i was
involved in starting that thread, and i was merely trying to clarifiy the
current *social locus* of Howe in the poetry world: someone had said she
was now a *popular* poet among academics, and i begged to differ, and i
think because i had just seen a bunch of Pinsky being reshelved at Emory's
main library, i used him as an example of what it seems to me folks around
University Engl. Lit depts *are* encouraged to read, if!! they read
anything contemporary.. a huge if!)

(And no not everyone on the list is an academic by a long chalk Peter: tho
i'm a clerical worker in academe, anyone who's done that will tell you
it's pretty far from being within academe...Quite a few personal friends
and acquaintances on this list are like me poets and not
academics...Nonetheless, i don't think most of us are putting you-all down
when the shape of criticism in academe is discussed...)

Anyway having gotten hopelessly sidetracked, let me quickly sum up what i
wanted to say bouncing off of Mark W.'s first paragraph above: he points
to one of the real confusions we all fall into (including me): we say
*academic poetry,* and are refering to the niche within the academy of the
writing-workshop phenomenon; people often express incredulity and
confusion, because the theorists they know in lit. departments are into
postmodernist trends, and this seems closer to the "experimental" stream
of poetry than to the "neo-New Yorker" one.  But the
economic/social/cultural locus of "workshop" poetry is *in* the academic
world, even though (from the point of view of post-Derrideans in
literature and other depts) it is not *of* it.  This tension has been
pointed to by Perelman, Silliman, Perloff and others in passing in various
places. So i'm not saying anything new.  But it helps to keep this odd
anomaly in mind, when someone starts tossing around "academic" to refer to
workshop (or, as Mark so sharply puts it, New Yorker) poetry.

markedly,
Mark (p.)
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:54:53 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Poetry Project 
Subject:      Dan Featherston
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Anyone who can privately send me Dan Featherston's e-mail address will
forever occupy a warm chamber of my heart. -- Anselm Berrigan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:50:07 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Toleration & The Polyanthos
In-Reply-To:  <365975A4.15FB7483@sdsp.mc.xerox.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE

The excerpt below (from a piece entitled "New Art of Criticism") is taken
from the August 1809 issue of The Polyanthos, an American journal.  It's a
tongue-in-cheek article supposedly written by Henry Brooke.=20

The kind of poetry written during that age -- an age of heavy critical=20
intolerance -- was awful.  Whenever strictures are placed on a community=20
of writers, the writing suffers. =20

Much of the off-hand commentary on this list, unfortunately, follows the
dictum in the first sentence below.  Defining oneself and one's writing as
"not that" is rather too hippy-ish for my tastes: some hippy vibes coming
of this list at times. One of the reasons so much of language poetry has
been so famously B=3DA=3DD is it's violent refusal to be anything _but_=20
oppositional.

"RULE I. Find fault, at first sight, with every thing that is published.=20
This is the first and fundamental rule of all good criticism; and is
itself founded upon solid reasons. For, 1st. It is ten to one but you are
in the right; there being at least ten bad productions published every
day, for one good one. =20

2dly. Because finding fault implies a plain superiority of genius....Claim
boldly, then, for criticism hath, in this respect, some resemblence to
calumny;  and, indeed, it is so like it, in some hands, that none can
adept distinguish them; and you know the rule, calumniare fortiter (in
English criticise boldly)....
=09It is a clear consequence from this rule, you should always
censure those works most, which are thought most to excel....

RULE III. =D2If your own authority is not sufficient to quell
opposition, and carry your point; why then, two or three of you join
forces, and call yourselves the WORLD -- and the work is done....[A]
critic is a judge; and everyone knows, the business of a judge is, not to
draw up pleadings, but to pronounce sentence."=20



-- Guttapercha Bunsen
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:18:53 -0500
Reply-To:     Mark Prejsnar 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Gabriel Gudding is WRONG
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

>
> The kind of poetry written during that age -- an age of heavy critical
> intolerance -- was awful.  Whenever strictures are placed on a community
> of writers, the writing suffers.
>

That's the silliest thing i've ever heard......."Critical
intolerance" in the sense for which Marjorie and Peter are arguing, has
and can have nothing whatever to do with producing "awful poetry"

As they suggest, lack of passionate commitment produces "awful poetry"
(though it has other causes too).

i'm glad for the occasion to use this header, though.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:29:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Mark Prejsnar is a Crumbcake
Comments: To: Mark Prejsnar 
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Mark Prejsnar wrote:

> >
> > The kind of poetry written during that age -- an age of heavy critical
> > intolerance -- was awful.  Whenever strictures are placed on a community
> > of writers, the writing suffers.
> >
>
> That's the silliest thing i've ever heard......."Critical
> intolerance" in the sense for which Marjorie and Peter are arguing, has
> and can have nothing whatever to do with producing "awful poetry"

Mark, I appreciate the heavy-handed comeback (thank st peter someone else
out there knows how to assert a statement with rabidity), and I know that
I'm dealing with some very old and timeworn ideas about the role btw
poetry and criticism (most of the ideas, remember, promulgated by
critics), but THE HISTORY JUST DOESN'T SUPPORT YOUR ASSERTIONS.

> As they suggest, lack of passionate commitment produces "awful poetry"
> (though it has other causes too).

Marjorie Perloff asked me why I called her assertions "romantic" and you
can see now why I did so: because rhetoric like yours is nearly always
applied in lieu of serious historical work: "passionate commitment" indeed.

>
> i'm glad for the occasion to use this header, though.
>

So am I: that was fun.  Love you, --Guttapercha
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:37:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: Perloff & The Rubicon of Stupidity
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

(from Gabriel Gudding):

>3).  There are two kinds of critics: those who pave the way for Authors
>     and those who pave the way for Anthologists.  Jorie Perloff, in her
>     advocacy of THE IMPORTANT, proves herself, like Vendler and Bloom,
>     to be one of the latter.
>


This is hard to take.  Have you ever actually _read_ Perloff?  She ain't no
Vendler or Bloom.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:50:48 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Re: Mark Prejsnar is a Crumbcake
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

>
> Marjorie Perloff asked me why I called her assertions "romantic" and you
> can see now why I did so: because rhetoric like yours is nearly always
> applied in lieu of serious historical work: "passionate commitment" indeed.
>
> >

Serious historical work????

Haven't seen any yet...
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 11:53:14 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Pinsky
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Here's a poem of Pinsky's from the NYRB for Oct 22.


PROLOGUE: FOR A STAGE PRESENTATION OF THE INFERNO

To go into it: in the declivity
At the center of Hell
Furthest from the light,
Knotted in ice the Beast himself weeping.

Misery of cold, treachery of dark, agony
Of sin, bottomless sorrow of evil:
Not punishment, but the agony of rage unspent.

To go into it: sorrow of revenge
Never sufficient, extravagant.

Bottomless agony of the self-wounded
Soul in self-extinction.

Treacherous soul.

To go into it
The pilgrim becomes the voice of the sinners.
The reader's voice becomes the pilgrim's
As the pilgrim becomes the writer.

To go into it--grappling at the ice-matted
Flank of the Beast, to bring
Sorrow to light.

Unreadable
Body of losses.

To go into it and through it
Or to go into it and never
Through it.

Withdrawal from the world of light.

To go into it to go through it: agony
Of despair, hand in the dark
Plucking at the knot that
The same hand tied
In the light.



What was Charles Alexander's phrase in his wise and temperate post? This
disinclines me to look further at the man's work. For one, as I think
anyone who's read Dante, or for that matter almost any medieval religious
work, this is the Cliff Notes version--true as far as it goes, but the most
obvious possible commentary. The core of Catholicism then and now is that
one makes one's own fate. The light/dark imagery also involves no
discovery--it's the core of Dante's imagery, and self-consciously so. So
what's left? Sorrow, agony, loss, sorrow, agony, loss, repeated
agonizingly, and never concretized, so that we're asked to feel empathy for
abstractions.

This whole exercise appears to be at the service of setting up the
revelation in the last four lines, which is at best a piece of slight
cleverness that also advances understanding, whether of Dante, or Pinsky,
or poor humanity, or poetry, not a whit. But worse--there's every
indicatiion in the poem that Pinsky knew the end, shallow as it is, before
he sat down to write. And for me this is the desideratum, the line in the
sand. For me poetry is only poetry if it's an act of discovery (and there
are many kinds of discovery, some linguistic or formal and some
psychological or political), not a recitation of the given.

This is not a question, Gudding, of defining oneself in opposition. The
non-"experimental" in the sense defined above is simply irrelevant.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:46:48 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      yarn tolerance chart

This simple chart can be used by poets and critics for quick positioning of
good and bad poets and avoidance of embarrassing passion (ie. "the worst
are full of passionate conviction" - Yeats).

MAINSTREAM       -       ALTERNATIVE       -       UNREAD

  BODY           -        SHADOW           -        SOUL

The chart can be utilized in either the anterior or posterior mode, ie.
"Robert Pinsky" can be placed in the mainstream/body position either
before or after the critic has chosen a position, and either before or
after the critic has actually read the work.  In the case of the latter
the resulting critique will produce more heat than light, and vice
versa; the choice of the CRITIC position usually regulates the overall
smoke level.  Eric Blarnes, in an unpublished monograph entitled
"The Wye of Criticism : How to Reed without Bellowing through a Horn",
calls on critics to ply their craft from the Unread/Soul position,
as this mode of quietude often allows for a more thorough & discerning
Exhumation of the Work at Hand.

I have no particular axe to grind in that regard. Nevertheless one might
surmise a diminution of critical aptitude & acuity in the unworldly
and supra-mellow precincts of small beer and large potatoes habitued
by our dear friend Prof. Blarnes, mightn't one?  Eh?

- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 12:10:06 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAXINE CHERNOFF 
Subject:      Re: Gabriel Gudding is WRONG
Comments: To: Mark Prejsnar 
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Dear Listees:  I have a feeling that those who produce "awful poetry"
produce it with the same passion as those who produce wonderful poetry.
When we imagine "the other" (assuming our poetry isn't awwful), it's
always easier to ascribe baser values and more shallow motives to them.
What's actually true and even more troubling is their firm commitment to
the "aesthetic" they've accepted.  Whether it's an articulated or implied
aesthetic is immaterial.  So the progressive notion that somehow we can
educate them through "tolerance" mainly isn't true.  Of course, some
people change their direction in writing, undergo a conversion, as it
were, but to imagine that someone who appreciates Rita Dove will be
convinced by gentle coaxing or close reading to see the higher goals of
Susan Howe?  A possible but not probable scenario.

I wonder, however, if Marjorie's initial post had something of this sort
unstated in it:  "they" show little, if any, tolerance for us, so why are
"we" suffering their presence in our sphere (this list, our work-related
poetry activity, our own criticism and writing).  If you examine the list
of laureates, Guggenheims, major prizes, it's obvious "they're"
winning.  It's their figures who determine what gets discussed in most
venues where something called "poetry" is the topic.  Meanwhile, the
"other Tradition," which we know to be the one of value, creates an
enormous and vital life of its own-- here, in major poetry cities, at
certain universities, with a number of presses committed to its writers.

Maybe then, the discussion should be, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, what
they talk about when they talk about "poetry," which is a cultural issue,
a media issue,  an issue of who "they" are vs. who we are.

Maxine Chernoff
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:13:34 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Toleration & The Polyanthos
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE

I propose you add the following rule: never forget to discount whole
areas of writing by asserting, in passing, "one of the reasons so much of
X school is so famously bad, is that..." After all, you are likely to be
right--much work of any category is likely not be be excellent.  At the
same time, you will give the mistaken impression that you have actually
done a statistical study of how much poetry written under the rubric of a
particular label is bad.=20

I see there is a message just posted saying Gabriel Gudding is wrong so I
will now sign off to read it.  =20

On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Gabriel Gudding wrote:

> The excerpt below (from a piece entitled "New Art of Criticism") is taken
> from the August 1809 issue of The Polyanthos, an American journal.  It's =
a
> tongue-in-cheek article supposedly written by Henry Brooke.=20
>=20
> The kind of poetry written during that age -- an age of heavy critical=20
> intolerance -- was awful.  Whenever strictures are placed on a community=
=20
> of writers, the writing suffers. =20
>=20
> Much of the off-hand commentary on this list, unfortunately, follows the
> dictum in the first sentence below.  Defining oneself and one's writing a=
s
> "not that" is rather too hippy-ish for my tastes: some hippy vibes coming
> of this list at times. One of the reasons so much of language poetry has
> been so famously B=3DA=3DD is it's violent refusal to be anything _but_=
=20
> oppositional.
>=20
> "RULE I. Find fault, at first sight, with every thing that is published.=
=20
> This is the first and fundamental rule of all good criticism; and is
> itself founded upon solid reasons. For, 1st. It is ten to one but you are
> in the right; there being at least ten bad productions published every
> day, for one good one. =20
>=20
> 2dly. Because finding fault implies a plain superiority of genius....Clai=
m
> boldly, then, for criticism hath, in this respect, some resemblence to
> calumny;  and, indeed, it is so like it, in some hands, that none can
> adept distinguish them; and you know the rule, calumniare fortiter (in
> English criticise boldly)....
> =09It is a clear consequence from this rule, you should always
> censure those works most, which are thought most to excel....
>=20
> RULE III. =D2If your own authority is not sufficient to quell
> opposition, and carry your point; why then, two or three of you join
> forces, and call yourselves the WORLD -- and the work is done....[A]
> critic is a judge; and everyone knows, the business of a judge is, not to
> draw up pleadings, but to pronounce sentence."=20
>=20
>=20
>=20
> -- Guttapercha Bunsen
>=20

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:20:53 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981123115314.00ac0980@mail.earthlink.net> from "Mark
              Weiss" at Nov 23, 98 11:53:14 am
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Evidentally Mr. Pinsky missed Pound's admonitions against abstraction.
He's just short of invoking "dim lands of peace..."    -m.

According to Mark Weiss:
>
> Here's a poem of Pinsky's from the NYRB for Oct 22.
>
> Misery of cold, treachery of dark, agony
> Of sin, bottomless sorrow of evil:

> the agony of rage unspent.
>
>  sorrow of revenge
>
> Bottomless agony of the self-wounded
> Soul in self-extinction.
>
> agony
> Of despair>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:31:33 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <199811232020.PAA62022@dept.english.upenn.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Good point MM:

I honestly thought this poem was Mark's parody when I first read it, but
when when I looked more closely and saw that it was in the New York Review
of Books I realized it had to be for real.  It's curious how a certain
"poetic" diction has made a big comeback amoung our Laureates. The agony
of rage unspent indeed! Again, the point is not that such patently bad (in
this case not merely middling) writing exists, but that it is celebrated
in prestigious journals.


On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Michael Magee wrote:

> Evidentally Mr. Pinsky missed Pound's admonitions against abstraction.
> He's just short of invoking "dim lands of peace..."    -m.
>
> According to Mark Weiss:
> >
> > Here's a poem of Pinsky's from the NYRB for Oct 22.
> >
> > Misery of cold, treachery of dark, agony
> > Of sin, bottomless sorrow of evil:
>
> > the agony of rage unspent.
> >
> >  sorrow of revenge
> >
> > Bottomless agony of the self-wounded
> > Soul in self-extinction.
> >
> > agony
> > Of despair>
> >
>

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 12:33:44 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hilton Manfred Obenzinger 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981123115314.00ac0980@mail.earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I've been bemused reading the storm over Pinsky and tolerance and the
rest.  First of all, I like Cliff Notes, and this aint Cliff.  A Cliff
Notes poem about the Inferno would be wonderful.  The worst thing Ted
Berrigan could say about a poem was that it was boring: this poem is
boring.  But maybe I'm not tolerant, and it's actually very interesting,
moving, linguistically zappy.  Maybe this is my taste -- and there is room
for different poetries.  Tolerance is not the best word in this regard;
perhaps multiplicity.  Certainly, I'm not interested in skewering the poem
-- it's just that if Mark Weiss hadn't inserted it into this discussion
I probably would never have gotten to the end of it.  I do like close
reading -- it's one of the great pleasures -- and I was almost tempted to
say, "What other kind of reading is there?"  But then I thought of distant
skimming, intimate misreading, stand-offish decoding, and other pleasures
I enjoy almost as much as, sometimes more than, close reading.  Does this
mean I establish a "school?"  Marjorie Perloff is right that passionate
response, discriminating taste, aesthetic chutzpah are positive; others
are right that small-minded fault-finding and in-group/out-group nastiness
are negative: unfortunately, so many poets and critics confuse the two.
Critical and social intolerance are not entirely identitcal -- and, as
David Kellog pointed out, in many circumstances I wouldn't mind being
tolerated.  In literature, the only thing I can't tolerate is
indifference -- and so this Pinsky poem leaves me indifferent -- and
intolerant.

Hilton Obenzinger


On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Mark Weiss wrote:

> Here's a poem of Pinsky's from the NYRB for Oct 22.
>
>
> PROLOGUE: FOR A STAGE PRESENTATION OF THE INFERNO
>
> To go into it: in the declivity
> At the center of Hell
> Furthest from the light,
> Knotted in ice the Beast himself weeping.
>
> Misery of cold, treachery of dark, agony
> Of sin, bottomless sorrow of evil:
> Not punishment, but the agony of rage unspent.
>
> To go into it: sorrow of revenge
> Never sufficient, extravagant.
>
> Bottomless agony of the self-wounded
> Soul in self-extinction.
>
> Treacherous soul.
>
> To go into it
> The pilgrim becomes the voice of the sinners.
> The reader's voice becomes the pilgrim's
> As the pilgrim becomes the writer.
>
> To go into it--grappling at the ice-matted
> Flank of the Beast, to bring
> Sorrow to light.
>
> Unreadable
> Body of losses.
>
> To go into it and through it
> Or to go into it and never
> Through it.
>
> Withdrawal from the world of light.
>
> To go into it to go through it: agony
> Of despair, hand in the dark
> Plucking at the knot that
> The same hand tied
> In the light.
>
>
>
> What was Charles Alexander's phrase in his wise and temperate post? This
> disinclines me to look further at the man's work. For one, as I think
> anyone who's read Dante, or for that matter almost any medieval religious
> work, this is the Cliff Notes version--true as far as it goes, but the most
> obvious possible commentary. The core of Catholicism then and now is that
> one makes one's own fate. The light/dark imagery also involves no
> discovery--it's the core of Dante's imagery, and self-consciously so. So
> what's left? Sorrow, agony, loss, sorrow, agony, loss, repeated
> agonizingly, and never concretized, so that we're asked to feel empathy for
> abstractions.
>
> This whole exercise appears to be at the service of setting up the
> revelation in the last four lines, which is at best a piece of slight
> cleverness that also advances understanding, whether of Dante, or Pinsky,
> or poor humanity, or poetry, not a whit. But worse--there's every
> indicatiion in the poem that Pinsky knew the end, shallow as it is, before
> he sat down to write. And for me this is the desideratum, the line in the
> sand. For me poetry is only poetry if it's an act of discovery (and there
> are many kinds of discovery, some linguistic or formal and some
> psychological or political), not a recitation of the given.
>
> This is not a question, Gudding, of defining oneself in opposition. The
> non-"experimental" in the sense defined above is simply irrelevant.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:48:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

A question here - Who _does_ like Pinsky? What are the demographics? What
do they say? What is the laureate-function at work? And given the func-
tions and institutions and critical apparatus which has singled him out -
what can we say about these? That they have less critical acumen? That
they prefer simpler and safer writing, more conservative writing? That
they are culturally-dysfunctional in one or another sense?

I'm not asking these questions out of ignorance or the desire to defend -
I don't defend in fact. But I think there are other and overlooked con-
texts (perhaps?) that are critical, themselves (perhaps?) to the discus-
sion. For quite simply, if _x_ is bored with Pinsky, who is _not?_

Alan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:51:48 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: Guttapercha Bunsen is a Ninny
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Judy R. & Mark P.,

1).  I believe I have been mistaken for a serious person.

2).  Have I read Marjorie Perloff?: not a paragraph!

3).  I feel like the old mean catapult who was abandoned on the pointy hill.

4).      Rambo come
         to me, Chuck Norris
         come.
                Mad Max
        I say come to me: Samson
            in Gaza, eyeless,
       come -- with long hair -- to me

       and bring thy jawbone so useful.
                                Bruce Lee
           where art thou Jackie Chan
         I need thy skinny justice.

5).  The next time I offer my services as an agent provacateur, I'm charging.

6).  It was nice to be among the billyclubs again.

Warmly, GB

(ps: yes of course I have read Perloff and I always enjoy doing so.)
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:58:13 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.5.32.19981123115314.00ac0980@mail.earthlink.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

from Pinsky in NYRB:

>Unreadable
>Body of losses.

 Mr. P. says it for us, doesn't he.

>
>
>
> But worse--there's every
>indicatiion in the poem that Pinsky knew the end, shallow as it is, before
>he sat down to write. And for me this is the desideratum, the line in the
>sand. For me poetry is only poetry if it's an act of discovery (and there
>are many kinds of discovery, some linguistic or formal and some
>psychological or political), not a recitation of the given.
>

Bravo, Mark Weiss.

Live words vs. dead words.  That's the issue.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:15:29 +1300
Reply-To:     beard@met.co.nz
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tom Beard 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Wow, I'd assumed that Pinsky was old and distinguished, but he's apparently
a 17-year-old who listens to a lot of Marilyn Manson and The Cure:


HellBeastweepingMiserycoldtreacherydarkagony
sinbottomlesssorrowevilpunishmentagony
rageunspentsorrowrevengeBottomlessagony

self-woundedSoulself-extinctionTreacheroussoul.
sinnersBeastSorrowBodylossesWithdrawalagony
despairdarkPluckingknottiedlight.


Does he wear black mascara?


        Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 16:10:43 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Guttapercha Bunsen is RIGHT

    Who wants to be the receiver of received opinions?  Who wants to go into
receivership?  The only criteria for criticism is informed intelligence.
Andrey Gritsman, at the Translation conference, argued that you cannot
even begin to understand a poet in a foreign language until you immerse
yourself as much as possible in the sensibility and the bio-historical
literary background of what you're reading.  This goes for reading any
poetry.  Does this mean everybody has to become a jumpin' mandarin?
NO!!!!  You & you & you too & me too are perfectly free to make snap
conclusions based on a brief whiff of 2 lines of a poem - what is
literature all about if not that?  But don't call it CRITICISM.
I could plop down a juicy poem of Howesky that would sound just
as turrible as Pinsky if I had her books handy, but that's too damn
EASY.  Oh Lordy set us free from these narrows & shallows!!
Bring on the big frigates, bring on the men o'war & the women o'war,
bring on the Spanish galleons & the sloops & trawlers while You're at it!
But nay, thou shalt not call the tinny piping of the post-pinsky
faction CRITICISM!!!  Oh, bloody not mine ears with the little clubs
of aren't-we-so-great alternativos once again!!!  Oh the windy
self-righteous snores of it all!!!  Somebody with an ear for
Poetry, hey!   - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:34:34 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Elizabeth Treadwell 
Subject:      Debbie AN EPIC
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Thank you Wendy for the breathless information. Where who how can I find it?

Debbie by Lisa Robertson.



Elizabeth

Outlet Magazine -&- Double Lucy Books
P.O. Box 9013, Berkeley, California 94709  U.S.A.
http://users.lanminds.com/~dblelucy
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:36:35 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Guttapercha Bunsen is RIGHT
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

But Henry, this poem is written in English and we are all all too familiar
with its diction, its tone, its devices, its rhetoric. I have read
hundreds of poems of this ilk over the past 25 years or so.  That it takes
about 10 seconds to render a judgment about Pinksy's poem does not mean
that it is a superficial judgment--it could be the product of years of
experience.  It's like hearing an out of tune piano--you don't have to
think about it for hours to know it's out of tune, do you?

We are all somewhat schooled in a certain mainstream tradition just
because it is mainstream, in a way that mainstream people are not schooled
in the avant-garde. I could even tell you why someone would think this is
a good poem, coming out of this tradition, and its not because of its
heavy metal imagery either!


Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 17:28:17 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:   from
              "A. Jenn Sondheim" at Nov 23, 98 03:48:14 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I feel like I might have something useful to say here re "who reads
Pinsky" though whether it'll shed light I'm not sure.  I'm someone who
didn't grow up with a sense of allegiance to experimental writing, so I
read a lot of stuff: Edward Hirsch, Dave Smith, Robert Haas, things like
that - lot's of it, and I read it carefully and generally liked it.  I
will still argue that folks like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell should
be read w/ care and not dismissed, that this exercise pays off whether one
decides they "like" the poems or not.  So, what does this have to do with
little Bobby Pinsky? well, one way to approach it would be through the
metaphor of deterioration: say what you want about classic list nemeses
like Lowell (or even Eliot): they were smart and rigorous and wanted to
say something important; I think the tradition that claimed Lowell (that
claimed Life Studies for the most part) was full of people who, for
whatever reason, took the easy way out - by which I mean, they got the
gist of it and then used the tradition as self-validation to write a lot
of very self-indulgent and innocuous poems.  Sometimes they'll even write
a pretty good poem, as Hirsch's poem "The Abortion (1969)" is: that poem
turns the confessional conceit on its head by telling a very "private"
story of an abortion and then revealing that the young woman had never
been pregnant, that the two teenagers involved had made some diagnostic
screwup, which renders the confessional moment both bathetic and awful.

I'm digressing now so I'll just say this: whether Hirsch's poem is "good"
is really neither here nor there b/c his *attititude* towards "poetry"
remains constant - there is always the sense that he knows exactly WHAT A
POEM *IS*.  Pinsky, in the poem we've been discussing, is a good deal
worse: he shares Hirsch's attitude and writes a really bad poem to boot.
So again, to circle back, why read Pinsky?  Well, for many young readers,
one reads Pinsky because he's there: and more precisely, because Perelman
and Mullen and Lauterbach and Mackey and the gang are *not* there.  I can
honestly say these latter writers DID NOT EXIST at my undergraduate
college - and it would have taken some strange and heroic intervention for
me to have been introduced to them before the age of 21.  So what you have
is Pinsky and you do the best you can (young readers can be quite
ingenious in entertaining themselves with bad poetry).  Or you do what I
eventually did: you say, "wait a minute, one tires of Pinsky a hell of a
lot quicker than one tires of Stevens or Williams or Moore or Dickinson;"
that's step one; the second step involves dismissing the "there's no
*great* poetry anymore, only good poetry" argument  and if you don't know
any better this is a very persuasive argument: it encourages you not to
look around; but if you're lucky enough to dismiss it then you *do* start
to look around and the Pinsky spell is broken!  My post-Pinsky discoveries
went something like this: Creeley, Neidecker, O'Hara, Ashbery, Perelman,
LangPo, Mackey, Mullen, experimental diaspora.

As for the older folks who like Pinsky, well, they *are* Pinsky or
resemble him very strongly.  And it's a mathematical certainty that Pinsky
will like Pinsky 90% of the time.

-m.

 According to A. Jenn Sondheim: >
> A question here - Who _does_ like Pinsky? What are the demographics? What
> do they say? What is the laureate-function at work? And given the func-
> tions and institutions and critical apparatus which has singled him out -
> what can we say about these? That they have less critical acumen? That
> they prefer simpler and safer writing, more conservative writing? That
> they are culturally-dysfunctional in one or another sense?
>
> I'm not asking these questions out of ignorance or the desire to defend -
> I don't defend in fact. But I think there are other and overlooked con-
> texts (perhaps?) that are critical, themselves (perhaps?) to the discus-
> sion. For quite simply, if _x_ is bored with Pinsky, who is _not?_
>
> Alan
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 18:42:32 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Keith Tuma 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <199811232228.RAA62930@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>As for the older folks who like Pinsky, well, they *are* Pinsky or
>resemble him very strongly.  And it's a mathematical certainty that Pinsky
>will like Pinsky 90% of the time.

As Marjorie noted in her post before the pack let loose to scramble for the
last turd, Robert von Hallberg is an admirer of Pinsky's work and can be
quite passionate and intelligent about it.  I can assure you that he is not
Robert Pinsky.  An Explanation of America is a poem I once read with
interest for its effort to deploy neo-Horatian and neo-Augustan
verse-essayistic modes. I look much less like Robert Pinsky than Robert von
Hallberg does.  The more recent Pinsky verse--after that book really--
seems to me considerably weaker as well as very different, in mode as well
as in its relentless and finally (for me) uninteresting worrying of a
thematics of "desire" that I suspect RP took over from his friend Robert
Hass.  And there are limits to my interest these days in the earlier mode
at work in Explanation's post-Vietnam discursiveness, with its perhaps
too-resonant closure warring with its nightmare scenarios of nascent
reaganism. But it's a book that one might well know whether one decides to
hate it or not.  Passion requires context and even knowledge.

Before you make a statement such as the one above you might read what von
Hallberg has written of Pinsky in his 1984 book on American poetry, which
also sympathetically discusses poets such as Creeley, Ashbery, Olson, Dorn,
Bishop, Lowell etc. and remains a good study of poetry and nation-building
(the emergence of a tone of the center in poetry as well as politics post
WWII).  Or you might read Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry, which quotes,
among others, Bruce Andrews.  Then go ahead and lob a few bombs:  they'll
be taken seriously.  Mark Weiss, at least, quoted a (terrible) poem.

I'm with Ron Silliman when he says that he finds it important to read poets
in the other so-called camp. There's a funny line, by the way, in one of
Ron's books--forget which--about "Merrill's Pinsky."  That continuity would
be worth considering, Auden behind them both, Pinsky's (early) mode crossed
by exposure to Yvor Winters.

It's a strange day when I find myself grateful for Henry Gould.  (Hello Henry.)

Perhaps some wit with the venom would help too.  Always grateful for that.
Sorry not to have any ready today but this discussion is depressing me.

Keith Tuma
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:59:49 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Guttapercha Bunsen is RIGHT
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At the risk of responding seriously, Henry, why don't you read thru all of
Pinsky and post us something really wonderful? Or are you disenclined?

But I doubt you'll find much gold in them hills, and here's why--Susan Howe
and everybody else who writes has probably written bad poems (by the way,
setting Susan up as the champion of the light is a little unfair. Whoever
brought her into this was probably just using her name as a shorthand for
the band of angels). But the kind of bad poem that Pinsky published in NYRB
is hard to imagine from a poet who was capable of something superbly
better. This is not a failed experiment, it's a failure to read with
intelligence and a failure of courage and a failure of ambition.

Or maybe it was just an amazingly bad day. And maybe it was another when he
decided to push it to so public a venue.

At 04:10 PM 11/23/98 EST, you wrote:
>    Who wants to be the receiver of received opinions?  Who wants to go into
>receivership?  The only criteria for criticism is informed intelligence.
>Andrey Gritsman, at the Translation conference, argued that you cannot
>even begin to understand a poet in a foreign language until you immerse
>yourself as much as possible in the sensibility and the bio-historical
>literary background of what you're reading.  This goes for reading any
>poetry.  Does this mean everybody has to become a jumpin' mandarin?
>NO!!!!  You & you & you too & me too are perfectly free to make snap
>conclusions based on a brief whiff of 2 lines of a poem - what is
>literature all about if not that?  But don't call it CRITICISM.
>I could plop down a juicy poem of Howesky that would sound just
>as turrible as Pinsky if I had her books handy, but that's too damn
>EASY.  Oh Lordy set us free from these narrows & shallows!!
>Bring on the big frigates, bring on the men o'war & the women o'war,
>bring on the Spanish galleons & the sloops & trawlers while You're at it!
>But nay, thou shalt not call the tinny piping of the post-pinsky
>faction CRITICISM!!!  Oh, bloody not mine ears with the little clubs
>of aren't-we-so-great alternativos once again!!!  Oh the windy
>self-righteous snores of it all!!!  Somebody with an ear for
>Poetry, hey!   - Henry Gould
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 16:16:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Angela Szeto 
Subject:      Bright lights
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

 Some of the issues raised in the Pinksy/Howe thread have been on my mind
for a long time. Particularly the conflict between the gut response and the
head response. Sometimes the gut response really isn't the gut -- sometimes
it's whatever's been mercilessly drummed into you and impacted by reasonable
fear. Trouble enters when you hear of marvelous things about Gertrude Stein,
say, or Susan Howe from people you love and respect and you want to see what
everyone else sees so badly but old habits keep you on the other side of the
window display, looking in at all the bright lights
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 19:33:04 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Thompson 
Subject:      Re: Perloff & The Rubicon of Stupidity
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Well, I'm  going to leave the barking to Gabriel Gudding, who does it so
well, and so full of bite.

I'm interested in poetics, to be sure. But I'm interested in all kinds.
Mostly, as some of you know, I'm interested in the really old kinds, Vedic
poetics, Homeric poetics, the poetics of Indo-Europeans whose poetry we no
longer have but which we in our all-too academic minds reconstruct by means
of meticulous comparisons and inter-weavings from long dead languages.
Weird stuff, but not quite theoretical.

I'm also interested in the poetics of this list. Sometimes I see a kind of
convergence between these old poetics and the "new" ones of this list. I
see things new as a result of such convergences. My interest, in both,
becomes renewed.

I've been reading Vedic for going on 25 years, and I still don't get it. I
get glimpses pf something really different, really unknown to me. So I keep
on with it. It is fascinating.

I admit that I am not much interested in Pinsky. I read Pinsky and I get
it, more or less, right away. So I lose interest, and move on. Without
meaning to offend, however, I find much of the poetry mentioned, advocated,
generated, on this list much closer to Pinsky's than what, as a Vedicist,
I'm used to. As Charles Alexander politely puts it, there is little there
that I'd go back to read again.

After only a little while, disjunctive syntax is not hard to get, after
all, and what I wind up seeing inside this poetry is not so very different
from what's going inside Pinsky's. The disjunction, the weird loops, the
flight from coherence, from narrative, etc., all of it: okay. I like it.
But a lot of the time there isn't much in it, as far as I can see.

There are exceptions of course: Howe's, Hannah Weiner's [never heard of her
until I joined this list], some others. They remain intriguing after many
readings. Yes. More close reading, by all means.

But I think we should all be humble, because in fact we most of us most of
the time are not doing anything very interesting.

So the little devil in me says [or is that a little buddha there?].

GT
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 18:45:44 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" 
Subject:      Vole in Boulder
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Lisa Jarnot and her band VOLE will perform their new rock opera, "Follow the
Sandpiper," this Wednesday, Nov. 25, 7pm, at the Boulder Museum of
Contemporary Art.

Y'all come down, y'hear?
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 17:58:22 -0800
Reply-To:     clarkd@sfu.ca
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Clark 
Organization: A Use for Poets (Editing) Company
Subject:      RADDLE MOON 17, some Vancouver writers
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

hello all, =

hope the below is readable. for further information, =

please contact Susan Clark at clarkd@sfu.ca. =


***************************************************
Announcing the publication of RADDLE MOON 17
-- dedicated to the memory of Charles Watts -- =


A special section, "Some Vancouver Writers," with work by : =

Marie Annharte BAKER, Ted BYRNE, Susan CLARK, Peter CULLEY, =

Kevin DAVIES, Jeff DERKSEN, Dan FARRELL, Deanna FERGUSON, =

Maxine GADD, Dorothy Trujillo LUSK, Rob MANERY, Paul MUTTON, =

Meredith QUARTERMAIN, Lisa ROBERTSON, Nancy SHAW, Christine STEWART, =

Colin SMITH, Catriona STRANG, Lary TIMEWELL, Melissa WOLSAK. =


Work from Quebec, curated by Nicole Brossard : =

Cynthia GIRARD, Michael D=C9LISLE, =

translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mour=E9=82

New work from : =

William FULLER, Jean DAY, Jackson Mac Low, =

Gil McElroy and Rae Armantrout

Photograms by Katrine Le Gallou

DISTRIBUTION: =

in Canada :
individuals, please order through New Star Books, Vancouver:
newstar@pinc.com (Visa accepted)
booksellers, please order through General Distribution : Ontario & PQ:
1-800-387-0141 =

                 in the rest of Canada: 1-800-387-0172

in the USA :
individuals, please order through : Small Press Distribution, Berkeley,
1-800.869.7553 or orders@spdbooks.org
        or through =

Bridge Street Books, Washington, DC : contact Rod Smith,
AERIALEDGE@aol.com

US booksellers, please order through : =

General Book Distribution, Toronto, Canada : 1-800-805-1083 =

        OR through =

Small Press Distribution, Berkeley above.

in Britain:
through Paul Green, at Spectacular Diseases, 85b London Road,
Peterborough, Cambs, England PE2 9BS, or through New Star (VISA
accepted)

*Erratum*: Marie Annharte Baker's name is spelled [consistently]
incorrectly throughout the issue as Annehart. Most issues were shipped
before this error was noticed and so lack erratum slips. Apologies to
Marie.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 18:26:41 -0800
Reply-To:     clarkd@sfu.ca
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Clark 
Organization: A Use for Poets (Editing) Company
Subject:      RADDLE MOON price
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Dear all,

I managed to send off our announcement without mentioning the price:

single issues of RM17 are $10, postage paid
subscriptions are still only $15 (US subscribers, please pay in US$)

(single issues will be going up next issue to $12, so a subscription
will save $7 over the price of two copies)

back issues are $8
our ISSN is: 0826-5909

hope that's it,
Susan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 23:57:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Dowker 
Subject:      Re: Debbie AN EPIC
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Thought I should throw my two cents worth in and mention that
some excerpts from "Debbie: An epic" can be found at

http://home.ican.net/~alterra/robe.html

David

"By representing a trait as mutual a coin certainly does lead us into debt,
but this coin, which the debtor accepts as existence, has been struck in
the likeness of one's soul by the indestructible Imperium."
 - Debbie

>Thank you Wendy for the breathless information. Where who how can I find it?
>
>Debbie by Lisa Robertson.
>
>
>
>Elizabeth
>
>Outlet Magazine -&- Double Lucy Books
>P.O. Box 9013, Berkeley, California 94709  U.S.A.
>http://users.lanminds.com/~dblelucy
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 21:31:45 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      debbie an epic
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I am gladdened by the interest this book is stirring among Listmembers. Its
deployment of its various rhetorics is constantly engaging, and thru its
devices some of the agony of our fix can actually be heard to speak, which
is a phenomenal accomplishment. Its humor is excruciating; we laugh that we
may not weep. The intelligence is penetrating & lucid--witness the citation
re coinage from David Dowker. _Debbie_ is wicked and exonerating, despite
its recurring analyses of complicity. I find this poem irresistible.

Equally so "The Device," a poem that reads like a footnote to _debbie_ ,
and which can be found at

 http://www.theeastvillage.org

 It was published originally in Cabri and Manery's zine _Hole_.

David
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 01:52:35 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM
Subject:      Out of Control @ Bridge Street -- new Retallack, Mayer, Mackey,
              Rasula/McCaffery, Trupwire &&&
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

LOTS -- New Retallack, Mayer, Mackey, Rasula/McCaffery, Tripwire &&&. Ordering
& discount info at the end of the list. Bernstein's _My Way_ from U Chicago
Press due in soon.

1. _Avec Sampler # 2_, ed Cydney Chadwick, $12.95. Michael Palmer, Julie
Kalendek, Ann Lauterbach, Nick Piombino, Charles Borkhuis, Gad Hollander, Mary
Angeline, Joe Ross, Michelle Grangaud trans Guy Bennett, Andrew Joron, Camille
Guthrie, Lisa Lubasch, Pierre Alferi trans Cole Swensen, & Elizabeth
Treadwell.

2. _An Anthology of New Poetics_, ed Christopher Beach, U Alabama, $29.95.
David Antin, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Maria Damon, Michael Davidson,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Hank Lazer, Nathaniel Mackey,
Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, Leslie Scalapino, James
Sherry, Ron Silliman, John Taggart, & Barrett Watten.

3. _Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist_, compiled by Aaron Fischer, Granary
Books, $32.95. Essays by Fischer & Lewis Warsh. A short book for the price, 70
pages, but the Schneeman/Berrigan collaborations here, many in color, must be
seen.

4. _William Blake's Illuminated Books: Collected Edition Vols. I-VI, William
Blake Trust, Princeton U Press, boxed set of six paperbacks, $165.00. The
volumes are Jerusalem, Songs of Innocence & Experience, Early Illuminated
Books, The Continental Prophecies, Milton, & The Urizen Books.

5. _songs from navigation_, chris cheek and Sianed Jones, Reality Street,
$24.95.
Book w/ C D. "that putting the key in the hole left no exit wound"

6. _The Common Good_, Noam Chomsky, interviews by David Barsamian, Odonian,
$12. Don't buy it at Barnes & Chernobyl.

7. _Dance Writings and Poetry_, Edwin Denby, ed Robert Cornfield, Yale, $18.
Much more of the dance writing than the poetry.

8. _Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington
Dickinson_, ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Paris Press, $19.95.
On the back it says "This remarkable correspondence brings to light Susan
Huntington Dickinson as the central source of the poet's passion and
inspiration."

9. _The Feminist Memoir Project_, ed Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow,
Three Rivers Press, $20. Memoirs and responses by 32 writers including Kate
Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michelle Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo
Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis and many more embody the
excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from
within.

10. _Futures_, Ken Edwards, Reality Street, $13.95. A novel. "Eye: Yes, of
course."

11. _Morning Light_, Lee Harwood, Slow Dancer, $13.95.

12. _Elephant Surveillance To Thought_, Andrew Levy, Meow, $6. "The thrall of
computerization overlooks the softer, subtler aspects of a good imitation.
Inappropriate intrusion is the private sector's last ditch effort. Try soaking
with fly juice to give it that emerger affect like the scared fish it
imitates."

13. _Whatsaid Serif_, Nathaniel Mackey, City Lights, $12.95. " Sun cult.
Cargo cult.   Pharaoh's / Andalusian song our secret cargo, the / sun burning
a hole in the sky . . . / The voice / was a boat where there'd be no boat. /
No balm, no abdominal blessing, unless the / voice draw the torso up . . .
Abdominal / scuff /
and impatient loin-rut . . . Ache and orexic / trunk / sung from under . . .
Hoist and thoracic / struff. . . / Dreamt beginning. Unbased / itch and
intransigence. . . / End / urged inside /  out"

14. _Oulipo Compendium_, ed Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie,  Atlas Archive
Six, $19.99. Large format paperback including substantial primary,
biographical, bibliographical, and theoretical material including Queneau's
"100, 000, 000, 000, 000 Poems."

