========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 20:28:15 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: Happy new year MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Millennium Poem Get your Y2K Chihuahua here today Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 18:13:42 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Millennial readings Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed George, I can't imagine only reading one or two books at a time -- even though it sometimes takes me a year to read a book "cover to cover" when surrounded by all its peers. Here's my list The Letters of Mina Harker, by Dodie Bellamy (just finished -- last book of the millennium for me and a total dazzler) Frank Lima, Inventory Laurie Price, Except for Memory (great underappreciated book) Ron Padgett, New & Selected Poems Cole Swenson, Noon Charles Bernstein, My Way (don't expect to finish this until 2001) Philip Whalen, 0vertime Rod Smith, Protective Immediacy (best ear of his generation) Charles Tomlinson, Selected Poems Edmund Berrigan, Disarming Matter Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel (John Ashbery meets Catcher in the Rye) Walter Mosley, Blue Light (It wants to be Samuel Delaney sooo bad) Phillip K Dick, Valis Annie Finch, Eve & its secret twin... Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse CD Wright, Deepstep Come Shining (great!) Ron ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 20:10:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: <005701bf53d7$4c957300$31568218@we.mediaone.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Books Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols. 1 & 2 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, & Dangerous Things bpNichol, Gifts (The Martyrology, Books 7&) Nathaniel Mackey & Art Lange, eds., Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose CDs Miles Davis, Bitches Brew Complete Sessions Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68 John Coltrane, Sun Ship John Coltrane, Stellar Regions Carlos Santana, Supernatural Laurindo Almeida, Duets for Spanish Guitar >----- Original Message ----- >From: Arielle C. Greenberg >To: >Sent: Thursday, December 30, 1999 11:38 AM >Subject: end of century reading material > > >> I got a posting from someone asking what everyone was reading now, at the >> end of the century, which I thought was such a lovely idea, until I >> realized that posting came from a different list I'm on. So I'm >> introducing the idea here. Bedside stacks, circa the flip of the nines to >> zeros? >> >> I'm particularly excited to answer this myself, since as I write I am also >> trying to gather books to bring on a three-day hide-out in an Adirondack >> cabin. My house is stocked with books I bought in 99 and never had a >> chance to read, so what to bring? >> >> Possible selections include: >> Journals I bought from SPD: Volt, Big Allis, New American Writing, The >> Hat, Fourteen Hills, American Letters & Commentary >> Many new Barbara Guest books >> The New American Poetry anthology I finally own >> Wang Ping's Of Flesh and Spirit >> French Symbolist Poetry anthology >> New issue of Fence >> Jena Osman's The Character >> Plus novels I never got to read: Everlasting Story of Nory by Baker, The >> Saskiad by Hall >> Pride & Prejudice, which sig oth and I are reading out loud to one another >> nightly >> >> >> Also coming: >> ingredients for tofu/mushroom thai curry >> champagne, bien sur! >> the new Stephin Merritt/Dolly Parton/Beastie Boys cds >> pancake mix >> videos: Modern Times (Chaplin), Rules of the Game (Renoir), 2001 >> (Kubrick), Irma Vep (Assayas), Philadelphia Story (Cukor) >> >> >> noisemakers for everyone! see you in the meltdown... >> Arielle >> >> >> >**************************************************************************** >> "I thought numerous gorgeous sadists would write me plaintive appeals, but >> time has gone by me. They know where to get better looking boots than I >> describe." -- Ray Johnson >> > > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 04:13:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Traceroute Results MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Please go to http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/routout.cfm for the reasonable first fiction / non-fiction of the new millennium. Thank you - - Alan Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 21:37:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen Kelley Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dropping Ashes on the Buddha -- Zen Master Seung Sahn, Stephen Mitchell (Editor) Nine-Headed Dragon River -- Peter Peter Matthiessen Moon in a Dewdrop -- Dogen Ark -- Ronald Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 03:11:53 -0500 Reply-To: shana Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: shana Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit George Bowering wrote: > This what are you reading right now business shows up on this list about > three times a year. > That's exactly the time when I show up, too. Everyone is reading so much, I feel inferior. :) But for what it's worth... books- Tieta do Agreste-Jorge Amado Making Your Own Days-Kenneth Koch American Review 16-lots of people, Ralph Ellison, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Kizer Father Hunger: Fathers, Daughters and Food-Margo Maine still sludging through Richard Weisberg's Poethics music- Santana's Greatest Hits Alabina-Alabina Khaled-Sahra The The-Mind Bomb Marianne Faithfull-Broken English Xymox-Subsequent Pleasures Burt Bacharach-Make it Easy on Yourself Best of Mary Wells Happy New Year! xoxo Shana shana@bway.net http://www.bway.net/~shana/index.htm > I am always amazed that most respondees are reading eight or ten books at > once. I just cant handle that many at once. At the moment I am reading D.G. > Jones's new book of poems entitled _Grounding Sight_ and Beckett's > _Eleuthera_. > > > > > George Bowering. > > > > fax: 1-604-266-9000 > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 12:39:48 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michel Delville Subject: Re: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Books:=20 A special issue of *PO&SIE* on contemporary South Korean poetry. Jacques Derrida and Marc Guillaume, *Marx en jeu*. F.T. Marinetti, *The Untameables*. F. M. Dostoevsky, *The Idiot* Robert Smithson's *Collected Writings* Madeline Gins, *Helen Keller or Arakawa* John Buchan, *The Moon Endureth* R. M. Rilke,=A8*Sketches of Malte Laurids Brigge* Daniel Defoe, *General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates*. Paul Noug=E9, *Fragments*. Fred, *L'histoire de la derni=E8re image* (comic book) Edward Bond, *Bingo* Music: Antonio Carlos Jobim, *Stone Flower* Gong, *You-Remixed* Ken Ishii, *Sleeping Madness* Carlo Gesualdo's madrigals John Coltrane, *Bye Bye Blackbird* Henry Threadgill, *Spirit of Nuff ... Nuff* Frank Zappa, *Thing Fish* Robert Wyatt, *EPs* Aka Moon, *Ganesh* Eugene Chadbourne and Jimmy Carl Black, *Locked in a Dutch Coffeeshop* --------------------------- Michel Delville English and American literature University of Li=E8ge 3 Place Cockerill 4000 Li=E8ge BELGIUM fax: ++ 32 4 366 57 21 e-mail: mdelville@ulg.ac.be You may want to visit L3's website at the following address: http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/uer/d-german/L3 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 11:27:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Doug Lang / Beginning Century Reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [reformatted] Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 08:13:25 -0500 From: Doug Lang Subject: Beginning century reading Woke up this morning and (re) read poems by Lee Ann Brown (Polyverse) and P. Inman (at least) In the CD player: shine-eyed mister zen by Kelly Joe Phelps best Doug Lang ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 14:36:52 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: i'll be in NYC jan 15, 16 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit anyone know of any poetry events happening that weekend? thanks randy prunty ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 15:45:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Harold Teichman Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks to Jacques Debrot and Brian Kim Stefans for enlivening the list here at world's end. Some books: J. Bouveresse: Le philosophe et le reel Wittgenstein: Wiener Aufgabe, Band 1 M. Nadeau: The History of Surrealism Thomas Kling: Morsch J. Roubaud: Mathematique Oskar Pastior: Das Unding an sich R. Waldrop: Reproduction of Profiles and Against Language? Mathews & Brotchie: Oulipo Compendium CDs: the Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Boulez: Repons anything by Art Blakey ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 15:51:42 -0500 Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Millennial readings In-Reply-To: <20000101021342.15087.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Claude Addas, _The Quest for the Red Sulphur: A Biography of Ibn Arabi_ Régis Debray, _Loués soient nos seigneurs_ Gustave Sobin, _ Luminous Debris_ Koelle, _Paul Celans Pneumatisches Judentum_ Bernhard Paha, _Die Spur im Werk Paul Celans_ (with another 5 recent booklength studies on Celan on the shelf) Goethe, _West-Oestlicher Diwan_ Jacques Derrida, _Donner la Mort_ (with 3 more recent JDs waiting on the shelf) Walter Benjamin, _The Arcades Project_ Robert Kelly, _The Time of Voice_ Lucie Bolens, _La Cuisine Andalouse, an art de vivre_ Rae Armantrout, _True_ William H Gasss, _Reading Rilke_ Christopher beach, _Poetic Culture_ Abdelwahab Meddeb, _ Aya dans les villes_ Alice Becker-Ho, _Les Princes du Jargon_ ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those 6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim Email: joris@csc.albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 16:35:41 +0000 Reply-To: archambeau@lfc.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lake Forest College Subject: Samizdat #4 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Announcing... S a m i z d a t # 4 Featuring... John Peck: Modernist After Modernism (new poems and an essay on his work by Brooke Bergan) And... Four British Poets (David Kinloch, David Kennedy, Mark Robinson & Peter Robinson) Plus poems by... Charles Cantalupo Kymberly Taylor Orlando Ricardo Menes Stephen Collis Reviews of... Tod Thilleman (by Henry Gould) Charles Bernstein's Close Listening (by Dubravka Djuric) And the word from... Russia (Masha Zavialova) Ireland (Billy Mills) How, you ask, can I get my hands on this marvel? send $3.50 (or $10 for a three-issue subscription) to Robert Archambeau 9 Campus Circle Lake Forest, IL 60045 (checks made out to R. Archambeau) A limited number of FREE issues are set aside for distribution to readers of the poetics list residing in the USA (sorry, foreign mailings are expensive). If you would like a copy, and have not received a free issue before, send e-mail to archambeau@lfc.edu with the heading "Samizdat/free offer." Happy new year, Robert Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 10:12:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Graham W Foust Subject: books and music for now MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reading: Joshua Beckman-- _Things are Happening_ Michael Burkard-- _Entire Dilemma_ J.F. Lyotard-- _Postmodern Fables_ _Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Photomotages of Hannah Hoch_ Medbh McGuckian-- _On Ballycastle Beach_ and Niedecker, cuz I'm visiting my family in Wisconsin . . . (not that that would be the only reason to read LN, but it's the one Christmas tradition other than getting drunk that I can abide by) Listening: _If there was a way_-- Dwight Yoakam Citzen Steely Dan (box set! merry christmas indeed!) _I'm friends with all-stars_ -- love-cars (the best cd you won't hear this year) _Bandwagonesque_-- Teenage Fanclub _Heartaches_ -- Patsy Cline Graham ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 11:46:57 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michel Delville Subject: Re: South Korean poetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Dear listers: The enquiries about the anthology of contemporary South Korean poetry that featured in my list of end of the century readings have been so overwhelming that I feel the following information should be made available to you all: PO&SIE is a French magazine edited by Michel Deguy and published three times a year. Its list of "international correspondents" include listmember Pierre Joris, Clayton Eshelman and Christopher Middleton. The South Korean issue came out this Summer and was guest-edited by Claude Mouchard and Kim Hee-kyoon. Full details of how to subscribe to the magazine are available from: Editions Belin 8, rue F=E9rou 75278 Paris Cedex 06 They also have a web site at: http://www.editions-belin.fr Hope this is useful--all the very best to you all, Michel --------------------------- Michel Delville English and American literature University of Li=E8ge 3 Place Cockerill 4000 Li=E8ge BELGIUM fax: ++ 32 4 366 57 21 e-mail: mdelville@ulg.ac.be You may want to visit L3's website at the following address: http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/uer/d-german/L3 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 02:59:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: ^^^^^ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - ^^^^^ Raise both hands, palm upwards, hunching the shoulders inward, the fore- head also raised, including the eyebrows. Accompany this with a slight smile. Point across the space with the index finger of the right hand at the other. Raise and lower the head in his or her direction. Now bend your body forward, holding your hands concave/convex (the left hand arched away from the body, the right hand arched towards the body), draw them across your limbs, one after the other, slowly lingering. Following this, place them across your chest, as if you were wrapping a blanket. Then extend your arms away from your body, with your hands horizontal, mostly flat with your palms downward, and raise them to a height indicating a great pile. Sweep outward with your right hand, indicating negation. Now you have the attention of the other. Look intently at her. She will look back intently at you, but you must attract her attention to your hands. The indexfinger of your right hand should then touch her chest, approaching her in a closed position, except the forefinger should be crooked against the end of the thumb, with the whole configuration upright and the palm outward. Now move your hand slowly horizontal, and look intently at her again. She will look intently at you again with her forehead raised and a slight expression of consternation, her forehead slightly wrinkled, her eyes half-opened. Now speak to her slowly and say, "We don't want your clothes." She will understand your gestures to refer to the great amount of clothes she has offered you. _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 17:51:24 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Walter K. Lew" Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 30 Dec 1999 to 31 Dec 1999 (#2000-1) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Now & over the last few months (only some in their entirety and some re-read in a new context)--Mainly (but not always) to recommend them: Naoki Sakai, TRANSLATION AND SUBJECTIVITY =46rank Lentricchia, "Philosophers of Modernism at Harvard, circa 1900" _South Atlantic Quarterly_, Fall '90. Lentricchia, ARIEL AND THE POLICE Harry K. Wells, PRAGMATISM, PHILOSOPHY OF IMPERIALISM Walter Benjamin, THE ARCADES PROJECT (including Rolfe Tiedermann's essay) Cary Wolfe, THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN LITERARY IDEOLOGY IN POUND AND EMERSON Kawamura Minato, various essays on Korean literary Modernism (as in "Modanizumu," not literature during the modern era in general) Various novels and lectures by Natsume S=F3seki, including THE MINER (K=F3fu= ) in Jay Rubin's outstanding translation and S=F3seki's curious introduction t= o his own "Bungaku-ron" S=F3seki-related criticism, esp. by Komori Y=F3ichi Hosea Hirata, THE POETRY AND POETICS OF NISHIWAKI JUNZABURO Jan Lin, RECONSTRUCTING CHINATOWN (sociological study) Peter Kwong, THE NEW CHINATOWN Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, READING ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: From Necessity to Extravagance The new Akutagawa reader compiled and introduced by Seiji Mizuta Lippit Leonard Chang, THE FRUIT 'N FOOD and DISPATCHES FROM THE COLD (two novels) Gary Pak, THE RICEPAPER AIRPLANE (novel) John Zerzan, FUTURE PRIMITIVE AND OTHER ESSAYS Deleuze and Guattari, ANTI-OEDIPUS Ty Pak, GUILT PAYMENT (short stories) Roy Kiyooka, PACIFIC WINDOWS: Collected Poems edited by Roy Miki Capt. Beefheart, any printed lyrics I can find Richard Wright, HAIKU: This Other World A READY-MADE LIFE: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction, comp., trans. Kim Chong-un and Bruce Fulton Essay on DICTEE by Eun Kyung Min in Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, ed., OTHER SISTERHOODS: Literary Theory and U. S. Women of Color Maurice Merleau-Ponty, THE PRIMACY OF PERCEPTION John B. Henderson, SCRIPTURE, CANON AND COMMENTARY (focuses mainly on commentaries in the Confucian canon) Tzvetan Todorov, SYMBOLISM AND INTERPRETATION Margeurite Yourcenar, THAT MIGHTY SCULPTOR, TIME Periodicals: RAIN TAXI; BAMBOO RIDGE; BUG ('zine on Korean and Japanese pop culture); LIPSTICK; Phillytalks; WIRED; new Wm. Gibson in YAHOO! INTERNET LIFE; CHAIN; XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics; Alvin Lu's pieces (incl. his "City God" column) in the S. F. BAY GUARDIAN >Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 15:28:43 -0800 >From: George Bowering >Subject: Re: end of century reading material > >This what are you reading right now business shows up on this list about >three times a year. > >I am always amazed that most respondees are reading eight or ten books at >once. I just cant handle that many at once. At the moment I am reading D.G. >Jones's new book of poems entitled _Grounding Sight_ and Beckett's >_Eleuthera_. > > > > >George Bowering. > > > >fax: 1-604-266-9000 > >------------------------------ > >End of POETICS Digest - 30 Dec 1999 to 31 Dec 1999 (#2000-1) >************************************************************ Walter K. Lew 11811 Venice Blvd. #138 Los Angeles, CA 90066 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 19:36:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerrold Shiroma Subject: readings for 2000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris Michael Palmer, The Danish Notebook Jean-Luc Godard, Interviews Peter Greenaway, Screenplay for The Pillow Book Paul Klee, Diaries Andre Breton, Break of Day Helene Cixous, Rootprints Olivier Cadiot, Art Poetic Adonis, Introduction to Arab poetics Paul Blackburn, Proensa ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 22:23:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: easy readin' and listenin' MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Pinker, Learnability and Cognition Pinker, How the Mind Works Pinker, Words and Rules Bernstein, My Way Roberto Tejada, Translations of Lezama Lima (ms.) Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh Maldive, United Colors of Panetone (ms.) Laver, Principles of Phonetics Ladefoged and Madieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages The Oulipo Compendium Vallejo, Obra Completa Vidal, Lincoln Carlin, Brain Droppings The Onion's Our Dumb Century The Black Book of Communism on the gramophone Elcides Ochoa La casa de la trova Cesaria Evora Trova santiaguera Asi bailaba Cuba, Vol. III with Barbarito Diez Berio Messaien Crumb Julio Jaramillo Festival del Vallenato Kiri te Kanawa sings Irving Berlin ------------------------------------------ Jorge Guitart ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 15:54:00 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damion Searls Subject: Re: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" What a great thread! Thanks Arielle. My list: Thomas Pynchon, MASON & DIXON (just finished it) Martin Walser, BRANDUNG Vanessa Bell, SKETCHES IN PEN AND INK (her (auto)biographical writings) David Brewer, IMAGINATIVE EXPANSION AND THE AFTERLIVES OF TEXTS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN (for my dissertation) Charles Brockden Brown, THE HISTORY OF THE CARRILS (ditto) Joanne Kyger, JUST SPACE Shu-mei Shih, THE LURE OF THE MODERN: WRITING MODERNISM IN SEMICOLONIAL CHINA, 1917-1937 (which I'm copyediting) Books which I've started more or less recently, put down, and will eventually pick up again and finish, but which it would be cheating to say I'm currently reading: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, EMPATHY Trane DeVore, SERIES/MNEMONIC MUNGO VS. RANGER, Issues # 1 and 3 THE GERM, Issue # 3 Dubravka Ugresic, THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, trans. with additional remarks by Charles Brockden Brown, A VIEW OF THE SOIL AND CLIMATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA H.D. Thoreau, JOURNALS (grazing through all 14 vols.) Joseph Moxon, MECHANICK EXERCISES, VOL. 2 Thomas Bernhard, CONCRETE Roland Barthes, SADE/FOURIER/LOYOLA And I'm jealous of all the people with Walter Benjamin's ARCADES PROJECT on their lists. Happy new year, Damion Searls ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 18:33:50 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon (recent cloth remainder) Some of These Days, Poems by Philip Whalen (Desert Rose Press). This is an extraordinary printing job (hand-set, letter press, a Curtis paper as tender as flesh) by Clifford Burke, interpreting Whalen's work in his ironic regal, 18th century 'love the language' best. Exhibits Man Ray photographs including the "Woman with the Glass Tears" (which, by the way, for those who want to know, is the first million dollar photograph). Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., SF. A total knock-out room of about 12 photographs. Carleton Watkins at the Met; Daido Mauriyama at the Japan Society and the Met (NY) Degas to Picasso (a mis-named show) of the relationship of photographs to primarily symbolist painters and sculptors. A smart, well thought out show with very fine pix and pieces at SFMOMA. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 18:36:13 +0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong Subject: End of Century Reading Material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Here it is from Chiang Rai: The material at my bedside: Paris Match: Aout, Septembre, Octobre, Novembre Without Stopping, Paul Bowles The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz Gunter Grass, Nobel lecture Tragedy in Paradise, Charles Weldon Traite de Metrique Khmere, Ieng Say Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism, Johansson The Jerusalem Bible Millennium, Fernandez-Armesto Poems for the Millennium Vols 1 and 2 Near the stereo: Gregorian Chants, Christmas Songs, Nana Moskouri, Maria Callas, Jobim sings Jobim, and innumerable cassetteless containers, containerless cassettes belonging to my daughter. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 11:52:35 -0500 Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: South Korean poetry In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20000102114657.007c22b0@pop3.mailbc.ulg.ac.be> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Just to add my voice to Michel's: The Korean poetry issue of po&sie is indeed excellent, and especially useful in that while starting with the great modernist figure, Yi Sang (Who is also in vil I of JR & my MILLENNIUM antho) as it features a number of younger Korean poets based in Paris & thus not well-known in the Anglo-American axis, such as Woo Jong N, Kim Chang-kyum and Kim Hee-kyoon. Po&sie generally is an excellent mag and anyone having some or enough French should check it out. Deguy is a superb editor, poet and essayist. Just before typing my list of end-of-century readings I had finished his lastest, so didn't include it, but here it is: Michel Deguy, _ L'Energie du désespoir_. Pierre ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those 6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim Email: joris@csc.albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu]On Behalf Of Michel Delville > Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2000 5:47 AM > To: POETICS@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu > Subject: Re: South Korean poetry > > > Dear listers: > > The enquiries about the anthology of contemporary South > Korean poetry that > featured in my list of end of the century readings have been so > overwhelming that I feel the following information should be > made available > to you all: > > PO&SIE is a French magazine edited by Michel Deguy and published three > times a year. Its list of "international correspondents" > include listmember > Pierre Joris, Clayton Eshelman and Christopher Middleton. The > South Korean > issue came out this Summer and was guest-edited by Claude > Mouchard and Kim > Hee-kyoon. Full details of how to subscribe to the magazine > are available > from: > > Editions Belin > 8, rue Férou > 75278 Paris Cedex 06 > > They also have a web site at: http://www.editions-belin.fr > > Hope this is useful--all the very best to you all, > > Michel > > > > --------------------------- > Michel Delville > English and American literature > University of Liège > 3 Place Cockerill > 4000 Liège > BELGIUM > fax: ++ 32 4 366 57 21 > e-mail: mdelville@ulg.ac.be > > You may want to visit L3's website at the following address: > http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/uer/d-german/L3 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 09:15:25 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: End of Century Reading Material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Laura Riding, "Progress of Stories" Geri Halliwell, "If Only" this memoir by the former Spice Girl is much better than I thought it would be James Schuyler, "Selected Art Writing," ed Simon Pettet, I got this for my birthday and so far it's very disappointing, a crack in the idol for me, I hadn't realized how awful a book could be when the writer has nothing to say & yet curiously fascinating because it just goes on and on and on Russell Ferguson, "In Memory of my Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art" this is the catalogue from the LA MOCA show which I missed, another birthday present, beautifully done and Ferguson's essay not bad for a kind of primer into O'Hara, tho' very basic of course, I got the feeling he wrote it for people who don't know much or care much for poetry "Mary Butts Scenes from a Life," this long, long biography of Butts seems to be taken most directly from Butts' unpublished diary so we hear every little thing about her that the diary knows . . . Unquestionably strengthens my take on Butts' novels and poetry (at the same time you think, what an awful mother and b, if you or I smoked 20 pipes of opium a day we'd be awful parents too) Result, for my birthday I wanted maybe 4 or 5 pipes of opium, alas, did not get "Teller of Tales the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle" finally a biography that does make sense of Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism and the paranormal, I enjoyed this one a lot "Period," Dennis Cooper's fifth novel, this one comes out in the stores in March but Dodie is reviewing it and I'm reading it over her shoulder, very challenging and difficult "Dusty in London," the so called "lost" recordings of Dusty Springfield now available on CD from Rhino records, what can I say, she is so strong and affecting, yes, another birthday present On another note, we sent out 135 copies of the "Atlanta" issue of our zine, "Mirage #4/Period[ical]," after the flood of e-mail requesting them, to the various characters on this list, and to date eight of you have written back saying you've received it. This reminds me of the way Lear mistakenly felt Cordelia ungrateful, and how, before, I always faulted Shakespeare for making him, Lear, so quick to jump to sorry conclusions. In any case, you wonderful eight people have warmed my heart turning it into a beacon of light and hope for the year 2000. You know who you are! -- Kevin Killian ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 11:59:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher M Devenney Subject: Re: Millennial readings In-Reply-To: <000401bf549a$02dd0840$ae871918@nycap.rr.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Blanchot, L'attente l'oubli; L'entretien infini L.Davis, Almost No Memory Ashbery, A Wave Laura Kasischke, Suspicious River Brosard, Mauve Desert Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin Duras, Writing Pinera, Cold Tales Beckett, Teleplays Chris Devenney "Lecturer" Villanova Univ. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 10:08:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: dan raphael Subject: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Valley Mike Dailey The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship Murray Bookchin Simulcast Yearning John Noto The Buddhist 3rd class junkmail oracle d a levy The Skull Mantra Eliot Pattison ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 17:25:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: brandon and christina Subject: books and music for MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit the past two days and before then some then reading [and almost done with] TALKIN' WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL edited by steve fagin [a discussion ETC of the videos of fagin] HOW WE BECAME POSTHUMAN n. katherine hayles OF TWO MINDS: HYPERTEXT PEDAGOGY and POETICS michael joyce BODY ART: PERFORMING THE SUBJECT amelia jones DHALGREN samuel r. delany [ a third time on this ] PURPLE, newspaper catalogues, VIDEOMAKER [ack], BUST [partner's copies], ARTFORUM, olson now and again, a strangely worded letter from DMV, old notes, etc... sounding partial le tigre LE TIGRE tony conrad EARLY MINIMALISM sun ra THE SINGLES bugskull SNAKLAND rainer maria ATLANTIC pedro the lion THE ONLY REASON I FEEL SECURE and watching HAPPY TOGEHTER, wong kar-wai A TASTE OF CHERRY, abbas kiarostami MAGNOLIA, pt anderson portions of a work in progress -brandon ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 12:35:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: Bowering's reading habits//my reading list Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable [note: a partially completed version of this post left here unexpectedly during a senior moment I was enjoying fifteen minutes since....my apologies] Bowering tells us that he cant read more than two books at once. I believe it, because he is like that in other important ways. Those of us attending the Moosehead Conference in the previous century, will recall that GB never left the side of Rachel Loden and Maria Damon, day or night, despite the blandishments of others present. To my view of these matters, this near-singlemindedness does him credit, and I say this mindful of the sneers of such as Jay Gutz, Sasha Mudd and Dwight Cork, idiots fumbling at the bride's door. ///////// The only reason my list of currently being-read-by-me books is a bit longer than GB's, is that I forget where I have laid a book down, so begin to read another until I can find the first. I am not proud of this procedure. I simply report it. Also, some of my reading is intense, some, desultory. Here's a quick & partial list: =46UTURES, by Ken Edwards.....brilliantly conceived novel that holds the fee= t of high finance to the fire of human idiosyncracy. PETRARCH'S LYRIC POEMS,, ed.Durling....Of use in my current series of poems. THE POEM ITSELF, ed. Burnshaw. ... : this book is endemic to my reading, as from time to time I like to tweak the translationese out of this considerable range of Modernist poems. The extensive prose trots make this easier. AUTOCRATS & EGOTISTS, by George Bowering. . . .Not, as some contend, a history of the friendship between GB and myself, but of each & every Prime Minister of Canada. A hard book to put down, & an easy one to find again, as it occupies a quarter-acre, and has a suitably garish cover. { HOTEL IMPERIUM, by Rachel Loden.....Have been re-reading ever since I read i= t. VALGA KRUSA, the novel by Charles Potts....My umpteenth time thru this neglected classic of street- and lounge-poets, revolutionaries, & deadbeats of the Bay Area 60's...a must if you want a fuller picture of those times, espec as seed-bed for the poetry of the succeeding decades. CALL ME LUCKY, by Bing Crosby, or possibly "by" B.C......the official autobio, loosely strung collection of anecdotes, some more amusing than others, with the odd historical jewel. A re-read, as I recently turned up this classic paperback---I owned one just like it decades since, that then vanished--in a bookcase stuffed with unsorted such items in a local bookstore, while hunting for Ellery Queens for my father-in-law's xmas present. THE GLORIOUS POOL,by Thorne Smith. A glad addition to my collection by this author, whose risqu=E9 novels entertained my father (& thus my subteen self, surreptitiously) & continue to divert me, tjhough as much today for the elegant sentences & unremitting word-play, as for the erotic charge, which, after all that's interposed itself, seems mild indeed. However, the fantasy, a pool to restore youth to any still headstrong enough to dive in, may tickle a reader's fancy even today : =46OR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO, by Slavoj Zizek......Just why you enjoy th= e buttons on your couch, as unfolded by this Slovenian Lacanian. (Or perhaps the couch-buttons crop up in this author's EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT LACAN BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK HITCHCOCK, or his book THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY. For those of us who hold that a joke is consciousness [though not vice versa], Zizek is an alluring writer. I first found him on the bookshelf of Clint Burnham, whose THE JAMESONIAN UNCONSCIOUS i started to read during my recent stay at Bowering Manor, but was unable to finish as the Master of the Manor conducted one of his random suitcase searches when I was nearly out the door. I must order it from SPD. ____________ During my stay there, one evening I watched, in company with GB and his daughter Thea, a Danish movie that contained the following joke : Q : Why does an Irishman as he is going to bed place on his bedside table a full glass of water, and an empty glass? A : Because, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he might be thirsty, or he might not. db ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 14:43:37 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: <001c01bf554c$59b6f060$dcd063d8@orion> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" reading around a lot of late, among which: **the premier issue of _wicked_, a new horror zine (interesting in that they list the "greatest" 50 horror films of all time---not a bad list) **as others of you, dipping into benjamin's _arcades_ (an xmas gift, lucky me!) **most recent _american book review_ **most recent _the temple_ **most recent _saveur_ **laura wright's _hide: what's difficult_ (nice work, hi laura!) **diane di prima's _selected poems: 1956-1976_ **patrick pritchett's _reside_ (nice work, hi patrick!) **andrew schelling & anne waldman's _montane_ **karen kelley's _venus return_ (nice work, hi karen!) **rachel loden's _the last campaign_ (this one keeps bringing me back, hi rachel!) **aldon nielsen's _vext_ (again, i keep coming back to this one, hi aldon!) **last coupla _skanky possum_'s **meridel le sueur's _salute to spring_ (the first story, "corn village," is a knock-out) **_poetics@_ (really enjoying joel k's compilation, hi joel!) nice to be reading the work of so many around here!... cd-wise, the new santana, and the best of bond (no shit)... and this time of year is when i pull out my old beatles discs for my trip down memory lane... happy naught-ies! (which latter i just picked up from a pal in mountain view...) best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 16:32:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Amy King Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit * Dr. Axelrod, What Everyone Should Know About the 20th Century * Norikomaru wrapper * Bell Atlantic "Account Summary" * Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry * Dorothy Parker, Complete Short Stories * Eye - The International Review of Graphic Design Magazine * Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around * Bill Vanderford, Secrets of Fishing Lake Lanier (You should check this out R.P.!) * Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man * Fujitsu Lifebook, Recycling Bin * Robert Frank, Black White and Things ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 12:40:25 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Catherine Daly Organization: e.g. Subject: some announcements MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I am teaching a practicum on love poetry at UCLA Extension six weeks beginning January 11, ending February 15 (with a recap, naturally). It is an alternate approach than the currently-popular "Artist's Way" sort of thing. For example, we'll be talking about Bellen, Ronk and Genji, also Joris, Carson, and ideas of eros, in addition to Petrarch, Dante, et.al. For more information (registration open until January 11, the first class): http://www.ucla.unex.edu/writers http://www.unex.ucla.edu/catalog/Catalog2.cfm?course_title=Love%20Poetry%3A%20Reading%20the%20Classics%20and%20Writing%20Your%20Own&course_number=X%20423%2E92&quarter=Winter&year=2000&heading_code=N00329&dept=Poetry Jerrold Shiroma has also included an e-chapbook of mine in the derive section of Duration Press. called "The Last Canto", it's my translation of the last canto of the Divine Comedy and some fun with nouns. PDF to come! http://www.durationpress.com/derive/daly/toc.html I hear that Bruce Andrews is doing the Inferno; I could be very interested in doing a (probably electronic) anthology of the Paradiso with an author and tranlation technique per canto. In an unlikely result, I am "January Fresh Poet" at http://www.freshpoetry.com. Regards. Catherine Daly cadaly@pacbell.net ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 14:40:47 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "P.Standard Schaefer" Subject: Ribot/Readings for 2000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit May I second the Godard Interviews? I'd also like to add the new Italian anthology that came out from Sun & Moon which I don't think has gotten nearly enough attention. And Scalapino's New Time, though I know it has been mentioned. By the way, Ribot #7, the last Ribot, is available from me, Standard Schaefer, 1307 Stratford Ave., So. Pasadena, CA 91030 (please note: this is a new address). You may write checks to Ribot. This year's theme was music. The issue costs $10 dollars and includes the work of George Albon, Douglas Messerli, Carl Martin, Nick Piombino, Jacques Debrot, John Lowther, Ray DiPalma, Raymond Pettibon, Diane Ward, Leslie Scalapino, Aaron Shurin, Timothy Liu, Avery Burns, Devin Johnston, Brian Lucas, Sheila Murphy, Norma Cole, Catherine Wagner and many many others. As I said, Ribot is through. The magazine that I edit, Rhizome, is likely to do only one more issue. However, a new composite international journal is in the works to be edited by Paul Vangelisti and myself. Best, Standard ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 05:06:42 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Readers Organization: Re*Map Magazine Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit my books: Hamilton Stark: by Russell Banks (just finished: Rule of the Bone) same author Danish Notebook: Michael Palmer Poetry of Wallace Stevens: collected: American Lib. Our Town: Thorton Wilder Too many E-Mails--- and Whitman( as bible) (text) sorry) T.Baron ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 05:04:35 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Readers Organization: Re*Map Magazine Subject: Re: query re philosophy books MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit charles alexander wrote: > > For those of you who may be teaching philosophy, or poetry & philosophy, or > others -- > > My father-in-law has expressed a recent interest in reading philosophy, > perhaps partly influenced by his advancing age and brushes with health > problems in the last year. He has not read much philosophy or literature in > the past, but is an intelligent reader. He also has a birthday coming up. > I would always read B. Russell. History of Western Phil. ---Todd B. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 11:51:49 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: derek beaulieu Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit i know i mostly lurk, but i'd add: bpNichol's HOLIDAY mccaffery & rasula's anthology and 2nd the vote for levy ciao derek ----- Original Message ----- From: dan raphael To: Sent: January 2, 2000 11:08 AM Subject: end of century reading material > Valley Mike Dailey > The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship Murray > Bookchin > Simulcast Yearning John Noto > The Buddhist 3rd class junkmail oracle d a levy > The Skull Mantra Eliot Pattison ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 23:21:30 +0000 Reply-To: toddbaron@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Todd Baron /*/ ReMap Readers Organization: Re*Map Magazine Subject: Re: End of Century Reading Material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit dear kevin: add one to eight and you get nine. wonderful gifts/yours/the issues/etc. some problem with e-mailing you from here so pardon this general thot. love Todd B. ps: read the new york sunday today times re: dusty . ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:28:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: easy readin' In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Pinker, Learnability and Cognition >Pinker, How the Mind Works >Pinker, Words and Rules >Bernstein, My Way >Roberto Tejada, Translations of Lezama Lima (ms.) >Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh >Maldive, United Colors of Panetone (ms.) >Laver, Principles of Phonetics >Ladefoged and Madieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages >The Oulipo Compendium >Vallejo, Obra Completa >Vidal, Lincoln >Carlin, Brain Droppings >The Onion's Our Dumb Century >The Black Book of Communism There's what I mean: there are 15 books, some of them long or dense. Say you manage to get five hours of reading time a day (and some of it is taken up by newspapers and magazines)--you wont get more than about 20 minutes per book. In my house that is called browsing. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:28:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" See? Now, that is more honest. The correspondent calims in his/her message title that it might take one year to read these books. > >Thomas Pynchon, MASON & DIXON (just finished it) >Martin Walser, BRANDUNG >Vanessa Bell, SKETCHES IN PEN AND INK (her (auto)biographical writings) >David Brewer, IMAGINATIVE EXPANSION AND THE AFTERLIVES OF TEXTS IN >EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN (for my dissertation) >Charles Brockden Brown, THE HISTORY OF THE CARRILS (ditto) >Joanne Kyger, JUST SPACE >Shu-mei Shih, THE LURE OF THE MODERN: WRITING MODERNISM IN SEMICOLONIAL >CHINA, 1917-1937 (which I'm copyediting) > >Books which I've started more or less recently, put down, and will >eventually pick up again and finish, but which it would be cheating to say >I'm currently reading: > >Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, EMPATHY >Trane DeVore, SERIES/MNEMONIC >MUNGO VS. RANGER, Issues # 1 and 3 >THE GERM, Issue # 3 >Dubravka Ugresic, THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER >Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, trans. with additional >remarks by Charles Brockden Brown, A VIEW OF THE SOIL AND CLIMATE OF THE >UNITED STATES OF AMERICA >H.D. Thoreau, JOURNALS (grazing through all 14 vols.) >Joseph Moxon, MECHANICK EXERCISES, VOL. 2 >Thomas Bernhard, CONCRETE >Roland Barthes, SADE/FOURIER/LOYOLA > >And I'm jealous of all the people with Walter Benjamin's ARCADES PROJECT on >their lists. > >Happy new year, >Damion Searls George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:36:58 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerrold Shiroma Subject: Re: Ribot/Readings for 2000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Also would like to add my praise for the Sun & Moon Italian anthology...as well as the recent anthology of Chinese poetry (ed. Wang Ping)... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 14:14:10 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: puns MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I can find plenty of sites with puns on them on the net but nothing on the theory of puns & punning -- any suggestions will be gracefully received best Tony Green ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 21:31:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Charlie Morrow / W'00'F Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [reformatted to remove html coding] Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2000 20:53:04 -0500 From: Charlie Morrow Subject: W'00'F 1/1/00 ---------------a millenium wags it's tail / / 0 0 1 1 -- Charlie Morrow =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Charles Morrow Associates, Inc. phone: +1-212-595-8300 fax: +1-212-595-6566 www.cmorrow.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 21:26:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Clay Subject: Kimberly Lyons: Abracadabra Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Granary Books and Poetry City invite all to a publication party for Kimberly Lyons and her new book Abracadabra. This is Kim's long-awaited and much-anticipated first substantial (100 pp) collection following a half-dozen or so small pamphlets which have appeared sporadically over the past 15 years. For those who can't make the party more details about the book can be found on the Granary website; SPD will distribute. 7 PM at Teachers and Writers Collaborative 5 Union Square West, 7th Floor, NYC Thursday January 6, 00 With best wishes, Steve Clay Granary Books, Inc. 307 Seventh Avenue, Suite 1401 New York, NY 10001 http://www.granarybooks.com tel: (212) 337-9979 fax: (212) 337-9774 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 22:47:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: easy readin' In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I blame my disorderly reading for not having ever gotten anyplace, but it is too late to do anything about it. jg On Sun, 2 Jan 2000, George Bowering wrote: > >Pinker, Learnability and Cognition > >Pinker, How the Mind Works > >Pinker, Words and Rules > >Bernstein, My Way > >Roberto Tejada, Translations of Lezama Lima (ms.) > >Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh > >Maldive, United Colors of Panetone (ms.) > >Laver, Principles of Phonetics > >Ladefoged and Madieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages > >The Oulipo Compendium > >Vallejo, Obra Completa > >Vidal, Lincoln > >Carlin, Brain Droppings > >The Onion's Our Dumb Century > >The Black Book of Communism > > > There's what I mean: there are 15 books, some of them long or dense. Say > you manage to get five hours of reading time a day (and some of it is taken > up by newspapers and magazines)--you wont get more than about 20 minutes > per book. In my house that is called browsing. > > > > > George Bowering. > > > > fax: 1-604-266-9000 > ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 22:51:20 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ramez Qureshi Subject: Turn of the century reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I usually lurk but: _The New Italian Poetry_, Lawrence Smith _The Promised Land: Italian Poetry after 1975_, Luigi Ballerini et.al., Sun and Moon fabulous as usual _Swarm_, Jorie Graham, I know, not the cutting edge _The Palm at the End of the Mind_, Stevens, I'll never tire of him _The Arcades Project_, Benjamin, Can't wait to dive in _Kant after Duchamp_, Thierry de Duve, the second-person first chapter's a blast _The Romantic Image_, Kermode, some old-fashioned crit. _Rocks on a Platter_, Barbara Guest Listening John Coltrane, _Ascension_ & _Om_ over & over & over ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 01:40:24 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Fewell Subject: Evolution of Language MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Listmembers I was contemplating the other day this thought: when did the word "baby" develop into a sexual one? When did mates start using it for terms of endeatment because it seems to be rotting with connotations of pedophilia. Aaron Keith ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 23:10:00 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: John Ashbery poem in RealAudio Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" All y'all purists should note that it's NOT read by Ashbery , though. Alvin Lucier's setting of John Ashberry's Theme, for four readers heard through unusual resonating chambers, can be heard as part of this week's Mappings, my online new music program, available all week at . When Ashbery provided the text to Lucier for this composition the poem had not been published. I'm not sure if it has subsequently been printed elsewhere. In the archive, last week's feature on instrument builder/composer Harry Partch. Bests, Herb -- Herb Levy NEW MAILING ADDRESS: P O Box 9369 Forth Wort, TX 76147 NEW PHONE: 817 377-2983 same old e-mail: herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 22:51:48 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Zephrus Image - Exhibit Opening MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Zephyrus Image (aka Hermes Free Press & Spring Creek Typesetting) 1970 - 1982 was one of the San Francisco's most active pre-Regan era Presses. The late Holbrook Teter (on linotype) and Michael Myers (crow quill pen and linocuts) executed extraordinary political, literary and ecological broadsides, pamphlets and books. Variously elegant, exquisite, funky they were fearless in their use and play with typefaces, found materials, curious paper stocks combined with an in-the- face intelligence and satirical wit. Corollary influences of the time included Coach House Press and Impulse magazine in Toronto and Flux. Most items were passed out for free at readings, bars and public events. Project collaborators and writers included William Wiley, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Tom Raworth, Lucia Berlin, Stephen Vincent, Bill Barich among several others. Yours truly has been working with this extraordinary archive for the past couple of years. 871 Fine Arts (the bookstore and gallery) at 49 Geary St. (Fifth floor) in San Francisco opens the Zephyrus Image show (graphix and books) this Thursday evening from 5:30 to 7:30. The exhibit will be up until April. You is all invited. By the way, on first Thursdays most San Francisco galleries and the museums are open for the evening. After Zephyrus, go down to the fourth floor and check out Fraenkel Gallery's gathering of incredible Man Rays plus lots of other goodies in all the other galleries in the same building. Hope to see you there, Cheers, Stephen Vincent ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 23:39:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Toni Simon and Nick Piombino Subject: end of the century reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" And the lists go on ( a selection from my unwieldy stacks): From Krupskaya Press: Dan Farrell: Last Instance Elizabeth Fodaski: Fracas P. Inman: At. least. From:Green Integer Press: Regis Bonvicino: Sky-Eclipse: Selected poems Herve Guibert: Ghost Image Christopher Middleton: In The Mirror of The Eighth King Ron Silliman: R (Drogue) Rosemarie Waldrop: Split Infinities (Singing Horse) George Bowering, Angela Bowering,Michael Matthews and David Bromige: Piccolo Mondo (Coach House Books) Ray Dipalma: Letters (Littoral Books) Jean Day: The Literal World (Atelos) Barrett Watten: Bad History (Atelos) Rod Smith: Protective Immediacy (Roof) Selected Poems of Renee Char (edited by Maryann Caws and Tina Jolas:New Directions) Joan Retallack: Musicage: Cage Muses (Wesleyan) Charles Bernstein and Richard Tuttle: Reading red (Walter Konig: Koln) Elaine Equi: Voice-Over (Coffee House) Cydney Chadwick: Persistent Disturbances (Texture Press) Douglas Messerli: After (Sun and Moon) Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: Four Year Old Girl (Kelsey Street) Michael Gottlieb: Gorgeous Plunge (Roof) Aerial 9: The Bruce Andrews Issue Walter Benjamin: Arcades Project (Harvard) Adalaide Morris (editor):Sound States (with Accompanying CD):(University of North Carolina) Charles Bernstein (editor): Close Listening (Oxford) 20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig Cologne (Taschen) Anselm Jappe: Guy Debord (University of California) Christopher Reiner: Ogling Anchor (Avec) Plus oldies: Phillip K. Dick The Crack In Space (Ace Books) The Robert Sheckley Omnibus (Penguin) Colin Wilson: Poetry and Mysticism (City Lights) David Antin: what it means to be avant-garde Thomas Bynam: Hecatomb (Drogue) Dick Higgins: Pattern Poetry (SUNY) Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel: The Ego Ideal (WW Norton) Serge Gavronsky: The German Friend (Sun) John Gross, editor: Aphorisms (Oxford) -Nick Piombino ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 09:09:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: too much anatomy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - too much anatomy skin skin, no jump-cuts, skipping nothing, guitar tuned so low microtones are patches of skin skins are invisible. in this world we don't need skins, so we need clothes breathing down your neck. i can see your skin through anything you place thank you, i know you have invisible skins. i know you are saying these each other. i can't see your skin at all, and you can't see mine, and we tissue bone above mausoleum-mouths, skulls riding into roof-hole skies, boned bent there's a bone in my foot against your splintered bones against your splintered bones calls forth dissolutions last suck, ingest- name burned in me, my tongue ripped against your splintered bones is, dead name burned in me, my tongue ripped against your splintered bones? muscle hair shakuhachi and voice combined, azure and me on the floor, on the chair, as packets sputter and die, i'm slamming my arms into the chair, the pain Nikuko the famous Russian ballerina was near the wooden chair where Doc- his side), more or less erect and spent, _as if by virtue of a hair._ And vagina penis eye signal corrections, eye always on the waveform monitor and vectorscope I will be what I will be, or that which I will be, eheeyeh ASHER aheeyeh, tion of the continuous I / eye? It is death that detours back into the i rip your cock, your eyes, your mind, writing beneath the .concealment Nikuko, said Doctor Leopold Konninger, I cannot take my eyes off your dyes, you'd have eyes and if ocular separated from troff, you'd have off his eyes off her legs beneath her pink tutu, which rose and fell with eve- head also raised, including the eyebrows. Accompany this with a slight eyes half-opened. Now speak to her slowly and say, "We don't want your mouth for queen, mouth, wheel, superimposed over disheveled azure mouthing aah, glazed look, tripods everywhere, my mouth's long aaah in background, this above mausoleum-mouths, skulls riding into roof-hole skies, boned bent skull-heart thinking twisted moon against words mouth-lined, from steamed so that you can see us. i say these things all the time with mouths you cock pain, contusions on our skulls, cock lacerations, labial woundings churn violent cock, violent cunt, it's the burn-marks as bodies splinter, grope, i rip your cock, your eyes, your mind, writing beneath the .concealment teeth, your breasts shuddering in pain, contusions on our skulls, cock this cunt and cock shaft, torn and bleeding lent cock, violent cunt, it's the burn-marks as bodies splinter, grope, abia surrounding my cock, the cock, at the very interval of the cunt violent cock, violent cunt, it's the burn-marks as bodies splinter, grope, this cunt and cock shaft, torn and bleeding lent cock, violent cunt, it's the burn-marks as bodies splinter, grope, cunt, to the labial portal backoning my hand my hands, want that freedom of pure touch ahead of visual feedback, here i studio imagery, as well as more musical recording. i worry that my hands haven't been able to shake it, the v5000 camcorder was able to handle the rol is the slider or knob, the hand twisting about the boards, arm moving the tape in my hand, the noise on the vhs vcr, in problematic opposition the final crash. On the other hand, like Star Trek beaming, they may re- Raise both hands, palm upwards, hunching the shoulders inward, the fore- smile. Point across the space with the index finger of the right hand at body forward, holding your hands concave/convex (the left hand arched away from the body, the right hand arched towards the body), draw them across your arms away from your body, with your hands horizontal, mostly flat pile. Sweep outward with your right hand, indicating negation. Now you intently at you, but you must attract her attention to your hands. The indexfinger of your right hand should then touch her chest, approaching outward. Now move your hand slowly horizontal, and look intently at her foot footage from the tr81, the jittering just added to the dance, used noise there's a bone in my foot body pixelless image, the image-body as flux or flow, it fascinates, fastens of the body against imminent desire, imminent against immanent, clutching no wings,' one always inheres in the body, its presence-presentiment, it's i attach serrated edges to my body! my body slows into an easy descent on referent, in relation to body and pain, this bursts through desire, body and sex, writing beneath the .concealment of the name, my body bandaged, flesh of the name, my body bandaged, flesh seared to the core from your intense opposing thumbs, relatively upright posture (body swiveling) - you've got might well predate spoken language. Look at the way the body moves! What's lded and circles your body. Your your body. I open myself to you. pirouettes; I am obsessed with your body; I dream of you all the time. If If being separated from threnody, you'd have body. If sighing separated body forward, holding your hands concave/convex (the left hand arched away from the body, the right hand arched towards the body), draw them across your arms away from your body, with your hands horizontal, mostly flat __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 22:22:41 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Thompson Subject: Re: puns MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 1/2/00 9:35:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, tgreen@CLEAR.NET.NZ writes: > can find plenty of sites with puns on them on the net > but nothing on the theory of puns & punning -- any suggestions > will be gracefully received > > best Tony Green Well, if you are willing to get off the net and read some old-fashioned books, I would recommend Walter Redfern's *Puns* [1984] and a collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler, *On Puns:The Foundation of Letters* [1988]. Both published by Blackwell [I don't know why]. These are both good. If there is newer literature on puns I wouldn't mind learning of it. I've been out of touch. George Thompson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 08:08:15 -0800 Reply-To: booglit@excite.