15. _Two Haloed Mourners_, Bernadette Mayer, Granary Books, ltd edition of 100
copies, 42 pages, $12.  "harmless / garden variety / like this poem / I hate
it I wont mention / Alcohol stimulants & solitude / & that's why / people like
Shakespeare so much / he never mentioned it / besides burning everything /
leave alone one leave alone two"

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=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 01:53:20 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      The Use of Full Emotion (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


The Use of Full Emotion


@examine Alan
Alan *sob* *boohoo*  *sniff*   *weep*    *wail*
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Has been logged on for 15 seconds.
Alan is not currently idle.
Cumulative login time is 13 hours, 41 minutes and 41 seconds.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Listening to shouts and tells. Receiving logon/logoff messages.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Alan) Oh wail! For I do try
Alan falls swiftly down, so sadly as he stumbles, gains his speech -
(Alan) to be conveyance of desperate misery
(Alan) so much so to give credence, as I do breathe
(Alan) or lay a wreath upon this darkened earth!
Alan weeps!
Alan wails!
Alan whimpers, as in a wake for dearest friends, in this deep and mournful
 world
(Alan) or in this swollen hollow, as grief sustains itself with public
 declamation
(Alan) Think *sob*, think *whimper*, *wail* and *sniff*
(Alan) Enough to make your tears flow full; I would be sore in selfish
 adulation, were I ignorant of your presence, and *gasp* and *wow* and
 *hold-the-breath* and *laugh* and *giggle* and all the *tattered day*
(Alan) against the Shouts and Tells, against the Message, appearing without
 source or destination: I beg you, Read me!
Alan cries!
Alan sobs to the very fullest!
(Alan) This is the strife that makes me die content,
(Alan) Since you shall never know my full intent.
Rains fall, storms gather around stark and broken trees!
(Alan) Consider the earth, the swarm, this doomed and shattered wreath!
(Alan) Content, again, and one last *sob* and *wail*
(Alan) Or *whimper" lost, oh *sniff* and I set sail!
ALL SHIPS CRASH


_________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1998 23:17:02 +0000
Reply-To:     MPerloff@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marjorie Perloff 
Organization: Stanford University
Subject:      Re: enough already!
MIME-Version: 1.0
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              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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Wow--I never expected to unleash such fury!  If Gabriel G had paid
attention to my first posting, he would have realized that I began by
noting that Bob von H and I have just had quite a good dialogue on Howe
and Pinsky with interesting pros and cons and I said there that I
respected Bob's opinion very much as you'll see when that "dialogue"
comes out!  In the meantime, nothing like pouncing on the word
"tolerance" and giving me the business.

It's becoming tiresome.  But I want to correct one thing David Kellogg
said which is that "Marjorie separates political from aesthetic
tolerance" etc.  When the dialogue comes out, David, you'll see that my
central caveat about the poem in question ("History of my Heart") is
political--specifically, the patronizing treatment of the mother which I
take to be quite sexist and smug.  But then David loves to jump to
conclusions!

Another caveat I have is about the argument that New Directions, once
Norton became its distributor, decided oh hell, might as well publish a
new poet like Susan Howe.  This is absurd because the issue would be:
what new poets did they refuse to publish--a long list, some on this
list and many of them women!  So why did they prefer Howe?  That would
take a little bit of investigation, wouldn't it?

What really troubles me is the endless name-calling here.  When in
doubt, compare Perloff to Bloom and Vendler --not that I mind that
comparison since I have a lot of respect for both of them.  Instead of
taking up the challenge and looking at Pinsky's poetry (or Howe's)--the
only person who did was Hilton O in a fabulous posting--we get endless
slurs or bravos, etc. etc.  It only proves my original point that the
discourse has hit a real low!  But then I'm afraid I don't know where
Gabriel Gudding publishes his interesting commentaries.  In what
journals do they appear?

xxx
Marjorie
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 01:22:26 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      Re: tolerance
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.1.32.19981123090743.006c5a18@theriver.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> She reacted in a very intense and personal
>>manner, citing how the real poetry was being shaped by the likes of Mary
>>Oliver, Mark Doty, and a few others.

Are these 2 real or made-up names?




George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 01:53:14 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      re : tolerance Bowering-style
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

        George! What are you doing, up this late? Yes, those names are
actual. You must be kidding. There are plenty more where those came from. I
dreamt I was lying in bed & the radio said the smallest piece of Canada was
going to come thru the roof. I relaxed expecting a mosquito but it was
Prince Edward Island! A pretty place, almost naif, good for tourists but
bad news busting thru the roof. George, go to bed! I'm going to. Don yr Old
Codger tasseled nightcap & yr puppy-&-kitty slippers & shuffle off of
Buffalo for the peace of Bowering Manor. I'm going to. There will be time
for these lists of names, & the names of the books they writ, in the
morning.....then ensues the reading of them. You _are_ kidding, aren't you!
Brahms
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:44:06 +0200
Reply-To:     robert.archambeau@englund.lu.se
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Archambeau 
Organization: Lunds universitet
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> Evidentally Mr. Pinsky missed Pound's admonitions against abstraction.
> He's just short of invoking "dim lands of peace..."    -m.


He didn't miss it -- Yvor Winters at Stanford convinced him that
abstractions were the only thing that could save us from madness.  A
nutty conclusion, I admit, and not a good one for RP's poetry.  But it
wasn't a question of missing.

Bob
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 08:22:50 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry 
Subject:      Re: Guttapercha Bunsen is RIGHT
In-Reply-To:  Message of Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:36:35 -0600 from
              

On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:36:35 -0600 MAYHEW said:
>But Henry, this poem is written in English and we are all all too familiar
>with its diction, its tone, its devices, its rhetoric. I have read
>hundreds of poems of this ilk over the past 25 years or so.  That it takes
>about 10 seconds to render a judgment about Pinksy's poem does not mean
>that it is a superficial judgment--it could be the product of years of
>experience.  It's like hearing an out of tune piano--you don't have to
>think about it for hours to know it's out of tune, do you?

Undoubtedly, Jonathan.  The poem was dim lands of terrible.  But my point
was that if critics want to be intolerant, they need to be highly informed
first.  The Pinskys and Heaneys (2 very different-calibre poets I guess)
occupy literary space in the "real" world - a stance more complicated &
subtle than is suggested by comparing the latest postmodernist acado-
experiment with a bad poem by Pinsky.  That's why I liked Schuchat's
suggestion about the Chinese tradition of "transparency" - basically
"character is style".  This might be a way to ground a criticism that
takes groups & politics & subcultures into account - seriously - without
skimming over the detailed characteristics of an individual writer's
approach.

- Henry
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 08:53:09 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: enough already!

Now Marjorie, you know all us "virtual" people just go into the squiggles
when a "real world" critic actually joins the conversation.  You shouldn't
take it as picking on you at all.  Nor is examining the word "tolerance"
a low point of discourse for this list.  But asking Guttapercha Bunsen
for his resume is a bit ad hominem for conversational purposes, no?
Just because he's more virtual than you are doesn't mean you have a
right to rub his nose in real academic dirt ("where have YOU been
published"?) & get away with it.  This is snobbish, if not intolerant.
& it gets my poet knickers in a dither.  Because there's a point
at which the clanking gears of academic controversy & intellectual
rhodomontade LOSES POETRY COMPLETELY, all the while posing as the art's
curators.  Sorry - it's the poets who manage that themselves.
Your "seriousness" & power as a critic is exemplary - & your
question about publication reminds us of the sheer labor &
dedicated consistency involved in pursuing any "real" vocation.
And what it takes to BE the challenging critic you are calling for.
But nobody has to flash their credentials to talk on this list.
That's part of the wonder of it, as well as the inconsequence.

- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:34:26 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

Hey hey Henry Gould someone should write you a song!
But rhodomontade what a word!!
Couldn't agree with you more -- and I thought you were up to no good at
that job of yours!
As an aside, can't help noticing M. Perloff's tolerance of Bloom and
Vendler as we poets eviscerate one another. Certainly don't want to be a
member of the Rough & Dainty Flayers of Pinsky Group.
Do agree, though, with M.P. about literary and political tolerances being
mutually imbued.
Woody

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Henry Gould wrote:

> Now Marjorie, you know all us "virtual" people just go into the squiggles
> when a "real world" critic actually joins the conversation.  You shouldn't
> take it as picking on you at all.  Nor is examining the word "tolerance"
> a low point of discourse for this list.  But asking Guttapercha Bunsen
> for his resume is a bit ad hominem for conversational purposes, no?
> Just because he's more virtual than you are doesn't mean you have a
> right to rub his nose in real academic dirt ("where have YOU been
> published"?) & get away with it.  This is snobbish, if not intolerant.
> & it gets my poet knickers in a dither.  Because there's a point
> at which the clanking gears of academic controversy & intellectual
> rhodomontade LOSES POETRY COMPLETELY, all the while posing as the art's
> curators.  Sorry - it's the poets who manage that themselves.
> Your "seriousness" & power as a critic is exemplary - & your
> question about publication reminds us of the sheer labor &
> dedicated consistency involved in pursuing any "real" vocation.
> And what it takes to BE the challenging critic you are calling for.
> But nobody has to flash their credentials to talk on this list.
> That's part of the wonder of it, as well as the inconsequence.
>
> - Henry Gould
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:40:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:   from "Keith Tuma" at Nov
              23, 98 06:42:32 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Keith, don't tell me you didn't recognize this final line of mine below as
tongue in cheek?  Ain't I adressing your request for "some wit with the
venom"?  And, respectfully, did you read the rest of my post?  I *have* in
fact read von Hallberg's book as well as Pinsky's "Situation" albeit a
while ago now.  And, as I said about young readers, the resourceful reader
can like almost anything b/c reading is a creative act: von H is one of
these resourceful readers to be sure. I can do a lot with Pinsky
myself, though in most cases I end by questioning his merit.
Take these opening lines from "The Living," from 1984:

The living, the unfallen lords of life
Move heavily through the dazzle
Where all things shift, glitter or swim -

Not bad, huh?  Well, that's because they're not really his exactly.  He's
taken them from Emerson's essay "Experience," which opens with a poem
beginning "The lords of life, the lords of life," and, in its opening
paragraph, describes a state where "all things swim and glitter."
"Heavily" also appears there, as does the word "shift."  So as far as I
can tell the only words of Pisnsky's are the not-so-hot "through the
dazzle." Now, I write about Emerson, so I can do some work on this poem in
that regard.   And it really isn't a bad poem.  But, finally, the
comparison to Emerson works very much to Pinsky's detriment.  Even here
(and I'd say this is one of his best) the tendency to a kind of confident
abstraction grows tiresome.  What makes the engine of Emerson's
"Experience" run is the sense of *specificity* - the particularity of his
stunningly casual (read: not confessional) admission that the essay
revolves around the death of his five year old son which somehow "leaves
no scar" - and the sense of fragmentation: "I know better than to claim
any completeness for my picture.  I am a fragment and this is a fragment
of me."  I would to god Pinsky had read those words carefully!  Instead he
seems very comfortable in the role of chronicler of "the world's rage" as
he calls it in that poem.  Is there such a thing as "the world's rage" in
the absence of specifics.  Most of all, I feel like Pinsky could have used
a good dose of the Objectivists to mediate against his double-dose of Ivor
Winters.  Oppen wrote, "mere autonomy of the mind *or* the emotions is
mendacity," and "the actuality of consciousness cannot be doubted."
Good lessons.    -m.


According to Keith Tuma:
> > >As for the older folks who like Pinsky, well, they *are* Pinsky or
> >resemble him very strongly.  And it's a mathematical certainty that Pinsky
> >will like Pinsky 90% of the time.
>
> As Marjorie noted in her post before the pack let loose to scramble for the
> last turd, Robert von Hallberg is an admirer of Pinsky's work and can be
> quite passionate and intelligent about it.  I can assure you that he is not
> Robert Pinsky.  An Explanation of America is a poem I once read with
> interest for its effort to deploy neo-Horatian and neo-Augustan
> verse-essayistic modes. I look much less like Robert Pinsky than Robert von
> Hallberg does.  The more recent Pinsky verse--after that book really--
> seems to me considerably weaker as well as very different, in mode as well
> as in its relentless and finally (for me) uninteresting worrying of a
> thematics of "desire" that I suspect RP took over from his friend Robert
> Hass.  And there are limits to my interest these days in the earlier mode
> at work in Explanation's post-Vietnam discursiveness, with its perhaps
> too-resonant closure warring with its nightmare scenarios of nascent
> reaganism. But it's a book that one might well know whether one decides to
> hate it or not.  Passion requires context and even knowledge.
>
> Before you make a statement such as the one above you might read what von
> Hallberg has written of Pinsky in his 1984 book on American poetry, which
> also sympathetically discusses poets such as Creeley, Ashbery, Olson, Dorn,
> Bishop, Lowell etc. and remains a good study of poetry and nation-building
> (the emergence of a tone of the center in poetry as well as politics post
> WWII).  Or you might read Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry, which quotes,
> among others, Bruce Andrews.  Then go ahead and lob a few bombs:  they'll
> be taken seriously.  Mark Weiss, at least, quoted a (terrible) poem.
>
> I'm with Ron Silliman when he says that he finds it important to read poets
> in the other so-called camp. There's a funny line, by the way, in one of
> Ron's books--forget which--about "Merrill's Pinsky."  That continuity would
> be worth considering, Auden behind them both, Pinsky's (early) mode crossed
> by exposure to Yvor Winters.
>
> It's a strange day when I find myself grateful for Henry Gould.  (Hello Henry.)
>
> Perhaps some wit with the venom would help too.  Always grateful for that.
> Sorry not to have any ready today but this discussion is depressing me.
>
> Keith Tuma
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:48:25 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      Camping it up
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

>
> I'm with Ron Silliman when he says that he finds it important to
read poets in the other so-called camp.



Well, this is true, but i'm becoming increasingly bemused by the
repetition of this banality....

Are there people on this list who have *not* read widely in all types of
poetry, including the most dominant workshop/poet laureate modes????

No doubt there are some, though i wonder if there quite as many as these
schoolmasterly admonitions assume....
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:06:01 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Kellogg 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

>Wow--I never expected to unleash such fury!  If Gabriel G had paid
>attention to my first posting, he would have realized that I began by
>noting that Bob von H and I have just had quite a good dialogue on Howe
>and Pinsky with interesting pros and cons and I said there that I
>respected Bob's opinion very much as you'll see when that "dialogue"
>comes out!  In the meantime, nothing like pouncing on the word
>"tolerance" and giving me the business.
>
>It's becoming tiresome.  But I want to correct one thing David Kellogg
>said which is that "Marjorie separates political from aesthetic
>tolerance" etc.  When the dialogue comes out, David, you'll see that my
>central caveat about the poem in question ("History of my Heart") is
>political--specifically, the patronizing treatment of the mother which I
>take to be quite sexist and smug.  But then David loves to jump to
>conclusions!


Hi Marjorie.  Can I correct your correction?

I wasn't referring to your dialogue, which as you rightly point out, I
haven't had the chance to read, but to your post.   To quote:

"Tolerance of other people is essential in any community that professes
to be democratic, yes.

But "tolerance" of poetries that one takes to be --as one member of the List
said--not poetry at all but just crap is a way of undercutting the very
poetry one believes in and has had a terrible effect of making things bland
and unimportant."

Within the context of your post, I don't think I was jumping to conclusions.
Do I really love to do that?  Nor was I "giving [you] the business" -- I
have too much respect for your opinions to do that.  I post relatively
infrequently on this list precisely because I think too-frequent posting
leads to such jumping.

Love,
David
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Kellogg   Duke University
kellogg@acpub.duke.edu  Program in Writing and Rhetoric
(919) 660-4357    Durham, NC 27708
FAX (919) 660-4381  http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:09:00 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Camping it up
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Banality it is, with the added implication, almost comical, that there are
only 2 "camps"--us and them. I think Mark is right that most of us have,
at one time or another, read a wide variety of poets. In my misspent youth
I used to read Josephine Miles, Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, Anthony
Hecht, John Betjeman, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Louise Gluck, Louis
Simpson, John Berryman, just about anyone in the Norton anthology of
Modern Poetry. I "studied" writing with Karl Shapiro and Thom Gunn as an
undergraduate. I guess it would be possible now, for a young person who
happened to get hooked up with an avant-garde mentor early on, to bypass a
lot of the mainstream or academic tradition, in which case this banality--
"you really should check out Lowell and Auden"--would have some meaning.



On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Mark Prejsnar wrote:

> >
> > I'm with Ron Silliman when he says that he finds it important to
> read poets in the other so-called camp.
>
>
>
> Well, this is true, but i'm becoming increasingly bemused by the
> repetition of this banality....
>
> Are there people on this list who have *not* read widely in all types of
> poetry, including the most dominant workshop/poet laureate modes????
>
> No doubt there are some, though i wonder if there quite as many as these
> schoolmasterly admonitions assume....
>

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:30:29 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      [Fwd: FLUXLIST: Celebrating the Life of Dick Higgins]
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Subject: FLUXLIST: Celebrating the Life of Dick Higgins
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"Celebrating the Life of Dick Higgins"
Sunday, December 27 at 3 pm
Judson Memorial Church
New York, New York
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:25:18 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         louis stroffolino 
Subject:      Fescue Rant (asy)
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   DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE EMAIL ADDRESS FOR HEATHER FULLER?
   thanks.............c
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:34:26 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      GABRIEL GUDDING'S RESUME
Comments: To: Marjorie Perloff 
In-Reply-To:  <3659ECEA.90CEE362@earthlink.net>
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Dear MP:

1).  From what I can see of the screen through the wine stain on my
glasses, I find that once again I have been mistaken for a legerdemainist.

2).  As you WELL KNOW, Marjorie Perloff, I have written several definitive
studies of American poetry, as well as a few seminal articles on the
rhetoric of academic prose.

3).  The most famous of the former, I'll remind you, is my work on the
influence of Trolle's _Das italinische Volkstum und seine Abhngigkeit von
den Naturbedingungen: Ein Anthropo-Geographische Versuch_ upon Whitman's
1855 Edition of LoG.

4).   The work I am most proud of is "The Posthumanity of Late Capitalist
Micro-Narrativity in the Novels of Pynchon and Q.R. Serif," but there's
also "Re-imaging Aristotelian _Eudaimonia_ as a Legitimating Signifier in
the Fuller-Thoreau Editorial Conflict" to bolster my flagging ego on
morning's like these.

5).   My current work-in-progress is (so far) entitled "_Times Roman_ vs.
_Palatino_: A Study of the Influence of Fonts on Acceptance Rates at
Leading Literary Journals, 1985-Present."  (I could really use your
thoughts on this one!)

6).  My only book thus far is _A New Definitive and Thoroughgoing
Late-Bakhtinian, Post-Lacanian, Somewhat-Foucauldian, and
Certainly-Deleuzean Creative Rereading of David Bromige's Tight Corners
and What's Around Them._ (Pseudonymously published under the name
Omnibus P. Poppycock.)

7).  I was also thinking of writing something called _The Posthuman Always
Already Rings Twice: Barthes & The Importance of the Dialectical Semiotics
of Nationalist Representations of Left-Handed Mail Deliverers Wearing
Mauve Great Coats in Central European Epistolary Short Stories_ but I
think that title might already be taken by one of your students.


On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Marjorie Perloff wrote:

> But then I'm afraid I don't know where
> Gabriel Gudding publishes his interesting commentaries.  In what
> journals do they appear?

You take care, Marjorie Perloff.  Yours & only yours, Gabe
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:38 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      What Are The Virtues of Name-Calling?
Comments: To: Marjorie Perloff 
In-Reply-To:  <3659ECEA.90CEE362@earthlink.net>
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On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Marjorie Perloff wrote:
> What really troubles me is the endless name-calling here.

1).  What are the virtues of name-calling?
        a).  It says, I resent your exclamation points.
        b).  It says, Your question marks have not been earned.
        c).  It is a nice substitute for fisticuffs in an era of keyboards.
        d).  As the first sublimation of physical battle, it is the spice
             of intellectual battle.
        e).  For the abacus and the kazoo could not argue without first
             giving each other names.
        f).  For we are all essentially nameless, and calling names
             highlights this little truth.
        g).  It shouts DIE to the hippy vibe.


-- Guttapercha
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 13:24:43 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Kristen Gallagher 
Subject:      Re: Fescue Rant (asy)
In-Reply-To:   from
              "louis stroffolino" at Nov 24, 98 12:25:18 pm
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rescuefantasy@mailcity.com


>
>    DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE EMAIL ADDRESS FOR HEATHER FULLER?
>    thanks.............c
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 13:54:18 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joseph Conte 
Organization: SUNY at Buffalo
Subject:      Stern and Pinsky
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I'm intolerant to the extent that I will not pay good money to read
poetry I dislike.

Marjorie Perloff, in many lectures in which she's had at the trolls of
mainstream poetics, always amazes me with the thoroughness with which
she's read the poets she dislikes.  She is intolerant of their
mannerisms, but she knows their work well enough to attack them in
public.

Know your enemy.  Reconnaissance.

Did anyone catch the mewling Gerald Stern (not the howling Howard) on
the News Hour last night?  Holding up the copy of his book-award winning
volume like a box of Bisquick?  Reading the most banal poems with what
one could only call a respiratory tic?

If it comes to this, please let us have the dashing, mellifluous, dare I
say sexy, Mr. Pinsky as the representative of American poetry on the
News Hour.  However much we might prefer not to read his poetry, let's
not pass over the fact that an engaging spokesperson probably "sells"
more Americans on the pleasures of poetry than the unattractive,
self-congratulating, boorish, and uninteresting Mr. Stern.

Joseph Conte

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=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:00:12 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Fred Muratori 
Subject:      Re: Stern and Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <365B00DA.78E3046@acsu.buffalo.edu>
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>Did anyone catch the mewling Gerald Stern (not the howling Howard) on
>the News Hour last night?  Holding up the copy of his book-award winning
>volume like a box of Bisquick?  Reading the most banal poems with what
>one could only call a respiratory tic?
>
>If it comes to this, please let us have the dashing, mellifluous, dare I
>say sexy, Mr. Pinsky as the representative of American poetry on the
>News Hour.  However much we might prefer not to read his poetry, let's
>not pass over the fact that an engaging spokesperson probably "sells"
>more Americans on the pleasures of poetry than the unattractive,
>self-congratulating, boorish, and uninteresting Mr. Stern.
>
>Joseph Conte
>
Actually, I just thought Stern (whose popularity and reputation I've never
been able to fathom) looked befuddled, tentative, out-of-his-element, as
most 70-something folks unaccustomed to being on television might be. His
attempt to hold his book up to the camera only succeeded in catching the
white glare of the studio lights, obscuring the cover entirely.  It was
just embarassing. And sad. What I found more irritating were the host's
(can't remember her name) attempts to ask penetrating questions
("Now...what _about_ that tortoise?") that only reminded me of a high
school English teacher trying lamely to rouse a snoozing class. Almost made
me run out of the room like a hare.  Like a hare.  Like a hare.

Still wasn't enough to make me wish for Pinsky, though.

-- Fred M.

********************************************************
Fred Muratori
(fmm1@cornell.edu)
Reference Services Division
Olin * Kroch * Uris Libraries
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
WWW: http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html
*********************************************************
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:07:21 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Carl Wilson 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky

((Pardon me for jumping in here all wet for the first time; we'll skip intros
for the moment, though it may be useful to know I'm writing from Toronto.))

While not agreeing with all his aesthetic shadowplays, i appreciated what
Michael Magee had to say late yesterday on the Pinsky perplex: Yes, it's
intriguing to consider why he has a readership that Susan Howe and all the
howler monkeys we esteem haven't got. But it really is a matter of Who Exists to
people who've not breached the fence and gone out searching in the wilderness -

- whether that's from lack of passion/time or simply not having had a clue
dropped in their faces that there's anything beyond the fence, any door in the
Magrittean sky to exit tinytown culture - or, more likely, anything other than
mistaking (as is easy for any urban youth) the so-called counterculture, the
hip-and-dirty bohemia in the movies and off-hours of MTV, for the Other
Tradition.

 As a young'un, for instance, my encounters with O'Hara were always - from my
small-town-ontario vantagepoint - mediated by a misapprehension that lumped him
w/ Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso - which made me take his poems as
spontaneous-bop-prosody, assume they were self-celebrating slapdashery, and not
read more closely. It took till years later for me to revisit them and
appreciate how much F.O'H's version of extasy was self-subverting, rather than
simple Beat machojaculation as I'd thought. The all-too-easy
miscontextualization slowed down what I coulda gained and where I coulda gone.

By contrast, as a Canuck undergrad, I became aware reasonably early on of the
Canadian exemplars of outside-the-lines writing - bp nichol, Chris Dewdney
(before he let himself be swallowed in the techno-hipoisie), some of Michael
Ondaatje, eventually even Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, who
happened to do a reading in Montreal when I was there. But since nobodybutme
seemed to notice or talk about these people, they only half-existed. I was left
to assume for years that they were random mutations in the Canadian wild, not
connecting them to their forerunners and contemporaries south of the border and
therefore not really Getting much of what they were about. I couldn't even have
articulated why I liked them, at the time, having no broader poetics, no
figure-to-ground relationship, to refer to.

Sure, it was inevitable, after all that, that I'd eventually figure it out. But
then I was dedicated to the attempt. Lately I've had letters from friends from
those old periods, with whom I'd fallen out-of-touch, and they'll quote stuff
like Pinsky to me with delicate reverence -- not, Michael, because they are
Pinsky, but in a sentiment of we-always-liked-poetry-didn't-we-? and that's all
they've stumbled on since. I'm not about to laugh or argue at them, but the
distance apart is certainly emphasized at such moments.

I see no reason why those same people couldn't get into Howe. They're smart
enough. But to alter the dynamic would take changes in, for instance, how Howe
gets talked-up by publishers and brought into a public sphere. Eg., what living
poet can we name who'd *want* to be Laureate whom we'd *like* to be Laureate?
(Same reason there are no politicians worth voting for, btw.) At least Pinsky
works the job hard, if with excess gravit-ass.

As well there'd have to be a change in the Other Tradition's self-image. The
question of opposition is fraught: kneejerk oppositionalism reads to the
outsider as "we're against people like YOU, you Pinsky-pinching pantywaist." No
wonder they don't rush to buy up the whole Sun & Moon backlist. On the other
hand, if aesthetic oppositionalism values itself as invisible but perpetual
counterweight, as may be true, then there's no use complaining about
minoritarian status and treating that as odd or inexplicable.

     carl patrick wilson
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:41:30 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Prejsnar 
Subject:      once again, knee-jerks all around
In-Reply-To:  <9810249119.AA911948954@ccMail.GlobeAndMail.ca>
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On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Carl Wilson wrote:

>
> As well there'd have to be a change in the Other Tradition's self-image. The
> question of opposition is fraught: kneejerk oppositionalism reads to the
> outsider as "we're against people like YOU, you Pinsky-pinching pantywaist." No
> wonder they don't rush to buy up the whole Sun & Moon backlist. On the other
> hand, if aesthetic oppositionalism values itself as invisible but perpetual


Carl Wilson's post was really thoughtful and fascinating.  However we
really have had enuff i think of this "knee-jerk"  bizness.

There is a chronic, hand-wringing self-doubt among people whose poetics
put'em outside the mainstream, that tends to manifest itself in
repeated use of phraseology like that quoted above.  In 1997 and 1998
there were several "dialogues" in different mags, in which poets
castigated themselves and their peers for "knee-jerk experimentalism;"  i
found this so peculiar and misdirected a tendency that i subtitled a whole
issue of the magazine i edit, "Special knee-jerk experimentalism issue."

In my experience, there really isn't quite as much bullying of Pinskites
as the above seems to declare.  Why, i haven't beaten anyone up for
reading Lowell or Pinsky for, jeeez, it must be 4 or 5 months...

swaggeringly,
Mark
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:32:02 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" 
Subject:      FW: Contemp. Women's Poetry & the Tradition (1/5; ALA, 5/27-5/30)
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Of use? If not, w.p.b.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lisa Sewell [SMTP:lsewell@email.vill.edu]
> Sent: Monday, November 23, 1998 1:34 PM
> To:   cfp@dept.english.upenn.edu
> Subject:      CFP: Contemp. Women's Poetry & the Tradition (1/5; ALA,
> 5/27-5/30)
>
> I am interested in organizing a panel on women's poetry for the upcoming
> American Literature Association conference in Baltimore, May 27-30.  My
> idea for the panel is to contextualize the work of contemporary women
> poets within the larger tradition of twenieth century poetry.  If
> contemporary women poets have inscribed their own tradition, what are its
> characteristics?  How do women poets rewrite, reject or conform to
> conceits that are central to our understanding of the tradition.  All
> theoretical approaches, but papers that make use of theories of women's
> writing are especially encouraged.
> Please send or email abstracts only to Professor Lisa Sewell, Deparment of
> English, Villanova University, Villanova, PA  19085.
> lsewell@email.vill.edu. by January 5, 1999.
>
> Please note:  I will be choosing papers that seem to make up the best,
> most coherent panel, and sending in a proposal to the Association of
> American Literature.  Panel proposals are due Jan. 30, so I need to get
> all the submissions by the beginning of the month.
>
>          ===============================================
>          From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
>                       CFP@english.upenn.edu
>                        Full Information at
>                 http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
>           or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
>          ===============================================
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:56:14 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      Carl Wilson's question
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>. Eg., what living
>poet can we name who'd *want* to be Laureate whom we'd *like* to be Laureate?

Charles Bernstein. Ron Silliman. Lyn Hejinian. Leslier Scalapino. Barrett
Watten. Bob Perelman. Robert Grenier. (More to the point, how about Grenier
replace Letterman and the Late Night Show replace movie stars with
counter-culture poets? --I entirely agree with Carl Wilson, people are
smart enough, they only require exposure : to echo EP,

 The thought of what America would be like [x 3]
 if Bob Grenier was in charge of the Late Show
 ah well, it troubles my sleep.

And it would disturb America's sleep for good. [Fond as I am of Paul
Schaeffer, I think he should be replaced by Larry Ochs and the Rova
Quartet].)

db3
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:00:27 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Poetics List 
Subject:      Two Tenure Track Jobs (fwd)
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F.Y.I.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:25:25 -0500
From: Rachel Blau DuPlessis 
To: poetics@acsu.buffalo.edu
Subject: Two Tenure Track Jobs



Subject: Two Tenure Track Jobs

Dear Listafarians: I am sorry that my posting of the following may
have historical layers that I don't and didn't control, but I wanted
you all to know the following, which was just announced to us:
Temple University, Department of English
Two Provost Authorized Assistant Professor tenure-track positions 1)
Creative Writing, with expertise in poetry and creative non-fiction
(memoir, autobiography, poetics, etc.). Ph.D. or MFA in hand by
September 1, 1999; 2) Professional and Organizational Writing, with
expertise in business and technical writing, global corporate and
institutional discourses, writing program pedagogy. Ph.D. in hand or
by September 1, 1999. Additional expertise in British or Anglophone
litertures (1700 to the present) preferred for both positions.
Evidence of strong scholarly/ creative potential and strong teaching
credentials expected for both positions. Top candidates will be
interviewed during campus visit early in Spring 1999 semester.
Appointments will be made by the end of February 1999. Please send
letter of application, C.V., writing sample, and at least two letters
of
reference, by January 10, 1999, to Daniel T. O'Hara, Chair,
department of
English, Temple University, 1114 W. Berks Street, Philadelphia, PA
19122-6090. Temple University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  That
is
the official wording of our job announcement. Thanks for your
attention.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis ========================= Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 215-204-1810
=========================
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA 19122
215-204-1810
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:17:48 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" 
Subject:      Re: outtake from preparing _whether hotel_ for PERFORATIONS
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:
m i s p e l l e d  nomad
a d     l
r e     e
i n     c
a t     t
  i     r
  t     i
  y     c
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:50:38 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Jennifer says
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


Jennifer says


Jennifer says, already dead, we're more alive than you are. Jennifer says,
take three giant steps. Jennifer says, your feet are rotting, and I just
said something and you can't speak. Jennifer says, shake those arms and
legs. Jennifer says, see how they run. Jennifer says, pass the antler down
to Julu.

Julu says, already dead, we're more alive than you are. Julu says, I took
those steps. Julu says, now spread your legs and somersault. Julu says,
now shake your head in No No No! Julu says, your head falls off but we
don't care. Julu says, see how you run. Julu says, see how they run after
you. Julu says, pass the antler down to Nikuko.

Nikuko says, already dead, we're more alive than you are. Nikuko says, I
gave those steps. Nikuko says, now drink the drink and eat the meat.
Nikuko says, now jump your bones up and down. Nikuko says, shake those
bones and shake that meat. Nikuko says, take three steps backward, pass
the antler down to Jennifer.

Jennifer says, already dead, we're more alive than you are. Jennifer says,
I said those steps. Jennifer says, now turn yourself from side to side.
Jennifer says, now run away and don't come back. Jennifer says, see how
they run. Jennifer says, see how they run after you. Jennifer says, place
the antler on the ground.

Julu says, place the antler.
Nikuko says, place the antler.
Jennifer says, place the antler on the ground.


__________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:24:26 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Carl Wilson 
Subject:      Re: once again, knee-jerks all around

At the risk of being kneejerk myself, a quick response to Mark P's response:

I wrote:
>The question of opposition is fraught: kneejerk oppositionalism reads to the
> outsider as "we're against people like YOU, you Pinsky-pinching pantywaist."
>No wonder they don't rush to buy up the whole Sun & Moon backlist. On the
>other hand, if aesthetic oppositionalism values itself as invisible but
>perpetual counter... (etc)

And Mark said:
     > we really have had enuff i think of this "knee-jerk"  bizness...
>In my experience, there really isn't quite as much bullying of Pinskites
>as the above seems to declare.  Why, i haven't beaten anyone up for
>reading Lowell or Pinsky for, jeeez, it must be 4 or 5 months...

     Point taken, but it was a problem of syntax not intent - I should have
     said, "oppositionalism tends to be read **from outside** as kneejerk,
     as indiscriminate in its target practice and so (to venture the word)
     intolerant." That is, not that it is kneejerk, but that people's
     natural fear of exclusion and inaccess creates the expectation. That
     doesn't make loyalty to an anti-tradition less valuable, but it does
     make it "fraught." Inherent in the attempt to-boldly-go beyond
     outlying frontiers is that there'll be a public-relations gap. I think
     the Other Tradition could use more genial popularizers, but I think
     there's been evidence in this discussion of some bitters over what's
     pop and what's not. Which is kinda disingenuous or at least
     unrealistic.

     Carl
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:31:40 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Carmen Butcher 
Subject:      Thanks Hilton Obenzinger
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Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Your intolerant and articulate paragraph was much appreciated by this poetry
enthusiast, also near Stanford.  Cheers, Carmen Butcher
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 13:56:17 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Stern and Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Frde--my take on this exactly. What I found most curious was Stern's
attempts to elucidate the hidden imagery in the poems--at one point a poem
refers to an animal's grey whiskers, and we're apparently supposed to
divine that that's a reference to hasidim. If so, it's more opaque than
Zukofsky. That said, the poems were at least more interesting than Pinsky,
altho the camera presence was simply cruel.

At 03:00 PM 11/24/98 -0400, you wrote:
>>Did anyone catch the mewling Gerald Stern (not the howling Howard) on
>>the News Hour last night?  Holding up the copy of his book-award winning
>>volume like a box of Bisquick?  Reading the most banal poems with what
>>one could only call a respiratory tic?
>>
>>If it comes to this, please let us have the dashing, mellifluous, dare I
>>say sexy, Mr. Pinsky as the representative of American poetry on the
>>News Hour.  However much we might prefer not to read his poetry, let's
>>not pass over the fact that an engaging spokesperson probably "sells"
>>more Americans on the pleasures of poetry than the unattractive,
>>self-congratulating, boorish, and uninteresting Mr. Stern.
>>
>>Joseph Conte
>>
>Actually, I just thought Stern (whose popularity and reputation I've never
>been able to fathom) looked befuddled, tentative, out-of-his-element, as
>most 70-something folks unaccustomed to being on television might be. His
>attempt to hold his book up to the camera only succeeded in catching the
>white glare of the studio lights, obscuring the cover entirely.  It was
>just embarassing. And sad. What I found more irritating were the host's
>(can't remember her name) attempts to ask penetrating questions
>("Now...what _about_ that tortoise?") that only reminded me of a high
>school English teacher trying lamely to rouse a snoozing class. Almost made
>me run out of the room like a hare.  Like a hare.  Like a hare.
>
>Still wasn't enough to make me wish for Pinsky, though.
>
>-- Fred M.
>
>********************************************************
>Fred Muratori
>(fmm1@cornell.edu)
>Reference Services Division
>Olin * Kroch * Uris Libraries
>Cornell University
>Ithaca, NY 14853
>WWW: http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html
>*********************************************************
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:56:34 -0500
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: enough already!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I haven't had much stake in this discussion being one of those outmoded
individuals who feel that the potentialities of modernism have either
been abandoned or betrayed for the lesser idioms, but let me provide
some raw data from the realm of commerce e. g. my bookstore. Anyone
who's been here will attest to the fact that we maintain the best
selection of USED poetry in Washington, DC, just as Rod Smith at Bridge
Street has the best new selection. Our selection is so good because we
are insiders--that is we know something about poetry. Not from a
published critical standpoint (that was a cheap shot from Perloff though
Gudding's knowledge seems to be exceptionally limited, so why bother
with him) but from our reading and writing and, of course, public
discourse- much of which takes place in the store. Pinsky fans to
paraphrase Eliot cannot bear too much reality, at least as regards their
poetic tastes. They generally are reluctant to provide an exegesis of
what they are reading. They admire the clarity of a Pinsky, Stern,
Graham, Hass et al. and often that's all they require. If they write
reviews for the papers or blurbs for books the word that always appears
is 'accessibility'. The Georgians used to call it 'perspicuity'. They
associate accessibility with universality and by extension regard their
own condition as template for the rest of the world. This has been
called 'liberal' or 'bourgeois'. They find my decades long modernist
passion for ruminating and writing upon and through Europoean
transcendental philosophy, the philosophy of science and technology and
American history among other subjects to be utterly extraneous to what
they "look for in poetry" and downright intimidating. Some, because I
engage them concerning their poetic tastes, have stopped coming to my
store or only come when they can feel certain I will not be there. They
are less likely to be poets themselves than those in the Susan Howe camp
(if I may be allowed to carry forward these crude distinctions and
general observations.) The Susan Howe requesters are decidedly from a
smaller coterie and less connected to people who read "poetry for
pleasure." Like most underdogs, as they perceive themselves, they are
more likely to be willing to engage in theoretical discourse, trying to
hammer home their own position. They also are more inclined to read
poetry to establish for themselves a sense of poetic-historical
continuity. Pleasure does not appear to be their primary motivation. If
you link pleasure and consumption, like I'm forced to do everyday as a
merchant, you can draw some distinctions (possibly worthless) between
two generalized though hotly perceived approaches to poetry.
I like to watch sales anomalies at the store. It relieves some of the
banality and boredom of operating a business. One such phenomenon
surrounds T.S. Eliot and the popularity of the Broadway musical Cats
based on Eliot's Old Possum's Books of Practical Cats. Apparently after
seeing Cats, many people who either read no poetry or very little went
out and purchased the Complete Poems and Plays of Ol' Possum. Then
finding there was more to Eliot than anthropomorphised animals, they
dumped unread mint copies on the used market. It was also a Book of the
Month Club selection. But even though I've bought perhaps several dozen
copies of the Eliot, I'm often, as now, sold out. Anyone serious about
poetry buys one; but so do many people who read poetry for pleasure.
Eliot is one of the most 'accessible'. That's why he is treated with
some deference, say, by journalists at the Washington Post who have
nothing but smug dismissiveness for Pound, Joyce, Olson and Duncan. The
Post was in a tizzy over the recent promotion of Ulysses as the 20th
century's greatest novel because they, being the full measure of all
discourse, literary political and otherwise, could not understand it. I
had just with great pleasure and much thoughtful exegesis and criticism
for help just finished Finnegans Wake. But my quite natural and superior
knowledge of Joyce would never land me a review much less a job at the
Post or anywhere else because I have a natural inclination away from
what Altieri calls the melodramatic, and a natural affinity for texts
that take me out of myself so I'm confronted with new worlds of
information.
A "CLOSE READING" of Eliot might reveal an element of a perceived gap
between whatever was the perceived gap in the flurry of postings above.
I've got to draw the line at praise for Vendler. I can appreciate the
scholarship but some of the "twisty thoughts" she has to invoke to make
a case for say, Jorie Graham go way, way ,way beyond the pale. Bloom's
writing on the other hand was useful to me when I was a young know-
nothing punk, which is the way I'm sure Dr. Perloff remembers me. I can
still recite every recorded Lenny Bruce routine by heart.---Carlo
Parcelli

Marjorie Perloff wrote:
>
> Wow--I never expected to unleash such fury!  If Gabriel G had paid
> attention to my first posting, he would have realized that I began by
> noting that Bob von H and I have just had quite a good dialogue on Howe
> and Pinsky with interesting pros and cons and I said there that I
> respected Bob's opinion very much as you'll see when that "dialogue"
> comes out!  In the meantime, nothing like pouncing on the word
> "tolerance" and giving me the business.
>
> It's becoming tiresome.  But I want to correct one thing David Kellogg
> said which is that "Marjorie separates political from aesthetic
> tolerance" etc.  When the dialogue comes out, David, you'll see that my
> central caveat about the poem in question ("History of my Heart") is
> political--specifically, the patronizing treatment of the mother which I
> take to be quite sexist and smug.  But then David loves to jump to
> conclusions!
>
> Another caveat I have is about the argument that New Directions, once
> Norton became its distributor, decided oh hell, might as well publish a
> new poet like Susan Howe.  This is absurd because the issue would be:
> what new poets did they refuse to publish--a long list, some on this
> list and many of them women!  So why did they prefer Howe?  That would
> take a little bit of investigation, wouldn't it?
>
> What really troubles me is the endless name-calling here.  When in
> doubt, compare Perloff to Bloom and Vendler --not that I mind that
> comparison since I have a lot of respect for both of them.  Instead of
> taking up the challenge and looking at Pinsky's poetry (or Howe's)--the
> only person who did was Hilton O in a fabulous posting--we get endless
> slurs or bravos, etc. etc.  It only proves my original point that the
> discourse has hit a real low!  But then I'm afraid I don't know where
> Gabriel Gudding publishes his interesting commentaries.  In what
> journals do they appear?
>
> xxx
> Marjorie
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:10:36 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Laura Moriarty 
Subject:      grin ear
Mime-Version: 1.0
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It's true. Bromige is right.  Letterman is the fallen form of Bob Grenier.
It's the same grimace - but Letterman's is frozen in place.

I've been away (from here) for awhile, but have a new chap book (Spicer's
City/ by Poetry New York) to trade with anyone who has something and wants
to trade. Backchannel me.

Laura

moriarty@lanminds.com
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~moriarty/
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:16:37 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
Comments: To: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
In-Reply-To:  <365B2B91.2881@ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I love it!  A bookstore owner who makes his clients feel embarrassed about
their poetic tastes. They've got to sneak in for their academic poetry
when he isn't there.

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:18:17 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky
In-Reply-To:  <9810249119.AA911948954@ccMail.GlobeAndMail.ca>
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I'm in substantial agreement, with a few demurs. First, it wouldn't hurt to
take another look at Ginsberg and Kerouac. Minus the media hype they look a
lot less slapdash etc. than you thought.
2nd, on oppositionalism: I don't know anyone who sits down to write a poem
thinking about what isn't going to go onto the paper. Oppositionalist talk
is another matter and I think is an expression of frustration, because it's
not just bad public relations that keeps more interesting poetry out of the
larger marketplace. And patience doesn't help much: Pound and Williams are
barely accepted in that market, Zukofsky, Oppen and Niedecker are almost
invisible, Spicer, despite the two new books, entirely so, and Creeley is
also almost unknown compared to say Stephen Sandys or certainly Merrill. I
wish I had a solution, but as long as the old guard maintains its grip on
the wide-circulation magazines, the bulk of the award circuits, most
creative writing departments, and the prestige sinecures we're not likely
to see a whole lot of access offered to the other side for poetry readers
who might be vulnerable to reeducation. The situation for all I know may be
different in Canada because of its comparatively massive arts funding.

At 03:07 PM 11/24/98 EST, you wrote:
>((Pardon me for jumping in here all wet for the first time; we'll skip intros
>for the moment, though it may be useful to know I'm writing from Toronto.))
>
>While not agreeing with all his aesthetic shadowplays, i appreciated what
>Michael Magee had to say late yesterday on the Pinsky perplex: Yes, it's
>intriguing to consider why he has a readership that Susan Howe and all the
>howler monkeys we esteem haven't got. But it really is a matter of Who
Exists to
>people who've not breached the fence and gone out searching in the
wilderness -
>
>- whether that's from lack of passion/time or simply not having had a clue
>dropped in their faces that there's anything beyond the fence, any door in
the
>Magrittean sky to exit tinytown culture - or, more likely, anything other
than
>mistaking (as is easy for any urban youth) the so-called counterculture, the
>hip-and-dirty bohemia in the movies and off-hours of MTV, for the Other
>Tradition.
>
> As a young'un, for instance, my encounters with O'Hara were always - from my
>small-town-ontario vantagepoint - mediated by a misapprehension that
lumped him
>w/ Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso - which made me take his poems as
>spontaneous-bop-prosody, assume they were self-celebrating slapdashery,
and not
>read more closely. It took till years later for me to revisit them and
>appreciate how much F.O'H's version of extasy was self-subverting, rather
than
>simple Beat machojaculation as I'd thought. The all-too-easy
>miscontextualization slowed down what I coulda gained and where I coulda
gone.
>
>By contrast, as a Canuck undergrad, I became aware reasonably early on of the
>Canadian exemplars of outside-the-lines writing - bp nichol, Chris Dewdney
>(before he let himself be swallowed in the techno-hipoisie), some of Michael
>Ondaatje, eventually even Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, who
>happened to do a reading in Montreal when I was there. But since nobodybutme
>seemed to notice or talk about these people, they only half-existed. I was
left
>to assume for years that they were random mutations in the Canadian wild, not
>connecting them to their forerunners and contemporaries south of the
border and
>therefore not really Getting much of what they were about. I couldn't even
have
>articulated why I liked them, at the time, having no broader poetics, no
>figure-to-ground relationship, to refer to.
>
>Sure, it was inevitable, after all that, that I'd eventually figure it
out. But
>then I was dedicated to the attempt. Lately I've had letters from friends
from
>those old periods, with whom I'd fallen out-of-touch, and they'll quote stuff
>like Pinsky to me with delicate reverence -- not, Michael, because they are
>Pinsky, but in a sentiment of we-always-liked-poetry-didn't-we-? and
that's all
>they've stumbled on since. I'm not about to laugh or argue at them, but the
>distance apart is certainly emphasized at such moments.
>
>I see no reason why those same people couldn't get into Howe. They're smart
>enough. But to alter the dynamic would take changes in, for instance, how
Howe
>gets talked-up by publishers and brought into a public sphere. Eg., what
living
>poet can we name who'd *want* to be Laureate whom we'd *like* to be Laureate?
>(Same reason there are no politicians worth voting for, btw.) At least Pinsky
>works the job hard, if with excess gravit-ass.
>
>As well there'd have to be a change in the Other Tradition's self-image. The
>question of opposition is fraught: kneejerk oppositionalism reads to the
>outsider as "we're against people like YOU, you Pinsky-pinching
pantywaist." No
>wonder they don't rush to buy up the whole Sun & Moon backlist. On the other
>hand, if aesthetic oppositionalism values itself as invisible but perpetual
>counterweight, as may be true, then there's no use complaining about
>minoritarian status and treating that as odd or inexplicable.
>
>     carl patrick wilson
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:19:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: enough already!

ick.  ms. perloff, i think better of you than your post would allow.

i started off on a literary criticism track, but got too annoyed to
continue.  i might go back there sometime -- they say age does wonders
for patience and annoyance.  but until i do, does that mean i don't
get to publically comment on other writers?  do i get to think about
other writers about other writers if i don't publically comment?  if
i don't publically comment, and i promise to think only the thoughts of
Important Literery Commenters, THEN do i get to think?  is it thinking
if it isn't my thoughts?

you see, this is all kind of a chicken and egg scenario -- if i can't
think or publically comment until i amass a critical mass of articles
in One Big Kahuna Review, how will i ever attain this mass, since any
article in One Big K. R. is, in effect, a public comment and, one would
hope, evidence of some sort of thinking?

no wonder i got too annoyed to continue.

yours from the unimportant club which is so unimportant it refuses to
have members; i lift an upside down beer stein to the possible yet
to be amassed (but not probably) pile of critical articles that will
allow me to read and write critical articles...

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:34:51 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Kellogg 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
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>you see, this is all kind of a chicken and egg scenario -- if i can't
>think or publically comment until i amass a critical mass of articles
>in One Big Kahuna Review, how will i ever attain this mass, since any
>article in One Big K. R. is, in effect, a public comment and, one would
>hope, evidence of some sort of thinking?


I saw the One Big Kahuna Review travelling company after the Las Vegas gig
ran its course.  Bloom and Perloff were quite good, but Vendler was having
trouble with the high kicks, and her straw boater kept falling off.  A low
point was audience member Cary Nelson lobbing tomatoes at the stage.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:47:22 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Aldon Nielsen 
Subject:      this needful thing
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Michael B.!

I'm interested in the project you describe, but wonder about what appears
to me an inescabaple epistemological problem --

I need poetry -- I'd like to say that everybody needs poetry --

but HOW are you going to figure out "what kind" of poetry any particular
people might be properly said to need at any given time????  We can speak
of what poetry they HAVE produced and/or read -- we can talk of the use
they made of it,,,, we can look at what they have said about their own
needs -- but how would we ever come to any kind of statement about X needed
poetry of the type Y at Z point in time??????

I begin to think "need" isn't the right word?

what you think?  (I'll be away till Monday,,,, but want to hear you on this)
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:41:29 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Carl Wilson 
Subject:      Re: Pinsky

Mark Weiss writes:
>it wouldn't hurt to take another look at Ginsberg and Kerouac. Minus the
>media hype they look a lot less slapdash etc. than you thought.

yeah, both at their peaks have worthy cloudcover, though Ginsberg's peak
was very short and Kerouac's plateau was long but very bumpy; still, both
are worlds away from O'Hara's game, even if just-down-the-street (at
another bar) at one point in time. my point was that there was a period in
my reading life when i couldn't distinguish the diff, because "beat" was
the sole discernible image from the burg where i wuz raised. the slurs on
their writing were incidental to the story.

Mark's points on oppositionalism i agree with -- as i was saying, it's not
a poetic problem, it's a public problem. -- but this:
>The situation for all I know may be different in Canada because of its
comparatively massive arts funding.

     ?? nah.

     first of all, the "massive funding" bit is a myth. our percentage of
     GDP support of arts is much smaller here than in Europe, it just looks
     big per capita from the States; but that's entirely outweighed by the
     fact that comparatively speaking there is *no* private-sector support
     for the arts in Canada, whereas the US has (despite what you'd think)
     an internationally exemplary level of arts-oriented philanthropy,
     conservative as it usually but not always is.

     there are some 'nuck advantages in re: grant money, but even that's
     minor; the highprofile awards, readings, media attention etc all go to
     very conservative poetry here, too, with small exceptions. our Arts
     Councils are no more adventuresome than the NEA and often less. a
     couple of figures have broken through (the late bp nichol's a Toronto
     hero; Ondaatje was recognized for his experimental work, ie, Billy the
     Kid for instance, before he became a moviestar; 1 or 2 others) -- but
     not much more so than i'd say Creeley has. (he ain't famous but he's
     respected, known.) in Canada there are far fewer academic shelters,
     urban institutions, foundations, etc that promote poetry at all, much
     less "outside" poetry. if the playing field seems more level it may
     just be because it's all one big hole in the ground.

     Carl
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:57:14 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
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I posted the message below early this morning to--I thought--the
Buffalo Group, assuming the "Mail To" would automatically take it
to Buffalo, the origin of the message I was replying to.  I do this all
the time.  Anyway, my reply went to Marjorie Perloff only, so I am
belatedly posting it again--even though Marjorie has already asnwered
it to me personally.  If she wants to post her answer to the group as
a whole, I will answer it there--and try to send my answer where I want
it to go.

What Marjorie said: "It only proves my original point that the discourse
has hit a real low! But then I'm afraid I don't know where Gabriel
Gudding publishes his interesting commentaries.  In what journals do
they appear?"

What I replied: "I thought the discourse reached a real low with Gabriel
Gudding's first post--but it went significantly lower with Marjorie
Perloff's last two sentences above.  I think they're a pretty good
epitomization of the term, "academic."

                                                          --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:09:24 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Keith Tuma 
Subject:      Camp R(I)P
In-Reply-To:  <199811241440.JAA20000@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Michael writes:

>Keith, don't tell me you didn't recognize this final line of mine below as
>tongue in cheek?  Ain't I adressing your request for "some wit with the
>venom"?  And, respectfully, did you read the rest of my post?  I *have* in
>fact read von Hallberg's book as well as Pinsky's "Situation" albeit a
>while ago now.  And, as I said about young readers, the resourceful reader
>can like almost anything b/c reading is a creative act: von H is one of
>these resourceful readers to be sure. I can do a lot with Pinsky
>myself, though in most cases I end by questioning his merit.

Well, Mike, my apologies if I DID misread the tone, certainly not
impossible.  Along with the passage I excerpted yesterday, it was your
reference to "little Bobby Pinsky" that I took to be condescending and,
moreover, exactly the kind of rhetoric that defeats your good purposes.
Yes I did read the rest of the post;  I prefer the remarks above and those
that followed.  And I have no doubt that you've read lots there at Penn (I
think you're there) with Bob P and Al F and what sounds like a lively
community.


Mark, quoting one of my cheesier sentences, writes:

>> I'm with Ron Silliman when he says that he finds it important to
>> read poets in the other so-called camp.

>Well, this is true, but i'm becoming increasingly bemused by the
>repetition of this banality....

>Are there people on this list who have *not* read widely in all types of
>poetry, including the most dominant workshop/poet laureate modes????

>No doubt there are some, though i wonder if there quite as many as these
>schoolmasterly admonitions assume....

I'd call attention first to the "so-called," omnipresent and weak
academicism that it might be, and maybe the typing should have landed it
before "other."  And just as Robert Creeley is fond of Hank Williams, I'm
rather fond of banalities as they stagger through permutational forms and
performance.  Otherwise, why would I remain on this list and suffer its
eternal return?  (My first Poetics List statement on this matter can be
found on the bottom of Jed Rasula's Wax Museum, page 339. I was 12 years
old when I wrote that, and now I am 87.)  As for the "schoolmasterly," will
you please put that on letterhead and mail it to my department so that they
will recognize that their apathy and/or befuddlement about my various
activities derives from their failure to recognize that they have an F. R.
Leavis in their presence?

Jonathan,following Mark, writes:

>Banality it is, with the added implication, almost comical, that there are
>only 2 "camps"--us and them. I think Mark is right that most of us have,
>at one time or another, read a wide variety of poets. In my misspent youth
>I used to read Josephine Miles, Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, Anthony
>Hecht, John Betjeman, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Louise Gluck, Louis
>Simpson, John Berryman, just about anyone in the Norton anthology of
>Modern Poetry. I "studied" writing with Karl Shapiro and Thom Gunn as an
>undergraduate. I guess it would be possible now, for a young person who
>happened to get hooked up with an avant-garde mentor early on, to bypass a
>lot of the mainstream or academic tradition, in which case this banality--
>"you really should check out Lowell and Auden"--would have some meaning.

That's a stellar list, you're right, though there are poems by several of
these folks I'd give to any student about to be brainwashed by me.  But
what I find interesting is the self-recrimination and the scare quotes
(maybe) around "studied."  Is this meant to suggest that you learned little
or nothing of value from Shapiro and Gunn?  I also refer you to the
"so-called" re "camps."  If it seemed so, I surely did not mean to imply
that there are only two camps out there.  From a certain perspective, there
are of course infinite differences among "us."  And then from other
perspectives--let's say those informed by Pierre Bourdieu maybe (Hello
David Kellogg)-- I'm sure that the differences and alignments usually
referred to when poets such as Howe and Pinsky are contrasted and not
"threaded"-- as in my first post on this matter--resemble bowlers choosing
between red and blue balls.  And so on and so on.  I am not going to commit
sociology today.

KT
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:30:27 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      one trip ticket to New American Poetry of the 80's/90's/forever?

ok, a few months ago a friend of mine, c.e. chaffin (cechaffin@earthlink.net)
gave me a whooping up about a pet literary bug of his which i am afraid may
have turned into a twainian "one trip ticket."  i herewith pass it on in
hopes i will come out the tunnel on the other side unbeset.

in summary that does no justice to c.e., he finds there to be a
prevailing mode in modern poetry of first person, intimate address.
poems start off as if narrator addressing best friend over a half-full
beer glass and launch, forthwith, into personal woes.  he has begun to
find this annoying.

i brushed it off with an "oh c.e., what does it matter what case a writer
chooses for the narrator of her or his poem?  poems throughout history have
been written in the first person, adn addressed that way to the reader."
c.e. was not convinced.

i thought that was the end of it, a difference of opinion between
writing chums.  but as i read many of the poems moving across my
screen, in zines, journals, anthologies, books, something began to
bite a path from my ear to my brain...  i opened up a variant of this
discussion with another chum, r.j. mccaffery (rjmccaffery@geocities.com).
we both discussed the navel-gazing feel of poems constantly fixated on
"I..I..I" and how poem ABOUT ANOTHER PERSON, i.e. telling their story,
felt less neurotic and self-absorbed, both as writer and as reader.

now during current discussion of robert pinsky, that bug in my ear set to
whining in a high pitched mosquito noise.  i got out my New American Poets
of the 80's to read what there was of pinsky, as well as a couple of other
sources.  lo, it was the "I."

but even worse, the poem groupings excerpted of larry levis, mark
doty, micheal burkard, mark jarman, denis johnson, robert long, steve
orlen, greg pape, bin ramke, michael ryan, micheal sheridan, john
skyoles, gary soto, maura stanton, david st. john, james tate, richard
tillinghast, leslie ullman, michael waters, roger weingarten, .. god,
i'll stop now.  but the poems in their section, poems i've been
reading from that era, poems i'm seeing lately, seem, way too often,
to be these extended "here let me tell you about my sad self, my
precious observations, my sensitive soul, what makes me feel X Y Z" or
these vague, I Am Pronouncing epics wrapping the whole world up in a
ball, covering it with tin foil, and shooting it into the corner in
front of what is supposed to be an admiring crowd.

in short, they began to sound, to me, like a guy trying to get laid.

i admit, the latter image came from yet another source -- a friend saying
"there is only one reason a guy dances in public -- he's trying to get
laid."  and he went on to describe the bravado, grope after rhythm, intent
expression, bizarrely focused energy, of... well, of a guy trying to
attain some of the proverbial.

and there is a long history, in poetry, of guys writing the things because
they are trying to get laid.  and of course, anthologies reflect the neurosis
of the anthologists.

but listafarians, is it just me?  yes, pinsky has gone on to write
many other poems sounding nothing like an attempt to talk someone into
the horizontal.  but don't they, often, sound like, well...  isn't it
sort of an Iowa Writers Workshop sound, the earnest tortured and
sincere confessional (and almost all of the writers in New American
Poets ... seem, one way or another, to have an affiliation with Iowa
W.W.  All of them have an academic affiliation.  most of them are
male.  doesn't that seem pretty fucked up for an anthology purporting
to represent the best new american writing of hte 80's?  and both of
the anthologizers, jack myers and roger weingarten, included
themselves! -- THAT to my mind is really self serving to the limit.)?
isn't writing, from late 60's on, way too caught up in these personal
monologues?  i used to love sexton -- haven't dared open up one of her
books lately...  maybe one of the really experimental (and refreshing)
things about langpo/pomo writing (and it's offspring) is a focus on
something other than the earnest "I"?

r.j. had been particularly tryuing to sell me on thomas lux and stephen
dobbyns.  neither wallows in the earnest "I" -- they stick out in this
anthology, for example, like anything.

comments?  slingshot shots?  flowers?  horrified silence (elliza SHUT
UP!)?

will someone, in four months, write with an insane twinge "one trip
ticket, one trip ticket... all that earnest "I" can't they talk about
something besides themselves or those sophmoric My View Of Life
essays?"

shall i inflict quotes on you all to back this up -- i'm not sure i
could stand it.

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:38:49 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Chicago Review 
Subject:      Peter Dale Scott in Chicago
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For those in the Greater Chicagoland Area:

Chicago Review is hosting a poetry reading by
Peter Dale Scott
Monday December 7 at 4:30 pm
Classics 10
1010 E. 59th St. on the University of Chicago campus.

Scott has recently completed a remarkable trilogy--Coming to Jakarta,
Listening to the Candle, and Minding the Darkness--which mixes politics and
autobiography, beginning with the 1965 slaughter of more than a half
million Indionesians. His brilliant use of collage in the composition of a
long poem is clearly in the tradition of Pound, if to very different ends.
James Laughlin has said of the first volume in the trilogy: "Not since
Robert Duncan's Groundwork and before that William Carlos Williams'
Paterson has New Directions published a long poem as important as Coming to
Jakarta."

The most recent issue of Chicago Review (44:3 & 4) features a special
section on Scott's poem.

If anyone needs directions, more information, etc. feel free to e-mail me.

Devin Johnston



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Chicago Review
The University of Chicago
5801 South Kenwood Avenue
Chicago IL 60637
ph/fax: (773) 702-0887
e-mail: chicago-review@uchicago.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:41:27 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
Comments: To: alphavil@ix.netcom.com
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it's true, Alphaville is a pretty good used bookstore.  I've never
spoken with the staff, though, so my taste has never been commented
upon.  nevertheless, I do read poetry for pleasure.  I didn't know there
was anything wrong with that.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:48:30 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      chicago recommendations
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will be in Chicago  ( for the first time in years)   this Thanks weekend
& looking for some recommendations about good small press / experimental
/ zine   bookstores to check out... also wouldnt mind hearing if there's
any wild readings or shows going on.


miekal
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:55:43 +0900
Reply-To:     kimball@post.miyazaki-med.ac.jp
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         J Kimball 
Subject:      Deepening tolerance
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slogan-free poetics
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:48:20 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Re: what isn't going to go onto the paper
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>  I don't know anyone who sits down to write a poem
> thinking about what isn't going to go onto the paper.

That's *exactly* what new workshoppers do. And for a Pinsky- (and his ilk) induced
reason: They see something like the NYRB Pinsky & figure from the
*prestigiousness* of the mag that the poem must be "good." But they also sense
something's missing (duh...passion, engagement, etc.)--so lots of people go along
thinking good poetry is a kind of bland hole, sensitively rendered.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:59:21 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      Re: Deepening tolerance
MIME-Version: 1.0
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slogan-free poetics

is like gravy without the meat
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:04:04 +1300
Reply-To:     beard@met.co.nz
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tom Beard 
Subject:      Resumes & typography
Comments: cc: tom.beard@cumulus.co.nz
In-Reply-To:  
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> 5).   My current work-in-progress is (so far) entitled  "_Times Roman_ vs.
> _Palatino_: A Study of the Influence of Fonts on Acceptance Rates at
> Leading Literary Journals, 1985-Present."  (I could really use your
> thoughts on this one!)

Actually, this doesn't sound too far away from something I'm working on: the
use and significance of typography in literary journals & books. Not so much
on the conscious use of layout by the poet, but on the decisions &
assumptions made by editors.

Here at least, literary journals & small presses tend to fall into two
camps:

1) Traditional "fine printing", "proper" typography:
Garamond/Bembo/Minion/Baskerville/Bodoni, with small caps, old-style
figures, ligatures etc. Chiefly from University presses, or those who want
to be University presses.

2) Anti-slick, we-don't-give-a-fuck-how-it-looks, "anti-" typography:
Times/Arial/Courier, layout according to Word's defaults. Either from those
whose knowledge & resources truly don't allow for typographic niceties; or
from those who are using this look as a conscious signifier for cheapness,
urgency and the separation of form from content.

What's interesting is that no-one (with a few exceptions, such as "The
Pander", which is a more general arts/culture/politics magazine) is aiming
for a potential third approach: a consciously-designed "magazine" look,
rather than either the linearity of an academic journal or the "Word
default" look. It seems that layered type, Emigre fonts, blurring the line
between type & image, and all the other tropes of contemporary design are
reserved for skateboarding magazines and annual reports.

Another possible approach is represented by Alan Loney's "A brief
description of the whole world". As an A4, photocopied, stapled mag, it has
some of the elements of the "antislick" look. But since contributions are
photocopied as is, there has been the opportunity for writers to control the
look of their own pages. There's a lot of Times in there, as one might
expect, but also a lot of visual work. Tony Green, John Geraets (are you
still on the list, guys?) and Alan Brunton have played around with typefaces
& sizes; Wystan Curnow photocopied maps & telephone books; Michele Leggott
has a subtle approach to leading and placement; others have used dot-matrix
printers; and I've done a bit with Freehand and photocopiers. Interestingly,
Loney's own editorials have been in justified Palatino: I would have
expected Kis-Janson or perhaps Electra.

Anyway, while Gabriel intended it as a joke, there _is_ a lot to read into
something like the choice of typeface. Fonts signify. If anyone has any
examples from the US (or elsewhere) that choose other paths, I'd love to
know.


        Cheers,
                Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 04:38:04 +0000
Reply-To:     toddbaron@earthlink.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Organization: Re*Map
Subject:      poetics and the holidays (we pass)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--------------12071CE04736
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>

HAPPY HOLIDAYS
(for fifty-thousand received and sent
E-mails)


> the shot--lands--I'm sure
> in the "best part"
>
>
> ps: wonderful how a friendship is--now--e-
> maild--and electronic--like Whitman's tele-
> graphic line--we are
> McLuhan's only
> children--now
> that we "know" what we know "   "
> about the world and each other
> through the wires. Too, poetry
> is slow, as money is
> costly to print
> the faces on those bills
> unseen and read. Poetry
> is "useless", finally, and
> politically, I believe, a trap--all
> those who feed others
> know the poem is
> an ornament--blast-pheme
> he said, a poet
> streaking across the sky
> like some ram-
> jet of old--but really--
> if you were hungry you
> wouldn't go to
> college, would you? trans-
> formed--the ballet--into
> wings--not yet
> transmited, and yet,
>Ballanchine died
>for want of
>nothing less.

--------------12071CE04736
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Received: from 38.29.52.144 (ip144.malibu4.ca.pub-ip.psi.net [38.29.52.144])
        by swan.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.8.7/8.8.5) with SMTP id QAA13062;
        Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:27:54 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <365B8859.5B5F@earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 04:32:25 +0000
From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap 
Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net
Organization: Re*Map
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01-C-MACOS8 (Macintosh; I; PPC)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Hoa Nguyen 
CC: toddbaron@earthlink.net
Subject: Re: as if I were
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the shot--lands--I'm sure
in the "best part"

All love to you, two, too

Todd B.

ps: wonderful how a friendship is--now--e-
maild--and eletronic--like Whitman's tele-
graphic line--we are
McLuhan's only
children--now
that we "know" what we know "   "
about the world and each other
through the wires. Too, ReMap
is slow, as money is
costly to print
the faces on those bills
unseen and read. Poetry
is "useless", finally, and
politically, I believe, a trap--all
those who feed others
kow the poem is
an ornament--blas-phere
he said, a poet
streaking across the sky
like some ram-
jet of old--but really--
if you were hungry you
wouldn't go to
college, would you? trans-
formed--the ballet--into
wings--not yet
transmited.


--------------12071CE04736--
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:41:24 +1300
Reply-To:     beard@met.co.nz
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Tom Beard 
Subject:      the first person (to get laid)
In-Reply-To:  <199811242330.SAA29885@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
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> "there is only one reason a guy dances in public -- he's trying to get
> laid."

Hey, don't knock it, it works!

(or at least it used to - these days I just get arrested)


But seriously, Eliza, though you are being a little reductive, it could be a
useful reduction. Many (if not all?) writers consider the image that their
writing might give their readers, at least in the back of their mind.
Perhaps one of the more common impressions that poets (often, but not
entirely, male) are trying to give is, I admit, "I'm sensitive and
intelligent, so please sleep with me".

Here are some other messages that various poets send out:

- "I'm witty and charming, so please invite me to your dinner parties."
- "I'm a double-hard bastard, so don't fuck with me."
- "Hey look! I've read Derrida!"
- "I'm thoughtful and accessible and comforting, so please make me
Laureate."
- "Ha, no-one's done _this_ before!"
- "I've got a nice garden full of nice flowers, and a nice house full of
nice cushions."
- "If you'd had a proper education, you'd be able to read Provencal and
Sanskrit too."
- "I exist, and I have a point of view that's worth reading."
- "I'm such a genius (Byron & Ginsberg & Jim Morrison all rolled into one)
that I don't need to revise or edit."
- "If I use 'sd' and 'thru' and 'cld', you might think I was at Black
Mountain."
- "I write about drugs & television, so I'm not a boring middle-class fart
like you."

Exercise for the reader: match these up to poets you know.


> we both discussed the navel-gazing feel of poems constantly fixated on
> "I..I..I"

I agree, this gets dull..dull..dull. But I think that this is _the_ reason
that a lot of people start writing poetry, at least for those without a
literary background. Not out of narcissism (many won't even show their poems
to anyone else), but because they want to validate and express their
experiences. One hopes, however, that if they continue to write, their
writing will go beyond "expression" towards a thoughtful exploration of
experience/emotions, and how the act of writing can shape experience.

There's another good reason to "fixate on 'I'": the sense of I-ness is a
bloody important fact of our lives. Consciousness & subjectivity are worth
exploring. It could be argued that Langpo's mission to deconstruct the
unified subjective "I" of lyric poetry is itself an obsession with
"I..I..I". The deafening absence of "self" underscores it's importance. I
know that a poem of mine where I intentionally avoided all use of personal
pronouns (no "I", "you", "we", "they") ended up being one of the most
intensely personal that I'd ever written.

Of course, it's not the exploration of selfhood that you're attacking: it's
the unexamined "I" or workshop poetry. One might write a poem full of "I"
and still challenge received notions of I-ness (Creeley; Rimbaud's "I is an
other").

The poetics and politics of personal pronouns seems endlessly fascinating.
The pronoun of choice among the local workshop crowd (otherwise known as the
VUP mafia) is "you": "You walk/beside water. Your/mouth is full of song." To
me, it makes everything sound like a choose-you-own-adventure book: the
Sundaystream crowd complain that it makes everything sound detached and
bloodless. It's probably the result of wanting to be impersonal, but not
wanting to use the word "one" because it makes one sound like Prince
Charles.

Someone in a workshop once told me off for using the word "we" in a poem.
She claimed that it was arrogant, the royal "we", and that "you can only
speak for yourself". It made me think, but I still use "we" quite a lot,
because it allows a subtle ambiguity of speaking positions: an intimate
speech between friends or lovers; satirically speaking for one's generation;
an almost mythological mode of speaking for the species; and yes even the
royal "we" at times.


> he went on to describe the bravado, grope after rhythm, intent
> expression, bizarrely focused energy, of... well, of a guy trying to
> attain some of the proverbial.

To me, this sounds like a description of some fairly interesting poetry...


        Cheers,
                Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 23:06:12 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      6).  My only book thus far is _A New Definitive and Thoroughgoing
              Late-Bakhtinian, Post-Lacanian, Somewhat-Foucauldian,
              and Certainly-Deleuzean Creative Rereading of David Bromige's
              Tight Corners and What's Around Them._
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

While I realize Gabriel spoke in jest, no doubt somewhat at random, & even
perhaps in disparagement ("Omnibus P. Poppycock" would scarcely write
anything worthwhile), like Tom Beard with his typography project [which I
find fascinating] I feel that my 1974 book, _Tight Corners_ , would yield
much to such a reading. I had not read any of those authors at that time,
so nothing of theirs is woven in; discounting trickle-down and cultural
synchronicities, then, the tight corners would prove perfect vehicles for
projection.

I say everything you're thinking. I have no thoughts of my own.


David
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 01:24:59 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Emily Lloyd 
Subject:      I ain't for Iowa
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Ach, everybody off Marjorie.  It was a low dig, but it was a good dig, & I
see no reason why someone with power & publications shouldn't be permitted
to win a cat fight.  To say "We expected better of you, Marjorie" and not
to say the same to Gabriel seems a ridiculous reinforcement of exactly
what most here are attempting to argue against: the notion that one is
superior simply because one's got more pubs.  It's just that here you're
talking moral superiority.  WHY would you expect better of Marjorie?
It's as if people are secretly glad to have a popularly accepted reason to
slap her wrist...a chance to write "I told off MARjorie PERloff today!" in
their journals.

So yeah, enough.  We could've cornrowed Lucie Brock-Broido's hair in the
time this thread's taken.

Eliza--on the "I" thing: it seems "I"s often become the scapegoat for
plain old self-indulgent writing that assumes the poet's life &/or
thoughts are inherently interesting.  "I" comes to stand for "egocentric."
Perhaps the pronoun lends itself to easy abuses, but I disagree with those
who assume it necessarily *leads* to them (or that a poem lacking an "I"
can't be at least as self-indulgent).  It was hard not to crack up when,
on the first day of a course called "Open Poetics," the professor--w/all
the passion of Garbo--cried, "We must get RID of the *I* that PLAGUES
us!!!"  And the "I" gets identified with "academic" poetry, yet it pops up
in many of Bernstein's & Mayer's infamous exercises; Joe Brainerd's never
taken to task; Hejinian's _My Life_ isn't accused of assuming LH's life is
inherently interesting.  Why?  I guess because it's so damn good.  It
lances those nasty PLAGUE buboes.

What of poems that go beyond the elevation of the poet's private life to
the elevation of the poet's private jokes?  Is this even more
self-indulgent?  It would seem so.  Yet in Stein it works (for me) rather
charmingly.  But when Rod Smith writes, in _In Memory of My Theories_,
"Why does Ron Silliman hate Shakespeare?...Do a fractal of it"?  Here it's
not only the poet's life, but Ron Silliman's (eek!  another poet with
another life!) taste in literature that's assumed inherently interesting.
I ain't saying I didn't laugh when I read it.

Just that "I" doesn't stand for "Iowa."

Speaking of--what *does* Iowa stand for, now that Hejinian's teaching
there?  I for one inherently interesting one am now regretting having
steered clear of it (for the reasons you mentioned) when searching for MFA
programs to join and drop out of...(oy! for Lyn, I might've stayed)...

em
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 22:21:53 -0500
Reply-To:     BANDREWS@prodigy.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         BETSY ANDREWS 
Subject:      Re: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Amen to David Kellog's post!  As a Jew and a lesbian, I really resent the
suggestion that tolerance is mediocre or unnecessary or apolitical or dirty
or any other negative.  Tolerance is just about the most we expect of each
other in a complicated world.  As for the entire thread, critique masks
elitism masks insecurity.  Forgoodness sakes, people.  There is enough room
out there in the world for zillions upon zillions upon zillions of words.
Shouldn't we be HAPPY that there is a greater interest in poetry in this
country?  Shouldn't we THANK slam poetry for that, you snobs?  Sure, there
are the economic and political issues of who gets published and who gets
the jobs, but everyone is guilty of playing that game, and you never know
who will rule the next hegemony.  (Everyone might benefit from re-reading
Czeslaw Milosz.  You know, the ironic question, "What is poetry which does
not save nations or people?") For instance, all you "experimental" 'zine
editors won't be publishing any progenies of Pinsky or any slam poets, no
matter how talented they may be and how moving their work might be.  This
thread has been a turf battle blown up into a jargonistic farce.  No one
has absolute authority over aesthetics.  Not even you all.  In the name of
bad taste, I leave you with a poem about my lover's ass:

BEHIND

You. Vista.
Past the blue chewed frisbee and sleeping dog
what an ass in the air says to me about composition
the drive toward regularity, formality, toward heaven
such simple material  inflated, dialogic
relentless choral couplets
ballade in perfect rounds
spondee with caesura  the conspicuous 3rd eye
in the boom-boom thrust toward godhead
we make like the divine  molding animal crack-
ers  Polly wants a...Polly wants a...Polly wants it
perfect  choicest cut
but get closer and the almost imperceptible assymetry
unfolds  something in the air about the form is
slightly off  on the swells a tiny shark yawns
inky blue persuasion  old tattoo  human cant
the difference between rhyming and poetry is this:
hair  hemorroid  pimple  pock  and
the acrid open moment of one's wanting still and all
the 3rd eye winks  the new day dawns
the sharp sweet mess of it--
so human  so actual--
unknots


anti-vanguardist, betsy

----------
> From: David Kellogg 
> To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
> Subject: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
> Date: Monday, November 23, 1998 9:22 AM
>
> OK, I've got a big stake in this, as those who've read my work know.
>
> In these Southern parts, I hear a lot of anti-tolerance talk, of the
> following type: "They don't want me to just tolerate their perverted,
> ungodly lifestyle, they want me to accept it and promote it."
>
> Actually, tolerance would be just fine.
>
> Marjorie wants to separate political from aesthetic tolerance, but don't
> think such separation can or should be done, esp. since the operations of
> the "academic" (which as Ron pointed out, has yet to be unpacked) mean
that
> poetry evaluation and poetry jobs go uneasily together.
>
> Jonathan Mayhew may be right that the word "tolerance" is both negative
and
> vacuous, but our whole language for dealing with these issues is bankrupt
--
> whaddaya wanna do, not talk about it?
>
> Jonathan, if Pinsky is a "mediocre poet," are those who actually enjoy
his
> work mediocre readers?  Mediocre intellects?  Mediocre people?
>
>  I'm with Susan Schultz (hi Susan!) -- I'll passionately advocate my
tastes,
> but I'm not about to speak for another.
>
> Cheers,
> David
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> David Kellogg   Duke University
> kellogg@acpub.duke.edu  Program in Writing and Rhetoric
> (919) 660-4357    Durham, NC 27708
> FAX (919) 660-4381  http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:09:36 +0900
Reply-To:     kimball@post.miyazaki-med.ac.jp
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         J Kimball 
Subject:      Deepening name-calling
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gravy-free poetics
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 23:23:20 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark W Scroggins 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
Comments: To: "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
In-Reply-To:  <365B2B91.2881@ix.netcom.com>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

In re Carlo's post--
yes, Alphaville's a pretty damn good used bookstore, with good prices to
boot.  And without even buying a book, you can get roundly abused by the
owner!  (who says there's no pleasure involved in reading poetry?  beats
out "La Nouvelle Justine:  The S&M Cafe" [motto:  "If you have
reservations, stay home"] any day!)
Mark S
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:44:49 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Weiss 
Subject:      Re: one trip ticket to New American Poetry of the
              80's/90's/forever?
In-Reply-To:  <199811242330.SAA29885@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

You're certainly to my mind describing the target group, a pretty flaccid
group at best. But first person as criterion needs a little refinement.
There's also "Of arms and the man I sing..." and "I saw the best minds of
my generation..." and "My quietness has a man in it..."


At 06:30 PM 11/24/98 -0500, you wrote:
>ok, a few months ago a friend of mine, c.e. chaffin (cechaffin@earthlink.net)
>gave me a whooping up about a pet literary bug of his which i am afraid may
>have turned into a twainian "one trip ticket."  i herewith pass it on in
>hopes i will come out the tunnel on the other side unbeset.
>
>in summary that does no justice to c.e., he finds there to be a
>prevailing mode in modern poetry of first person, intimate address.
>poems start off as if narrator addressing best friend over a half-full
>beer glass and launch, forthwith, into personal woes.  he has begun to
>find this annoying.
>
>i brushed it off with an "oh c.e., what does it matter what case a writer
>chooses for the narrator of her or his poem?  poems throughout history have
>been written in the first person, adn addressed that way to the reader."
>c.e. was not convinced.
>
>i thought that was the end of it, a difference of opinion between
>writing chums.  but as i read many of the poems moving across my
>screen, in zines, journals, anthologies, books, something began to
>bite a path from my ear to my brain...  i opened up a variant of this
>discussion with another chum, r.j. mccaffery (rjmccaffery@geocities.com).
>we both discussed the navel-gazing feel of poems constantly fixated on
>"I..I..I" and how poem ABOUT ANOTHER PERSON, i.e. telling their story,
>felt less neurotic and self-absorbed, both as writer and as reader.
>
>now during current discussion of robert pinsky, that bug in my ear set to
>whining in a high pitched mosquito noise.  i got out my New American Poets
>of the 80's to read what there was of pinsky, as well as a couple of other
>sources.  lo, it was the "I."
>
>but even worse, the poem groupings excerpted of larry levis, mark
>doty, micheal burkard, mark jarman, denis johnson, robert long, steve
>orlen, greg pape, bin ramke, michael ryan, micheal sheridan, john
>skyoles, gary soto, maura stanton, david st. john, james tate, richard
>tillinghast, leslie ullman, michael waters, roger weingarten, .. god,
>i'll stop now.  but the poems in their section, poems i've been
>reading from that era, poems i'm seeing lately, seem, way too often,
>to be these extended "here let me tell you about my sad self, my
>precious observations, my sensitive soul, what makes me feel X Y Z" or
>these vague, I Am Pronouncing epics wrapping the whole world up in a
>ball, covering it with tin foil, and shooting it into the corner in
>front of what is supposed to be an admiring crowd.
>
>in short, they began to sound, to me, like a guy trying to get laid.
>
>i admit, the latter image came from yet another source -- a friend saying
>"there is only one reason a guy dances in public -- he's trying to get
>laid."  and he went on to describe the bravado, grope after rhythm, intent
>expression, bizarrely focused energy, of... well, of a guy trying to
>attain some of the proverbial.
>
>and there is a long history, in poetry, of guys writing the things because
>they are trying to get laid.  and of course, anthologies reflect the neurosis
>of the anthologists.
>
>but listafarians, is it just me?  yes, pinsky has gone on to write
>many other poems sounding nothing like an attempt to talk someone into
>the horizontal.  but don't they, often, sound like, well...  isn't it
>sort of an Iowa Writers Workshop sound, the earnest tortured and
>sincere confessional (and almost all of the writers in New American
>Poets ... seem, one way or another, to have an affiliation with Iowa
>W.W.  All of them have an academic affiliation.  most of them are
>male.  doesn't that seem pretty fucked up for an anthology purporting
>to represent the best new american writing of hte 80's?  and both of
>the anthologizers, jack myers and roger weingarten, included
>themselves! -- THAT to my mind is really self serving to the limit.)?
>isn't writing, from late 60's on, way too caught up in these personal
>monologues?  i used to love sexton -- haven't dared open up one of her
>books lately...  maybe one of the really experimental (and refreshing)
>things about langpo/pomo writing (and it's offspring) is a focus on
>something other than the earnest "I"?
>
>r.j. had been particularly tryuing to sell me on thomas lux and stephen
>dobbyns.  neither wallows in the earnest "I" -- they stick out in this
>anthology, for example, like anything.
>
>comments?  slingshot shots?  flowers?  horrified silence (elliza SHUT
>UP!)?
>
>will someone, in four months, write with an insane twinge "one trip
>ticket, one trip ticket... all that earnest "I" can't they talk about
>something besides themselves or those sophmoric My View Of Life
>essays?"
>
>shall i inflict quotes on you all to back this up -- i'm not sure i
>could stand it.
>
>e
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 21:50:47 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Thompson 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
Mime-Version: 1.0
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I agree with Marjorie Perloff that it is time to put this thread to bed. I
just want to say that the subject heading that I used in my last post was
an act of carelessness, a typical misuse of the automatic REPLY button, and
was not intended as an act of indirect bashing [just in case it may have
appeared to be].

Putting aside the messy rhetorical baggage that attached to the term
tolerance, once the thread got rolling, I at least have no problems with
what she has argued for, except that I think that there is a default
[therefore automatic] definition of poetics which much of the list operates
with, and which I think is too narrow [or: too us vs them]. I say this as
someone who is not involved in any of the camps [I gave up camping to study
Sanskrit].

As for the list's discourse hitting a real low here, I have to agree with
Henry Gould: I've seen it MUCH lower than this [for example sll the sordid
things that Bromige and Bowering do, and have been doing for years
apparently, to their ex-friend Eliza McGrand (not her real name): I don't
know why the list, never mind poor Eliza, puts up with them].

I send this in the dark

GT
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 01:03:41 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      re : tolerance Bowering-style
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> You _are_ kidding, aren't you!
>Brahms

No, honest. I never heard of those people. I wondered whether they had been
heard of by others, or just the person who mentioned them.

But then people here have been talking about one Pinsky--as if anyone had
ever read Pinsky. I never have. I dont know anyone in Canada who has read
Pinsky. But I know 100 Canadians who have read Tom Raworth.




George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 23:00:35 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ramez Qureshi 
Subject:      Re: Enough already. /Bad news about "The Paper."/p.s. Marjorie
              Perloff was wrong
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I've stayed away from this discussion, being but a grad student who tweaked
his
way into a creative writing program that dosn't make you write blank verse.
I've
recently been saved from the likes of Lowell and Auden, and can't get enough
of
Pound on down. This said, "The Paper" (The New York Times of course) ran a
review today on Heany's selected poems along with Venthelaw's new book on
Heany, calling her America's "most astute and erudite poetry critic." Now, the
Times will publish ten full reviews a year max on poetry books in their Sunday
review, but very very rarely will they give one a review as part of their
daily
regimen. Which is only to show just how entrenched the "establishment" is,
when the likes of Pinsky's fellow unextraordinary Bostonian gets reviewed. On
the other hand, I find Stevens in Rothenberg's _Revolution of the Word_
anthology, and isn't ol' Harpo Bloom one of Ashbery's strongest promoters?
Like
Perloff I like Montale, and isn't Montale published (his late work) by New
Directions? The penultimate issue of The NYRB may have had its Pinsky poem,
but the current one has an article on Pessoa, not in the American avante-garde
tradition (and yes the review was by Merwin), but he does get discussed on
this list. I don't know if i've just said anything, but anyway. Why is it that
i'm
not alone in prefering the American avante-garde and the foreign giants?
(Examples of the latter include not just Pessoa and Montale, but recent NYRB
reviewees Milosz, Zagajewski, and Venclova) Heany excepted, along with
Brodsky.
Whatever.

P.S. Marjorie Perloff was wrong. I "need" poetry
-RQ
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:29:08 +0000
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R. Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      pleasure
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Mr. Schuchat: Who said there was anything wrong with reading for
pleasure. I was merely pointing out that when you attempt to browbeat a
pinsky people into reading, say, Olson's Maximus, there usual response
is along the lines that I only read peauxtry for pleasure. Then when I
reply that I read the Maximus for pleasure, they look at me, as though
I'm nuts or a liar. I'm gettin' a complex from it. Can you help
me?---Carlo Parcelli
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 05:59:10 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Brennan 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
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as someone who actually frequents alphaville on a regular basis -- it's a
terrific bookstore -- I've never seen carlo parcelli insult anyone who didn't
insult him first, nor do I know anyone who's more passionate and involved with
poetry then he is, and that includes those of us on this listserv.  folks who
suggest anything to the contrary simply don't know what they're talking about,
which on this list is not all that unusual....

happy turkey day....

joe brennan
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:43:51 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Randy Prunty 
Subject:      the power (or not) of pronouns
Mime-Version: 1.0
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I recently experimented with a poem in which I tried to go "over the top" with
the use of "I".  I was in every line.  not easy to do.   then I wrote a mirror
poem by replacing every I, I'm, I'll with You, You're, You'll etc.  Had a
rather interesting effect, read really with a different vibe,  and helped me
figure out what I really wanted to do with the poem. I considered changing to
"we", but by this time the experiment was over.