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kirschenbaum Subject: Beginning of the century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Got to go along with George Bowering on this, I'm a one book kinda guy. Right now it's Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein, though I'm always reading manuscripts of my friends poesy, with new stuff from Ike Kim currently in the hopper. I used to keep a stack of poetry books on my nightstand, like 10 or so, and randomly flip to a page and read one poem in each, crossing out the title, before heading to bed. Think I'll supplement my Sportscenter habit and end my nights this way once more. as ever, David _______________________________________________________ Visit Excite Shopping at http://shopping.excite.com The fastest way to find your Holiday gift this season ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 10:06:48 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: end of the century reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Beckett. Ill seen ill said. (once again) B. Guest. Rocks on a platter. Contemporary Spanish poets: Isla Correyero, Concha Garcia, etc... Preferred method of reading: find a poem to memorize. Memorize it. Forget it. Come back to it a few years later. Memorize it again. Forget it again. Jonathan Mayhew jmayhew@ukans.edu _____________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 10:27:25 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 Comments: To: archambeau@lfc.edu In-Reply-To: <386E2CDE.1B11@lfc.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" hi robt --i adore masha z, but have noticed that your publication is a bit thin on the girl end of things otherwise. just a gentle friendly nudge...md At 4:35 PM +0000 1/1/00, Robert Archambeau wrote: >Announcing... > > S a m i z d a t # 4 > >Featuring... > > John Peck: Modernist After Modernism > (new poems and an essay on his work by Brooke Bergan) > >And... > > Four British Poets > (David Kinloch, David Kennedy, Mark Robinson & Peter Robinson) > > >Plus poems by... > > Charles Cantalupo > Kymberly Taylor > Orlando Ricardo Menes > Stephen Collis > >Reviews of... > > Tod Thilleman (by Henry Gould) > Charles Bernstein's Close Listening (by Dubravka Djuric) > >And the word from... > > Russia (Masha Zavialova) > Ireland (Billy Mills) > > >How, you ask, can I get my hands on this marvel? > > send $3.50 (or $10 for a three-issue subscription) > to Robert Archambeau > 9 Campus Circle > Lake Forest, IL 60045 > > (checks made out to R. Archambeau) > > >A limited number of FREE issues are set aside for distribution to >readers of the poetics list residing in the USA (sorry, foreign mailings >are expensive). If you would like a copy, and have not received a free >issue before, send e-mail to archambeau@lfc.edu with the heading >"Samizdat/free offer." > >Happy new year, > >Robert Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 10:52:30 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: puns In-Reply-To: <0.4615ff69.25a17001@cs.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" just about anything by freud is good on puns. At 10:22 PM -0500 1/2/00, George Thompson wrote: >In a message dated 1/2/00 9:35:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, >tgreen@CLEAR.NET.NZ writes: > >> can find plenty of sites with puns on them on the net >> but nothing on the theory of puns & punning -- any suggestions >> will be gracefully received >> >> best Tony Green > >Well, if you are willing to get off the net and read some old-fashioned >books, I would recommend Walter Redfern's *Puns* [1984] and a collection of >essays edited by Jonathan Culler, *On Puns:The Foundation of Letters* [1988]. > Both published by Blackwell [I don't know why]. > >These are both good. > >If there is newer literature on puns I wouldn't mind learning of it. I've >been out of touch. > >George Thompson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 08:51:28 -0800 Reply-To: booglit@excite.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kirschenbaum Subject: Beginning of the century listening material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit oh yeah, the soundtrack: Elliott Smith New year's eve live recording, knitting factory either/or XO untitled Quasi Featuring "Birds" Field Studies The Gits Enter: The Conquering Chicken All Allroy's Revenge Kenny Kirkland Untitled Herbie Hancock Maiden Voyage Weather Report Night Passage Gillespie/Getz Diz and Getz Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out John Coltrane Blue Train as ever, David _______________________________________________________ Visit Excite Shopping at http://shopping.excite.com The fastest way to find your Holiday gift this season ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 13:28:32 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: millenia books MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit right before Books Stuart Perkoff: Collected Poems Fleda Brown Jackson: The Devil's Child----These two seem heavily ignored and both are fine reads, the seriality of Perkoff & Jackson both do it for me. The Jackson book is very unique from her earlier work. Errol Miller: The Drifter takes another look Rachel Loden: Hotel Imperium Maj Ragain: One sucker burleyfried Haniel Long: The Grist Mill Blevins: Collected later poems of Phillip Marlowe Museum: Santa Fe @ O'keefe: Steglitz circle, Hartley, O'Keefe, Marin Music: Naked Raygun: Understand & all others reissued by 1/4 stick Suicaine Gratifaction: Westerburg Ground Rule Double: ultimate baseball comp v/a :Trilogy: Dirt Bike Annie: Hit the rock! (anybody who can write infectious pop songs about smoking crack deserves some kind of notice) Sleater Kinney: Hot Rock Hellacopters: Grande Rock Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 09:55:16 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damion Searls Subject: memorizing for the next century (was Re: end of the century reading) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Preferred method of reading: find a poem to memorize. Memorize it. Forget >it. Come back to it a few years later. Memorize it again. Forget it again. I've heard (and found it true so far) that if you reinforce what you memorize just enough so that it's still in yer head at 3 checkpoints -- 3 days, 3 weeks, and 3 months after the initial memorization -- then it's there for life. I still have stuff in my head from back in college ("Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless / As silent lightning leaves the starless night!" -- Shelley), like occasionally annoying houseguests who are still, in the end, better than being alone. ("That is what we love about art / It seems to prefer us and stays" --O'Hara) Unless you like rememorizing. Damion Searls ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 12:29:26 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick" Subject: Re: end of the century reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Great lists from everyone. Here's my own, scattershot & fragmented: Levinas - Alterity & Transcendence Wm. Gass - Reading Rilke Derrida - On The Name and Monolingualism R. Johnson - ARK S. Howe - Pierce-Arrow Cole Swensen - Try Gerald Bruns - Modern Poetry & The Idea of Language (thanks, Robert Archambeau, for mentioning this) V. Woolf - The Waves Celan - Breathturn (over & over & over) Jabes - Book of Margins Blaser - Holy Forest Shlain - The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess J. Amato (ms.) - Lake Affect (dated material) (hey, one good turn, etc., right? It's great stuff!) Mark DuCharme - Near To R. Waldrop - Reluctant Gravities NK Hayles - How We Became Posthuman And CDs: Blue Rose - Rosemary Clooney & Duke Ellington Money Jungle - Duke Ellington, Mingus, Max Roach Mingus Ah Um - Mingus Supersuckers - Must've Been High Nanci Griffith - Other Voices, Too ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 13:33:55 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Reading List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices Christopher Isherwood, Down there for a Visit T.W. Adorno, Notes to Literature I & II Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity George Perec, Life: A User's Manual Kenneth Rexroth, The Alternative Society Lyn Hejinian, Happily Tim Davis, Dailies La poesie quebecios, by a bunch of Canadians Stanley Cavell, Themes out of Shool Raymond Williams, Keywords Karen McCormack, Marine Snow Shark 2 (or 3, can't remember) The first two pages of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Meditations Samuel Delaney's suprisingly uninteresting article on the future in the Village Voice Jacques Debrot's most recent post on the poetics list My checkbook ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 10:46:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Henry Gould interview MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT An interview I have conducted with Henry Gould has been put up at Jacket #10. The piece opens with a fascinating response by Gould to a comment by Charles Bernstein in his tribute to Barbara Guest in the same issue. Many other topics are discussed, including matters relating to the Poetics List, materialism and mysticism in poetry, the idea of the avant-garde, and so on. I'm sure some of you will want to take a look! Happy new century! Kent ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 14:38:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Carter Subject: Re: puns In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >just about anything by freud is good on puns. > >At 10:22 PM -0500 1/2/00, George Thompson wrote: >>In a message dated 1/2/00 9:35:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, >>tgreen@CLEAR.NET.NZ writes: >> >>> can find plenty of sites with puns on them on the net >>> but nothing on the theory of puns & punning -- any suggestions >>> will be gracefully received >>> >>> best Tony Green >> >>Well, if you are willing to get off the net and read some old-fashioned >>books, I would recommend Walter Redfern's *Puns* [1984] and a collection of >>essays edited by Jonathan Culler, *On Puns:The Foundation of Letters* [1988]. >> Both published by Blackwell [I don't know why]. >> >>These are both good. >> >>If there is newer literature on puns I wouldn't mind learning of it. I've >>been out of touch. >> >>George Thompson goes almost without saying, supplementally, of course, always good to have a copy of Finnegans Wake handy, also stuff by Derrida and McLuhan -- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 12:07:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mary Burger Subject: Melodeon/Second Story Reading, SF 1/8/00 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" A Reading to toast recent publications from Melodeon Poetry Systems and Second Story Books: Tracy Grinnel, Jono Schneider, Lauren Gudath, Mary Burger Saturday, Jan. 8, 7:30 p.m. Modern Times Books, 888 Valencia St (at 20th St.), San Francisco Tel. 415.282.9246 Come for the poetry, stay for the food! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 15:05:36 +0000 Reply-To: archambeau@lfc.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lake Forest College Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit > hi robt --i adore masha z, but have noticed that your publication is a bit > thin on the girl end of things otherwise. just a gentle friendly nudge...md > Maria, Yep, I know what you mean about this issue being a bit light on what you call the "girl end of things." We've done better in this regard in the the past three issues. This bothers me and Valerie too. Sadly, the last few months we haven't had many submissions by women that fit our "no workshop poetry, no language poetry" mandate. Next time you run across a woman who writes interesting poetry that can't be assimilated to either of those two paradigms, have her drop us a line. 9 Campus Circle, Lake Forest IL 60045. (Note that Brooke Bergan, Dubravka Djuric and Kymberly Taylor have work in Samizdat #4 -- Masha isn't the only woman here this time out). Bob Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 14:28:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: memorizing for the next century (was Re: end of the century In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Or there's the parody method--writing a parody will burn the original into your brain for life--at least it has mine, in the case of Hopkins. On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Damion Searls wrote: > >Preferred method of reading: find a poem to memorize. Memorize it. Forget > >it. Come back to it a few years later. Memorize it again. Forget it again. > > I've heard (and found it true so far) that if you reinforce what you > memorize just enough so that it's still in yer head at 3 checkpoints -- 3 > days, 3 weeks, and 3 months after the initial memorization -- then it's > there for life. I still have stuff in my head from back in college ("Leave > me not wild and drear and comfortless / As silent lightning leaves the > starless night!" -- Shelley), like occasionally annoying houseguests who > are still, in the end, better than being alone. ("That is what we love > about art / It seems to prefer us and stays" --O'Hara) > > Unless you like rememorizing. > > Damion Searls > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 16:21:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Arielle C. Greenberg" Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Just thanks to everyone for listing what they're reading. I'm amazed/impressed/inspired by how many people are reading so much hardcore philisophy, and wrote down a bunch of stuff for my reading list for 2000. Over the weekend I read Wang Ping's Of Flesh and Spirit and found it very moving, really rich. I tend not to actually read 8 books at a time, but try to have my nose in one novel while also browsing through new journals, and reading over breakfast magazines (Utne Reader, The Atlantic, etc.), plus doing school reading. Arielle **************************************************************************** "I thought numerous gorgeous sadists would write me plaintive appeals, but time has gone by me. They know where to get better looking boots than I describe." -- Ray Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 15:17:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: on the millenial juke box MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Turnin on the Tables: David Bowie's Hunky Dory Various Hedrix (including two of the most poetic moments of the past century 1: the sacrificing by fire of a strat at montrose 2: the banner) Blonde Redhead's In an Expression of the Inexpressible Vanessa-Mae's interp of the Four Seasons and The Devil's Trill Sonata The Stone Roses' Turns Into Stone Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk The Jesus & Mary Chain's Darklands Mozart's Requim Brahms String Quartets No.1 and No. 3 Lara St. John's recordings of Bach's Partita No. 2 and Sonata No. 3 Various Classical Guitar music Placebo's Without You IM Nothing and a couple of things to add to my reading list: Eco's Serendipities Eco's Search For The Perfect Language Ashbery's The Mooring of Starting Out Revolution of the Word Anthology All for now, TEDD -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 15:45:39 +0000 Reply-To: archambeau@lfc.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lake Forest College Subject: Samizdat #4 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit SAMIZDAT #4 / NOTICE Just a note to say that the supply of free copies of Samizdat #4 reserved for list members has been exhausted. To everyone who backchanneled -- thanks for your interest. Copies will be out shortly. Robert Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 17:28:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Zimmerman Subject: Re: Henry Gould interview MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit A wonderful interview by Kent and Henry in Jacket #10: incisive, funny, conspiratortial--right up my Buffalo Tenpin Alley [the John Clarke Lanes]. [...and now a word from our sponsors: Y2K READY for Rachel where the lilymopers dumble as the well of Mossword weep and lugubriators scramble for the fleecing of the bleep where lummoxen crumble & genii creep noses wrinkle over trouble & the bardfish saddle up the deep --Daniel Zimmerman ]... KENT JOHNSON wrote: > An interview I have conducted with Henry Gould has been put up at > Jacket #10. The piece opens with a fascinating response by Gould > to a comment by Charles Bernstein in his tribute to Barbara Guest > in the same issue. Many other topics are discussed, including > matters relating to the Poetics List, materialism and mysticism in > poetry, the idea of the avant-garde, and so on. I'm sure some of > you will want to take a look! > > Happy new century! > > Kent ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 16:10:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Henry Gould int./URL MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I had meant to include in last post the Jacket link for the interview with Gould: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/johnson-iv-gould.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 21:11:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wendy Kramer Subject: last texts of the 20th MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit i always like the what are you reading thread actually reading several books magazines etc at once is do-able i think someone mentioned something about this it makes reading very different of course than when you read one at a time indeed tho it spreads out the material over a span of time i've finally discovered the pleasure & knowledge of newsletters... i've read the past few weeks : an insight meditation newsletter, a running newsletter called "footnotes" , the newsletter from my credit union in my old home of portland, the gay & lesbian community center newsletter of nyc the newsletter for my unions both regional & national newsletter for the new york road runners club & of course poetry project newsletter all fascinating nonfiction so to speak & over christmas the wizard of oz (fabulous had never read the whole thing, just watched the movie every year on tv) jim fixx's book on running from the 70's ( the drawings of people are a kick) "mac answers" a book of macintosh questions & answers, a picture book version of the jewish folktale "golem" with paper-cut illustrations several english folktales ed dorn selected poems lots of e-mail letters from mom & some recipes on another front did anyone else go hear some of the making of americans marathon? i'd heard about it a few years ago & it was exciting to finally go there a friend & i went on thurs to the gallery it was in and alternately dozed daydreamt & paid attention stein really was the perfect one to hear on new year's eve ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 20:43:35 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Zauhar Subject: reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII belatedly, and assuming that not too many people are sick of this thread yet (I'm not) 1: Readings Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans Benedicta Ward THe Legends of the Jews, by Louis Ginzberg Love Had a Compass, Robert Lax Cables to the Ace, Thomas Merton A REading, by Beverley Dahlen Gender WArs, by Brian Fawcett 2) Listenings STeady hum of traffic down U.S. 30 outside our back window Birds at the neighbor's feeder Teething cries of the other neighbor's child (thin walls) occasional sirens (U.S. 30 again) 3) Viewings The Carnegie International Exhibit, 1999-2000 (yawn) The Andy Warhol Museum Maxo Vanka's Murals of the Croation immigration at the Catholic church in Millvale, PA David Zauhar University of Illinois at Chicago "i have a city to cover with lines" --d.a. levy ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 22:16:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: Beginning of the century reading material In-Reply-To: <30239450.946915696820.JavaMail.imail@bernie.excite.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII You and George and all other one book kinda persons are missing a lot by being so serious and disciplined. Say hello to Ike Kim for me. Jorge Guitart On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, David Kirschenbaum wrote: > Got to go along with George Bowering on this, I'm a one book kinda guy. > Right now it's Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein, though I'm always reading > manuscripts of my friends poesy, with new stuff from Ike Kim currently in > the hopper. > > I used to keep a stack of poetry books on my nightstand, like 10 or so, and > randomly flip to a page and read one poem in each, crossing out the title, > before heading to bed. Think I'll supplement my Sportscenter habit and end > my nights this way once more. > > as ever, > David > > > > > > _______________________________________________________ > Visit Excite Shopping at http://shopping.excite.com > The fastest way to find your Holiday gift this season > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:03:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Marla Jernigan: from a Napkin Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [this had to be reformatted to eliminate HTML tags] Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 18:47:00 -0800 (PST) From: Marla Jernigan Subject: from a Napkin (12/31/99) Hint. Lounge in wisps----I can't see your eyes for all the curl. Curve, is in your lip but you're broad shoulders and flat as a board, tough hands and red knuckles. What did you whisper at the bar, foot up on brass, cowboy act, What did you whisper that I would listen? You had me till then. I was made up to trample fences kick down the wash on lines. Too bad. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 20:46:09 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 Comments: To: archambeau@lfc.edu In-Reply-To: <3870BAC1.6137@lfc.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" i'll keep my eyes open...thanks for the thoughtful reply. bests, md At 3:05 PM +0000 1/3/00, Robert Archambeau wrote: >> hi robt --i adore masha z, but have noticed that your publication is a bit >> thin on the girl end of things otherwise. just a gentle friendly nudge...md >> > > > >Maria, > >Yep, I know what you mean about this issue being a bit light on what you >call the "girl end of things." We've done better in this regard in the >the past three issues. This bothers me and Valerie too. Sadly, the >last few months we haven't had many submissions by women that fit our >"no workshop poetry, no language poetry" mandate. Next time you run >across a woman who writes interesting poetry that can't be assimilated >to either of those two paradigms, have her drop us a line. 9 Campus >Circle, Lake Forest IL 60045. > >(Note that Brooke Bergan, Dubravka Djuric and Kymberly Taylor have work >in Samizdat #4 -- Masha isn't the only woman here this time out). > >Bob Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:06:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Steven Marks / All Points Invitation Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [this message was reformatted to eliminate html tags] From: "Steven Marks" To: "UB Poetics discussion group" Subject: All Points Invitation Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 22:16:23 -0800 Everybody is invited to view my latest work on my new web site at http://www.99main.com/~swmarks. The two works currently on the site are: Inminutest Inscrutiae -- a visual poem made with shapes and charts as well as words taken out of an extremely condensed version of an abandoned short story. Ghostwriting Collages -- JPEGs of collages consisting of pages from business books I have ghostwritten and graphics from stock illustration books. Come one. Come all. Thank you, Steven swmar@99main.com swmar@conncoll.edu For resume and visual poetry: http://www.99main.com/~swmarks ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 22:17:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: In the Spirit of EX--- MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain EXEMPLIFYING the "symptoms of capitalism" I would like to offer for sale to the highest bidder a one-and-only art object, the 1st semi-official APG T-shirt. (Originally) Extra Large. 100% cotton and made in the U S of A. The APG T-shirt features; crude 'art brut' style renderings of famous APG personalities and incidents (including the "inflections wars" and "the-time-we-forgot-to-plug-the-tape-recorder-in"); a subtle work of 'found art' (a chipotle salsa stain, that if you squint yr eyes looks something like the visage of Ron Silliman from the cover of his _the difficulties_ special issue); several lines of Real Poetry by Real Atlanta Poets (all this on a Ciccone Youth t-shirt reincarnated as a readymade). This is a once in a lifetime offer folks. Backchannel all offers. Bidding starts at $80. DISCLAIMER: I make this offer on my own behalf and not as an official representative of the atlanta poets group, the opinions exemplified by this offer do not necessarily reflect those of the atlanta poets group, the electronic poetry center, the poetics list &/or its owner(s) and moderator(s), the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, Madonna, Sonic Youth or Jardines (the makers of a most excellent chipotle salsa). )ohnLowther ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 23:52:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Zimmerman Subject: Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Currently reading or just finished: Avni, Ora. The Resistance of Rhetoric: Linguistics, Philosophy, and the Literary Text. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Creeley, Robert. Gedichte. Trans. into German by Michael Mundhenk.Berlin: Literarisches Colloquium, 1984. Davidson, Michael. Post Hoc. Bolinas: Avenue B, 1990. Ellis, Stephen. A Book of Currencies. Amman: Oasis, 1997. Gurney, George. Sculpture and the Federal Triangle. Washington: Smithsonian, 1985. LeGuin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Avon, 1971. Krajewski, Bruce. Traveling with Hermes: Hermeneutics and Rhetoric. Amherst: UMass, 1992. Johnson, Kent, and Stephen M. Ashby, eds. Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry.Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1992. Marshall-Stoneking, Billy. Singing the Snake. Auckland: William Collins, 1990. Osman, Jena. The Character. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Rasula, Jed, and Steve McCaffery, eds. Imagining Language: An Anthology. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998. Salerno, Joe. Song of the Tulip Tree/La Canzone della Magnolia. Trans. into Italian by Emanuel di Pasquale. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1999. The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Edward Sanders Issue. Spring 1999. & several hundred student papers. ;~) MM, Dan Zimmerman "Arielle C. Greenberg" wrote: > Just thanks to everyone for listing what they're reading. I'm > amazed/impressed/inspired by how many people are reading so much hardcore > philisophy, and wrote down a bunch of stuff for my reading list for 2000. > > Over the weekend I read Wang Ping's Of Flesh and Spirit and found it very > moving, really rich. > > I tend not to actually read 8 books at a time, but try to have my nose in > one novel while also browsing through new journals, and reading over > breakfast magazines (Utne Reader, The Atlantic, etc.), plus doing school > reading. > > Arielle > > **************************************************************************** > "I thought numerous gorgeous sadists would write me plaintive appeals, but > time has gone by me. They know where to get better looking boots than I > describe." -- Ray Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 00:38:30 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: Larry's MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit January 3 - Elizabeth Ann James January 10 - Ed Mabrey January 17 - Karen Masullo January 24 - Douglas Gray January 31 - Rose M. Smith February 7 - Connie Willett Everett February 14 - Matt Hart (sic, I couldn't resist) from Forklift February 21 - Terry Hermsen February 28 - Cathy Hardy March 6 - David Baker & the all stars of poetry fundraiser Stay tuned-- march & april Maj Ragain-- whose collected poems bested 97 Stephen Ellis from Maine coming out to support his new book _The Long & Short of It_ Spuyten Duyvil just out now-- The Tom Beckett, Dan Raphael from Oregon, etc. 21 years & growing, funded by the Ohio Arts Council 2040 N. High St Columbus Ohio Mondays 7pm Followed by open mic Be well David Baratier, Curator ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 00:18:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: baby baby Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I had supposed it was due to an (unthought-thru?) equation of baby-bliss with sexual-bliss. If you look into the face of an infant (who isnt indisposed due to a variety of possible causes!) your look will be returned with one of riveted fascination. Not unlike your lover's face during lovemaking. David ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 13:11:12 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Mills, Billy" Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 1 Jan 2000 to 2 Jan 2000 (#2000-3) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01BF56B5.30FF77C2" This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. ------_=_NextPart_001_01BF56B5.30FF77C2 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Just to register that this Irishman finds this kind of thing frankly offensive. Billy hardPressed poetry Alternative Irish poetry publishing and distribution bmills@netg.ie __________ > > During my stay there, one evening I watched, in company with > GB and his > daughter Thea, a Danish movie that contained the following joke : > > Q : Why does an Irishman as he is going to bed place on his > bedside table a > full glass of water, and an empty glass? > > A : Because, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he might be > thirsty, or he might not. > > > db > > ------------------------------ > > ------_=_NextPart_001_01BF56B5.30FF77C2 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" RE: POETICS Digest - 1 Jan 2000 to 2 Jan 2000 (#2000-3)

Just to register that this Irishman finds this kind of thing frankly offensive.

Billy

hardPressed poetry

Alternative Irish poetry publishing and distribution

bmills@netg.ie <mailto:bmills@netg.ie>

 


__________
>
> During my stay there, one evening I watched, in company with
> GB and his
> daughter Thea, a Danish movie that contained the following joke :
>
> Q : Why does an Irishman as he is going to bed place on his
> bedside table a
> full glass of water, and an empty glass?
>
> A : Because, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he might be
> thirsty, or he might not.
>
>
> db
>
> ------------------------------
>
>

------_=_NextPart_001_01BF56B5.30FF77C2-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:02:48 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Emily Lloyd Subject: baby baby books 2000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed I thought it might be a short form of "babydoll," since it was easier for me to see why one might equate a plastic pretty molded thing with an attractive woman than a baby. Unfortunately. But an online entymology site tells me that "baby" as a euph. for "woman" first appeared in 1901 (this excellent site does not tell me *where* it appeared), while "doll" as a euphemism for same entered the stage in 1904 ("doll" and "dolly" had previously been used to refer to prostitutes or "loose" women). I remember workshopping a poem by a woman who'd titled the work "I Feel My Baby Moving Inside Me"--sounded to me like a disco song title, actually referred to a rollicking pregnancy. Personally, I prefer endearments along the line of "flying buttress," "forklift," "serving suggestion," & so on. Keeping within the baby frame, a list of children's books I've been reading: --the Harry Potters, of course, first in English, now in Spanish, hoping to brush up on the language and pop culture at the same time. What brilliance there is is in the onslaught of small, delightful, seductive details; concept-wise, they're no match for, say, "A Wrinkle in Time." --"What Hearts" & "The Moves Make the Man" by Bruce Brooks, exquisite "children's" novels that kick the butt of most fiction written for adults in the past, say, 20 yrs --"The Scrambled States of America" by Laurie Keller. Kansas is bored & wants to mingle, throws a party for the states (great pictures of states doing the limbo, trying to spell Connecticut while addressing an invite, complaining about their hairdos, etc.). At the party, the states decide to trade places. Clearly, Minnesota gets sunburn because she's forgotten her lotion in relocating to the Area Formerly Known as Florida...etc., etc. A great first book by this author & illustrator. --"The Snark-out Boys and the Avocado of Death," Daniel Pinkwater. Out of print for years and finally back in an inexpensive book containing 5 Pinkwater novels (& called "Five Novels"). Classic. As another fan said, "It'd be worth it just for the description of the potato." --and scads of picture books. I keep a list of the exceptional ones, so if anyone needs recommendations for kids (or selves), I'm your man, your baby, your flying buttress. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:32:16 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 In-Reply-To: <3870BAC1.6137@lfc.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Sadly, the >last few months we haven't had many submissions by women that fit our >"no workshop poetry, no language poetry" mandate... > >Bob Archambeau I know workshop poetry when I see it, but what are the boundaries of language poetry? A serious question. I'll be interested in what people have to say. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:52:23 -0500 Reply-To: aglover@stlawu.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Albert Glover Subject: Release: A Curriculum of the Soul, fascicle #4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------6C5D7CCEAA41A96D6E43E0D4" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------6C5D7CCEAA41A96D6E43E0D4 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit January 4, 2000 The Institute of Further Studies announces the publication of fascicle #4 in A Curriculum of the Soul --- "one's own Mind" by Michael Boughn. 32 pp. stitched in printed covers designed by Guy Berard. 300 copies. $14.95 plus $1.50 p&h. Available from Glover Publishing, Box 633, Canton, NY 13617 or from SPD. A Curriculum of the Soul, based upon Charles Olson's "A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul" constitutes the seventh volume of The Magazine of Further Studies. Initiated in 1971, the series of 28 fascicles (plus Olson's Pleistocene Man which serves as "preface") was edited by John Clarke until his death. --------------6C5D7CCEAA41A96D6E43E0D4 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; name="aglover.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: Card for Albert Glover Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="aglover.vcf" begin:vcard n:Glover;Albert tel;fax:315-229-5628 tel;work:Piskor Professor of English x-mozilla-html:FALSE adr:;;;;;; version:2.1 email;internet:aglover@stlawu.edu fn:Albert Glover end:vcard --------------6C5D7CCEAA41A96D6E43E0D4-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:51:19 -0500 Reply-To: BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Grumman Subject: Jonathan Brannen, Where'dja Go? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I need to get hold of Jonathan Brannen to invite him into an anthology I and Crag Hill are working up. Neither my e.mail nor my snail-mail addresses for him work anymore. Anyone know how to get hold of him? --Bob G. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:13:32 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: baby baby books 2000 In-Reply-To: <20000104150248.19701.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Thanks for the alert on Pinkwater. Fat Men From Space one of the great books of all time. Hope it's one of the 5. >--"The Snark-out Boys and the Avocado of Death," Daniel Pinkwater. Out of >print for years and finally back in an inexpensive book containing 5 >Pinkwater novels (& called "Five Novels"). Classic. As another fan said, >"It'd be worth it just for the description of the potato." > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 11:23:48 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: sylvester pollet Subject: Looking for specific poem(FWD) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Here's genuine interest in poetry. Can anyone help? Happy New Year, Sylvester >X-Sender: soandlo@mail.greatlakes.net >Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2000 16:20:59 -0500 >To: pollet@maine.edu >From: Steve and Lisa O'dell >Subject: Looking for specific poem, can you help? >Mime-Version: 1.0 > >Hello, I found your bulletin board and decided to send you an email. If you >can help or even advise me on a way to get help, it would be greatly >appreciated. > >I am looking for the original text to two poems that my late grandmother >used to recite to me. One was about a Christmas mouse who meets santa >filling the stocking and makes a bet with Santa that she can put one more >thing in the stocking. Santa agrees to bet a piece of cheese and the mouse >proceeds to chew a hole in the stocking and thus has put one more "thing" >in the stocking. > >The other poem is something to do with what a crazy time there was in the >house the day "mom lost her pocketbook." > >Is there anywhere online that I could perhaps post this information for >other poetry fans and maybe someone might know the origin of these poems? > >Thank you so much for your time, > >Sincerely, > >Lisa O'Dell > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:53:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: U B U W E B: N E W R E S O U R C E S :: J A N 2 0 0 0 Comments: cc: silence-digest@lists.realtime.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ___U B U W E B___V I S U A L , C O N C R E T E + S O U N D___P O E T R Y___= =20 =20 http://www.ubu.com=20 U B U W E B: N E W R E S O U R C E S :: J A N 2 0 0 0=20 Historical:=20 John Cage, USA Memogram Correspondence Bern Porter, USA Found Poems Jacques Villegl=E9, France, Affiches 1960s-1980s Sound:=20 Antonin Artaud Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (1946) Gal, Austria Bestimmung New York (1999) Luigi Grandi, Italy Cavalli + Acciaio (1935) Brion Gysin Sound Poems and Lectures 1960-1981 Bob Cobbing Sound Poetry 1964-1995 F'loom Sound Poetry (1998) Fluxus Anthology 18 Artist's Soundworks (1962-1989) Raoul Hausmann, Austria Sound Poetry (1918 / 1959) David Moss My Favorite Things (1991) Narrative Poetry from The Black Oral Tradition 1964-1966 Ben Patterson Early Works, 1960-1995 Antonio Russolo, Italy Chorale (1921) Luigi Russolo, Italy Risveglio di una Citta (1920s) Pierre Schaeffer Solfege de l'objet Sonore, 1966 (Complete) Poesia Sonora Do fonetismo =E0s po=E9ticas=20 contempor=E2neas de voz, Brazil (1996)=20 Sound Poetry Today An International Compilation (1998) Demetrio Stratos Cantare La Voce, 1978 Contemporary:=20 David Daniels The Gates of Paradise=20 Papers:=20 S=E9rgio Bessa, NYC, NY, USA Architecture Versus Sound in Concrete Poetry Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, USA Eugen Gomringer, Switzerland 1. From Line To Constellation 2. Concrete Poetry 3. Max Bill and Concrete Poetry 4. The Poem As A Functional Object Noigandres Group, Brazil Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry Marjorie Perloff, USA "Concrete Prose": Haroldo de Campos=B9s Gal=E1xias and After Pierre Schaeffer, France Treatise on Musical Objects Mary Ellen Solt, USA Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press, 1968)=20 ___U B U W E B___V I S U A L , C O N C R E T E + S O U N D___P O E T R Y___= =20 =20 http://www.ubu.com=20 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:46:03 -0500 Reply-To: gps12@columbia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Millennial Reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi everyone, I guess I have two categories of reading: "project related" and "for pleasure" ... except it's all really "for pleasure," finally. The two projects are (1) things read for a comic book biography of Jack Smith I'm doing and (2) the pre-Socratics. The lists for either of those would be "too much," and probably only of interest to people already interested in either subject. So, instead, here's the non-project-related stuff, at least what I've read since December (there's a lot, but many of these are chapbooks and/or comic books) David Bromige, _My Poetry_ (still working on this one; it's wonderful) Sean Cole, _By the author._ (very fun book) Jordan Davis, manuscript (like best the longer poems here, "When I Was the Subject," esp.) Kim Deitch, _Beyond the Pale_ (one of the most bizarre and wonderful of the underground cartoonists of the 60s & 70s; Deitch never uses brushes or nib pens, so the drawings look extra flat ... it adds to their oddness) Tom Devaney, _The American Pragmatist Falls in Love_ (also fun; reminded me somewhat of Michael Lally, so I just photocopied some Lally for Tom, who hasn't yet read him) Julie Doucet, _My New York Diary_ (I reviewed this for Rain Taxi online: http://raintaxi.com/doucet.html so I won't say anything about it here, except to say Julie's one of my current favorite cartoonists) Betsy Fagin, manuscript of poems-in-progress (this was really fine work, though she's still futzing with it) Steve Fagin, _Talkin with Your Mouth Full_ (Brandon mentioned this one; I read some, not all, of this book hoping to find out more info about his film, "Tropicola," a movie about Cuba I saw about two, three years ago. The book was published prior to the film's release, though it's mentioned in a few places here.) Phoebe Gloeckner, _A Child's Life_ (I just interviewed her: http://www.jps.net/nada/gloeckner.htm so I guess this is really "project-related" ... issue #2, by the way, is still in the works, though you can see what's up there already, if you like: http://www.jps.net/nada) Ted Greenwald, _The Life_ (not sure that's the exact title; it's a Big Sky book, not long, that I read twice, I loved it so much) Aaron Kiely, _My Money_ (pretty wonderful, reminiscent a bit of Greenwald's stuff) Carol Mirakove, _Walls_ (really nice chapbook; saw Carol read not too long ago at Zinc; she interviews Hoa Nguyen in Readme #2: http://www.jps.net/nada/nguyen.htm and there's half a dozen poems from _Walls_ as well: ) Laurie Price, _Except for Memory_ and _Under the Sign of the House_ (another "interview" reading assignment: http://www.jps.net/nada/price.htm ... I agree with what Ron said about her work, and was really thrilled to see her read at the PoProj marathon) Dori Seda, _Dori Stories_ (One of the great "personal" underground cartoonists; unfortunately died young. This collects all of her cartoons, and reproduces some of her paintings and sculptures) Chris Stroffolino, _Stealers Wheel_ (re-read this while working on a cartoon about Chris for Rain Taxi; I love Chris's writing) Tod Thilleman, _A World of Nothing but Nations_ (yet another interview-related reading, though I'd read this book -- my favorite poetry book of 1999 -- before: http://www.jps.net/nada/thilleman.htm Probably there's more, but I'm at work & don't have everything at hand ... Have fun, Gary ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 12:14:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Arielle C. Greenberg" Subject: Re: baby stuff In-Reply-To: <20000104150248.19701.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I think the term "baby" in reference to a lover is just a natural term of endearment -- in love, we feel protective/possessive/responsible for our lover, just as we would towards an infant. Besides, babies are adorable, soft and often naked, so there's a natural comparison. But I think the sense of ownership -- one owns a baby, cares for it, provides for it -- probably led to the original usage from a man to a woman. Now, of course, women call men "baby," too. Oh, and there's also the thing about babies being "sweet," and we use all sugary substances to refer to lovers: honey, sugar, sweetie-pie, etc. I'm actually really interested in studying pedophilia and the way it comes up in our culture, but I don't think this is a case of that...especially since most pedophiles prefer children, not infants. If someone called their lover "Little Girl" or "Daddy" or "Pre-Pubescent One," then maybe there'd be something to go on. Arielle **************************************************************************** "I thought numerous gorgeous sadists would write me plaintive appeals, but time has gone by me. They know where to get better looking boots than I describe." -- Ray Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:34:37 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Mathews Losh Subject: Re: baby baby books 2000 In-Reply-To: <20000104150248.19701.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Well, during turn of the century Mardi Gras in New Orleans, black prostitutes dressed up as babies, which was considered pretty exciting then, because -- of course -- they were showing their _legs_ in public. The photographs are really extraordinary and the phenomenon continued through World War II. I think there is an interesting sociological study of this in Sam Kinser's 1990 book, but can't find it to confirm. Hence, perhaps "baby" as a sexual term. Liz On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Emily Lloyd wrote: > I thought it might be a short form of "babydoll," since it was easier for me > to see why one might equate a plastic pretty molded thing with an attractive > woman than a baby. Unfortunately. But an online entymology site tells me > that "baby" as a euph. for "woman" first appeared in 1901 (this excellent > site does not tell me *where* it appeared), while "doll" as a euphemism for > same entered the stage in 1904 ("doll" and "dolly" had previously been used > to refer to prostitutes or "loose" women). > > I remember workshopping a poem by a woman who'd titled the work "I Feel My > Baby Moving Inside Me"--sounded to me like a disco song title, actually > referred to a rollicking pregnancy. > > Personally, I prefer endearments along the line of "flying buttress," > "forklift," "serving suggestion," & so on. > > Keeping within the baby frame, a list of children's books I've been reading: > > --the Harry Potters, of course, first in English, now in Spanish, hoping to > brush up on the language and pop culture at the same time. What brilliance > there is is in the onslaught of small, delightful, seductive details; > concept-wise, they're no match for, say, "A Wrinkle in Time." > > --"What Hearts" & "The Moves Make the Man" by Bruce Brooks, exquisite > "children's" novels that kick the butt of most fiction written for adults in > the past, say, 20 yrs > > --"The Scrambled States of America" by Laurie Keller. Kansas is bored & > wants to mingle, throws a party for the states (great pictures of states > doing the limbo, trying to spell Connecticut while addressing an invite, > complaining about their hairdos, etc.). At the party, the states decide to > trade places. Clearly, Minnesota gets sunburn because she's forgotten her > lotion in relocating to the Area Formerly Known as Florida...etc., etc. A > great first book by this author & illustrator. > > --"The Snark-out Boys and the Avocado of Death," Daniel Pinkwater. Out of > print for years and finally back in an inexpensive book containing 5 > Pinkwater novels (& called "Five Novels"). Classic. As another fan said, > "It'd be worth it just for the description of the potato." > > --and scads of picture books. I keep a list of the exceptional ones, so if > anyone needs recommendations for kids (or selves), I'm your man, your baby, > your flying buttress. > > > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 09:47:22 -0800 Reply-To: aerodyne@sirius.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Candace Moore Subject: 2000/1999 reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In the Midst of: Speech and Phenomena & Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs by J. Derrida The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Mc Cullers Heroine by Gail Scott Recently Read (and Recommend): Carol by Patricia Highsmith Bleeding Optimist by Mary Burger Last Poems by Paul Celan Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson Recently Re-read: Minima Moralia by Adorno The Subject of Semiotics by Kaja Silverman Cheers, Candace Moore ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:41:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Daniel Bouchard / Re: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [reformatted] Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 13:53:40 -0500 From: Daniel Bouchard Subject: Re: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Isn't there another year left of the 20th century? And therefore a year to go to the new millenium also? Here's some books I read in December: Goya, Jean Francois Chabrun Goya: The Disasters of War, DeSales/ Faure (mostly pictures) Language and Politics, Noam Chomsky (interviews) Capital of Pain, Paul Eluard English Poems of George Herbert, George Herbert Roderick Hudson, Henry James Mesh, Clark Coolidge Boston Common, M.A. DeWolfe Howe (local history; author is grand-uncle of Susan and Fanny) Nationalism and Culture, Rudolf Rocker (one of the best books I've ever read) also a turn-of-the-last-century anthology of Dryden, Byron, and Pope ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 12:38:30 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: a gathering of threads... Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" or i might have called it "loose ends"---not entirely sure where this is coming from, or for that matter where it's going, i.e., to whom it's addressed in its entirety... but away we go... ---first, the few remarks i've seen hereabouts re _poetics@_ (ed. joel kuszai), esp. vis-a-vis reference to kent johnson's piece on the poetics list meltdown (which latter appeared a coupla issues back in _skanky possum_)... since i've been (i guess) a primary "player" wrt the latter "event," at least insofar as what i posted at the time, and what folks posted me; and since the meltdown occurred, what, a calendar year ago; and since i don't wish to dredge up all sortsa old biz: let's just say it SMARTS, still... i believe in fact it still smarts on all 'sides,' in all 'camps,' what have you... there's no way to get around the fact that *everyone* involved said things they probably shouldn't a said (incl. moi, and i apologize to one and all)... there's no way to get around the fact that many of us miss (e.g.) henry gould, no matter what (if you will) orneriness henry evinced... there's no way to get around the fact that many of us hold charles bernstein and joel kuszai in high regard, no matter what editorial (if you will) mistakes may have been made (b/c we view said mistakes AS mistakes, and as democratic in character)... i esp. enjoyed kent's interview with henry in the recent _jacket_---and this in spite of the fact that i thought henry indulged in some oppositions that were as provocative as the ones he attributes to charles (i don't find, personally and e.g., that keeping one's rational brain intact need detract from more spiritual and/or irrational poetic endeavor---and yes, i'm using shorthand here...)... [and btw: would someone be so kind as to forward this post to henry?... thanx in advance...] there is (and this pace henry's musings re poetry in said interview, which of course are not to be confused with his musings re poetics, or regarding the poetics list---re which latter he chose, to his credit, not to beat to death, as in 'dead horse') an ideological issue at stake in *any* public endeavor, this list no exception... i might argue (i would) that i value most highly that poetry that reaches beyond (e.g., and to pick yet another point of recent contention around here) economic class issues by reaching *through* such issues... i trust my construction here is not untidy---i don't esp. enjoy writing that takes for granted ALL sortsa things, not least of which is economic class... at the same time, if said writing does not try to locate the (ever-changing) human and social and ineluctably mortal aspect of life on planet earth (which of course includes all sortsa spiritual inclinations), i'll probably walk away disappointed... but let's not confuse things: posting our little diatribes (mine esp.) to the poetics list may only occasionally approximate a purely textual act... as in this post, *this one*, which, however un/poetic, is meant to be rec'd not as a poem, nor as conceptual art, but as an (what was it someone once said about my posts? 'overweaningly earnest') appeal to other sentient beings (strangers incl)... what makes alan sondheim's work intriguing (regardless whether i respond to it aesthetically) is that his effort is directed at redirecting the nature of *this* transaction... and when i aver that this is not what *this* post is about, i would expect at least some of you to work at least a quotient of this, my intention, into your receptive grids... all of which is to say: ideology as such is, in addition to other things, a matter of writing history, and history is, among other things, a fairly messy affair requiring both the view from near, and the view from afar... and there are numerous histories of this list (and others like it) yet to be writ, which will no doubt require some real finesse, along with some real re/searching... ---on a related note, this question of 'what the poetics list used to be' vs. 'what it is now'... it's a question that mark p raised, i think---was it three weeks or so ago?... in any case, as mark stated then, it DOES appear as though the poetics list, at least under joel's careful editorial eye, was more coherent, enabled a more sustained and focused conversation c. 93-95, than it does today (even setting aside the new moderated format, IF the latter may be set aside)... at the same time, i would like to observe that the list had at its inception *many* fewer subscribers (and fewer of these were women, as i recall)... yet in fact starting out small is a good way to begin *any* list, in my view---preferably with some effort directed at establishing a reasonably wide spread of social 'types'... ergo my advice (if i may) would be to begin small, private or semi-private, in anticipation of the inevitable splintering, spin-offs, disagreement, and lack of focus that will likely follow... but in any case the point here is that there are many more folks in these regions today than five years ago, and that these regions are likely over time (not "naturally," but b/c of our social conditions/displacements) to experience migration (of people, of ideas, of alliances) that lead to a somewhat different form of engagement... hence that us "old timers" (yuck) are bound to find ourselves encountering a "new" and somewhat uncomfortable set of parameters (and let's not forget that the internet in general has contributed to and is symptomatic of all sortsa dire as well as sanguine developments lo these past six years, both of private and public ilk, as both joel and charles suggest in their intro/preface to _poetics@)... also (and charles can back me up here) i anticipated a poetics list meltdown a full six months before it happened... and my suggestion to charles at the time (out of the blue, as it were) was to try to hold a poetics@ f2f conference, to help allay what i took at that time to be increasingly irreconcilable online differences... i say this NOT to credit mself with foresight---i say this by way of indicating that there is only so much (grief, frustration, hurt) these spaces can handle (imho), and that sometimes a simple handshake [w/wink] can mitigate what would otherwise require screens upon screens of typeface... now: charles did not have the time OR resources to hold said conference, and neither did/do i... but it's worth considering the latter in terms of futures... hence i post it here, by way of a proposal, something to chew over, perhaps collectively... ----finally, i feel compelled to render a precis here re, i guess i would call it, institutional power: i have of late, as many of you are aware, fallen into what for me is an unprecedented position of academic good fortune---a tenure-track job, teaching a 2/2 (for the uninitiated, that's two courses/semester), at a carnegie I research institution... if you wish to read just how lucky i have been, a full(er) account is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.1amato.html and when i write "lucky," i write this in spite of having pulled every damn string i could pull to land this job... and in spite of having had some relatively powerful strings to pull... but fact is, there are just SO many talented folks out there, some on this list, who deserve this job more than me... moreover, i'm teaching poetry workshops (lordy) as opposed to (primarily) professional writing, which latter kept me busy for the past nine years... i'm teaching b/c, to be candid about it, i believe it to be the best alternative to just plain writing for a living (which is not to say i don't bring a certain passion to the learning situation)... yes, i have to publish in order to keep this job---i'm up for tenure (again) in two-three years, and i need another book to cinch same (i.e., setting aside teaching and service)... my writing is, therefore, completely bound up with my 44-yr-old sense of professional self, and my bread & butter... hence my poetry undoubtedly reveals my institutional, professionalized status, in ways i can *and* cannot imagine... now, some would observe that this is not the most desirable way to conduct one's writing life... that it would be far preferable not to be beholden to ANY institution, least of all of the academic variety... that in fact my work as a writer and thinker has in so many ways been "corrupted" by my academic-institutional status... that if i were a laborer, e.g. (and my choice of manual labor is hardly unmotivated), my work would somehow be "purer," less complicit with the status quo of our (what was jacques's convenient formulation?) 'left of center suburban-professional' world... no doubt this is true, to some extent... and without wishing to fall into the self-loathing academic/intellectual stance, i *do* in fact have problems with academics, and with academic life... i have after all gotten to this position w/o an ivy league pedi(de)gree, and w/o a trust fund... i do after all represent a growing number of academics who have found it difficult to find a life that is *not* institutionalized in some undesirable ways, and who may yet wish to bring to academe---i.e., to our postsecondary learning institutions---something of the kick-in-the-ass that such institutions will likely need in order to become truly worthwhile places of employment AND social change... now i ask you: is this really such a mysterious urge?... while i don't mind being called to the floor to answer for my petit bourgeois longings and blindnesses, i *do* take some exception to superficial characterizations of my work as a poet-teacher, or teacher-poet, or whatever... ergo, and at the risk of appearing more than a bit self-indulgent, i would like to submit that this is how i conceive of my new-found institutional power, as it were... and further, that my poetry, whether directed to members of the academic or non-academic tribes, and IF in fact it speaks to my institutional status (and enjoys the empowerments attending thereto) is conceived, on this end (i.e., in my head) as contributing to the sort of engagement i've just outlined, (if i may, and this is most personal) one rooted less in a thirst for knowledge per se than in a wandering toward (it is to be hoped) wisdom... just to set the idiosyncratic? record, if not straight, then at least legible... ----------- well that about does it for my .00 clearinghouse of millennial whatsbeenbuggingme's... thanx for listening... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 01:38:40 -0500 Reply-To: gps12@columbia.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: More Millennial Reading & an URL MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Oh, yeah: also, Kimberly Lyons' _Abracadabra_, which is just out from Granary. Not quite finished with it, but wow is she great! ... and, Brendan Lorber's chapbook of note-sonnets, _Address_ (I think!), which is a swell read, too. I just put one of the mentioned books, Laurie Price's Under the Sign of the House, up at: http://www.jps.net/nada/under.htm so you each can read for yourself ... Back to "work," Gary ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 13:48:57 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baptiste Chirot Subject: Re: baby baby books 2000/puns In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII As a small child in the Fifties, my Quebecois relatives used the word "Baby-doll" to mean a woman's slip After the movie Baby Doll came out, they used to make a bi-lingual sort of pun: "Qu'elle est belle, ma baby doll en sa baby doll". ("How pretty she is, my baby doll in her baby doll".) Another pun along these lines referred to Pall Mall, the cigarette that was popular for a while among the same relatives because in Quebecois it is prounounced "Pas Mal"--"not bad". Years later, going to live in France, one found that the French are endlessly essaying to root out that evil, the influence of "Franglais", the corruption of French by Americanisms and Anglicisms. Often I thought of how In Joual (Quebecois), American and English words became remade, so that they were a joking code you only understood if you were (forcibly or not) bi-lingual. Among the strong, crowned with power, glory, history, language becomes a power, a purity, that defines, limits and coerces. Its weakness is that it must be protected. Among the oppressed and humiliated, language becomes a secret code, filled with jokes that may one moment ease a wound and at another cause one. It is a signal of a fugitive existence, recognized and passed on, "signs" in the street among the billboards . . . --dave baptiste chirot ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 15:36:48 -0500 Reply-To: BobGrumman@nut-n-but.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Grumman Subject: Looking for More Names MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Wow, I got the address I needed for Jonathan Brannen almost instantly. Thank you, Buffalo. My request worked so well I've decided to see if I can locate other people I've tried to invite to be in this anthology I spoke of only to have my invitations returned to sender. So, anyone know where the following are: Paul Zevalansky, R. Prost, Michael Winkler? --Bob G. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 20:24:02 -0000 Reply-To: suantrai@iol.ie Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" Subject: Re: Bowering's reading habits//my reading list MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit David Bromige wrote: > During my stay there, one evening I watched, in company with GB and his > daughter Thea, a Danish movie that contained the following joke : > > Q : Why does an Irishman as he is going to bed place on his bedside table a > full glass of water, and an empty glass? > > A : Because, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he might be > thirsty, or he might not. Had a laugh at that one. Made me think of a legendary Irish tv quiz show, Quicksilver, (often called Thicksilver). Some samples: Q. What was Hitler's first name? A. Heil Q. Who is the Ayatollah? A. A Ceili band. (Out of respect for those who dislike explanation I won't mention that a Ceili band alternates waltzes and traditional Irish dance music at a most enjoyable rustic soiree termed a Ceili. Likewise I must remain silent about the Eye of Tullow Ceili band, only begetter of the confusion.) The above may well be apocryphal, but here's one I heard with my very own shamrock bedecked ears on Irish radio: Q: What rock is so light it floats? A: The moon. best wishes Randolph Healy Visit the Sound Eye website at: http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm or find more Irish writing at: http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr7/contents.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 16:06:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: baby stuff MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit arielle >> I'm actually really interested in studying pedophilia and the way it comes up in our culture<< you know, i've long wondered if there's pedophiliac connection/implication/etc. w/the practice of shaving. esp. women. esp. legs. i've no idea the history, when it began, etc. but am quite curious. would love to hear more. hassen ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 13:13:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: revised joke for billy mills Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > During my stay there, one evening I watched, in company with > GB and his > daughter Thea, a Danish movie that contained the following joke : > > Q : Why does an Englishman/ Scotsman/ Canuck/ Swede/ Pole/ Ozzie/ Yank/ Frenchman/ Italian/ Swiss/ Czech/ German/ Finn/ Dane/+ -- + give the sods a taste of their own medicine! Egyptian/ Israeli/ Russian/ Iranian/ Indian/ Pakistani/ Chinese/ Korean/* .as he is going to bed place on his > bedside table a > full glass of water, and an empty glass? > > A : Because, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he might be > thirsty, or he might not. * ...you get my drift. I am aware there are those who think this is a joke about stupidity; I am not one of these. To me it is poetic, philosphic, and mysterious. We shouldnt be too quick to leap to disparaging conclusions abt ourselves. I have heard many a joke abt the English (as one of whom I was intended by birth) but never bridled.....Abt Canadians, too (as one of whom I intended myself by citizenship), and abt Americans (as one of whom I intend myself by proximity), also w/o bridling. I suppose my trouble is that I don't identify strongly enough with any national group, to take such offense. Billy, perhaps you might take consolation in the fact that it was a glass of WATER.....David ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:18:17 -0800 Reply-To: booglit@excite.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kirschenbaum Subject: Boog 2000 Calendar now available Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Boog 2000 Calendar now available Poem, "Cento Century," by Lee Ann Brown Art and design, by Madeleine Hope Arthurs=20 11"x17" white glossy cardstock 2000 calendar. Purple ink, offset printed. Benefits Bluestockings women=92s bookstore, 172 Allen St., NY, NY 10002=20 Tel: 212 777 6028 Email: bluestocking@jps.net=20 Web site: www.bluestockings.com Individuals, $12ppd ($4 to Bluestockings); institutions, $18ppd ($7). Only 74 copies produced (32 available). Limited edition, signed and lettered by Brown and Arthurs.=20 Individuals, $20ppd ($8); institutions, $30ppd ($13). Only 26 copies produced (16 available). =20 Calendars are shipped first-class in poster tubes. Checks payable to:=20 Boog Literature=20 351 W.24th Street, Apt. 19E=20 New York, NY 10011-1510=20 email: booglit@excite.com tel: (212) 206-8899=20 Boog Literature publications are edited and published by=20 David A. Kirschenbaum.=20 Send SASE, or email, for catalog. as ever, David _______________________________________________________ Visit Excite Shopping at http://shopping.excite.com=20 The fastest way to find your Holiday gift this season ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 21:37:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: from Marla Jernigan / My Reading List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" [reformatted to eliminate HTML tags] Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:53:43 -0800 (PST) From: Marla Jernigan Subject: My Reading List Dear Poetics List, My own addition to the tide of reading lists is just this; _Not Me_ by Eileen Myles (She's very cute in the photo!) _The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_ (Just finished this last night. I liked it a lot too.) _Poems_ Pier Paulo Pasolini, translated by Noman MacAfee (In places I can't get inside it but in other places I can.) _Selected Poems_ Ted Berrigan (only about 10 pages down but I like this also.) I bought the bio of Mina Loy also but then left it in a friend's car. Sincerely, Marla ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 19:25:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: ~As the Odometer Turns~ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } h e r e i s my list o f t h i n g s n o p articul a r orde r I. "Sting with a spatulate or lamelliform appendage apicodorsally; infradental lamellae strongly developed, acutely dentate or spinose, the spines sometimes as long as the propodeals." (and if that wasn't enough t'get ya) "Nuchal carina forming a broad uninterrupted curve across the posterior extremity of the head; posterior surface lacking dark apophyseal lines; on vertex, median groove absent or ill defined; petiole a transverse scale, sometimes with angulate dorsalateral corners;, or with its apex produced as a blunt apical knob." (this miraculous melos is from the taxonomies in the front of _The Ants_ by Bert Hollander and Edward O. Wilson --- it seems to me that one wd have to be a bit nuts to NOT read this as poetry ---- thereare many other parts of the book that have a poetic punch but i think that taxonomies are perhaps the best things in that respect) II. December 1999 issue of ARTFORUM (it's a "best of the 90s issue" so while there is a lot of stuff inside there isnt a lot of discussion much of any of it --- theyve had a bunch of different art critics pick their 10 favorites from the 90s, all of which have to be covered on one page while another page shows small pictures of as many as will fit --- there are also two page spreads for music books and movies --- the things that stuck out for me in the art round ups were all the bodies, lifesize, almost lifesize, more than life size with looks ranging between very real to giant g i joe (i'm not sure i really like this stuff a great deal but i was surprizsed i guess by how many people are making these things) --- one crit mentions buffy the vampire slayer as an exemplar of a new acting style --- the simpsons, porn, abject art, color field paint coming round again --- good for reading in airports) III. _The TEENAGERS_ & _THE TWEENS_ by James Sanders (two chapbook sized volumes, the latter a sequel or sorts ---- i think James made about 10 of each and that's a shame as this stuff is great ---- the teenagers features Teenagers (of course), The Blob, Harry Connick Jr. and the Harry Connick Jr. Zombie, several Evil Robots, Wink Martindale, Robbie Kenieval and Santa Claus moving thru pool parties, The Match Game, suburban interiors and exteriors (maybe) --- thru out _The Teenagers_ all the poems have a large ceasura roughly formed down the center of the page --- here's a sample from that book (my best shot at reproducing the orthography)) The Future How long have you been in love with the blob. Ive been in love with the blob since age 17. Have you ever met the blob. No, my mom says she invited him over for thanksgiving but I happen to know she's lying. How do you know she's lying. She's been in cahoots with the blob for years now. Why would your mom want to be in cahoots with the blob. The blob has a sparkling personality. Once I heard the blob took his girlfriend for a tour of Napa Valley. The blob won the tour from being on ~Price is Right~. Really? Yes. The blob won the Showcase Showdown: he bet 11,590 and the actual amount was 11,600 so the blob got both showcases because if you come within less than $100 you get both showcase. Maybe the blob just got lucky? No, darling, lucky might get you by on ~Wheel of Fortune~ but you gotta have skills to succeed on ~Price is Right~. Well what about Plinko or that big spinning money wheel that gets you into the showcase shodown. Seems like those are mostly luck and depend very little on a broad consumer product knowledge base. Dont you think youre idealizing the blob just a bit? No, I could tell you tons of things about the blob, tons of accomplishments that the blob has accomplished. If youre in love with the blob why dont you call him up or email him or something? Oh, i wouldnt ever dream of disturbing him. The blob is a very busy and important person. And hes very reclusive. He lives a solitary life pacing back and forth on his oriental rug in the fading blue of winter evenings. Besides he has a drinking problem. Its lonely being the blob you know; you never thought of that,though, did you, DID YOU? ~Fade~. (the sequel _The Tweens_ has some of the same characters and like _The Teenagers_ has some artwork and diagrams and such things but it has no ceasuras instead appearing for the most part as a narrow column full justified down the center of the page --- "The Future" above is one of the more linear of the pieces in that volume and this is (maybe) one of the more disjunct in _THE TWEENS_) 26. We do double. What is that moment? The minotaur will walk right through us with icy circles. We giggled and soon after water slapped mind at the center. Our brief instant of phases like white shoes in a question the cuts the inside of luggae or a cursor in a sandwich in a yellow suspension of the world. It was listening a tooth among strangers. You wonder why the Mummy had a personal life and the minotaur to some extent, but not Harry Connick Jr. We describe it as "the unknown body". No longer does the spectacle of the "either-or" posture white dust. and they no longer wagged and the Mummy, subjunctive and foamed with our clear paired boo boos from encounters. "Let's go" A time blob. We said weariliy in the diner they had to take shrewd loitering in the immense perhaps. We realize time is running out but some zeros, almost word for word, dialed might blob resucked into like a clown gripped both sides of the rim of recent things with a blank. We will strand as much of him as any other and lay over everywhere, and the neck liquid ear apart by skipping for joy through the endured They told us what we already knew: that there was no other minotaur over the phone, or that it was public, attached to the silhouette of a robot. Our soft unformed on the shag years. instincts that nobody gown, at the card table behind the Payless Shoe Store. We may never have seen them. We showed up. We automatically the boney goomy was endangered of becoming the dummy, not yet a match for it, what we foresaw that the encounter, clustered by the minotaur's secret aisles like baloons of pink jello. Or Santa searched the box. IV. _Queen of Angels_ by Greg Bear (pretty cool sci-fi novel with poets, poetry, murder, internal "mindscapes", voodoo, human reformation, cops/detection, hints of strange sex, vinegar baths, future social hierachies imagined, art, AI, remote exploration of another planet, ethical questions about human behavior and the idea of punishment, all that and los angeles in the 22nd C. --- Bear has some fun with language as well, using his many coinages without much explanation, puncuating non-sentences with periods, ending without punctuation sometimes, letting sentences start and not finish --- a fun read and it was just right somehow for sleeping on the floor in my mother's apartment) V. _Time's Arrow and Archimede's Point_ by Huw Price interesting so far --- he's concerned to question why so many basic physical properties are asymetrical, time, radiation, etc and he promises in the opening that by trying to conceive of a point outside time one cd imagine a symetrical viewpoint on these seemingly asymetrical forces and he also says that given this view that many of the puzzling things about quantum mechanics will become less puzzling and more what one might have expected given a way to bracket our own temporally biased--asymetrical perspective "huw price is reader in philosophy at the u. of sydney australia and fellow of the australian academy of humanities. author of _facts and the function of truth_ and many articles in journals such as _jou.of philosophy_ _mind_ _nature_" i hadnt known or remembered that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was based on statistical probabilities --- and as he presents the issue it does seem curious that from any state of affairs that the stats wd seem to indicate that entropy wd increase in either direction past/future -- from this he moves to say that it isnt the increase of entropy in the future that needs explaining, its the decrease in entropy toward the past all of this is building out of work done by others on something called "the block universe" a theory i was totally ignorant of but which is very curious to think about -- it grants time full status as a dimension stating that our sense of the objective present and the flow of time are actually subjective --- there are also some hints that causality will be looked at in this atemporal perspective, which is really twisting my head a bit VI. _Imagining Language_ ed. McCaffery and Rasula (i wrote the list about this previously --- it's still great --- probably my favorite book this year (as last year's was _REVERSIBLE DESTINY, We Have Decided Not To Die_ Arakawa/Gins --- i still read in this a lot too) ) music Becks new one "Midnight Vultures" is sly and funny and great ass shaking music vol.1 of the Magnetic Fields "69 love songs" --- good pop songcraft with kinks "From Here to Eternity Live" the compiled live CLASH album --- this is fucking great and for any even small fan essential Double Nickels on the Dime" The Minutemen's best release, old now but i love it (d.boon is my hero, r.i.p.) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 13:52:54 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: re baby baby reading 2000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dave-Baptiste Chirot wrote : > Among the >oppressed and humiliated, language becomes a secret code, filled with >jokes that may one moment ease a wound and at another cause one. I come over all mustache-and-beard, once I'd had a butcher's at this chain and fetter, and had to go up the apples and pears and lie down on my Uncle Ned. It gave me ideas of deference, aroused my glass royalty, and punctured my plaster and beam, until in the river bend I found it ghostly expensive so I hashish-and-pot off a sausage and toast of my own to pound-and-ounce my imminent removal. Let that dettol-and-bleach them a vegetable Wesson, I fiddled-and-voted in splash-and-wallow haw humph. But then I thought, Who was the Jeff and Mutt, who the fish dinner, in the throttles and chokes I had fungus-and-mold? Was the singer and dancer, he there, or Hi there? Underclass Dave with an overcast education ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 22:42:32 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lawrence Upton Subject: Re: from Daniel Bouchard / Re: end of century reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Yes; 1999 was the 99th year of the twentieth century and the 999th year of the millennium; and we are now in the 100th and 1000th years respectively; but people become really quite aggressive if you point it out. L | Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 13:53:40 -0500 | From: Daniel Bouchard | Subject: Re: end of century reading material | Mime-Version: 1.0 | | Isn't there another year left of the 20th century? And therefore a year to go | to the new millenium also? ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 20:22:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Flash Pome (fwd) Comments: To: Cyberculture@cmhcsys.com, Fop MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Barry Smylie and Alan Sondheim invite you to eye, ear, and click touch: http://24.64.186.222/alan/dancer.swf ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:47:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Nielsen, Aldon" Subject: Re: walcott citation: desperate query In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 5:36 PM -0800 12/27/99, Tisa Bryant wrote: >> >>Perhaps Mr. Nielsen knows? >> Perhaps, but he was in Chicago -- love to all, aldon ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:20:42 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: baby baby books 2000 In-Reply-To: <20000104150248.19701.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I thought it might be a short form of "babydoll," since it was easier for me >to see why one might equate a plastic pretty molded thing with an attractive >woman than a baby. Unfortunately. But an online entymology site tells me >that "baby" as a euph. for "woman" first appeared in 1901 (this excellent >site does not tell me *where* it appeared), while "doll" as a euphemism for >same entered the stage in 1904 ("doll" and "dolly" had previously been used >to refer to prostitutes or "loose" women). > >I remember workshopping a poem by a woman who'd titled the work "I Feel My >Baby Moving Inside Me"--sounded to me like a disco song title, actually >referred to a rollicking pregnancy. > >Personally, I prefer endearments along the line of "flying buttress," >"forklift," "serving suggestion," & so on. thanks for this great post, the use of these words has troubled me for some time, being a lover of the blues, where baby, mama, honey child, etc. are used constantly. but i suppose, as with all words, the intent with which they are said is more relevant than what is said. komninos ps what is the url of the entymology site? k komninos zervos Lecturer CyberStudies School of Art Griffith University Gold Coast +61 7 55948602 k.zervos@mailbox.gu.edu.au ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 18:49:46 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Anselm Hollo Subject: recent hits MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Here=92s what=92s been close to hand lately: Prose: Clark Coolidge, Now It=92s Jazz Robert Creeley, In Company: Collaborations=20 Edward Foster, Answerable to None Laird Hunt, Dear Sweetheart Cecily Mackworth, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist Life Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger Poetry: Anselm Berrigan, Integrity & Dramatic Life Edmund Berrigan, Disarming Matter Mark DuCharme, Near To Michael Gizzi, Too Much Johnson Randolph Healy, Scales Rachel Loden, Hotel Imperium Alice Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses Tom Raworth, Meadow Henry Reed, A Map of Verona Jacques Roubaud, 128 poemes composes en langue francaise de Guillaume =20 Apollinaire a 1968 Philip Whalen, Some of These Days Laura Wright, Hide: What=92s Difficult Some of the music: Ensemble Alcatraz, Danse Royale / 13th century Vox, From Spain to Spain Codex Faenza: Instumental Music of the Early XVth Century, Ensemble =20= =20 Unicorn / Michael Posch Musique Arabo-Andalouse, Atrium Musicae de Madrid / Gregorio Paniagua The Extempore String Ensemble Plays John Dowland Joaquin Rodrigo, Orchestral Works II, Mexico State Symphony Orchestra / =20= =20 Enrique Batiz Les Inspirations Insolites d=92Erik Satie, various ensembles, EMI CDZB =20= =20 62877 Thelonious Monk, Straight No Chaser (and everything by TM) Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer Cassandra Wilson, Traveling Miles And, in the shameless self-advertising department, I would like to recommend= : Anselm Hollo, Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets La Alameda / University of New Mexico Press ISBN 1-888809-15-9, 14 US thalers ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 01:12:16 -0500 Reply-To: Brian Stefans Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: Lucious Jacqeson Comments: To: Jacques Debrot MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Jacques, Just wanted to say hi and to note your comment on the list, which I thought very insightful. > mainstream poetry is fascinating to me in that it is, in several ways, in a profound state of crisis, while simultaneously seeming to be incredibly complacent (or "lukewarm" as brian puts it)--a crisis, in other words, as much *of* as *in* complacency. for the readers of mainstream poetry--& such readers have, by definition, a casual relationship to poetry--poems are almost entirely about "soul making" (thus, bill moyers)--& register the (fairly circumscribed) dissastisfactions, aspirations, & values of the most completely socialized segment of the american population (left-of-center, suburban college-educated professionals). I think people got confused by "soul-making" -- or at least your one respondant. But this idea of the state of crisis in "mainstream" poetry could have many factors, one of which is that the glory days of this "mainstream" -- Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, etc. -- still maintained some very close ties to modernism and its myths, not to mention the figures of modernism in their presence (Thomas, Auden, Stein a little bit even, the ever-looming Pound, Eliot, and even Williams for those like Jarrell who accepted him). They could derive some excitement from that, and feel a part of the "age of anxiety" even if in socially unchallenging teaching jobs. Now, that thrill is to be found in their own peers whom they, by nature, have to ignore -- i.e. "us," the so-called experimental wing (whose predecessors took them to task, though not as "citizens" but as artists, which isn't nearly as effective [this could be reversed -- artists rather than citizens?). And we have to ignore them -- ignore people like Ammons who, though "boring" often, is as much an inheritor of Williams and, say, the poetics of Thoreau as Howe would want to be, only different. Anyway, this is a willed blindness that, until now, has been generally bought into. Does this make sense? Though it seems a minor blindness, in that it only concerns the realm of the literati, it's really, I think, not -- how can we choose to ignore those who loom so large in our world and yet pretend to have anything amounting the "vision"? Even Blake, the most outside, challenged Reynolds on very intellectual grounds, as did Williams/Eliot -- these are dialectics, in a way, that create the sensation of movement. There are other factors, of course. > 2. alternative poetries are not diametrically dissimilar to mainstream poetry, but actually share/reproduce many of the symptoms of this crisis-in-complacency. this is not, however, necessarily a *bad* thing inasmuch as it might be more useful & interesting for poetry to make the symptoms of capitalism, etc. *exemplary* rather than to propose "alternatives" or "solutions". Not quite sure what you mean here. Sort of: that we should take the fact, the symptoms, of this complacency as a sort of content, especially since it's a key into larger social scales. > 3. for example, silliman's "solution" of a more locally-oriented poetic strikes me actually as extremely, if unintentionally, conservative. for one thing, it would tend, of course, to leave in place the status quo ideological & aesthetic assumptions of more ambitiously positioned poetries like language (not coincidentally). this is particularly evident for instance w/ the more noticeably regional poetic groupings like apg-- which, although it produces interesting work, is in an extremely unoriginal position vis langpo--or boston, on the other hand, which is largely frozen in an olsonian aesthetic. what exp poetry needs is in fact an "outside" -- an alternative, just for a start, to all the *puffing* that constitutes the critical discourse (for what it's worth) that surrounds it. indeed, rather than the chaos of proliferating books & presses, the reception of alt poetry & its relationship to its audience seems more & more regulated by networks of affiliation structured by a.) apprentiships by emerging poets to more established writers & b.) accreditation/initiation in/by graduate writing &/or english depts at buffalo, brown, naropa, san diego, etc. A little lost here when it comes to the conceptual stuff (the analysis seems pretty accurate): I guess the idea is of the "outside" -- which of course you put in scare quotes. I tend to think that the idea of an "outside" still suggests a sort of purity of vision that, at base, has a metaphysical foundation, and once having that, would have to be examined deeply and conclusively -- which any of us are free to do. I rather like the idea of there being a constant soiling or corrupting of this purity, that there is no outside but running among the corridors of the "inside," either as criminal or mystified adolescent or what-not, is quite interesting, a possibly anarchic, possibly very invisible activity. That is, if you choose to remain "inside" but never create a vocabulary for how you are operating there -- selectively silent, selectively lying or stealing, selectively dead-on, etc. -- this may be the closest you come to creating a system that can't be subsumed. If you are talking more realistically (i.e. "realism"), about where a poet does her work, I find I hardly think about that now that I am out of school, working unhappily, making no money from poetry. Unfortunately the outside is the inside in this case. Anyway, where would you find this "outside"? Is it something that can be rationalized? As for the local, I feel like the term is too loaded right now to know what it means -- I could venture based on how/what Silliman writes, but is what O'Hara was doing writing the "local"? Isn't A.R. Ammons writing the "local"? Isn't the local in terms of New York something of a tradition now that becomes commodified (or taken as a sign of "purity"), and couldn't one say the "local" in Atlanta becomes manifest in the very fact of it's becoming a sort of ghost double of some of the gestures of language poetry (in this way, I read Miles Champions' investigations of language poetics a sign of his confronting the "local" of London -- by creating the non-local -- a sort of gesture to the ephemeral nature of much language writing by granting some poems the air of permanent form, hence, satisfying a peculiarly English need for form that responds to class and other social issues, the need for "art," while at the same time accessing peculiarly alien meanings, etc. etc.) > 4. poetry, both mainstream & avant-garde, has become a minor genre in almost every respect. it is, for instance, telling that so few of the poets writing in the contributors's notes of fence magazine, when prompted to name their favorite books, mention poetry books. even the way the word is pronounced --po *em* --with the stress on the second syllable-- seems to attest to its anachronism. perhaps one could/should begin again by writing *pomes.* This is a depressing thought, of course. But I don't know how minor it is, actually -- if we consider it more glorified several decades ago, then why do Kenneth Rexroth's essays on "Poetry in 1965" and "Poetry in 1970" sound like they could have been written today? I think we don't have a heck of lot of ideas these days, if that means anything. But I wonder what the proliferation of good ideas would do to poetry -- would it really help. Is the idea of the "liberal ironist" (in Rorty's phrase) just not as interesting as the "ubermensch" -- is there something inherently unexciting about liberal democracy as we know it? This sounds like a stupid question, but I wonder what people are offering as alternatives when they imagine the world of poetry today as being a bunch of over-tolerant, intellectual, self-serving, rather unreflective automatons (I'm exaggerating for effect) -- i.e. liberals -- is this a call for more violent, egotistic, spontaneous, and intolerant poets? In Rortian terms again: how to we achieve scale, the effects of the sublime, without inflicting cruelty? Cheers, Brian ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 19:14:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pam Brown Subject: Re: baby baby books 2000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hi Komninos, Are you looking for insect speech ? Cheers, Pam --- komninos zervos wrote: > >I thought it might be a short form of "babydoll," > since it was easier for me > >to see why one might equate a plastic pretty molded > thing with an attractive > >woman than a baby. Unfortunately. But an online > entymology site tells me > >that "baby" as a euph. for "woman" first appeared > in 1901 (this excellent > >site does not tell me *where* it appeared), while > "doll" as a euphemism for > >same entered the stage in 1904 ("doll" and "dolly" > had previously been used > >to refer to prostitutes or "loose" women). > > > >I remember workshopping a poem by a woman who'd > titled the work "I Feel My > >Baby Moving Inside Me"--sounded to me like a disco > song title, actually > >referred to a rollicking pregnancy. > > > >Personally, I prefer endearments along the line of > "flying buttress," > >"forklift," "serving suggestion," & so on. > > thanks for this great post, the use of these words > has troubled me for some > time, being a lover of the blues, where baby, mama, > honey child, etc. are > used constantly. > but i suppose, as with all words, the intent with > which they are said is > more relevant than what is said. > komninos > > ps what is the url of the entymology site? > k > > komninos zervos > Lecturer CyberStudies > School of Art > Griffith University > Gold Coast > +61 7 55948602 > k.zervos@mailbox.gu.edu.au > ===== Web site/P.Brown - http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/7629/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 13:22:02 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" just say sorry! and don't do it again, swallow your ethnic pride http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 komninos's cyberpoetry site http://www.mp3.com/komninosblinddog komninos's blues and spoken word site http://www.navihedra.com/komninos%20zervos/infinity alternate navigation ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 01:52:20 -0500 Reply-To: Brian Stefans Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: Re: Questions about Gould Interview MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I read the interview with Henry Gould yesterday, out of curiosity since I don't know much about him except for a brief essay in Witz (on stanzas, I think that was him), and because, alas, he has been "banned" from the list. I wasn't on the list back then, haven't read @poetics nor the archives (don't particularly care to, actually, since it's only been described as an unfortunate event, and no doubt cannot be of "objective" interest to anyone for a number of years), so I could hardly comment on that. My general question about the interview, though (and this may be directed toward people who know Gould very well, care for his work, etc.), is: what does the interview actually say, i.e. what positive statements does it put forth? I think there are a lot of interesting gestures within it: for example (these are based on one reading and having the print-out next to me right now), the framing of the questions, with requirements to include names of people or concepts, gave the proceedings something of a tug-and-pull quality, which was pretty weird but fun, but I suppose a lot of fun to do (was this done over the phone, in person? that might help). This sort of activity conveys a tone and mood which has its content -- like a Oulipian game of sorts, along with the puns. I also felt that Kent Johnson was sort of trying to lead HG into some sort of more direct (say, polemical) statements about the list, about Language poetry, and about being "banned" -- this seems to me quite obvious -- and yet HG seemed to want to deflect this, even at the risk of not fulfilling all of the requirements of the question. This isn't to say that HG doesn't in fact indulge in a bit of, say, polemic, but that it didn't (when it did appear) seem to be in response to what KJ was asking. For example, there was a question about "depth" early on, which lead HG, after mentioning Beth Anderson's essay "Imperturbable Things," to conclude that if "you piggyback poetry on the hump of rationalized materialism, you've provided it with a critical pseudo-answer rather than an answer drawn from its own (poetic) depths." I think even this brief quote from HG's reply raises for me a number of problems -- for instance, in the phrase "rational materialism," what is the meaning of the word "rationalism"? Is there another type of materialism, say a "mystical" or "spiritual" materialism"? The word materialism, of course, seems to suggest something along the line of "dialectical materialism," e.g. Marxism, and from Marxism you go to Hegel, for whom the word "spirit" had a very special meaning (which survives into Adorno) -- I won't venture a definition my self, but it has something to do with the thesis/antithesis dialectic by which historical periods are able to feel their own movement, their contingency but their approach to the eternal as well, the eschatological. Anyway, I am wondering if, here, there is any particular reason to use the term "rational" with "materialism," especially if the term is being used in opposition to the statement: "... Barbara Guest has used no hooks, and this has allowed her to create a textually saturated and satisfying poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, the flickering in translucent surfaces that we call painterly for lack of a term to chart the refusal of a pseudo-depth of field that remains a ghostly presence in much of the poetry of our time." It seems to me that this statement is not, in fact, a statement grounded in any firm sense of the efficacy of "rationality" -- rationality, as an absolute (grounded either in the mathematical certainties of Plato's Timaeus or the religious certainties of Kant, or the abstract certainties of Science or the historically-ordained certainties of the State), is not being referred to here as referee in determining the qualities of this "poetic" writing, but rather (in my opinion) a rather contingent form of humanism, which is to say a humanism that itself doesn't refer to a higher authority but recognizes the provisionality -- in some sense, the irrationality -- of its own language. Is could someone "rationally" praise the "transient, ephemeral, flickering" qualities of someone's work -- isn't the idea of "rationality" predicated on clear terms, on eternal forms for thinking (i.e. "final vocabularies")? Then there is a description of some sort of "ghostly presence in the poetry of our time" -- it doesn't seem that a "rational" writer would want to mention the fact of ghosts (unless religion played a very firm role in the rational system). Maybe I'm taking the word "rational" too much to heart, but it seems to be used pejoratively in this context, and yet it seems to have been a project of poets and philosophers for some time to investigate this very term (Raymond Williams devotes three full pages to it in Keywords, right between Radical and Reactionary, which get less.) [Note: Were the Surrealists "rational" or "irrational"?] Actually, now that I look at it closer, I realize that HG seems to build a similar sort of structurally-threatened platform on Beth Anderson's essay, which didn't strike me (in my dim memory of it) as being particularly "rationalist" or "materialist" (but I'll reread it tonight). HG says (writes?): [Anderson] looked at some "painterly" poems by Stevens, Guest & others from standpoint maybe similar to Bernstein here [in his introduction to Guest's reading]. The idea [or the "premise," one presumes] is that poetry is a progressive force for a demythologized, egalitarian materialism - by analyzing and rejecting all forms of idealizing/poeticizing rhetoric. I thought it [not sure which piece of writing he means here] was really well-written, though I disagreed with its premises all the way through. Maybe if you take these premises to the limit, as Bernstein tries to do, it can be understood as "revolutionary": in a rationalist post-Enlightenment sense, uprooting all remnants of antique, medieval and romantic spiritual "aura" around language on behalf of the demystified human will. So Bernstein & others attach themselves to abstract expressionism in painting (doing away with the "hooks"), to deconstruction in criticism (doing away with the "aura"), and will round up any stray calves in the field of outsider & marginal art (even if those strays are from a different ranch) to forward this project. [On my second read-through, I realize there's a problem here. In his summation of Anderson's essay, he seems to be describing the conclusion of her writing, not the premise -- i.e. that poetry should or could be a progressive force were it to "analyze and reject.. etc." However, he refers to this idea as the "premise," which suggests that the idea is that poetry is, and always is despite its particular features, this progressive force, and by extension that it always is "analyzing and rejecting all forms... etc." If it is that latter, then the conclusions based on these premises haven't been stated. Etc. etc.] There seems to me quite a lot of ideas to unpack here, but I would like to ask some questions about what he means. For instance, when he writes of a "demythologized, egalitarian materialism," is he talking about a state of thinking, an essentially private state of thinking about the world (i.e. Nietzschean irony, "god is dead," Kierkegaardian self-creation, one's attachment to his or her dog, one's interest in wearing make-up to parties) or a physical social creation, i.e. if this poetry is written, the State will be transformed into something we can describe as embodying the principles of "demythologized, egalitarian materialism." That is, is he describing poetry as a "progressive force" for certain private world-view (can one be "progressive" about a private world-view, like Jehovah's Witnesses?), or is he classing it with movements such as Marxism or Anarchism which sought/seeks to change social structures. If it is the latter -- one sense, granted the spin he puts on the statements, that it is -- then is it really the society of the State that he is writing about, or some other society like that of the "world of letters"? Where is this "demythologized, egalitarian materialism" supposed to exist? Consequently, what does the binary that HG establishes here -- on the one side is the "demythologized, egalitarian", on the other side, the "idealizing and poeticizing" rhetoric -- imply? It's probably not worth while pursuing the term "poeticizing" since, for me at least, it's always been a very ineffective verb -- it just doesn't seem to mean much (I guess it's "anesthetizing" with a persuasive edge, such as "He poeticized what existence in Greenland for us would be like so that I would go there with him" -- i.e. it seems to suggest adding an attractive exterior to something that is otherwise mundane or unattractive, the very opposite of poetry to me). But idealizing raises a lot of issues, at least in relationship to the words "idealist" and "ideal." Actually, does it have a relationship to those words -- which suggest the idea of permanence, of the possibility of perfect good, and the individual striving for it -- or is it as distant from "ideal" as poeticize is from "poetry"? Presuming that it isn't so distant (and, if you want, that poeticize is very close to poetry, or to what poet's are supposed to do), then why is "idealize" held up in opposition to "egalitarian"? Weren't many of the "ideals" of the Romantic movement the idea (spiritually confirmed by Hegel later on) concerned with egalitarianism, the God-given truth (hence eternal) that all people were created equal, etc? Since we are dealing with binaries, would we find the opposite of "egalitarian" to be "authoritarian" and/or "hierarchical" (class wise, meritocracy, "poetocracy") -- if that's the case, then why not just say it (to avoid confusion)? (I.e. if you're not a liberal, what are you?) Looking at this a bit closer, I would ask whether one could have a "demythologized materialism" -- is materialism, or has it ever been, "mythologized"? If it has been mythologized, i.e. fetishized (though non-anthropomorphically, as we must assume) as the defining factor of the movement of "spirit" in history -- is HG then saying that Bernstein and Anderson have a goal to demythologize this reading of materialism? There are other parts to this paragraph I have questions about. For instance, HG writes that "Bernstein and others" attach themselves to Abstract Expressionism. It would be enough to ask where any substance exists to the claim that Bernstein felt any particular fondness for Abstract Expressionism, or whether he felt it was useful to him (he tends to write more of people like Arakawa/Gins and people in the constructivist/dadaist axis, as his peers like Watten have stuck to other conceptualists like Smithson, Burden, etc.). But moreso (and this is trickier, but there is substance to it): has any literary movement, or group, ever actually benefited from a relationship to Abstract Expressionism, or even particularly acknowledged it as leading them to their respective discoveries? (It seems to me that Ashbery didn't particularly like them, at least the males, O'Hara was a great fan but used it mostly early in his development [when he was equally imitating Joyce and thousands of others], and Schuyler, who was very much into the "cult of paint" of New York nearly always had a closer affinity to Fairfield Porter and certain types of landscape painting, as did F O'H.) Consequently, why would anyone want to "attach themselves to Abstract Expressionism" for the sake of the goal of "uprooting all remnants of antique, medieval and romantic spiritual 'aura' around language on behalf of the demystified human will." Was that Pollock what was doing -- isn't it, in fact, the exact opposite? Didn't the shapes and magnificence of religious iconography, not to mention the splendor of the clashes of color that one witnesses in cathedrals, inform much of the scale of the project, and wasn't putting the gesture of the individual, the man, in the middle of it creating a "mystification" of the human will all the more? (This is thumbnail interpretation right now.) Imagining the Abstract Expressionists as inheritors of the Surrealist project, is the image of the human psyche they present more or less mystified? And what is HG suggesting the "hooks" are here -- does he mean figuration? So is the sum of his statement here: the Abstract Expressionists did away with using figuration and narrative in their paintings because they felt they created religious and idealist subtexts to their work concerning the human will and provided ease of viewing by a popular audience, and this provided Bernstein and his friends at the time with the idea of taking figuration and narrative out of their poems, in their similar goal of doing away with religious conceptions of mankind and the nature of the will." Well, there are many ways one can take this (it doesn't sound too bad now, but needs work), but it seems to me that Freud had pretty much "demystified" the human will -- at least divorced it from any ideas of elective salvation, indivisible structure, eternal qualities, "essences," etc. -- and created the context for the great jokes that we, the ironic artists that succeeded his and others' battles with metaphysics, can make regarding it, and that the Abstract Expressionists -- who were, as the name suggests "expressionists," not constructivists (i.e. concerned with the agonic will) -- were not very ahead in that game, and in fact rendered the conceptual (or "rational") component of art further "medieval" with their work. I feel I could go on -- this essay is chock-full of phrases that don't seem to add up, but probably could with a little work. For example, what's a "rationalist post-Enlightenment" sense? Does he mean, perhaps, the particular spirit of rationality (or the claim to rationality) of post-Structuralists? Is it "deconstruction" that Benjamin claims "did away with the aura" in art? If the "aura" in art is the sense of its permanence, it's one-of-a-kindness, it's presence in the eternal frame of a history and scale of values, wasn't this "aura" being "done away with" long before deconstruction? Does Bernstein, in this statement, or in his poetry, ever actually "deconstruct" meaning (or make any claims that meaning is so entirely textual that it can't be found and kicked around) or does he "ironize" it (i.e. highlight its contingencies when it is masquerading as permanence -- "psuedo-depth-of-field")? What's the difference, here, between Enlightenment rationality and post-Enlightenment rationality, and does it matter for the sake of this particular argument? Anyway, I only ask these questions -- rather long-windedly, I confess -- for the sake of showing that this interview has significance in regards to its contexts (HG's personal context, for example, in anticipation of his new book, or the state of poetry discourse as its carried out among "us", or the state of why we claim not to be very well understood by others, the state of the list), in terms of larger (or maybe smaller, if you think this trite) frames of discourse that are of interest to people not personally involved (philosophically, politically "from a different ranch" [does he mean "race" here?]), in the way interviews can serve to entertain or project ideas, etc. I'm approaching it as a sort of Curious George (a touch of mischief, of course, but really trying to understand what's going on here) -- I'm not a trained philosopher, kind of a dilettante, and have no doubt screwed up much of the above. There's a lot of interesting language in the interview, I feel, and interesting gestures within it, but I can't help feeling, myself, that it needs "unpacking" before it is to be "understood" -- which isn't to say it has to be "rational" by any means (whatever rational means, of course), just a little more nuanced, so that it's rhetoric doesn't brush so roughly -- perhaps just "clearer" so the reader can trust that he's not always going for laughs and easy kills. But that's just my opinion, I'm sure many of you who know him know what he means by these things. Any idears? (Please forward this if you'd like.) Brian ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 15:35:52 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: geraldine mckenzie Subject: Re: baby baby Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >but i suppose, as with all words, the intent with which they are said is >more relevant than what is said. >komninos > Can these two be separated so neatly? As I've been gardening rather than reading, I haven't the energy to explore this point. Those in the northern hemispere making "good use of this winter" might respond - I'd also question privileging intent over 'what is said' - does this mean content? if so, content and intent are only a piece of the picture. (metaphors come in handy when you're feeling lazy). In relation to the 'baby' etc terminology, this attitude seems precisely the wall many of us have bashed our heads on over the years - people (to be suitably vague) will claim that because a word is used with the best of intentions (as gauged by the user)it cannot be offensive. I feel that this is such a familiar argument I don't need to spell it out. As this is my first posting to the list since the New Year, I wish all the best to everyone. I am unsentimental (I think), the new year has no great significance and 2000 isn't the first year of the millenium, as I understand it, but, on Saturday, watching more TV than I usually do, the worldwide coverage of dancers, musicians, acrobats, just people, the spirit that seemed abroad was unusually moving. I find faith a huge leap, impossible really, but there were glimpses of what it can be like that day. Already a memory rather than an experience. regards, Geraldine McKenzie ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:28:19 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: baby stuff In-Reply-To: <01f201bf56f7$93381420$e34eccd1@hassen> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 4:06 PM -0500 1/4/00, hassen wrote: >arielle > >>> I'm actually really interested in studying pedophilia and the way it >comes up in our culture<< > >you know, i've long wondered if there's pedophiliac >connection/implication/etc. w/the practice of shaving. esp. women. esp. >legs. > >i've no idea the history, when it began, etc. but am quite curious. would >love to hear more. > >hassen i think you are right on about that, esp in the US women are abnormally infantilized and this is a prime piece of evidence. a woman who speaks without giggling, self-deprecating affect, and who keeps her body hair is seen as threatening. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 00:09:54 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Tills Subject: Re: end of century MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Been reading these last few months: VEXT, Aldon Nielsen--first book of poetry I took up after several month hiatus; clicked and clicked and clicked, and I turned on again. Many Thanks, Aldon! MEDIEVAL, Steven Farmer--Here's one brims with substance, authenticity; will see more and more of these. THE LAST AVANT-GARDE, David Lehman--Have commented earlier. PARADISE, Ron Silliman (re-re-readin)--never seems to fail me. THE LION BRIDGE, Michael Palmer--Selected 1972-1995. Wow, yep! FIRST INTENSITY, #12--including Bromige, Ratcliffe, yep. TRIPWIRE, #2--another purchased "then," readin now, and liking, e.g., Bellamy, Cabri, Toscano, for starters. BLACK BOX CUTAWAY, Susan Gevirtz--Glides on infinite sheets of poise; "crosstalk," "attentuation," "line noise," no, so clean packets throughout. "Eight Untitled Sonnets," by Elizabeth Willis (in HOW2, I think)--fabulous! Genuine, and genuinely refreshing. Poetry by Pam Rehm (must go find again, indeed)--amazing sophistication; again, a quality and depth of "substance," or whatever, too. Especially enamored of the discipline to follow/pursue object relations dimensions, depths, whatever, and through an endlessly intriguing house of "mirrors." Steve Tills ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:50:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: <38717CA0.3F103B65@idt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Currently reading Nicole Brossard, _She Would be the First Sentence of my Next Novel_. Mercury Diane di Prima, _Freddie Poems_, Eidolon Shusako Endo, _Silence_, Taplinger Gail Scott, _My Paris_, Mercury Charles Watts and Edward Byrne, _The Recovery of the Public World_, Talonbooks Linda Wagner-Martin, _"Favored Strangers": Gertrude Stein and her family_, Rutgers Steven Watson, _Prepare for Saints_, Random House Daniel Pinkwater, _5 Novels_, Farrar Strauss Edo van Belkom, ed., _Northern Dreamers_, Quarry Press Jerome Charyn, _Loustal: une romance_, Mille et une nuits Raymond Queneau, _The Blue Flowers_, New Directions Erin Moure, _Pillage Laud_, Moveable Text Dacia Maraini, _The Silent Duchess_, Quarry Jim Jones, _Use my Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families_, ECW Idries Shah, _The Hundred Tales of Wisdom_, Octagon Paco Ignacio Taibo II, _Calling all Heroes_, Plover J.M. Coetzee, _Boyhood_, Secker & Warburg Aldona Jonaitis, ed., _Chiefly Feasts: the Enduring Kawkiutl Potlach_, U. Washington Robert Richard, _A Johnny Novel_, Mercury Joao Capistrano de Abreu, _ Chapters of Brazil's Colonial History: 1500-1800_, Oxford Scott Watson, _Stan Douglas_, Phaidon David Underwood, _Oscar Niemeyer and the Architecture of Brazil_, Rizzoli Amy Cappellazzo & Elizabeth Lieata, eds., _In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations_, Niagara U. Cees Nooteboom, _Roads to Santiago_, Harcourt Brace Barry McKinnon, _A Walk,_ Gorse and some mags George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:14:08 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: baby In-Reply-To: <20000104150248.19701.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ive been told by an animal behaviorist that humans are prematurely born, and that that accounts for some of our mating behavior like kissing, or erotic attraction to the female breast, which is not found in other parts of the mammalian kingdom or even among our cousin primates. this wd account for all manner of regressive behavior during courtship rituals, including mutual infantilization through rhetoric. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 21:44:55 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed I rarely post these days, but I'll weigh in on this one: (in no particular order) *Anselm Hollo, Caws & Causeries *Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter/Dead Souls *Ted Berrigan, On The Level Every Day *Ed Foster, Answerable to None *Clark Coolidge, Now It's Jazz *Eleni Sikelianos, Blue Guide *Laura Wright, essay on Carla Harryman published in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (pardon my memory of Spanish spelling here) *Stephen Ellis, White Gravity *Peter Bagdonovich, Who the Devil Made It (interviews with film directors) ...