Randy
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:32:36 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
In-Reply-To:  Message of Tue, 24 Nov 1998 21:50:47 -0500 from 

I love the header for this thread. Especially around Thanksgiving.
No Mom, I DO NOT want any more jellified squash!  Enough already!

Okay, some sociology before pie. Rules for research:

1. Do not blame the established digestive tract for the lack of Vitamin
Experimental.  Zukofsky had sex appeal - he was just too hypochondriac
& didn't get around enough.  Typical introvert.

2. Do not measure literary popularity in terms of acid relief medication.
Do not misjudge the general public. Regular peeples have enough poetry
in their lives - that's why they don't take any book pitches seriously.
That's why there were all these angsty "I"s hanging around the singles
bars - it was a tough scene.  Casanovas are a dime a dozen - but Masters &
Johnson appear just once in a generation.

3. Book people want to change the world through books because books
are their world.  Same deal with poets.  In modern times everybody
understands revolution - it's like the neighborhood Sunday riot -
very few understand the good life.  And I'm not talking barbecues,
daquiris and Caribbean tub-time. Thomas More wrote Utopia as a farce.
That's why we're always talking sociology on this list, power relations,
rather than the individual achievements & skill & marvels of particular
poets & poems.  Nobody's doing their homework.  The high point of this
thread was when Mike Magee pointed out the too-obvious cops from Emerson
in Pinsky's poem.  I don't know where he got that from but SOMEBODY's
reading poetry.  The cure is obvious - do your homework & write good
indie-crit.

- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:14:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: 6).  My only book thus far is _A New Definitive and
              Thoroughgoing              Late-Bakhtinian, Post-Lacanian,
              Somewhat-Foucauldian,
              and Certainly-Deleuzean Creative Rereading of David Bromige's
              Tight Corners and What's Around Them._
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, david bromige wrote:

> While I realize Gabriel spoke in jest, no doubt somewhat at random, & even
> perhaps in disparagement ("Omnibus P. Poppycock" would scarcely write

No, David Bromige, I most emphatically NOT speak in disparagement.

How can I put this without sounding fawning: I. Fucking. LOVE. Your. Work.

Yours, Brenda Floribunda
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:51:33 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      so don't read this unless---
Mime-Version: 1.0
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well, just unless... i thought i'd try to get back to one loose end in the
prior (i hope it's prior) and trying discussion re tolerance/intolerance,
why i'd rather avoid those terms... reason is that they may well have
broader cultural implications than they might appear to have (which are not
about to be understood, pace gg's remarks, via antebellum romanticism,
however defined)...

so for you trivia buffs out there, the following excerpt from david m.
potter's _people of plenty:  economic abundance and the american character_
(u of chicago p, 1954 originally---year before i was born---but the edition
i'm quoting from is 1973))... potter's (dated as put forth yet still
intriguing) thesis has to do with how the usa as a land o plenty (today we
might say, *represented* as a land o plenty) has created institutions
predicated on abundance... anyway, the following comes after a brief
discussion of the levelling effect of radio soap-operas:

"In a sense---a negative sense---the desire to offend no one involves an
attitude of what may be called 'tolerance.'  As David Riesman tellingly
remarks, the writer and broadcaster, addressing himself to the amorphous
audience, does not know how the virus of indignation may be received, and
he must therefore 'be preoccupied with the antibodies of tolerance.'  But,
clearly, this tolerance is, as the phrase implies, one of mental asepsis
rather than one of mental nourishment.  It deals with ideas not by
weighting them but by diluting them.  Tolerance once implied that the
advocates of an idea might be heard without prejudice and judged on their
merits, but this toleration merely implies that, since society will refrain
from exercising the power to judge them, it will relieve itself of
responsibility to hear them.  It involves not impartiality of judgment but
simply default of judgment."  (186-7)

i would argue that this particular postwar effect (still with us?
resurrected of late?) accords nicely with jed rasula's premise in _the
american poetry wax museum_ that the "age of sociology" provoked in poetry
a formalist's formalism... of course the beats (e.g.) may be understood as
rising *in opposition to* this---as risking offense---in part b/c of their
associated theorizing (as rasula argues---though this latter point is in
some sense more controversial)... and oh yes---i do believe the argument
via broadcasting (potter eventually goes on to discuss advertising) is
pertinent to other cultural forms...

in any case, one might conclude, like me, that "tolerance" as "default of
judgment" leaves something to be desired... if this in fact *does* have
something to do with (not only potter's) "american character" (albeit
revised to incl. a half-century of rearticulation and modification), well
then to ask in the late 90s that we be "tolerant" is at the very least a
complicated request, complicated (for one) by one's sense of relative
abundance perhaps (i.e., one's economic class perspective---whether one
feels we can "afford" to be tolerant)...

ergo i'd rather simply avoid the term... but just so's i make mself
remotely clear... for my part, i prefer to situate today's urgencies
against the backdrop of more recent histories, if only b/c of the amplified
nature of our public domain...

///

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:28:25 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      air for thanksgiving

AIR FOR THANKSGIVING

    I was just leaving our Little Olde Post Office here in Providence, to
check as I do every day my little too-empty Nedge mail box (c'mon you
snobs & snobbettes - send us some poems & reviews! Nedge ain't gliss
but it's dirigible), medgitating and coditating on a previous
message sent in which Henry claimed that the "parochial is the essence
of world civilization" or some such thing, when Our Big Olde Postal
Employee with the scraggly gray hair over ye Olde Bald Pate & the
rubicund Falstaffian manner called out, "yeah, I'm going down to get
some coffee & hang out with the POETS!! Hah ha hah!"  Which caused
the scrappy wee bantam-weight olde Chap he was serving to turn & say
"Yes!  You DESERVED that!  Ha hah!" & dash out the door with Henry;
this fellow, ye Olde Local Character RISD professor Providence-born-
&-bred contributor to historical reminiscence columns of local paper
English teacher jazz afficionado will-go-nameless literature lover
shook my hand & re-introduced himself for the thousandth time as we
strolled along ye Olde Sidewalk, past - a newly-vacant lot.

    Not long before, a little TINY old red clapboard one-story one-
person house had stood there, dwarfed by Burger King on one side &
latest restaurateur-real-estate mafia (truly) ye Olde Campus Adjunct
Parasite creation on the other.  In that little old house lived quietly a
little OLD African-American lady. Now dear reader you must understand that
bellifluous Providence is a delicate diorama of Historical Preservation-
Erasure, and this little old lady represented a very anomalous ungentrified
holdover in that particular spot; she even played a bit part in Henry
Gould's magnificent 2000-quatrain epic poem which takes place over a few
blocks of prime Providence real estate.  So Henry's ears pricked up when
ye Olde Bantam Raconteur said: "yes, she's gone - remember the house there?
I knew her - took a lot of photographs there - the nicest old lady -
afraid toward the end she was being ripped off by her nurse attendant -
and now she's gone - and I wanted that little house to be YOUR OFFICE!"

Henry was a bit puzzled by this remark until he realized ye Olde Prof was
speaking poetically as he continued - "Brown should have bought that &
put some mild harmless scholar in there to do their thing - that was
the glory of Yale in the old days - but you know it was that mafia boy's
doing, tearing it down - now it will be a parking lot - "

Henry spoke up tentatively - "Yeah, I was interested - put her in a long
poem of mine - "

"Well now it's just a VOID - nobody will remember - it will be a PARKING
LOT!"

Henry, trying to smooth things over, said, "Well, have a nice Thanksgiving"
or some such poetic remark - the olde Prof said - "you too - what are you
having?  Not turkey, I hope!"  Henry replied (honestly) "well... I
don't know actually".  Spake the Prof:  "ahh.. you ARE a poet!  There are
still POETS around! That's what a POET would say!  Ha hah!"

And after they bade ye olde farewells, Henry felt a knot of bitterness
in his belly, and realized... he was having NOTHING for thanksgiving -
in fact, he'd just received it, in his solar plexus.  And that departing
olde bantam Rhode Island Red - HE was the poet - & Henry was just...
the turkey.  And the grass grew in the little square plot where the little
red house where the little old black woman had lived, long ago, yesterday.
Cowwamaunsch.  Moshassuck.  Cowwamaunsch.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:11:55 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: enough already!
In-Reply-To:  <365AFDD2.6515@his.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>it's true, Alphaville is a pretty good used bookstore.  I've never
>spoken with the staff, though, so my taste has never been commented
>upon.  nevertheless, I do read poetry for pleasure.  I didn't know there
>was anything wrong with that.

Amen, and I read Susan Howe for pleasure and I'll bet most of the folks on
this list do to.

The folks Carlo Parcelli is writing about don't read for pleasure, they
read to have their prejudices confirmed.  As against (to quote C.P.) "a
natural affinity for texts that take me out of myself so I'm confronted
with new worlds of information."  Which doesn't necessarily mean a natural
affinity for, say, Susan Howe (apologies should she be reading this for the
way in which her name is ceaselessly invoked as an emblem), but at least an
affinity for folks who pay attention to what they are doing and don't
settle for the obvious.  Which can be done within any poetic persuasion.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1998 05:54:37 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Alexander 
Subject:      Re: re : tolerance Bowering-style
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>But then people here have been talking about one Pinsky--as if anyone had
>ever read Pinsky. I never have. I dont know anyone in Canada who has read
>Pinsky. But I know 100 Canadians who have read Tom Raworth.

here's to those Canadians!

and yes, Raworth should be the poet laureate of Great Britain

and Lyn Hejinian the poet laureate of the USA

and Phyllis Webb the poet laureate of Canada -- although I understand she
isn't writing poetry any more, so perhaps we'd give this one to Bowering,
who would clearly be a sexy presence on the tube. I might have to get a
satellite just to pick up the right Canadian stations


charles
charles alexander   ::   poet and book artist   ::   chax@theriver.com
chax press   ::   alexander writing/design/publishing
books by artists' hands   ::   web sites built with care and vision
http://alexwritdespub.com/chax   ::   http://alexwritdespub.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:33:52 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      Nedge
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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What's Nedge?  Why should its mailbox be full?  What kind of word is it
anyway?
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:38:20 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         sylvester pollet 
Subject:      Re: Resumes & typography
Comments: To: beard@met.co.nz
In-Reply-To:  <006801be1807$1e285530$adc032ca@beard.met.co.nz>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

        Tom, have you looked at NYQ (New York Quarterly)?  ed. William
Packard has been choosing different fonts for each poem for many years. I
have my doubts about the results, but you should definitely take a look at
what he does. It's still in that "linearity" mode, for the most part, I
guess, but trying to move it. best, Sylvester

>What's interesting is that no-one (with a few exceptions, such as "The
>Pander", which is a more general arts/culture/politics magazine) is aiming
>for a potential third approach: a consciously-designed "magazine" look,
>rather than either the linearity of an academic journal or the "Word
>default" look. It seems that layered type, Emigre fonts, blurring the line
>between type & image, and all the other tropes of contemporary design are
>reserved for skateboarding magazines and annual reports.
>

>Anyway, while Gabriel intended it as a joke, there _is_ a lot to read into
>something like the choice of typeface. Fonts signify. If anyone has any
>examples from the US (or elsewhere) that choose other paths, I'd love to
>know.
>
>
>        Cheers,
>                Tom Beard.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:37:13 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry 
Subject:      Re: Nedge
In-Reply-To:  Message of Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:33:52 +0000 from 

Hi Miekal - it's a poetry mag - comes out about every 9 months - tiny
circulation - struggling to move beyond parochial-traditionalist-amateur
status, but not struggling too hard - would be happy to send you a sample
free if you send address - you probably know some of my biases already
(I prefer Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens for example), but we have published
people like Leslie Scalapino, Jacques Debrot, Wendy Kramer, Eileen Myles,
& other explorers -

Nedge is a neologism born out of an acronym.  Formerly Northeast Journal,
an old RI litmag, which people would call NEJ.  I turned it into a word.
Was happy to learn it already was a word, sort of: mathematical shorthand
for "number of edges".

- Henry
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:44:50 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Emily Lloyd 
Subject:      bobbing for laurels
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Charles writes: and "Lyn Hejinian [should be] the poet laureate of the
USA"

Oh, no.  Oh, no no no.  "Lyn Hejinian" rolls off the tongue so well that
it'd be an acoustic tragedy if she changed her name to Robert.  That's
the prereq., yes?  Sooner or later, if laureate pickers in motion tend to
stay in motion, they've got to get to Creeley; let us give thanks for
that.

em
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:45:15 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry 
Subject:      ye olde SORRY - delete
Comments: To: "\" "@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

sorry - classic backchannel should-have-been.  HEY SEND NEDGE SOME WORK
ANYWAY!!!!  WE USE "FUNNY FONT" - AN ELASTIC ALPHABET COMBINING
MANDARIN WITH STONE RUBBINGS FROM WAMPANOAG ROCK CARVINGS!!
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:02:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Anya Lewin 
Subject:      IET details
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>X-Sender: c.bergvall@lrc.dartington.ac.uk
>Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:01:31 +0000
>To: Anya Lewin 
>From: c.bergvall@dartington.ac.uk
>Subject: IET details
>
>Greetings!
>
>Writing Research Associates UK / NL in association with the Utrecht School
>of the Arts, NL and Dartington College of Arts, UK are pleased to announce:
>
>IN THE EVENT OF TEXT: EPHEMERALITIES OF WRITING
>a second international symposium on writing & performance
>Utrecht, Netherlands
>April 28 - May 2,  1999
>
>[PLEASE SEND REGISTRATION FORM (see below) TO:  ]
>
>'In the Event of Text' is a 5-day symposium on contemporary strategies in
>performance and writing with intensive workshops led by artists of
>international reputation and working with writing in various media.
>
>The four 3-day intensive workshops run in parallel, are based in practice,
>and will be concerned with ephemerality,  exploration and process in
>differing media.  the contents of the workshops feed into the 2-day
>conference weekend and provide a convergence of issues and debates in
>contemporary performance writing. Workshops will be lead by * Jason E.
>Bowman (visual artist), * Paul Pourveur (playwright),
> * Leslie Hill & Helen Paris (digital artists) & * Sianed Jones (voice
>artist). Further details of the workshops are available at
> or on request by post) or by email (see
>contact addresses below) from December 1998.
>
>
>The conference will include papers, presentations and panel discussions
>around ideas of the ephemeralities of writing, and text as event. papers
>will include recent work on tactical media * poetics * telematics *
>authoring * post-dramatic texts * internet radio collaborations * text and
>memory.
>
>'In the Event of Text' aims to explore, through work and discussion, the
>ways in which writing can be seen to function as a time-based, transient,
>ephemeral artform when played out in the context of different media and
>environments. curated work will take place under the following broad
>categories:
>
>* the disappearing text and contemporary live performance
>* the dispersal of written material through new interactive and sonic media
>* electronic writings, cybertext and hypertext
>* the local sites of mobilised writing including poetic and book-based
>practices
>
>Emphasis is placed on performances, installations, readings, open showings
>and curated exhibitions as an integral part of the conference.  A virtual
>cybertext collaboration will be initiated by  writer in residence John
>Cayley.  The first symposium in the series was held at Dartington, England
>in April 1996. [See
>http://www.dartington.ac.uk/Performance_Writing/perf_writing.home.html ].
>The conference language will be English.
>
>Invited contributors include:
>* Fabienne Aud=E9oud * Jason E. Bowman *  Arnold Dreyblatt * David Garcia =
 *
>Heidi Grundmann
>* Leslie Hill & Helen Paris  * Sianed Jones  * Kirsten Lavers * Hans-Thies
>Lehmann * Tertia Longmire
>* Jurrienne Ossewold  * Paul Pourveur  * Joan Retallack * Paul Sermon *
>Enno Stahl * Aaron Williamson
>
>Writer-in-Residence:   * John Cayley
>Exhibitions Curator:  * cris cheek
>Catalogue:  * Sally Tallant
>
>Initiated & Organized by: * Ric Allsopp * Caroline Bergvall * Nirav
Christophe
>
>Contacts:  Conference website:  http://www.hku.nl/events/iet  * Conference
>email: iet@theater.hku.nl
>Conference contact address:  IET, HKU Faculteit Theater, Janskerkhof 18,
>3512 BM, Utrecht, NL.
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~
>IN THE EVENT OF TEXT
>Electronic Registration Form
>
>[also available at ]
>
>* Personal Details:
>
>full name: [
>
>address:        [
>
>city:   [
>
>country:        [
>
>postcode:       [
>
>telephone: [
>
>fax:    [
>
>email:  [
>
>Preferred means of communication: * [  ] mail        * fax [  ]      *
>email [  ]
>
>* Dates:  'in the event of text' will open on wednesday 28 april at 12.00
>(registration 10.00-12.00) and finish on sunday 2 may at 18.00. *
>registration for conference only (friday 30 april  - sunday 2 may) will be
>between 17.00 - 18.00 on friday 30 april (conference begins at18.00).
>
>* Fees: fees include all conference events, performances and exhibitions;
>tea, coffee, lunch, and supper on friday 30 april only. accommodation is
>NOT included.
>
>        [   ]  workshop & conference inclusive (5 days) NFL. 500  (=A3175)
>        [   ]  conference only (2 days)  NFL. 250  (=A390)
>
>* Workshop choice: (please indicate first & second choices)
>
>Workshop 1:  Paul Pourveur              [   ]
>Workshop 2:  Leslie Hill & Helen Paris          [   ]
>Workshop 3:  Jason E. Bowman            [   ]
>Workshop 4:  Sianed Jones               [   ]
>
>Early booking for workshops is advised as there is a maximum of 10
>participants per workshop
>
>* Accommodation & Travel:  participants will need to arrange their own
>accommodation and travel
>
>Please send  * list of hotels and guesthouses  [   ] * travel information
>[   ]
>
>* Food:  lunch will be provided from wednesday 28 april - sunday may 2.
>supper will be included on friday 30 april
>
>* Specific Needs: Dietary requirements: * vegetarian [   ]  *
>non-vegetarian [   ]   * Other [   ]
>* Other needs:  (please specify)  [
>
>* Payment:  Payment in full should be made by April 1st EITHER by transfer
>to Postbank  No. 2354345 in name of 'HKU/Theater Utrecht' mentioning 'IET'
>OR by UK or NL bank cheque/ Eurocheque/ International postal or money order
>made payable to 'HKU/Theater Utrecht' and sent to address below.
>
>Nirav Christophe,  In the Event of Text, HKU Faculteit Theater, Janskerkhof
>18, 3512 BM, Utrecht, NL
>tel.  0031 30 230 0493, fax. 0031 30 232 2465.
>
>[PLEASE SEND REGISTRATION FORM (see above) TO:  ]
>
>****END****
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~
>Writing Research Associates, UK
>Amberleigh, East Allington, Totnes,
>Devon UK. TQ9 7RD
>tel. 0044 (0)1548 521436
>     0044 (0)1803 861631
>fax. 0044 (0)1803 866053
>email. transomatic@gn.apc.org
>www. http://huizen.dds.nl/~sdela/wra
>
>Caroline Bergvall
>Performance Writing, Director
>Dartington College of Arts
>Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EJ, England
>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:38:03 +0000
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R. Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: enough already!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Another Henry misread screed. Nada by fiat.--cp
Henry Gould wrote:
>
> I love the header for this thread. Especially around Thanksgiving.
> No Mom, I DO NOT want any more jellified squash!  Enough already!
>
> Okay, some sociology before pie. Rules for research:
>
> 1. Do not blame the established digestive tract for the lack of Vitamin
> Experimental.  Zukofsky had sex appeal - he was just too hypochondriac
> & didn't get around enough.  Typical introvert.
>
> 2. Do not measure literary popularity in terms of acid relief medication.
> Do not misjudge the general public. Regular peeples have enough poetry
> in their lives - that's why they don't take any book pitches seriously.
> That's why there were all these angsty "I"s hanging around the singles
> bars - it was a tough scene.  Casanovas are a dime a dozen - but Masters &
> Johnson appear just once in a generation.
>
> 3. Book people want to change the world through books because books
> are their world.  Same deal with poets.  In modern times everybody
> understands revolution - it's like the neighborhood Sunday riot -
> very few understand the good life.  And I'm not talking barbecues,
> daquiris and Caribbean tub-time. Thomas More wrote Utopia as a farce.
> That's why we're always talking sociology on this list, power relations,
> rather than the individual achievements & skill & marvels of particular
> poets & poems.  Nobody's doing their homework.  The high point of this
> thread was when Mike Magee pointed out the too-obvious cops from Emerson
> in Pinsky's poem.  I don't know where he got that from but SOMEBODY's
> reading poetry.  The cure is obvious - do your homework & write good
> indie-crit.
>
> - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:20:47 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
In-Reply-To:  <199811250330.WAA53560@pimout2-int.prodigy.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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coming late to this and tried to stay out of it.  my tendencies as you know
are toward the michael bibby end of the pole, though i like very much
marjorie AND robert von hallberg as colleagues. and this more i have to say
about marjorie's post.  i've learned not to mind, to even appreciate,
poets' strong likes and dislikes in other poetry. but to blame the
proliferation and hegemonic popularity of poets like PINSKY on
MULTICULTURAL TOLERANCE, for Godsake.  Methinks someone slipped up here.
Is affirmative action (which has certainly resulted in OUR being as well
treated as we are, Marjorie, like it or not) really responsible for the
popularity of poets like Robert Frost, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky and all
those other crusty, fusty Roberts that everyone oohs and ahhs over?  Did
folks really die in the 1960s and 70s, shot by police in their sleep or as
they worked out in the prison yard, so that Black studies programs etc
could be established, living conditions improved, infant mortality curbed,
and the ROBERT Barons put in power?  i mean, puh-leeze.  perhaps "hordes of
foreign immigrants" are responsible for the current impeachment
proceedings.  perhaps we should abdicate our right to vote and to hold
property and to be gainfully employed in a manner commensurate with our
talents and aspirations so that we can get Susan Howe declared poet
laureate.  it seems to me that multicultural tolerance has done a great
deal more good than harm in the academy, in the poetry scene, and
specifically in unseating the status quo in the nexus between poetry and
visibility/power.
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 21:17:31 +0200
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Fredrik Hertzberg LIT 
Subject:      Re: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, Maria Damon wrote:

> poets' strong likes and dislikes in other poetry. but to blame the
> proliferation and hegemonic popularity of poets like PINSKY on
> MULTICULTURAL TOLERANCE, for Godsake.  Methinks someone slipped up here.

I didn't read Perloff's mail as blaming Pinsky's popularity on
multicultural tolerance. What I thought she said was that a NOMINAL
multiculturalism has created a situation where tolerance has become an
unquestionable virtue. And that few (academics) make a case for poetry
they feel strongly for, or the value of which they believe in. Which
includes, I guess, a multiculturalism that doesn't only pay homage to
domestic mainstream poetic values.

Speaking as someone doing research on poetry I feel I have to ask if
there aren't people on this list who read poetry not for pleasure mainly
or for personal reasons, but because of a more general interest in
language, reading and writing? Not that these interests exclude each other,
but for me poetry is not something I usually feel strongly about or
believe in. Nevertheless I have a great interest in poetry as a way of
reading, & a possibility of self-reflective linguistic construction.
Feeling strongly rarely enters the picture, but it's difficult to be
interested in someone like Pinsky cause it's not construction work
whereas Howe is.

Fred
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:11:16 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
Comments: To: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT 
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

If feeling strongly about poetry rarely enters into the picture I would
guess you're in a very small minority of subscribers to the list. We don't
just "do research  on poetry."  And my interest in reading, writing, and
language is not "general" but extremely specific. Poetry is at the center
of this for me.

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:38:21 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Thoughts on the Pinsky/Howe
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

well i understand maria's taking marjorie up on the matter, and i would
like to think that nobody here is advocating an anti-civil rights stance
(whatever our diverse views may be as to how to go about it)... but
inasmuch as i've already said what i had to say about m's post (which has
been read reductively in at least two ways on this list), i'll let sleeping
dogs lie...

an interesting synchronicity:  i've just today rec'd my direct mail for the
"tolerance challenge 1999"---incl. my "southern poverty law center/teaching
tolerance decal," on the back of which the word is defined as follows:

        tol*er*ance n:  the capacity for or the practice of recognizing and
respecting
        the beliefs or practices of others

        (the american heritage dictionary)

of course they want me to help "reduce bigotry and prejudice in america by
supporting the educational work of TEACHING TOLERANCE"... and so i am asked
to enclose a tax-deductible contribution of ____ ($25 or more gets me their
mag, a 22-minute "seeking justice" video, and a quarterly newspaper)...

now, assuming all of this is on the up & up (i think it is), there's
nothing wrong with any of it, and in fact it sounds to me like it might
raise some consciousness (as we used to say)...

but i don't think you can import this notion of "tolerance" into the poetry
sphere(s) 'as is' (even setting aside the academic/job issues david k
rightly raises)... lots of difficulties associated with doing so, no?... i
would imagine, too, that corporate america (though of course it sometimes
endorses good causes) would see nothing at all wrong with this effort...
which might give us reason to consider that it's, well, not enough---not
nearly so---not even from a teaching pov...

anyway///

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:45:20 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pierre Joris 
Subject:      Faraj Bayrakdar
MIME-Version: 1.0
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              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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Now that the Pinsky/Howe thread (or rather the egoless egos's chewing of
that bit of american fat) has  spooled itself down & out ad nauseam, and
just before every good thinking american poet gets down to his or her
turkey or tofu thing, permit me to  offer up a meager morsel for
thought. Not about the lesser or greater redundancy of a laureate's
work, or the lesser or greater hackademic acceptance or non-acceptance
of an experimentalist's work, but  about a matter of actual existence
for a poet. How many on this so well-read & -spoken list know who Faraj
Bayrakdar is?

He is a poet, like you and me, except he is a Libyan poet who has now
spent all of the last 11 years in jail, goulaged for life by a
repressive system for having publicly advocated democratic reform, asked
for the liberation of all political prisoners, and — most likely the
worst offense, because it did reach print — dared to publish and tried
to keep going an independent poetry magazine. Repeated queries to the
Libyan Embassy always gave him as "disappeared," until recently when
Michel Deguy, Abdellatif Laabi and several other poets yet again went to
the Libyan Embassy in Paris where they were told that Faraj Bayrakdar in
fact ... "did not exist."

He does, and has managed to smuggle work out of jail, clandestinely
published in Beirut and now in translation in France, under the title
"Neither Dead nor Alive." Here a retranslation (after Abdellatif Laabi's
French version) of "Portrait" -- that of a prison guard.

Malediction said to him: be
and he was
His eyes, two blackened copper buttons
His nose, a badly drawn exclamation point
His mouth, a revolver's silencer
And in the detonator, his tongue
On his shoulders, peacock insignias
bloated with defeats
His debts
threaten the blood banks
with all out bankruptcy
With his blind heart
he protects us
and with barbed wire
he guards us
His intentions are booby trapped
and his smile announces carnage
For him death is wisdom's surrogate
and hell justice's
Excuse me, I have to stop
I'm nauseous
Maybe he is not totally like that
And yet

(February 1993)


Pierre

--
========================
Pierre Joris
joris@csc.albany.edu
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202
tel: 518 426 0433
fax: 518 426 3722
========================
Through the living the road of the dead
— Ungaretti
========================
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:55:01 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: I ain't for Iowa

1) ms. perloff's dig WAS a low dig but, i think, not a good dig at all --
"someone wi power and publications" should certainly participate if she or he
chooses in a debate, but it would be nice not to see list beset with catfights,
and as to winning, no one wins them.  all participants just end up looking
bad.  one can rebut without participating.

2) gabriel HAS, in fact, been multiply reprimanded both front and back channel.
moreover, reprimand has moved to satire and even funpoking -- best methodology
for removing "catfight" strain i've seen so far.

3) i WOULD expect betterof ms. perloff because i've not seen her fall into cat-
fight before.  and she hasn't ever before, that i've seen, tried to dis and
squash people (at least on this list) based on publication/academic creditialing
but has respected multiple, open, and slightly wild nature of this venue.  if
one wants venue where only published academicians allowed to talk, one can go
to m.l.a., no?  except there'd be considerably less to discuss there since good
number of writers (remember writers?  what all this is based on, the writers?)
are not academicians, so they wouldn't be allowed to be published or discussed.

4) might i ask, could we not engage in pointless pejorative? -- i did not, as it
happens, post as i did so that i could go home and write in my journal "i told
m. perloff off today" as you suggest.  i posted for exactly the reason i said
i did, and a pretty good reason it was: iwas strongly distressed at an effort
(however hasty and ill thought out and unmeant as i'm sure it was) by one with
a fair degree of influence to coral the list over to only those who were
published academic critics.  it is not the "well published academic critic
list," it is the "poetics list" and if you read the charter, it is MEANT to be
open to all.  and it DID appall me that this corraling came from ms. perloff
particularly becuase as far as i've seen, she is last person to want to put
down non academics and cut writers out of list.  certainly it was a hasty
moment of temper, and not unprovoked either.  but precisely because she has
that bit of influence, i wanted to be quick to add a voice to tip the balance
so that list stays open to all.

5)re the "i" thing, of course there are always those who make any trend a
vehicle for abominations -- you have only to look at polyester and leisure
suits, or george bowering and raincoats, for examples.  that goes w/o saying,
surely.  my point is, again, as i said: that once youget ticked onto this
"i" business, there seems to be an awful lot of it, some emanating from people
with talent and imagination that seems particularly ill-served by such dull
dog tricks and self-indulgence.

the degree of tedium extant in elevation of one's private life, or jokes, to
public writingt might, of course, be based in part on skill and in part on
material.  but surely it is also in part based on Glamour of writer.  a
truly charismatic writer might convince readers and critics to twist themselves
into knots interpreting (consider charges of lit crit investing in the obscure
because of High Priest(ess) positions that accrue).  what about all those
lesser, perhaps, or certainly duller janes and joes who plod along that
path, though?  or, perhaps, the dianthas and braemores who get kidnapped
into being jane and joe dull?  the young tender shoots in m.f.a. programs,
the anthology readers, the followers of literary journals (in an effort
to be published) who subsume their budding imagination to service of this
"I I I" mode?

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:57:21 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Anya Lewin 
Subject:      Re
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

feeling strongly about a way of reading seems to me to be a perfectly fine
entrance to poetry even if one has a passion about reading that touches on
poetry w/o it being central - reading across mediums - reading as studying,
making, writing, less borders. Personally I mostly make pictures sometimes
moving ones and an involvement with poetry for me can be about a particular
poem or writer but feels more like a general approach and that seems
specific.

At 02:11 PM 11/25/98 -0600, you wrote:
>If feeling strongly about poetry rarely enters into the picture I would
>guess you're in a very small minority of subscribers to the list. We don't
>just "do research  on poetry."  And my interest in reading, writing, and
>language is not "general" but extremely specific. Poetry is at the center
>of this for me.
>
>Jonathan Mayhew
>Department of Spanish and Portuguese
>University of Kansas
>jmayhew@ukans.edu
>(785) 864-3851
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:02:07 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Carl Wilson 
Subject:      Re: Faraj Bayrakdar

     Thanks,  Pierre,  for an antidote to all the ego-snipe of the past
     couple days... is there any org'd action people can take in support of
     Bayrakdar, aside from the usual contacting embassies/politicians etc.?
     (Is he a PEN case?)

     carl patrick wilson
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:14:09 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Re: the first person (to get laid)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I dated a Vendler-lionized&anthologized Harvard poetry chair poet almost 15
years ago when I was in charge of the poetry section in a Harvard Square
pre-computerized bookstore (btw, Carlo, the people who don't believe you read
Olson for pleasure either think you're lying or, if they think themselves
erudite, that you're trying to one-up them). Anyhow, this guy is one of the
"sensitive" poetry types, but was a BOOR on our date, and he got really mad when
I laughed because I realized that the reason he was so grudging about Ashbery
winning a MacArthur grant was because he thought he deserved it more. Anyhow, it
was a first and a last date, regardless the allure of his dancing.

A few years later in grad school, his name came up. One of my fellow students
gushed, "Oooh, I *love* him." I told her I'd known him in Boston, and she asked,
"Is he as sensitive as his poetry is??" I felt a little taken aback, it was
clear she was invested in his being as sensitive as his poetry.

But what the hell, I told her the truth. She still wouldn't read Maximus, but it
was a start.

Tom Beard wrote:

> > "there is only one reason a guy dances in public -- he's trying to get
> > laid."
>
> Hey, don't knock it, it works!
>
> (or at least it used to - these days I just get arrested)
>
> But seriously, Eliza, though you are being a little reductive, it could be a
> useful reduction. Many (if not all?) writers consider the image that their
> writing might give their readers, at least in the back of their mind.
> Perhaps one of the more common impressions that poets (often, but not
> entirely, male) are trying to give is, I admit, "I'm sensitive and
> intelligent, so please sleep with me".
>
> Here are some other messages that various poets send out:
>
> - "I'm witty and charming, so please invite me to your dinner parties."
> - "I'm a double-hard bastard, so don't fuck with me."
> - "Hey look! I've read Derrida!"
> - "I'm thoughtful and accessible and comforting, so please make me
> Laureate."
> - "Ha, no-one's done _this_ before!"
> - "I've got a nice garden full of nice flowers, and a nice house full of
> nice cushions."
> - "If you'd had a proper education, you'd be able to read Provencal and
> Sanskrit too."
> - "I exist, and I have a point of view that's worth reading."
> - "I'm such a genius (Byron & Ginsberg & Jim Morrison all rolled into one)
> that I don't need to revise or edit."
> - "If I use 'sd' and 'thru' and 'cld', you might think I was at Black
> Mountain."
> - "I write about drugs & television, so I'm not a boring middle-class fart
> like you."
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:51:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Poetry Project 
Subject:      Kenward Elmslie
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

A pre-Thanksgiving reminder:

On Wednesday, December 2 at 8 pm, the Poetry Project hosts a reading by

Kenward Elmslie

Tickets are $7, $4 students and seniors, free for members

Kenward Elmslie's books include the long-awaited and just-published
_Routine Disruptions_ from Coffee House Press, which will be on sale the
night of the reading at the Project. His other recent books include _The
Champ_ and _Sung Sex_, both with drawings by Joe Brainard. Elmslie has
written six opera librettos, including _Lizzie Borden_, and the book and
lyrics for the Broadway musical _The Grass Harp_. He has toured widely
with solo performances of his musical, _Postcards on Parade_.

For more information, call (212) 674-0910.

Happy Thanksgiving!
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:04:48 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      happy thanksgiving wishes
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

to Charles of Chax Press : George Bowering is already a noted tv and radio
personality in B.C. (His voice, as Rachel, Maria, and Eliza can testify, is
basso-Profumo). He would make a fine Poet Laureate, as he knows some French
phrases as well as the farm argot of the dark interior of his home
province. Added to which, he "_is_ " the David Letterman of Canada. The
clincher : his book on all the Canuck Premiers is just about written. It
will cement his national fame. I'm glad I will be able to say "I knew him
when" to his fans as they push past me, Sob.

to Dale Smith of Chip N Dale's Strip Club Zine : Only kiddin', kid. It
looked like the thing to do, at the time. Listen, you'll be one of the
greats. You got under my skin, but I'll delete your f-c posts in future,
for the sake of a peaceful List. Best o' luck, child of my loins! B-c when
you find work, & an Aged P cottage behind your Inn of Happiness. All best
to your wife, lucky lass.

to George Bowering, Bowering Manor, 29 The Winch, Grimsby : Now you're to
be Poet Laureate of Canada and the Orcas Islands, George, you are simply
gonna _have_ ta read those poets from the other side of the blanket.
Honestly, it's not so bad--their poems are Evelyn Wood fodder, so not much
time spent, and plus which (b) you find out something further about what
makes the way _you_ write, distinctive. Well, anyway, the way _I_ write.
Oops, but you had your Thanxgvng a month ago, eh? Never mind, then....Back
to work!

to Carl Wilson, Yonge and Bathnite, Toronto : Welcome to the List! Some
fine maiden posts. Excuse us while we baste the turkeys (it'll be a
metaphor of what we do to one another's idols, on the List).

to Enery : Henry, on the bright side, you still know you _have_ your solar
plexus. Knowing the sun rises and sets in one's own belly-button ain't so
bad. Especially a "solar" as "plexus" as yours, man of many v(o)ices! May
the coming year bring you more Indians than Puritans, and all your punkins
be sweetie-pies!

to Gabriel Gudding : Well hey man my tight corners fuckin.love.you.too.

They had been preenin n primpin in the bathroom mirror all morning long. He
had had to pee in the kitchen sink. Now he was relieved, but they looked
ready to express himselves.

to David W. McFadden : where did you go, Dave? Come back to the List! You
are sorely missed! Your fans are getting pissed!



Happy Thanxgvng everybody! Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers, long as
you got that kiss that conquers! Answer : I do, I do!

Broadway Dave
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:35:07 -0800
Reply-To:     griffinbaker@bc.sympatico.ca
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark Baker 
Subject:      POETICS Readers Reading Right
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> The folks Carlo Parcelli is writing about don't read for pleasure, they
> read to have their prejudices confirmed.  As against (to quote C.P.) "a
> natural affinity for texts that take me out of myself so I'm confronted
> with new worlds of information."


Poetry, it seems to some, is dangerous, best when
the poet doesn't know what will happen, best of all
for readers eager to have prejudices overturned.

More cliches from the Why Read Poetry lecturers.

I already know about the prejudices of the "folks" who
don't know how to read right. Tell me some prejudices anyone
here has had challenged by any particular poem. Does this
mean some revelation like, "Before reading this
poem-like thing, I thought I was an I, but now we
know better"?

Mark Baker
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:01:29 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         miekal and 
Organization: Awkward Ubutronics
Subject:      sorry, help
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CAN SOMEONE B/C ME WITH INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO SET DIGEST  & THEN RESTORE
IT LATER?
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:26:02 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pierre Joris 
Subject:      Re: Faraj Bayrakdar
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Carl Wilson wrote:

>      Thanks,  Pierre,  for an antidote to all the ego-snipe of the past
>      couple days... is there any org'd action people can take in support of
>      Bayrakdar, aside from the usual contacting embassies/politicians etc.?
>      (Is he a PEN case?)
>
>      carl patrick wilson

Not sure yet what the best thing to do is from here. Not even sure if there's
a Lybian Embassy in DC these days, depite the fact that the White House, State
Department & Mil-Indus Complex have changed their Arab whipping boy this
decade.

The French section of the Pen Club is aware & involved -- US Pen members
should check with their various branches.

One thing we could do would be to bring out his book in English translation --
and use whatever power we may have together to try & raise awareness of his
fate. And, even faster, one could start by creating a web-page, maybe on the
epc (Loss? what you think?).

Could even, strange thought, be the occasion to test the mettle of our US Poet
Laureate?!

And I'm sure you all will come up with more ideas.

Pierre

--
========================
Pierre Joris
joris@csc.albany.edu
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202
tel: 518 426 0433
fax: 518 426 3722
========================
Through the living the road of the dead
— Ungaretti
========================
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:14:27 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Pritchett,Patrick @Silverplume" 
Subject:      Kenward Elmslie at Naropa
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Kenward Elmslie paid us heathens in Boulder a marvelous visit this week
past. I'm sorry to say I missed his performance at the Boulder Museum of
Contemporary Art, but the raves I heard later were sky-high.

I did, however, catch him last Saturday in the Shamballa Room at Naropa.
Although the name conjures up visions of celestial daiquiris (at least for
me it does), the place, alas, is quite dry - not a waiter, much less a bar,
in sight.

Kenward Elmslie is a very large and graceful man. He looks like a Roman
senator -- in tennis shoes -- and carries about him his own private orb of
gravitas. The reading began with works from his new collection _Routine
Disruptions_, out from Coffee House. The deep, rich baritone of his voice,
which at times verged on a basso profundo, belied the antic play of these
marvellously witty poems - and at the same time lent them a graver hilarity.
His first poem revelled in the bright obsessional aura of pop figures and
icons like Marilyn Monore and James Dean even as it sharply critiqued
capitalist pretensions and anxieties over identity. This was followed by a
long and very powerful elegy for Joe Brainard that really defies any easy
summary -- a deeply moving combination of wryly ironic recollection and
honest pathos.

Next, Kenward burst into song. Now, these songs took me a bit of getting
used to at first. Perhaps it was the pre-recorded accompaniment, with its
electronic drum beat giving it a kind of cheesy Vegas patina, that put me
off. But very soon I was completely charmed and won over by these delightful
and witty numbers -- Cole Porter (or Sondheim) meets the NY School,
ha-cha-cha. Kenward and Steven Taylor performed a number of duets together
-- among them: "Propped Up In The Rain;"  the rousing "Brazil"  (originally
from the musical of Capote's "The Grass Harp," and updated to include the
latest in scnadla du jour); "They," a laugh out loud funny ditty on
paranoia; and the bluesy "One Night Stand." By tunrs these songs were
notable for their cheeky joie de vivre, their outrageous over-the-topness,
and their sweet and oddly touching qualities.

Also of note: Kenward's solo rendition of "Original Parkway," a tour de
force of first lines and an index of titles from a fictional work that
creates a vivid and wickedly funny narrative of its author's obsessions and
petty grudges. In a word, brilliant. As was the entire evening. Hearing
Kenward Elmslie made me think that within every poet is a frustrated
song-and-dance person waiting to burst into a tap routine while twirling a
cane. Instead, as the Senator intoned,  we became the next best thing -
writers.

Patrick Pritchett
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 18:51:18 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Emily Lloyd 
Subject:      Re: I ain't for Iowa
In-Reply-To:  <199811252055.PAA09711@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Eliza, peace!  I typed "It's AS IF people [want to write such & such in
their journals]"--I didn't even know you had a journal!  It simply seemed
as if *many* were adding, almost as afterthoughts to posts which weren't
really conerned with the issue, "Bad Critic No Turkey" P.S.s to Marjorie.

Plus, I thought you wanted to initiate a discussion on the "I," that your
post was an invitation.  If I'd known you just wanted to be agreed with, I
would've remained that less close to carpal-tunnel syndrome.  (Not to be
catty or anything.  I don't appreciate [except on "Celebrity Death Match"]
cat-fights, either.  But I don't expect Marjorie to be wearing a "What
Would Jesus Do?" bracelet any more than Gabriel, and I defend her right to
defend herself at the level at which she was attacked.  It's not like she
can build a fort out of copies of her books and, once respectably inside,
not feel blows).

Finally--goodness, I hardly think one slingshot aimed at GG foreshadows
MP trying to knock us (I don't know if you're in that us, but I'm in that
us) amateurs off the list.  Nor do I think that if she were, we'd leave.
Do we quit writing when our peers--or even we--get rejection letters?
Am I seriously to take your earlier post as an upthrust fist for the
proletariat?

Please, please, calm down, before either one of us gets accused of being
hysterical females.  I think we're supposed to be thankfully cooking or
some such.

steadily,
em
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 01:18:21 -0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jim Bennett 
Subject:      Last chance to see...
Comments: To: John Kinsella's List ,
          british-poets@mailbase.ac.uk
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Please excuse the cross posting.

But there is just enough time for you to catch a plane, boat, train and =
get to Liverpool in time to attend the  FREE POETRY EVENT OF THE DAY.  =
Come and be amazed at the courage of two of Liverpool University's =
Lecturers presenting their own work to an audience of ravenous students. =
 Come support them, please bring your own rope.=20

David Bateman and Jim Bennett, in a free reading, at the Everyman =
Bistro, Hope Street, Liverpool (Everyman Theatre).

Thursday 26th November (today) - 8pm sharp for a start some time after =
that...

be there or be elsewhere.

Love and lots of it.

Jim

Click on this link to vote for my site.  =
http://conline.net/vote.mv?id=3D1780

Click on this link to visit my site.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1127/

"Poetry is what the future makes of it."  John Garner





------=_NextPart_000_003E_01BE18DA.A818FE60
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        charset="iso-8859-1"
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Please excuse the cross =
posting.


 


But there is just enough time for =
you to catch a=20
plane, boat, train and get to Liverpool in time to attend the  FREE =
POETRY=20
EVENT OF THE DAY.  Come and be amazed at the courage of two of =
Liverpool=20
University's Lecturers presenting their own work to an audience of =
ravenous=20
students.  Come support them, please bring your own rope. =



 


David Bateman and Jim Bennett, in a =
free=20
reading, at the Everyman Bistro, Hope Street, Liverpool (Everyman=20
Theatre).


 


Thursday 26th November (today) - 8pm sharp for a =
start some=20
time after that...


 


be there or be elsewhere.


 


Love and lots of it.


 


Jim


 


Click on this link to vote for my site.  http://conline.net/vote.mv?=
id=3D1780

Click=20
on this link to visit my site.
http://www.geociti=
es.com/Athens/Academy/1127/

"Poetry=20
is what the future makes of it."  John=20
Garner





------=_NextPart_000_003E_01BE18DA.A818FE60--
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:36:28 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      Re: pleasure
Comments: To: alphavil@ix.netcom.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I guess some people just don't know how to have a good time.

R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
>
> Mr. Schuchat: Who said there was anything wrong with reading for
> pleasure. I was merely pointing out that when you attempt to browbeat a
> pinsky people into reading, say, Olson's Maximus, there usual response
> is along the lines that I only read peauxtry for pleasure. Then when I
> reply that I read the Maximus for pleasure, they look at me, as though
> I'm nuts or a liar. I'm gettin' a complex from it. Can you help
> me?---Carlo Parcelli
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:41:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: I ain't for Iowa

emily

this wierd-seeming thing (but explicable if one thinks in terms of
secure and insecure) happens whenever list kaboxes and blanks.  scads
of new people (who haven't been through it yet) think their screens
are electron-bereft because they've been snipped out for excesses of
uncoolness.  people SEEM secure, act like they are, but i'll come out
and say it here, _I_ wasn't, and after all the "hey, did i get kicked
off list" panics i've seen, i KNOW lots of others aren't.

a pretty well known academic squashing someone by saying basically,
well who are you to say anything anyway, you haven't ... PUBLISHED!
whatever the provocation, is going to make people uncomfortable.  it
wierded me out.  so as i said, regardless of the provocation, i didn't
like the idea or the effect.  i said so.  nicely, but clearly.
period.  and if ms. p. thinks i was out of line for saying it, maybe
she could be left to say so herself to me, eh?  re getting off her
case, you may not have picked it out, but that is what well over half
the messages have been suggesting, including the notes i have NOT sent
out over the now infamous "ms. p. was wrong" banner and what every
note bannered by mockeries like "g. was wrong" or "my cat is snoring"
or "enough already" etc. was doing in a peter-pannish sort of way.  in
ways that didn't slam gaga (poor thing, after the hydrangea transplant
and unsuccessful reconceptualization in shades of morning buttercup
and blue blast, he has never been the same), ms. p. has been getting
lots of help out of hot seat.

i really don't think there is anything in my post(s), demeanor,
responses (many of which have been, so far, giggling), or karma to
suggest i wanted instant agreement.  just like there was nothing in
ditto to suggest i responded to the putting in our unwashed and
unpublished place post in order to be able to chalk one up for my
Gallant Gabriel Pin Finder in my presumed journals.  odd, but many who
know me find me NOT to be overzealous in search of righteousness or
brushes with the Great.  it is, perhaps, just all the broccoli i have
been eating that causes my ennui that way.  i pass over the effects of
the asparagus except to say, don't visit bowering manner in the spring
-- the plumbing has never been what it used to be...

one for the files -- if it had been a nobody, one of the great
un-washed/published, i have an odd hunch there are perhaps a smidgin
or two of Gallant Defender posts that would not have been posted,
n'est ce pas?

yours from the land of the resentfully staring at the CLEAVER before
it comes down, but go ahead, eat that turkey anyway, don't mind us,
we'll just sit in the dark, suck down Beano pills, and play with our
pop-up indicaters till they say "Cooked Through"...

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:15:26 +0000
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R. Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: pleasure
MIME-Version: 1.0
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O.K. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber
his grannyamother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name thunder'd ever
belevin you were that bolt? But you're holy mooxed and gaping up the
wrong palce as if was seeheeing the gheist that stays forenenst, you
blessed simpletop domefool! Where's your belested loiternan's lamp? You
must lap wandret down the bluishing refluction below. Her trunk's not
her brainbox. Hear where the bolgylines, Yseen here the puncture. So he
done it. Luck! See her good. Well, well, well, well! O dee, O dee,
that's very lovely! We like Simperspreach Hammeltones to fellow
Selvertunes O'Haggans.
---
Troping, Ix florted twad Musstus Isendhowitzers, slurping her his
hemlook.---I kon lysurgically entfart that moul with my bouche, mordamn,
he slaid.---Dinka, applead the laidy, but hausa dem ultratheen
shempskeen connundumns.---Is that a quetschen, me poky hole?---No, an
ardor, me pine noodle!---O, Maim me!
---
I know I'm having a good time.---Carlo Parcelli

schuchat wrote
> I guess some people just don't know how to have a good time.
>
> R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> >
> > Mr. Schuchat: Who said there was anything wrong with reading for
> > pleasure. I was merely pointing out that when you attempt to browbeat a
> > pinsky people into reading, say, Olson's Maximus, there usual response
> > is along the lines that I only read peauxtry for pleasure. Then when I
> > reply that I read the Maximus for pleasure, they look at me, as though
> > I'm nuts or a liar. I'm gettin' a complex from it. Can you help
> > me?---Carlo Parcelli
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 01:23:40 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Randy Prunty 
Subject:      pronouns
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"I'm only pronouns and I am all of them."

Ted Berrigan from the poem Red Shift as heard on the Exact Change CD
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 03:43:05 +0000
Reply-To:     baratier@megsinet.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         David Baratier 
Organization: The New Web, Inc.
Subject:      Re: Listen, Kent
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Eliza--

I am checking mail on the road right now (more on poetix when situated)
and while I thank you for placing me on the HOT list with the other
adoreables, I must say that I am quite tired of yet another
attributation towards my transgendered identity. It was the eighties,
when all men had to grow hair, wear lipstick and the like to get a
record deal. While Drew Barrymore has been inside me, all these people
bringing it up again in the past few weeks infuriates.

Regarding the choice of the Levis etc. "I" poems, that is bent of the
anthologist, who gets laid quite frequently and placed together the
anthology to uplift a few winter months when the seasonal affectation
disorder runs full swing and to look at later and feel better during
moments of low self esteem.

Gotta go,  Be well

David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:42:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Loving-Kindness Vibes and one last Bark
In-Reply-To:  <199811260141.UAA11976@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Before I go make my chocolate cake for my fruitcake guest, Jasper, and
catapult the 18 lb tofu turkey into the chamber of flaming gas for the
tiny family, I just want to wish everyone a great day and say yes in fact
I heard George Thompson out there in the west without one tut-tut
crackling open his Dhammapada all the way across these Alleghanies, to
tell us a little abbot tolerance, one of the 13 mental perfections.

And I heard Eliza,Eliza and her odd-grown sentence whipping its chilly
chain and the "chink" of that chain cacchinating all the way up the Hudson
Valley onto my dark old stoop goddamn, And D.Bromige doing lawd knows what
to his Keyboard to make us laugh god knows how, And Henry Gould in his
fucked-up epic timbre scatting to his own devil-tuned trombones, & Mairead
Byrne booted from the fug of Dublin pubs thinking she's P.Kavanagh pissing
on an old back wall "No I was not important I was not important no", then
trying to deal with the elitist devil vibes whirling out of Palo Alto with
George Thompson watching and the old Pali words saying "One whose mind is
free of malice certainly wouldn't strike another living thing" and I'm
thinking "yeah but does Perloff count, is she living" and knowing I'm
being a total jerk and Weiss and Parcelli and Mayhew saying what the fuck
do You know and DuCharme back there just waiting to kick my ass and BETSY
ANDREWS wherever she is making me cry with joy and my Good Brain is
reminding my Bad Brain mp's HUMAN she's HUMAN be decent be decent, but
lawd ain't it HARD when people talk that way?: FOR

1). Is not the action of criticism which exercises the terms Important
Bad Good & Lasting just normalizing criticism, FOR

2). are not MP's books being read by old guard students all over the
country just so they can know what and how to think, FOR

3). is not MP the old guard despite who she's chosen to write about,
BECAUSE as well all know It's not WHO she writes about it's HOW she
writes BuT

I _will not_ be swayed from my course fuck it fuck it and may my argument
be as Deft as the brushstrokes of Tintoretto, FOR

did I NOT cry Bruce Lee where art thou?, annd did he not come he DID,
F-O-R

Lord I am barking again and there is some serious psychomachy rifling
under my furious hair, saloon fight in frontal lobes, and YES

May your Thanksgiving be GOOD and for those not celebrating it due to
constraints of non-north american sub-canadian geography and/or custom or
beliefs about food, may you all, including those in Palo Alto, feel real
warm and like it says on the gravemarker for cb: Don't Try.  Just LOVE.
love, Gaga
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:58:02 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: Loving-Kindness Vibes and one last Bark
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Gabriel Gudding wrote (among other things):

1). Is not the action of criticism which exercises the terms Important
Bad Good & Lasting just normalizing criticism?

Yeah, you could call it that but discrimination is a better term for
it.  Sanity is perhaps the best term for it.  We don't have time to
read everything, Gabriel, so we need help to decide what to read.
And the strength of character not to let anyone's help enslave us.

                                                          --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:14:15 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      all poetics is local

Enjoying my braised & spitted air here on Thanksgiving & I sure hope you all
are too, David, Elliza, Marjorie, Maria, Lurker #124, Mairead, Gabe, keyboard
weirdos all.  Not to forget Jack & Eric, good buddies.

Now on to the substance abuse of this post.  Irregardless of her own (Maria's)
exaggerations, and totally irregardless of the pros & cons of the Marjorie
P. fandango, what I found interesting in Maria's post on the "enough already"
bit was the presence of political memory.

Because it started some thinking in this old pate about some things that
believe it or not the great "I, Henry" do not have the answers for & am
actually, I, Henry, looking for discussion on.

This is a little hard to put into words.  But essentially it's that I find
it difficult to find a poetry that represents my own political aspirations.
I have tried to do what I could in my own writing but have not gone far
enough.  I am very aware that the relations between actual politics,
cultural politics, and art are very, very paradoxical and complex.

For example there has been issue, problem, or identity-oriented political
art for some time.  Dealing with feminist, racial-cultural, ecological,
national-military issues; with poverty & oppression around the world.
The most vital art in any medium takes its conceptual freedom & does
something dynamically RELEVANT with it.  This is the ethos of most
engaged work.

Okay I will try to come to the point here.  First, I don't see this engaged
perspective as playing a role in the discourse about poetry much.  What
we have instead is a transmutation of real politics into cultural or art
politics: your style or your clique is a political act in itself.  But
this is to displace real politics with a sort of sub-politics.  The reason
for this is, paradoxically, the ideological-conceptual STRENGTH of poetic
tradition.  Poetry is a medium of transmission not only of relevant
or engaged issue politics; it's a medium of world-views, philosophy,
comedy-tragedy, life as it is, ultimate questions, etc. etc. - i.e.,
poetry absorbs everything into its discourse.  This is why the choices
of style & voice & allies are so fraught with (pseudo) political meaning.
& why we debate these abstractions (experimental, mainstream) over & over.

Let's say that writing poetry is political in itself, first of all.  The
best work of this century has been oppositional - it's art's sphere of
freedom & possibility speaking - saying NO to things as they are on behalf of
something better.  It's art's freedom from consequences & allegiances using
that freedom to expand horizons.  Some artists & poets take that one step
further into issue-engaged or even politically committed (i.e. committed
to the consequences of their dreams) poetry.  This is a dangerous step which
involves both losses & gains.

I would guess that the best practitioners of this kind of work are neither
theoretical leftists of "experiment" & coterie-academy writing, nor
artists "representing" the political aspirations of one particular
segment of society (remembering that very few good poets can be pigeon-
holed this way anyway); the best are probably some amalgam of slam-
street work that has moved into performance art of some kind & is simply
below the radar of most of us on this list.

But that still leaves me with the dilemma which I started out with in this
post.  As a reader & writer, I'm looking for a poetry which consistently
& variously expresses MY politics.  Because I'm for the working class,
but I'm not a Marxist; I consider myself a feminist, but I don't think
feminism is a master key to all issues; I'm for the poor, but I believe
in private property; I'm against capitalism more like the Pope than like
your coffeehouse intellectual; I'm a populist.  People like Adrienne Rich
& Thomas McGrath are more radical than me, but their poetics of looking
for that populist idiom seems more relevant to me than experiment-as-
leftism.  Basically I'm looking for a Green Party that emphasizes
government for the common good - a politics of compromise between
bourgeois self-interest and universal ideals.  Compromise - but on the
side & with the strength of the mass, not on behalf of corporate lobbies
& bought-out political honchos.  The deal-maker mafias that run the world.
If you go into this with your eyes open regarding human nature & traditions,
this is an extremely difficult project & capable of become a joke, a parody
or a tragedy very, very easily, as history shows over & over.  But the
"democracy" movements are ABOUT those ideals, and they aren't dead yet.
(Tragedy: i.e., as in St. Petersburg last week.)

What I would like, if anybody's interested, is not a list of names of poets
I should read, or a defense of "experiment", but a discussion about how
as writers we all connect our local political lives & aspirations with
our ambitions & aspirations as writers.  Ezra Pound is a terrible name to
bring up, but all his ranting & raving about "autarchy" (local control of
self-sufficient economies; banks which serve the public interest) is
something I find extremely suggestive when it comes to imagining a more
vital, rooted, vibrant, sane, happy, artistic, independent "way of life";
a more conscious integration of education, craft, vocation, employment,
ecology, art & culture in communities really struggling to survive
as cultural entities.  I know this sounds like a deracinated a-historical
vague utopian goof.  But I'm not talking about these abstracts in isolation
from the particular local histories of places & communities.  I'm doing a
Mumford for Thanksgiving.

- Henry "the Old Buzzard" Gould
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:57:45 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         david bromige 
Subject:      re : all poetics is local
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Dime to a donut Bowering weighs in on that "irregardless" vocab item. (His
Dad was a schoolteacher, y'know.) Part of what I admire about GB is that,
for a poet, he is very leftbrain. So watch out, here he comes. . . . .
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 11:56:59 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Do Men Cry, By Jennifer (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

-


Do Men Cry, By Jennifer


No, men do not cry, and I am not sure they could be Taught to. I have seen
many men and they do not cry, even when there are things that would make
Them cry if they could. I am sure of this from my obversation Study. Now I
have seen many a distrawt woman who will be sitting in a Chair looking
very sad with tears runing down her Face. She is doing Crying. And then a
man will come Over to that woman and he will put his Hand on her showlder.
He will Stand there just with his Hand on her showlder. And she will put
Her hand on his Hand. Then she may not be So distrawt, I do not know from
obversation study. But he will not Cry too.


___________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:56:43 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         dee morris 
Subject:      Re: Out of Control @ Bridge Street -- new Retallack, Mayer,
              Mackey,               Rasula/McCaffery, Trupwire &&&
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Here's my order.  My address is
                        Dee Morris
                        431 Brown Street
                        Iowa City, IA  52245

Thanks for these terrific packages.   &  Happy Thanksgiving to you . . .

                                                        Dee



>2. _An Anthology of New Poetics_, ed Christopher Beach, U Alabama, $29.95.
>David Antin, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Maria Damon, Michael Davidson,
>Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Hank Lazer, Nathaniel Mackey,
>Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, Leslie Scalapino, James
>Sherry, Ron Silliman, John Taggart, & Barrett Watten.
>
>7. _Dance Writings and Poetry_, Edwin Denby, ed Robert Cornfield, Yale, $18.
>Much more of the dance writing than the poetry.
>
>19. _How To Do Things With Words_, Joan Retallack, Sun & Moon, $10.95. Signed
>copies. Includes the hits "The Woman in the Chinese Room," "Shakespeare was a
>Woman," "A I D /I/ S A P P E A R A N C E," "Steinzas in Mediation," "Japanese
>Presentation I & II," & "The Earlier N'ames Are Almost Forgotten."
>
>22. _Ron Silliman and the Alphabet_, ed Thomas A. Vogler, Quarry West 34, $15.
>Thomas C. Marshall, Hank Lazer, Tyrus Miller, Lytle Shaw, Marjorie Perloff,
>Silliman interview, essays, and bibliography.
>
>23. _Talisman 19: Armand Schwerner_, ed Ed Foster, $9. Theodore Enslin, John
>Tritica, Andrew Schelling, Burt Kimmelman, Brian McHale, Garrett Kalleberg,
>Pam Rehm, Heather Ramsdell, Lisa Jarnot, Susan Wheeler, &&&. "Anomalous circus
>events take the shape of mandible density in the great outer planets."
>
>_The Letters of Mina Harker_, Dodie Bellamy, Hard Press, $13.95.

>Poetics folks receive free shipping on orders of more than $20. Free shipping
>+ 10% discount on orders of more than $30. There are two ways to order.
>1. E-mail your order to aerialedge@aol.com with your address & we will bill
>you with the books. or 2. via credit card-- you may call us at 202 965 5200
>or e-mail aerialedge@aol.com w/ yr add, order, & card # & we will send a
>receipt with the books. We must charge some shipping for orders out of the
>US.
>
>Bridge Street Books, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20007.
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:00:32 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Amy King 
Subject:      Re: Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
              boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00BA_01BE194D.83AA39E0"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01BE194D.83AA39E0
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Do you know how many pages yet?

Thank you,

Amy King
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Steven Clay 
    To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU =

    Date: Wednesday, November 18, 1998 7:17 PM
    Subject: Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
   =20
   =20
    Granary Books
    announces the publication of
    Log Rhythms
    by Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein
   =20
    In Log Rhythms, Susan Bee sets and illustrates a long serial poem by =
Charles
    Bernstein, offering a running visual dialog with the poem's textual
    acrobatics. Bee has created a visual counter-text for Bernstein's =
poems in
    four previous books Little Orphan Anagram (Granary), The Occurrence =
of Tune
    (Segue), Fool's Gold (Chax), and The Nude Formalism (Sun & Moon). In =
this
    work, Bee's illustrations comment on and extend the many far-flung =
motifs of the
    poem, from a list of "Bob's" businesses to fractured and re-sung =
nursery
    rhymes ("Oh, do you know the muffled man?"). At times dark, at times =
dizzyingly
    demented, swerving from the wildly comic to the searingly political, =
from the
    whimsical to the elegiac, Bee and Bernstein explore the =
psychopathology of
    everyday life with what The New York Times calls (in reference to =
Little
    Orphan Anagram) "real visual =E9clat".
   =20
    Log Rhythms is printed in black and white. The illustrations were =
first made
    with brush, ink, and wash combined with collage and then printed =
offset by Brad Freeman on Warren's Lustro Dull. Cover design by Susan =
Bee and Philip Gallo, laser-printed in color at the Hermetic Press.
   =20
    The edition consists of 500 copies; 8 1/4 x 11"; ?? pages.
   =20
    The price is $25 till December 15; $35 thereafter
   =20
    Residents of the state of New York add 8 1/4% sales tax
    Shipping is $3 (U.S. & Canada) $6 (everywhere else).
   =20
   =20
    ISBN 1-887123-25-3
   =20
    Granary Books
    568 Broadway #403
    New York, NY 10012 USA
   =20
    sclay@interport.net
    www.granarybooks.com=20

------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01BE194D.83AA39E0
Content-Type: text/html;
        charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable










Do you know how many pages =
yet?


 


Thank you,


 


Amy King


    
-----Original =
Message-----
From:=20
    Steven Clay <sclay@INTERPORT.NET>
To:=
=20
    POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.B=
UFFALO.EDU=20
    <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.B=
UFFALO.EDU>
Date:=20
    Wednesday, November 18, 1998 7:17 PM
Subject: =
Announcing: Log=20
    Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan =
Bee

Granary=20
    Books
announces the publication of
Log Rhythms
by Susan Bee =
and=20
    Charles Bernstein

In Log Rhythms, Susan Bee sets and =
illustrates a=20
    long serial poem by Charles
Bernstein, offering a running visual =
dialog=20
    with the poem's textual
acrobatics. Bee has created a visual =
counter-text=20
    for Bernstein's poems in
four previous books Little Orphan =
Anagram=20
    (Granary), The Occurrence of Tune
(Segue), Fool's Gold (Chax), =
and The=20
    Nude Formalism (Sun & Moon). In this
work, Bee's =
illustrations=20
    comment on and extend the many far-flung motifs of the
poem, from =
a list=20
    of "Bob's" businesses to fractured and re-sung =
nursery
rhymes=20
    ("Oh, do you know the muffled man?"). At times dark, at =
times=20
    dizzyingly
demented, swerving from the wildly comic to the =
searingly=20
    political, from the
whimsical to the elegiac, Bee and Bernstein =
explore=20
    the psychopathology of
everyday life with what The New York Times =
calls=20
    (in reference to Little
Orphan Anagram) "real visual=20
    éclat".

Log Rhythms is printed in black and =
white. The=20
    illustrations were first made
with brush, ink, and wash combined =
with=20
    collage and then printed offset by Brad Freeman on Warren's Lustro =
Dull.=20
    Cover design by Susan Bee and Philip Gallo, laser-printed in color =
at the=20
    Hermetic Press.

The edition consists of 500 copies; 8 1/4 x =
11";=20
    ?? pages.

The price is $25 till December 15; $35=20
    thereafter

Residents of the state of New York add 8 1/4% =
sales=20
    tax
Shipping is $3 (U.S. & Canada) $6 (everywhere=20
    else).


ISBN 1-887123-25-3

Granary Books
568 =
Broadway=20
    #403
New York, NY 10012=20
    =
USA

sclay@interport.net
www.granarybooks.com=20


------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01BE194D.83AA39E0--
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:08:23 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Randy Prunty 
Subject:      Re: Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Amy, I've been wondering the same thing!!!

I think i really might want to buy that book, but there's no way I'm gonna
commit until I know how many pages.  who knows what kind of devious scam they
might be running.

Rinde Skepticov
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:56:50 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Amy King 
Subject:      Re: Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Esp. during the holiday seasons ... "free" poetics indeed!

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Prunty 
To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU 
Date: Thursday, November 26, 1998 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee


>Amy, I've been wondering the same thing!!!
>
>I think i really might want to buy that book, but there's no way I'm gonna
>commit until I know how many pages.  who knows what kind of devious scam
they
>might be running.
>
>Rinde Skepticov
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 26 Nov 1998 19:21:46 CST6CDT
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hank Lazer 
Organization: The University of Alabama
Subject:      self-portrait in a convex mirror

Why I Am Not Bob Dylan


I'm Charles Bernstein

omnivorous schtick

the whiz of metaphysics

do you know

the muffled man

the muffled man

hell

they all use

a megaphone

and croon a jewish

klezmer tune

bar mitzvah boy

bar mitzvah boy

this

my pride & joy

& danced by the light of the moon



A happy turkey day, Charles, to you, Susan, Emma, & Felix.

Hank
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 00:38:50 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: all poetics is local

henry

i was thinking of a few authors when i read your post.  i won't do this as a
list of who you must read, but i do want to suggest some of the ways i've
seen writers translate their political/social/personal beliefs into their
writing within a loose, quick, theoretic frame.

i don't think a politically/etc influenced poetic need be dramatic, big,
obvious, earthshaking.  it can be as simple and personal as the choice r.j
mccaffery and i, seperately and without knowing each other, made -- mine
influenced by something martin espada said.  we all write poems about other
people, poems telling other people's stories.  i decided to make a point of
making at least 1/2 of my writing be about someone else.  espada talked
about writing the stories of people he knows who don't write, so they are
part of the cultural literary legacy.  i liked that.  a small thing, eh?
but politics/ethics put into poetic practice.

or, judy grahn wanted to see women's stories get told, she wanted to explore
rhythms of language she heard from women and didnn't hear in male-centric
writing, and she wanted the lives and images of working class women to enter
poetic body of text.  so, _Common Woman Poems_.  and she cared for an older
friend who was dying, and began confronting death and it's effects, and
wanted to write a poem for other people, especially women, burdened with
knots around notion of death, so, "A Woman Is Talking To Death."  and her
early linguistic experiments.

bruce weigl wanted to write about things that were important to him,
especially vietnam and his working class hometown and family roots.  but
at the same time, he didn't want to be considered "a vietnam writer."
he wrote poems, some about vietnam, criticism, got ph.d., and then, he
joined with some other vietnam vets in project to break down walls he
felt were culturally/governmentally imposed between american vets and
vietnamese.  so they all began travelling to vietnam, corresponding with
vietnamese, researching the culture, and just in general, countering the
propaganda during the war aimed at dehumanizing vietnamese.  it is not
just that a number of books have come from this with poems about going
back to vietnam, or that he has begun translating vietnamese poetry.  it
is that buddhism, vietnamese culture, vietnam war from viewpoint of
vietnamese have all begun changing his world view.  i could name a bunch
of other writers involved in project -- tim o'brien, larry heinemann,
kevin bowen.  or there is lady borton -- not a poet but an autobiographist,
essay writer, a quaker woman busdriver who ran a refugee camp for vietnamese
and cambodians, who worked as hospital manager during vietnam war.  politics
in action.

or, again not poets, but look at the lives and writing of tillie olson,
meridel leseuer.  both working class women, poor, struggling, who wanted to
put those aspects of their lives not just into literature as SUBJECT matter,
but as style, form, philosophy, imagery.

none of this, perhaps, madly dramatic, none of it sudden fixes.  all of it
a direction, really, of writing, of choice, that comes from personal/political
choices.  another example, again, personal?  _The Battered Poems_, my latest
finished ms. of poetry, has a section of poems about the framingham eight,
one for each woman.  in one poem, i found myself thinking that the woman,
shannon booker, when i've heard her speak, has stressed alot how she didn't
speak out in her own life, how she was taught NOT to speak.  so when i sat
to write a poem about her, i decided i'd include a lot of quotes from her
own words, to let her "speak" in my poem, and i found myself shaping the
movment and themes toward things she had expressed.  or with another woman,
patricia allen, i felt as if there was this "how could she have done it"
attitude expressed by the prosecution in her case that blatantly ignored
a lot of the evidence, the obvious circumstances of the case.  so i made
the poem a collage of voices, many of them people like social workers, the
major political figures of the day (ray-gun, quayle), legal counsels...

again, not earthshattering, but just natural extensions of some of the ethical
questions/issues/thoughts i had about subject, or they felt natural to me
anyway...

hope this is in some way a useful discussion...
e
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 00:51:03 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         George Bowering 
Subject:      re : all poetics is local
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>Dime to a donut Bowering weighs in on that "irregardless" vocab item. (His
>Dad was a schoolteacher, y'know.) Part of what I admire about GB is that,
>for a poet, he is very leftbrain. So watch out, here he comes. . . . .

Nah, disirregardless of what Brom says, I am a sloppy liberal all over.




George Bowering.
                                       ,
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada  V6M 1P4

fax: 1-604-266-9000
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 06:42:21 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Susan Wheeler 
Subject:      Long Island Reading
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I'll be reading Saturday evening at 6:00 at Canio's bookstore in Sag Harbor,
for anyone out Long Island-way.

Susan Wheeler
susan.wheeler@nyu.edu
voice/fax (212) 254-3984
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:36:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Do Men Cry, By Jennifer (fwd)
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

Some Men Cry

I have known criers.  Male criers.  Lusty criers.  Broken-hearted criers.
When men cry bone-cages shake, hair wettens, hands crawl to heads, faces
break.  Lost loves come tumbling out sometimes when men cry.  Down close
to the dirty carpet he cries looking for something left over inside his
hands.  He cries wildly.  He cries without connection to any damn thing,
hunting for string that should attach him at shoulder at elbow at hip and
knee to something, even to himself.  Sometimes his sobs rack with hers:
maybe the best cries.  If a man who does not cry comes to a crying woman
and puts his hand on hers, she cries more.

On Thu, 26 Nov 1998, A. Jenn Sondheim wrote:

> -
>
>
> Do Men Cry, By Jennifer
>
>
> No, men do not cry, and I am not sure they could be Taught to. I have seen
> many men and they do not cry, even when there are things that would make
> Them cry if they could. I am sure of this from my obversation Study. Now I
> have seen many a distrawt woman who will be sitting in a Chair looking
> very sad with tears runing down her Face. She is doing Crying. And then a
> man will come Over to that woman and he will put his Hand on her showlder.
> He will Stand there just with his Hand on her showlder. And she will put
> Her hand on his Hand. Then she may not be So distrawt, I do not know from
> obversation study. But he will not Cry too.
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:28:13 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         LITSAM@AOL.COM
Subject:      Re: Do Men Cry
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Finally!  A poetic resurgence from the group.  On the day AFTER
Thanksgiving, I am a grateful and, yes, sometimes crying man.

Sam

 Original Message -----
From: Mairead Byrne 
To: 
Sent: Friday, November 27, 1998 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: Do Men Cry, By Jennifer (fwd)


>Some Men Cry
>
>I have known criers.  Male criers.  Lusty criers.  Broken-hearted criers.
>When men cry bone-cages shake, hair wettens, hands crawl to heads, faces
>break.  Lost loves come tumbling out sometimes when men cry.  Down close
>to the dirty carpet he cries looking for something left over inside his
>hands.  He cries wildly.  He cries without connection to any damn thing,
>hunting for string that should attach him at shoulder at elbow at hip and
>knee to something, even to himself.  Sometimes his sobs rack with hers:
>maybe the best cries.  If a man who does not cry comes to a crying woman
>and puts his hand on hers, she cries more.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:50:02 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Steven Clay 
Subject:      Announcing: Log Rhythms by Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

The book has 24 pp.
sc.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 11:13:20 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hannah J Sassaman 
Subject:      I Love Learning Things!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Just saw IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE for the first time yesterday.  Never knew
where the journal name *ZUZU'S PETALS* came from -- now I know!


When I learn tidbits like that from a movie so integral to holiday pop
culture, you know it's time for me to pick up some NYT bestseller and
snuggle in with a cup of hot chocolate.  Bah to journals, while I'm home
for Thanksgiving, at least!

Happy Turkey Days to you all,

Hannah Sassaman

*****************************************************************************

Hannah Jane Sassaman
Sophomore, University of Pennsylvania
Majoring in Theatre Arts and English
Editor at CrossConnect (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect)

School Address:                  Home Address:
4009 Pine St.                    42 Framingham Lane
Philadelphia, PA  19104          Pittsford, NY  14534


Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
 -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about
women and cocaine.

 -- Tallulah Bankhead
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 11:20:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         sylvester pollet 
Subject:      Re: I Love Learning Things!
In-Reply-To:  <199811271613.LAA00324@mail1.sas.upenn.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Three cheers for Hannah! You get my Best Message Title Award, for bringing
some joy to this world-weary list. Happy Turkey Days to you! (& all).
Sylvester, in rainy Maine.


At 11:13 AM -0500 11/27/98, Hannah J Sassaman wrote:
>Just saw IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE for the first time yesterday.  Never knew
>where the journal name *ZUZU'S PETALS* came from -- now I know!
>
>
>When I learn tidbits like that from a movie so integral to holiday pop
>culture, you know it's time for me to pick up some NYT bestseller and
>snuggle in with a cup of hot chocolate.  Bah to journals, while I'm home
>for Thanksgiving, at least!
>
>Happy Turkey Days to you all,
>
>Hannah Sassaman
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:18:18 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         James Brook 
Subject:      new issue of Pharos
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Actually, it's the "newly arrived" issue--the spring 1998 issue
of Pharos magazine, based in Paris, is on these shores and
otherwise available.

Contents includes poems by Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, Dawn
Michelle Baude, James Brook, and Nina Zivancevic. There's a
funny story about the cracker-thin pleasures of a literary
party, too.

Price is 30 francs, which translates to about five or six dollars.

Address for business of all kinds is

Pharos
The British Institute
11, rue Constantine
75007 Paris
France
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:19:59 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Billy Little 
Subject:      reading treats
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

i'm still reading kimball and bromige's poetries of canada, each click
opens another morsel, collections of this strength are rare and to have it
all at the beck of your cursor tripley so. two of the reasons i like it
this morning are
1.

George Stanley
-------------------------

The Power of the Unhappy People

The unhappy people have great power.
They invest in the unhappiness of others.

Not generic unhappiness, the kind
of unhappiness anyone could feel,
but designer unhappiness, the exact
shape of the hole in your heart.

These are dreams without doors.  Let the blonde
demonstrator slip one around your feelings.
As it goes on, it clings like shrink-wrap.

Now the birds can cry in the night, and you
won't hear them. Or your ancestors. Or jazz.
The image of your death will dance for you
with as many veils as you please.

In your fog-coloured room, in your Queen Anne chair,
you may wish you were dead, but be glad of that wish
since it sets you above the common sort
inured to ordinary unhappiness.

And we, the investment community, will grin.
(Though like you, we cannot feel the sun or hear the rain.
Or jazz.) We will grin at the thought of you dreaming.

More & more people must become rich & unhappy,
so the original unhappy people can die rich.

and 2

Meredith Quartermain
-------------------------

Prayer for Geography

                         To all who fall
                         to matter
                         write the earth
               a         space          of        white
                              break     of bread
          plates         break                    in relief
                         write     stones    cocks cry
               to collected waters
                         or hollow fire of iron.

          Eat  atmosphere, a garland
                         sift on a drift
                              post out the earth's hearth
                    to horizon and swallow heat
                         of antipodes
                    plants ride out in leaves

          to mirror oceans
          to finger rivers tribulations
          smooth away our tombs.

               Figures of earth, press out our bodies.
               Strange our urge into that which takes stand.
               Distribute our loom
          work through the scape the seek of air
                    each ear our forgotten art.

                         For these are our herdsmen
               and without this earth as
                    risk we have no
               right of river      hear
          our three yonders             a sphere
          of being                           of geography to the
          ring             of ocean                   above them
               the maps            antipodean
          tenderness     in all    who fall
                    to matter      who come simply
                    to throw  shadows on the moon's
                         shifting horizon    who
                    devote constellations to the ends
                         of the earth   wide
               from the road of symmetry.


Colin Smith's Multiple Poses from Tsunami is a scream and  cheaper than a
roller coaster and you can go back ad eternatum for the same low price. A
Frank O'Hara for the 21st century? these words seem to careen from the
epiglottis,   his tongue twisting makes a resonance with gerry gilbert and
dotty lusk and gerry creede and renee rodin for that matter, very
vancouver? quel marrant, seriously funny, manick soars/fissionary
elucidations, in the fewchair they'll say his spew flew, spitterature is
one of the strong points of the KSW/downtown Vancouver praxis, Kevin Davies
and Jeff Derksen being exemplar. You don't have to take my word for it you
can check out in

The New Raddle Moon which features a strong selection of vancouver writers
with naturally some overlapping with poetries of canada, more Meredith
Quartermain, more Melissa Wolsak, Lisa Robertson, Lary Timewell, Kevin
Davies, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, even the brainwashed bagdaddy,
the sweetheart of sebastapol, the romeo of the russian river hisself, and
more Marie Anneharte Baker, the star of the bp conference reclaiming
coyote. Susan Clark has done another marvelous job with Raddle Moon's issue
17 also includes some new quebecois poets selected by Nicole Brossard, some
new poems by Jackson Mac Low,  Rae Armantrout, in the classiest package all
for merely $10, or two issue subscriptions for $15,

billy little
4 song st.
nowhere, b.c. V0R1Z0
poemz@mars.ark.com

Go ahead and say something true
before the big turd eats You
You can say any last thing in Your poem.

-Alice Notley
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:59:18 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Christina Fairbank Chirot 
Subject:      Re: AntolerInce
Comments: To: Peter Quartermain 
In-Reply-To:  <2.2.32.19981122070439.006c4304@pop.unixg.ubc.ca>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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        Isn't this debate really about--to use that weary, beaten term, at
once victimized and despotic--the CANON?
        I agree with a number of the poets who have written in--of
course, if one makes work, there's tons of other work one detests.  God!
That person who writes this palaver--they must be blind!  No ear! They
were born and bred on milquetoast! They're ruining the eyes and ears and
movements of all those who read them!  They're butchers--putting out
eyes and ears and bodies liike so many candles!  One could get far more
violent--and one does in one's heart so to spak--but don't waste time
looking at
the waist line as the Contours used to sing--better to get on with the
work, keep on guerilla style . . .
        The fallacy of Perloff's argument to me is that she is NOT A
POET--(and here of course I may be practising my own form of intolerance .
.  )--
                                BUT
        she is in the position and has been for years of telling others
who (the right) poets are--
        i.e. she is working away on the edifice called the canon,
inscribing her own name on it as on the spines of her books--
        and in her classes--
        as last year in teaching a visual poetry course--which frankly
could have thrown a lot of beautiful monkey wrenches into the whole works
of the Stanford machinery!--and opened up some people's eyes, ears,
bodies, n0ses, hands--and instead Perloff ignored the generous and
highly informed advice of a number
of visual poets (who also do write essays and reviews, publish the work
of others and participate in exhibitions and performances) on this list
and blithely
went on teaching a kind of revised (er, updated) version of her books--
                        of course Perloff has every right to do so--
        yet this is about the making of canons--not OPEN reading, but
CLOSE(D) reading--
        by OPEN--think of any poet whom you passionately care for--don't
they continually OPEN everything for you? and that openess is not some
fuzzy feeling, but a challenge thrown done--and any passionate reader is a
"close" reader--but not a closed one . . .
        well--take a cannon to the canon--why not? but it's hard to knock
it down! it's well guarded and well financed by the Perloffs of the
world--who exploit the intolernace so called of poets into the intolerance
of the academy, the market, the teaching of the next generation of
teachers and critics . . .
        in short, a form of hypocrisy which is so self righteous that it
can claim intolerance as a virtue . . .
        to exploit--
        in the name of the poets!

        but then it's a funny world eh? as the Brazilian proverb says
"When shit is worth money, the poor will be born without assholes" . . .
        close/open--in a dream this poem appeared as a graffiti on a
shattered building in Boston, where i among the squatters lived--

                        the
                    po       em
                    is       in
                       side

intolerance/tolerance--maybe not either/or but both/and . . as many of the
poets demonstrate in their posts--
        but that's not laying down the law on your fellow workers--it's
just telling them off--they're wasting paper for God's sake! they suck!
they're pigs--they suck up everything!--by God! we'll show them! we''ll
make something far better and more challenging and all! we'll ignore their
continual braying!
        --and so on--
        maybe the difference might be summed up by a phrase by Clark
Coolidge on writing:  "if you're going to be a speaker, say it"--
        maybe Perloff and Bill Bennett can go on tour . . .
dbc
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:01:27 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Christina Fairbank Chirot 
Subject:      Re: AntolerInce
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

David, if you log back in, DELETE DELETE DELETE or I will & then go home &
clean house

tina
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:26:39 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Jacques Debrot 
Subject:      Re: PERLOFF
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The question of (in)tolerance is a difficult one, isn't it?  On the one hand,
innovative poetry demonstrates & embodies the *pleasures of contradiction*. On
the other hand, the difference between Pinsky & Howe is an ethical as much as
an aesthetic distinction inasmuch as their work implicates opposing moral
values.  Neutrality, then -- or tolerance -- can seem merely lazy.  At the
same, it seems important not to respond to traditionalist work in automatic &
predictable ways --either in a positive or a negative sense.  (A distinction
might also perhaps be drawn here between the function of reviews vs. that of
literary criticism.)  In any case Perloff's willingness to engage with
opposing poetries is well documented -- you might want to check out Hank
Lazer's excellent book _What is a Poet?_ however to see how such a dialogue
cannot & should not result in anything like a  reconciliation of differences.
There, the dialogue between Perloff, Louis Simpson, Gerald Stern, Charles
Bernstein, Helen Vendler, David Ignatow, et. al., clearly reveals the
irreconcilable ethical dimension lurking beneath formal & aesthetic choices.
Perloff has her own canon, obviously, but then so does each of us & she can
hardly be faulted if, through her energy & intelligence, her canon is more
consequential in the world than, say, my own.  My initial reaction to her
asking Gabriel for his credentials was quite negative & yet her remarks could
also be interpreted as an invitation & a challenge to engage with her in a
wider venue than the Poetix List.  Even she might perhaps concede however
that, in the arts, the impulse to bite the hand that feeds you (hers in this
instance) is fundamentally a healthy one -- every truly original poem, every
truly original critique, after all entails destruction as much as creation.
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:40:20 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Brennan 
Subject:      Re: PERLOFF
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In a message dated 11/27/98 3:29:52 PM Eastern Standard Time, JDEBROT@AOL.COM
writes:

<<
 the other hand, the difference between Pinsky & Howe is an ethical as much as
 an aesthetic distinction inasmuch as their work implicates opposing moral
 values.  N >>

an interesting remark, Jacques, and i wonder if you would elaborate on it?

joe brennan
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:30:59 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: AntolerInce
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

It seems to me the argument "Perloff is not a poet" is totally bogus.
There are poets who are idiots.

Also, someone who is so well-known can make an easy target for people who
are basically anonymous. So when MP says "and what have YOU written?" it
could be taken in this spirit:  what do you offer to this debate? Let's
debate YOUR writing.  If someone disagrees with some specific thing
Perloff has written, that's fine. But the blanket statement:  Perloff is
the sort of critic who... has no validity in my accounting.

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 20:09:19 -0500
Reply-To:     mcx@bellatlantic.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         michael corbin 
Subject:      Re: AntolerInce
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MAYHEW wrote:

>  totally bogus.
>  poets who are idiots.
>
>  for people who
> are basically anonymous.
>
>
>  But the blanket statement:
> my accounting.
>
>
> University of Kansas
>
>

I was just reading Alfred Crosby's _Measure of Reality_.

I liked in particular the history of double-entry book-keeping.

A kind of radical artifice.

In the age of media

and lists.

And the attempts at the oppositional manqué

in the various performed celebrity

and intellectual labor.

My eyes are getting bad, so when I look up at

the dome in the Jefferson building, main reading room

all the paean to poets laurels seem lost

in the dust motes, but maybe that is

what congressional libraries are bout.

Demos, nihil obstat.

mc
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:46:34 +0100
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Marjorie Perloff 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
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              x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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Christina Chirot informs the List that I have no right to comment on
poetry because I'm not a poet.  Then in her next paragraph she declares
that my course on Visual Poetics was suspect because I didn't listen to
"well informed" people who could tell me what to teach (like their own
visual poems!).  So now it seems I'm not allowed to be an academic
either because by some wonderful inverse reasoning, only poets decide
what should be taught in such a course!

The TOLERANCE exhibited here is really something.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 00:53:58 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
In-Reply-To:  <365F0FA6.C2CE97B1@earthlink.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I have to agree strongly here with Marjorie Perloff. By such criteria,
none of us could critique anything whatsoever example whatever is genera-
ted by (for me, suspect) identity politics. It's not even a question of
tolerance. Everyone has a right to her or his own opinion; Perloff's is
certainly well-informed, but even if it wasn't, one would hope the _ideas_
would be discussed - instead of ill-natured ad feminem/hominem attacks.