& lots of poetry that I find myself coming back to, including various books by Jackson MacLow, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Gizzi, Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan, etc. movies include *Spike Jonze dir., Being John Malkovich CDs include *Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington *Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Trust *John Coltrane, My Favorite Things The list goes on... & I'll add a shameless plug for my two recent books, Near To from Poetry New York & Desire Series from Dead Metaphor Press Happy New Year Mark DuCharme ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 22:01:34 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: End of Century Reading Material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >On another note, we sent out 135 copies of the "Atlanta" issue of our >zine, "Mirage #4/Period[ical]," after the flood of e-mail requesting >them, to the various characters on this list, and to date eight of >you have written back saying you've received it. This reminds me of >the way Lear mistakenly felt Cordelia ungrateful, and how, before, I >always faulted Shakespeare for making him, Lear, so quick to jump to >sorry conclusions. In any case, you wonderful eight people have >warmed my heart turning it into a beacon of light and hope for the >year 2000. You know who you are! > >-- Kevin Killian Okay, I'm one of the silent lurkers here, I admit (not because I haven't enjoyed the issue, but because I feel I'm still digesting it & didn't feel I was at a point where I was ready to make any sort of serious "response"-- certainly to the list-- other than talking about it w/ a couple friends. But I'll take this (belated) opportunity to thank Kevin & Dodie for _generously_ offering copies to the list, & to definitely recommend the issue to anybody who hasn't seen it. The issue underscores, I think, the importance (which Ron Silliman pointed to) of the local. Those of us who are in localities with (that is, in contact with) other poets should definitely give some thought to the role of the local in shaping (or perhaps more accurately: being a CATALYST for) both poetry & poetics. & Perhaps I'll have more to say on this later.... Mark DuCharme ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 02:01:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matthew Blevins Subject: Re: Lucious Jacqeson Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Jacques wrote: >mainstream poetry is fascinating to me in that it is, in several ways, in a >profound state of crisis, while simultaneously seeming to be incredibly >complacent (or "lukewarm" as brian puts it)--a crisis, in other words, as >much *of* as *in* complacency. for the readers of mainstream poetry--& >such readers have, by definition, a casual relationship to poetry--poems >are almost entirely about "soul making" (thus, bill moyers)--& register the >(fairly circumscribed) dissastisfactions, aspirations, & values of the most >completely socialized segment of the american population (left-of-center, suburban college-educated professionals). I write: I'm curious how you mean "most completely socialized." I think of college education to be a process of DE-socialization in some ways. While certain values are passed on, higher education in many fields also includes considerable meta-knowledge, knowledge which in typical postmodern fashion creates (or should create) a certain critical self-awareness of one's own culture and assumptions. A simple example would be comparing high school history (heros and patriots) to college history (murderers and slavers). What I'm saying is that, at least in my own experience, college is a place that breaks down a person's modernist ideas, rather than building them. I assume, however, that you are refering to those who are more business oriented (vs academics) and/or who still cling to dead metanarratives like "the american dream". These are the people who read Jewel...? I've been reading Bin Ramke of late, and I think my particular fondness for him derives from the way he seems to be aware of this modern-postmodern tension. He can take a positivist, modernist narrative or image and slip under it to find its dark lining. Reading to your child at bedtime becomes a darkly manipulative act. Science and education become liars. How marvelous. -Blevins ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:07:14 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >just say sorry! and don't do it again, swallow your ethnic pride I have to admit that I myself am 100% All-American Dutch with no admixture of English, Irish, Greek, or any of the other varieties of human inbreeding. (no, this isn't a response to the "class" thread). The joke was about being stupid, stoopid. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:57:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >just say sorry! and don't do it again, swallow your ethnic pride This person is telling an uptight mistaken polcor joke, right? George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:12:31 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Mills, Billy" Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills Hi Like it or not, this is a joke about stupidity, or to be precise, about a racial/racist stereotype about the stupid Irish. A long tradition of such dating back to Gerald of Wales, through Spenser and on to Punch cartoons. Part of the colonial past. And there it should stay. A question: would the moderator have allowed this through if the protagonist were Afro-American? A woman? Jewish? If not, why was this considered OK? Billy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 10:59:33 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Dorow Subject: Re: Millennial readings Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed I couldn´t resist pitching in: Books The collected books of Jack Spicer Johann August Apel, Friedrich Laun: Gespensterbuch (the source of The Black Rider, and what Shelley, Byron, Mary Woolstonecraft-Godwin et al. read to each others in 1861, great stuff) Heimito von Doderer: Frühe Prosa Charles Olson: Selected Poems Bernhard Cohen: Tourism Ludwig Marcuse: Obszön. Geschichte einer Entrüstung Deleuze: Logik des Sinns, Differenz und Wiederholung, Kino II Das Zeitbild. Schreibheft 53 (which has a very enjoyable version of "Ulysses" in the form of sonnets in them. Here´s the first: "Telemachus Two students standing on a tower (He, Mulligan: I Dedalus) Are echoing the ancient hour (Antinous: Telemachus) My mother´s ghost haunts the envirrons Her silence singing with the sirens. Buck holds the mirror of my fear, Pouring quicksilver in my ear. Why must we live in silly Ireland? While he flees to his Omphalos And I hug art to intercross, The sea is narrowing our island For him, his father´s burier, For me, my mother´s murderer. Music: Trashmonk: Mona Lisa Overdrive Underworld: Beaucoup Fish Grateful Dead: Dick´s Picks 1-5 Randy Newman: Bad Love ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:01:20 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Emily Lloyd Subject: Re: shaving pedophilia Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Hassen--I'm more inclined to imagine that women shaving has its roots more in inflating (so-called) differences between the sexes than in returning them to a little-unhairy-girl state as a pedophilic fetish. I think that even a shaved, naive, little-girl-acting woman wouldn't be especially attractive to a true pedophile: it's just not the genuine article, and pedophilia seems to be about that first and foremost. I don't think men dressing up as babies and getting spanked is related to pedophilia, either... A side note: not long ago I had, linked to my site, an essay on the curious lack of a NAWGLA (when we've got a NAMBLA, which I support). It was questions-n-theory based, as I'm not a girl-lover myself (although it did contain a admiring reference to Judith Vittet, who plays Miette in *The City of Lost Children*). Among other things, I was interested in the way that age-of-consent laws can be used homophobically; I'd just seen on one trashy news show or another a story about a young (14, actually--not in the "accepted" "pedophilia" range, which goes to 12, 13 max.) woman with an older (late twenties) female lover. The 14-yr-old had instigated the relationship, was perfectly happy with it, etc., but when it was found out, the cops were called and spent much of the show giving her the ol' "You realize what that lady did to you was BAD" and "That woman is a very confused lady" & "You were taken advantage of, you know" schtick, because they refused to acknowledge even the possibility that a 14-yr-old could choose to enter a lesbian relationship. At any rate, the girl's only care was that her lover not be harmed or arrested, which the cops of course promised, just about the time their cop buddies were harming and arresting the lover. In my own life I've seen a friend, 24, lose his lover, 16, to age of consent rules resorted to as a legal means of "trying to make our son straight" (No Date, Go Straight chimes in my ear). The NAWGLA site generated tons of mail, none from folks angry about the site. I deleted it because most people wanted something more than theory (My goodness! What's WRONG with those people who want more than THEORY? said the academic), and redirected those who had written to more appropriate (it's all relative) sites. That's my two cents on pedophilia. If this becomes a thread, we should maybe watch it/be careful, as many folks, I imagine, do not want to hear about this, or at least don't come to poetics to do so. best, em ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:25:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: Re: Lucious Jacqeson Comments: To: bstefans@earthlink.net In-Reply-To: <001801b41e5e$24341c40$1957f6d1@bway.net> from "Brian Stefans" at Jan 1, 1990 01:12:16 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thought I'd offer some response to this wonderful dialogue of Brian's & Jacques': According to Brian Stefans: > > Now, that thrill is to be found in their own peers whom they, by nature, > have to ignore -- i.e. "us," the so-called experimental wing (whose > predecessors took them to task, though not as "citizens" but as artists, > which isn't nearly as effective [this could be reversed -- artists rather > than citizens?). And we have to ignore them -- ignore people like Ammons > who, though "boring" often, is as much an inheritor of Williams and, say, > the poetics of Thoreau as Howe would want to be, only different. Anyway, > this is a willed blindness that, until now, has been generally bought into. One way to look at what an Ammons is doing vis a vis WC Williams is through this historical analogy. In 1851, on the heals of Daniel Webster's negotiation of the Fugitive Slave Law "compromise," Emerson gave one of his most vitriolic anti-slavery speeches, in which he made this keen observation regarding Webster's on-going celebration of "democracy": "He [Webster] praises Adams and Jefferson, but it is a *past* Adams and Jefferson his mind can entertain. A present Adams and Jefferson he would denounce. So with the eulogies of liberty in his writings - they are sentimentalism and youthful rhetoric." Likewise, Ammons entertains a past WCW - those aspects of his work that have already been assimilated comfortably by a very large portion of the culture - the chattiness, the more facilely (as opposed to riskily) improvisational. But of course there's still much in Williams's work which continues to risk something unknown, and with this, as far as I can see from a work like GARBAGE, Ammons has no truck. The point being, Williams is experimental precisely for the things Ammons can't accomodate. This reminds me of something I just read in Adorno’s *Aesthetic Theory*: "That aesthetics, in its desire to be more than chatter, wants to find its way out into the open, entirely exposed, imposes on it the sacrifice of each and every security that it has borrowed from the sciences; no one expressed this necessity with greater candor than the pragmatist John Dewey....The openess of artworks--their critical relation to the previously established, on which their quality depends--implies the possibility of complete failure, and aesthetics alienates itself from its object the moment that by its own form it deceives on this score. That no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and anxiety, which are totally foreign to the contemporary self-understanding of science, subjectively registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art. The insight that perfect artworks scarcely exist brings into view the vanishing point of this vulnerability" (AT 353-4). It’s interesting that when he gets to the aesthetic Adorno appeals to Dewey, in this context especially since Dewey is such an important theoretical source for WCW’s experimentalism. Which brings me to my next point, regarding this issue of the local. Brian has this to say in response to Jacques and thinking of Silliman: > As for the local, I feel like the term is too loaded right now to know what > it means -- I could venture based on how/what Silliman writes, but is what > O'Hara was doing writing the "local"? Isn't A.R. Ammons writing the > "local"? Isn't the local in terms of New York something of a tradition now > that becomes commodified (or taken as a sign of "purity"), and couldn't one > say the "local" in Atlanta becomes manifest in the very fact of it's > becoming a sort of ghost double of some of the gestures of language poetry > (in this way, I read Miles Champions' investigations of language poetics a > sign of his confronting the "local" of London -- by creating the > non-local -- a sort of gesture to the ephemeral nature of much language > writing by granting some poems the air of permanent form, hence, satisfying > a peculiarly English need for form that responds to class and other social > issues, the need for "art," while at the same time accessing peculiarly > alien meanings, etc. etc.) Brian may be right that "the local" is too loaded - i.e. worn out - as a term, at least for the moment. But it’s worth pointing out that Williams’ local has very little to do with "local color" – it’s much closer to Dewey’s "local" which, as a concept, allowed him to a) privilege a multi-ethnic "American Idiom" and b) to treat "whatever happens in the course of writing as revelation," as Duncan once put it. The emphasis here is on *whatever* - sure, Ammons let’s some stuff in that, say, Donald Justice of Mary Jo Salter wouldn’t. But what does that matter to me or thee when compared to all the possibilities which, in the act of writing, clearly don’t qualify as "poetry" to him? This is where Brian’s speculation about the Atlanta poets’ "local" or Miles Champion’s "local" becomes really interesting – since the local is en-acted in Champion’s work (I’m hypothesizing here and don’t know the work well enough to really say) in that moment when a reified idea of London-ness is dropped into the muddy stream. Then: > I think we don't have a heck of > lot of ideas these days, if that means anything. But I wonder what the > proliferation of good ideas would do to poetry -- would it really help. Is > the idea of the "liberal ironist" (in Rorty's phrase) just not as > interesting as the "ubermensch" -- is there something inherently unexciting > about liberal democracy as we know it? I wonder what people are offering as > alternatives when they imagine the world of poetry today as being a > bunch of over-tolerant, intellectual, self-serving, rather unreflective > automatons (I'm exaggerating for effect) -- i.e. liberals... Hey, I’ve got lot’s of ideas! And mine are a real pittance compared to Nate Mackey’s or Kamau Brathwaite’s (read their new book!) or a whole bunch of others. The point being: Rorty inspires self-defeating gestures. I like Rorty well enough but there’s something terribly wrong with his pragmatism, as compared to Dewey’s or Ralph Ellison’s or, I dare say, Susan Howe’s. He makes democracy sound incredibly boring! Rorty’s liberal ironist is largely a private, rather than public or social, experimenter. He doesn’t really allow, except in a tacit, ineffectual way, for those moments in which, as Ellison puts it, it is necessary "to make chaos out of no longer tenable forms of order." His "solidarity" is entirely to solid. Brian asks, > is this a call for more violent, egotistic, > spontaneous, and intolerant poets? In Rortian terms again: how to we > achieve scale, the effects of the sublime, without inflicting cruelty? > No, I don’t think so - just that we not shy away from Adorno’s "openess of artworks--their critical relation to the previously established, on which their quality depends" or the implied "possibility of complete failure." A pleasure, -Mike. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:38:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Correction in Gould Interview Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I goofed on one word in my post on the interview -- the statement should read: ... I guess it's "aestheticizing" with a persuasive edge... I kind of made up a word there. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 09:57:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Re: from Daniel Bouchard / Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: <016101bf5714$45826880$79ce28c3@overgrowngarden> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Stephen Jay Gould addressed this whole question, by the way, about 2 years ago, in his book, Questioning the millennium : a rationalist's guide to a precisely arbitrary countdown. He concluded, in agreement with Lawrence and Dan, that the real turn of the millenium will be January 1, 2001. However, he took the position (with which i agree) that since popular culture and the vast majority of individuals were definitely commited to Jan. 1, 2000 as the turning, it would be pedantic and silly not to acknowledge that it is also "real" After all, the *whole* thing is socially constructed, and it starts getting very strange if you imagine that these things somehow exist out there as "real" phenomena in the physical universe! (Don't start me talking: one of my major beliefs is that units of time have been fetishized in a very destructive and stupid way: "the sixties", "the 20th century", that seventies show, the tranquilized 'fifties, the Me Decade.....which then extended out into the preposterous and confused fetishization of "generational" politics: Boomers, generations X, this gen and that gen.... Jeeez...Many of these things function as masks to hide much more (in my opinion) *real* human and histoical realities...Such as class, social dynamics, political commitment..) As i say, *don't* get me started! Oh and by the way: the Sunday New York Times (which a socialist friend of mine used to call, "two pounds of lies" as he picked it up with his coffee and bagel on a sunday morning) had an article about Cuba on Jan. 2nd, about how the Cuban government will be celebrating the turn of the millenium on Jan.1 2001.... The article was really the usual NYT excuse to fling a lot of putrid right-wing snide mud at Cuba... (also typical of the NYT, it is a rather stupid article that doesn't mention that this whole issue has been noticed by lots of people besides the Cubans...) post scriptum: recently Erika and i thought to weigh the Sunday NYT, in honor of our friend john V., and it turns out to be closer to 4 and a half pounds of lies!! --mark On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Lawrence Upton wrote: > Yes; 1999 was the 99th year of the twentieth century and the 999th year of > the millennium; and we are now in the 100th and 1000th years respectively; > but people become really quite aggressive if you point it out. > > L > > | Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 13:53:40 -0500 > | From: Daniel Bouchard > | Subject: Re: end of century reading material > | Mime-Version: 1.0 > | > | Isn't there another year left of the 20th century? And therefore a year to > go > | to the new millenium also? > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 08:32:04 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: neglected to add--- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" for folks w/o project muse access, you can reach an ascii version of my pmc piece at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/10.1amato.html /// best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 07:45:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: for list moderator MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Chris. Let me withdraw that last post if I may. I'm always irked by posts that have nothing to do with poetics and here I am fanning the flames.... leonard ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 10:55:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Atlanta: a few distinctions! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII i really haveta protest just a bit here... since members of the APG are *extremely* different and individual in their work and perspectives, this should be taken as just the point of view of myself, and no one else.... but when Brian writes: "As for the local, I feel like the term is too loaded right now to know what it means -- I could venture based on how/what Silliman writes, but is what O'Hara was doing writing the "local"? Isn't A.R. Ammons writing the "local"? Isn't the local in terms of New York something of a tradition now that becomes commodified (or taken as a sign of "purity"), and couldn't one say the "local" in Atlanta becomes manifest in the very fact of it's becoming a sort of ghost double of some of the gestures of language poetry" ---that's when Mark reaches for (if not his revolver) at least some modest attempts to make genuine and care-taking distinctions: Some members of the APG (remember this is entirely MY reading): --Randy Prunty is exploring "other sense" poetic modes, as he recently demonstrated at the New Orleans Review conference: poetry based in large part on senses other than sight and sound. Nothing very LanpPo there. And he has done some amazing work with pieces to be performed by groups of readers. Not really LangPo at all. --Much of John Lowther's work involves a systematic exploration of modes of cognition in relation to poetry, (see his long poem on "art object and art process" in the atlanta mag "108"); and has also been doing stuff with long narrative forms...Even the "Readings" series (2 sections have appeared as chapbooks) uses a panoply of sound-based and linguistic maniuplations for reasons that have *nothing* to do with the politics of performance and innovation contained in Watten or Andrews... Sure, because we know each other, i know from conversation the importance for his way of thinking of artists like David Antin and Marcel Duchamp, who have influneced his thinking and practice in very NonLangPo directions....But any careful reader will work out some of the same perceptions just from paying attention to his work... --Dana Lustig is closer to the narrative lyric modes of the "NY School" than to any current that is associated with LangPo. --John L. has just posted to this list describing and quoting some recent chapbooks by James Sanders....Boy, is James ever not a LangPo't. His exploration of narrative/cinematic modes, his creation of poem-objects and poem-posters, his use of vizpo graphic elements at an extremely high level of complexity.... Well, he just ain't, not even close.. --Many other individuals linked to the group, Karen Phillips, Rebecca Hyman, Colleen Dunne, Brian McGrath, Marla Jernigan, myself, all do work that is obviously contemporary, but no more "langpo" than tons of other contemporary poets known to this list, Susan Schultz, say, Jena Osman, Karen Mac Cormack, Aldon Nielsen........ I invite you to suggest to some of those folks that they are merely "ghost doubles of language poetry" --mark ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 11:35:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: One other Atlanta distinction... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Oh, on refection, i should say this: i just posted to the list objecting to the phrase "Ghost double of language poetry" (used in reference to the atlanta poets group) ..i realize that the intent of this phrase was probably not to equate us with "langpo" but to refer to the (undeniable) fact that recently a couple of other people have used us as a kind of stand-in for Langpo, in discussions on the list...Ghost double in that sense So my point was not to impugn the person who typed that phrase (Brian Stefans? i no longer have the original post on my computer)..But to describe how the folks in the group each do their own thing....Because as long as phrases like this keep popping up offhandedly, they will reinforce this fallacious "equation" in people's minds... --mark ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 08:42:57 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marla Jernigan Subject: Sincerely vexed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Poetics List, Mudslinging seems to be the order of the day. Dear Atlanta Poets, thank you for inviting me to a meeting. It was a lot of fun as I said in my post here. But I would to tell those of you on this list who have dropped me notes; I am not a part of the Atlanta Poets Group. I just live here too, o.k.? I wouldn't have thought that it was impeachable to have written something about meeting them and having a blast being introduced to _Finnegans Wake_ but, apparently, it is. I'm not sure that I'm happy about not having poetry friends to hang out with frequently, that's just the way it given my life these days. Still for those of you so intent upon pigeonholing the APG I would like to ask that you take a moment and look in the mirror, I think that you'll find that you, like me, and like these folks in town aren't God's gift to the future of poetry. Sincerely vexed, Marla __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 13:37:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Unoriginal Poems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable { p o e t i x } it's good to see that the poundian tradition of authority and "global veiwpoint" is alive and well on the list ---- and not just that, but = that from a small sampling of a few of anything, the whole can be known, categoried and pinned to a poetic taxonomy here are 2 pieces of mine, which, being mine, must be in a very = 'unoriginal position vis langpo' ---- alas, the formating will probably be mangled, = but that may be all to the good, making the poems look more "wacky" and = "crazy" and hence avant __________________________________ to enact (20 situational poems with props) * FOR CONDUCTING RODS standing stretch out each to make the circuit =20 speak [any poem that meant something to you] * FOR A WHEEL MADE OF GLASS grit there and hiss here (points) * FOR A BUCKET, A NOOSE AND HANDFUL OF SAND connect the pulse=20 and turn signal lift the calendar=20 page to last time * FOR 4 OBJECTS UNDER 10 LBS ask me about this tomorrow it's no ask me about this tomorrow it's late =BE=BE no =BE=BE put some newspaper down * FOR A NAKED MAN, DEAF, COVERED IN ASHES=20 you, to be=20 my ice cream cone sprinkles and smoke * FOR THREE LEFT HANDS 1. "O.K."=20 2. "asshole" 3. "is there any orange ? this is flat" * FOR A PAPER BAG OF SPIDERS the woman lifts her long auburn hair and lets it fall in slow cascades=20 snow on the screen * FOR DELIVERY VAN NEEDING TO TURN AROUND IN MEDIUM TRAFFIC chalk, shoes, ribbon * FOR HOT WATER BOTTLE in the belly of the beast shriveled lust=20 * FOR TWO CANS AND A STRING BETWEEN THEM things have been difficult lately=20 you know I know you know it too * FOR A HAMMER Cb {blink} * FOR ANYONE WHO BELIEVES IN ANY GOD TO LISTEN TO a puzzle so difficult that... (?) * FOR A PIECE OF PAPER AND A KNIFE this is the last meal that can be shared with the anyone by anyone=20 RSVP * FOR A PAIR OF MISMATCHED SHOES (NARROW, SIZE 8) sound of an owl they look to be soft and friendly birds to nestle at one's cheek and throat * FOR A GHOST OR A POLITICIAN AND BUTTER KNIFE (sexist) wrists=20 with we=20 can mingle * FOR A PUDDLE OF WATER THAT WAS ICE OR A PUDDLE OF ICE THAT WAS PISS foglights (whisper) * FOR THE EYES OF ANYONE IN THE 4TH DIMENSION the back of my hand * FOR A LENGTH OF ROPE INSUFFICIENT TO HANG ANYONE who's on yr side now ? * FOR A WOMAN WHO CAN'T STOP LAUGHING=20 3.3333333333333333... drafty interiors etc. * FOR THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE CURTAIN everyone's face at yr funeral _________________________ final draft on the resolution of art object and art process {music} for davidantin note the slow revolution of the cylinders =20 the variance between them as i ride the pedals note the pedal apparatus itself three wide footpedals=20 as one wd find on a manual sewing machine but three instead of one=20 each larger than a sewing machine's broader than yr foot is long=20 you must build up momentum on one first say here on the left then switch to the center pedal while the right keeps on and you have to pay attention b/c if any one stops after a minute all motion will cease pedals cylinders rows all of it and every element is crucial to operation now it's easy to imagine the operator's seat not as it is here basically a tractor seat you cd imagine it as somehow more = comfortable with contours and such and some will construct it this way=20 and one can imagine it taking on baroque levels of ornament but consider this the necessary skeleton upon which such impulses wd = build at this stage the maker is the only operator but that will change presently consider these three cylinders their vertical axes unhooked from the gears and without any of their rods one is struck by = their seeming uniformity in size by the pattern of holes that dot their = surface there is always a question about this pattern and how determinate it is this is a complex question what happened was this ; consecutive telephone poles on north highland = ave. were mapped roughly onto one sheet of paper whose length was = slightly longer than the outside area of each of the three cylinders laid end to = end and flat this mapping was a charcoal rubbing of the telephone poles=20 one at a time until all of the available map space the paper had = been used the map was then cut into three equal parts and glued=20 one part to the template for each cylinder where the map showed both corners of a staple from one of these poles = it got marked and numbered from these numbered marks 36 were selected for each cylinder with = the selection principle being primarily that the holes drilled wd be = more spread out than bunched together this intention was continually challenged by the specifics of the map now to know all of that isn't essential I tell you to head off the inevitable question the cylinders' revolutions are varied b/c each is driven by its own footpedal when it's in action it's difficult to determine which drives which b/c = the cylinders don't start until all pedals are in motion and there's the difficulty caused by the counting gears which have the following complications to be considered one count of a footpedal is equal to 3 motions forward-back-forward = or back-forward-back and obviously these two succeed one another each pedal shifts between 3 gear ratios 3:1 3:2 and 3:3=20 these are counting gears in that the operator does not shift them each gear shifts only when a count of 108 has been reached on its drive pedal nor do the gears shift in easily predictable sequence it wd take a chart to illustrate the shift pattern suffice to say that if cylinder X reaches a shift point the = determining variables are which gears the other two cylinders are in and = their relations sequentially to the cylinder that has reached shift point this somewhat arbitrarily but equitably determines that cylinder = X's gear shift up from 1st to 2nd for instance or down from 1st to 3rd the gear mechanism is quite complex but the operator having made it = will understand it enough will even pointlessly know which pedal drives which cylinder if we're clear about the footpedals counting gears and cylinders we = need to turn our attention to the rods the classes of tips the rows and the selection of their keys the rods are relatively straightforward each is just under 3" in = length and something less than an inch around on one end a screw extends another =BE's of an inch=20 on the other a flattened head something like a nail but with a threaded = hole in its middle the screw end gets inserted into one of the holes on the surface of a cylinder and twisted tight until it's tight note once a rod has been screwed in it will protrude about 2.5" from = the surface of the cylinder if one depresses the rod it'll catch and then only protrude about = =BE's of an inch press again and the rod'll release and regain its full height ok with all the holes on all the cylinders filled by rods we're = ready to begin putting the tips on them now i neglected to point out that each of the holes on each of the cylinders was after the template was removed numbered from 1 to 108 these numbers were not applied in any specific order save that no two consecutive numbers are found on the same cylinder here's a chart of the tip placement=20 as you can see it's divided into 4 groups of 27 and above each group is = a heading these headings are 'ball and spring' 'brush' 'mallet' and 'stick' these designations are only approximate and each tip is a unique item = not replicated by any other tip in use ball and spring tips are what they sound like they might be a spring = or a wire with one screw end for the rod as all the tips have and the = other end driven into or somehow attached to an object such as a small rubber = ball ball of wood or ceramic in each case the materials vary in size weight strength of spring brush tips might be strands of wire or heads of paintbrushes plastic bristles or even just one strand of stiff rope or cord mallet tips are formed something like a drummer's mallet but the = heads of them might be of felt wood metal plastic or even stone=20 and stick tips might range from modified drumsticks to just about any straight and reasonably hard object of the appropriate length this one is made of a section of rubber tubing with all the tips screwed in the cylinders have a pincushion look to = them or perhaps more apt wd be a comparison to the little barrel inside = a music box amassing a collection of a usable tips and their maintenance is a time-consuming and careful job=20 they can become damaged and break now and then and they should on = occasion be replaced simply so that no tip is always in operation for these reasons it's useful to have a number of spares on hand when any tip is joined to a rod combined they protrude a fixed 5.5" = from the surface of the cylinder this fact is very important as on the opposite side of the cylinders = from the operator's seat these tips must be of just the right length to = strike the keys=20 before we consider the variety of keys let's take a look at the rows = which hold them and the assembly that generates their movement the rows themselves are simply strips of metal with small vise grips = evenly spaced along them for holding the keys in place both sides are scored such that these large screws at top and bottom as = they turn cause the row itself to move up or down you can see now why the cylinders are placed this high above the ground why the operator's seat is so high also =20 it's so that the rows can pass completely below the bottom edge of the cylinders before they begin to be raised again their motion is as with everything else here determined by the = footpedal that drives the cylinder to which they are linked =20 initially each row is loaded from the top and they can be loaded with = either side down but once operation has begun they move down or up in response = to the footpedal the chart i referenced in regard to the counting gears is again used = here but with each of the designations changed when a shift point is reached by a pedal a new gear assignment is = generated there's also the potential that the row will begin to move in the = opposite direction from what it was doing until that moment as happens now and then a row makes it all the way to the top or bottom = it automatically switches direction and proceeds down or up respectively finally the keys must be considered unlike the tips their placement is not mandated and their composition = is in no way grouped beforehand the parameters that must be attended to are two ; that when struck by a key they make a sound ; that they be of the right size to span the distance between the row and = tips when extended their materials are even more wide ranging and various than those used = for the tips but keep in mind the keys take a beating and they must be changed frequently as they break bend and are on occasion knocked out of = the grips that hold them it is essential to have as many spare keys available as one can = reasonably accumulate in the event of such accidents the finding and modification of materials to use as keys is a near = constant activity for any operator and after a time almost any piece of scrap metal or plastic appears a potential key before it's seen as anything else maintenance of the gears and their connections to the cylinders and = rows is also a task that requires patience and care on the part of an operator the reward is a music impervious to mastery utterly singular and indifferent to predation a music dependant on an object and yet a music process unavoidably=20 both aspects in this case resolved in what you've just built=20 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 12:08:49 +0000 Reply-To: archambeau@lfc.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Archambeau Organization: Lake Forest College Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Judy Roitman wrote: > I know workshop poetry when I see it, but what are the boundaries of > language poetry? For my purposes (as editor) I go by what Nataniel Tarn has to say about it in his essay in Jacket: (http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket09/tarn-on-paz.html). Disjoined syntax as a central trope, or that becomes a mannerism, or "disjunctivitis." A bit limited, but it works for me. Bob Archambeau ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 08:50:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Re: Amato and Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I've just read the posts by Joe Amato and Brian Stefans. (It took me four and a half hours to do so-- I'm somewhat a slow reader). Seriously, though, they are both extremely interesting-- I suppose examples of this List at its thoughtful best and most useful. I just have a couple of points while still mulling over some of the things said: First, to correct Joe, my "Buffalo '99" piece appears in the _current_ issue (# 3) of Skanky Possum, which can be ordered from skankypossum@hotmail.com Second, in answer to Brian's question re: the making of the interview-- it was done entirely on e-mail in the space of a week or so. I should say that one of the things amazing to me was the velocity with which my questions were responded to by HG, so it had the feel (though I suppose such indicates how the medium is messing with our brains) of a "spontaneous" conversation. Third: Brian is right that I tried to "edge" Henry into a provocative response when I asked about his exclusion for the Poetics List. His answer took me by surprise, to tell the truth. It's a gentle answer that says something about Gould. Fourth: And partly in the light of what I just said, Brian's tour de force of questions (and Joe's post more indirectly) has hovering over it an overarching and ghostly big Question, which could be phrased in many ways but which might go like this: "Isn't it a shame that a person whose life is informed by such eloquent love for poetry and whose thought provokes such reflection and response from others is not able to be here to answer their good questions and thus extend that spirit of discussion and debate on which real community in writing depends?" I can't speak for him and don't know if Gould would feel able to come back, even though this "place" meant a great deal to him personally. But isn't it high time to say clearly (without it meaning that anyone "lost" or whatever) that the "mistake" that was made constituted a serious, regretable wrong? I know I might sound millennial in saying so, but I'm absolutely certain that the righting or not righting of the wrong will be noticed by many poets down the road looking back. Kent ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 21:41:59 +0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong Subject: Baby Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A comment on baby... It is interesting to note that the word bebe in French was derived, according to the Robert, from the English in 1841. Unfortunately, it does not give the quotation of first use. French dictionaries prior to that date do not include the word in the lexicon. The English use of the word gained at that point international currency. Could it have had something to do with the industrial revolution and the surge of prostitution? (London was the world capital with estimates up to 120,000) Was it at that time we started to use the word "babe" to describe a beautiful woman? Most women would hardly have had the time to keep their skin soft and hair washed, what with taking care of all the babies... Baudelaire, in L'Invitation au Voyage, seems to forshadow the current use of baby (babe), "bebe" in the way he uses "enfant": Mon enfant, ma soeur, Songe a la douceur D'aller la bas vivre ensemble! Aimer a loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble... The poem was published in 1862. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 20:38:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: The World Has Already Ended (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This was sent to the administrative account. - tim shaner --On Tuesday, January 04, 2000, 10:28 AM -0800 "jesse glass" wrote: So it's time to enjoy a few good books. Some of the books by my futon: The Zohar Vol. 3 (Sperling trans.) Keith Douglas--The Complete Poems The Art of Memory--Francis Yates Poems For The Millenium Vols 1 & 2 (thanks Pierre! & J. R. if you're there) Cherokee New Testament (In Cherokee) Basic Kanji, book 2 Santoka--Haiku (in Japanese) Maldoror Artaud--Oeuvres Completes Modern Verse--Oscar Williams, ed. Remember him??? A Fighting Pig's Too Tough To Eat by Susan Brogger--Read it if you haven't aready!!!! A Treaties on Angel Magic James Hogg--The Three Perils of Man About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 16:16:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: Re: a gathering of threads MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit thought i had posted this previously regarding joe's gathering of threads,so/but here goes: as a babe in this cyber land of poetics and a member of(if a word such as member can be applied to those of us associated with the "Atlanta Poets Group," but this is subject for another debate) APG, this message appeals to me and strikes me as more concordant with my own views of . . . und so weiter. _______________________________________________________ and on the heals of other posts of late: i am a singular voice which, unless otherwise noted, speaks only for its/myself in the expression of any opinions/thoughts/conceptions/ideas/dreams/predictions/usw. i enjoy my association with the atlanta poetics and if it helps to list them individually, as in Mark P, John L., Randy P., James S., Dana L., usw. to avoid discussions of group politics/sociology/usw, so be it, i would rather discuss issues related to their individual work/poetry and or collaborations. as a further, and more personal, note, i have written "poetry" for several years, only recently have i actually read or been exposed to "modern" poetry which iam now "catching up" on(im talking within the last few months, i am more familiar with blake, milton, donne, and/or dante than let's say Pound, Cage, or Silliman whom ive found i enjoy a great deal (to get even more personal and detailed, my "academic" interests lie in the field of ancient history/languages and literature). if my work/poetry, which im sure most on the list have never seen/read, is a ghosting of such a creature as langpo, it is by pure coinc., no pre-meditation involved all for now . . . TEDD -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 15:49:04 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: baby stuff In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >At 4:06 PM -0500 1/4/00, hassen wrote: >>arielle >> >>>> I'm actually really interested in studying pedophilia and the way it >>comes up in our culture<< >> >>you know, i've long wondered if there's pedophiliac >>connection/implication/etc. w/the practice of shaving. esp. women. esp. >>legs. >> >>i've no idea the history, when it began, etc. but am quite curious. would >>love to hear more. >> >>hassen > >i think you are right on about that, esp in the US women are abnormally >infantilized and this is a prime piece of evidence. a woman who speaks >without giggling, self-deprecating affect, and who keeps her body hair is >seen as threatening. Speaking about giggling, what about Japan, where women's social speech-tones are artificially high, a sort of permanent giggle? Contrast to many European countries where women are encouraged to have low speech tones. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 17:31:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: shaving pedophilia MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit emily >>I'm more inclined to imagine that women shaving has its roots more in inflating (so-called) differences between the sexes << hm, doesn't seem to ring as true in my experience. which may be little, comparitively. how about so-called differences between the sexes is used more as excuse to secure such practices? but let me ask: are there not various aspects of the average american male's - and female's - sexual tastes/practices/desires that seem to indicate obvious pedophiliac tendencies? but i've certainly not researched/studied this in even a remotely scientific manner. lol. harmless questions, really, blink. and this: >> I don't think men dressing up as babies and getting spanked is related to pedophilia, either...<< elicits not only a playful smirk, but a related bounce: that perhaps pedophilia, shaving & even child-like sexual role-play, etc. are indeed related - may be simple sexual nostalgia? no judgment re such things on my part, i'd like to point out. this is nothing by way of complaint or nonesuchdarklycrummyeww things. only curiosity & conversation. youthfully, sweetly, hassen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 17:55:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: shaving pedophilia, revised MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit sorry, spit that last one forth without care, accidentally sent, before giving it a look. perhaps to reduce misunderstanding: >>I'm more inclined to imagine that women shaving has its roots more in inflating (so-called) differences between the sexes << hm, doesn't seem to ring as true in my experience. which may be little, comparatively. how about so-called differences between the sexes is used more to secure such practices than as a root/reason? but let me ask: are there not various aspects of many american males' - and females' - sexual tastes/practices/desires that seem to indicate (at least traces of) pedophiliac tendencies? and this: >> I don't think men dressing up as babies and getting spanked is related to pedophilia, either...<< perhaps pedophilia, shaving & even child-like sexual role-play, etc. are forms of sexual nostalgia? (tho it may have nothing much to do with the baby/endearment/lover question.) hassen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 18:03:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: Amato and Stefans and Gould MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit kent, >>the righting or not righting of the wrong will be noticed by many poets down the road looking back.<< what are you proposing? i'll second the motion. notion. if that counts. h ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:03:16 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: Just Gould Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed The occasion for the Henry Gould interview, it seems to me, was his excommunication from this otherwise well preserved list. And it makes sense for him to reflect publicly about that. So Kent's provocative questions I think give Gould space to speak his mind. Brian Kim Stefans brings up some good questions about rationality, its shape and form both historically and socially. And I think that he's right to point out that Gould could be confusing things. For instance, in the interview, Gould writes: "The idea is that poetry is a progressive force for a demythologized, egalitarian materialism - by analyzing and rejecting all forms of idealizing/poeticizing rhetoric. . . Maybe if you take these premises to the limit, as Bernstein tries to do, it can be understood as 'revolutionary': in a rationalist post-Enlightenment sense, uprooting all remnants of antique, medieval and romantic spiritual 'aura' around language on behalf of the demystified human will." There's nothing rational about "uprooting all remnants of antique, medieval and romantic spiritual 'aura' around language...." In fact, Bernstein, and some others within the Language tradition, are irrational, or arational perhaps, for their insistence on foregrounding social and material assumptions about late 20th century cultural phenomena, at the expense of historical and psychological antecedents. This tradition of writing also seeks to subvert and reveal structures of power (of the community, corporation, individual), without seeking or presenting a comparable sense of justice. The dispossessed, who could stand a little Lone Ranger styled justice, are not awed by poetic revelations of power's truculent existence. Subverting the powers that be, however marginally or inclusively one moves within its walls, is a nice gesture. But without an accompanying demand for justice, power subversions merely strip the Emperor of his clothes. He's still the man in charge. (Cf. Presidente Clinton). A sense of justice requires a rational faculty and an imagination sympathetic enough to inhabit opposing spaces. Not to belabor the point, but Kent's interview with Gould seems to be an attemt to restore justice, and to reopen an issue unreasonably closed to debate by those for whom power issues have been important, at least theoretically. If nothing else, Gould's dismissal from The List revealed how power is used at the animal level by those for whom we might desire a greater sense of justice. Anyway, Brian brings up some other good points, but Henry should answer those himself. Who knows. Maybe his cyber ghost is listening in. Dale Smith ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 16:54:18 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: derek beaulieu Subject: new from housepress MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit housepress is pleased to announce the release of several new chapbooks & ephemera: "For Thomas A. Clark" by Lucas Mulder only 75 copies printed .pamphlet w/ tip in. openpalm series #1.1 $1.50 ea. "still life or a natureza morta" by damian lopes only 75 copies printed. small chapbook with hand sewn binding. openpalm series #1.2 $4.00 ea. "Directions to the Primary: Maps of Juxtaposition" by Crag Hill only 75 copies printed. a visual sequence. small chapbook with hand sewn binding. openpalm series #1.3 $3.50 ea. "Finger Lakes" by Joel Bettridge only 75 copies printed. a poetry pamphlet. openplam series #1.4 $1.00 ea. "Willed Thinks: an excerpt" by Ross Priddle only 75 copies printed. staple bound chapbook. openplam series #1.5 $2.00 ea. or all 5 releases for $10 (including postage - cheques payable to "derek beaulieu") if you have any questions, or if you would like to order copies, contact derek beaulieu at: 1339 19th ave nw calgary alberta canada t2m 1a5 housepre@telusplanet.net ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:39:34 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lawrence Upton Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Then perhaps it should have been a joke about a stupid man rather than an Irish man L ----- Original Message ----- From: Leonard Brink To: Sent: 05 January 2000 07:07 Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills | >just say sorry! and don't do it again, swallow your ethnic pride | | I have to admit that I myself am 100% All-American Dutch with no admixture | of English, Irish, Greek, or any of the other varieties of human inbreeding. | (no, this isn't a response to the "class" thread). | The joke was about being stupid, stoopid. | ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 18:40:57 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Disjunctivitis Comments: To: archambeau@lfc.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Bob, This description does not fit much if not all of the writing of Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, David Bromige, Tina Darragh, Erica Hunt, Charles Bernstein, myself..... It's like saying that any poem that mentions a painting is a NY School work. Ron ----Original Message Follows---- From: Robert Archambeau Reply-To: archambeau@lfc.edu To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Samizdat #4 Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 12:08:49 +0000 Judy Roitman wrote: > I know workshop poetry when I see it, but what are the boundaries of > language poetry? For my purposes (as editor) I go by what Nataniel Tarn has to say about it in his essay in Jacket: (http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket09/tarn-on-paz.html). Disjoined syntax as a central trope, or that becomes a mannerism, or "disjunctivitis." A bit limited, but it works for me. Bob Archambeau ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 22:21:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: end of century reading material In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hats off to the Great Browser of the North. jg On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, George Bowering wrote: > Currently reading > > > Nicole Brossard, _She Would be the First Sentence of my Next Novel_. Mercury > Diane di Prima, _Freddie Poems_, Eidolon > Shusako Endo, _Silence_, Taplinger > Gail Scott, _My Paris_, Mercury > Charles Watts and Edward Byrne, _The Recovery of the Public World_, Talonbooks > Linda Wagner-Martin, _"Favored Strangers": Gertrude Stein and her family_, > Rutgers > Steven Watson, _Prepare for Saints_, Random House > Daniel Pinkwater, _5 Novels_, Farrar Strauss > Edo van Belkom, ed., _Northern Dreamers_, Quarry Press > Jerome Charyn, _Loustal: une romance_, Mille et une nuits > Raymond Queneau, _The Blue Flowers_, New Directions > Erin Moure, _Pillage Laud_, Moveable Text > Dacia Maraini, _The Silent Duchess_, Quarry > Jim Jones, _Use my Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families_, ECW > Idries Shah, _The Hundred Tales of Wisdom_, Octagon > Paco Ignacio Taibo II, _Calling all Heroes_, Plover > J.M. Coetzee, _Boyhood_, Secker & Warburg > Aldona Jonaitis, ed., _Chiefly Feasts: the Enduring Kawkiutl Potlach_, U. > Washington > Robert Richard, _A Johnny Novel_, Mercury > Joao Capistrano de Abreu, _ Chapters of Brazil's Colonial History: > 1500-1800_, Oxford > Scott Watson, _Stan Douglas_, Phaidon > David Underwood, _Oscar Niemeyer and the Architecture of Brazil_, Rizzoli > Amy Cappellazzo & Elizabeth Lieata, eds., _In Company: Robert Creeley's > Collaborations_, Niagara U. > Cees Nooteboom, _Roads to Santiago_, Harcourt Brace > Barry McKinnon, _A Walk,_ Gorse > > and some mags > > > > > George Bowering. > > > > fax: 1-604-266-9000 > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 22:37:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: brandon and christina Subject: end of century end of century reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit people so willing so willing to show off top ten lists then admit then [as i do] that they were [or are] but lurkers just before a moment then but are still. i was. i admit it. i admit i was all this. to drop names. to name names. and why? is all. i know: to drop names is all this ever is. maybe. is. -brandon ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 19:38:38 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Hunting facts for inspiration Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 2000 Sonia Sanchez hunted facts for inspiration for the inaugural poem. It took work to wax poetic for Street By James M. O'Neill INQUIRER STAFF WRITER For her latest artwork, acclaimed poet Sonia Sanchez had to do some sleuthing. Asked only a week before to craft a poem for Mayor Street's inaugural on Monday, Sanchez jumped into the task, scanning the two-page bio Street's team gave her. But that terse curriculum vitae didn't set Sanchez's creative juices afire. "A two-page CV," Sanchez said yesterday with a smile, "does not help inspire poems." Sanchez had a passing acquaintance with Street. She had shaken his hand at the occasional ceremony or fund-raiser. And she remembered his days manning a hot-dog stand at Temple University in the late 1970s, when she was just starting her decades-long tenure as an English professor there. But she wanted something more. Searching for the personal, she cornered Street's friends. "Too often we don't see the human component of public figures," Sanchez said. "It's always the gloss." From lawyer Ron White she learned of Street's aversion to sweets, and the huge bowl of fruit that sits in his office. "I'm a vegetarian," Sanchez said, "so I think that's exquisite." Naturally, that detail found its way into the poem. From Carl Singley, a trusted adviser to Street, she learned of the new mayor's political and personal history, his "directness, his knowing what he wants." She learned of his youth on a Norristown farm. That sparked Sanchez's search for a strong image to represent the new mayor in her poem, this man from nowhere who had risen to power. And so she made it a point to emphasize in the poem that: "In this city / where history stretches in aristocratic silence / In this city / where hope blooms like flowers / . . . a worker's son / has become the mayor of Philadelphia. / The city is not the same / because a worker's son / has come with eyes like diamonds, / . . .has come at the beginning / of the 21st century / carrying the quiet urgency / of a star." And she wanted an image of nature to symbolize the route his life had taken. "From a Norristown farm of privation / he crossed cities with hands quiet, / stood tall as lightning, / heard the propagators of poverty call his name, / But his legs, tongue caught fire / . . . swam downstream, away from graveyards . . . / became a mountain. Not a hill or terrace. / Finally a mountain raining veins of silver / and gold." "It was like he had been in the valleys and struggled to come out," Sanchez said. "His story tells us it is possible to do this. He was moving mountains to become mayor." Because of the tight time limit, Sanchez wrote her poem at all hours - early in the morning in her sunlit Germantown study, late at night in her bedroom. Even when she wasn't actually writing, she was crafting the poem. "Once you begin working on a poem, the movement continues," Sanchez said. "When you're cooking, walking, driving, your mind goes back to the poem." She wanted to touch on democracy in the poem somehow. She penned a line, but even as she set it down, she cringed. "I had done this little corny thing - I knew as I was writing it, and I thought, 'Oh, no!' " Perhaps a quote from someone else would be more appropriate. But who? Sanchez liked Langston Hughes. She was fond of Philadelphian W.E.B. Du Bois. She pulled a book of Du Bois' writings off a shelf in her study, intending just to flip through, with no particular quote in mind. The book opened randomly, she started reading - and there was the quote that would help her sew the poem together. "Sometimes when you're writing, something magical happens," Sanchez said. "I opened the book and saw the quote and thought, 'Oops, that's it!' When we write, we are not really alone. We are connected to other people. We always have voices speaking to us. "That great genius W.E.B. Du Bois said: What shall the end be? / The world - old and fearful things. / War and wealth / murder and luxury?