If anything, Perloff has generated more intelligent discussion on this
list recently than most of the other contributors, including myself.

Alan

On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Marjorie Perloff wrote:

> Christina Chirot informs the List that I have no right to comment on
> poetry because I'm not a poet.  Then in her next paragraph she declares
> that my course on Visual Poetics was suspect because I didn't listen to
> "well informed" people who could tell me what to teach (like their own
> visual poems!).  So now it seems I'm not allowed to be an academic
> either because by some wonderful inverse reasoning, only poets decide
> what should be taught in such a course!
>
> The TOLERANCE exhibited here is really something.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:40:46 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Kathy Lou Schultz 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry/salient points
MIME-Version: 1.0
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I remember the number of "poets" I encountered in my MFA program who had
read very little, if anything, and were quite happy about continuing in
this state of ignorance because their writing was about "personal
expression." Do I think these people are qualified critics or teachers
or poetry? No I certainly do not. Give me a team of Perloffs any day.
The classroom is not, despite what some might hope, a democracy in which
"poets" decide what poetry should be taught. Every person on this list
who teaches a course is--hopefully--relying upon years of study and
careful consideration of the subject in making critical choices about
what to include on any given syllabus. And, yes, they are allowed those
choices, and debate about those choices can hopefully proceeed along the
level of careful textual analysis and comparison rather than unwarranted
personal attacks.
The more interesting points, I believe, are: what is the role of
literature, what is the role of criticism, and finally, what is the
relationship between the two. This ties into an examination of the
process of canon formation. For example, Marjorie Perloff and others on
this list have contributed in interesting and expansive ways to the
discussion of the canon of "women's writing" and what that entails. Is
it only "subject matter" that these writers have in common, or can we
also consider technical/textual innovations are part of the discussion
in feminist literary criticism? These are some of the things I'd
personally like to hear debate about on the poetics list. All are
invited to join.
Kathy Lou Schultz

Marjorie Perloff wrote:
>
> Christina Chirot informs the List that I have no right to comment on
> poetry because I'm not a poet.  Then in her next paragraph she declares
> that my course on Visual Poetics was suspect because I didn't listen to
> "well informed" people who could tell me what to teach (like their own
> visual poems!).  So now it seems I'm not allowed to be an academic
> either because by some wonderful inverse reasoning, only poets decide
> what should be taught in such a course!
>
> The TOLERANCE exhibited here is really something.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 02:29:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         joel lewis 
Subject:      Re: I Love Learning Things
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hannah--

I just saw It's a wonderful time for the 300th time & decided that Pottersville
(the honky-tonk town that emerges because George Bailey is never born)
looks a whole lot more appealing than dull Bedford Falls!

joel lewis
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:55:20 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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I see why Marjorie Perloff tends to keep aloof from squabbles like this
one.  She's not too deft at the kind of fencing required.

Now she has decided that Dave Chirot ("dbc," not Christina Fairbank
Chirot, whose name is in the "from" box of Dave's message) has claimed
that she is "not allowed to be an academic" because she is not a poet.
Actually, Dave was claiming that her argument was flawed, to him,
because she was not a poet and therefore (I gather) unable to connect to
the poet's point of view in this ONE particular case (something I'm
afraid I disagree with Dave about).  I'm quite confident Dave does not
believe non-poets should be prohibited from being academics.

Maybe I should take back my remark about Marjorie's skill at squabbling:
she IS good at the fencing required, here misrepresenting an opponent so
as to be able more easily to put him down.

As one of the ""well informed"" people who provided Marjorie with advice
on what to teach at her visual poetry seminar (at her request to the
list, and never presuming to TELL her what to teach in the seminar), I
naturally agree with Dave that Marjorie ought to have paid more
attention to my advice.  Marjorie is certainly NOT well-informed about
visual poetry.  I might add that I never suggested she include my own
visual poems in her course, though I may well have suggested
(diffidently, in an aside) the inclusion of my book about visual poetry
and poetry-in-general, Of Manywhere-at-Once, soon to be out in a third
(self-needless to say-published) edition, which I (undiffidently)
consider of as much value in the field as any text she used in her
seminar, which isn't much of a boast.

In conclusion, I go along with Dave's remark, intolerance/tolerance--
maybe not either/or but both/and."  And would like to add the following
to his charmful poem
                                   the
                               po       em
                               is       in
                                  side

:
                                    eht
                                me       op
                               tuo       si
                                   edis

                                                           --Bob G.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:54:34 -0000
Reply-To:     suantrai@iol.ie
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" 
Subject:      Marjorie Perloff IS a poet
MIME-Version: 1.0
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This lovely poem by Marjorie Perloff (quoted below) appears in her essay
_Sentence, not Sentence_ which is available on her home page
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/perloff

Randolph Healy

***************************


Noun phrase with adjectival modifier

past participles used as predicate adjectives

imperative clause (or past indicative verb + adverbial compliment)

past indicative verb + prepositional phrase

complete clause (subject, verb, predicate) in past tense

prepositional phrase modified by preopositional phrase

noun phrase with adjectival modifier

past indicate verb + present participle

noun phrase + prepositional phrase

past progressive verb + object

infinitive + conditional clause

adverb + qualifier + adverb

complete clause (subject +predicate)

adverbial phrase of timefrom suantrai@iol.ie
from suantrai@iol.ie
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 07:33:05 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Ganick 
Subject:      new website
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

low-tech site with a long poem i've been
working on since december 1997...

click on:
  ...

peter ganick
potes & poets press / a.bacus
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 09:28:20 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Randy Prunty 
Subject:      Re: Ganick's long poem
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Peter, I can't read your poem.
 Now, what does this mean.  It means I can't treat your poem like I treat
(most) other poems.  I can't say "in section 48 you say, 'fortunes of
excelling intentionality looking at atoms opened for herself in snapped
gratitude'; what were you going for there"?  I mean I can say it.  I just did.
But even if you had a response to that, its not like that would help me "get"
your poem.
But then some people don't "get" some of my work.  And if they ask me what a
certain section or phrase means then i'm just dumbstruck because if they don't
get it then I can't explain it.
I think I mean i can't complete your poem.  But i remember I once thought i
couldn't read/complete Coolidge's Crystal Text. but so what.  I "get" it to
the extent it works.  and it DOES work for me.  in me.
I'm pretty sure that you realize that I write this not as a criticism, (I'll
say here that your piece in the latest Kenning is one of the cool
contributions that makes it such a good issue.  and perhaps I've said to you
before how much I enjoyed your chap Agoraphobia) but rather as an open
question to you and other listees about writers and readers.  Do you find
readers who read your long works with a kind of intensity/obsessiveness with
which you write them?  I mean, Peter, that's MASSIVE.   you expect it to be
consumed so soon after Thanksgiving?  or do you expect/hope that I and others
will visit frequently for Around A Corner sandwiches.  i'm assuming you care
about having readers or you would not publish.  so, another question, do you
intentionally try to overwhelm the reader?  to try to force me/us out of the
"this is a nice little poem" mentality?
you force me to expand what I think of as a poem.   if you say its a poem,
then its a poem.   like finnegans wake is a long mindfuck poem.   like Crystal
Text is a meditative-language-experience poem.
I hope you respond to this, but perhaps not until you've allowed others to
respond to your work and my questions.

Randy
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:01:31 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
Comments: To: Bob Grumman 
In-Reply-To:  <365FD697.1A92@nut-n-but.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Sat, 28 Nov 1998, Bob Grumman wrote:

> one.  She's not too deft at the kind of fencing required.
>
>                                tuo       si
>                                    edis

1).  As to your Latin: I DID edit the above by myself.

2).  Kenneth Tynan: "A critic is someone who knows the way but cannot
     drive the car."

     Trouble is, poets keep making shortcuts.  I think the critic in
     question needs a new Baedeker.


-G. Bunsen, III
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:11:13 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "David Erben (Art)" 
Subject:      Forgive Me For I Have Sinned...
Comments: To: UB Poetics discussion group 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Friends,

Some of you who recall my name appearing regularly on this list in the
distant and recent past might have noticed that I have taken a few months
off from posting here.  I could say I was travelling out west on
vacation or I was enjoying time without teaching in more than a few years
or that I had a series of respiratory infections and was on massive doses
of interventionist drugs most of the time and all of those would be at
least partially true.

But more recently there is a somewhat more nefarious reason my name and my
words haven't appeared on your screens.  I have been being "others." Using
my childhood memories from CCD education and tones so over the top that I
thought someone would surely notice quickly; and starting with an
insidious series of provocative subject lines targeting a well known
critic (sorry Marjorie!)), moving on to create narratives as an
agent provacateur , then duelling using the rhetoric of various
absolutisms, and finally concocting a paranoid fantasy of Arababble about
non poets not being able to critique poetry that would make Ross Perot
proud, I have been, for the past week and a half, creating a number of
cyber-personas (borrowing from Joyce and the Old Testament sneaking in a
few jokes about JD's "on the one hand, on the other hand" strategies in
the De Man essays, the early thing on Freud, and elsewhere). I was going
to continue this little performance, but the listowner tells me I must
come clean at this point since things are getting out of hand (sorry...).
So this is my little announcement/circumfession.  I hope no one took any
of my silliness seriously, all that talk about my book on visual poetry
and the fear and trembling at 1789 and May '68, and the hack-job poem
pricking the sensitive by using Foucault (I particularly like the lines I
came up with on the virtues of name calling). How could those of you who
know my whimsical tendencies towards dramatic excess not have heard me
there?  So much for intention and the re-marking of the
signature...dissemination indeed!!!...and all that. Its all gotten to be
an awful lot of work though, and kind of tedious, posting all these
things, so the time has come to put this thing to bed.

So this is me saying so long and reminding everyone about some favorite
lines from *Glas* and Lyle Lovett . . .

"Its/His signature, as thought of the remain(s), will envelop this corpus,
but no doubt will not be contained therein.
   This is -- a legend." (1a)

"Words are like posion..."
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 10:09:10 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Burt Hatlen 
Organization: University of Maine
Subject:      Re: POETICS Digest - 26 Nov 1998 to 27 Nov 1998 (#1998-137)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Dear Members of the Poetics Listserv,

I'm writing to you as a member of the steering committee of the newly
formed Modernist Studies Association, which is designed to bring
together
scholars who are working on all facets of literary and cultural activity
between the later 19th- and the mid- 20th century.

The inaugural conference of the new association will take place October
7-19, 1999 at Penn State University (University Park). The title of the
conference, "The New Modernisms," speaks to the revitalization and the
variety of new developments in the field over the last several years.
At
our first conference, we will run sessions on topics such as the
expansion
of the modernist canon, particularly in light of recent concerns with
race, class, gender, region, and ethnicity; the "postmodern"
revaluation of modernism; the new interest in modernism, science, and
technology; the reassessment of the
socio-political contexts of modernism; issues of nationalism,
imperialism,
and colonialism; the marketing of modernism; the impact of new editorial
principles and procedures; and new approaches to the relations among the
various arts and sciences of the era.

You should be hearing about the conference over the next few months.
We'll
be distributing flyers over the next month or so, and the official
conference brochure, which will contain a call for papers and a
registration form, will appear in early spring.  You can also check out
our
website (still under construction) at
http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa.htm.  For further information,
feel free to contact me or any one of the conference planners,  Michael
Coyle (mcoyle@mail.colgate.edu), Cassandra Laity (CLAITY@drew.edu), Gail
McDonald (g_mcdona@uncg.edu), or Sanford Schwartz (sxs8@psu.edu).

Since we are still in the process of constructing our mailing list, I
wondered if you could suggest the names of several colleagues (along
with
their institutional affiliations and e-mail addresses if you have them)
who might be interested in the organization and the conference.  I or
one
of the other members of the steering committee would be happy to contact
them.

Best wishes,

Burt Hatlen (Hatlen@Maine.Edu)
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:25:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hannah J Sassaman 
Subject:      Re: I Love Learning Things
In-Reply-To:   from "joel lewis" at Nov
              28, 98 02:29:42 am
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
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I agree -- one thing that struck me about Pottersville was how similar it
seemed to any portrayal of New York in "showgirl-makes-good" type movies
of the thirties and forties.  Everyone in those movies *owned* nightclubs
and drank themselves silly.  IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is morally polarized
in comparison to those flicks.  Which world were the moviegoers of the
era rooting for most of the time?

Hannah

joel lewis said:
(c;
(c; Hannah--
(c;
(c; I just saw It's a wonderful time for the 300th time & decided that Pottersville
(c; (the honky-tonk town that emerges because George Bailey is never born)
(c; looks a whole lot more appealing than dull Bedford Falls!
(c;
(c; joel lewis
(c;



--
*****************************************************************************

Hannah Jane Sassaman
Sophomore, University of Pennsylvania
Majoring in Theatre Arts and English
Editor at CrossConnect (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect)


School Address:                  Home Address:
4009 Pine St.                    42 Framingham Lane
Philadelphia, PA  19104          Pittsford, NY  14534


Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
 -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about
women and cocaine.

 -- Tallulah Bankhead
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 10:28:50 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
In-Reply-To:  <365FD697.1A92@nut-n-but.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

So we're back to petty sniping at Marjorie Perloff's syllabus? This was
one of the low points of the list almost a year ago.

My point about relative anonymity: most people's syllabi are not publicly
debated by a group of 700 people. Let's turn the spotlight on Bob Grumman
for a while.

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
jmayhew@ukans.edu
(785) 864-3851
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:00:06 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------276647F05A4D"

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Jonathan Mayhew wrote:

"So we're back to petty sniping at Marjorie Perloff's syllabus? This was
one of the low points of the list almost a year ago.

"My point about relative anonymity: most people's syllabi are not
publicly debated by a group of 700 people. Let's turn the spotlight on
Bob Grumman for a while."

Nor was Marjorie's: only three or four people found fault with it; a
half dozen of so others tch-tched.  Certainly 700 did not participate.
Moreover, I wasn't the one to restart the squabble but felt I ought to
correct what Marjorie said about it in her retort to the one who did.
But I'm all for laying off Marjorie and spotlighting Me!  I have a few
poems and an essay at Light & Dust, stuff at my own hardly-ever-visited
Comprepoetica site (address below) and a play that almost nobody thinks
much of at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/3228.  You should be
able to get enough ammunition to use against or for me from these.

                                                             --Bob G.

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Bob Grumman

BobGrumman@Nut-N-But.Net     http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492

                          Comprepoetica, the Poetry-Data-Collection Site




--------------276647F05A4D--
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:14:14 -0500
Reply-To:     BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Grumman 
Subject:      Re: Forgive Me For I Have Sinned...
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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Well, David, you sure fooled me.  I thought you were writing Marjorie's
posts.

                                                    --Bob G.

David Erben (Art) wrote:
>
> Friends,
>
> Some of you who recall my name appearing regularly on this list in the
> distant and recent past might have noticed that I have taken a few months
> off from posting here.  I could say I was travelling out west on
> vacation or I was enjoying time without teaching in more than a few years
> or that I had a series of respiratory infections and was on massive doses
> of interventionist drugs most of the time and all of those would be at
> least partially true.
>
> But more recently there is a somewhat more nefarious reason my name and my
> words haven't appeared on your screens.  I have been being "others." Using
> my childhood memories from CCD education and tones so over the top that I
> thought someone would surely notice quickly; and starting with an
> insidious series of provocative subject lines targeting a well known
> critic (sorry Marjorie!)), moving on to create narratives as an
> agent provacateur , then duelling using the rhetoric of various
> absolutisms, and finally concocting a paranoid fantasy of Arababble about
> non poets not being able to critique poetry that would make Ross Perot
> proud, I have been, for the past week and a half, creating a number of
> cyber-personas (borrowing from Joyce and the Old Testament sneaking in a
> few jokes about JD's "on the one hand, on the other hand" strategies in
> the De Man essays, the early thing on Freud, and elsewhere). I was going
> to continue this little performance, but the listowner tells me I must
> come clean at this point since things are getting out of hand (sorry...).
> So this is my little announcement/circumfession.  I hope no one took any
> of my silliness seriously, all that talk about my book on visual poetry
> and the fear and trembling at 1789 and May '68, and the hack-job poem
> pricking the sensitive by using Foucault (I particularly like the lines I
> came up with on the virtues of name calling). How could those of you who
> know my whimsical tendencies towards dramatic excess not have heard me
> there?  So much for intention and the re-marking of the
> signature...dissemination indeed!!!...and all that. Its all gotten to be
> an awful lot of work though, and kind of tedious, posting all these
> things, so the time has come to put this thing to bed.
>
> So this is me saying so long and reminding everyone about some favorite
> lines from *Glas* and Lyle Lovett . . .
>
> "Its/His signature, as thought of the remain(s), will envelop this corpus,
> but no doubt will not be contained therein.
>    This is -- a legend." (1a)
>
> "Words are like posion..."
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:22 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Emily Lloyd 
Subject:      Critic-Penitents, Poet-Penitents
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Critcs have so much "power" in poetry because poetry has so little power
(despite gains) in the U.S. as a commodity.  People will see heavily hyped
films whether or not film scholars/critics "approve" them--and even
whether or not pop critics like Siskel & Ebert do.  I don't know of any
pop poetry critics--by which I mean critics whose opinion the average
person (let's say even average college or post-college graduate) doesn't
have to go looking for, doesn't have to be *already interested* in poetry
to read, hear, or be bombarded with.  The closest to pop would not be
Vendler, but, now, Hass--the Sunday *Washington Post* having a larger, I'm
pretty sure, readership than the New Yorker.  And, for the most part,
poetry is to the novel as "20th Century Music" is to the overwhelming
majority of the music on FM radio.  I'm not even talking Babbitt or Boulez
poetry "equivalents."  I'm talking Robert Pinsky.  Go door to door and ask
folks who the current poet laureate is--who ANY of the laureates (besides,
of course, Frost) were.  Poetry only sells well if it's by a singer,
actor, pope or ex-president.  Or, whoops, Maya Angelou.  Most people will
still define poetry as writing that rhymes.  These are *not* stupid
people.  Even among "cultured" people--or people who wish to appear
cultured--knowing who's being put forth as tops in poetry in the
mainstream (don't even *think* about any other stream) is no priority.

Poetry crit is read by poets, critics, and
college-students-who-are-forced.  This, I think, is why it *seems* less to
separate the wheat from the chaff that to separate poets from poets.  The
ultimate use (far, perhaps, from the ultimate interest or concern of the
critic) to which crit is put is to determine what's taught in schools.
Not what's read by any other or the larger population.  Perhaps not what's
actually read by those students to whom it's assigned.

Why are we angry when what we consider bad poetry (I'll cite Pinsky for
the ease of it) is put forth as the best (or even as good)?  I can't
imagine it can be too much about money.  I'd guess it's because we have
some kind of love and respect for poetry (that ol' abstraction,
"poetry")--such that the "bad" stuff feels like an *abuse* of poetry.  Bad
poetry has occasionally made me, at least, stomp around the house, bang my
head against a wall, rant, and practically pluck my eyes out because
they've offended me.  I've responded (and will again, probably) more
indignantly to bad poetry than I have to all manner of shootings, a couple
bombings, etc.  This is either because I'm a poet, a critic, or a crazy
person, all things I've actively been at certain times.

I take it for granted that critics, too, have a love of & respect for
poetry--and *of course* they need not be poets.  Many excellent poets are
lousy teachers and critics; many excellent critics might be lousy poets.
Frankly, the closer I've come to reading as much or knowing as much about
poetry as the most qualified (ok, credentialed) critics, the less likely
I've been to write it.  I quit writing poetry a year and a half ago--out
of love & respect for poetry.  I still consider myself highly qualified to
critique it (and no, I'm not, nor have I ever tried to be, a published
critic.)  Perhaps more highly than when I wrote it.  Perhaps more highly
for having written it.  What's clear is that I wasn't able at the time,
and may never be, to write the poetry that I, as a critic, would find
worthy of "poetry."  For the record, I quit when in the peak of high favor
with my MFA profs & other poets whose work I respected.  That's a big "so
what."  I did not consider them rigorous enough critics.  One prof, in
workshop, asked the poets to forget her critiques and concentrate on mine
instead.  So it's not a case of "I'm my own toughest critic."  I was
everyone's .

Finally (and I apologize for having been rambling & disjunct), I would
never assume a necessary relation between a love of poetry and a love of
poets (and keepin' 'em all happy).  I'd far prefer a love of poetry.
Hell, I'd prefer blind submission processes to even the lowliest of
litmags (which reminds me: eds. of litmags should be at least as
infuriating to this crowd as critics, no?)  As yet, I think we should
still be grateful to Perloff (and Perelman, Lazer, etc.)  The Canon is
still a far more "dangerous" opponent than their (or our individual)
canons.
        All of this kind of reminds me of my 2 yrs. or so of "hardcore"
lesbian feminism.  More energy & time was spent on such questions as
"Should lesbians be allowed to wear lipstick?" and "Should we even SPEAK
to bisexual women?" than, well, I dunno, "How can we stop courts from
automatically denying lesbian mothers custody?"

Focue.  Perspective.  Practicality.
em
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:47:09 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         William Slaughter 
Subject:      Mudlark
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

MUDLARK
An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics
Never in and never out of print...
http://www.unf.edu/mudlark
____________________


New and On View: Mudlark Poster No. 15

"The Point of Touching" and "Moving Bodies"

Prose Poems by Michael Hettich

                *  *  *

Current Issue: Mudlark No. 9

THE ROAD TO OCOSINGO

Chapbook by Andrew Schelling

                *  *  *

Next Issue: Mudlark No. 10

IMPROVISATIONS ON TITLES OF WORKS BY JEAN DUBUFFET

Chapbook by Diane Wald

____________________

Spread the word. Far and wide,

William Slaughter, Editor
E-mail: mudlark@unf.edu
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:48:09 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
In-Reply-To:  <36602C16.4433@nut-n-but.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

imho, difficult poetries profit from intervention by critics who are
sensitive to same... and from where i sit, marjorie is one of the latter,
and one of the best, period... (if i may, marjorie) prof. perloff didn't
become prof. perloff just b/c she's at stanford---anyone who knows anything
about her knows how hard she's had to work to distinguish herself, to even
"make it" with the stanford crowd... in her ability to read various works
"closely" (shorthand alert here), she often speaks directly to my
aspirations and experiences as a poet...

there are other, more broadly cultural studies of poetry that are valuable,
as well, and that help make my work valuable to me... we have a number of
folks on this list capable of such reckonings, as i've said before... and
of course i continue to value and respect the work of so many other poets
(of course)...

i find mself friends---and friendship is what i value---both with marjorie,
for example, and with dave chirot... i dislike it when i see friends
quarrel, but i understand that the world, too, can be a difficult place...

from where i'm sitting, i think kathy lou schultz points to the salient
issue---the relationship twixt the (only apparently) dichotomous realms of
literature (e.g., but may be expanded in semiotic terms) and critique...
these are nice categories to deploy, in certain situations, but can be
extremely delimiting under certain other situations (just ask a. jenn
sondheim, for one)...

i think this discussion is beginning to sound a whole lot like the hoary
"two cultures" conflict (humanities "vs." sciences)... i appreciate david
erben's (hi david!) sense of humor... and i admire jonathan m's capacity
for cutting to the quick of things...

binaries can be useful, in that they point to actualities of practice...
but they can be reified, to use an overworked expression... i hear some
reified rumblings rumbling forth from these vicinities on occasion, though
i sympathize, i really do, with the poet tribes, "academic poet" that i am,
even as i will rise to the defense of the critical function (me, who
imagines himself a scholar-poet sometimes, but other times a plain ole
writer)...

oh and if i had three feet, one would most certainly be up my ass...

///

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:29:19 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Brennan 
Subject:      Fwd: let's play monopoly
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thought this might interest some list members.

j..

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Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:15:37 EST
To: heidegger@lists.village.virginia.edu
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please forward to everyone you know who reads:



Fellow Writers and Readers:

For those of you who've missed the front page news this past week, Barnes and
Nobel, and biggest bookseller in the country, as just bought Ingram, the
biggest book distributor in the country.  The Washington Post likened the deal
to King Kong buying Godzilla.  To say that it will change the publishing
industry forever, or that independent booksellers, authors, and publishers are
unhappy about it, is a gross understatement.

The following message from Tom Purdom, a member of Science Fiction Writers of
America (SFWA) is being forward to writers' organizations all over the country
with the request that it be forwarded to anyone and everyone who ever buys a
book.  I'll be sending my letters, per Tom's letter, and I hope all of you
will consider doing the same.

Mary

[BEGIN TOM'S MESSAGE]

Last night I received a message from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America asking me to write the Attorney General and the Federal Trade
Commission.  I've written both of them, and it occurs to me this issue should
interest anyone who reads.

On Friday, Barnes and Noble announced it is buying Ingram Books-- the major
national wholesaler in the book business.  Ingram is the primary supplier for
the independent bookstores and chains in the United States.  If this deal goes
through, the largest retail bookstore in the country will control the major
wholesaler.  Ingram is also the major supplier for Barnes and Noble's chief
online competitor--amazon.com.

For the last twenty years, writers have been dealing with a corporate
consolidation that has changed the nature of the publishing industry.  The
overall result has been a reduction in the choices offered readers.

The American Booksellers Association is asking its members to write the
Attorney General and the FTC.  SFWA is joining in this effort.  Other writers
organizations are probably jumping on the bandwagon.  The founder of SFWA,
Damon Knight, has urged all SFWA members to send letters.  Another SFWA past
president, Jane Yollen, has called the takeover "the final nail in a number of
coffins."

To quote the ABA statement:
"This acquisition, should it be allowed to take place, is just one more
example of the large scale corporate consolidation that has infiltrated every
corner of our culture......Consumers are left with an environment in which
fewer and fewer people are deciding which books get published, and ultimately,
which books Americans can read and buy....This deal would make independent
bookstores virtually dependent upon their largest competitor....While there
are some smaller, unaffiliated book wholesalers that provide independent
booksellers with excellent service, Ingram Book
Company is a primary distribution source for the vast majority of ABA member
stores...."

The relevant addresses are:
 Attorney General Janet Reno
 Department of Justice
 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
 Washington, DC 20530

 Robert Pitofsky
 Chairman
 Federal Trade Commission
 Pennsylvania Avenue &  6th Street, NW
 Washington, DC 20580

The ABA would like to receive courtesy copies of all letters to Reno or
Pitofsky.  Their  fax number is 1-914-591-2720.  Their mailing address is:

 American Booksellers Association
 828 South Broadway
 Tarrytown, NY 10591

Two years ago, Senator Hatch made two attempts to slip significant changes in
the copyright law through Congress.  The American Society of Journalists and
Authors mailed everyone on its list, we responded with faxes and emails, and
Senator Hatch retreated.  In the past, writers and readers have been an
invisible community.  By the time we learned about developments like the
Barnes and Noble deal, it was usually too late to do much.  Now, thanks to
online communications, we can join campaigns like this knowing thousands of
other writers and readers are mounting an immediate response.

The ABA is asking for letters, not emails or faxes.  If you don't have time to
write a couple of paragraphs, two sentences will do.  Just tell the AG and the
FTC you support the ABA position on Barnes and Noble's attempt to buy Ingram
and hope the Justice Department will initiate anti-trust action.

Please feel free to forward this.

For more information on this subject, you can consult the ABA Bookweb site at
http:www.bookweb.org



bob


     --- from list heidegger@lists.village.virginia.edu ---

--part0_912281360_boundary--
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:40:43 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

*The Poetics of Indeterminacy* being a prime example.

Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:

> imho, difficult poetries profit from intervention by critics who are
> sensitive to same... and from where i sit, marjorie is one of the latter,
> and one of the best, period...
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:33:58 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Gabriel Gudding 
Subject:      The Virtues of Going Over The Top
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Sat, 28 Nov 1998, David Erben (Art) wrote:
> tones so over the top that I thought someone would surely notice quickly

What are the virtues of going over the top?

1).     When, like the sides of a hippy fortress, the sides of debate
        are so thickened by tedious argument and tut-tuttle that one cannot
        punch through them, one must go over them.

2).     Just as the arrow must fly over the cat in the plum tree in order
        to penetrate the rainbow above the meadow of oleander, so also must my
        rhetoric overshoot your feline brain on its way to the moon.

3).     All successful catapults fling items _over_ palisades, missiles
        being unable to fly through the ground.

4).     Aside from skirts and possibly socks, the best garments go over the top.

5).     All "boss" poetry goes over the top.  And why shouldn't argument
        follow it?


-- Gaga Gagarin
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:40:02 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      Re: non-poets on poetry
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

>Chirot informs the List that I have no right to comment on
>poetry because I'm not a poet.

Marjorie, a lot of the posts can be boiled down to simply being critical
of you for being a critic, doing what critics DO, i.e. making a
difference between the good, the bad, and the merely ugly as you see it;
taking a stand for what you believe in instead of being "tolerant."

 Pinsky...Howe...Howe?...Pinsky?..."Can(n)ons to the right of us ...
Can(n)ons to the left of us"... personally, I can't tolerate the idea of
having to side with either of them. Maybe that means I'm a loose cannon
caught in the crossfire of the Determinacy of Criticism.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:23:20 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Charles Bernstein 
Subject:      Free Poetics
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I am not writing to dispute an assertion or tone in any specific post,=
 though I have several in mind, but because I am concerned that the=
 tabloidization of the recent  list is discouraging people from=
 participating who don't want to enter into such a fray. By tabloidization I=
 mean persistent posts that are big on attitude but little else; that are=
 more focussed on generating attention than provoking thought. Maybe I am=
 just sticking my hand against the wind, to feel the breeze; that is, I=
 realize that some of what I am concerned about here is part of the=
 structure of the listserve environment. But technology is not destiny and I=
 am convinced that the group of people subscribed to this list can edit=
 themselves in a way responsive to what this list might aspire to be. I am=
 not writing this to provoke a round of defensive remarks -- I understand=
 that every specific I might give would be open to question,  no doubt=
 reflects my misunderstanding of the underlying issues, or simply reflects=
 my disagreement with another perspective, etc. I am, of course, expressing=
 my preference, with the understanding that, as list moderator, that=
 preference needs to be articulated to the list more forcefully than I have=
 generally been willing to in the past.=20

For this list is moderated, as all the subscribers now. Joel and I are=
 reluctant to intervene in any given exchange, or about any given post,=
 because I believe that free and open and even intemperate exchange is a=
 fundamental feature of dialogue. Disagreement is always welcome. But the=
 viability of this space requires a greater level of care in what is posted=
 than has been evident in some -- indeed a small but visible minority -- of=
 the posts in the recent past, where self-proclaimed "cheap shots" and "name=
 calling" end up dominating the space, creating more spectacle and than=
 conversation . Heavy attitude is fine at times, but I am finding that while=
 I can tolerate a heavy diet of it, I am losing my patience for it.=20
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 17:35:08 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         louis stroffolino 
Subject:      Re: Critic-Penitents, Poet-Penitents
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

  I (sometimes) like arguing with critics and/or scholars.
  But of course I realize when I do so, I realize that they do something
  I either can't, won't, or simply didn't, do.
  There is a skill to a certain kind of general, binary, sweeping,
  thinking that critics often employ. It is something I respect,
  even if it seems sometimes I don't. I think it can be useful for
  poets. I, for one, know that some of my poems are written out of
  arguing with critics (and eventually arguing against arguing).
  I'd rather do it IN the poem often than in what some would say is
  more "legitimazing" prose, but then I'm aware that some would say
  that such poetry is really more "like" criticism (the enemy) than
  it is like poetry. Sometimes this dilemma can be very fascinating.
  Sometimes I can even get myself to be "reductive" enough to
  write things that "pass" for essays in an academic, or journalistic,
  sense (it's an "or" not an "end").
  (and sometimes I'm even "lyric" enough to pass for what some
   journals call "poetry").

  Anyway, this isn't really about me.
  So, let me just say that--at thew risk of sounding fuddy-duddy
  in valuing communication--that I have been on a Shakespeare email
  list for about as long as I've been on this...
  And there's a certain (at the risk of sounding sexist, which is NOT
  my intention) "gentlemanliness" to the nature of the argument on
  that list which is lacking here. I don't want to hold the discussion
  there as a STANDARD that we, at poetics, should strive for (for there's
  a lot of silly dross there too). But at least there's an idea of
  respect for the varying speakers there admist the disagreements about
  opinions. Bitterness is often justified, entertaining, and a powerful
  tool for communication, but the email forum seems to encourage
  no time for reflection---especially when the list is so free ranging.
  Awhile back Kevin or Dodie said something about how those who
  complain about hierarchies may really want them.
  I sometimes we think we need to "free" poetics FROM its current
  "freedom" and set some limits to the discussions....
  well, this seems incredibly BLAND of me (to myself at least) to say
  this. Maybe we could PAY somebody to be a moderator (like the talk
  about paying NFL officials), but then it would make the most
  interesting talk backchannel pleas to the moderator
  (but then a lot of the most interesting talk MAY VERY WELL BE
   backchannel anyway), like lobbyists doing the real work
   while the floor of congress is a figurehead.
   ---chr


On Sat, 28 Nov 1998, Emily Lloyd wrote:

> Critcs have so much "power" in poetry because poetry has so little power
> (despite gains) in the U.S. as a commodity.  People will see heavily hyped
> films whether or not film scholars/critics "approve" them--and even
> whether or not pop critics like Siskel & Ebert do.  I don't know of any
> pop poetry critics--by which I mean critics whose opinion the average
> person (let's say even average college or post-college graduate) doesn't
> have to go looking for, doesn't have to be *already interested* in poetry
> to read, hear, or be bombarded with.  The closest to pop would not be
> Vendler, but, now, Hass--the Sunday *Washington Post* having a larger, I'm
> pretty sure, readership than the New Yorker.  And, for the most part,
> poetry is to the novel as "20th Century Music" is to the overwhelming
> majority of the music on FM radio.  I'm not even talking Babbitt or Boulez
> poetry "equivalents."  I'm talking Robert Pinsky.  Go door to door and ask
> folks who the current poet laureate is--who ANY of the laureates (besides,
> of course, Frost) were.  Poetry only sells well if it's by a singer,
> actor, pope or ex-president.  Or, whoops, Maya Angelou.  Most people will
> still define poetry as writing that rhymes.  These are *not* stupid
> people.  Even among "cultured" people--or people who wish to appear
> cultured--knowing who's being put forth as tops in poetry in the
> mainstream (don't even *think* about any other stream) is no priority.
>
> Poetry crit is read by poets, critics, and
> college-students-who-are-forced.  This, I think, is why it *seems* less to
> separate the wheat from the chaff that to separate poets from poets.  The
> ultimate use (far, perhaps, from the ultimate interest or concern of the
> critic) to which crit is put is to determine what's taught in schools.
> Not what's read by any other or the larger population.  Perhaps not what's
> actually read by those students to whom it's assigned.
>
> Why are we angry when what we consider bad poetry (I'll cite Pinsky for
> the ease of it) is put forth as the best (or even as good)?  I can't
> imagine it can be too much about money.  I'd guess it's because we have
> some kind of love and respect for poetry (that ol' abstraction,
> "poetry")--such that the "bad" stuff feels like an *abuse* of poetry.  Bad
> poetry has occasionally made me, at least, stomp around the house, bang my
> head against a wall, rant, and practically pluck my eyes out because
> they've offended me.  I've responded (and will again, probably) more
> indignantly to bad poetry than I have to all manner of shootings, a couple
> bombings, etc.  This is either because I'm a poet, a critic, or a crazy
> person, all things I've actively been at certain times.
>
> I take it for granted that critics, too, have a love of & respect for
> poetry--and *of course* they need not be poets.  Many excellent poets are
> lousy teachers and critics; many excellent critics might be lousy poets.
> Frankly, the closer I've come to reading as much or knowing as much about
> poetry as the most qualified (ok, credentialed) critics, the less likely
> I've been to write it.  I quit writing poetry a year and a half ago--out
> of love & respect for poetry.  I still consider myself highly qualified to
> critique it (and no, I'm not, nor have I ever tried to be, a published
> critic.)  Perhaps more highly than when I wrote it.  Perhaps more highly
> for having written it.  What's clear is that I wasn't able at the time,
> and may never be, to write the poetry that I, as a critic, would find
> worthy of "poetry."  For the record, I quit when in the peak of high favor
> with my MFA profs & other poets whose work I respected.  That's a big "so
> what."  I did not consider them rigorous enough critics.  One prof, in
> workshop, asked the poets to forget her critiques and concentrate on mine
> instead.  So it's not a case of "I'm my own toughest critic."  I was
> everyone's .
>
> Finally (and I apologize for having been rambling & disjunct), I would
> never assume a necessary relation between a love of poetry and a love of
> poets (and keepin' 'em all happy).  I'd far prefer a love of poetry.
> Hell, I'd prefer blind submission processes to even the lowliest of
> litmags (which reminds me: eds. of litmags should be at least as
> infuriating to this crowd as critics, no?)  As yet, I think we should
> still be grateful to Perloff (and Perelman, Lazer, etc.)  The Canon is
> still a far more "dangerous" opponent than their (or our individual)
> canons.
>         All of this kind of reminds me of my 2 yrs. or so of "hardcore"
> lesbian feminism.  More energy & time was spent on such questions as
> "Should lesbians be allowed to wear lipstick?" and "Should we even SPEAK
> to bisexual women?" than, well, I dunno, "How can we stop courts from
> automatically denying lesbian mothers custody?"
>
> Focue.  Perspective.  Practicality.
> em
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:23:42 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Steven Shoemaker 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics
In-Reply-To:  <199811282159.QAA04942@nico.bway.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Well, I imagine the backlash is on its way, but I'm with Charles on this
one.  I use to think that one of the things I liked most about the list
was its tendency toward anarchy, the fact of it *un*moderation etc.
And there have been plenty of zesty brouhahas along the way that I've
enjoyed.  But lately it seems as if there is very, very little actual
discussion going on, and I'm certainly one of those people Charles
mentions who have found themselves gradually alienated by the
just-plain-*nastiness* (my word, not CB's) that has become so
prevalent.

steve
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 22:35:44 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Bull Run
Comments: To: Poetics List 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I took the kids to Manasas yesterday to see the site of the first Battle of
Bull Run only to discover that the Civil War re-enactment was really going
on here on The List whilst our backs were turned. My attitude toward this is
pretty much the same as my answer to Colin's question yesterday, "Who were
the good guys?" "They all were. That's what makes war so wasteful and
stupid."

I've often thought that the really radical distinction between our age and
those of decades past is not one of more (or less) good poets per se
[although I'm inclined to believe that there are more good writers right now
than ever before in history], but rather that there are far fewer critics of
substance. I think that Marjorie Perloff (and Peter Quartermain, Jerry
McGann, Alan Golding, Steve Evans, Maria Damon, Tom Vogler &c &c &c) takes a
lot of flack because  she (and they) stands in for "all of criticism" in its
positive functions. If Marjorie's work has a weak spot, I think it's that
she knows just how little good criticism is being written about contemporary
poetry and she's always trying to fill all of the gaps. Her energy always
astounds me as does her ability to bring extraordinary powers of
concentration of every project she tackles.

A much more interesting question than why does X or Y not make it onto
reading list A is always "what is it about X or Y that keeps someone from
putting it onto reading lists A, B, C, etc.?"

Yes, it's true that critics who don't write or publish or primarily publish
poetry will see the poem differently than do other poets. Poets often read
the poem as though the other poet were "solving the problems" put forward by
the poem and vote heavily with their (my) emotions on how well that gets
done. Is it the only way to read a poem? Is there any such "only way"? Not
in this galaxy there's not. And I write this as one of the loudest
proponents of poets writing criticism there has ever been.

I note that I, for one, don't feel "disabled" to speak about the fiction I
read, although I haven't ever published fiction (tho I did "win" one
Pushcart Prize for same and was ostensibly hired as a fiction teacher by
UCSD some 16 years ago, which says more about the institutionalization of
genre than anything else). Ditto the films I see or music I hear, although
I've never ventured into those media either. I've been reading Kathy Acker
on Goya this weekend. Should I presume that this should not have been
written?

There are also people in virtually every poetry scene who are important to
it who publish neither poetry nor criticism, or else very very little. We
lost two of these folks in the past year or so in Barry Cox and Charles
Watts. Were their opinions not of value? That seems non-sensical on the face
of it. I think it's very difficult to understand or articulate precisely how
poetry is diminished by the loss of someone who doesn't characteristically
speak up, but I never met anyone who knew these people (or others like them)
who wouldn't admit it.

In some ways, that silence replicates the position of most of the folks who
lurk on this list. This list, after all, has 700 recipients but can handle
only 50 messages per day.

If anything, we need more of all these social functions in and around the
poem. We certainly need 100 Marjorie Perloffs, preferably all in contention
with one another so as to create a true public discourse about literature
that we would, every one of us, benefit from. If nothing else, the arguments
who have more in the way of nuance.

Ron Silliman
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 22:32:42 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      Re: Ganick's long poem
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Randy Prunty writes:

>Peter, I can't read your poem.
> Now, what does this mean.  It means I can't treat your poem like I treat
>(most) other poems. .........
>I hope you respond to this, but perhaps not until you've allowed others to
>respond to your work and my questions.