/ Or shall it be / a new thing - a new place and / a new democracy of all races: / A great humanity of equal men and women!" Sanchez said that at Temple, she always tried to get students from every race and background to work together. "We've got to teach this generation that if the world is to stay alive, they must learn to live together," she said. She saw her Street poem as a way to get that message across to a wider audience. Not just to the new mayor, but to all Philadelphians. After building up Street as a mountain among men, Sanchez ended her poem with a challenge of sorts, crystallizing the hopes and expectations Street - any new mayor, for that matter - engenders from the electorate. The new slate. The clean start. The pure beginning, like that of an innocent child: "Let us accompany this man called John / Street towards a new thing: / the truth in our children's eyes; / let us wash the feet of this city / let us sanitize the walls of this city / with peace, racial, social and sexual justice, / let us inaugurate flint and feather / Steel and silk / country and cathedral / in this city of heritage." She knew it was finished after she had read it aloud - she always reads her work aloud. "When I read this poem, it felt good. I felt I had gotten across what I wanted to say - not only to Mayor Street, but also to the city of Philadelphia." © 1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 22:49:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brendan Lorber Subject: Brendan Lorber's THE ADDRESS BOOK launch Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Brendan Lorber will read with Alicia Wing at the St. Marks Poetry Project >on Monday 10 January 2000 at 8:00pm. > >Brendan Lorber is the author of the waterproof magazine Lungfull! and >co-curator of the Zinc Bar Reading Series as well as the Double Happiness >Reading Series. > >Poet and actress Alicia Wing is currently performing in the play Rude >Restaurant in Los Angeles. > >At the reading, Brendan will be reading from, and pushing, THE ADDRESS BOOK >(The Owl Press), a chapbook collection of sonnet sized note-poems >ostensibly posted on doors by the poet. The original version of the book, >which spans several miles & involves many large buildings, has been shrunk >to more traditional book size for your convenience. > >We hope you can attend. > >The Poetry Project is located at 131 East 10th Street on the Corner of 2nd >Avenue here in New York City. It's $7 or $4 if yr a student. Call >212.674.0910 for more info. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:43:02 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Emily Lloyd Subject: a few PSs re: baby/pedo/Pinkwater Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed One pedophilia PS: I wrote earlier that a pedophile wouldn't be attracted to a shaved, naive woman, because pedophiles want the "genuine article." What I meant by this was less a genuine young person than a person genuinely devoid of artifice (which includes, of course, shaving one's legs) (although youth clearly IS a priority). This is why Humbert Humbert is not a pedophile: Lolita knows she's sexy, & works it. Plus: girls have hairy legs, don't they? Or are they more blindly-kindly called "downy" at that age? Re: baby---just thinking of a few interesting places this term has cropped up and, it seems to me, stuck out a bit: the 90's film "Swingers," throughout which women are referred to as "babies," "beautiful babies," etc., to the exclusion of any other term, and these are women the men in the film haven't *met* yet, lessening the possibility of the term's being used as a personal endearment. Fred MacMurray tensely, continually, and, I find, hilariously, referring to Barbara Stanwyck as "Baby" in "Double Indemnity"--while his character's a total babe in the woods and she couldn't be further from naive. Amy Grant singing, in the 80's? early 90's? "Baby Baby," a song *she wrote for her infant*; in the video, Grant is singing to a man; when performing the song at, I think it was, the Grammys, she sang to her (brought onstage) child. Maybe less relevantly to this inquiry, there's "Wayne's World"'s Garth: "If she were a president, she'd be Babe-raham Lincoln." (& what about Babe Ruth?--yet "Babe," to me, is almost entirely stripped of any but sexual/romantic connotations: the only baby I've ever heard referred to as a "babe" was Jesus). And Toni Morrison's "Baby Suggs," who acquires "Baby" as a first name because, as a born slave, she's never "properly" named and her husband calls her Baby. And, of course, "Bringing Up Baby"--where the leopard is named "Baby", it seems, solely as a plot device that allows Hepburn's and Grant's characters to seem to be singing "I Can't Bring You Anything But Love (Baby)" to, variously, each other and strangers. "Fat Men in Space" [right?] isn't in Pinkwater's *5 Novels*, but it does inc. "Slaves of Spiegel" and the happily titled "Young Adult Novel"... downily yrs, em ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:08:17 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: knowing what a joke means Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" George Bowering posts: >This person is telling an uptight mistaken polcor joke, right? I dunno, George, that's all geek to me. Further, Leonard & Billy & whomever can proceed on their interpretation of this joke as being abt the stereotype of the Irishman as stupid, but it was never that to me. (I wasnt aware there is such a stereotype until they told me, even tho the woman who raised me was Irish). I heard it as a joke abt the craftiness and perspicacity of the Irish (another stereotype, but one far less objectionable, I should have thought), whereby an "each way" bet has been placed & either situation has been covered. I guess I'm too gullible to be told jokes. Like I said, I am sorry that leaping to a single assumption has brought some Listmates grief. It appears no alternative was possible. I suppose, as "Dutch" Leonard says, it is I who am stoopid, thinking the Irishman was clever. I have always admired the Dutch for their frankness, broadmindedness, ability to laugh at themselves, and their civility, qualities not always easy to hold in balance. I dont think the Moderator, though, ought to be blamed for not spotting the only possible meaning of this joke. Possibly he, too, was unaware of this particular stereotype. Obviously, someone living in Ireland has the advantage of us auslanders when it comes to their national stereotypes. In future, I shall make sure that my jokes all begin "An Esperantese, a Venutian and a Martian were discoursing in a bar...." --But then won't I be told that the latter two types are gender-coded? If Leonard and Billy are correct, obviously the joke would be clearer if it began, "When a stupid person goes to bed, he places on his bedside table.....".How come, then, it is actually funnier if it begins, "When a crafty and perspicacious person goes to bed, he places on his bedside table....". Because, you say, the element of surprise obtains in the latter instance only? But the same could be said of the joke if it began "When a mentally incompetent person goes to bed, he places on his bedside table....", for one would hardly expect someone designated as mentally incompetent to be capable of such foresight and care in execution. Yet when the joke begins in such a fashion, I do not find it funny. It was only fear of being thought vain of the country of my birth that stopped me from altering the joke before I posted it, so that it might begin, "When an Englishman (or "Limey," or "Pom") goes to bed, he places on his bedside table.....". Perhaps it is merely personal, but I have always thought of the English as thorough, if a tad too deliberate. Since in the Land of Stereotypes, we do not expect the English (unlike the Irish) to be scintillant, inspired, off-the-cuff, the thoroughness and the deliberateness will be what we see, rather than the perspicacity and craftiness. (And stupidity, once one is aware of _that_ stereotype.) David ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:33:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Corbett Subject: Re: Baby (really millenial reading) In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000105214159.007a5d80@chmai.loxinfo.co.th> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong wrote: > A comment on baby... > > > Baudelaire, in L'Invitation au Voyage, seems to forshadow the current use > of baby (babe), "bebe" in the way he uses "enfant": > > Mon enfant, ma soeur, > Songe a la douceur > D'aller la bas vivre ensemble! > Aimer a loisir, > Aimer et mourir > Au pays qui te ressemble... > > The poem was published in 1862. > my question: why isn't "sister" a common endearment? anyway, what i am reading: Benjamin, "Selected Essays: Volume 1" Robert Musil, "The Man Without Qualities" Ron Silliman, "The Age of Huts" Michael Palmer, "The Lion Bridge" Jack Spice, "The Collected Books" Jonathan Raban, "Soft City" (just finished "Hunting Mr. Heartbreak") Kim Stanley Robinson, "Antartica" (just finished) my coop newsletter various WTO-related articles in the local press and for my diss: Julia Kristeva, "The Powers of Horror" Peter Marshall, "William Godwin" William Godwin, "Four Pamphlets" listening: Miles Davis, "The Columbia Years" Versus, "Secret Swingers" Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" Jane Siberry, "Child" (and returning to earlier albums) millenially, robert ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 19:52:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Margaret Holley Subject: Job opening MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Please post, forward, and share this announcement of a job opening. BRYN MAWR COLLEGE: FACULTY POSITION BEGINNING FALL 2000 DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE WRITING AND LECTURERE IN THE ARTS: a full time non-tenure track position, initial appointment for three years. Candidate to direct a small program in Creative Writing, conduct a visiting writers series, teach two courses each semester, and work with undergraduate students who are pursuing independent majors, minors, and concentrations in Creative Writing. Ph.D. or M.F.A. required with substantial publication or equivalent professional activity, and competence to teach in at least two of the genres currently offered in our program (short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting, and journalism). Opportunities also exist to teach in a multi-disciplinary College Seminar program. The Arts faculty at Bryn Mawr is on continuing non-tenure track appointment. Bryn Mawr College is an equal opportunity affirmative action employer. The College particularly wishes to encourage applications from individuals interested in joining a multicultural and international academic community; minority candidates and women are especially encouraged to apply. Send a letter of application, writing sample, curriculum vitae, and three letters of reference by February 20, 2000, to Mark Lord, Arts Program Chair, Bryn Mawr College, 101 North Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA. 19010-2899. Questions may be addressed to mlord @ brynmawr.edu or to http//www.brynmawr.edu. Admins/Provost. Margaret Holley Director of Creative Writing Bryn Mawr College 101 N. Merion Ave. Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899 610-526-5310 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:40:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: reading material MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Currently reading: webartery mail list Trace online, Alan Sondheim's project Director 7 Demystified Director pdf documentation Imagining Language: Steve McCaffery Memory Trade: Darren Tofts The Presence of the Word: Walter Ong The Art of Memory: Frances Yates How We Became Posthuman: Katherine Hayles b/c: Bill Marsh Hamlet on the Holodeck: Janet Murray The New Sentence: Ron Silliman Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics and Poetry The Aesthetics of Murder: Joel Black Orpheus and Greek Religion: WKC Guthrie The Origins of Attic Comedy: FM Cornford The Alphabet and the Goddess: Leonard Shlain Paul Celan: John Felstiner How to make money in stocks: O'Neil Appy 00 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 03:04:19 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: Moosehead memories MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Those of us attending > the Moosehead Conference in the previous century, will recall that GB never > left the side of Rachel Loden and Maria Damon, day or night, despite the > blandishments of others present. Well, as they say about the sixties, if you remember Moosehead you weren't there. Was it the peyote or Bowering, fetching in antlers? I have no idea. * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * Rachel Loden http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html email: rloden@concentric.net * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 08:25:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: job opening - Bryn Mawr MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hey, thought some of you might be interested in this! I taught at Haverford/BrynMawr (they sort of share an Eng Dept) in '98 and it's a terrific place to teach, methinks. -m. According to Margaret Holley: > > Dear Michael, > > I wanted to let you know that, because of my husband's relocation > to the Phoenix area, my position at Bryn Mawr will be open starting in the > fall. Could you pass this copy the the ad on to anyone you know who might > be interested in applying? Many thanks. Maggie Holley, Director of > Creative Writing, Bryn Mawr College > > BRYN MAWR COLLEGE: FACULTY POSITION BEGINNING FALL 2000 > > DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE WRITING AND LECTURERE IN THE ARTS: a full time > non-tenure track position, initial appointment for three years. Candidate > to direct a small program in Creative Writing, conduct a visiting writers > series, teach two courses each semester, and work with undergraduate > students who are pursuing independent majors, minors, and concentrations > in Creative Writing. Ph.D. or M.F.A. required with substantial > publication or equivalent professional activity, and competence to teach > in at least two of the genres currently offered in our program (short > fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting, and journalism). > Opportunities also exist to teach in a multi-disciplinary College Seminar > program. The Arts faculty at Bryn Mawr is on continuing non-tenure track > appointment. > > Bryn Mawr College is an equal opportunity affirmative action employer. > The College particularly wishes to encourage applications from individuals > interested in joining a multicultural and international academic > community; minority candidates and women are especially encouraged to > apply. Send a letter of application, writing sample, curriculum vitae, > and three letters of reference by February 20, 2000, to Mark Lord, Arts > Program Chair, Bryn Mawr College, 101 North Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA. > 19010-2899. > > Questions may be addressed to mlord @ brynmawr.edu or to > http//www.brynmawr.edu. > Admins/Provost. > > > > Margaret Holley > Director of Creative Writing > Bryn Mawr College > 101 N. Merion Ave. > Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899 > 610-526-5310 > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:55:02 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ken Edwards Subject: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable N E W T O N A L L A N G U A G E the third volume in Reality Street Editions=B9 new writers series is now out: 80 pages of linguistic virtuosity, lusciously produced, including PATRICIA FARRELL: AN ORDINARY DEMON =B3Sumptuousness conceptually researched...=B2 SHELBY MATTHEWS: THIS WHICH =B3no frontier to this territory=B2 SIMON PERRIL: DRAWING ATTENTION =B3micro-tonal erotics of location=B2 KESTON SUTHERLAND: A POW ODE =B3cut: the word here is pow,/ experience flashes out with it from us=B2 NOW AVAILABLE FROM SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION IN THE USA Editorial enquiries: Ken Edwards, Reality Street Editions 4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London SE15 3PH, UK Tel: 020 7639 7297 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 06:06:18 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Ellis Subject: Endo Cento reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Prologos, by Jonathan Bayliss. A novel, or more accurately, a large book of speculative writing, full of beautifully complex sentences that run rings around "the life of" the central character. To take a few sentences off the back of the book, "[t]he intricate form of Prologos reveals Emerson's whole Man Thinking (though not according to Emerson's thought), and thinking as much about woman and children as about less personal interests. At the back of the book a schematic diagram of the Table of Contents maps the normal course of reading ... less patient "Postulants" (who will naturally be tentative in devoting time to unfamiliar content) will be guided through [a] "Second Curriculum" as if through a computer program, in such manner that after grasping the basic story they can decide whether or not to pursue apparent digressions or abstractions. If they continue on this path, they will read the whole book in non-sequential order. A "Third Curriculum" ... is intended for readers who wish to make a selective review (or preview) of the "Pythagorean triple" that represents [main character] Michael Chapman's oddly bourgeois life." About 1100 pages, and the introductory volume to a trilogy based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the first two volumes of wch have been published under the respective titles, Gloucesterbook and Gloucesteride, the third, Gloucestermas, being in progress. The books chart the life of the central character's relationship with his locale, town, and its various denizens in terms of political, social and economic theory, especially as these relate through mythological and religious "histories" to the living life of the ensemble momently at hand. They also give what I'm told by one who shld know, a very accurate portrait of the late Charles Olson, here operating under the pseudonym Ipsissimus Charlemagne. But Prologos, set in Berkeley, lays the groundwork for all that follows - this, after all, is a LIFE'S work - and is probably the best place to begin. Prologos can probably be got through the publisher, Basilicum Press, at 121 Lake Shore Drive, Ashburnham, MA 01430 ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 10:16:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Atlanta Poets Revisited Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Dear Mark and others, I apologize if my comment made it sound like I was essentializing the poets in Atlanta with a suggestion that they are, by nature, a "ghost double of language poetry." This was a rhetorical mistake -- I was sort of writing this statement to Jacques, and accepting for the moment that his comment had value you to it (rather than arguing that value, just accepting it to make my point). I'm not sure that Jacques was essentializing in this way either, but I won't take that up. My sentence, in this public context, should have been more like "that we [who is this "we"?] see the Atlanta poets involved in the APG as a sort of ghost double to language poetry," or something along those lines, in other word admitting this outside view (I'm not in Atlanta), the fact that it has holes, exceptions, or could be just a big mistake, etc. (I'm very close to many of the poets once involved in the Kootenay School in Canada, who have often been, in reductive statements, called a sort of tail-end to Language poetry, despite their very different practices; consequently, as an "Asian American," I have tried to avoid anything suggesting essential qualities in writing about writers purportedly of that group -- I hate to use scare quotes [Adorno said it was cheap], I am Korean American if anyone is, but I don't see how that could determine anyone's writing, nor do I see how being in Atlanta could.) Anyway, I thought the "sort of" and the "some" in the line would have suggested the provisionality of the statement -- I don't think there's anything essential about, well, poetry, and my statements on Miles Champion would suggest this (i.e. that the same poem could have differences of meaning in relation to the time and place in which it was composed, as well as its relations to predecessor poems -- contingency). Thanks for your ideas, though; this kind of descriptive writing seems to me useful. Brian ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 07:31:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marla Jernigan Subject: Desire at 14 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Poetics List, Having first got it on at age 14 myself I'd like to say that I knew quite clearly what I was doing. Yet I am bothered by seeing young women agressively sexualized in magazines and television shows. Why does it feel better that I was so tomboy that I was mistaken for a boy until age 17 or so. I agree with Emily Lloyd's post on whole, but I think that the designation "pedophile" while representing something rather loathsome, is an attitude that finds its object in powerless sexual partners (objects); college profs sleeping with freshman, 40 year old business men dallying with 21 years olds... There is nothing to say that a 14 year old and a 50 year old couldn't make sweet love but the power thing is disturbing when it becomes a part of the equation. Sincerely, Marla > > The 14-yr-old had instigated the relationship, was perfectly happy with it, etc.,but when it was found out, the cops were called and spent much of the show giving her the ol' "You realize what that lady did to you was BAD" and "That woman is a very confused lady" & "You were taken advantage of, you know" schtick, because they refused to acknowledge even the possibility that a 14-yr-old could choose to enter a lesbian relationship. At any rate, the girl's only care was that her lover not be harmed or arrested, which the cops of course promised, just about the time their cop buddies were harming and arresting the lover __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 11:56:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: +++ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII +++ http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt When I die I need you to create my philosophy. Please do go and read all of the Internet Text before it is taken away. It can be taken away at any moment and you must save it yourself. Then when I die you can go back and love every word for its brilliance. You can harbor words close to your body so you will finally understand me. All my words connect through underground chambers very close to the truth. The chambers form hieroglyphs of the mind and my philosophy. You will find everything you need in these hieroglyphs of my philosophy. You must take a great deal of time because thought does not come quickly. Every moment you spend on my Internet Text will be repaid in full. You will be utterly changed because you will have worked it out yourself. All truths cannot be uttered by anyone except yourself. I have opened the gate for you to understand this and other truths. In my Internet Text you will discover if there are truths at all. Perhaps you will discover if there are truths in any case. My own needs will be met if you read and reread my text and understand. To understand you must save the words and the order of the words. My own needs are those of surviving through the words I have written. No one will understand me fully for decades except through concentration. Concentration and study are the keynotes to this success. With all my heart I promise you this will all be worthwhile. You will judge for yourself and realize the truth I have given you. The philosophy is there within as the greatest gift of all. Please be successful with my philosophy and save my very words. This is a hope for tomorrow and I will never know if I am in your heart. Thank you for preserving my Internet Text and studying its philosophy. _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 05:41:29 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: book offer Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Chax Press would like to offer the following books at special prices to all who order in January 2000. Please send orders via email directly to chax@theriver.com or by mail to Chax Press / 101 W. Sixth St., no. 6 / Tucson, AZ 85701-1000 / USA or call 520-620-1626 or fax 520-620-1636 Orders of 1 - 2 books will be assessed a $2 shipping charge. Orders within the USA of 3 - 5 books will be assessed a $3 shipping charge, and orders within the USA of 6-10 books will be assessed a $4 shipping charge. Orders within the USA of more than 10 books will be shipped free of charge. Orders outside the USA will be charged enough shipping charge to get the books to you by land, sea, or air (as you choose), wherever you may be. We can accept cash, checks, and credit cards. 1. In The Attic of the House of the Dead, by Hugh Steinberg (poetry) $6 (will retail for $11) Chapbook with letterpress cover, with poems from the author's *A Book of Days,* the "March" sequence. This book is currently being produced and will be ready by January 10, 2000. March 28 the rope of yourself. hair colored. birdnests. your hat. a coat. the story of your body as the unraveling of rope. like someone who is always leaving. let me kiss your chin. this morning I took a walk and I saw a Checker cab. Brittany, this man said, addressing his 9-year-old daughter. you will probably never ride in one of these again. 5,000 Checkers once roamed this city. now there are two. to travel through a city. to hold a kite in your arm. to be like a little bird in a shopping mall. to listen to a fountain. to not buy anything. because I have enough rope. I’ve been working on this knot for years. put your finger here. it will always be that way. 2. The Said Lands, Islands, and Premises, by Mary Margaret Sloan (poetry) $7 (retails for $11) "Sloan's passion for words -- their lipstick traces and lingering inflections (as grammar would have it) -- makes for a poetry of extraordinary pleasure and difficulty. The mind and ear are redirected from inherited sequence to intentional mutation. As consummate artificer, Sloan's skill and gift demand an equally rigorous reading. Her first book assumes the presence of a mature collection and takes American poetry into its next argument." --Kathleen Fraser 3. Speech Acts, by Eli Goldblatt (poetry) $6 (retails for $10) "Energetic and engaging work, ranging over *ache* and *embrace,* reality and dream in a rich, quicksilver language." --Rachel Blau DuPlessis "Eli Goldblatt writes realist lyrics; this is not a world that is 'utterly c hanged,' it's more the place where the question, 'What language does the poet speak?' is beginning and goal of writing. These poems speak our languages, with care and pasion. --Bob Perelman 4. The Closets of Heaven, by Diane Glancy (fiction) $7 (retails for $12) In this novel, Dorcas (Tabitha) is a seamstress who holds the world together with her stitches. 5. (Ado)ration, by Diane Glancy (poetry) $7 (retails for $12) 42 poems by Glancy -- poems of energy and high wit, compassion and deep thinking. Assimilation Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked throughout all the land, why has she never entered the wigwam of the Apache? -- Cochise The land divided now by roads \ the rusted leaves \ fly. Lightning frantic as limbs. Some upstairs woods \ we aim for. Field trampled by hooves of cattle \ glint of barn \ the gusty star flung as a javelin. 6. < a ' s a t t v >, by Peter Ganick (poetry) $7 (retails for $12) "We read < a ' s a t t v > for its physics of the aleatory, its perpendicular musicology and cabaret of strifes. Theatricalities, though, comprise only a fraction of the red-shifted meditative forces Peter Ganick puts into play. Ideolect and bricolage pull together, emanating new corpuses of behavior with language, 'emitting sociability,' as Ganick has it, a 'bill world' almost cheerfully acclimating a 'bob world' within its densely graveled 'klatsch.' Thanks to Ganick we are worlds richer, worlds ahead, imminent to their launch." --Jack Kimball 7. & Calling It Home, by Lisa Cooper (poetry) $7 (retails for $12) "Lisa Cooper asks big questions. Like what is sense? Or why do men and women do what they do? Is it nature or culture? And she asks them of today's saints of everything that matters: Jack Spicer and Gertrude Stein. She gets no answers from either. But she writes a lot of great poems in the asking." --Juliana Spahr 8. Chromatic Defacement, by Phillip Foss (poetry) $7 (retails for $12) "Phillip Foss's *Chromatic Defacement* is a new fin de siecle theater of cruelty with the roles played by perfumes, echoes, and elisions. 'Coquettish effluvia.' Susan Howe meets Bataille and they have this child called 'Fetter of Nuance', or, in fact, Chromatic Defacement." --Rae Armantrout 9. Hopeful Buildings, by Charles Alexander (poetry) $6 (retails for $9.95) "Thinking is the experience of everyday living, and Charles Alexander's work is a poetry of thinking. But it is experience, not difficulty, that wonderfully complicates these poems and brings them very close. I hope many people will read *Hopeful Buildings* and take great p leasure both in its detail and in the larger construct that the details, perceived, provide. I do." --Lyn Hejinian from "Inside Moves, Punctual Matters" A mustard poultice makes medical history. For the record, erase the woeful strain. Candidates stump the nation, bumper stickers err gramatically. Stop. This line makes a turn. Make a wish that moves as music. Saxophone causes skin to open. Take you, for example, surround me with stretched limbs. Do it again. It never composes. 10. A Reading 8-10, by Beverly Dahlen (poetry) $7 (retails for $12) "Here her true unlike-anythingness, hear her see through, somehow about *you,* the 'privacy in invention' *becomes* a reading. Dahlen's is a gorgeous argument, methodical, indexed by an intricate thinking. Historical and future, desire and emptiness. Simple. Mythical. 'the antithesis of primal words' is primal too. A reading how it goes out remnants, resistant, her far and wide a future tense timed swing shift speaks up, generative -- expect something else. 'here was twisting, all kinds of thorniness.' Careful. A normal heroine astounds." --Jessica Grim & Melanie Neilson 11. Precisely the Point Being Made, by Norman Fischer (poetry) $6 (retails for $10) "If Gertrude Stein were a Zen monk family man living on a farm by the ocean at the tail end of the century, she would be Norman Fischer." --Kit Robinson 12. 3 of 10, by Hank Lazer (poetry) $8 (retails for $14) "Lazer asserts that poets are 'portals multiply open.' *3 of 10* gives us something of the story of how he arrived at that formulation. It is a formulation deeply involved with a perception about mythology, for to think mythologically is to think chordally, in clusters of simultaneously-sounded 'tones.' That is the kind of thinking -- and writing -- we 'hear' in this deeply conscious, deeply self-conscious work." --Jack Foley 13. The Tongue Moves Talk, by Karen Mac Cormack (poetry) $7 (retails for $11) "Sense is made and remade word for word in Karen Mac Cormack's *The Tongue Moves Talk.* Exquisite refractory, incessantly modulating, sumptuously uttering, these poems attain a state of aesthetic grace without recourse to hooks or props." --Charles Bernstein 14. Prospect of Release, by Tom Mandel (poetry) $7 (retails for $12.95) "Memento mori: sonnets. These 50 poems, 700 lines (neither number divisible by three), confront self, other, identity, loss, history, language and meaning through the most concrete instance we have of what the poststructuralists call 'an absent presence' -- the death of a parent. This loss of apparent meaning (who gave you your name?) doubles (this father arrived by marriage, already a rhyme for the dead blood kin that came before), invoking tradition, transmission, instruction . . . These are the most intensely felt poems I have ever read." --Ron Silliman 15. Teth, by Sheila Murphy (poetry) $6 (retails for $9) "Not the wrong word but the nonword, word purely as spacer . . . will come in here, as people like Murphy really like the phrase as a thing different from a word and prior. What her eye falls on, kites, clothes-pins, record jackets, gets in but not . . . as diurnal notation, this because t his-then, but as a religious trusting of the perceptual manifold to be an Event." -- Gerald Burns 16. art facts: a book of contexts, by bpNichol (poetry, prose, visual poetry, etc.) $11 (retails for $15) "He [Nichol] was Toronto's most innovative poet at a time when that city could claim more innovative poets than any other in the English speaking world. Whatever mode he was working in, he approached it as though he had to reinvent it from the ground up . . . probably more than any of his contemporaries he embodied the joyful spirit of invention, that elusive center of all the arts in this century. His printed and recorded work bear partial witness to that spirit." --Karl Young ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 15:21:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: all sorts of news Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" First, we'd like to announce a book party for Kimberly Lyons's long-awaited _Abracadabra_, just published by Granary Books. The party is tonight, Thursday, January 6th at 7 pm at Teachers & Writers, 5 Union Square West, 7th floor. *** Our readings next week are: Monday, January 10 at 8 pm Brendan Lorber & Alicia Wing Brendan Lorber has just published a chapbook of poetry, _The Address Book_ (Owl Books) and is leaving next week to stay in an ice hotel above the arctic circle in Sweden (so this may be your last chance to see an unfrozen version of Lorber). He is also the editor of Lungfull! Magazine and the co-curator of the infamous Zinc Bar Sunday Reading Series. Alicia Wing is the curator of the reading series at Beyond Baroque Literary Center in Los Angeles and is currently performing in the play _Rude Restaurant_. Wednesday, January 12 at 8 pm Rick Moody & Susan Noel Rick Moody is the author of the novels _The Ice Storm_ and _Purple America_, and the co-editor of the anthology _Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited_. Tonight, he'll be reading some of his poems, one of which can be found at the Project's web site at http://www.poetryproject.com/moody.html. Susan Noel is the author of _Bronze Age_ and _Autobiography in Words_, which was published last year by CUZ Editions. Friday, January 14 at 10:30 pm Fall Workshop Readings Readings from students of the Poetry Project's fall workshops, which were taught by Larry Fagin, Frank Lima, and Patricia Spears Jones. All events are $7, $4 for students, and $3 for members. The Poetry Project is wheelchair-accessible with assistance and advance notice. Call (212) 674-0910 for more information. *** The Poetry Project's Spring Workshops are now posted at http://www.poetryproject.com/workshops.html, but here's a little information anyway: Poetry Workshop: Pen Pals taught by Julie Patton (Tuesdays 7-9 pm; 10 sessions begin February 15). Julie Patton has taught workshops at New York University and Cooper Union. She is currently working on film and musical collaborations with Henry Hill, Uri Caine, and Euphrosyne Bloom. Poetry Workshop: Attunement in Poetic Practice taught by Kimberly Lyons (!) (Fridays 7-9 pm; 10 sessions begin February 18). Well, as stated at the beginning of this e-mail, Kim has just published _Abracadabra_, an event for which many of us have been eagerly waiting a long time. She is also presently editing the new writing section of How2, the online incarnation of How(ever). Journals, Poetry and Prose taught by Todd Colby (Saturdays 12-2 pm; 10 sessions begin February 19). Todd Colby is a poet, actor, and singer-songwriter. His most recent book is Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings (Soft Skull). He is the editor of the forthcoming Heights of the Marvellous: An Anthology of New York Writing (St. Martin's Press). Workshop fees are $250, which includes tuition for all classes and an individual membership in The Poetry Project for one year. Work scholarships are also available. Payment must be received in advance either by mail or in person at the Poetry Project office. Address is: The Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St., New York, NY 10003. *** If you'd like to be removed from this e-mail list, respond to this message with "please remove me" and we will be happy to do so. *** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:38:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Last Words MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } the idea of 'threads' in an e-discussion while it makes a certain sense also gives a curiously false impression that we might pick up and 'end' and then trace back and find the, singular, other 'end' ---- i don't have a new metaphor to offer Silliman posted a piece about _@poetics_ wherein he mentions "the local" in a three pronged post prong one talks of the misapplied sense of unity when looking back at the movements of the 60s prong two mentions the "simpler" landscape of poetry when he arrived on the scene contrasting it with the landscape now where there is simply too much happening for any critical "mastery" prong three asserts no "answer" and holds nothing up as a "solution" instead he says simply "Both of these thoughts have been driving me toward the idea that the local is more important now than ever." Joel Weishaus replies suggesting that locality is somewhat antique "a poem that rhapsodizes... place seems to me like an Arthurian legend" now i read that and thought he was saying that given the big old virtual world, that a sense of the local was old-hat but then he says "Now place exists only as a myth. And where a myth lurks, poetry sounds itself out." next up Heather Allen, it seems to me, says some good stuff but also seems to be responding to stuff i can't find "Does it [poetry] truly have to be about epitomizing a certain standard?" who said it does? is HA psychically predicting posts yet to come ? i agree with Heather that one need not focus in either direction (local... and the what? the self-alienated misanthopicality ? ..) both are open and it is veritably cool deal that i now have friends in australia and california and new england and all over b/c of the web & email Patrick Herron added a note of caution about just that sense of making friends, and his point is well taken, but i've found on numerous occasions already that folks i've met and liked on email have turned out to be just as likable in person only once so far have i had that table turned Heather Allen addressed Ron Silliman at the end of her post saying something about how we "must" now feel "competed against" (by the masses?) but that confuses me as i can't find much in Silliman's post to justify this question at all but that, if anything, should be unsurprising Patrick Herron also noted to everyone involved that "the internet is making clear the importance of proximity" and i think this is a great point i may not be quite as suspicious about the possibility of communicating in this medium as i ought to be or as Patrick may be but i do think that Tom Beckett is correct in everything he says in his posting --- here it is again, in toto; > The "local" and the "global" are __false__cognates. As the new information technologies "shrink" the" world", the world becomes less knowable because it comes to seem more abstract and similar. And I still insist that what e-mail listservs tend to produce is speech without social context--a whole lot of bad monologues. < to me it seems to be the dislocation of the medium --- i find i want it to be a forum in the old sense where anyone can have their say where anyone can listen, or not where we're not at each other's throats 24/7 but, lacking the locality, the physical presence of others, lacking any but the most oblique and dislocated sense of address in the short run i'm trying to avoid that here this post is addressed to everyone whose posts i am responding to... But the long run ? Joel W wasnt swayed by Tom B's post and wrote; "What world are we talking about? Perhaps there are as many worlds as ... minds to perceive them." and while true that Tom's comment isnt something one cd prove --- the notion that each mind makes its own world is a bit iffy as well each mind as some irreducible untouched monad ---- i don't know hope there cd ever be for consensus on any of these kinds of questions nor what it wd matter if any cd be reached but for those of you keeping track i believe there is a world out there that we share a reality that is --- and i take the real to be that which is what it is regardless of our thoughts about it (perceptions too i s'pose) and it's circumstantial evidence sure but we seem to agree on so much and to be able to, when we differ, to work towards common ground (if that last line is read as irony i can only say i didnt mean it to be so) in here someplace is Brian Stefan's post to Rebecca at _Fence_ --- lots of interesting stuff i'd like to 2nd the suspicions raised about "the general reader" ---- that's an abstraction that i'd just assume do without if i can (tho admitting that it is hard) --- i like _Fence_ by the way next up is Jacques Debrot with a post that many lauded but that i found really quite confusing when it wasnt being somewhat grandiose in his 1st numbered section Jacques talks of the complacency of mainstream poetry the relationship of its readers to it and it's "soul-making" a/effect that last bit Patrick H responds to neatly covering most of my initial troubles with the idea as dismissed by Jacques ---- then Jacques adds a characterization of "left of center, suburban college-educated professionals" as "the most completely socialized segment of the american population" does that make sense ? i mean i hear him and i think i understand what he's saying, but i'm unsure where one gets their litmus for ~What socialization is supposed to be~ --- i can only guess that the society controller-gnomes have this shit down & their demographics bear him out but what if you ascribe to the idea that there are no society controller gnomes ??? or what if you thought that the idea that if this segment of the populace was the ~most~ anything it was the most unable to see that it was in many respects an anomaly in a large society none of which can be said to be lacking in socialization ? ---- if this is the most socialized then the rest must really be fucking up on the old social scale, no ? but that's a digression, i don't think Jacques is saying that at all ---- my confusion comes with him being able to compass the whole enchilada at all his 2nd point after stating that alt po and mainstream po aint so radically unlike one another (all po after all) maybe isnt a point at all but a hypothetical "...it might be more useful & interesting for poetry to make the symptoms of capitalism *exemplary* rather than to propose 'alternatives' or 'solutions' " is this the proposed sillimanic 'solution' (sic) ? it seems that it from where he goes in 3. but i'm still unsure what wd be so interesting about making the symptoms of capitalism (everyone knows those right?) exemplary in poetry --- what fuck wd that mean ? [see my "In the Spirit of EX-" post for one take] in 3. Jacques again repeats the "Silliman Solution" : a "locally-oriented poetic" --- saying "[it] strikes me as extremely, if unintentionally, conservative." ignoring for a moment the fact that Silliman didnt offer any "solution" , why wd Jacques D. think this ? "for one thing, it would tend, of course, to leave in place the status quo ideological & aesthetic assumptions of more ambitiously positioned poetries like language (not coincidentally)." so Silliman's "solution" (that he didnt propose, have i said that yet ? that he said nothing about the Local as solution to anything ?) is a pernicious attempt by the reigning poetic dinosaurs to anaesthetize us in our abject localism to further shore up any challenge to LangPo dominance (was there an X-Files on this ?) the most compelling explanation for this paranoia so far is by reference to the "rugged individualist" character of the "american spirit" and the collective fear and suspicion of groups but as neatly as that does seem to account for say Jacques' posting a month or so ago attacking the APG out of (for me at least) a clear blue sky --- somewhere in the midst of which he said that so naming ourselves was "naive and self-aggrandizing" (which may be the title of the 1st APG anthology, by the way) --- back to Debrot; "this is particularly evident for instance w/ the more noticeably regional poetic groupings like apg-- which, although it produces interesting work, is in an extremely unoriginal position vis langpo" seeing this the APG legal counsel wrote to the group; "most of you probably saw this already but [i]* thought it was interesting (...) we're being situated in an argument which im not sure we belong in yet anyway- ie im not sure we are old enough to have a position (even an uninteresting one) yet (and i dont think our stuff in mirage or on this list is enough to base an opinion on) good to know we are in his head ? plus its interesting to me to associate local with atlanta anyway since like dallas and l.a. (although l.a. is unique and might not quite fit) atlanta is really an anti-locus and always has been all the way from the people down to the city layout have a happy new year im heading down to the local swamps buffy" --- attached were some legal do's and don't for the PR Smear campaign that we're launching to link Jacques Debrot invariably in the public mind with "ill will, the worst pretensions of criticism, hate groups, pedophilia and tax evasion" --- luckily the T-shirt sale will easily cover the cost of this (and as a poetic it neatly exemplifies the symptoms of capitalism, no?) but to return to the actual words of Jacques post why wd having some sense of localism in various location around the country / world "tend to leave in place the status quo" etc ?? didn't (the Evil) LangPo start as a local thing in the bay area & in NYC and then make its mythical meteoric rise to "acadominance" --- where wd one start if one was (simply for the sake of argument) jockeying for position -vs- "more ambitiously positioned poetries" ? well,... in the capitalism media one strategy wd be to demonize and dismiss ---- for instance insinuating that someone like Ron Silliman's avowed interest in the 'local' was cover for solidifying his own power what power doesnt really matter --- you just have to say it and it primes the audience to remember it to associate it --- this wd neatly exemplify one symptom or stratagem of capitalism ---- a "debrotian poetic" embodied ? i should have said "critical poetic" as from what i know of Jacques' poetry, it, like mine and everyone else's wdn't get ya 10 cents on any street corner and in the capitalist world wherein we dwell aint worth squat (which is part of why i find it valuable actually) but the what if's multiply rapidly for me; What if you don't think there is any real poetic status quo ? What if yr interest in poetry doesn't entail generational battles ? What if you don't think "Language Poetry" describes poetry but a large and amorphous group of very distinct poets ? What if you (gasp) actually like the work of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman but don't feel that their shadow reaches you at all much less than anyone need feel they are dwelling in it ? What if ...... ???? so, getting back to the posting Jacques using his omnipovision and a startlingly small amount of input data (the APG issue of Mirage) was able to blithely state that we (i am one recall) are in a 'most unoriginal position vis lang po' Mark P. my APG comrade has posted some "distinctions" that he felt were important to share in the face of this and i'm fine with those i s'pose but rather than disavowing LangPo i'd like to say that i like many of those poets and that i was very powerfully effected by some of Bernstein's essays, Rosmarie Waldrop's poetry, (is she langpo ? does she know ? should we tell her ?) by Gertrude Stein (honorary langpo right ? anyway) Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Clark Coolidge (but is he...) cataloging gets tiresome after awhile but what i'm saying is that i liked all that stuff and it hit mea moment when i was just trying to figure out what i was up to in an initial and temporary way --- my explanation wd be that this is good poetry rather than that i've bought into some sort of post-language group think (no disrespect to those who've chosen the term "post-language" --- it's not a name i wd relish but to each her own) but of course i'd like to think i like that stuff b/c its good --- isn't that exactly what a well brainwashed and anaesthetized localist poet in a very unoriginal position vis langpo wd think ? APG false consciousness (from an email) "langpo has turned into this big dusty file cabinet that someone is still cramming files into because it seems better than allowing the 'miscellaneous' box to fill up." (oh, and did i tell you that the Atlanta Poetry Group is the official Poetry Group of the 21st Century ? ..oh... you knew) Jacques then turns to the boston scene and dubs it as "largely frozen in an olsonian aesthetic." ---- i can only say WOW, to be so knowledgeable and so willing to share --- i'm sure the folks in beantown are pleased to know where they stand just as much as we here in @lanta are so what now ? well in spite of Jacques' dismissal of "alternatives" and "solutions" he has something of a cure "what exp poetry needs is in fact an "outside" -- an alternative, just for a start, to all the *puffing* that constitutes the critical discourse (for what it's worth) that surrounds it." --- oops i guess he does say that this Outside wd be an 'alternative' --- pity that the omnipovision either doesnt tell him anything meaningful about this outside or does but he's unwilling to share with us yucks out in the sticks -- but then i do wonder what if anything his post is if not critical *puffing* --- that is "puffing by exclusion" (i forget the latin for it) --- Jacques again: "indeed, rather than the chaos of proliferating books & presses, the reception of alt poetry & its relationship to its audience seems more & more regulated by networks of affiliation structured by a.) apprentiships by emerging poets to more established writers & b.) accreditation/initiation in/by graduate writing &/or english depts at buffalo, brown, naropa, san diego, etc." [Harvard anyone ?] there is some truth in this i'm sure there is a sense in which the critical discourse mediates between audience and readers and certainly given my druthers i'd prefer that this not be the case (enough of critics out of harvard ignore them!) or at least not be "increasingly" the case --- but then again i'm willing in to state openly in the forum that i like Marjorie Perloff's books i don't always agree with her conclusions or understand how she makes certain turns in her arguments --- but i still like them --- is the complaint that some poets arent smart enough to make up their own minds ? and that those foolish enough to attend a writing or english program are actually paying to be indoctrinated ? and if this is true what should we do ? if this is how one ought look at it then the problem seems to be how the smart ones of us those that realize their cattle status and weak minds can (in a blessed aristocratic gesture) enlighten the rest of us (that wd be me) as to the judgements of our own uberbovines, our own omnipovisonary cud chewing betters --- a tough one all around but one thing we do know ---- don't talk to anyone about yr ideas to help this situation --- grouping is right out ---- henceforth everything from the barbershop quartets to the national association of women must remain pure and individual in hopes a stimulating an original position vis a vis the flow of hot air ///// and with that i conclude my tour --- other people said things that i liked and which were very reasonable i thought but this is already the longest post i have ever made to poetics and who knows it may even be rejected and so before going i wd like to say hello and thanks to all the folks i've met and interacted with here i'd love to list names but that wd take even longer and i wdnt want anyone else tainted with APG connections what i wd like to know about are other listservs if anyone cd send me info backchannel about interesting ones i'd also be game to start one up so if anyone is interested in trying out something like that on a small scale, lemme know, but remember: backchannel, as i am, in accordance with my new years resolution signing off of the poetics list but keep yr eyes peeled for more APG wanking "so long, farewell, her feet are stained, goodbyee" )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 21:30:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: currently MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII reading more of The Bear Comes Home, Rafi Zabor (used to play drums w/ me & we'll do that again) Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion Donald Knuth's first two books on computer algorithms etc. Michael Grant, editor, Roman Readings Millennium Film Journal on The Digital Chaucer Richard Wagner, Ring of the Nibelung Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays The Mode of Information, Mark Poster, again Sherman Alexie, The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Burns, The Romans in Britain, an Anthology of Inscriptions Aboriginal Sign Languages of the Americas and Australia, eds. Sebeok^2 Lacanian Ink 7 Various essays of Hippocrates in the Loeb edition Spinoza volumes in Dover A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation by Cornford Book on the Chinese archaeological find of the Qin armies Ross & Robins, The Life and Death of a Druid Prince Keene, Donald, Modern Japanese Diaries Physical Being, Rom Harre (goes with Leder, The Absent Body) Early Schocken book, Yiddish Proverbs, ed. Ayalti Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, An Introduction to History and various other stuff, technical books on Unix, etc. - Alan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 21:51:50 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Thompson Subject: Re: baby stuff MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I hesitate to add to this thread because as a scholar I feel a little naked without my fig-leafed references and footnotes in front of me, but what the hell. I'm among poets, if not friends. But in fact there is an enormous literature among cultural anthropologists on 'magical hair', correlating hair and sexual prowess. So that shaving indicates restraint, asceticism, the accumulation of yogic power, or chi, or chastity, etc. I think that this association can be found in classical China and Japan, certainly in classical India, in Greece and Rome, in the Old Testament, etc. [perhaps only god knows where else, or perhaps everywhere, else]. I think that Stith Thompson might have quite a lot on magical hair in his index of folklore motifs. But I can't go and look [too lazy/busy]. Just for one example, I recently reviewed a book on the erotics of riddling in which there is discussion of the Biblical Queen of Sheba whose hairy legs identified her as an awesome, powerful witch [she was also a good riddler, not unrelated, to be sure]. Of course, there is also the Samson and Delilah scenario.nearby.... George Thompson In a message dated 1/5/00 4:27:57 PM Eastern Standard Time, damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU writes: > At 4:06 PM -0500 1/4/00, hassen wrote: > >arielle > > > >>> I'm actually really interested in studying pedophilia and the way it > >comes up in our culture<< > > > >you know, i've long wondered if there's pedophiliac > >connection/implication/etc. w/the practice of shaving. esp. women. esp. > >legs. > > > >i've no idea the history, when it began, etc. but am quite curious. would > >love to hear more. > > > >hassen > > i think you are right on about that, esp in the US women are abnormally > infantilized and this is a prime piece of evidence. a woman who speaks > without giggling, self-deprecating affect, and who keeps her body hair is > seen as threatening. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:02:23 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Thompson Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I think that David Bromige is very kind for not saying it directly that Leonard Brink and Billy Mills simply misread his joke. GT ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 19:47:58 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Foward from Cydney Chadwick MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Could anyone who sent me e-mail on Saturday, January 1st please resend it. I had to request that my server delete my entire "in" box for that day. Cydney ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 17:11:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: the local outside MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII jacques, brian, et al., some thots on the outside and the local sparked by yr recent posts; i relate here some recent poetry-related experiences and the ways in which i think/hope they tie in at several places in the discussion. first, i agree completely with jacques on the following: "2. alternative poetries are not diametrically dissimilar to mainstream poetry, but actually share/reproduce many of the symptoms of this crisis-in-complacency. this is not, however, necessarily a *bad* thing [. . .] " part of the symptom is an unflinching acceptance of terms in which the alternative defines itself oppositionally to the mainstream. this strikes me as fundamental and one of several things that i immensely dislike about the beach book, namely how if you take oppositionality as a given, and specifically one pole's terms for positing that oppositionality, it becomes impossible to discern anything that might frustrate that oppositionality such as, for example, the fact that many emerging alternative poets cut their teeth in the much-demonized university creative writing program, as jacques suggests here: "the reception of alt poetry & its relationship to its audience seems more & more regulated by networks of affiliation structured by a.) apprentiships by emerging poets to more established writers & b.) accreditation/initiation in/by graduate writing &/or english depts at buffalo, brown, naropa, san diego, etc." this may be one of the most important facets of current alternative poetries, but it simply can't be admitted into the discussion as long as the m.f.a. program is universally opposed. and again i think jacques is right, the modes of production embraced by the alternative may very well be much closer to those of the mainstream than the alternative would want to admit. thus i'd rather than assume radically opposite mechanisms for cultural production assume homologous mechanisms and then try to specify differences from there. we're approaching a point, if not already there, where the alternative exhausts its conceptual resources -- or at least the efficaciousness of those resources begins to wither -- in persisting with a tried-and-true and hence simplistic oppositionality. hence, i think, brian's "we don't have a heck of lot of ideas these days." second, i'm doubtful that the ideas are going to come by constructing, as jacques suggests, an "outside," partly because I'm not sure what such an "outside" would look like or constitute, and partly because of the way that the disciples of foucault blanchot bataille et al. tend to uncritically assume some radicality of the "outside." i think there needs to be a continual, what, reconnoitering?, between the poles, a movement to an outside that is then followed up by a renewed view inside... maybe some "local" anecdotes are in order here. first, was watching the new year's eve festivities on the mall in d.c. -- on the tube about ten miles away at my sister's in suburban maryland, yes i succumbed to the insinuations of terrorist attacks but what can i say from where i was the view the temperature and the food were terrific -- and everyone actually is gathered around the tube as midnight approaches and spielberg's thing is wrapping up and on comes pinsky to give the requisite poem-bite, and somebody asks who's that? and i reply without missing a beat robert pinsky knowing full well that no one in this room full of intellegent people has any idea who robert pinsky is. who's he someone asks and i say he's our current poet laureate. everyone is of course astounded at this and they wonder how i know this and someone says well he *does* work in an english department, and my brother-in-law adds not only that but tom actually does things like go to poetry readings a lot. (end of scenario, enter maya angelou.) second. my co-worker asks me one morning how was the poetry reading given by jean donnelly that i went to the previous night. and i said it was great, that her work is really terrific, that everyone in attendance agreed, etc. my co-worker wants to know more, she asks how jean's work compares to that of others in the department, and i of course fall back on the old "experimental" and "alternative" tags. smartly, she senses that these are tags and asks further, about poetry slams and is this work like or unlike that. no, that's something else, but i try to get into that a little bit, then the Beats, performance, etc. then she asks a really good question, about if there are a lot of women involved in this alternative stuff, but then work interrupts and conversation ends. point being, i think, that in either case it's immensely difficult to add not even nuance or shading but any color at all to the grey morass that is the general perception of poetry. should more people know who the poet laureate is, would it increase his fan base if pinsky published in the new yorker, and if i know who he is am i thereby implicated as a fan and if not how to explain why i'm not. what is my responsibility here -- mine or anyone else's for whom poetry matters? what are the *real* choices between big group hugs and trenchant oppositionality? -- neither of which i think are particularly feasible or desirable. hence i think the value in making forays through the poles, precisely to suspend my own predilications and get into another reader's head and try to identify the appeal. like, third, frank bidart gave a reading at the folger which i did not attend but a line from which has provoked endless hilarity among us devotees of the alternative: "the tapeworm was her soul." it's a serious exercise to suspend one's immediate response and try to figure out exactly in what sense of poetry does such a line register an affirmative. i can't quite wrap my head around it and i'd love nothing more than for some to "make a case" for it to me. fourth. a reading put on in the experimental series at the d.c. arts center, two poets who teach in a local university english department. both took an enormous amount of time "setting up" their work. the first curiously divided the audience into those familiar/unfamiliar with the work (which struck us as those with/not-with the university program), part of which dealt at length with the poet's coming-to-terms with her mother's terminal illness, the other part being a collaboration with the work of a local visual artist who deals with domestic issues through the use of glycerin and lead. the second poet's work was an extensive foray into family history, the ancestors who had emigrated here and turned out to be not all the wonderful people that family legend suggested. this is a real nutshell recounting and i've oversimplified a great deal. but our discussions afterward revolved around the terms in which to think about the work: the "quality of emotion," mode of engagement with another artform, the de facto validity of history? none of which anyone was very comfortable with... i guess i'm trying to back up brian's "idea of there being a constant soiling or corrupting of this purity, that there is no outside but running among the corridors of the "inside"." i want pure oppositionalities to be soiled, corrupted. this applies also to the local (vs. what, global? non-local?). the local is interesting to me primarily insofar as it extends beyond itself and thus sullies any pure local-ness it might want to claim. all the activities of the local scene here in d.c. might as well take place in a vacuum if there is no attempt to extend the locality, to get people here to read from philly, nyc, atlanta, to cross over into and do collaborative work with the visual arts community, etc. so i don't know that the local as a framework has been exhausted, but it certainly needs rethinking. apparently its langpo residues seem to be clinging to our friends in atlanta, but there is a confusion i think over whether that residue is of the nature of the works themselves or of the positioning of the group as locality. brian referred to "a sort of ghost double of *some of the gestures* of language poetry," jacques to the apg's "extremely unoriginal *position* vis langpo" (my emphases). so it's not, as i see it, the work but the positioning that might be considered unoriginal (members of a loosely-affiliated group of writers who read and engage with each others work while disavowing any specific shared aesthetics, etc.; but the means of intervention are certainly unique: a san fran 'zine picks them up and disseminates 135 issues nationwide thru a buffalo poetics promo!) but then again, to continue with brian's turn of phrase, i want an originality that is thoroughly sullied by the derivative. duncan was definitely onto something there... bests, tom ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 01:10:55 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed David - <> OK, so you were ignorant, and as a result you made a mistake. At such a junction you have several options - apologize, hide, or explain the mistake away. I think the proper choice is evident. Show some humility, apologize. And the choice you made was way off the mark. Your joke is clearly about stupidity, (two glasses, one full, as options for drinking or not drinking? C'mon pal, you sound like Jimmy the Greek with such a charade) and you could have admitted you made a mistake. But you seem to be defending something in the name of, well, what is it in the name of? Pride? Would it be too much to ask you to be secure enough to acknowledge that either a) you made a mistake or b) you honestly cling to the notion that Irishmen are stupid (or drunks, as you teased us with in another post). How can one be completely ignorant of sentiments like the Irish as "niggers turned inside out" just as blacks were called "smoked Irish"? If you can imagine African Americans would not like to hear that, well, then you may start to understand. Or how about names like . . . barks, bog trotters, boiled dinners, Celts, chaws, chaw mouths, dogans, flannelmouths, greenlanders, harps, Hibernians, mackerel snappers, Micks, narrow backs, paddies, Patlanders, salt water turkeys, spuds, teagues, terriers, Turks? Have you never heard of the time of history in America where Irish and African Americans were treated equally, but only as equal to each other, and together both below everyone else? "Niggers and Irishmen need not apply"? Or other aspects of the legacy of British oppression of the Irish? Or the fact that most people in the South in the US are of Irish decent and NOT of British decent, as they like to fantasize of themselves as somehow being related to the deliverers of slavery and aristocracy to the SE US? From 1695 until 1793, the Penal Laws imposed by your ancestors, the British, denied most Irish to any education at all. Enforced law. Thereafter, schooling was run by Christian Brthers and Ursuline Sisters. Not a very good way to stimulate intellectual growth in a country. OK, so you didn't know this was a soft spot. Cannot you just apologize? And the passive aggressive stuff in implying a contrast between Dutch and Irish is not a clever tactic - "ability to laugh at themselves." I was born and raised in america and was acutely aware of this stereotype of the Irish, as many well-educated people are. <> And so you add insult to injury? Where is your compassion, your ability to fathom? I did not find the joke insulting so much as stupid and blissfully ignorant. C'mon David. Patrick ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:21:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: geraldine mckenzie Subject: Re: Lucious Jacqeson Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Hi Brian, Please excuse a belated response to one of the points you responded to in a series of letters I read with interest and pleasure. I refer to the claim that poetry has become a minor genre. I'm sure this is the case in Australia, and, to varying degrees, in most Western democracies. I'm not so sure about Russia or South America (I've heard of poetry festivals there that draw thousands) or China etc. This is not an idle point. If we look at societies in which poetry does play a major role in the life of the people, I think we can understand why it fails to do so in the West. In a society like that of my Irish forebears some thousand years ago, the bard had a valued position in society because poetry fulfilled important functions - history, philosophy, myth, entertainment - which today are taken over, in the day to day life of the majority, by mass media. The fact that the media is so visually oriented exacerbates the problem. Similarly, the way in which the media dictates the time span of the viewer/listener's experience might make it difficult to adapt to the different way in which reading a poem operates in time. (That point's purely off the top of my head - I could be way off beam.). The way I see it, it's because poetry has been squeezed out of its traditional functions (plus, perhaps, a certain loss of faith in high culture - of which, more later) that it has come to occupy this minor role, and not because of the the nature of what is written (although I'm not sure that helps). People will argue that poetry needs to become more accessible, to reach out to Old Hundred Names, but if large sections of the population are not reading poetry, it's not because they don't like what is being written - they don't even read what's being written. Poetry simply doesn't play a part in their lives, just as it doesn't play a part (except in rare circumstances) in reality as mediated through the TV and radio. Trying out another position - if the majority are not interested in poetry, isn't that also a reflection of the deficiencies of mainstream poetry, rather than experimental work which is not easily come by. Certainly, it's not what one is exposed to in schools and I think most of those who don't read poetry have acquired their dislike of it in school. (and it can be this strong - as a school teacher, I come across it all the time and with poetry more than any other aspect of English - on the other hand, the art teachers encounter no such difficulties in teaching about Surrealism etc. - sorry, got sidetracked) This is due in part to the method of approach to a poem which is taught - close textual analysis - the focus on 'meaning' - (I could get sidetracked again so easily) but must also be a reflection on the texts studied - absolute mainstream with Eliot as a token (naturally I'm referring to Australia here and would be interested to hear what sort of poetry is taught in American schools - are they any more adventurous?). Another question - earlier I referred to high culture, and poetry, whatever the intentions of some of its practitioners, is identified with that area. In an age when popular culture dominates our impression of the world and the attitudes of many of its inhabitants, high culture has become the lesser partner, more prestigious perhaps and, to varying degrees, the preserve of elites (into a tricky area) but not, well, popular. This may appear as a decline,that poetry "has become" less than it was, but high culture is, by definition, the culture of an elite/elites and thus of a minority. Popular culture has always existed but it has not always been reported on, so our impressions of periods of history where poetry seemed in some golden age, for example the English Romantics (not a personal favourite), may be quite false. Perhaps, in lieu of movie stars and rock singers, some poets might have attained fame but did the proportion of people who read their work differ significantly from the proportion of people who read poetry in England today? I'm not even sure that can be answered, but I think it's worth mentioning as many statements about 'the state of poetry today' are based on some perception, possibly false, about the state of poetry in the past. One last point - I mentioned Celtic Ireland earlier as an instance of a society in which the poet has a unique and important function, if we consider briefly a contemporary example I think it may lead us to Brian's question (I can't do it justice) about the sublime and cruelty. I'm referring to Russia in the period in which it was the USSR (any reports on the current state of poetry in Russia?) My impression is that poetry mattered there in ways it simply can't here or in the US or England - again, it is in part because of the function it performed. Even a poorly written samizdat poem might have some force because of the nature of the action. And this may be where poetry shows its true colours, for it is surely one of the few resources available to the oppressed. It doesn't even require materials for its production or transmission, we may make our poems and teach them to others who will pass them on in turn. Being a little less romantic, typewriters, roneo machines,photocopiers, even publishers can be found and the results distributed privately. Poetry, we might say, is the natural voice of the revolutionary whereas television is the natural voice of the status quo. If people accept the status quo (mustn't grumble)then I guess they'll be happy enough with TV. (This could be too stark - I am not unilaterally in favour of revolutionaries and opposed to all status (stati?) quo.) So, is this where cruelty comes in? do we need to be stripped of possessions and liberties to realise that we still have poetry? (This has a particular pertinence in Australia, we had to go all the way to Turkey and France to experience anything approaching national trauma.) I don't accept the notion that we need cruelty/egotism/ intolerance from poets, especially in the interests of making them more interesting, but it may be that we need to experience or at least admit to the presence of evil in the world if our poetry is to approach the sublime. A final comment - if we're reduced to an audience that loves poetry for its own sake, is that such a bad thing? All the best, Geraldine McKenzie > > > > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 02:10:16 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matthew Blevins Subject: "Disjunctivitis" + Postmodern Poetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Judy Roitman wrote: >I know workshop poetry when I see it, but what are the boundaries of >language poetry? Bob Archambeau wrote: For my purposes (as editor) I go by what Nataniel Tarn has to say about it in his essay in Jacket: (http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket09/tarn-on-paz.html). Disjoined syntax as a central trope, or that becomes a mannerism, or "disjunctivitis." A bit limited, but it works for me. I write: Hrm. I just returned from The Coffee Bean Cafe and Tarn's essay, and while I agree with much of what he has to say, I would like to give some defense to the use of "fragmentation", as well as ponder a bit regarding a "postmodern" poetry. First of all, I find it amusing that Tarn managed to get through that entire essay without once saying "postmodern". While the word is enough to make most (honest) people cringe, I think that there are some important questions that need to be addressed with regards to the postmodern. Particularly, what might a postmodern poetry be like, and what would serve as legitimation in it, what would "vouch for its authenticity?" While it is arguable that the effects of postmodernism are probably more prominent among academians than in the general populace, that is the cultural world I feel I live in, and thus the experiential one which I must try to "make articulate" as Creeley might say. It is perhaps paradoxical to try to construct narratives amid a "crisis of narratives" as Lyotard calls it, but this is what people do, this is a way we read meaning into our experience. So why all the fragmentation? Because when trying to articulate the postmodern, that's one way to do it. Fragmentation of experience, meaning, culture, etc-- these are all an important part of the postmodern world many of us live in. Younger poets (myself included) are influenced by media saturation which delivers its messages and stories in visual and narrative chunks and fragments. Attention spans shorten. In another sense, actual Disjunctivitis might be seen as a symptom of an excess of postmodern anxst over the breakdown of modernist metanarratives. (also: Paz's note of "imitation masquerading as originality, invention, and innovation" is not surprising; postmodern society very much into "recycling", the new VW Bugs, for example) What I'm saying is that this isn't all just eccentricity for its own sake; there is a purpose in the fragmentation of language to some degree, or at least a cause. When such fragmentation become totally inarticulate, there's a problem. Yet skepticism about knowledge and the ability of anything to be "true" (or articulate) is at the very heart of a postmodern poetry. It isn't enough to write typical verse with postmodern subject matter or concerns; these concerns must be taken up, must be at issue, in the language itself. Which leads us to legitimation. Self-reflexivity is certainly the pragmatic "high point" of postmodernism, although many bad postmodernists (read: "cultural studies") tend to gloss over it. "But I do feel poems to involve an occasion to which a man pays obedience, and which intentions alone never yield." -Robert Creeley, "Poems are a Complex" 1965 (reproduced in -Claims for Poetry- ed. Donald Hall) "Poems are like children and have minds and manners of their own, luckily beyond the control of parents and poets." -Bin Ramke There comes a point in many poems--some might say all--where the language decides to say or do something the poet hadn't expected. Bizzare tangents, uncomfortable realizations. So does one listen to the language, or does one try to control it? It is my own hope to try to make this "point" not a point but a constant process of listening. By surrendering some of my intention, I might just learn something. Death of the author? Not exactly. Just a realization that the author is a flawed, biased individual who would perhaps do well to be a bit more humble. One might note as well that this surrendering of intention to language might account for some of these peculiarities (such as fragmentation). The style and form of language in such a postmodern poetry is an important part of this listening. Thus, postmodern legitimation might include the surrendering of intention to language, a close styling of form to content (if one can even presume to separate them), and a certain self-deprecation regarding the author's role in the poem--a generosity of sorts in which one opens oneself up to being imperfect and positioned. What's perhaps most strange is the way in which faith and authenticity spring not from a belief in the ability of one to directly articulate through language, but in a belief that language is subversive--"Damn subversive." as Wayne Dodd gruffly agreed with me--and can subvert our intentions and take us to something self-reflexive and perhapseven (gasp)"true." Seeing and hearing this subversiveness, letting the language in a sense deconstruct itself, is one way this legitimation plays itself out. Well, I don't have a brilliant closing for this and it is very late here. Despite the extensive use of many large, latinate words, I don't claim to be certain of any of this or to have any comprehensive grasp of the current "scene" as it were. Hopefully this will server as food for thought and discussion, though... -Matthew Blevins, another poet-anthropologist (whose theory is probably more interesting than his poetry?) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:59:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: my wild irish joke Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Listmates, stop the presses. Ignore my recent post, "knowing what a joke means." The Irish woman who helped raise me came to me in a dream last night. She told me "That joke, Davey? It's about being stupid." I remember that I tried to reason with her, gave her a precis of my prior post on this topic. Might even have pointed out to her it was a matter of opinion. "You always were a clever lad," she told me, "But sometimes, you were too clever by half." "Yes, Mother Mary," I said, submissively. "You have done that boy Billy an injury. I want you to stand up like a man and say you're sorry in front of the whole school." I saw we were in a schoolroom, with tiny desks, and that Mary Murphy was the teacher. "I will, Mother," I told her. "Don't leave yet---there's so much I want to ask you!" "Yes, Davey?" "Is it really you, or...?" "What do you think?" She reached over and grasped my arm. "Thank you, thank you! I have another question." "I don't have time, Davey." In heaven---do people laugh in the case of mistaken identity?" "Only the saints, Davey. Now go to sleep, there's a good boy." I found I was in my little bed, on Sumatra Road in West Hampstead. Then I went to sleep. Then I woke up. I am sorry I hurt your feelings, Billy,,,and perhaps those of other Irish on this list. Or, and which is a very different matter, stupid persons, come to that. Davey. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 20:29:43 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: shaving pedophilia MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit hi hassen cdnt help noticing that youre maybe the first to use chatroom language/style on this list: _lol_ , _blink_ best Tony -----Original Message----- From: hassen To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Friday, 7 January 2000 14:45 Subject: Re: shaving pedophilia >emily > >>>I'm more inclined to imagine that women shaving has its roots more > in inflating (so-called) differences between the sexes << >hm, doesn't seem to ring as true in my experience. which may be little, >comparitively. how about so-called differences between the sexes is used >more as excuse to secure such practices? but let me ask: are there not >various aspects of the average american male's - and female's - sexual >tastes/practices/desires that seem to indicate obvious pedophiliac >tendencies? but i've certainly not researched/studied this in even a >remotely scientific manner. lol. harmless questions, really, blink. > >and this: >> I don't think men dressing up as babies and getting spanked is >related to pedophilia, either...<< >elicits not only a playful smirk, but a related bounce: that perhaps >pedophilia, shaving & even child-like sexual role-play, etc. are indeed >related - may be simple sexual nostalgia? > >no judgment re such things on my part, i'd like to point out. this is >nothing by way of complaint or nonesuchdarklycrummyeww things. only >curiosity & conversation. > >youthfully, >sweetly, >hassen > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:11:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means / Boughn MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I had to reformat this message. Chris -- Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 09:35:17 -0500 From: Mike Boughn > In future, I shall make sure that my jokes all begin "An Esperantese, > a Venutian and a Martian were discoursing in a bar...." --But then > won't I be told that the latter two types are gender-coded? This whole thread makes me think of Barry Levinson's latest Baltimore movie, Liberty Heights. It's the most good humoured, generous treatment of race, religion and class in the US that I think I've ever seen. It begins with three young Jewish boys in 1954 facing a sign on a WASP swimming pool that says No Jews, Dogs or Coloreds. Their response is to try to figure out why whoever made the sign chose that order. It's hilarious. But of course some people have no interest in bringing either humour or generosity to these issues. Mike ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 10:17:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: sylvester pollet Subject: end of century reading material Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Am I the only one on the list who read all 20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels between Sept. 2 and Jan. 2? You can get the first vol. "Master and Commander" free from Norton (because they know it's addictive). Briefly, they are sea adventures from the era of British navy vs. Napoleon, but that's really not an adequate description. I read other stuff too. Sylvester ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 10:27:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: ooh baby baby Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed As a response to MDamon's last post on 'baby' and the more extraordinary posts on this subject (MDamon's was not nearly as ridiculous as some of the other posts, and she protected herself by telling us that someone was relaying this information to her and that she was merely delivering it to us). . . <> that sounds like somewhat of a misnomer, since prematurity is based on ONE species' average . are we humans premature in comparison to chimpanzees? a human at 9 mos. is not premature just because a chimp takes 12 mos (or however long a chimp takes). what the behaviorist said makes no sense. unless he means something like, humans have begun to force delivery of babies before gestation is complete. but even then. prematurity is an unlikely conclusion. it might be better to say that _h. Sapiens_ has one of the longest known neotenous periods, neoteny being the dependance of an infant on its mother (or father). which extends our period of childishness considerably, perhaps indefinitiely. the god of man is child. <> it may be mammalian, not merely human, since my two kittens like to try to groom my mouth and fingers when I come home and just before I go to sleep, a sort of kissing. they are certainly being affectionate but kissing is neither limited to the phenomenon of the erotic nor to the lot of humans. i think 'erotic' attraction, namely, pinpointing what 'erotic' is, is quite difficult to witness or measure in other species, and challenging to describe without some first-person experiences, which are by definition beyond the range of behavioralism. As a result, I would find a comparative analysis between species, well, specious. there may be a more sufficient approach than a behaviorist one to kissing or mammary fixation or use of the word 'baby.' or let's say a hammer is used as a tool (a) to build a house and (b)for murder. let's also assume some guy named Harry is building a house, hammer in hand. Would we say that Harry, having never employed a hammer for any violent actions, is partaking of a homicidal action? would we say that a hammer represents homicidal inclinations even when used to build a house? i think the answer is clear. similarly, 'baby' might be used in two different ways, and there seems no imperative to deduce that the use in one way automatically implies use of the word in the other way. under most circumstances I doubt 'baby' partakes of some sort of predatory pedophilia, as was suggested earlier in this thread. however, i do indeed think that sexuality works in all relationships, whether lover, friend, or child-parent. love sometimes becomes immersed in cooperative living, mutual support, and perhaps even multiple child-parent type relations between lovers. why 'baby'? maybe the sounds in 'baby' are affectionate, sweet, gentle, and soothing to intimates of either variety -- parent-child and lovers. i guess the main issue here is whether the meaning of a word at its coinage is always implied in future uses. Nietzsche obviously believed the answer is 'yes,' or at least he built some important arguments on such a heuristic. i disagree strongly, as meanings are dynamic. they shift from generation to generation (diachronically), and even individuals may beleive at different times in their lives that a particular word means different things, or an individual will change his or her use of a word over a lifetime. And even synchronically speaking, there may be different meanings for different people, different usages, etc. if 'baby' were initially used in the sense we are talking about as a word of sexual objectification, it does not mean that most people today intend it the same way. but new orleans certainly IS a strange town, and I wouldn't have it any other way. OK, maybe a bit less humidity in the summer. Also, the meaning of a word seems to be distorted even by its immediate surroundings. So it is plausible that 'baby,' used in some song and sung to a lover, means something completely different than 'baby' in the same song but actualy sung to a child. I find it safe to say, language is very complicated. And pedophilia is obviously an ingrained aspect of human behavior, even if in a minority. But 'baby' said to a lover does not necessarily partake of pedophilic inclinations. Patrick ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 09:44:03 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: knowing what a joke means MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In my collosal naivete I actually misunderstood this joke, not as illustration of stupidity, but of a sort of surrealist, magical logic perhaps characteristic of Irishmen and -women and poets. I propose revising the joke as follows: Why did Andre Breton leave a full and an empty glass by his bedside? etc... It also reminds me of the story of the monk in China who hires a man to row him across a lake. When they are almost to the other side, the monk asks his rower to take him back, since he, the monk, doesn't want to go there anymore. This seems illogical to those of us who would say "well, I might as well go all the way to the other side, since I've gotten this far." But why do something you don't want to do just because you've started it? Jonathan Mayhew jmayhew@ukans.edu _____________ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 11:09:20 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Emily Lloyd Subject: Re: Desire at 14 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Marla, I think the power thing is almost always part of the equation (or in-equation). I guess age of consent laws happen because "we have to draw the line somewhere," but it (perhaps/hopefully with lawmakers' knowledge?) remains flawed (& reductive & potentially harmful) to assume that once a person gets past a certain age s/he will be able to consent any better than a younger person (not that *you* assume this; the law does). Power can come into play between two same-sex financially-equal identical in ht/wt same-race partners in their 40's. Some people are sexually "powerless" their whole lives; some never are. I don't think pedophilia, in its "pure" form (it's all relative), is about attraction to powerlessness. One can find powerless enough people in legal age groups anywhere one looks. I think it is about attraction to children's bodies, period; I really do. Anything else is just something glommed on to pedophilia, the way, say, a fetish or a tendency toward sadism can glom on to good ol' innocuous heterosexuality. I do not think pedophiles are attracted to children because they're "easy marks," or because they're easy to keep quiet. Many adults are these things; many kids aren't. I guess I think of it this way: when I was a kid, I was attracted to both kids my own age and adults (celebrity adults, usually). It does not seem unreasonable to me, therefore, that one might be attracted to both as an adult (or neither, or only one). That pedophilia acted out harms (can harm) children is not an attraction for "normal" pedophiles...it's a cause for grief, or shame, or quite possibly disbelief (the pedophile thinks he's "in love" and that the kid must be, too...perhaps a bit like the de Clarembeaut's [sp?] syndrome captured in Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love") As this is admittedly not very interesting, I'll sign off-- em ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 12:10:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: what we're reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" We at the Poetry Project are reading the following: we are ALL reading Kim Lyons' fantastic new book, Abracadabra, from Granary Books. Katy L is reading Jack Derrida Vittengstein Lichee Diderot Joan Didion The Bell Jar Interview with the Vampire Bliss to Fill by Prageeta Sharma listening to: Serge Gainesbourg Greg F. is reading a book about Miami by Joan Didion Anselm B. is reading The New York Post The Conquest of Mexico by W.H. Prescott Interviews with Marcel Duchamp Joanne Kyger, Patzcuaro Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry by Lawrence Perrine listening to: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Elizabeth Cotten, Combat Rock, mixed tapes that people have been handing him, Scarf Box with Eddie & John Coletti Marcella D. is reading Cape Cod by Thoreau Patagonia by Metcalf The Larousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology (only $16 at the Strand!) Blue Guide by Eleni Sikelianos Lots & lots of Tiny Press Center goodies (Interlope, Beautiful Swimmer, A+bend press...) listening to: Jim O'Rourke, Sam Prekop, Les McCann, Jammin' 105, Thomas Dolby Rich O is reading Tender to the Bone by Ruth Reichl listening to: the flutist in the 70s who's sampled all the time & lord, tons of jazz Eddie B is reading the International Journal of Psychoanalysis some philosophy book he found in the street listening to: Doc Boggs, Royal Trux, Talking Heads Love, The Poetry Project ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 09:51:55 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: The Local Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed I'd just like to say that my own definition of the local is not automatically one linked by geography. I think that there are other types of intensive/intended collaborations that might equally qualify. Although I do think that the face-to-face element of the scene vs. the network really helps in detoxifying the paranoia which sometimes lurks up in more distant interactions (the history of this list being a pretty decent example of same). Reading the history of Black Mountain College, particularly in relation to people who were not always "present" (Duncan and Creeley both there only for short periods, Levertov not really at all, Eigner never), brings up lots of things to think about over just such dynamics. Ron ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 10:21:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kirschenbaum Subject: John Milner, 1973 Topps, in memoriam Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable John Milner, 1973 Topps =09in memoriam Your picture always seemed brighter than the rest the first year I ever collected baseball cards. (I wonder if you were in the stack that fluttered=20 out of my second grade teacher Mrs. Flayton=92s hands and onto the stickball courts=20 that September day when I cried through the night.) In our Flatbush apartment we grew grass from Shea Stadium, grabbed the day your Mets defeated the Reds in the playoffs and my brother, readying his dugout-roof leap, went back to free my sister=92s leg from a seat=20 and save her from a fan stampede. It must have been a fall day at Shea Stadium, when the photographer took the subway=20 from the card company=92s Brooklyn offices to Flushing, Queens, because you have on a bright blue windbreaker beneath your uniform top. Your light brown, game-worn-and-then-some, left-handed first baseman=92s mitt rests=20 over the hole between your chest and abdomen, the upside-down letters, in big, black block print, say your nickname, HAMMER. _______________________________________________________ Visit Excite Shopping at http://shopping.excite.com=20 The fastest way to find your Holiday gift this season ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 13:26:52 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: was Luscious Jacquson, now Steffanwolf MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit hello to everyone doing this thread, brian, you write: >> . . . But this idea of the state of crisis in "mainstream" poetry could have many factors, one of which is that the glory days of this "mainstream" -- Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, etc. -- still maintained some very close ties to modernism and its myths, not to mention the figures of modernism in their presence (Thomas, Auden, Stein a little bit even, the ever-looming Pound, Eliot, and even Williams for those like Jarrell who accepted him). They could derive some excitement from that, and feel a part of the "age of anxiety" even if in socially unchallenging teaching jobs. Now, that thrill is to be found in their own peers whom they, by nature, have to ignore -- i.e. "us," the so-called experimental wing<< i agree w/ you substantially, but w/ this revision: just happening, by chance, to see norman podhoretz being interviewed on c-span the other day, it really struck me how much the various literary circles radiating out from commentary, the partisan review & the new critical journals identified *themselves* as being the representatives of the avant-garde in relation to mainstream culture, rather than in some sense, as you suggest, getting a contact high from the presence of auden, thomas, etc. so that when podhoretz, as i was saying, looks back at the fifties he sees *himself & his friends* as having embodied "the most radical & advanced political & aesthetic thought of the day." i mean, while you & i, for example--almost w/out thinking about it--would link the nys painters to o'hara and the others, remember, greenberg was writing about pollock for the partisan review crowd which also strongly identified w/ the aesthetic aims of ab ex--&, it seems to me, in a much less complicated way than the nys poets. what changed all of this was vietnam & post structuralist philosophy. the lang poets were, from my point of view (it almost goes w/out saying), absolutely on the right side in both instances. &, too, borges-wise, i think it's possible that the influence of the lang poets has migrated backwards in a way, so that retrospectively, o'hara looks more av-garde to us today than he did to his contemporaries (after all, the reviews he received in the 50s didn't put him down for being too experimental, but for being too lightweight). one of the added complications of the present situation however is that both the modernists's & the new crits relationship to their audiences was not nearly as conflicted as "ours" is--we each are writing for elites, the modernists embraced that idea--"we" are deeply troubled by it. it never mattered, then, for them, in the same way that it does for us, that our readers are only those who are already, overwhelmingly, in complicity with us aesthetically & politically. for this reason (&, from my perspective, other reasons i don't have time to go into now) the difficulties obstructing exp poetry's having any cultural relevance at all seem practically intractable. i tend to be as pessimistic about it as bruce andrews who writes "this is the most invisible avant-garde" (quoting roughly from memory). about blake / reynolds, too--this is an excellent case of how outside/inside dichotomies can be misleading. rather than being "the most outside" blake essentially shares reynolds concerns, but in a form that is so eccentric that this might not at first be entirely obvious. blake, for example, was just as much caught up as reynolds was in the chauvinistic idea of the development of a uniquely british art & exhibited the same feelings of over-compensating inferiority toward continental artists which subtended the dominant english aesthetic ideolgy of the period. i think you are probably right though in seeing in my desire for an "outside" a buried nostalgia for some fantasmal objective cultural authority--a feeling i definitely want to keep in check--but don't you ever feel that way? naively, perhaps, what i had in mind was the situation of the visual arts &, more specifically, i was influenced by the latest artforum in which something like 15 art scholars listed their favorite exhibitions of the year. now i know about all of the corruptions, compromises, etc. etc. in the artworld, but i was still impressed by the fact that there was an audience for contemp visual art (which is almost generically experimental) that includes people as impressive as krauss, and buchloh, and foster, and martin jay, and bryson, and jacqueline rose, etc. etc.-- but nothing like that for exp poetry. indeed, when artforum does cover contemp poetry in the bookforun supplement, it's often the blandest variety. thank god for maria damon, joseph conte, perloff, altieri, shoptaw--but even they, for the most part, don't ever write about anything more recent than lang poetry. & it is (a little) dissapointing that when someone like jacqueline rose does write about poetry she writes about sylvia plath (even if i am a plath fan). the lang poets are probably the best am poet/critics of the century, but there is a tendency to take them entirely on their terms & so our inheritance of their work -- and all of its possible or most counter-intuitive implications-- is diminished. it's (particularly) presjnar's too simple understanding of lang poetry & his very easy & uncomplicated adoption of oppositional terms & the way in which this is manifested in his poems-- that i object to. re your second point, let me just repeat what tom orange has just said much better than i did: "the modes of production embraced by the alternative may very well be much closer to those of the mainstream than the alternative would want to admit. thus i'd rather than assume radically opposite mechanisms for cultural production assume homologous mechanisms and then try to specify differences from there." this post is already too long & i haven't yet addressed several remarks of yours brian that point to weaknesses or ambiguities in my earlier post--which like this one, was written at too great a speed to fault me for using scare quotes. but i feel i should say something about the apg. first, i do accept the argument that the group includes a diversity of poets. in fact, i think that some of them are doing work that interests *me* a lot whatever other value it--or the work i don't so much like-- might or might not have. my references to the "apg" actually reflect my reluctance to criticize, by name--or even, in any specific terms, the work of-- poets who are not in some sense already "established." even now i am very reluctant to criticize presjnar's & lowther's work at length in this venue (though, if i thought there was any interest i would do it, i suppose, in an essay--but would anyone run it?). but this has been, obviously, on my part, an unsatisfactory inhibition as it seems to have spared nobody's feelings. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 06:17:53 -0500 Reply-To: Jonathan Williams Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jonathan Williams Organization: The Jargon Society Subject: Thomas Meyer's new book MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Jargon Society is pleased to announce the publication of AT DUSK IRIDESCENT a substantial selection of Thomas Meyer's poems, 1972-1997 The jacket, using photographs by Mark Steinmetz and Guy Mendes, is stunning. The book's design, by Jeff Clark, is wonderfully fresh and gives the poems all the room they need. AT DUSK IRIDESCENT is not "easy. " Thomas Meyer ranges across a panoply of ancient & modern European and Asian lanaguages. The poems are serene, meditative; at times erotic, at other times sombre. Hip-Hop Contemporary Life is not like that. Few readers these days have much in the way of gravitas, or a broad acquaintance with the world's poetic heritage. (The Editor of Parnassus, our finest magazine devoted to reviewing poetry, has tried for 28 years to find someone capable of taking on TM's previous books and has come up short.) Reviews or not, this is an impressive volume and there will be many enthusiasts for it. Ezra Pound (remember him?) used to say he dividred poetry into what he could read and what he couldn't. I have read AT DUSK IRIDESCENT calmly and carefully to the very last page. Jonathan Williams, Publisher The Jargon Society Post Office Box 10 Highlands, NC 28741 vox/fax: 828.526.4461 email: jwms@jargonbooks.com online: jargonbooks.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 16:09:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Lennon Subject: contact info request Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Anyone have email, phone, or surface mail for Joan Retallack? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 12:56:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: exemplary symptom or if not, please supply one? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > "...it might be more useful & interesting for poetry to > make the symptoms of capitalism *exemplary* rather > than to propose 'alternatives' or 'solutions' " Jacques Debrot, as reported in John Lowther's long poem [I read Jacques' post, but it is now deleted so I rely, I hope justifiably, on John's accuracy] Jacques, would the ensuing be an instance of the exemplary you mention? THE ART OF CAPITALISM I heard of this woman who loved to eat oranges. Hey, a friend said to her, You should go see this movie at the International Film Festival. It's just tjhis woman eating an orange for fifteen minutes in close-up. So go she did. Two weeks later, he husband finally notices something's amiss with her. You've been pretty much depressed and off your feed, he says. Why not eat an orange? I can eat an orange better than the woman in that movie, she tells him. I'm damned if I can see why I should have to eat an orange and not get paid for it. David ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 16:21:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Machine-19e MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII --- Machine-19e Renan-Machine Seminary to Spiritual Crisis to the future of science to the history of religion and the lover of ideas through 1892 Taine-Machine The young philosopher through literary critique through critique of art to moral crisis to historian through 1893 Baudelaire-Machine His mother's remarrying through the solitary child through the Parisian bohemian through the man of letters through 1867 Rimbaud-Machine The child-prodigy through the visionary poet to renouncing all literary activity to the adventurer through 1891 Hugo-Machine The sublime child through the romantic chef to the sonorous echo through the death of Leopoldine to the political man through the coup d'etat and exile through the proscribed to the grand-father through 1895 Lamartine-Machine The young aristocrat through the sentimental crisis through the diplomat through the public man to the political crisis through the vanquished through 1869 Nodier-Machine The touched-by-all to the cruel years through the lunatic through 1844 Vigny-Machine The first tests through the epoch of the pen to the young romantic through the disenchantment through the elaboration of wisdom through 1864 Stendhal-Machine The student to the discovery of Italy through the soldier to the Milanese through the dandy and the diplomat through 1842 Gautier-Machine Research into equilibrium to debut in journalism through studies in eva- sion through 1872 Balzac-Machine The quest for success to the first successes through the brilliant expan- sion of genius through 1850 Verlaine-Machine The inspired commencement to the years of crisis through a strange mysti- cism to a sadness through 1896 Mallarme-Machine The Baudelarian tradition through studies in aesthetics to the first Tues- days to supreme ambition through 1898 Sainte-Beuve-Machine The poet and romance writer to the interior crisis through the critique through 1869 Flaubert-Machine The exalted adolescent to nervous malady through the hermit of Crosset through 1880 Zola-Machine >From romanticism to naturalism to the success of l'Assommoir to the natur- alist landscape through humanitarian propaganda through 1902 Lautreamont-Machine The destiny of Isidore Ducasse through the despair of Maldoror through the frenzy of Maldoror through 1870 Michelet-Machine The young plebeian through the university youth to the entrance into the National Archives through the master through the militant through the judge through 1874 _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:09:39 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dale Smith Subject: forward from Henry Gould Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >From: Henry >To: Dale >Subject: your post >Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 23:48:14 EST > Dear Dale, Joe Brennan kindly forwarded your post. I had just been thinking earlier that if I did the interview again I would say something about how the poet isn't just a shaman, but a reporter, and sometimes a prophet. I was thinking about Anna Akhmatova's REQUIEM as a cardinal example from the last century. I also replied to Brian Stefans backchannel. On those murky words (murky in my usage) "materialism, rationalism": the interview with Kent helped me clarify some very basic issues (as I see them). Rationalism/materialism means, at least to me, the main "zeitgeist" of the last few centuries: a narrow, debased form of Reason, which questions but without insight, allied to a realpolitik of self-interested power, and with a mirror-face of fanaticism, "full of passionate intensity". But reasoning without evidence is mere wind, empty talk. The work of poetry and art is to supply evidence for a deeper, more humane Reason: the evidence of beauty, harmony, bravery, mystery, truth. Of course, not everyone always everywhere (none of us) have ears to hear this kind of evidence - but it's there just the same, providing its strange "answers", lifting the human spirit. It was unfair of me, & wildly inaccurate, to portray the elfin Charles Bernstein as point-man for that zeitgeist. But I wanted to emphasize aspects of poetry that seem to have been lost sight of, lately. The occasion seemed apt. I think we'll all figure it out at the Sorbonne someday - and maybe even have a laugh. Maybe they'll post this to the List if you send it - thanks - Henry ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 15:05:39 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: derek beaulieu Subject: help w/ contacts? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ya'll i was wondering if anyone could backchannel me with the styreet address of peter jaeger as i have printed a collection which he appears in and i would like to send him his contributor copy. as well i'm also looking for an email address for jeff derkson. can anyone out there help me? thanks derek ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 16:32:10 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: miekal and Organization: awkword ubutronics Subject: Re: Machine-19e MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'll take a Lautreamont-Machine with extra batteries Alan Sondheim wrote: > --- > > Machine-19e > > Renan-Machine > > Seminary to Spiritual Crisis to the future of science to the history > of > religion and the lover of ideas through 1892 > > Taine-Machine > > The young philosopher through literary critique through critique of > art > to moral crisis to historian through 1893 > > Baudelaire-Machine > > His mother's remarrying through the solitary child through the > Parisian > bohemian through the man of letters through 1867 > > Rimbaud-Machine > > The child-prodigy through the visionary poet to renouncing all > literary > activity to the adventurer through 1891 > > Hugo-Machine > > The sublime child through the romantic chef to the sonorous echo > through > the death of Leopoldine to the political man through the coup d'etat > and > exile through the proscribed to the grand-father through 1895 > > Lamartine-Machine > > The young aristocrat through the sentimental crisis through the > diplomat > through the public man to the political crisis through the vanquished > through 1869 > > Nodier-Machine > > The touched-by-all to the cruel years through the lunatic through 1844 > > Vigny-Machine > > The first tests through the epoch of the pen to the young romantic > through > the disenchantment through the elaboration of wisdom through 1864 > > Stendhal-Machine > > The student to the discovery of Italy through the soldier to the > Milanese > through the dandy and the diplomat through 1842 > > Gautier-Machine > > Research into equilibrium to debut in journalism through studies in > eva- > sion through 1872 > > Balzac-Machine > > The quest for success to the first successes through the brilliant > expan- > sion of genius through 1850 > > Verlaine-Machine > > The inspired commencement to the years of crisis through a strange > mysti- > cism to a sadness through 1896 > > Mallarme-Machine > > The Baudelarian tradition through studies in aesthetics to the first > Tues- > days to supreme ambition through 1898 > > Sainte-Beuve-Machine > > The poet and romance writer to the interior crisis through the > critique > through 1869 > > Flaubert-Machine > > The exalted adolescent to nervous malady through the hermit of Crosset > > through 1880 > > Zola-Machine > > >From romanticism to naturalism to the success of l'Assommoir to the > natur- > alist landscape through humanitarian propaganda through 1902 > > Lautreamont-Machine > > The destiny of Isidore Ducasse through the despair of Maldoror through > > the frenzy of Maldoror through 1870 > > Michelet-Machine > > The young plebeian through the university youth to the entrance into > the > National Archives through the master through the militant through the > judge through 1874 > > __________________ > ______________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 18:01:35 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Re: exemplary symptom or if not, please supply one? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit david bromidge, actually, yes! it was warhol i had in the back of my mind--so no oranges, & no punch line--but, essentially, yes. hmm, i'd have to work it out a little, but isn't there also something a little warholian about tight corners & lines upon a distant prospect of lines? or --no-- something more like richard prince's joke paintings? so related in that way? i think both are pretty great. jacques ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 18:19:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: poetics list stats MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit These statistics represent the current subscribership to the Poetics List, as given by country. The estimate will be skewed to the U.S., thanks to our chauvinistic software, which recognizes country by the "country code" given at the end of the domain segment of some email addresses (e.g., ".ca" for Canada). Since most U.S. addresses do not carry the ".us" country code (i.e., since the U.S. believes that it owns or perhaps simply is the world) in the case of addresses without a country code, the program defaults to U.S. Special greetings to the Russian members of our list, and any others who are not accurately represented in these statistics. Chris -- Country Subscribers ------- ----------- Australia 13 Belgium 2 Canada 41 Finland 1 Germany 3 Great Britain 21 India 1 Ireland 5 Italy 1 Japan 5 Netherlands 1 New Zealand 14 Poland 1 Romania 1 Singapore 1 Spain 2 Sweden 4 Switzerland 2 Thailand 1 USA 683 Yugoslavia 1 Total number of users subscribed to the list: 806 Total number of countries represented: 22 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 18:19:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: postscript MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Each time I post the list statistics, I can't help but wonder what's happening other locations on that list. For instance, it's remarkable that 14 of us are in New Zealand, and yet I'd wager that few of us outside of those 14 know much of poetry in New Zealand. I don't mean to put anyone on the spot, but it would be good to hear from some of those outside of the U.S. I'd be interested to know, for example, whether there are active chapbook presses in operation in any of these locations? I've been told that small press is largely a North American phenomenon - e.g., there are very few chapbook presses in France (but see Emmanuel Hocquard's "Un bureau sur l'Atlantique" ) - but it seems unlikely that there wouldn't be some kind of inexpensive or informal publishing going on almost everywhere. I'm also curious what magazines and journals are in publication, what sort of poetry is being written, what sort of events are happening, etcetera. Chris % Christopher W. Alexander % poetics list moderator ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 18:20:45 -0500 Reply-To: i_wellman@dwc.