To me, reading Peter's poem is like picking one's way through a sort of
multi-colored and many-faceted Australia in the shape of a mountain. It
is an immense, hard going, and deserted place in terms of the visitor's
prior expectations but so rich on its own terms that one fears getting
lost in it.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 03:40:40 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      ===========
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

=====


============================================
Fierce Theodor has wrought this sonnet.
Norn walked to Valkyrie, true fey Princess
lost in Mordor's distance, wilt thou say
I abjure rumor lost and truth regained. I
speak of Mordor's legions, O charmful
Magister, of fired visage, know thou what
Norn will speak, in light of tongueless
Norn, in light of mouthless Norn and
speechless Norn? The Portal formed the
Wander of many a fey Princess; I formed
them, they formed them. Would that Sorcery
have no role but obvious Sincerity; would
Upper and Nether World clash at volcanic
Rim, defeat of legionnaire and Norn alike.
============================================
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 06:10:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Peter Ganick 
Subject:      Fwd: GOMA/english y castellano version
Comments: To: fop-l@vm.cc.purdue.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>UA+MA
>URGENT ACTION  OF MAIL ART
>
>GOM@
>(Global Organization of Mail Artists)
>
>November, 26, 1998
>
>Pinochet, the justice and Humberto Nilo
>
>Approximately a year ago, the Director and Academic of the Arts School of
>the University from Chile, Humberto Nilo Saavedra, promoted a Mail Art call
>to please the freedom in education for the arts. Months later, he was
>expelled from his chair. The dictatorship continued operating. Now, the
>ex-dictator and Chilean life senator, Augusto Pinochet, has been arrested .
>In such an unexpected way, he is in the custody of the court in England as=
 a
>result of the request for extradition from a Spanish judge, Baltasar=
 Garz=C3=B3n.
>The charges are for more than 90 crimes of genocide, international=
 terrorism
>and tortures. Faced with the danger that the process can be stopped by
>Spanish reactionary forces, we asked for solidarity to all the mail artists
>for justice to be strictly applied.
>
>The group AU MA+gom@ (Urgent Action =E2=80=93 Mail Art), consider the first=
 stage of
>this project to be closed, once achieved that both Spanish and English=
 Court
>sentenced the ex-dictator and Chilean life senator, Augusto Pinochet, must
>to be put in trial for crimes of genocide, international terrorism and
>torture.
>
>For these crimes, Pinochet was requested by the laws of several countries
>(Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland...and others). The extradition
>proceedings will take time. However, we consider the precedent established
>will make possible to be optimists about the make up of an International
>Court to fight the crimes against humanity.
>
>On the other hand, our campaign was mainly aimed at Mail Art world, even
>thought a lot of people from another circles did identify with our call. In
>that respect, we want to declare that our report of the case of Humberto
>Nilo -ex Director of the University of Chile=E2=80=99s Fine Art School, who=
 was
>dimissed from his position after the organization of the Mail Art=
 exhibition
>"Stop: liberty, diversity and pluralism"- is still not solved. Because this
>reason, we will continue making all efforts to give him back his position.
>
>Adhesion to the list: tartarug@teleline.es  subject: adhesion
>Participate in future actions of GOM@ : gom@crosses.net  subject: member
>
>
>Pinochet, la justicia y Humberto Nilo
>
>Hace aproximadamente un a=C3=B1o, el profesor de BB.AA. de la Universidad=
 de
>Chile, Humberto Nilo Saavedra, promov=C3=ADa una convocatoria de Mail Art=
 en
>favor de la libertad de ense=C3=B1anza para las artes. Unos meses despu=C3=
=A9s, era
>expulsado de su c=C3=A1tedra. La dictadura segu=C3=ADa operando. Ahora ha=
 sido
>detenido el ex-dictador y senador vitalicio chileno, Augusto Pinochet. De=
 la
>manera m=C3=A1s insospechada ha quedado bajo custodia en Inglaterra ante la
>petici=C3=B3n de extradici=C3=B3n de un juez espa=C3=B1ol, Baltasar=
 Garz=C3=B3n. La=20
>acusaci=C3=B3n es
>de m=C3=A1s de 90 delitos por genocidio, terrorismo internacional y=
 tortura. Ante
>el peligro de que el proceso sea detenido por fuerzas reaccionarias
>espa=C3=B1olas, solicitamos a todos los mail artistas su solidaridad para=
 que la
>justicia se aplique con todo rigor.
>
>
>
>EL COLECTIVO AU MA+gom@ (Acci=C3=B3n Urgente - Organizaci=C3=B3n Mundial=
 del Mail
>Art), da por concluida la primera etapa de este proceso, una vez conseguido
>que tanto los tribunales espa=C3=B1oles como los ingleses hayan sentenciado=
 que
>el ex-dictador Chileno y senador vitalicio Augusto Pinochet, debe ser
>juzgado por los m=C3=BAltiples crimenes de genocidio, terrorismo=
 internacional y
>tortura.
>Delitos cuyo procesamiento ha sido solicitado por diversos=
 pa=C3=ADses.(Espa=C3=B1a,
>Francia, Alemania, Suiza...) El proceso de extradici=C3=B3n, probablemente=
 ser=C3=A1
>largo. Pero consideramos que a partir de estos momentos, el precedente
>sentado permitir=C3=A1 contemplar con nuevas perspectivas la formaci=C3=B3n=
 de un
>Tribunal Internacional para combatir los cr=C3=ADmenes
>contra la humanidad.
>Por otro lado, nuestro manifiesto iba dirigido al universo del Mail Art,=
 que
>es donde nos movemos. Bien es cierto que al mismo se han sumado otras
>personas y colectivos que se han identificado con nuestro llamamiento. En
>este sentido, queremos dejar constancia de que nuestra denuncia por el caso
>del ex-Director de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Chile, Humberto Nilo,
>expulsado de su c=C3=A1tedra despu=C3=A9s de organizar una covocatoria de=
 Mail Art por
>"La Libertad en la Ense=C3=B1anza de las Artes", no ha sido solucionado. Es=
 por
>ello que proseguiremos en nuestro esfuerzo para que le sea restituido su
>cargo.
>
>Adhesiones a la lista a: tartarug@teleline.es  subject: adhesion
>Participa en futuras acciones de GOM@: gom@crosses.net  subject: member
>
>More than 300 Signatures/Firmas  until/hasta  25 November 1998:
>
>A Cova da Terra
>Abel Figueras
>Abraham Vecina Guti=C3=A9rrez
>AG(+A)e-1
>Agurrak
>Aiolidiggi
>Alberto Duarte
>Alberto Gonz=C3=A1lez
>Alejandra Sequeira
>Alejandro Beltr=C3=A1n
>Alfons Herraiz
>Alfonso Sorribes
>Alicia Bay Laurell
>Alicia Gil
>Aljosa Abrahamsberg
>Amir Brito Cador
>Amoniako-Markt
>Amy Baylaurel Casey
>Ana Tiscornia
>Ana-Aj
>Anabel Vanoni
>Anah=C3=AD Caceres
>Anah=C3=AD Flores
>Anchi
>Andrea C=C3=A1rdenas
>Andr=C3=A9s Burbano
>Anna Banana
>Anna M P=C3 mies
>Annie Wallois
>Antonio Lirio Barajas
>Archivo Situacionista
>Arenaton-Docks
>Armando P=C3=A9rez
>Artur Matuck
>Ateneu Gastron=C3=B3mico Restaurant Enoteca Culture
>Beatriz Cilleruelo
>Beatriz Ram=C3=ADrez
>Beatriz Silva
>Bod Grumman
>BOEK 861
>Boog
>Bora Balar
>Bora Ercan
>Bruno Pollacci
>Btmadra
>Cabrespina
>Calen Rsign
>Carla Sala
>Carles Canetti
>Carlos =C3=81ngel S=C3=A1nchez
>Carlos Garc=C3=ADa Tomillero
>Carlos Red=C3=B3n Pastor
>Carlos Romano Garc=C3=ADa
>Carlos Vaz Ferreira
>Carmen Cilleruelo
>Carmen Delgado
>Carmen Garc=C3=ADa
>Carmen Patricio
>Centro de Iniciativas Culturales y de Comunicaci=C3=B3n (CICC)
>C=C3=A9sar Espinosa
>C=C3=A9sar Reglero
>Charles Francois
>CGT (Tarragona)
>Clara Gari
>Claudia Castelo
>Claudia Liekam
>Clemente Padin
>Colectivo Cine Delirio
>Colectivo Stidna
>Concha J=C3=A9rez
>Cracker Jack Kid
>Cristiane Neder
>Cristina Mart=C3=ADnez
>Dan Ferdinande
>Daniel Barrachina Sala
>Daniel Daligand
>Daniel Quiroga
>Daniele Gardiol
>David Batista Chirot
>Denis J. Highberger
>Dinka Todorovick
>Dolores Abrahamsberg
>Dolores May
>Dorren Borrow
>Dr. Olu. Oguibe
>Dulcimira Capisani
>Editorial Pix
>Eduardo D=C3=ADaz Espinosa
>Eduardo Lara
>Ejs Kapretz
>Elias Adasme
>El=C3=ADas Levin
>Emanuela Carone
>Emmanuel Ayah Okwabi
>Encuadernaciones El Pavo Real
>Enrique Aguelo
>Ernest N=C3=BA=C3=B1ez
>Esteban =C3=81lvarez
>Esteban Tranche
>Estefano Pasquini
>Ettienne Christiaens
>Eugeni Bonet
>Eugeni Guell
>Ever Arts
>Fabio Doctorovich
>Felix Duque
>Fernando Garc=C3=ADa Delgado/V=C3=B3rtice Argentina
>Fernando Reglero Campos
>Festival Atl=C3=A1ntico de Lisboa
>Florencia Crescimbeni
>Francesca Maniaci
>Francisca Salvador
>Francisco Arias Sol=C3=ADs
>Francisco Felipe
>Gabriel Villota
>Gabriela Rangel Mantilla
>Galer=C3=ADa Ze dos Bois (Lisboa)
>GB - Debora Gavensky
>Geert De Decker
>Gerhard Ostfalk
>Ghe Schmidt
>Gianni Broi
>Gilbertto Prado
>Giovanni Strada
>Giovanni Tessicini
>Group Public Projects
>Gue Schimdt
>Gu=C3=ADa Cultural Flirt de Lisboa
>Guido Vermandel
>Guillermo Mar=C3=ADn
>Guy Bleus
>Guy Ferdinande
>Gy=C3=B6rgy Galantai
>Hale Tenger
>Hans Braumueller
>Harry Polkinhorn
>Helen Karasavidou
>Hilda Paz
>Hugo Pontes
>Hugo Sil
>Humberto Nilo
>Ina Blom
>Irving Weiss
>Isabel Gonz=C3=A1lez
>Isabel Jover
>Isabel Ron-Pedrique
>Ivana Mart=C3=ADnez Vollaro
>Jalil
>James Durand
>James Jabir Titelman
>Jane Mar=C3=ADa Chambault
>Jas W Felter
>Jaume Bobet
>Javier Almeida
>Javier Creus
>Javier Ildefonso Sobrino
>Jean Torregrosa
>Jennifer Demello
>JJP
>Joachim
>Joan Miqueu Spinasse
>Joe Galliva
>Joel Chace
>John M. Bennett
>Jordi Barrachina
>Jordi Folgado Illa
>Jordi Sol=C3=A9
>Jordi Vidal
>Jorge Daffunchio
>Jorge Garc=C3=ADa
>Jorge Garnica
>Jos=C3=A9 Antonio L=C3=B3pez
>Jose Carlos Preciados Domenech
>Jose E. L=C3=B3pez G=C3=A1lves
>Jose Emilio Ant=C3=B3n Pecharrom=C3=A1n
>Jos=C3=A9 Espinoza
>Jos=C3=A9 Guevara Castro
>Jos=C3=A9 Iges
>Jose L=C3=B3pez G=C3=A1lvez
>Jose Van Den Broucke
>Jos=C3=A9 Venegas
>Josep Aguilo
>Josep Cam=C3=B3s
>Josep M=C2=AA Damenson
>Josep M=C2=AA Yago
>Josep Noiret "L=C2=B4Estaminet"
>Joy Garnett
>JPG
>Juan Cam=C3=B3s
>Juan Carlos Romero
>Juan Clua Monreal
>Juan Francisco Arag=C3=B3n
>Juan Guerrero
>Juan M. Niza
>Juan Ragno
>Juan Vicente Aliaga
>Julia Klaniczay
>Julia Lohman
>Julien D=C2=B4Abrigeon
>Julio Plaza
>K. Van Den Broucke
>Kakart
>Karen Michelsen
>Karl Jirgens
>Klaus Rupp/Merlin
>Koichi Sughiara
>Kurt Vereecken
>L. Nicolas Guigou
>La Clau D=C2=B4Euterpe
>La Pluie d'Oiseaux
>Ladislao Pablo Gyory
>Latuff
>Laura Andreoni
>Leo Robertazzi
>Le=C3=B3n Ferrari
>Leonello Zamb=C3=B3n
>Llum Garc=C3=ADa
>Lu=C3=ADs Fern=C3=A1ndez - Aleph Arts
>Luis Romero
>Luisa Taliento
>Luiz de Aquino Alves Neto
>Luiz Monforte
>Maite Blasco
>Manuel Redon Blanch
>Mar Montero Soya
>Marcelo Sosa
>Marcos Lutyens
>Mar=C3=ADa Alemany
>Mar=C3=ADa Antonia Y=C3=A1=C3=B1ez
>Maria Jose G=C3=B3mez N=C3=B3voa
>Mar=C3=ADa Luz Zamora Loureiro
>Mariana Perata
>Marianne Muggeridge
>Maribel Mart=C3=ADnez
>Marisa Gonz=C3=A1lez
>Marlowe
>Marta Gonzalves
>Mart=C3=AD Pineda
>Martim Erre
>Mauricio Guerrero Alarcon
>Mauro Molinari
>Michael Lumb
>Michele Sigurini
>Mikel Garc=C3=ADa
>Mircia Rojo
>Miroljub Todorovic
>Mis=C3=BA
>M=C3=B3nica Gallardo
>Montse Forn=C3=B3s
>Muriel Frega
>Muruvvet Turkyilmaz
>Museo de la Nada
>Natalia Garc=C3=ADa
>Nathalie Hamard-Wang
>Natxo Xeca
>Navarro Manoli
>Nekane Aramburu
>N=C3=A9stor Tellechea
>New Jazz
>Nora Menghi
>Norberto Isca
>Norberto Jos=C3=A9 Mart=C3=ADnez
>Norma Morandini
>Nuria Nogu=C3=A9s
>Ozgur Uckan
>P.O.Box
>Paloma Mateos
>Paloma Porras
>Parking
>Pascal Lenoir
>Pascale Follard
>Pat Binder
>Patricia Salas
>Patxi
>Paulo Condini
>Pedro Custodio
>Pedro Meyer
>Pere Morat=C3=B3
>Pere Sousa - Merz Mail
>Pete Spence
>Pete Spence
>Philippe Castellin
>Philippe Espinesse
>Pier Paolo Limongelli
>Pilar Guijosa
>Postart / "Roodom"
>Postmaster PCBD
>Proyecto Sorpresa
>Pusula Haber Programy
>Rafael Juarez
>Ramiro =C3=81lvarez
>Ramiro Larra=C3=ADn
>Reed Altemus
>Renate Carelse
>Reni Hofmueller
>Richard De Meester
>Robert Adrian
>Roberto Duarte
>Rod Summers
>Rogelio Cerda Castillo
>Rogelio Rodriguez Coronel
>Roger Morris
>Rom=C3=A1 Sol=C3=A9
>Rub=C3=A9n Sanchez
>Ruth Turner
>Salvador Cobos
>Sandra Botner
>Selim Birsel
>Sepp Rothwangl
>Sergey de Rocombole
>Sergui Qui=C3=B1onero
>Shifra Goldman
>Silvina Szperling
>Silvio De Gracia
>Simon Baudhuin
>Simona
>Simone Rondelet
>Sugar Irmer
>Susanne Kunkele
>Taller del Sol
>Tamara Stuby
>Tartarugo
>Teresinha Pereira
>The Gastronom=C3=ADa of the Mediterraneo
>Therese Ectors
>Thierry Merger
>Transforma
>Unai Reglero
>Vagner T.S.
>Vanessa Hern=C3=A1ndez
>Veha Abrahamsberg
>Veterinarios sin fronteras
>Viktor Todorovick
>Viola Siruthairath
>Vittore Baroni
>Viviana Sasso
>V=C3=B3rtice
>www.crosses.net
>Xabier Idoate
>Xavier Moreno
>Xer
>Xtof Bruneel
>Xurxo Estevez
>Zaida Reverter
>
>Read more about GOM@  and
>the memory of our action Pinochet, Justice and  Humberto Nilo on:
>
>http://www.teleline.es/personal/tartarug
>http://www.fut.es/~boek/Nilo.htm
>http://www.crosses.net/nilo/
>http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/6345/justicia/auma.htm
>
>
>please send your cross
>http://www.crosses.net
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
>-------------------
>Hans Braumueller
>Licenciado en Artes Plasticas
>Osterstrasse 98
>20259 Hamburg
>Germany
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 08:32:04 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Daniel Carter 
Subject:      Re: Ganick's long poem
In-Reply-To:  <199811290628.WAA08911@raven.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Leonard Brink writes:

>Randy Prunty writes:
>
>>Peter, I can't read your poem.
>> Now, what does this mean.  It means I can't treat your poem like I treat
>>(most) other poems. .........
>>I hope you respond to this, but perhaps not until you've allowed others to
>>respond to your work and my questions.
>
>To me, reading Peter's poem is like picking one's way through a sort of
>multi-colored and many-faceted Australia in the shape of a mountain. It
>is an immense, hard going, and deserted place in terms of the visitor's
>prior expectations but so rich on its own terms that one fears getting
>lost in it.

I copied every bit of Peter's poem to hard drive so I could immerse myself
in it in the coming days (knock on would) of living/glyphing.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 08:28:55 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Daniel Carter 
Subject:      thanks torch the angst befired
Mime-Version: 1.0
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glassy void


                         leafy

                         triggerlink the oblique

                         among other

                         maybe not so oblique

                         the/a (Thea)

                         multi-dimensional

                         spirallytic spectrum

                         hard-glowing

                         ardent drive

                         the emergence of light

                         immerse/emerge ([m]a[y]a) selves

                         frayous aspects (of self/Self)

                         in(k) the coming/commingling days/daze

                         knock on word

                         glyphliff
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 08:41:22 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Daniel Carter 
Subject:      Re: thanks torch the angst befired
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>                         spirallytic spectrum


maybe that should be "spiralytic".
=========================================================================
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:18:27 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         WENDY KRAMER 
Organization: N/A
Subject:      debbie
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sorry for the hiatus elizabeth treadwell  the publisher address for
debbie  an epic is:


New Star Books Ltd.
107-3477 Commercial St.
Vancouver, BC
V5N 4E8

tried and failed to backchannel--but mebbe others want this info...
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 14:47:57 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         henry gould 
Subject:      Bull Run

I haven't seen any civil wars on the list lately, but some little canons
have been lining up & popping away -  Generals Perloff, Bernstein &
Silliman moving up on the left flank - scattered potshots from Gudding
Grumman & Gould out on limbs high in the trees - the usual buzzard-shoot
around Thanksgiving - settle down, boys!  When's Gen'l $50 thousand-dollar
Grant gonna get here?  - Capt. Gould

:)  :)  :)  :)  :)  :)  rah for the musketeers!  :)  :)  :) _+%- @!
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 15:38:35 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael W Bibby 
Subject:      Re: this needful thing
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.32.19981124144719.0076a8f4@popmail.lmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Hi, Aldon:

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Aldon Nielsen wrote:

> I need poetry -- I'd like to say that everybody needs poetry --

But this isn't what Perloff said, and her assertion that no one needs
poetry inspired my counter-statement that some people *do* need it--

> but HOW are you going to figure out "what kind" of poetry any particular
> people might be properly said to need at any given time????

Why is it necessary for me to determine the "kind" of poetry needed?  This
seems to me to fall back into a prescriptive critical trap--

> We can speak
> of what poetry they HAVE produced and/or read -- we can talk of the use
> they made of it,,,, we can look at what they have said about their own
> needs -- but how would we ever come to any kind of statement about X needed
> poetry of the type Y at Z point in time??????

Maybe I'm missing something, but it often seems to me that examining what
poetry is produced, circulated, valued, what a social group says about its
needs in any given historical moment, all amount to saying "X needed
poetry of the type Y at Z point in time"--I don't mean this to be
naively presentist--but this just seems to be a matter of analyzing the
available evidence, and as a cultural historian of a particular poetry
written by specific groups in certain historical moments it seems only
just that I begin by listening to what these people have to say about
their needs and study this in relation to the poetry they produce--

mb
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 16:09:03 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ruth Danon 
Subject:      Re: Bull Run
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Came back from over the river etcetera to find that the (dreary) argument
of last week had escalated. Thank you Ron Silliman and others for
suggesting that we have more important things to do with our time (I had 99
messages when I came home). I keep wondering if all this contrariness has
to do with some little thing that Pound said -- you can't write poetry in a
manner 20 years old. Seems like maybe there are are a lot of 20 year old
runs that have reached their limits and the scary questions have to do with
where do we go from here ( not necessarily falling into the modernist cry
of "make it new" -- still there is this question of what do we do now.) In
this country poetry proliferates at a great rate. Tomaz Salamun claims that
nowhere is there so much support for poetry as in the USA.


Here's something I think about a lot. If I know exactly what I'm about to
say and how it will emerge then I'm in deep trouble. Perhaps we all need to
know  little less about what we are doing, be a little less sure of
ourselves, our presuppositions, our stances. Don't mind referring to Yeats
here -- out of the quarrel with ourselves we produce poetry-- and y'all
know the rest.

And maybe it's this quality of self-sure "knowingness" that links Pinsky
(in his typical poems) with so-called experimental writers who already know
before they start what the formal, linguistic and political positions need
to be to write an "acceptable" poem.

Gotta be lost in the woods a bit to get anywhere.

and at the same time, that statement does undo itself & I know it.

Curious to hear some thoughts.


----------
> From: Ron Silliman 
> To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
> Subject: Bull Run
> Date: Saturday, November 28, 1998 10:35 PM
>
> I took the kids to Manasas yesterday to see the site of the first Battle
of
> Bull Run only to discover that the Civil War re-enactment was really
going
> on here on The List whilst our backs were turned. My attitude toward this
is
> pretty much the same as my answer to Colin's question yesterday, "Who
were
> the good guys?" "They all were. That's what makes war so wasteful and
> stupid."
>
> I've often thought that the really radical distinction between our age
and
> those of decades past is not one of more (or less) good poets per se
> [although I'm inclined to believe that there are more good writers right
now
> than ever before in history], but rather that there are far fewer critics
of
> substance. I think that Marjorie Perloff (and Peter Quartermain, Jerry
> McGann, Alan Golding, Steve Evans, Maria Damon, Tom Vogler &c &c &c)
takes a
> lot of flack because  she (and they) stands in for "all of criticism" in
its
> positive functions. If Marjorie's work has a weak spot, I think it's that
> she knows just how little good criticism is being written about
contemporary
> poetry and she's always trying to fill all of the gaps. Her energy always
> astounds me as does her ability to bring extraordinary powers of
> concentration of every project she tackles.
>
> A much more interesting question than why does X or Y not make it onto
> reading list A is always "what is it about X or Y that keeps someone from
> putting it onto reading lists A, B, C, etc.?"
>
> Yes, it's true that critics who don't write or publish or primarily
publish
> poetry will see the poem differently than do other poets. Poets often
read
> the poem as though the other poet were "solving the problems" put forward
by
> the poem and vote heavily with their (my) emotions on how well that gets
> done. Is it the only way to read a poem? Is there any such "only way"?
Not
> in this galaxy there's not. And I write this as one of the loudest
> proponents of poets writing criticism there has ever been.
>
> I note that I, for one, don't feel "disabled" to speak about the fiction
I
> read, although I haven't ever published fiction (tho I did "win" one
> Pushcart Prize for same and was ostensibly hired as a fiction teacher by
> UCSD some 16 years ago, which says more about the institutionalization of
> genre than anything else). Ditto the films I see or music I hear,
although
> I've never ventured into those media either. I've been reading Kathy
Acker
> on Goya this weekend. Should I presume that this should not have been
> written?
>
> There are also people in virtually every poetry scene who are important
to
> it who publish neither poetry nor criticism, or else very very little. We
> lost two of these folks in the past year or so in Barry Cox and Charles
> Watts. Were their opinions not of value? That seems non-sensical on the
face
> of it. I think it's very difficult to understand or articulate precisely
how
> poetry is diminished by the loss of someone who doesn't
characteristically
> speak up, but I never met anyone who knew these people (or others like
them)
> who wouldn't admit it.
>
> In some ways, that silence replicates the position of most of the folks
who
> lurk on this list. This list, after all, has 700 recipients but can
handle
> only 50 messages per day.
>
> If anything, we need more of all these social functions in and around the
> poem. We certainly need 100 Marjorie Perloffs, preferably all in
contention
> with one another so as to create a true public discourse about literature
> that we would, every one of us, benefit from. If nothing else, the
arguments
> who have more in the way of nuance.
>
> Ron Silliman
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 14:17:59 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

I completely agree with Charles Bernstein's post.  What Charles talks
about as "attitude" has been defended here recently as "humor" or
"satire." Although humor sometimes says as much as polite discussion,
name calling, personal attacks, "bravado" & heckling say nothing--
except about those individuals who insist on behaving like teenagers
when taking part in a virtual discussion.  (Although most teenagers I
know behave more maturely than some of the "rebels" on this list).

By using the word "rebels," I'm deliberately alluding to Henry Gould's
response to this thread, in which he took up the "Bull Run" theme to say
that what was happening was nothing more than pot-shots at the
"generals."  Why do you feel there are "generals," Henry?  One
unfortunate remark of a few days ago notwithstanding, no one has
addressed the list in a way that calls rank into question.
Furthermore-- as you all know-- cheap shots are not reserved for the
Marjorie Perloffs. This is not a matter of real rebels staking their
turf.  Real rebels want to talk about issues, they aren't interested in
flippantly defending the practice of cheap shots in a way that's sure to
get their name mentioned in a subject heading while shutting down all
further discussion.

Mark DuCharme



______________________________________________________
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=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 17:58:37 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "s. kaipa" 
Subject:      Poetry on CD
In-Reply-To:  <19981129221759.11130.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

For those of you who might be interested in a collaboration, permutation
that crosses poetry into the genre of "experimental" music, you should
check out the newest Ninian Hawick's CD, _ Steep Steps_.  Patrick F.
Durgin does a fabulous reading/rap/performance of an early version of a
poem that appears in his new chapbook, _Pundits Scribes Pupils_.  If the
words Seefeel, Felt, and Suicide mean anything to you . . .

Just came out, will be in stores soon, ask for it on the Grimsy label.


Best,
Summi Kaipa
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 19:34:49 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
In-Reply-To:  <19981129221759.11130.qmail@hotmail.com>
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On Sun, 29 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote:

> Why do you feel there are "generals," Henry?  One
> unfortunate remark of a few days ago notwithstanding, no one has
> addressed the list in a way that calls rank into question.
>
There are generals.  While stewing over Henry Gould's enquiry of some
days ago, in preparation for a considered response, starting with Berlin
and the ignominy of not having earned the right to triumph when the wall
came to be dismantled, to such antedeluvian but real achievements as the
legalization of contraception and divorce in Ireland, to recent
ceasefires, and my all too ready deletion of Barnes & Noble takeover
notices, to Libyan poets,imprisonment, and all sorts of censorship,
to my growing understanding of what "moderation" means in terms of this list
(YES, the tap of the cattle-drover, the nudge away from silliness to be
followed by the poke?  And then by the lash?  Or excommunication from
THE LIST?).  Some Mark's comment of weeks ago still echoes: to the effect
that intolerance in aesthetics/poetics had no connection with intolerance
in civil issues. I said "I wonder" but I don't.  Henry, I'm still
pondering your question and will, from the poverty of my position, reply.
But there are generals, I'm pretty sure about that.
Mairead
> >
>
______________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 19:40:13 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
In-Reply-To:  <19981129221759.11130.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
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Another little logical knot in Mark Du Charme's post: how exactly do "real
rebels" perform in "virtual discussion"?  "Teenagers" is a put-down,
right?  As opposed to "real rebels"? Who the heck are the "real rebels"?
You are beginning to sound like the teenager's nightmare: the Law of the
Father is to rebel: but really, virtually, democratically.
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 19:42:25 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mairead Byrne 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
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Excuse me: DuCharme.

On Sun, 29 Nov 1998, Mairead Byrne wrote:

> Another little logical knot in Mark Du Charme's post: how exactly do "real
> rebels" perform in "virtual discussion"?  "Teenagers" is a put-down,
> right?  As opposed to "real rebels"? Who the heck are the "real rebels"?
> You are beginning to sound like the teenager's nightmare: the Law of the
> Father is to rebel: but really, virtually, democratically.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 16:58:21 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

What's the point of rebelling if there's nothing at stake?  Or, nothing
more important than ego, or less important than poetry, at stake?  &
It's not a law if you don't have the power to make laws or to enforce
them.  At least that's what I'm told the people who have really stood up
to real (non-metaphorical) generals have always said.

--not "one of the Mark's"

>Another little logical knot in Mark Du Charme's post: how exactly do
"real
>rebels" perform in "virtual discussion"?  "Teenagers" is a put-down,
>right?  As opposed to "real rebels"? Who the heck are the "real
rebels"?
>You are beginning to sound like the teenager's nightmare: the Law of
the
>Father is to rebel: but really, virtually, democratically.
>


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=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 19:11:00 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      marco polo anyone?
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.1.32.19981125120257.006aa6d4@pop.buffalo.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

fwd from masha zavialova; i don't know the dude myself, but my curiosity's
been piqued by her inquiry:

X-From_: zavialov@zavialov.spb.ru Wed Nov 25 13:52 CST 1998
To: Maria Damon 
Organization: Private person (St.Petersburg)
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 10:23:31 +0300 (MSK)
From: "Sergei A. Zavialov" 
Subject: Marco Polo
Lines: 12

Dear Maria
Do you happen to know a guy Marco Polo? There is a chap here in St. Petersburg
who is currently teaching American poetry in the Institute of Culture (they
train librarians mostly). He says he is a poet from the US and wouldn't let
me come to
his classes. A weird guy judging from his messages (I haven't seen him yet)
Says one of the main reasons he is here is our girls who have no penis envy
and who enjoy being women not like crazy females in the West. That's his
words. Another adventurer looking for easily available love affairs?
For two centuries St. Petersburg has been quite a place for fortune-seekers
from the West. Much of our culture has been done by them - architecture mostly
and mostly Italians.
Hugs Masha
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 17:28:04 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      more bull
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Apologies for that last post, which was written in haste &, as a result,
was probably the sort of thing I was complaining about in terms of
behavior on the list.

Certainly Mairead was right to the extent that rebellion is anything you
want it to be, & there certainly are no rules about what is "real" in
that sense.  I was only trying to talk about rebellion that might be
effective, that might be taken seriously by the power structure one
opposes, & thus result in change.  Yes, my comparison of certain people
on the list to teenagers was a put down.  Mairead, do you find it an
inaccurate one?

As to the question of generals, I personally have never heard of anyone,
with the possible exception of Henry Gould, trying to dictate how one
should write poetry, or how one should write _about_ poetry.  Even so
prominent a critic as Marjorie Perloff gets called on the carpet here
for a thoughtless comment-- as well she should, in that case.  Now of
course there are hierarchies in academic departments, & if one is so
employed (I'm not an academic, fortunately or unfortunately, at the
moment) then, yes, there are generals _there_.  But I wasn't talking
about that sort of professional politics, though perhaps I should have
been more clear about that, & I do thank Mairead for being so diligent
in pointing such "loopholes" out.

Cheers,
Mark DuCharme

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=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 20:59:41 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
In-Reply-To:  Message of Sun, 29 Nov 1998 14:17:59 PST from
              

On Sun, 29 Nov 1998 14:17:59 PST Mark DuCharme said:
>I completely agree with Charles Bernstein's post.  What Charles talks
>about as "attitude" has been defended here recently as "humor" or
>"satire." Although humor sometimes says as much as polite discussion,
>name calling, personal attacks, "bravado" & heckling say nothing--
>except about those individuals who insist on behaving like teenagers
>when taking part in a virtual discussion.  (Although most teenagers I
>know behave more maturely than some of the "rebels" on this list).

I completely agree with Charles B's post too, since, as some of you know,
I wrote something very similar to the list about a week prior to CB,
interpreting what "free poetics" might mean.  I also said I liked short
funny posts, which was what the Bull Run "canons" were meant to be,
nothing more.

>
>By using the word "rebels," I'm deliberately alluding to Henry Gould's
>response to this thread, in which he took up the "Bull Run" theme to say
>that what was happening was nothing more than pot-shots at the
>"generals."  Why do you feel there are "generals," Henry?  One
>unfortunate remark of a few days ago notwithstanding, no one has
>addressed the list in a way that calls rank into question.
>Furthermore-- as you all know-- cheap shots are not reserved for the
>Marjorie Perloffs. This is not a matter of real rebels staking their
>turf.  Real rebels want to talk about issues, they aren't interested in
>flippantly defending the practice of cheap shots in a way that's sure to
>get their name mentioned in a subject heading while shutting down all
>further discussion.

Mark asks: are there generals?  The gravity with which any subject or posting
connected with certain names is taken, suggested to me that there might be.
People question a distinguished critic, and they are scolded for "picking on"
her.  I guess I'm getting what I deserve for calling myself for less humor
& grandstanding on the list recently.  I take that back.  Humor is a sign
of sanity.  Nevertheless I stand by what I said before : I agree in principle
with Chuckie's position.  Free poetics from these boring higgler epics;
talk poetry specifics, not generals.  - Henry Gould

p.s. Mark - you've never heard of anyone prescribing how to write poetry
besides me?  Well, I'm flattered, to say the least!  But you know - just
for your information - there was Pound too, & Eliot, & a few thousand other
poets going back at least to Theocritus, I believe, who did such - Wordsworth,
Poe... gosh, I could name quite a few!
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 18:36:45 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      People of the List
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Saw last night, surprisingly & serendipitously, documentary footage of the
community of chimpanzees I'd just finished reading about in Jane Goodall's book
"Through a Window." The documentary is called "People of the Forest" & ought to
show up a few times this month on Animal Planet. These animals are remarkable.
If one does something to aggravate another, the aggrieved party hoots, or, if
that doesn't work, bites (relatively lightly) the other's foot, or steps on
him/her, or threatens a bit with a branch of leaves. There's a hierarchy that
changes, but only through great struggle. Social gatherings are sometimes
tumultuous, lots of squabbling and hierarchical displays, and then everyone
settles back to community life.

The most amazing and pleasing thing about these films is seeing how deeply
emotional & related the chimps are *without language.* Kind of weirdly
extra-human because all the words aren't there to interfere.

And as an even further aside: I've been wondering what people on the list read
other than poetry & poetry criticism.

Ruth Danon wrote:

> Came back from over the river etcetera to find that the (dreary) argument
> of last week had escalated. Thank you Ron Silliman and others for
> suggesting that we have more important things to do with our time (I had 99
> messages when I came home). I keep wondering if all this contrariness has
> to do with some little thing that Pound said -- you can't write poetry in a
> manner 20 years old. Seems like maybe there are are a lot of 20 year old
> runs that have reached their limits and the scary questions have to do with
> where do we go from here ( not necessarily falling into the modernist cry
> of "make it new" -- still there is this question of what do we do now.) In
> this country poetry proliferates at a great rate. Tomaz Salamun claims that
> nowhere is there so much support for poetry as in the USA.
>
> Here's something I think about a lot. If I know exactly what I'm about to
> say and how it will emerge then I'm in deep trouble. Perhaps we all need to
> know  little less about what we are doing, be a little less sure of
> ourselves, our presuppositions, our stances. Don't mind referring to Yeats
> here -- out of the quarrel with ourselves we produce poetry-- and y'all
> know the rest.
>
> And maybe it's this quality of self-sure "knowingness" that links Pinsky
> (in his typical poems) with so-called experimental writers who already know
> before they start what the formal, linguistic and political positions need
> to be to write an "acceptable" poem.
>
> Gotta be lost in the woods a bit to get anywhere.
>
> and at the same time, that statement does undo itself & I know it.
>
> Curious to hear some thoughts.
>
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 21:32:35 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Henry Gould 
Subject:      how to write poetry

from THE LOST NOTEBOOKS

14.

A little rain on Thanksgiving.  Then moist air,
light clouds flowing under a luminous half-
moon.  I walk along wet streets (whiff
of turkey floating with me) to the curved corner

guarded by an old, elaborate iron gate
into the playground, quiet tonight,
where we brought them long ago.  Light
patter on the fallen leaves.  The distance.

Yours, theirs... my own.  The infinite
abandoned garden. _I shall not drink with you again._
Until.  Henry in his cardboard coracle (man
overboard), and Blackstone, carving in granite

the gnarled character for hollowness,
and Bluejay, waiting on the empty table,
pilgrim-servant-scavenger - the whole stable
gathering together by the empty sofa, sees

her, coming aboard - the day of Jubilee.
Across the empty plate of prairie
where the wind is born, and, ghostly,
elevates a clay-bowl memory (into eternity).

Because every feast's Thanksgiving, after all -
a shared-out superflux, unto the Peaceful One;
and every woman's Indian, and every man
is rubicund - ruddied by the blessings of the fall;

and while we walk beneath the twilight sphere
in gradual harmony, an excess love extends
its kelson overhead - the cosmos sends
a simple letter, momentary sentence: _Join me here._

                               11.26.98
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 21:50:59 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Re: People of the List
In-Reply-To:  <366204BC.5122F147@bayarea.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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People of the List, Current Reading

Hiaasen and others, Naked Came the Manatee
Mish, ed. The Anchor Anthology of Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century
Rosemont, ed. Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts
Hakutani, ed., Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi, 2, Prose
Ford,etc., eds., Android Epistemology
Morgan, Using Java 1.2
Dyson, Release 2.1
Thomas, ed, Sing the Sun Up, Creative Writing Ideas from African American
 Literature
Current issue of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly

Highly recommend Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles

Alan (like liszt)
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 22:00:44 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "A. Jenn Sondheim" 
Subject:      Desperate Realms (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

==


Desperate Realms


--- Review of Conversation ----------------------------------------------
(Julu) I am terrific Norn I have Killed Two Million Orc
(Alan) Oh Oh Oh I am an Orc I must Mourn Goodbye Fellow All My Orc
(Nikuko) I am Valkyrie Fly-Girl I will Kill Terrific Norn!
(Julu) Oh My Oh Oh! I will do be Dying Now, Oh Magister I pray!!!
(Magister) Oh Dearest Julu, You will now true to be Live Now!
(Nikuko) Argh and Graahr! I have not to power you Oh Magister help!
(Magister) Oh Darlingest Nikuko, Julu will Truly die Now!
(Julu) Alas! Alack! There is no one to Save me and I die!
(legions of Mordor) We have lost Our Dearest Julu!
(masses) Our Dearest Julu is Gone from Henceforth now From Here!
(Alan) Oh YAY! I would Have Been Deaded by Julu!
(Jennifer) Oh Now I will Kill you for the Deaded Julu, Ah Ha, Ah Ha!
(Alan) I am killed Dead and Now Do Join My Fair Fey Deaded Julu!
(Jennifer) Oh I will now Kill Nikuko Argh and Graahr!
(Magister) Oh I am So Alone In Uppter-Nethery-World!
(Jennifer) Well we have Wonderful Game Played, Now we will Play Another!
They All Rises!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
.echo (Jennifer) Well we have Wonderful Game played, now we will Play
Another!
(Jennifer) Well we have Wonderful Game Played, Now we will Play Another!
.echo They All Rises!
.w
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan      somersault naked with frock overhead           Idle 10 minutes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are all alone in Worldly-Worlds.
.q You depart Worldly-Worlds.


_________________________________________________________________________
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 20:14:45 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Laura Moriarty 
Subject:      but what do they want?
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Karen -

Thanks for asking. I've been enjoying reading Linda Nagata's Vast -  sci fi
in relation to nano tech and info tech - but very different from old
cyberspace stuff. And have also just finished Gerge B (machines are alive)
Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines. While I was reading it I tended to
believe that everything was alive. I'd be curious if any other listers have
any interest in this book, which is advertised as having cult status. Basic
thesis is that machine mind is already or almost already upon us. Memory is
supposed to be about equal - bit for bit, with them(it?) gaining fast.


Laura


moriarty@lanminds.com
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~moriarty/
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 21:00:35 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
Comments:     RFC822 error:  Incorrect or incomplete address field found and
              ignored.
From:         Katie Degentesh 
Subject:      9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9
Comments: To: alanjp@hotmail.com, abie@stilton.com, lafarge@stilton.com,
          adrian@gravity7.com, spit@tarin.com, ostashev@leland.stanford.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
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9x9 INDUSTRIES presents:


JASON CAMLOT, poet and essayist whose works have appeared, most recently,
in Rampike Magazine, sub-Terrain, Journal X, and Poetry Nation: The North
American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (Vehicule)

and

DAVID MCGIMPSEY, author of two collections of poetry, Dogboy and Lardcake
(both available from ECW Press) and a critical study, Called Shots:
Baseball as Modern American Fiction, due this spring from University of
Indiana Press.

POETRY READING!

ADOBE BOOKSHOP, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1998
3166 16TH ST. (AT GUERRERO)
8 PM, *FREE*



9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9

9X9 INDUSTRIES               http://www.paraffin.org/nine/
                                           nine@stilton.com

WE *STILL* DON'T LIKE POEMS
THAT ARE LIKE POEMS!
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 21:48:23 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Leonard Brink 
Subject:      Norma Cole, George Oppen, Marjorie Perloff
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

The 9x9 reading announced earlier is occuring in "The City," I believe,
(for those of you who don't know where 16th & Guerrero is.)

Also occuring in San Francisco on the same evening, Thurs. Dec. 3:
Norma Cole will be giving the annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture at the
First Unitarian Church on Franklin St. (1700 block I think) at 7 p.m.
The event is sponsored by the Poetry Center at SFSU from which one can
order tapes of previous Oppen lectures including a really nice one given
by General Perloff in 1989 which I was listening to in my car the other
day. In it she describes a washing machine ejaculating quarters into a
woman's apron (and she says she's not a poet.)
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 00:25:26 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         jen hofer 
Subject:      hey all you chicago-area folk!
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Film/poetry event in Wicker Park this Wednesday: please come & bring all
your friends--

"Moving Words"--Films and Poems
Celebration of issue #2 of Interlope & issue #3 of Kenning

Films by Amie Siegel, David Gatten, Heather Seybolt, Ken Eisenstein and
Sarah Jane Lapp

Poems by Amie Siegel, Jen Hofer, Patrick F. Durgin, Summi Kaipa and Tina
Celona

8 p.m., Wednesday December 2, at David's Studio @ In These Times Magazine
2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. (just above the Western stop on the Blue Line)

All are welcome.

We did the same program this recent Friday the 13th in Iowa City & it was
quite a blast--trash film strips in lovely little bundles all over the
house & ended with a screening of a film created in the Atlantic Ocean
which destroyed itself as it ran through the projector. The poems were more
durable but just as thrilling.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:59:33 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Ron Silliman 
Subject:      Current reading (non poetry)
Comments: To: Poetics List 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Just finished Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Surprised
actually at how different it was from the film Bladerunner, which extracts a
very single narrative line and runs with it). Also Walter Mosley's Always
Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (I highly recommend this). Currently reading
Kathy Acker's Body Works and Sarah Schulmann's Rat Bohemia. Enjoying them
both,

Ron
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:44:17 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Roger Day 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Thanks, Ron. Mine if I chip in with my current reading?

"The Deregulated Muse", Sean O'Brien. Verbose yet small account of Postwar
British & Irish poetry.
"The Last Of the Mohicans" William Fenimore Cooper. Better than expected,
but not surprised they left the bear - and a lot else - out of the Michael
Mann film.
"The Last Avant Garde", Lehman. Just can't put this book down. Absolutely
deleesh. Was reccomended by someone on this list (Kent Johnson | Henry
Gould|A.N.Other?). Thankyou.
Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Clarence Brown & WS Merwin Trs). Wow.
"UML Distilled" You don't want to know.
"About Face", Ditto.
"Dylan, The Language". Ditto.
At 30/11/98 10:59:33, Ron Silliman  wrote:
#  Just finished Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(Surprised
#  actually at how different it was from the film Bladerunner, which
extracts a
#  very single narrative line and runs with it). Also Walter Mosley's
Always
#  Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (I highly recommend this). Currently
reading
#  Kathy Acker's Body Works and Sarah Schulmann's Rat Bohemia. Enjoying
them
#  both,
#
#  Ron
#

Roger
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 08:24:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      Re: Critic-Penitents, Poet-Penitents
In-Reply-To:   from
              "louis stroffolino" at Nov 28, 98 05:35:08 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
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According to louis stroffolino:
>
>   I sometimes we think we need to "free" poetics FROM its current
>   "freedom" and set some limits to the discussions....
>

Chris, there's a journal entry of Emerson's where he defines liberty as
"neither chain nor chain of chain."  Your thought about "freedom" from our
current "freedom" reminded me of it.  As dedicated to liberty as I think
most of us are, might we sometimes "rebel" merely for the love of that
idea, and not in some genuinely worthwhile context?  And might this then
be not rebellion but simply sniping?  I think so, and have been guilty of
it myself at times.  Of course once we try to set rules of debate the
difficulty of *that* becomes to obvious to detail.  And words like
civility and - ugh - "decorum" are yucky words.  But all of us deserve a
certain amount of respect, we've all earned that in various ways.  And one
measure of respect is to try to make your posts "count" in one way or
another (lot's of ways of course, w/ new ones always being invented).  And
I'm going to try to remember this.   -m.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:22:58 -0400
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Pierre Joris 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Just started into Niklas Luhman's _Observations on Modernity_ as part of my
(very haphazard) attempt to keep up to date with European
socio-eco-epistemo-political  thinking.

But continuously dragged back into, ugh, the wider reaches of poetry as I just
got the fabulous Rasula/McCaffery _Imagining Language: An Anthology_ (MIT; $55
but worth every penny, the perfect xmas present to yourselves) and can't put it
aside.

Another recom someone made on this list some time ago: Yve-Alain Bois &
Rosalind Kraus' _Formless_ (Zone Books). Excellent thinking about art if
Bataille's thought interests you.

Just finished  the massive (600pp) critical biography _Mauric Blanchot /
Partenaire Invisible_ by Christophe Bident. A superb book, the best writing on
Blanchot I venture to say -- difficult to compare to other recently read
biographies such as the much liked (by me) Spicer one and the much disliked (by
me) _The Last Avant-Garde_.

And yet another biography: Bruno Etienne's work on the 19C Algerian cheikh /
freedom fighter/ sufi mystic Abdelkader.

Henry Corbin's _Alchémie comme art hiératique_.

Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress: _The Berbers_.

Régis Debray's _La République expliquée à ma fille_, a short book in a series
in which various writers/ intellectuels explain/ write about various aspects of
politics/philosophy/ psychiatry etc. as if or in fact explaining these matters
to their children. Interesting exzercise in toning down the jargon. Debray, at
any rate, has always been one of my favorite writers & I pick up every new book
he produces.

One Tintin (_The Cigars of the Pharaoh_) and a French young person's edition of
the Labors of Herkules as bedtime reading for Miles, and as corrective reading
versus the US tv Herkules.

Lucie Bolens: _La cuisine andalouse_ a wonderful treatise on food and the art
of living in XI-XII C Andalusia. Some recipes I will try out before the end of
the year.

Pierre

========================
Pierre Joris
joris@csc.albany.edu
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202
tel: 518 426 0433
fax: 518 426 3722
========================
Through the living the road of the dead
— Ungaretti
========================
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:42:05 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Eliza McGrand 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)

just finished all the work by james (or jamie?) lee burke that i could find
in my libraries.  action/mystery, set in new orleans for the most part.
primary series about character, dave robichaux, vietnam vet, policeman.  it
is funny, there were actually times when i had to stop reading, just stop
and reread because the writing was so gorgeous.  it is hard to describe, but
burke can set a scene, open out the emotions/visual/sensual aspects of an
imagined scene in almost no words, so clearly, in a simple way that seems
so easy and yet is not (as those who've tried with fiction will know).

got five stories by louisa may alcott written under psuedonym -- interesting.
much more worldly, in some ways, than one would expect, but with that curious
victorian/edwardian innocence which inserts the most complex, difficult,
questionable devices as if they were perfectly simple -- example, one character
-- a "haggard woman of at least thirty"! -- disguises herself as a young
girl, with a bit of paint, some "pearly white" false teeth, and facial
expressions.  hollywood, as well as us haggard women of at least thirty!, would
pay mightily for such easy renewal!

am craving mark twain again.  got _Life on the Mississippi_ but read that not
very long ago, and will exchange it for soemthing less familiar i think.

saw "The Boxer" and it was so rich and nuanced it felt like a book.  daniel
day lewis is an extraordinry actor.  story bitter, wierd, complicated.

finally, _Deadstick_ by Terence Flaherty.  first novel, mystery/suspense,
with, i kid you not, a feel in it of F. Scott fitzgerald (though no one
else has mentioned it in reviews).  that outsiders looking on feel?

e
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:59:02 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Emily Lloyd 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
In-Reply-To:  <802566CC.00407B56.00@noteslong.long.harlequin.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Hey, I *was* reading _About Face_ too, for a bit.  Then I stopped.

The novels of Ian McEwan.  I'd read _The Cement Garden_ and dug it in high
school (more than I did on a recent rereading), but none of the others.
_The Child in Time_ I find excellent; _Enduring Love_ scared me so badly
that I had to clench my hands tight to the boards to keep from dropping
it.  Not least because I saw disturbing signs of my high school self
in its deranged, eroto-manic antagonist.  What a weird moment that always
is, when one finds out one had some psychotic syndrome after years of
thinking it was "only life."  My tongue in just half of my cheek.

After seeing *Queen Christina* for the first time, I checked out _Walking
With Garbo_--a book whose author I can't remember (tho it was before me,
what, 2 days ago?).  I skimmed it, mostly reading only the lengthy quotes
from Garbo.  I'm very late to Garbo, I know, so this may be general
knowledge, but it surprised me to find that she constantly, easily,
referred to herself with masc. pronouns: "I was just a silly boy then; now
I'm a tired old man," etc.  A few yrs. back, and still fondly in my head,
I was yipping all around, over & through books on
trans/gendered/ness--ancient cases, etc., and concluding (insofar as one
can) that Gert Stein had more of a touch of the tg in her than the
lesbian.  I thought I'd read pretty deeply "in gender."  And here I find
this Hollywood actress, who I'd heard was queer & had some fun with
gender (for the most part, who hasn't?), seriously, constantly, and
seemingly without affectation, calling herself a dude.  I don't know; I'm
still kind of a geek about/fool for fucked genders (though I'm told it's
very out-of-date of me)--I swooned.

em
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:08:59 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      from today's _academe today_...
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

evidently the _chronicle of higher ed_ this week includes the following story:

THE RETURN OF AESTHETICS: Scholars in the humanities, weary of
cultural studies and political criticism, have begun once again
to discuss the pleasures of good, powerful -- even beautiful --
writing. (Research & Publishing Section)

some of us may well find ourselves asking, RETURN?...

i haven't yet read the piece (i will) but am forced to consider whether
this constitutes a *reaction against" cultural studies... having taken
cult. studies to task a bit mself here (and superficially so, though a more
bracing argument can be made) i'd like to suggest that considering
aesthetics (this term, like others, may slip & slide) need not be a matter
of avoiding "political criticism"... it does seem to me (again) that
aesthetics may be understood as operating at micro levels of
text/textuality (a good thing), even as it comes to be understood (as a
function, i mean) within or alongside more macro concerns... and that
aesthetics is not limited to the "pleasures of good, powerful -- even
beautiful -- writing," but may provoke more complex experiences... of
course one would have to ask what a given text is actually *doing*, and not
simply as a function of reception at the social/cultural level(s)... i can
go on and on about "jane austen," e.g., and generate all sorts of
intriguing insights about reception of her work, w/o having really dug into
her writing (which would no doubt generate all sorts of additional
intriguing insights)...

i'm most interested, mself, in work that manages to work both aspects of
this issue... and i do note the implicit binary that i've set up here,
which will undoubtedly dissipate some once one really gets into things...

anyway...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Sun, 29 Nov 1998 22:14:51 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: People of the List
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

current and recent reading:
various students' prelims
Georges Bataille on Gilles de Rais--full of blood and pathology, mmm
Dominick La Capra, History and memory after Auschwitz (or something like
that), intro seems defensive
Carla Harryman, Never rose w/o th.
an article on globalization by stuart hall and tony mcgrue, sound byte city!
mullen, muse + drudge
raddle moon most recent--groovy as heck!
west coast line most recent-ditto
diane glancy, primer of the obsolete, amazing little charmer of a book,
from chax no less
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 12:26:59 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bobbie West 
Subject:      A Wild Salience
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Burning Press is currently preparing for publication a booklength collection
of responses to the work of Rae Armantrout--

"A WILD SALIENCE": THE WRITING OF OF RAE ARMANTROUT,
edited by Tom Beckett.

Among other things, "A WILD SALIENCE" will include new work by Rae Armantrout,
an interview with Lyn Hejinian, an interview with Tom Beckett, and critical
work by Laura Moriarity, Aldon Nielsen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,  Brenda
Hillman, Fanny Howe, Susan Wheeler, Lydia Davis, Kit Robinson, Bobbie West,
David Bromige, Charles Alexander, Hank Lazer, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman,
Jessica Grim and Robert Creeley.

"A WILD SALIENCE" is the first book in a projected series of volumes to be
devoted to responses to individual contemporary writers. Following publication
of this initial offering Tom Beckett will function as Series Editor and work
to pair guest editors with important but underappreciated innovative writers.

We are working to develop the most complete mailing list possible to publicize
what we hope will come to be seen as an important contribution to the field of
innovative writing.  If you wish to be on the mailing list, or if you know of
persons or institutions that ought to be, or if you have a mailing list you
would care to share, please contact one of us:

Tom Beckett, Editor
Tbeck131@aol.com

Bobbie West, Assistant Editor
Ctfarmr@aol.com
-------------------------------------------

And stay tuned.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:46:55 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

oh yeah, in no particular order:

(1) email from this list
(2) "St. Martin's Press credits an innovative point-of-purchase [POP]
display with increasing display orders by 30% for their bestselling novel,
_Neanderthal_." [Book Marketing Update]
(3) this email
(4) "Reminder:  The [ ] interviewing teams will begin interviewing at MLA
as early as 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 17 [sic], 1998."
(5) this email
(6) student essays
(7) "There was no poetry in Richard Nixon." [can't get this line (of
theodore h. white's) out of my head]
(8) this email
(9) "I will be arriving at the MLA convention in San Francisco on Sunday
evening..."
(10)  _letters for the living:  teaching writing in a violent age_, michael
blitz & c. mark hurlbert (ncte, 1998)
(11) snippets of various issues of chain, raddle moon, famous reporter,
cross-cultural poetix, notre dame review, chloroform, chicago review, big
allis, explosive magazine, kenning, tinfish, bombay gin, the temple, mr.
knife/miss fork, samizdat, rain taxi (i finally subscribed, thanx gary!),
abr, academe, arshile, review of contemporary fiction, saveur (yep, the
cooking mag), the nation...
(12) _screenplay:  the foundations of screenwriting_, 3rd ed., syd field
(mjf books, 1994) [thanx to barbara wilder!]
(13) pmla, program for the 114th convention
(14) _postmodern american fiction:  a norton anthology_, ed. geyh/leebron/levy
(15) _giscome road_, c. s. giscombe (dalkey archive, 1998)
(16) _elephant surveillance to thought_, andrew levy (meow p, 1998)
(17) _wittgenstein's ladder_, marjorie perloff (u of chicago p, 1996)
(18) i forgot
(19) this email

-30-

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:12:24 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Elizabeth Treadwell 
Subject:      Last call for Outlet (3) Ornament
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Outlet (3) Ornament will feature work which addresses fashion: ornament, the
(synthetic) fixtures of the body, & the languages/technicalities of attire,
both contemporary & historical.  [Also: anthropologias, decorative arts, etc.]
Deadline December 15, 1998.  Please include SASE.

Response by late January.

The issue will be available in March 1999.  $5 ppd. (cash & stamps are fine,
checks to E. Treadwell)

Note to REVIEWERS: please contact me about the status of your review.  Thanks.

E.T.


Outlet Magazine -&- Double Lucy Books
P.O. Box 9013, Berkeley, California 94709  U.S.A.
http://users.lanminds.com/~dblelucy
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:09:24 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Laura Moriarty 
Subject:      details about Norma Cole on George Oppen
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Norma forwarded me more details of her talk this Thursday as well as a short
bio - Note that the talk starts at 7:30, not 7:00 -  I have been hearing her
describe the writing of the talk which sounds great -

The Poetry Center presents

The George Oppen Memorial Lecture
on Twentieth Century Poetics

          Norma Cole, "The Poetics of Vertigo"

Thursday, December 3, 1998
7:30 PM
First Unitarian Church
1187 Franklin Street, SF
$4 general
Poetry Center members free

Norma Cole's recent books are CONTRAFACT, MOIRA and DESIRE & ITS DOUBLE.  Her
translations include Danielle Collobert's IT THEN and Anne Portugal's NUDE.
She has been a recipient of the Getrude Stein Award several times, and has
received a Gerbode Award for Poetry as well as an award from the Fund for
Poetry.  A Canadian from Toronto, Cole has lived in San Francisco for the last
twenty-one years.  She currently teaches part time at San Francisco State
University.


moriarty@lanminds.com
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~moriarty/
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:24:24 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Hilton Manfred Obenzinger 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I forgot who first started this run of mini book reviews, but I want to
express my thanks.  After Bull Run it has been a delight to get glimpses
of wildly different reading lists -- and a token of what's been most
interesting to me about discussions on this list: shards of
different light to add to my own store.  I can't speak much about my own
reading list: I've just finished Henry James' "The Bostonians" and I was
reminded of why he irritates me so much, and I'm in the middle of Gay
Wilson Allen's "A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman" -- I find it very
sweet, informative -- plus "Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song" ed. by
Jim Perlamn, Ed Folsom & Dan Campion, which tickles me greatly and
the multifarious influence of the barbaric yawp intrigues me.

I suggest that someone host a current reading list bout every month or so
-- and Pierre Joris needs to translate Andalusian recipes.

Thanks,

Hilton Obenzinger
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:28:08 -0500
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: Bull Run
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

In between being told how fortunate I am to be permitted to operate my
bookstore in upper Northwest Washington by people who haven't read
anything more substantial than Primary Colors, I've reflected on Charles
Bernstein's post. I've concluded that Bernstein is dead wrong and short
sighted to boot.
I signed up for this list in part to see if my own form of enforced
autodidactism and vocation to modernism measured up to what other people
on the list, especially folks on campuses where you get to walk the walk
and talk the talk as part of your everyday existence, could bring to
poetic discourse.
Because Pound when he said "make it new" was not advocating a marketing
blitz or the inauguration of an age of poetic fads, I found I could
participate on the site. But, out of a sense of personal and artistic
responsibility, I've also found myself reading and thinking in order to
better grasp and often to contend with other strains on the site.
However, the truly pleasant surprise for me has been the 'fumiste' style
that many of the folks on the sight show a real talent for. I'm
referring to "the combination of the outrageous and the deadpan that
constituted the Chat Noir style." The email format, if it has any
virtues beyond basic communication, seems an ideal venue for a revival
of this style. It comes naturally and vehemently on this list. And to
Hell with content, personality, name calling etc. At the risk of
flattering you hucksters, this list has intelligence, wit, heart, and
knowledge to spare for the kind of voices that fit the 'tolerances' of
the medium. Although not every 'fumiste' post is 'successful', this is
email's imaginative edge. Some voices may not be
appropriate for the medium's creative dimension, but nothing 'historic'
is going to be derived here from putting up snippets of standard
critical fare or listing publications and readings though this news
never hurts. Its only lively and unique and I would insist legitimate
function may be a medium that combines the content of critical reading
and the outlandishness of the Hydropathes. Ron Silliman hasn't resisted
this impulse in his attached post e.g. "Bull Run", just as Henry Gould
considers a post without puns, punditry, mixed metaphors and meanderings
a post without sunshine.
Look, I'm a towney in a town usurped by Hass and now Pinsky. You go to a
gathering of poets here and the last thing they want to talk about is
poetry. Getting mentioned in the Washington Post or getting a grant take
top priority. If I thought face to face, I could maintain the kind of
lively discourse that takes place on this site, I'd move all your asses
here. With the exception of an occasional post by Rod Smith or Simon
Schuchat, I don't see D.C. poets (and I've been here all my life)
getting into the fray on this list or any list whatever. They wouldn't
have the knowledge, the committment, the passion, the imagination or the
guts. Don't ruin a unique thing.---Carlo Parcelli

Ron Silliman wrote:
>
> I took the kids to Manasas yesterday to see the site of the first Battle of
> Bull Run only to discover that the Civil War re-enactment was really going
> on here on The List whilst our backs were turned. My attitude toward this is
> pretty much the same as my answer to Colin's question yesterday, "Who were
> the good guys?" "They all were. That's what makes war so wasteful and
> stupid."
>
> I've often thought that the really radical distinction between our age and
> those of decades past is not one of more (or less) good poets per se
> [although I'm inclined to believe that there are more good writers right now
> than ever before in history], but rather that there are far fewer critics of
> substance. I think that Marjorie Perloff (and Peter Quartermain, Jerry
> McGann, Alan Golding, Steve Evans, Maria Damon, Tom Vogler &c &c &c) takes a
> lot of flack because  she (and they) stands in for "all of criticism" in its
> positive functions. If Marjorie's work has a weak spot, I think it's that
> she knows just how little good criticism is being written about contemporary
> poetry and she's always trying to fill all of the gaps. Her energy always
> astounds me as does her ability to bring extraordinary powers of
> concentration of every project she tackles.
>
> A much more interesting question than why does X or Y not make it onto
> reading list A is always "what is it about X or Y that keeps someone from
> putting it onto reading lists A, B, C, etc.?"
>
> Yes, it's true that critics who don't write or publish or primarily publish
> poetry will see the poem differently than do other poets. Poets often read
> the poem as though the other poet were "solving the problems" put forward by
> the poem and vote heavily with their (my) emotions on how well that gets
> done. Is it the only way to read a poem? Is there any such "only way"? Not
> in this galaxy there's not. And I write this as one of the loudest
> proponents of poets writing criticism there has ever been.
>
> I note that I, for one, don't feel "disabled" to speak about the fiction I
> read, although I haven't ever published fiction (tho I did "win" one
> Pushcart Prize for same and was ostensibly hired as a fiction teacher by
> UCSD some 16 years ago, which says more about the institutionalization of
> genre than anything else). Ditto the films I see or music I hear, although
> I've never ventured into those media either. I've been reading Kathy Acker
> on Goya this weekend. Should I presume that this should not have been
> written?
>
> There are also people in virtually every poetry scene who are important to
> it who publish neither poetry nor criticism, or else very very little. We
> lost two of these folks in the past year or so in Barry Cox and Charles
> Watts. Were their opinions not of value? That seems non-sensical on the face
> of it. I think it's very difficult to understand or articulate precisely how
> poetry is diminished by the loss of someone who doesn't characteristically
> speak up, but I never met anyone who knew these people (or others like them)
> who wouldn't admit it.
>
> In some ways, that silence replicates the position of most of the folks who
> lurk on this list. This list, after all, has 700 recipients but can handle
> only 50 messages per day.
>
> If anything, we need more of all these social functions in and around the
> poem. We certainly need 100 Marjorie Perloffs, preferably all in contention
> with one another so as to create a true public discourse about literature
> that we would, every one of us, benefit from. If nothing else, the arguments
> who have more in the way of nuance.
>
> Ron Silliman
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:42:12 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         daniel bouchard 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 10:24 AM 11/30/98 -0800, you wrote:
>... a delight to get glimpses of wildly different reading lists ...


yes, mere lists even of what people are reading
are far more interesting than the posts I'm deleting.



Autobiography (WC Williams)
Selected Letters        (WC Williams)
Tropic of Cancer        (Miller)
Picasso;         Everybody's Autobio. (Gertrude Stein)
Sky Memoirs (Blaise Cendrars)
The Words (Sartre)
Cezanne (Ambroise Villard)
Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Donald Reid)
The Lady of Situations (Louis Auchincloss)
Present Day Paris and the Battlefields [1922]   (Sommerville Story)
The Enlightenment in France (Frederick B. Artz)
Strange Communists I Have Known (Bertram Wolfe)
I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius)



<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Daniel Bouchard
The MIT Press Journals
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142

bouchard@mit.edu
phone: 617.258.0588
  fax: 617.258.5028
>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:40:07 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Haynes 
Subject:      Poetry in Phoenix
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

i just moved down to Scottsdale, AZ, from the San Francisco area. Anyone out
there know of poetry events, lectures, readings, whatnot, happening in and
around the Phoenix area??? I'd also be interested in writing groups, or
cafes....anything that might offer poetry.

Bob
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:04:11 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         ken|n|ing 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
Comments: To: daniel bouchard 
In-Reply-To:  <3.0.32.19981130134210.006a1bd0@po7.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

        Is this what we're doing, posting lists?  In that case, I submit
my current non-poetry reading:

Jean-Luc Nancy  The Sense of the World, The Gravity of Thought
Louis Zukofsky  Prepositions
Adelaide Morris, ed.  Sound States
Jed Rasula  American Poetry Wax Museum
Steve McCaffery  North of Intention

        Patrick F. Durgin

                             |
                             |
k e n n i n g````````````````|``````````````````````````````````
a newsletter of contemporary |poetry,  poetics,  and  non-fiction writing
                             |418 Brown St. #10  Iowa City, IA 52245  USA


=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:14:29 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: Free Poetics / Bull Run
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Humor is a sign
>of sanity.  Nevertheless I stand by what I said before : I agree in
principle
>with Chuckie's position.  Free poetics from these boring higgler epics;
>talk poetry specifics, not generals.  - Henry Gould

Couldn't agree more, Henry.  For the record.

>p.s. Mark - you've never heard of anyone prescribing how to write
poetry
>besides me?  Well, I'm flattered, to say the least!  But you know -
just
>for your information - there was Pound too, & Eliot, & a few thousand
other
>poets going back at least to Theocritus, I believe, who did such -
Wordsworth,
>Poe... gosh, I could name quite a few!

Well, yes, certainly, I'm aware of these, & I'll add the name of Andre
Breton, for one, to that list.  I was trying to talk about
contemporaries, & specifically individuals on the Poetics List.  I don't
think anyone still feels bound to the dictums of Pound, for example--
though didn't somebody on this list quote one of his slogans recently?

Mark DuCharme

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:20:50 PST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Mark DuCharme 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Roger day wrote:
>"The Last Of the Mohicans" William Fenimore Cooper. Better than
expected,
>but not surprised they left the bear - and a lot else - out of the
Michael
>Mann film.

does memory completely fail, or is it _James_ Fenimore Cooper?

MDC

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 14:23:48 -0500
Reply-To:     alphavil@ix.netcom.com
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli" 
Organization: Alphaville
Subject:      Re: Bull Run
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Joe Brennan has taken exception to being lumped in with the 'set in
concrete' set that comprise the Washington poetry scene. It is only my
long friendship and boundless admiration for this knowledgable and
passionate Freudian-Lacanian poetic voice that led to my unforgivable
oversight.---Carlo Parcelli
Thanks to Dan Rather at the Averrill Harriman memorial service for the
excessively fawning tone of the above.
--
ÐÏ à¡± á
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:32:07 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         shana 
Subject:      reading lists!
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

This is so cool. I love lists--my grocery list occasionally has footnotes.
Recent reading for me--

Diary of an Unknown-Jean Cocteau
The Life of Poetry-Muriel Rukeyser
The Children of Abraham (sequel to The Book of Abraham)-Marek Halter
The Best Defense-Alan Dershowitz
Wild Light-Collected Poems-Yona Wallach
love stories on FOP-L
The Managed Health Care Handbook
Chutzpah-Alan Dershowitz
Tales of the City series (for the 2nd and 3rd time)-Armistead Maupin
my diary from 12th grade
old love letters (I highly recommend them)

ps, I love The Cement Garden.

Shana
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:43:34 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         daniel bouchard 
Subject:      Re: reading lists!
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 03:32 PM 11/30/98 -0500, you wrote:

>my diary from 12th grade
>old love letters (I highly recommend them)
>
>


Please send them to me at the address below.



ps-- this was the obvious reply,  no? I'm terribly sorry.
Self-imposed silence for two months as contrition.





<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Daniel Bouchard
The MIT Press Journals
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142

bouchard@mit.edu
phone: 617.258.0588
  fax: 617.258.5028
>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:13:30 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Interesting questions, Joe, from where I sit.  Cultural studies is
considered very au courant in Peninsular (Spanish) studies these days.  It
usually doesn't include anyone working on poetry. The Latin American side
has been highly politicized for years. To take aesthetics seriously, in my
field, is the hallmark of a cultural conservative. So I find myself
siding--on many issues-- with people in Latin American literature, who
might not be interested in "aesthetics" as I am, as opposed to more
traditional peninsularists--whose "aestheticism," derived from the New
Criticism, has been dulled by the years. But when I see a book like John
Beverly's _Against Literature_ I have to cringe. I'd welcome a return to
aesthetics, as long as it wasn't just a recycling of the literary
criticism of 30 years ago.

I was in a splenetic mood last week, which accounts for some of the tone
of my posts.  But Carlo Parcelli's response to Ron makes me feel a little
better.

Jonathan
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:21:30 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Erik Sweet 
Subject:      Tool Party/Reading Postponed
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

The "Tool a Magazine" party and reading scheduled for
Friday December 4th at Segue will be postponed until
January-

Sorry about the change!

Issue number 2 will surface in early January..

E.S.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:37:58 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

jonathan, interesting to see these terms play themselves out in a field of
which i am (as per) largely ignorant...

but yes, "aesthetics" can be retro as hell, esp. when you get folks chiming
in with unexamined notions of "beauty"... the halls of poetry, the halls of
_____, are filled with such prattle...

i have to believe, though, in the possibility of being moved (as my high
school physics teacher used to say, "in various & sundry ways")... there
has been talk hereabouts in the past as to the persistence, even necessity
of the sublime... it sometimes seems to me that we need something like this
as an antidote to the prevalent cynicism (not that the latter can't be
useful at times, but after a spell it's about as interesting as watching
paint dry)... well there are other ways of handling this too, but i've
repeated mself by now...

on an entirely different matter (that you also raise):  i take carlo's
point, but i also take charles's intervention... let's say someone started
spouting hate speech hereabouts---it's safe to assume that we can all
imagine what this might likely consist of?... what then?---do we simply
turn a deaf ear?---do we rail against?... i'm not even *hinting* that such
a thing has happened here---but i think the duty of a list moderator is to
try to make things, well, in basic terms, hospitable for list inhabitants,
regardless of 12345678xyz... which would be a matter, in part, of
attempting to persuade folks not to insult, or to add insult to injury...

which is certainly not to say that tempers may not flare, that there isn't
all sortsa leeway around here...

but this, too, is a matter of judgment... and whenever an actual judgment
is made around here, you can see how controversial things quickly become...
of course charles has de facto more (list) power than any of us---he can
always pull the plug... so in one sense we're all operating out of his
sense of what's worthwhile (which is of course hardly unique---by which i
mean zero insult)... whereas when anyone else asks (e.g.) for more
"civility," that rhetorical request can only ever be just that---a
request...

still, i think it's important to recognize that there are some
responsibilities that come of "free poetics" (which are anything but
"free," as some have indicated)... i wouldn't wanna legislate same, but i
sure would wanna worry them some...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:00:01 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

You're right, Joe.  When the discourse gets too heated the function of the
list-moderator might be to gently remind us that things have gotten out of
hand. If someone really spouted *hate speech* on the list, I'm sure that
person would be blasted pretty quickly. The tone would escalate once
again. I didn't take you to be saying that any current subscribers would
be capable of hate speech as defined in contemporary American, e.g. overt
homophobia, racial slurs, anti-semitism, etc...

Has anyone read Butler's _Excitable Speech_?

 I took Carlo to be saying that the vigorous nature of the debate was one
of the attractions of the list for him, and I feel the same way.


Jonathan Mayhew
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:04:14 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Judy Roitman 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>You're right, Joe.  When the discourse gets too heated the function of the
>list-moderator might be to gently remind us that things have gotten out of
>hand. If someone really spouted *hate speech* on the list, I'm sure that
>person would be blasted pretty quickly. The tone would escalate once
>again. I didn't take you to be saying that any current subscribers would
>be capable of hate speech as defined in contemporary American, e.g. overt
>homophobia, racial slurs, anti-semitism, etc...
>
>Has anyone read Butler's _Excitable Speech_?
>
> I took Carlo to be saying that the vigorous nature of the debate was one
>of the attractions of the list for him, and I feel the same way.
>
>
>Jonathan Mayhew



Hi, JM.  Vigorous debate is fine, but the personal vendettas and itertions
of self-justification get pretty unpleasant.  We both know folks who have
dropped off for one or the other or both reasons, folks who would be nice
to hear from.

(This disguised note to Jonathan is of course to everyone.)



---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman                           | "Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!
Math, University of Kansas       |     memory fails
Lawrence, KS 66045                |         these are the days."
785-864-4630                        |
fax:  785-864-5255                |                    Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note new area code
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 17:26:16 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Michael Magee 
Subject:      COMBO 2 - HOT FUN IN THE WINTERTIME
In-Reply-To:  <001d01be060c$0f6e1780$4968d8cb@ahadada.gol.com> from "jesse
              glass" at Nov 1, 98 06:54:01 pm
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

                End of the Fall and COMBO comes back...

                        Hi, hi, hi, hi there!!

                ...those winter days, those COMBO days...


                HOT FUN IN THE WINERTIME!!      HOT FUN IN THE
                WINTERTIME!!    HOT FUN IN THE WINTERTIME!!


                 CCC   OO   MM   MM BBB   OO      222
                C   C O  O  M M M M B  B O  O    2   2
                C     O  O  M  M  M BBB  O  O       2
                C     0  0  M  M  M B  B O  O     22
                C   C O  O  M  M  M B  B O  O    2
                 CCC   OO   M  M  M BBB   OO     22222


                        FEATURING POEMS BY...

        Pattie McCarthy         Brett Evans     Prageeta Sharma

Heather Fuller          David Kellogg        Ray DiPalma

                Lee Ann Brown           Chris McCreary

        Ange Mlinko             Kit Robinson    Standard Schaefer

                        and Lev Rubinshtein
______________________________________________________________

for those who missed our first issue, COMBO is a quarterly journal of
poetry and poetics emphacizing work by experimental writers roughly under
35. COMBO is 52 pgs on nice off-white paper w/ printed glossy card stock
cover.  Single issues, $3.00 (a bargain!) 4-issue subscriptions $10.00 (a
bigger bargain!).  E-mail to mmagee@english.upenn.edu, and/or send checks
payable to Michael Magee, 31 Perrin Ave., Pawtucket, RI 02861.  Ask
around: this is a happenin' mag & we aim to please.  Woo-hoo!!!
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:39:58 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 3:13 PM -0600 11/30/98, MAYHEW wrote:
>Interesting questions, Joe, from where I sit.  Cultural studies is
>considered very au courant in Peninsular (Spanish) studies these days.  It
>usually doesn't include anyone working on poetry. The Latin American side
>has been highly politicized for years. To take aesthetics seriously, in my
>field, is the hallmark of a cultural conservative. So I find myself
>siding--on many issues-- with people in Latin American literature, who
>might not be interested in "aesthetics" as I am, as opposed to more
>traditional peninsularists--whose "aestheticism," derived from the New
>Criticism, has been dulled by the years. But when I see a book like John
>Beverly's _Against Literature_ I have to cringe. I'd welcome a return to
>aesthetics, as long as it wasn't just a recycling of the literary
>criticism of 30 years ago.
...

why does beverly make you cringe?  i really like that book, at least the
intro; but as a cult studs jock, i'm in the minority here on the list...
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:59:11 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         MAYHEW 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Maria Damon wrote:

why does beverly make you cringe?  i really like that book, at least the
intro; but as a cult studs jock, i'm in the minority here on the list...
>

Now I (JM) write again:

You might be a minority in cultural studies too, Maria, because you
actually care about POETRY. I think your work bridges the gap in a way
that sets a great example for other critics.

In the first place, there's the title, with its implication that
literature is a useful thing to be *against* Why does cult studs have to
be against literature?  Why assume that various nefarious uses to which
"literature" has been put in the past define all its possible future uses?
Doesn't his position basically rule out any useful role for the
practicing poet, playwright, or novelist by defining literature as that
which is already studied as such in the university?  I could repeat an
argument Chas. Bernstein makes about Eagleton in an essay in _Content's
Dream_ several years ago (even more relevant in today's climate):  why
concede to a conservative faction of academia the right to define what
literature is?

What specifically did you like in the introduction to _Against
Literature_?  Maybe I was cringeing too hard and missed something
important.


Junuthun Muyhuw
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 18:20:18 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Maria Damon 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
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At 4:59 PM -0600 11/30/98, MAYHEW wrote:
>Now I (JM) write again:
>
>You might be a minority in cultural studies too, Maria, because you
>actually care about POETRY. I think your work bridges the gap in a way
>that sets a great example for other critics.

thanks; there are some other folks --peter hitchcock, amitava kumar, walter
kalaidjian, kristin ross, increasingly michael davidson (tho he sticks to
"high" --tho hip) literature for his literary references), etc not to
mention important forebears like adorno and benjamin (stay tuned for my
dream anthology, Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, to be published
when i get the energy).  but in general, it's hard to find folks to talk to
--there's often a breakdown somewhere, because in cult studies (and i to
some extent agree w/ this) we are not supposed to be hung up on any
particular genre, but rather simply READ cultural phenomena.  but why is
"poetry" so seldom the cultural phenomenon that gets read?  is my thing.
and i'd like to do more of the actual stuff i used to do, like reading
housing project poetry, rather than endlessly tub-thumping for bridging
poetry and cultural studies...
>
>In the first place, there's the title, with its implication that
>literature is a useful thing to be *against* Why does cult studs have to
>be against literature?

i don't see this as *cult studs* against literature, but *poetry* against
literature.  my other project, to be pursued when i have the energy (when
will that be???) is a book called "Poetics for a Post-literary 'America,'"
which will address this very issue.


Why assume that various nefarious uses to which
>"literature" has been put in the past define all its possible future uses?
>Doesn't his position basically rule out any useful role for the
>practicing poet, playwright, or novelist by defining literature as that
>which is already studied as such in the university?

no, in my eyes, precisely not.  it foregrounds the practice of verbal
culture as *excluded* from academic considerations --weird language,
non-literary poetries (micropoetries, i call them, after mark slobin's
micro-musics of the west), etc.  my work is very "aestheticist", according
to my colleagues, not because it focuses on canonical work (which it
doesn't, though theirs does), but because it is not "historicist" in the
current sense, of applying historical inquiries to canonical literature (ho
hum).  they work on "great literature," pretending to have no aesthetic
stake in their subjects; i work on relatively unknown writers, with a fully
acknowledged aesthetic investment, like, i actually *like* the stuff others
consider doggerel on the one hand or unreadably "elitist" on the other.  i
even like mainstream stuff, not so much in itself but in what it obviously
means to people.

I could repeat an
>argument Chas. Bernstein makes about Eagleton in an essay in _Content's
>Dream_ several years ago (even more relevant in today's climate):  why
>concede to a conservative faction of academia the right to define what
>literature is?
>
>What specifically did you like in the introduction to _Against
>Literature_?  Maybe I was cringeing too hard and missed something
>important.

it was a while ago, but what i liked was his beginning to move away from
the category of the literary, though he sort of "takes it back" by then
saying, i'm not against literature, really; but i wanna look at some things
against the *backdrop* of literature, *that's what i meant by "against"
literature. then he backs his way into lacan, as i recall, and abandons
what could have been a promising step away from literariness.
>
>
>Junuthun Muyhuw
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:41:55 +0000
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         schuchat 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
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Am about halfway through Gershom Scholem on Sabbatai Sevi.
Just finished General William Odom (Ret.) THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET
MILITARY, extremely interesting discussion of what Gorbachev thought he
was doing versus what he actually was doing.
Before that, TLOOTH.
Also (re)reading around in the new Denby dance writings collection from
Yale, always a pleasure to read such clear, elegant observation.

Also, not long ago I read my second Tom Sharpe novel, THE THROW-BACK,
entertaining British slapstick.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 18:40:42 -0600
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher 
Subject:      Re: from today's _academe today_...
In-Reply-To:  
Mime-Version: 1.0
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maria, question:  you mention being tagged "aestheticist" over and against
"historicist"... to what extent do you see this repeating the (now quite
old) distinction stuart hall once made between "structuralist" and
"culturalist" cultural studies? (i never liked the latter term, though i've
always found the work of someone like williams (a culturalist by hall's
account) invaluable)...

my sense of cult. studies in fact (gross generalization coming) is that
it's gone increasingly structuralist in some increasingly unproductive ways
(neither structuralist nor culturalist excluded the historical---they just
treated it differently)... perhaps trying to work with poetry is pushing a
culturalist agenda into this highly structural (or poststructural)
arena?... as a result of the difficulties associated with the subject
position (or broadly, subjectivities) at stake in poetry?... which would
seem to operate almost at the surface of articulation/utterance?...

anyway... quick, perhaps badly posed questions, but i'd be much interested
in any response you may have...

best,

joe
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 17:11:06 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Robert Corbett 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
In-Reply-To:  <19981130192050.11366.qmail@hotmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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or perhaps William James Fenimore Cooper . . .

On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Mark DuCharme wrote:

> Roger day wrote:
> >"The Last Of the Mohicans" William Fenimore Cooper. Better than
> expected,
> >but not surprised they left the bear - and a lot else - out of the
> Michael
> >Mann film.
>
> does memory completely fail, or is it _James_ Fenimore Cooper?
>
> MDC
>
> ______________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
>

Robert Corbett                  "you are there beyond/ tracings flesh can
rcor@u.washington.edu            take,/ and farther away surrounding and
University of Washington         informing the systems" - A.R. Ammons
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 21:23:58 -0500
Reply-To:     mcx@bellatlantic.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         michael corbin 
Subject:      Re: Bull Run
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Ron Silliman wrote:

> I took the kids to Manasas yesterday

>  "Who werethe good guys?" "They all were.

Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher wrote:

> maria, question:
> ?... as a result of the difficulties associated with the subject
> position (or broadly, subjectivities) at stake in poetry?... which would
> seem to operate almost at the surface of articulation/utterance?...

There were, of course, more than one Bull Run. Though Antetium seems more about
the uselessness of that America.


But Manasas is something more. Poetrywise.
Disney had claims.
And these were warded off.
By Refrerence to bloody-soiledness.
And nation-state-needs.
We only need so many
living history theme parks, no?
Living-history. Needs.
But then suburban sprawl
covers much of that
stuff. Even outthere in Harper's
Ferry. Robert E. Lee, Marching out
with the Union Troops
to put down that Jown Brown.
Guerilla war, in the Appalachians.

Maria's _Dark End_
Opens up.
And it is a question of where to
go from here.Civil War poetry.
Like Edmund Wilson's _Patriotic Gore_.
And poets still trying to be
outside of history. And the superorganic
or CULTURE
and fumblings of
alienated listservservers believing
that civility and manners
will out in the end.

mc
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 21:36:36 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "r. drake" 
Subject:      Re: A Wild Salience
In-Reply-To:  <640effd1.3662d563@aol.com>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Wanted to add Ann Vickery to the list of contributors to A WILD
SALIENCE...  and also to mention that we're soliciting proposals
for further issues in this series--contact me direct if interested.

luigi-bob drake
Burning Press
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu


>Burning Press is currently preparing for publication a booklength collection
>of responses to the work of Rae Armantrout--
>
>"A WILD SALIENCE": THE WRITING OF OF RAE ARMANTROUT,
>edited by Tom Beckett.
>
>Among other things, "A WILD SALIENCE" will include new work by Rae Armantrout,
>an interview with Lyn Hejinian, an interview with Tom Beckett, and critical
>work by Laura Moriarity, Aldon Nielsen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,  Brenda
>Hillman, Fanny Howe, Susan Wheeler, Lydia Davis, Kit Robinson, Bobbie West,
>David Bromige, Charles Alexander, Hank Lazer, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman,
>Jessica Grim and Robert Creeley.
>
>"A WILD SALIENCE" is the first book in a projected series of volumes to be
>devoted to responses to individual contemporary writers. Following publication
>of this initial offering Tom Beckett will function as Series Editor and work
>to pair guest editors with important but underappreciated innovative writers.
>
>We are working to develop the most complete mailing list possible to publicize
>what we hope will come to be seen as an important contribution to the field of
>innovative writing.  If you wish to be on the mailing list, or if you know of
>persons or institutions that ought to be, or if you have a mailing list you
>would care to share, please contact one of us:
>
>Tom Beckett, Editor
>Tbeck131@aol.com
>
>Bobbie West, Assistant Editor
>Ctfarmr@aol.com
>-------------------------------------------
>
>And stay tuned.
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:40:57 -0800
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Karen Kelley 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
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_Through a Window: M Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe_  Jane
Goodall
_In the Shadow of Man_  Goodall
_In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon_  Redmond
O'Hanlon
_Intoxicated by my Illness_ Anatole Broyard
_The World is the Home of Love and Death_ Harold Brodkey
_Formless_ Rosalind Krauss
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 23:20:57 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "Eric Gleason, a.k.a Agent Sunshine" 
Subject:      dec/jan nyc readings
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

howdy everyone.  been out of touch a little lately, i'm trying to find out
about what readings and such are coming up during december and january.
are the segue and zinc bar readings continuing every week?

thanks,
eryque
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 23:26:07 -0500
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Steven Marks 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
In-Reply-To:  <36636549.4CCE5D19@bayarea.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Crime and Punishment -- Dostoyevsky

Unleashing the Killer App: digital strategies for market dominance --
Harvard Business School Press -- uh, I feel like I have to explain this
one. I'm writing a series of articles about the so-called New Economy. You
can't write about this without going into the belly of the beast. I'm also
reading some of my Uncle Karl's work as well since there are many who say
that Marx would see the information revolution as the way to get all those
material needs met. Yeah, right.

Alone -- Admiral Richard E. Byrd -- an account of his solo expedition
during the Antarctic night in the interior of that continent. What's
fascinating about the book is that the very technology that allows him to
inhabit his small cabin in -70 degree weather is the same technology that
is slowly killing him. Carbon monoxide poisoning from an oil stove and a
hand-cranked radio (connecting him to the hq at Little America) which saps
what little strength he has left. This book led me to reread Kafka's short
story, "The Burrow."

Steven
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 23:45:20 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Haynes 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
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I guess everybody's doing it--so here's mine:

-Poems for the Millenium (vol. 2), Rothenberg & Joris, eds.
-Deepstep Come Shining, C.D. Wright
-The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
-Science and Steepleflower, Forrest Gander
-Songs of Degree, John Taggart
-Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes, trans.
-Java Script Developers Guide...
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 23:49:42 EST
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group 
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         Bob Haynes 
Subject:      Re: Current reading (non poetry)
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ooops, please ignore that last post....I was a bit hasty...put in some poetry
books, too...sorry....call me Fishmeal.........
=========================================================================
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 1998 23:52:54 -0500
Reply-To:     fperrell@JLC.net
Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group 
From:         "F. W. Perrella" 
Subject:      Web Del Sol Update 12/1/98
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Perihelion #3 is up:  http://webdelsol.com/Perihelion

Ever wonder what those poetry editors are thinking as they sift through
all those submissions?  What if poetry editors are also poets?
Perihelion #3, now online, is devoted to the works of poets who are also
editors.  In the Discussion section, Jennifer Ley hosts five editors
from online and print, who tackle topics such as the varying
perspectives on the editor's role:  editor as collector, matchmaker,
creator, "one who dares to give".  Come take a look.

Two journals newly associated with WDS are also available for sampling:

Quarterly West http://webdelsol.com/Quarterly_West

Editor Margot Schilpp has a sampling of contemporary/experimental
literature, including fiction, short-shorts, poetry, and nonfiction.

and New England Review http://webdelsol.com/New_England_Review

Edited by Stephen Donadio, NER features fiction, poetry, performance
pieces, essays, translation, and interviews.

Hope you're working on your creative non-Quictions, too - contest
deadline is January 31, 1999.  Guidelines are at
http://webdelsol.com/cnq.htm

Thanks!

Anne Perrella