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: D Wellman Subject: Re: "Disjunctivitis" + Postmodern Poetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ... both the fragmentary and the self-reflexive are writ large all over the modernist canon: Eliot, Williams, Pound of the Pisan Cantos, Stevens. ... and if it is not always self-reflexive, the modernist agenda is to purify the text of purely subjective clutter in the name of a form and objectification of the self vis a vis the roll of the dice (Mallarme) ... I have found the Lucious Jackson thread and how it touches on questions of audience and program/intention and school/label -- all very interesting. I think what Debrot was trying to say about the "social sector" and how all poetries seems complacent might be part of the collapse of high and low culture that I associate with pomo. ... it is also interesting that these generalities raise so many attempts at clarification, authentication in protest to labeling. I think this desire for authentication is all part of the modernist heritage -- it is sort of like an examination of conscious to bring in the Irish joke thread. Maybe a postmodern poetics would among other things have to be a non-apologetics. ... even the langpo notion that the meanings underlying exposed incoherencies are in the language .... seems a purifying modernist gesture in hindsight. ... so we are back to an unapologetics of fragmentary sound clusters -- and maybe they articulate rushes and pauses that are related to sex or dancing or aerobics or even sharing. DW ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 18:50:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Arielle C. Greenberg" Subject: international listers? In-Reply-To: <343203.3156257976@321maceng.fal.buffalo.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Yes, I agree with Mr.Moderator -- I would love to see more posts from the people not in the USA about poetry activity in their local locales. Am also wondering why no Israeli listers, just personally, because Hebrew is really the only language I can speak well enough to do decent translating, and I've been trying for awhile now to find more experimental Israeli poets. If anyone knows of any, please backchannel. Arielle who babysat for a child tonight who is spoken to only in Hebrew -- and although I could understand everything his mother said, I could remember the word for "bottle" but not "fork," "train" but not "car" **************************************************************************** "I thought numerous gorgeous sadists would write me plaintive appeals, but time has gone by me. They know where to get better looking boots than I describe." -- Ray Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 19:09:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: lol, blink. was shaving ped MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >>cdnt help noticing that youre maybe the first to use chatroom language/style on this list<< didn't know it is/was chatroom. & now that you mention it, tony, i wonder if perhaps i've not seen much reference at all to ('real-time'?) physical/facial expression in many, if any, posts on this list. curious. maybe not. hassen ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 14:03:12 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: lol, blink. was shaving ped MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hassen -- it's lost its old freshness so it doesnt feel like, & isnt, real time anymore. Now that every posting is moderated, it is impossible to fire back a reply & see it posted on the list in almost immedaitely in _real time_ Maybe that's why there's not much call on the _other signs_ that accompany words. It feels to me like a severe limitation on discussion of poetics to so disassociate it from the terms of live communication. It wdnt be difficult to create a msn. poetics chatroom -- with password & host/hostess who cd simply remove people who were being seriously obnoxious & obstructive. It would make it difficult to compose anything much more than one or two liners & it could be as tedious as those dreary moments when chatters simply say hi & bye & lol best Tony ( 25 mins between your posting arriving & my deeply considered reply hehehe ) -----Original Message----- From: hassen To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Saturday, 8 January 2000 13:32 Subject: Re: lol, blink. was shaving ped >>>cdnt help noticing that youre maybe the first to use chatroom >language/style on this list<< > >didn't know it is/was chatroom. & now that you mention it, tony, i wonder if >perhaps i've not seen much reference at all to ('real-time'?) >physical/facial expression in many, if any, posts on this list. curious. >maybe not. > >hassen > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 22:09:11 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: Re: postscript MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit i've also wondered why the only language written here is English and why most topics (class, local, why doesn't poetry sell more, etc.) take a somewhat parochial view. tom bell Poetics List wrote: > > Each time I post the list statistics, I can't -- //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\ OOOPSY \///\\\/\///\\\/ <><>,...,., WHOOPS J K JOVE BY HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER index of online work at http://members.home.net/trbell essays: http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 09:51:43 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Moosehead memories In-Reply-To: <387476B3.AA5C7756@concentric.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" i want it understood that this post, linking me with the likes of Bromering and Bowidger has significantly imperiled my opportunity for a job as chief Disciplinarienne in the new age chemistry program at Moosehead Community College. i believe i was on the short short list, but now i've been relegated to the long short list and perhaps even to the long long list. there are times, i assure you, when length is not the virtue it is assumed to be, though Messrs B&B would not appear to know this. those antlers, for instance ... topheavy! At 3:04 AM -0800 1/6/00, Rachel Loden wrote: >> Those of us attending >> the Moosehead Conference in the previous century, will recall that GB never >> left the side of Rachel Loden and Maria Damon, day or night, despite the >> blandishments of others present. > >Well, as they say about the sixties, if you remember Moosehead you >weren't there. Was it the peyote or Bowering, fetching in antlers? I >have no idea. > >* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * > >Rachel Loden > >http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html > >email: rloden@concentric.net > >* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 22:08:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Weishaus Subject: Re: The Local MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > I'd just like to say that my own definition of the local is not > automatically one linked by geography. I think that there are other types of > intensive/intended collaborations that might equally qualify. Although I do > think that the face-to-face element of the scene vs. the network really > helps in detoxifying the paranoia which sometimes lurks up in more distant > interactions (the history of this list being a pretty decent example of > same). Reading the history of Black Mountain College, particularly in > relation to people who were not always "present" (Duncan and Creeley both > there only for short periods, Levertov not really at all, Eigner never), > brings up lots of things to think about over just such dynamics. > > Ron Yes, there is definitely an empathic thread. Although I'm not too sure that face-to-face detoxifies paranoia, as words--written or spoken--have a tendency to effuse a paralinguistic taint. Just that the internet arrived mysteriously on the cusp of a new century, and what this means when it comes to space/time and the possibility of new strategies of collaboration is yet to be worked out. -Joel Joel Weishaus Writer-In-Residence The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM ARCHIVE: www.unm.edu/~reality SKULL-HOUSE: [Most advanced draft] www.unm.edu/~reality/Skull/intro.htm SKULL-HOUSE: [Being built at Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Wales/University of Plymouth, UK.] http://caiia-star.newport.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/skullhouse/Skull/index.htm l ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 17:57:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Re: [webartery] print and the Web MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The following are links to a few pages featuring Reiner Strasser's works, including his own, rather extensive home page. A search for "Reiner Strasser" turned up quite a bit of material. Chris -- The Art Watchers PARALLEL NOTION EXHIBIT Rush Hour ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 07:43:47 -0000 Reply-To: suantrai@iol.ie Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit What on earth is going on? There's neither proportion nor perspective in these posts. As an Irishman I'm far more offended by the spectacle of David Bromige practically being accused of racism than at the original joke itself. That an accusation so grave, and so misplaced, is supported by so little is hardly any less offensive to me. On a milder not, I'm amazed that the possibility of more than one reading is being so strenuously rejected, here of all places. Stupid doesn't worry me. But I would be concerned if the Irish started turning into humourless shirts stuffed with standard-issue pea-brained p.c. twaddle. Randolph Healy Visit the Sound Eye website at: http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm or find more Irish writing at: http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr7/contents.html ---------- > From: Patrick Herron > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means > Date: 07 January 2000 06:10 > > David - > > < this joke as being abt the stereotype of the Irishman as stupid, but it was > never that to me. (I wasnt aware there is such a stereotype until they told > me, even tho the woman who raised me was Irish). >> > > OK, so you were ignorant, and as a result you made a mistake. At such a > junction you have several options - apologize, hide, or explain the mistake > away. I think the proper choice is evident. Show some humility, apologize. > And the choice you made was way off the mark. > > Your joke is clearly about stupidity, (two glasses, one full, as options for > drinking or not drinking? C'mon pal, you sound like Jimmy the Greek with > such a charade) and you could have admitted you made a mistake. But you > seem to be defending something in the name of, well, what is it in the name > of? Pride? Would it be too much to ask you to be secure enough to > acknowledge that either a) you made a mistake or b) you honestly cling to > the notion that Irishmen are stupid (or drunks, as you teased us with in > another post). > > How can one be completely ignorant of sentiments like the Irish as "niggers > turned inside out" just as blacks were called "smoked Irish"? If you can > imagine African Americans would not like to hear that, well, then you may > start to understand. Or how about names like . . . barks, bog trotters, > boiled dinners, Celts, chaws, chaw mouths, dogans, flannelmouths, > greenlanders, harps, Hibernians, mackerel snappers, Micks, narrow backs, > paddies, Patlanders, salt water turkeys, spuds, teagues, terriers, Turks? > > Have you never heard of the time of history in America where Irish and > African Americans were treated equally, but only as equal to each other, and > together both below everyone else? "Niggers and Irishmen need not apply"? > Or other aspects of the legacy of British oppression of the Irish? Or the > fact that most people in the South in the US are of Irish decent and NOT of > British decent, as they like to fantasize of themselves as somehow being > related to the deliverers of slavery and aristocracy to the SE US? > > From 1695 until 1793, the Penal Laws imposed by your ancestors, the British, > denied most Irish to any education at all. Enforced law. Thereafter, > schooling was run by Christian Brthers and Ursuline Sisters. Not a very > good way to stimulate intellectual growth in a country. > > OK, so you didn't know this was a soft spot. Cannot you just apologize? > > And the passive aggressive stuff in implying a contrast between Dutch and > Irish is not a clever tactic - "ability to laugh at themselves." > > I was born and raised in america and was acutely aware of this stereotype of > the Irish, as many well-educated people are. > > < Venutian and a Martian were discoursing in a bar...." --But then won't I be > told that the latter two types are gender-coded?>> > > And so you add insult to injury? Where is your compassion, your ability to > fathom? > > I did not find the joke insulting so much as stupid and blissfully ignorant. > > C'mon David. > > Patrick > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 17:59:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: fyi: KVASHWOP! / Lewis MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 03:21:50 -0500 From: "Joel Lewis" MAD Cartoonist Don Martin Dies MIAMI (AP) _ Don Martin, longtime Mad magazine cartoonist who drew an assortment of wild-haired characters, punctuating the grotesque action with wacky words like SPLOP! and POIT!!, has died. He was 68. Martin died of cancer at Baptist Hospital, hospital spokeswoman Christine Thompson said today. During his 30-odd years as a Mad contributor, Martin based his humor on misery and misfortune, to crack ``sick'' jokes. The magazine dubbed him ``Mad's Maddest Cartoonist.'' The guy poisoning pigeons in the park _ ``I hate pigeons'' _ winds up killing the people who gather around to sample his scrumptious popcorn. Mona Lisa, as the reader realizes only in the last frame of the strip, is sitting on a toilet. Hapless boobs with big feet get squashed in all manner of ways. ``There's always been physical suffering in comedy,'' he once said. ``Even ancient clowns kicked each other in the seat of the pants or hit each other over the head. It's the same thing in our time, just a little stronger.'' The cartoons had a vocabulary all their own. ``SHKLIP'' was the sound made when construction workers tossed concrete at each other. ``SPLOP'' described a surgeon throwing body parts into a doggie bag. ``FAGROON'' came from a collapsing skyscraper. His license plate read ``SHTOINK.'' ``Is it funny? That's the only test I know when it comes to cartooning,'' Martin once said. ``Not whether it's sick, or whether it's going to ruin people's values or morals. You only have to ask a simple question: Is it funny?'' His twisted approach influenced generations of younger cartoonists. ``Don Martin was the one who really stood out,'' Gary ``The Far Side'' Larson told The Miami Herald in a story published in 1990. ``I really always loved his work. He was such a great artist.'' Martin left Mad magazine in 1987 after a falling-out with its publisher, the late William Gaines, accepting a job at Cracked, a competitor. Martin chafed at the tradition that Mad, like most publishers, retained all rights to reprint and profit from his work that it used, paying him on a free-lance basis. But he put out paperbacks of cartoons not published in the magazine, eventually selling more than 7 million copies. Martin drew despite a degenerative eye condition that forced him to undergo cornea transplants, wear special, highly uncomfortable contact lenses and use a magnifying glass while drawing. ``He was a shy and retiring sort of guy, considering he drew a comic strip that was crazy,'' said a longtime friend, Laurence Donovan. Martin was born in Clifton, N.J., and began his undergraduate work at the Newark Institute. He earned a fine arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He began submitting drawings to the fledgling Mad magazine in the mid-50s. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:01:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: knowing what a joke means / Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "Brian Stefans" Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 01:04:22 -0500 Hi Patrick, I'd like to respond to some of comments to David about his joke, = particularly this line: > How can one be completely ignorant of sentiments like the Irish as = "niggers turned inside out" just as blacks were called "smoked Irish"? =20 As I've probably mentioned before, I was born and raised in Rutherford, = NJ, with obviously very Asiatic features imprinted on my face (I give my = mother credit for that, she was very clever). The suburb, by the time I = got there (and much in contrast to Williams's Stecher trilogy) was = primarily Irish, Italian and Polish -- mostly Roman Catholic as far as I = could tell -- and with my wide, "ignorant" eyes it seemed to me the = world was pretty much controlled by these folks, which is pretty much = another way of saying that I stuck out a bit, but certainly didn't up = until quite late in my life (say, after college) have any way of = appreciating the fact of this accident, and that this apparent totality = was something of a fiction -- as you most clearly point out with your = historical data and the variety of terms that you used. Which is to = say, bluntly, that I was quite ignorant of these statements, and many = others, much to same degree that I was ignorant of the fact that much of = the hostility I felt directed toward me when I was a kid -- from adults = and people of my age (i.e. from people who "should have known better") = was probably a result of lingering sentiments of anger against the = government during the Vietnam War, and partially from that of the Korean = War (of course, I thought it was about me, since I thougth the Koreans = lost the Korean war, not the Americans). I was always very amazed and = impressed when I met a non-Asian, or a "white" person from such a = background (meaning, I suppose, a class background, since most of these = people I am referring to were [as far as I know, this is provisional] = moving up from a working class background to middle class, which is to = say from Jersey City to Rutherford) who expressed any sort of affection = toward Koreans or Korea itself (whose history is one of the sadder ones = in our century, I feel, with my bias, certainly during the first half = and well into the present, where the situation in North Korea is = something of a joke to those who aren't particularly concerned with the = division -- even my father thinks the division of the country is = permanent.). Again, I met people who changed my sense of this totality, = but as far as I was concerned, the Irish, Italians, etc. -- perhaps due = to their projections of their assurance that they were more American = than myself, or were Americans at all whereas I was not -- were the = elite, the thing to be. Certainly, as most of the young lady-folk were = of this elite, I felt, in my adolescent sensibility, it would have been = a nice thing. I think, consequently (beyond my concern with your rhetorical tactic, = which really doesn't leave much option for David to do anything, = really), that you contradict yourself by stating certain things as very = "obvious" and then proceed to provide which, to most people I think, = would be fairly esoteric detail, not to mention relationships that are = untenable. Which is to say that the background you provide doesn't go = to prove that David was ignorant of something obvious, but that he is = not a scholar (of sorts) in the subject. Consequently, everybody knows = that the race issue concerning African Americans is far more public (I'm = not concerned with which is more serious or not, this is not the point) = than those of Irish Americans. What you choose to do about that is up = to you. But in the public sphere, or public media, the situtation of = African Americans has punctuated our understanding of American history = in a very general way, from the civils rights movement to the L.A. = "uprising" or "riots" (or whatever you want to call it). There are far = fewer punctuation marks for homosexual rights in the country, for = example, and those that exist haven't had the same degree of projection = than that of African Americans -- Stonewall, for example, was not = something I knew about until I was in college (that's what you get for = having a Korean as a mother), and there hasn't been a follow-up to this. = Can we state with certainty that there is a general understanding of = the Cuban situation among Americans, or does it change to an incredible = degree depending on what state you happen to live in? I had friends in = college who didn't even know Koreans were any factor in the L.A. = incident -- they just read it as a bunch of African Americans expressing = rage against the white system, and of course sympathized inadvertently = assigned what could be called a permanent position to African Americans = in the states, or at least a political force: to be be perrennially = dissatisfied, to more or less always exist in the (to use Hegelian = terms, not historically encoded though perhaps inflected) slave-master = relationship. In other words, African American identity is essentialized = by this relationship, hence foreclosing any sort of real imagination for = change. More to the point, the complexity of race relations in America = is completely lost with this ignorance, not to mention the continuing = invisibility of Korean American's particularly complex position right = now -- the country (South Korea) is doing well economically, but = politically lacks any real clout, and the country and culture as a = whole, which the Japanese quite literally tried to wipe out for 35 some = odd years, is still split. I didn't eevn know that I "wasn't supposed = to like the Japanese" until I was much older -- in Rutherford, we were = all pretty much in the same spot, they were Vietnamese and Chinese just = like me.) Every Korean American in this country carries something of = this in them (my mother, who is young as mothers go, I think, her = mid-fifties, was six when she had to cross the country by foot and on = the backs of trains to reach Seoul). I consider it a very good, = strange, statistically improbable day when I meet someone who has a clue = about any of this (hence my affection to Bruce Andrews, who devoted his = political science career, back when it existed, to this very issue). To = most others, Koreans are good in math. So to return to your post: > I was born and raised in america and was acutely aware of this = stereotype of the Irish, as many well-educated people are. The key term is "acute" -- I am obviously acutely of many things, as the = post above states -- but the percentage of "well-educated" folk who are = similarly "acutely" aware, or even, I would add, indifferently aware, is = probably very low, not to mention that I don't see what role being = "well-educated" plays -- Noam Chomsky, for instance, probably (based on = his movie) got more of his political, and very acute, awareness of these = issues from listening to his relatives talk politics than from the = schools. Anyway, this is a ramble (my computer is hiccuping, must be the gods = telling me something's wrong). Yours, Brian ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:03:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: that joke again / Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "Brian Stefans" Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 01:33:11 -0500 There was something else I wanted to mention (besides the fact that the = joke, not unlike "Starship Troopers", can be read in totally different = ways, and that in both contexts it can be extreme -- an extremely = tasteless joke based on racial stereotypes, and an extremely = metaphysical joke based on absurd degrees of reasoning which is, at the = same time, a testament to that reasoning), which is the following = passage from Pound's essay on Williams: "There is an anecdote told me by his moher, who wished me to understand = his character, as follows: The young William Carlos, aged let us say = about seven, arose in the morning, dressed ond put on his shoes. Both = shoes buttoned on the left side. He regarded this untoward phenomenon = for a few moments and then carefully removed the shoes, placed shoe _a_ = that had been on his left foot, on his right foot, and shoe _b_, that = had been on the right foot, on his left foot; both sets of the buttons = again appeared on the left side of the shoes. "This stumped him. With the shoes so buttoned he went to school, but... = and here is the significant part of the story, he spent the day in = careful consideration of the matter." ("Dr. Williams' Position") Pound wasn't saying that he was stupid, I don't think, but I'm not = prepared right now to interpret this or go on about it. I am also reminded of the early part of Ulysses, in which Stephen = Daedelus is turning over the phrase: "And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars." I didn't understand, when first reading this book, what was so important = about the line "love's bitter mystery," but this, along with many other = phrases in Joyce, takes on talismanic properties as it is repeated = througout the novel. I guess I mention this since I think it is not a = too willed reading of the joke to see that there is a metaphysical joke = underlying it, and that there is a special flavor of this in the Irish = tradition (at least to those like me who are not Irish) that probably = has to do with this very position of the Irish scholars and bards as the = preservers of European culture, but with the hermetic inflection that = could be attributed, I don't know, to many things -- I'm not a scholar. I would ask, though, and with no answers myself: do we call Heidegger = "stupid" for asking "Why is there essents, or things, rather than = nothing"? How stupid was Kierkegaard to the Corsaire? Could this joke = of David's have a different reading for those of us who think "untimely" = -- in the way Heidegger thinks philosophy is always "untimely," which = isn't to say useless -- and for those who think materially? Can a joke = have an essence? I know that within the system of contingent values this = joke falls pretty heavily on the one side, but in another system it = falls pretty far to the other, and whether we use an "Irishman" or not = does and does not matter -- it could be a rune disguised as a joke. Anyway, cheers. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 03:25:42 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: david bromige Subject: for patrick herron (was an irish joke) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Patrick Herron wrote : >Have you never heard of the time of history in America where Irish and >African Americans were treated equally, but only as equal to each other, and >together both below everyone else? "Niggers and Irishmen need not apply"? and >From 1695 until 1793, the Penal Laws imposed by your ancestors, the British, >denied most Irish to any education at all. Enforced law. Thereafter, >schooling was run by Christian Brthers and Ursuline Sisters. Not a very >good way to stimulate intellectual growth in a country. I think that the joke--if taken at its surface level, as being about stupidity--would have been in bad taste at those times. I had heard that the situation of the Irish improved immeasurably in the last 70 years. + + + + + + + One further point : I have never heard a joke about any stereotype which I could take personally, even where said stereotype supposedly applies to a group to which I belong. It was different, of course, to be physically attacked for being English, or better-educated, or smaller and weaker, or against the war in Vietnam, or (their mistake, but it made me proud) Jewish. But words, when in the context of a joke, slid right off me. Were I Irish, I should not suppose myself to be the stupid stereotype with which some find this joke ends. Perhaps this is because, as Patrick says in another recent post, love is beyond the behavioristic pattern,-- and, corollary, if one loves oneself, these stereotypes need not apply. Don't we find them amusing (though, obviously, not all of the people all of the time!) for what they show us about the mechanical process of undifferentiated thinking, on the part of the teller (although s/he may be disingenuous) and his audience, as well as the putative butt? For me, at the risk of flogging a dead horse (which I already enlisted Mother Murphy's help in burying, I had hoped), the surprise matching-up of full glass with thirst, empty glass with no-thirst, suggests that "Paddy isnt so simple," and becomes a critique of an unquestioning acceptance of the joke on its surface level. (Mary Murphy in the dream showed me the easy way out, and why not take it? Alas, Patrick's post and mine passed in the night, and so there is further work to do). I suppose what makes me persist in what Patrick Herron takes for folly is a something more I find in this joke. He calls my persistence pride (with which, I assume, he has no quarrel, since pride is surely involved in Billy Mills' objection), and it may be, but I think it is also a pedagogue's belief that the student--however well-educated--hasn't heard all there is to be heard in a piece of language. + + + + + + It is interesting, isn't it? that those who reprehend me for defending a joke that they find hurtful, if only at a remove, would be more wounding of my feelings, than the joke, not being personal, could ever be of theirs. As though there were an anger already waiting in them, for something to slip its leash. Imagine telling a stranger what his only options are! That I might have done that, ever, makes me blush for shame. David ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 15:57:53 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: [webartery] print and the Web Comments: To: webartery@onelist.com In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.16.20000107151531.39770dd4@pop.memlane.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" sorry ted the last post/quote was for peter. i believe peter is still thinking of the computer as a tool rather than a medium for creation, for the virtualization of the yet to be conceived, rather than the actualization of the already possible. he also has a very limited view of hypertext fictions and seems to see hypertext as a new way of indexing texts, which it is not. look at mark amerika's http://www.holo-x.com on-line hypermedia fiction, or the brandon project at the guggenheim museum or the lesko's codex to see examples of hypertext which is not just re-indexing for a new medium. and patrick, i hope you have forgiven me, but there seems to have been much good coming out of my suspicious questioning of your intent, as evidenced by the great discussions we are having now on this list. you are looking for real computer art, then i suggest you study the work of reiner strasser, he is unique in the field i believe. i must admit most of my work is imitation of styles, but reiner's work has developed a unique cyberpoetry voice, a voice like a voice in traditional poetry, that others like me, try to emulate. his work for me is a new experience, a poetic, text based experience, coupled with the excitement of discovery that games and quizzes give us, as well as being aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and charged with aural signs. i find his work a poetry of the senses. recently patrick you mentioned eduardo kac, and since we have been talking about the terms that describe the field we are working in, it might be interesting to note that when i made my first digital animated text poetry on computer in 1994, i called it cyberpoetry, but i did not surf the internet 'till april 1996, when i came across eduardo's holopoetry. i wrote to him inviting him to visit my site and what he thought of the name dimocopo(digital moving concrete poetry) as a name for what i was doing, which i had previously called cyberpoetry but thought it was too generic. eduardo wrote back saying that calling it dimocopo associated it with concrete poetry movement which was a thing of the past, and that what i was doing was in fact new and different. if i called it dimocopo it would just be seen as an extension of what already existed. later when i started to add sound, the term grew to dimocoposo which became hideous, so i reverted to calling it cyberpoetry. i now make the distinction, for myself, not as a rule, but so i can understand where and what i am doing, i make the distinction that digital art/poetry is created on the computer using software and cyberpoetry is when that digitally produced work specifically with the interconnectivity and interactivity of the world wide web in mind, poetry which is created for cyberspace, for all the senses. the thing about reiner's work is that the content and form work so well together that it pulls me through the work two or three times before i dive into his source code to see how he did that. on the other hand the recent work of jim rosenberg on this list only holds an interest in the technology for me, the content actually not engaging me as much as how the elements(blocks of text) interact as objects. at the risk of being cliche, the technology in good webart net-art cyberpoetry, has to be transparent. another thing about programmability, consider this. a computer program is a controlled system, all the variables are fully defined, in life, in poetry, the variables are not defined and can never be defined fully. in a sense a computer program is the only real thing that exits, it is totally constructed to act in totally predictable ways. however when programs are put onto the web and we interact with them we bring that unpredictability to them. look at plumb design's visual thesaurus http://www.thinkmap.com, this is just a program for displaying a database of words, a thesaurus, but because the user can input words, or it can randomly navigate a journey through the thesaurus, the journey becomes poetic, words associating meanings by the order in which they appear, in the clashing combinations of cyberspace. this poetic experience is always different, is always unrecordable, non-reproducible of the moment. as with many other poetry machines, that seem to have no other author than the present user. i forget who said something about the words of a poem on the web and the whole thing the piece is saying, (i think it was talan or jennifer, sorry.) and i agree wholeheartedly. julia kristeva, 'revolution in poetic language', makes the distinction between the phenotext and the genotext, the former being the words on the paper, and the later, the words on paper plus the context in which it is read, and added to the phenotext, by the reader. barthes also in 'from work to text' makes the distinction between 'the work', the words on paper/spoken, and 'the text', which is the words on paper plus everything that is brought to those words by all who read it, and everything else it comes packaged with. i think that is what charles olson was on about as well, that the written language is a poor substitute for what we actually want to say. being involved in cyberspace has changed the way i read published poetry these days. i tend to look for the 'space' the poem has or is capable of inducing around the words on paper, and find that a lot of published poetry is tied to a physical landscape, it maps out a very definite journey, but a flat journey, even if the poem is mapping cultural, relationship or psychological landscapes. whereas cyberpoetry is always spatial for me, and thus doesn't allow for topographical flat poetry, i am also realizing that women poets of the page and stage and now the world wide web have always been more successful at creating 'spatial' poetry than men, perhaps because in patriarchal society they have always been relegated to those "other" spaces or places that men didn't think important. perhaps that is why women in general are so prominent in the development and thinking about cyberspace, brenda laurel leads the field in interface design thinking, sadie plant in cultural and feminist representation of cyberspace, janet murray in the development of narrative in cyberspace, roseanne stone on gender representations and issues of identity, the hypertext community of trAce in the u.k.. generally george landow is considered the guru of hypertext but he really has only actualized what was known to be possible(vannevar bush, roland bathes, ted nelson, marshall mcluhan and post modern and post structuralist theory postulating the possibility of hypertext. it seems to be women and men who are prepared not to think in a male way who are virtualizing cyberspace and text. while i'm on my high horse(and many people think this is where i am most of the time) i'm really pissed off that at the moment on another list, the poetry list of the epc,buffalo, the big topic of discussion is about the divisions between poets in the language group and the workshop group,(and other smaller u.s.a. groups of poets)when in fact little separates them in politics or poetry and they argue about minor advances in the poetics of each group complaining that poetry is in crisis and nothing new is happening. i remind you this happens as an email discussion on the internet and yet no one mentions what is happening to poetry on the web. any way just a few thoughts, thanks for the great posts. komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 22:55:47 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means In-Reply-To: <20000107061055.13866.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" patrick herron wrote: "...Have you never heard of the time of history in America where Irish and African Americans were treated equally, but only as equal to each other, and together both below everyone else? "Niggers and Irishmen need not apply"?..." to which one might add Jews and, to a lessert extent, Italian immigrants. however, Jewish and IrishAmericans repudiated their possible alliance w/ African Americans in order to become "white." Irish Americans did this especially through labor unions which specifically barred African Americans from membership. this is not to deny British oppression of the Irish, but to say that in the US, institutional prejudice against Irish, Jewish and Italian etc Americans is a matter of historical record but no longer operative, unlike insitutional prejudice against African American and other groups. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 11:13:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Anastasios Kozaitis Subject: Samizdat Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" If you haven't gotten your hands on Bob Archambeau's _SAMIZDAT_, I highly recommend doing so. During this past year, it has been a most welcomed arrival on my front steps. It has, indeed, accomplished what it has set out to do, publish poetry that is outside language and workshop poetries. It's excellent, and Bob has pulled it of with such irony. For instance, Samizdat is published on news paper, in a tabloid size, with the red ink of tabloid banners and headlines. Excellent! I love the quality of the tabloid. And in the modernist vein (or in the inheritance of the modernist vein) that Bob professes in his editorials, it is indeed "All the news that stays news." Oh what the heck as EP said, "Irrepressibly fresh..." As for what else I'm reading at the Millennium: BLAKE (all of him) 19th Century American Poetry Frederick Douglass _Life and Times of..._ Simon Schama's _Landscape and Memory_ Biran Greene's _Elegant Universe_ Anne Carson's _Economy of the Unlost_ Susan Howe's _My Emily Dickinson_, _the birth mark_, _The Poems of Emily Dickinson_ Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ Paul Feyeraband's _Against Method_ John Donne's Holy Sonnnets Selected Poetry of Jay Wright E.J. Hobsbawm's _Nations and Nationalism since 1780_ WEB DuBois _Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880_ John Ashbery Berryman's Sonnets Ted Berrigan's Sonnets ******************************************************************************** Anastasios Kozaitis 274 President Street, 4R Brooklyn, NY 11231 kozaitis@earthlink.net ******************************************************************************** ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 11:42:20 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: of being humorous etc.... In-Reply-To: <387674CD.A6B6F54C@ma.ultranet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ---the local: what's at stake here, exactly?... is it that the "local" is no longer useful (to poets? to writers? to artists? to voters?) as a pragmatic construction?... by "pragmatic" i mean in terms both of aesthetics and community... by "community" i'm not sure what i mean... but if so, is this b/c the digital (western? emerging pacific rim? desktop?) world has managed to subordinate it? (via simulation marketing etc.)... you can air-drop me to parts of my hometown (syracuse ny) and i can tell you in an instant where i am... which ability? landscape? symbiosis? mythology? phenotypical up-shot? i value highly, for so many reasons... other parts of my hometown resemble, to some terrifying detail, patches of the suburban sprawl here, between denver and boulder... or is the problem that "the local" signals more a matter of conceptual nuance these days?... has a, the, any metaphysics of place been so thoroughly deconstructed (or whatever) that there is in effect no place left to stand?... i find the latter a bit scary, actually, when i think about what sorts of political exigencies might be req'd to stop , e.g., construction of a nuclear incinerator fifteen miles upwind of the tetons... as i just this morning heard on npr---and if you heard the same thing, our locals are thus brought into proximity... which isn't to suggest there are no local differences at work here, among us... e.g., i'm finding the writing communities here in the boulder area FAR more integrated than what i experienced in chicagoland (and of course, yes, "my experience" is also part of the brew)... i'm a bit dumbstruck here, in all, at what i take to be the tacit levels of analysis and emphases at work in the various musings i've read thus far re "the local"... i can recall having argued with a self-professed marxist scholar once as to whether there was any substantive material difference between two ostensibly different chairs (one metal, one wood)... his reply was that not only was there no substantive material difference between said chairs, but that there was no substantive material difference twixt the preformed concrete wall before which we both stood, and either chair... very well then... i understand the conceptual move here (i think---something approaching a critique of postmodern architecture), and i can even grasp the intellectual politics (if you will) of said move... but it doesn't do a helluvalot for my understanding of the micro-movements (materials, workers, even quality issues) supporting such material items... another way of saying which would be, my father (a wood-worker who never earned more than ten bucks an hour) would have had a shit-fit at this latter collapse of distinctions... ---publishing as a writer's (and not simply poet's) concern... something about the discussion of high/low culture (another collapse, salutary in so many ways), mainstream vs. avant-garde (or whatever), oppositional vs. aligned (or whatever), that seems to me to be neglecting a discussion of what's been going down in the publishing world, and how it's changed lo these last three decades... i wonder how public we might be here w/o falling into the standard writer's gripe?... i have, let's see now, something like 28 rejections from publishers (university presses, trades, smaller presses) for a (dare i say?) *memoir* that i finished some eighteen months ago (many glowing rejections, i might add, for a relatively conventional piece of prose, re which i am being given to understand, in general, that it's just not marketable enough)... ditto for my wife and partner (in her case, a novel and a memoir)... one thing i'll risk postulating outright: these 28 rejections equal perhaps twice that number if viewed against the publishing world of 1975 (owing to the incredible number of mergers and the like since)... never mind poetry for a moment (re which i've NEVER been able to figure precisely how publishing a book of same actually works (chapbooks? huh?), *except* inasmuch as one becomes a 'known' quantity via whatever networks (virtual, fleshy) one is interested in plumbing... always feels, much as with the trades, a kind of who-you-know game to me... and i don't know that this is necessarily a BAD thing, provided everyone agrees it's who-you-know... re literary scholarship, on the other hand, publishing strikes me as much more straightforward)... like i say, never mind poetry for a moment... also on hand here, rejections from literary agents... one (re kass's novel, which dabbles in assemblage, but focuses on life in central pa), very forthcoming, and suggestive, to wit: 'if you were from eastern europe, no doubt i could find a publisher for this item'... as i say, *very* suggestive... what's going on right now, publishing wise?... i don't believe poetry is a world unto itself here, either... though of course poetry is typically associated with zero profit margins... but the situation is more complicated than might be implied by setting poetic production/distribution over in its own corner, or esp., "above" more lucrative forms... ----sometimes it's best, initially anyway, to define things in terms of what they DON'T do... i.e., not what is language poetry, but what ISN'T?... my first answer to "what is a poem?" is "anything you want a poem to be"... which at least opens to the question of how we come to poetry, how it comes to us---which requires an examination of assumptions, and corresponding speculation, which opens to notions of genre, readership, etc... in any case, i found dale smith's post provocative (dale raises one of my favorite issues, justice), and i thought (whether i agreed with him or not) that he was on the right track... "this is what language poetry doesn't do"... now, as to my not agreeing with dale: one problem here is the obvious critical-poetic nexus that seems to have accompanied language poetry-writing since its inception... take charles bernstein's _my way_---a compendium, and in some ways a summation, of charles's project... now, in one sense it's not too difficult to distinguish twixt the more poetic (term used advisedly) and less poetic of the pieces in that volume... though most (of us too) will likely employ relatively well-worn categories (written in lines vs. written in sentences) to designate the poems in said volume "poems," and the prose, "prose" (back cover indicates "speeches and poems, interviews and essays")... but if, IF one were to seek out charles's oeuvre in terms not of such clearcut (as in *absolute*, *intrinsic*) distinctions twixt the prose and the poetry, but in terms of his writing in general: then i think it fair to observe that charles's writing is infused throughout with considerations of social (and institutional) justice... and not simply from the point of view of turning capitalist realities inside-out (if you will)... i think i could prove this readily, by citing any number of excerpts... but see for yourselves... well, permit me *one* polemical citation anyway: "we must resist the idea that difficult art is elitist, any more than that science is elitist or learning is elitist. such arguments breed demagoguery not populist empowerment. by denying the value of the labor necessary to become linguistically and culturally informed, we encourage the maintenance of an uninformed, indeed, ignorant, citizenry" (311)... he talks of citizenry, by gosh... by contrast (and similarly), have a look at a presumed 'poem' from said volume, "dear mr. fanelli," which is nothing if not a direct verbal assault on our bureaucrazies, and their casual disregard for public (and private) welfare... nothing at all, in fact, "inaccessible" about this latter (quotes merely to indicate another vexed notion)... ----to kent j: i hear what you're saying, kent... but when you ask, rhetorically, But isn't it high time to say clearly (without it meaning that anyone "lost" or whatever) that the "mistake" that was made constituted a serious, regretable wrong? i'm wincing... i used the word "mistake" in my post knowing full-well that the only "mistake" some would likely construe would be the "mistake" made by joel and charles... here's another rhetorical question, to match yours: isn't it high time to say clearly (without it meaning that anyone "lost" or whatever) that "mistakes" were made on all sides?... now what to *do*, what should be done, once this latter is "said," is anyone's guess... i won't presume to speak for henry here either, or for that matter, for chris a... ----finally: someone said something or other i think (sorry, can't recall who) about facial expressions... so why is it that i often picture so many of you with crinkled brow and, uh, serious demeanor?... please, i'm chuckling right now, really, and one eye is just about to wink... i wouldn't be doing this if it weren't, yknow, FUN... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 15:06:56 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: Re: was Luscious Jacquson, now Steffanwolf (and the apg) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit JDEBROT writes: <> and then he writes << this post is already too long & i haven't yet addressed several remarks of yours brian that point to weaknesses or ambiguities in my earlier post--which like this one, was written at too great a speed to fault me for using scare quotes. but i feel i should say something about the apg. first, i do accept the argument that the group includes a diversity of poets. in fact, i think that some of them are doing work that interests *me* a lot whatever other value it--or the work i don't so much like-- might or might not have. my references to the "apg" actually reflect my reluctance to criticize, by name--or even, in any specific terms, the work of-- poets who are not in some sense already "established." even now i am very reluctant to criticize presjnar's & lowther's work at length in this venue (though, if i thought there was any interest i would do it, i suppose, in an essay--but would anyone run it?). but this has been, obviously, on my part, an unsatisfactory inhibition as it seems to have spared nobody's feelings. >> jaques, i find these comments interesting and engaging. you point out that as individual poets, none of us are really "established." (depending on what is meant by that word, its possible that some agp folk wouldn't want to be established - but that's another topic). and this apparently has kept you from making specific criticism of our work. specifically you mention prejsnar and lowther. i haven't discussed this with them but my experience has been that they welcome specific critique of their poetry and the ideas believed to be behind them. re mark you say: <> i would like to hear why you think mark has a too simple understanding of language poetry and also how you see this as manifested in his poems. and i'd be interested not only because i know mark's work, but because i think he is one of the many 'unlabeled' post-langpo poets out there that is worth discussing. why wait until someone is established? who is established since langpo/new york school anyway? several things indicate you have an interest in our work: the fact that you have read and commented on the agp issue of mirage#4/period(ical). that you continue to use apg as an example as you discuss poetics on this list. and also i know you have given my work serious consideration for your magazine. so if you are interested why do you think others would not be? i think others would be interested not because the apg is so special but because i think people are interested in specific critique of other people's poems/essays because it might then give them a different perspective in their own work. this gets back perhaps to your comment that poetry is in need of an 'outside'. (i think you said something like that). my outside recently has been british/irish poetry. chris alexander is asking about the poetry scene in new zealand. (i have a feeling i'm simplimentizing and mangling your idea of 'outside') if i hear your overall message correctly you are trying to understand and theorize what has gone on in contemporary poetry since langpo. not only that but it seems you are trying to suggest some ideas to this community (poetics list, contemp po) about how to keep poetry and poetics alive and thriving. several have commented that your posts along with stefans and others have been a sort of shot in the arm to this list. i agree. my guess is that the majority of people on this list consider themselves unestablished, unaffiliated with a school or movement. (would love to hear otherwise if i'm off base). we are the great miscellany school. so anyway i hope your comments continue and i hope they become even more specific because it seems you want to make meaningful comments re the poetic landscape since langpo but because you are hesitant to make specific criticisms you end up using a broad brush and as you noted such a hesitancy is << an unsatisfactory inhibition as it seems to have spared nobody's feelings >> one such broad stroke is the way that you use language poetry. when you use those words who/what are you talking about? language poetry involved many poets over several years so which aspect of language poetry or which language poet's poetics are you honing in on? in order to make speific comments re someone's work in comparison to langpo it seems you would first have to define langpo or describe which part of it you are referring to. if you don't do this then the term langpo just becomes a blunt instrument/weapon. re mark you mention his "very easy and uncomplicated adoption of oppositional terms." what part of langpo do you see as using "oppositional terms." i say this not in disagreement, but in hopes of continuing the conversation. mounting my soapbox - ie, not necessarily addressing or critiquing jacques here - let me say it this way: i think this list and our community of poets would benefit from more discussion of specific poets and their works. i like conversations that go something like: "you know i find this line in this poem really interesting because it responds to what __________ (surrealist, black mountain, pound, new formalist, langpo, buckminster fuller, braque, etc) was trying to get at, ie _________ . and i never thougth of it that way before. but then later these three lines seem to undercut what's been accomplished because formally it______________ which seems to suggest a politics of__________ and that turns me off because i think poetry is better served when its political (not political) in this way of__________. so that's how it strikes me, tell me what you were going for in this piece" again, if there are others on this list who are not interested in this kind of discussion, let me hear about it. but to me this shows INTEREST. even when or especially when the criticism is in disagreement. i think most of us want our poems to be in circulation, to be discussed. that's what makes a community. otherwise our work becomes dust-gathering ornamentation. but i must be idealistically off base somewhere here (its happened before) because i've been on this list for two (or three?) years now and such conversations rarely happen. randy prunty ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:16:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Re: poetics list stats / Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "Brian Stefans" Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 01:34:49 -0500 Maybe, as a one time only experiment (since it would take a long time to = tally, I presume), those of us who are not using email addresses with = country codes on them but who are, in fact, mostly writing from non-US = locales could chime in, perhaps to a special email address, with their = respective countries, and the results posted. It would be unscientific, = of course, but I get a little frustrated seeing numbers like "683" in = the US row of the stats and 1s next to other countries and hypothetical = 0s next to those that don't make the list. Let's carve up that 683. I = tend to assume that most people on the list are from the States -- it's = why "non-intellectual" statements like "I read this while nearly running = over a [insert name of geographically specific animal here] this = morning" are sometimes useful. I think the Australians should attack = (or "Attahk", which is the name of a Magma album, I think), not to be = utopian about it. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:16:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Re: poetics list stats / Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brian Stefans wrote: > Maybe, as a one time only experiment (since it would take a > long time totally, I presume), those of us who are not using > email addresses with country codes on them but who are, in > fact, mostly writing from non-US locales could chime in, > perhaps to a special email address, with their respective > countries, and the results posted. I like Brian's suggestion very much, but with the reservation that I can't handle even such a small influx of mail right now, let alone attempt to organize the data in question. If someone would like to volunteer to undertake the task, I'm sure it would be appreciated. Chris % Christopher W. Alexander % poetics list moderator ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 14:57:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kyle Conner Subject: HIGHWIRE READING TONITE!!! Comments: To: abdalhayy@aol.com, aberrigan@excite.com, abirge@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, agil@erols.com, allison_cobb@edf.org, ALPlurabel@aol.com, amille1@MCCUS.JNJ.COM, amorris1@swarthmore.edu, Amossin@aol.com, apr@libertynet.org, avraham@sas.upenn.edu, ayperry@aol.com, banchang@sas.upenn.edu, baratier@megsinet.net, bcole@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, bdowns@columbiabooks.com, Becker@law.vill.edu, bette343@hotmail.com, BMasi@aol.com, bochner@prodigy.net, booglit@excite.com, BStrogatz@aol.com, cahnmann@dolphin.upenn.edu, chris@bluefly.com, Chrsmccrry@aol.com, coryjim@earthlink.net, Cschnei978@aol.com, daisyf1@juno.com, danedels@sas.upenn.edu, dburnham@sas.upenn.edu, dcpoetry@mailcity.com, dcypher1@bellatlantic.net, DennisLMo@aol.com, DROTHSCHILD@penguinputnam.com, dsilver@pptnet.com, dsimpson@NETAXS.com, ejfugate@yahoo.com, ekeenagh@astro.ocis.temple.edu, ENauen@aol.com, ErrataBlu@aol.com, esm@vm.temple.edu, Feadaniste@aol.com, fleda@odin.english.udel.edu, Forlano1@aol.com, FPR@history.upenn.edu, fuller@center.cbpp.org, gbiglier@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, gmarder@hotmail.com, gnawyouremu@hotmail.com, goodwina@xoommail.com, HighwireN2@aol.com, hstarr@dept.english.upenn.edu, hthomas@Kutztown.edu, icepalace@mindspring.com, insekt@earthlink.net, ivy2@sas.upenn.edu, jeng1@earthlink.net, jennifer_coleman@edf.org, jimstone2@juno.com, jjacks02@astro.ocis.temple.edu, JKasdorf@mcis.messiah.edu, JKeita@aol.com, jlutt3@pipeline.com, jmasland@pobox.upenn.edu, JMURPH01@email.vill.edu, johnfattibene@juno.com, josman@astro.ocis.temple.edu, jvitiell@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, jwatkins@unix.temple.edu, kelly@dept.english.upenn.edu, kelly@COMPSTAT.WHARTON.upenn.edu, Kjvarrone@aol.com, kmcquain@ccp.cc.pa.us, kristing@pobox.upenn.edu, ksherin@dept.english.upenn.edu, kzeman@sas.upenn.edu, lcabri@dept.english.upenn.edu, lcary@dept.english.upenn.edu, leo@isc.upenn.edu, lessner@dolphin.upenn.edu, lgoldst@dept.english.upenn.edu, lisewell@worldnet.att.net, llisayau@hotmail.com, lorabloom@erols.com, lsoto@sas.upenn.edu, lstroffo@hornet.liunet.edu, marf@NETAXS.com, MargBarr@aol.com, matthart@english.upenn.edu, Matthew.McGoldrick@ibx.com, mbmc@op.net, melodyjoy2@hotmail.com, mholley@brynmawr.edu, michaelmccool@hotmail.com, miyamorik@aol.com, mmagee@dept.english.upenn.edu, mnichol6@osf1.gmu.edu, mollyruss@juno.com, mopehaus@hotmail.com, MTArchitects@compuserve.com, mwbg@yahoo.com, mytilij@english.upenn.edu, nanders1@swarthmore.edu, nawi@citypaper.net, odonnell@siam.org, penwaves@mindspring.com, pla@sas.upenn.edu, poetry4peeps@hotmail.com, putnamc@washpost.com, QDEli@aol.com, rachelmc@sas.upenn.edu, rdupless@vm.temple.edu, rediguanas@erols.com, repohead@rattapallax.com, ribbon762@aol.com, richardfrey@dca.net, robinh5@juno.com, ron.silliman@gte.net, sernak@juno.com, Sfrechie@aol.com, singinghorse@erols.com, stephen.potter@ey.com, stewart@dept.english.upenn.edu, subpoetics-l@hawaii.edu, susan.wheeler@nyu.edu, SusanLanders@yahoo.com, swalker@dept.english.upenn.edu, Ron.Swegman@mail.tju.edu, Tasha329@aol.com, tdevaney@brooklyn.cuny.edu, thorpe@sas.upenn.edu, tosmos@compuserve.com, travmar03@msn.com, twells4512@aol.com, upword@mindspring.com, v2139g@vm.temple.edu, vhanson@netbox.com, vmehl99@aol.com, wh@dept.english.upenn.edu, wvanwert@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, wwhitman@libertynet.org, ywisher@hotmail.com, zurawski@astro.temple.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ++++++Highwire Gallery +++++++ FILE UNDER: READINGS AT... Susan Schultz and Ross Gay 139 North 2nd Street Philadelphia (215) 829-1255 January 8, 2000 TONITE 8 PM BYOB/ $5 suggested donation Susan Schultz has lived in Hawai`i, U.S.A., for eight years, where she teaches English and currently directs the creative writing program at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa. Her chapbooks include Holding Patterns (Wild Honey Press, Dublin, forthcoming), Addenda (Meow Press), voice-overs (with John Kinsella, Tinfish), Earthquake Dreams (Standing Stones), and Another Childhood (Leave Books); a full-length book, Aleatory Allegories, is forthcoming from Folio. Her work was included in Talisman's An Anthology of (New) American Poets anthology, as well as several anthologies published by Sun & Moon Press. She edits the journal of experimental Pacific poetry, Tinfish, as well as a chapbook series published by Tinfish Network. She is also a literary critic, and edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama), as well as publishing essays and reviews widely. An essay on Hawai`i poetry on tape was included in Charles Bernstein's recent Close Listening volume (Oxford). from MEMORY CARDS Yank my chain. Pallid the leash-men. Spasm in the back spells nine, number so fine. Show me writing that is not narcissistic, that doesn't come from the hysterical female, the drunken male (elephant tusks and so on). She wants to call her thesis "the oppressed chick codes"; wonders if to feel guilty for laughing. The memoir as a form is like cinder, grows around an invisible yet empty center, caldera lacking heat. The horses are a magnificent line, my high school teacher said. And that aside from suicide, which the governor claims is "a selfish act." Who knows nothing, one imagines, of interminable pavement, the mind without prescription (New Zealanders "prescribe" books). We can't leave you here alone, my mother said. The man with an orange VW bus jumped from the ninth floor across the street from me in Makiki, and his body lay on the lot for hours. A white cloth covered him; there was blood on it. The man who helped in the yard wondered why I took it so hard. His father killed himself. Ross Gay lives in Philadelphia, has recently had some poems in APR, Sulfur, Columbia, does not have a car, can run pretty fast,and wants to dedicate this reading to Walt. One Eye Gone Black You knew the cancer would grow over both lungs, make them black, mossy shadows. But no one told you about the blindness, that before your breathing sounded curdled and raw, one eye would phase out, the morbid meandering, a slow go, making your chest ache like a tractor breaking through bone. The last time I visited you in Youngstown, 110 lbs, one eye's sight gone black and the keloid on your arm approaching the bicep in size, you gave the same mechanic's vice-grip handshake, a challenge and warning that your killing would not be easy. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Please forward this announcement to whomever you think may be interested or ask them to contact us. If you would like to be removed from this list please let us know. Look forward to seeing you at the gallery. If you're from out of town and planning a trip to the East Coast, let us know, maybe we can set up a reading. All the best, Greg Fuchs (g_fuchs@hotmail.com) and Kyle Conner (Kyle.Conner@MAIL.TJU.EDU) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:18:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Gay Philadelphia Writer Kelly McQuain's Story Censored by Batman Owners / McQuain MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: kmcquain@ccp.cc.pa.us (McQuain, Kelly) Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 15:09:13 -0800 PRESS RELEASE January 6, 2000 For immediate release (please forward to interested parties) Gay Philadelphia Writer Kelly McQuain's Story Censored by Batman Owners Riddle me this: What's the one thing the superhero Batman won't protect? Free speech. At least that's how Philadelphia writer Kelly McQuain sees it. = His short story parody of the dynamic duo, "Je T'aime, Batman, Je T'adore," published in Simon & Schuster's anthology Best American Erotica 1999, has been excised from a second printing of that volume due to threatened legal action by the owners of the popular Batman character (DC Comics, the long-time publisher of Batman, is owned by media conglomerate Time Warner). "Joker, Penguin and Catwoman and now me," laughs McQuain. "I've joined Batman's rogue's gallery as Bat-enemy Number One." McQuain, who has been publishing short fiction since 1991, has had stories appear in The James White Review, The Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, and is the only writer to twice win the Philadelphia City Paper's annual Writing Award. The work responsible for the current controversy was first published in the anthology Best Gay Erotica 1997. At the time, = it received favorable reviews in Publishers Weekly and the Philadelphia City Paper, which called the piece "an hilarious short story=D6 in which a = hunky young Robin struggles with the Batlove that dares not speak its name." McQuain only recently became aware that his work was now being censored. "Shortly before New Year's, I was contacted by Susie Bright, the editor of the Best American Erotica series. The good news? The '99 edition had sold = out and was going into a second printing. The bad news? My story was pulled. Batman's lawyers had contacted the publisher of the anthology, Simon & Schuster, and had threatened legal action. I was told that Simon & = Schuster didn't care to fight the matter, and there was nothing I could do." Pulling a story from a strong-selling collection is a rarity in the publishing world. "On the bright side," notes McQuain, "anybody who has the first edition of Best American Erotica 1999 now has a collector's item. But on a more serious note, I believe my reference to the Batman character falls within the acceptable boundaries of parody usage. Certainly there are other such stories out there. A. M Homes wrote a wonderful sexual parody of Barbie in her collection The Safety of Objects, and back in the '60s the late Donald Barthelme published in his debut collection Come Back, Dr. Caligari a parody of Batman to which my own story is greatly indebted. That story never caused any stir as far as I know." McQuain, a native of Elkins, West Virginia, moved to Philadelphia several years ago to study at Temple University, from which he earned a Master's degree = in Creative Writing. For a short time in the mid-90s he worked as a comic = book artist for Comico, a Chicago-based comics company. McQuain figures that a July 1999 New York Times article about his short story and the popularity of erotica anthologies ("Batman's Robin Shaves His Legs? Erotica as a Portrait of the Age") is what prompted Batman's handlers to cry foul. "The lawyers' concern is a testament to the story's success," concludes McQuain, who has read = plenty of lesser parodies of trademarked characters published on the Internet. "The fact that my story has been widely published in anthologies such as Best Gay Erotica 1997 and Wilma Loves Betty, and has garnered praise from Publisher's = Weekly, Lambda Book Report and web-zines as far away as Australia, is what makes = it dangerous." McQuain admits that he hasn't been approached by any lawyers wielding Batarangs or Bat-cuffs--and he shrugs off any concern about such contact in the future. "My story is a love story told from Robin's point-of-view, based on dreams and fantasies from my childhood and adolescence. The Robin I refer to, Dick Grayson, is not even used by DC Comics as Robin anymore--they've revamped Batman and his attendant characters so many times that the current incarnations bear little or no resemblance to the toys I played with as a child or the characters I watched on TV. And as for playing around with Batman's sexuality, it wasn't me who added a codpiece and aroused nipples to his costume in = the recent spate of bat-movies! If Batman's homoeroticism is so worrisome, the powers that be have themselves to thank." But Robin's bawdy hero worship = of his mentor isn't the heart of the issue, stresses McQuain. "Trust me, I'm not getting rich off this story, nor was that ever my plan. But how can somebody tell me I am not allowed to commit a dream or a fantasy I've had onto paper? I think it's interesting and appropriate that a vigilante like Batman would serve as the springboard in a disagreement that blurs the line between hero and villain. But controversies involving free speech often make champions out = of the unlikeliest of candidates. Take a look at Larry Flynt. Batman should be fighting the Legion of Doom or the Riddler--not me." Still, the imbroglio hasn't dampened McQuain's love of the dark knight or his sidekick. "The best way DC Comics could get me to shut up would be to = have me write a few issues," he smiles. "That's been a dream of mine. I wouldn't exactly overhaul the characters, but I think I could provide Batman with = the dose of humor he needs to get his bat-panties out of the bunch they're = in." In the meantime, McQuain will continue polishing a first collection of = short stories, The Truth of Boys, for which he has just begun to search for a publisher. His latest story, "Erasing Sonny" appears in the newly = released anthology Men on Men 2000 (Plume). Along with other contributors to that anthology, McQuain will be reading at Borders Books in Center City Philadelphia, 18th and Market Streets, on March 2nd at 7:30 p.m. ******* For Additional Information/or Interviews with the Author: To contact Kelly McQuain kmcquain@ccp.cc.pa.us 215-545-6003 To contact Susie Bright, the editor of Best American Erotica 1999: SueB@well.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 01:13:00 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > >A question: would the moderator have allowed this through if the protagonist >were Afro-American? A woman? Jewish? If not, why was this considered OK? > >Billy I agree. And I would add that their should be no jokes about stupid people or men or women or kids or gods or animals. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 01:13:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Moosehead memories In-Reply-To: <387476B3.AA5C7756@concentric.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > Was it the peyote or Bowering, fetching in antlers? I >have no idea. Usually after I have had a few bottled of Moosehead you can espy me retching on anthers. GB George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 11:28:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: rebecca wolff Subject: Fence and the JCC Comments: To: ira@angel.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Please come January 12th, that's Wednesday, to a reading at the KGB Bar. It's cosponsored by Fence and the Jewish Community Center. It features poets Matthew Lippman, Hal Sirowitz, and Jennifer Hecht. It starts at 7:30, admission is free, and KGB is at 85 E. 4th Street. As always, please let me know if you would rather not receive these occasional announcements of readings and events in New York. Or if you have recieved multiple announcements (unless you're on the listserv). ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 01:13:12 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >It also reminds me of the story of the monk in China who hires a man to >row him across a lake. When they are almost to the other side, the monk >asks his rower to take him back, since he, the monk, doesn't want to go >there anymore. This seems illogical to those of us who would say "well, I >might as well go all the way to the other side, since I've gotten this >far." But why do something you don't want to do just because you've >started it? See? Now they are telling dirty nasty anti-Asian jokes! Do you know how long the Chinese people have been treated as second-class citizens in the USA? I'll bet you would find that joke hilarious if it was Greek Orthodox priest. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 13:43:59 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baptiste Chirot Subject: Re: forward from Henry Gould In-Reply-To: <20000107170939.23781.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII It's great to find a letter again from Henry Gould here. I miss Henry's postings a lot. Never figured out why he was more or less escorted out of the building, so to speak. Too many postings? Henry always had much to say, corrected himself, jabbed at himself-- I always admired and respected his passion, his commitment and his ability to say something off the cuff, on the wing, yet these comments always were and are born of a deep sense of poetry as a daily action--whether in reading or writing-- I remember an early letter, years ago when I first encountered Henry via the email--he was asking for books for a library--poetry books-- At the time, I was active in a program--now discontinued--to obtain books for the prison libraries here in Wisconsin. We sent tons of books, of all sorts, to the prisons. Henry always presents a challenge--which is what any person welcomes-- To me, he presents a true love of poetry, I do not care if I agree with him, or he may have so much to say--I think that is vital, and what keeps poetry alive. Henry signals what is important--that poetry is alive, in libraries, on the streets, "in your house"--as James Brown says in his great version of "For Your Precious Love" on the lp BRING IT ON-- The only thing--Henry, don't apologize so much. There is nothing wrong in speaking your mind. Especially when you have a good mind. all best davebc ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:25:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Akilah Oliver and Hugh Steinberg at SPT 1/14 / saidenberg MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- Friday, January 14, 7:30 p.m.Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 16:39:14 -0800 From: jocelyn saidenberg SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC Reading Akilah Oliver Hugh Steinberg Akilah Oliver is a poet, performance artist and teacher. Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999), recently nominated for the PEN American Center's Open Book Award. A founding member of the L.A. based feminist performance art collective, The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Oliver teaches at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, High Risk 2, Bombay Gin. Oliver's writing investigates the interstices and connections between 'blackness', 'femaleness' and 'heterogeneity', in a dynamic and elegant performance of dialogues with history, identity and sexuality. If only all performance-based work had this kind of integrity and magic on the page! Hugh Steinberg's poetry has appeared in Grand Street, Tinfish, 14 Hills and American Poetry Review, among others. His chapbook, "In the Attic of the House of the Dead" is forthcoming from Chax Press. He is a board member of Small Press Traffic and teaches writing at California College of Arts and Crafts. Steinberg succeeds most vividly as he mines personal memoir and memory of the city a la "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," extending Eliotic signals into the coded futures of weather and ether. His procedural based work (e.g. writing a poem a day for a whole year) opens the field of daily life, mundane existence and stretches it until holes appear, like fine cambric lace. New College Cultural Center 766 Valencia Street, San Francisco $5 ---------------------------------------- Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center 766 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415/437-3454 www.sptraffic.org ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 18:13:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Announcement: Windhover #4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Now on-line @ http://www.instress.com/windhover4.html Poetry by: Laynie Browne, Mark Salerno, Susan M. Schultz, Bill Marsh, Michelle Murphy, A.L. Nielsen, Rachel Levitsky, Sheila E. Murphy, Michael Ruby, Henry Gould, Krysia Jopek, Brian Strang, Jack Kimball, & Elizabeth Robinson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 00:02:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: notice of great relief MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - ..*....*....*....*....*....*.. nn*nnoo*oott*ttii*iicc*ccee*ee ..*....*....*....*....*....*.. there's nothing more I can do with nikuko and doctor leopold konninger in their present condition, it's better to consider them killed off somewhere in the midst of a narrative that refuses to stop for them, they might, yes they will, appear on screen, they might do a dance or two or a trick or two, but they've gone from the text, they're ghosts, oni, obake, they're scrabbling ..*....*....*....*....*....*.., but they're lost here, she might pirouette, she might not ..*....*....*....*....*....*.., he might look, he might not, they might get married and run off to konigsberg, they might not ..*....*....*....*....*....*.., but they've left here, left the texts, ..*....*....*....*....*....*.., there's nothing more to say, noth- ing more to write about then, they're off on their own, they'd rather have it that way, they've gone, you won't hear more about them, they've said goodbye, ..*....*....*....*....*....*.. __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 00:18:45 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Milletti Subject: CFP: Carto-Graphics Conference MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Department of English at the State University of New York at Albany invites one page abstracts for our first annual Graduate Student Conference: "Carto-Graphics: Bodies of Production, Migration, and Subjectivity." We welcome papers from all intellectual perspectives and traditions, and encourage participants to consider the trans-disciplinary and extra-academic dimensions of the conference theme. "Carto-Graphics" arises as a means to address issues of mapping, representation, and the discursive production of cultural bodies and spaces. We hope to further examine the plurality of contexts in which these artifacts--virtual, technical, biological--assume (and presume) intelligibility. Possible conference topics are: * Poetics, Place, and Praxis * Displacement and Identity in Contemporary Culture * Expatriates, Exiles, and "Other Communities" * Creative Geographies/Geography & Literature * Global Economies, New Industries, Class * Textual Production and the Future of the Subject * Space and Meaning in Contemporary Theory * Cognitive Mapping and Cultural Identities * Charting Virtual Terrains * Visual Culture and Nontextual Media * Travel, Tourism, and Sustainability * Bio-logics, Ecology, and Cultures of Production * Dis-ease, Trauma, and Becoming-Cyborg Deadline for Submissions is February 15, 2000 Please send one page abstracts for panel presentations to: Carto-Graphics Graduate Student Conference University at Albany, SUNY English Department Albany, NY 12222 For further information, contact Geoff Manaugh , Shealeen Meaney , or Christina Milletti ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 08:47:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Prejsnar's poetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Jacques Debrot writes to the list: it's (particularly) presjnar's too simple understanding of lang poetry & his very easy & uncomplicated adoption of oppositional terms & the way in which this is manifested in his poems-- that i object to. ******************** to which the culprit responds: I am gratified that my work is well-known enuff and widely-read enuff, to warrent critical comments on the List. However off-base or sketchy, JD's comments are welcome as part of the ongoing critical discussion. Let me just add, for those less familiar with my writing than jacques is, that it can be seen (of course) in the recent issues of New Orleans Review and Mirage #4...Issues which feature many atlanta poets, and which have largely occasioned, i guess, Jacques' several recent mini-attacks. I also have work in an issue of the atlanta mag "108"..which has pretty much just come out. Details about acquiring all these publications on request... The chapbook edition of my long poem, Burning Flags, is out of print. However i've got some copies which are my personal property, and will let a few of them go, for $8, to interested folks....... Just for those who wanna now what all the fuss is about... --mark ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 14:58:49 +0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong Subject: Lautreamont-Machine with extra batteries Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" (1976-78 I worked in the northwest of Haiti, a true Lautreamont-Machine with extra batteries.I spent the New Year reading Les Chants de Maldoror...) ...a village called L'Arbre without any trees Sixteen died that week no food to eat (the rats were cracking cottonseed) only Haitian sun and Haitian night and the song of Maldoror I had kept my city mangos in a secret sack dark and dry hoarded against the dust, against the new year when I'd go to the water five hours walking east sucking mangos in the sucking sun And lay thinking in the baths made for Pauline, of her song, my song, the song of others, the songs of Maldoror and where they were leading me. I had sung my Song to the frenzied bloodlust of spirits in silent measure of the night in silent battle with damnation shedding illusions as I wandered from my inscribed path I have not forgotten that song, that of the dying, nor moving in the vortex of souls, the framework of quotidian horror, nerves pinned to each minute passing, plucked by chants of Maldoror Somenights I awake thirsting, a song echoing through my garden and think of mangos ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 12:49:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maz881@AOL.COM Subject: knuth MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <> al s, any tips on getting these books used? or did you buy new? done any work with the riemann zeta function? bill l ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 14:36:20 -0500 Reply-To: mjk@acsu.buffalo.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mike Kelleher Subject: New Book, Book Party Comments: To: UB Core Poetics Poetics Seminar MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Heart Hammer Books is proud to announce the publication of This Side Facing You by Dan Machlin. A book release party will be held at 8:30 p.m. on 22 January at 13 East 3rd Street, #4A, New York, NY. Please come if you are in the neighbourhood! Questions can be directed to Huntl@un.org. To order books (Saddle Staple, Letterpress Cover, 35pp) please send $5.00 to: Laird Hunt 106 Ridge Street, #2D New York, NY 10002 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 15:18:00 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: Discount Offer: Kathleen Fraser's New Book MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable =46rom Hank Lazer and Charles Bernstein, an announcement = and DISCOUNT OFFER for Kathleen Fraser's new book: Announcing the latest volume in the series Modern = and Contemporary Poetics, edited by Charles = Bernstein and Hank Lazer Translating the Unspeakable Poetry and the Innovative Necessity Kathleen Fraser An accomplished and influential poet, Kathleen Fraser = has been instrumental in drawing attention to other = women poets working outside the mainstream. = Translating the Unspeakable gathers eighteen of her = essays written over nearly twenty years, combining = autobiography and criticism to examine what it means = for any artist to innovate instead of following an already = traveled path. Fraser tells how her generation was influenced by = revolutions in art and philosophy during the early 1960s = and how she spent years pursuing idiosyncratic means = of rediscovering the poem=92s terms. By the 1970s her = evolving poetics were challenged by questions of = gender, until immersion in feminist/modernist = scholarship led her to initiate greater dialogue among = experimentalist poets. Fraser also examines modernist women writers, their = contemporary successors, and the visual poetics they = have practiced. By exploring the work of such poets as = H. D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Barbara Guest, = Fraser conveys their struggle to establish a presence = within accepted poetic conventions and describes the = role experimentation plays in helping women overcome = self-imposed silence. All of Fraser=92s writings explore how the search to find = one=92s own way of speaking into a very private yet = historic space=97of translating the unspeakable=97drives = poetic experimentation for women and men alike. This = provocative book provides a glimpse into the thought = processes of the poetic mind, enhancing our = understanding of innovative writing. =93These superb essays by Kathleen Fraser take their = sanction from her long commitment to the craft of poetry = and to the advocacy of experimental writing by women. = She speaks with a poet's authority, but with a large and = articulate awareness of the theoretical and practical = concerns of contemporary poets. Current discussions of = contemporary poetry are enormously enriched by these = complex reflections, revealing Fraser=92s intelligent = passion for this lifelong vocation, not only as writer but = as teacher and editor, and her generosity and openness = to the labors of poets marginalized and occluded within = the record.=94 =97Eileen Gregory University of Dallas =93In Kathleen Fraser=92s radiant essays on the poetics of = innovation we meet the poet thinking her way through = issues of criticism and craft that have preoccupied many = of us for decades. Their passionate responsiveness, = generous spirit, and acute sense of experimental writing = by women in its recent historic contexts combine to offer = a rare account of what it has been to walk the tightrope = of the new.=94=97Carolyn Burke University of California-Santa Cruz Kathleen Fraser, award-winning poet, prose writer, and = editor/publisher of the journal HOW(ever) and the new = on-line journal HOW2, was Professor of Creative Writing = for twenty years at San Francisco State University, = where she directed The Poetry Center and founded the = American Poetry Archives. Her most recent book of = poems is il cuore: the heart. 248 pages, 6 x 9 ISBN 0-8173-0989-6 $44.95s cloth ISBN 0-8173-0990-X $19.95s paper SPECIAL OFFER TO POETICS LISTSERV 20% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU MENTION THAT YOU = ARE ON THE POETICS LISTSERV = OFFER EXPIRES 15 March 2000 To order contact Michelle Sellers: E=96mail msellers@uapress.ua.edu = Phone (205) 348=967108 Fax (205) 348=969201 or mail to: The University of Alabama Press Marketing Department Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487=960380 Attn: Michelle Sellers www.uapress.ua.edu Fraser/Translating the Unspeakable, cloth discounted = price $35.96 = Fraser/Translating the Unspeakable, paper discounted = price $15.96 Subtotal _________________ Illinois residents add 8.75% sales tax = _________________ USA orders: add $3.50 postage for the first book and = $.75 for each additional book _________________ Canada residents add 7% sales tax = _________________ International orders: add $4.00 postage for the first book = and $1.00 for each additional book = _________________ Enclosed as payment in full _________________ (Make checks payable to The University of Alabama = Press) Bill my: _________Visa _________MasterCard Account number _____________________________ = Daytime phone_______________________________ Expiration date _______________________________ = Full name____________________________________ Signature = ____________________________________ = Address_____________________________________ _ City = _________________________________________ State_______________________ Zip = ______________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 15:57:22 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: trade? MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I have extra copies of my _A Run of Letters_ from the poetry new york pamphlet series & would like to trade for things to read, backchannel. Be well David Baratier 2318 N. High St Apt 2 Columbus OH 43202 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 16:46:12 +0000 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: millineum books (cont.) MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit since the first: books: John M. Bennett - Mailer leaves ham -- Pantograph. The distant reach of what is available soundwise currently. First saw some of these a half dozen or so years ago, perhaps in the now defunct caliban, or clwn wr or even john's laft. Also a healthy number of the illustrated transductions of Emblems of Andreae Alciatti in his unique multi-readable script, which there is a name for & can't think of right now. Really opens up the issue of the word as form. Mighty fine. John Clarke- From feathers to Iron-- Tombouctou. This set me afire when I first read it & is doing the same after the distance between. A set up for a unique poetics fully founded within the collected. Also in Blue Hortals with Dan Z, which my copy of has disappeared, can anyone help me with one, even photocopied, Dan, Stephen? Nick Piombino -- Theoretical objects -- Green Integer. This new format of Doug's is something worth copying, two books from 1, split 6 by 9 into 6 by 4.5. Might even try it for cost. Better yet, the book itself. Very worth owing. The sentences have a weight and length only matched in recent writings by Tom Bridwell shown in a recent House Organ(#27). A gorgeous turn of the comma twists and retwists the idea. A careful reader needed. With the exception of some weak moments when Piombino gets into his defilement of the "I," this solidifies and transcends areas set down in _Boundary of blur's_ brilliance. Haniel Long -- The Grist Mill -- The Rydal Press, 1946. Found this in my recent travels in NM. After _Pittsburgh memoranda_ based on pound's notion of explaining a location which pre-dates & pales _Maximus_ Long dives down. I can see Robert Kelly's poem "The mill of particulars" in the title poem & both outdo each other in nice rotation shifting from book to book. David Bromige - A Cast of Tens - Avec. Except for a water joke in the poem "While Knitting" which might offend some Welch patrons, the movement tasting of tens really satisfies. Lost in my move from Philly to Ohio & glad to have again. Running low on books & now time. Be well David Baratier ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 16:26:30 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: Re: The Local In-Reply-To: <000a01bf5996$596dd580$940e1881@unm.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I'm reluctant to drastically re-define the local, thinking it might be better to come up with another description for those intensities which are not characterized by a proximity of spacial relations. Space does count for something, doesn't it? I do believe those other intensities exist, but I think that even though most of my closest literary relationships are quite distantly extended, the most intense ones have benefited greatly by times when those involved have been in the same locality, even if only for a few days. And that periodic renewal of such direct ties by collapsing the far spaces during various visits have been crucial to the relationships. My take on this, with the last twenty-two years having been spent in Madison, Minneapolis, or Tucson -- all places where such relationships, for me, were primarily long-distance and constantly changing ones, is certainly different than those who have maintained presence in communities where their main relationships have been local and constant. charles At 10:08 PM 1/7/00 -0700, you wrote: >> I'd just like to say that my own definition of the local is not >> automatically one linked by geography. I think that there are other types >of >> intensive/intended collaborations that might equally qualify. Although I >do >> think that the face-to-face element of the scene vs. the network really >> helps in detoxifying the paranoia which sometimes lurks up in more distant >> interactions (the history of this list being a pretty decent example of >> same). Reading the history of Black Mountain College, particularly in >> relation to people who were not always "present" (Duncan and Creeley both >> there only for short periods, Levertov not really at all, Eigner never), >> brings up lots of things to think about over just such dynamics. >> >> Ron > >Yes, there is definitely an empathic thread. Although I'm not too sure that >face-to-face detoxifies paranoia, as words--written or spoken--have a >tendency to effuse a paralinguistic taint. >Just that the internet arrived mysteriously on the cusp of a new century, >and what this means when it comes to space/time and the possibility of new >strategies of collaboration is yet to be worked out. > >-Joel > >Joel Weishaus >Writer-In-Residence >The University of New Mexico >Albuquerque, NM > >ARCHIVE: www.unm.edu/~reality >SKULL-HOUSE: [Most advanced draft] www.unm.edu/~reality/Skull/intro.htm >SKULL-HOUSE: [Being built at Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive >Arts, >University of Wales/University of Plymouth, UK.] >http://caiia-star.newport.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/skullhouse/Skull/index.htm >l > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 18:35:01 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Bourbeau Subject: Re: forward from Henry Gould MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 1/10/00 6:26:12 PM, dbchirot@CSD.UWM.EDU writes: << I always admired and respected his passion, his commitment and his ability to say something off the cuff, on the wing, yet these comments always were and are born of a deep sense of poetry as a daily action--whether in reading or writing-- >> I'll second this... & that he is missed here... Lisa ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 19:08:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: knuth In-Reply-To: <8e.8ef6df84.25ab75bd@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I got them used, believe it or not, at the Salvation Army - and haven't done anything with the riemann zeta function. I was looking for the books for years - there's a lot on binary systems, which merges with another book I found, called, appropriately enough, Binary Systems... - Alan (P.S. the Flatbush Ave. Brooklyn Salvation Army is pretty good; there's also wonders to be had at our local library branch on Pacific and Fourth, as well as a weekend bookseller on Sixth Avenue and Fifth Street (all Brooklyn) On Mon, 10 Jan 2000 Maz881@AOL.COM wrote: > <> > > al s, > > any tips on getting these books used? or did you buy new? > > done any work with the riemann zeta function? > > bill l > Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 19:53:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Prunty and general usage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Randy Prunty writes: > let me say it this way: i think this list and our community > of poets would benefit from more discussion of specific > poets and their works. i like conversations that go something > like: "you know i find this line in this poem really interesting > because it responds to what __________ (surrealist, black > mountain, pound, new formalist, langpo, buckminster fuller, > braque, etc) was trying to get at, ie _________ . and i never > thougth of it that way before. but then later these three lines > seem to undercut what's been accomplished because formally > it______________ which seems to suggest a politics of > __________ and that turns me off because i think poetry is > better served when its political (not political) in this way > of__________. so that's how it strikes me, tell me what you > were going for in this piece" again, if there are others on this > list who are not interested in this kind of discussion, let me > hear about it. but to me this shows INTEREST. even when or > especially when the criticism is in disagreement. i think most > of us want our poems to be in circulation, to be discussed. > that's what makes a community. otherwise our work becomes > dust-gathering ornamentation. but i must be idealistically off > base somewhere here (its happened before) because i've been > on this list for two (or three?) years now and such > conversations rarely happen. I want briefly to draw attention to this comment, which comes at the end of rather a long post and so may have been missed by some. I, too, have been on the list for several years, and of course have been moderator for a fraction of that time. One use I have not often seen the list put to by its subscribers, and to which it may lend itself quite well, is as a forum for comprehensive remarks on specific books or poems - or, as Komninos Zervos has just pointed out, remarks on web-based writing and art. It's a lack I've always taken to be of a piece with the more general absence of review-articles that characterizes so many of our journals and zines; but which is as inexplicable as it is regrettable, given that most writers soon prove to be highly opinionated (and generally wrong, I might say in jocund mood). I don't know what one could do to encourage this sort of thing, save to suggest that the next time anyone out there runs across a book or poem or story of particular interest, I'd like to hear about the source of that interest as much as would Randy; and that discussion of specific works might prove a vital component to any ongoing conversation. I think that the list is useful for such exchange for a number of reasons: its wide reach and relative speed, also the informality of writing that is allowable here; indicating that, lacking time, one need not write a formal review in order publicly to express one's thoughts on a piece of writing or art, though it goes without saying some depth of consideration would be the clearest expression of interest. The list may also be a good medium for "hammering out" ideas for a more comprehensive article destined to appear elsewhere. Chris ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 20:05:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: New Xconnect / Halvard Johnson MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account, but was found belatedly. Apologies for the delay. Chris -- From: Halvard Johnson Date: 12/20/99 11:39 AM -0500 ---------------------- C r o s s C o n n e c t L i t e r a r y M a g a z i n e +------->< c o n n e c t-------+ http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect Volume 5, Issue 1 featuring new work by: Hank Lazer Standard Schaefer Gill Ott Patrick Lawler Dorianne Laux Halvard Johnson and More... featuring ARTWork by: Brigham Dimick, Mark Leuders and Aaron Levy crossconnect * http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect * guidelines and correspondence: xconnect@ccat.sas.upenn.edu +------->< c o n n e c t-------+ CrossConnect is published in association with the Kelly Writers House U n i v e r s i t y of P e n n s y l v a n i a ========== ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:05:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: apology with jokes / Herron MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "Patrick Herron" Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:08:05 -0500 David -=20 My apologies if it came across that I accused you of being a bigot. = That certainly wasn't my point. I hardly have definitive evidence that = you are a bigot. I did suggest you were acting in an ignorant fashion by not apologizing. = I was asking you to consider that your joke might touch upon a = sensitive issue. You can defend the double reading, and I will return = to you the benefit of the doubt, but I did not see what was so difficult = about saying, "hey, if it came across in such a way, I'm sorry." So, David, I am sorry. =20 And to the posts from others on this subject (Randolph, Maria, Brian, = George), I have managed to come to my senses. =20 Apparently anti-Irish prejudice has never existed in this = world, and still does not, except of course in my "pea-brained" = imagination. Or, rather, anti-Irish prejudice doesn't really matter = because the Irish are white or because the Irish, even Irish Catholics, = are now enfranchised in America. Silly me. Perhaps I've also imagined = the totality of anti-Semitism. Or that Billy and I are both overly = sensitive. Perhaps sensitive people should not take interest in poetry. = Of course I do remember a conversation I had in Vienna (Cafe Strozzi) = with an Austrian who told me the Irish were "ignorant drunk apes" who = "shouldn't be allowed to reproduce." Or a certain southern = Presbyterian family that wouldn't let their daughter marry an Irish = Catholic. What thigh-slappin' fun!=20 Of course I could have been dreaming of a better world. . . . So let's all have a laugh. I DO have a sense of humor, if you can = believe it. On Irishness and its Zen-like approach to life . . . An Englishman, an American and an Irishman are called upon to test a lie = detector. The Englishman says: "I think I can empty 20 bottles of beer". = BUZZZZZZ, goes the lie detector. "Ok", he says, "10 bottles". And the = machine is silent. The American says: "I think I can eat 15 hamburgers". = BUZZZZZZ, goes the lie detector. "Alright, 8 hamburgers". And the = machine's silent. The Irish says: "I think...", BUZZZZZZ goes the = machine. On the Irish talents with novel "out of the box" solutions to old = problems . . . Two Irishmen met in a pub and discussed the illness of a third. "Poor Michael Hogan! Faith, I'm afraid he's goin' to die." "Shure, an' why would he be dyin'?" asked the other. "Ah, he's gotten so thin. You're thin enough, and I'm thin -- but by = my soul, Michael Hogan is thinner than both of us put together." On Irish problem-solving talents, take 2 . . . The Irish attempt on Mount Everest was a valiant effort, but it failed: = They ran out of scaffolding. On Irish optimism in the face of injury and danger . . . O'Connell was staggering home with a pint of booze in his back pocket = when he slipped and fell heavily. Struggling to his feet, he felt something wet = running down his leg. "Please, God," he implored, "let it be blood!" On the innocence of the Irish, take 1 . . .=20 What are the best ten years of an Irishman's life? Third grade. On the innocence of the Irish, take 2 . . . How can you identify an Irish pirate? He's the one with patches over both eyes. On the honesty and moral turpitude of the Irish . . . Paddy was picked up on a rape charge. He was placed in a lineup with ten other fellows and the accusing woman was escorted into the room. Paddy jumped forward, and screamed "That's her! That's her! Oi'd = recognize her anywhere!" And finally, on the philosophical complexity of the Irish, particularly = on the problem of personal identity . . . Two Irishmen met and one said to the other, "Have ye seen Mulligan = lately,Pat?" Pat said, "Well, I have and I haven't." His friend asked, = "Shure, and what d'ye mean by that?" Pat said, "It's like this, = y'see...I saw a chap who I thought was Mulligan, and he saw a chap that = he thought was me. And when we got up to one another...it was neither of = us."=20 Thank you, Patrick ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:17:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Supernumerary MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII '''''' Supernumerary 218:412) Jennifer 01:10:00:00:00 I couldn't think of a better topic since the hangman disappeared. Here I am writing you at midnight! It's as if everyone stopped breathing just for a moment. I know I did! 218:413) Julu 01:10:00:00:05 Hey Jennifer, I didn't know you were on! I feel that the air's cleared around here. If I hear the word "ballet" I'm going to throw up! Enough already! It was a stupid conceit! 218:414) Jennifer 01:10:00:00:10 Yeah, a conceit - that's exactly what it was. A trope or lever to explain just about everything in the world. As if you could squeeze blood out of a stone. Nothing is farther from the truth. 218:415) Julu 01:10:00:00:12 Exactly - but truth is simultaneously centrifugal and decentered. It's the lack of the eye, all that perspectival machinery. We're just coming to grips with it. 218:416) Jennifer 01:10:00:00:15 Just like those pirouettes, as if there were a body at the center of them. Her skirt kept flying up, and there was nothing there. An avatar, or woman of Lacan. In masquerade, burdened by the lack, shattered. 218:417) Julu 01:10:00:00:18 Well, there's no more to it, and his writing avatar discourse itself is getting stale. He's taken you and I around the bend, and meanwhile there is e-commerce to think about, all that corporate supernumerary exchange. It doesn't appear anywhere in his work; he's completely ignored the poli- tical economy of the Internet. 218:418) Julu 01:10:00:00:21 He's placed bodies in the way. The Net's about "streaming video, it's about streaming music," and he's back there with a vision or version of flesh and disappearance. He doesn't realize even the imaginary is disap- pearing - everything replaced by the monetary clot. 218:419) Jennifer 01:10:00:00:24 That gets back to his theory of the self as a coagulation - now the imag- inary itself is a coagulation, running between flesh and machine, swollen with flickering and competitive protocols. There are no rooms left for the avatars, and even human speech is always already stolen speech - from selves, machines, corporate entities which are themselves streaming. 218:420) Julu 01:10:00:00:29 Do you mean our days are numbered? 218:421) Jennifer 01:10:00:00:30 At least our conversations are. __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 15:43:08 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ralph Wessman Subject: Re: postscript Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable from Australia (Tasmania) in particular - 'Famous Reporter', a biannual = small press print journal, mainly regional but usually manages to publish = a couple of contributors to this list each issue (poetry, comment). I enjoy the many voices on the list. Ralph http://www.tassie.net.au/~ahugo/fr/ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 00:33:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: fyi: KVASHWOP! / Lewis In-Reply-To: <916020.3156515984@321maceng.fal.buffalo.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Don Martin was OK but not as good as any of the immortal trio of Wallace Wood, Bill Elder, and Jack Davis of the Harvey Kurtzman era (or the Golden age of Mad Mag). jg ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:23:13 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Moosehead memories In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Will I have to spend another century beleagured by this Demon woman? At the Moosehead conference she would always scuttle to my side just when the photographers from The Kenyan Review were flashing their flashes. Put her hand in my pocket one time. She was drinking something light green, and a lot of it. Nice enough looking woman, but I was at this conference to advance my career as a poem-adjuster. >i want it understood that this post, linking me with the likes of Bromering >and Bowidger has significantly imperiled my opportunity for a job as chief >Disciplinarienne in the new age chemistry program at Moosehead Community >College. i believe i was on the short short list, but now i've been >relegated to the long short list and perhaps even to the long long list. >there are times, i assure you, when length is not the virtue it is assumed >to be, though Messrs B&B would not appear to know this. those antlers, for >instance ... topheavy! > >At 3:04 AM -0800 1/6/00, Rachel Loden wrote: >>> Those of us attending >>> the Moosehead Conference in the previous century, will recall that GB never >>> left the side of Rachel Loden and Maria Damon, day or night, despite the >>> blandishments of others present. >> >>Well, as they say about the sixties, if you remember Moosehead you >>weren't there. Was it the peyote or Bowering, fetching in antlers? I >>have no idea. >> >>* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * >> >>Rachel Loden >> >>http://www.thepomegranate.com/loden/hotel.html >> >>email: rloden@concentric.net >> >>* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:23:15 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: an irish joke) In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" All my life I have noticed that people who do not get certain kinds of humour get resentful or angry and try to defend themselves against some attack that has not happened. They must make strange readings indeed of Samuel Beckett. It's too bad, but most of us know of something they just dont understand. I, for instance, do not understand why or how "American Beauty" is a great movie. I thought that it was filled with stereotypes usually thought to have been recently discovered by people in their twenties. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 20:29:02 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit & no jokes aboot Canadians best Tony Green -----Original Message----- From: George Bowering To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Tuesday, 11 January 2000 12:21 Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills >> >>A question: would the moderator have allowed this through if the protagonist >>were Afro-American? A woman? Jewish? If not, why was this considered OK? >> >>Billy > >I agree. And I would add that their should be no jokes about stupid people >or men or women or kids or gods or animals. > > > > > >George Bowering. > > > >fax: 1-604-266-9000 > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:09:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: The state of the art / Guitart MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris -- Date: Tue, Jan 11, 2000 12:56 AM -0500 From: Jorge Guitart Sometime when I have time (perhaps when I finish reading all 236 books at my bedside) I would like to write a long poem that would consist of ***abstracts**** of recently published mainstream/workshop type poems alternating with abstracts of recently published innovative/radical/experimental/linguocentric poems. Summarize each poem in 25 words or less. Do ten of each. For the mainstream ones I would perhaps rely heavily on APR and the New Yorker. Would anybody be interested in doing this as a collaboration off the list? (What do you think, Ms. Airam Nomad?) Jorge ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 23:38:42 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tisa Bryant Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Yes! But it is of interest to note that there was a time during the profusion of tenements in NYC that Blacks were considered more trustworthy, ambitious, clean and reliable than their Eastern European, Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrant counterparts, and were therefore a slumlord's preferred tenants. This before the repudiation you reference below, Mara, the advent of skin privilege and the agency it afforded everyone but Blacks, in such a short period of time. A visit to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side provided this information. I recommend any one of their tours to anyone living in or visiting NYC. It is an excellent way to learn about social and political conditions of NYC before the turn of the century. Although I saw no faded signs reading "Blacks only need apply" on any threshold. ---------- >From: Maria Damon >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: knowing what a joke means >Date: Fri, Jan 7, 2000, 8:55 PM > > patrick herron wrote: > > "...Have you never heard of the time of history in America where Irish and > African Americans were treated equally, but only as equal to each other, and > together both below everyone else? "Niggers and Irishmen need not apply"?..." > > to which one might add Jews and, to a lessert extent, Italian immigrants. > however, Jewish and IrishAmericans repudiated their possible alliance w/ > African Americans in order to become "white." Irish Americans did this > especially through labor unions which specifically barred African Americans > from membership. this is not to deny British oppression of the Irish, but > to say that in the US, institutional prejudice against Irish, Jewish and > Italian etc Americans is a matter of historical record but no longer > operative, unlike insitutional prejudice against African American and other > groups. > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 21:05:45 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: NZ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit dear poetics-listers, I want it to be understood that of the 14 people in NZ on the list I am probably the least qualified to make any general statement about poetry & poetics in New Zealand. But the enquiries keep coming in & nobody here seems to answer. So I will. I live alone on the North Shore of Auckland. I no longer go across the bridge into Auckland to teach art history at the university. I have never taught about English or American literature. & I have never been anthologised. I dont get to read poems aloud anymore. (Are there readings in Auckland any more?) & I'm not writing much poetry at present. My contacts are, as ever, more with artists than poets. My main writing concern is with writing I'm doing about some rather particular readings of paintings by the French 17th century painter Poussin. This is never far removed from issues in poetics in the broad sense of the way the arts get done. Apart from that I'm taking photographs which are closely related to my poetry energies Some of these photos have appeared in www.flim.com I do have contact with one magazine in which several of the NZ contemporaries that I most respect publish regularly: ABDOTWW which is short for A Brief Description of The Whole World. This quarterly was founded by Alan Loney, who edited 12 numbers, before passing the editorship to John Geraets. I suggest that those who are enquiring about published NZ poetry begin by reading this photocopy magazine. There are other magazines. They will perhaps speak for themselves. There is _Salt_ edited by Hamish Dewe. It looks quite interesting. Address for ABDOTWW: the Writers Group, 11-20 Poynton Terrace, Auckland 1001, New Zealand. Email: geraets@internet.co.nz Currently I have more connection with poetry & poetics through this list than in New Zealand. best Tony Green ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:52:32 -0000 Reply-To: suantrai@iol.ie Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "L. MacMahon and T.R. Healy" Subject: Reading in Dublin Ireland MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The Winding Stair and Wild Honey Press are pleased to announce that Mairéad Byrne, Gabriel Gudding, Randolph Healy and Máighréad Medbh will read their poetry in The Winding Stair, 40 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1, Ireland, at 8.00 p.m. on Thursday January 13th next. ..Admission £1. Negotiation possible. Mairéad Byrne lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a lecturer at Ithaca College and a visiting fellow at Cornell University. Her poem "The Pillar" has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Seneca Review. New work is forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly and the Literary Review. She is the author of The Golden Hair (Project Arts Centre 1982), Safe Home (Project Arts Centre 1985), Joyce -- A Clew (Bluett & Company 1982), Eithne Jordan (Gandon Editions 1994), and Michael Mulcahy (Gandon Editions 1985). Her poems have been widely published and anthologised. Gabriel Gudding is a lecturer at Cornell University. His poems and essays have been published widely in the United States in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Iowa Review, etc. He lives in Ithaca, NY, with the Irish poet Mairéad Byrne and their two small companions, Marina (age 12) and Clio (age2.75) He loves his life with these 3 ladies and is researching possible ways of stunting the growth of the girls so that they can stay this cute forever. Randolph Healy runs Wild Honey Press which has published over twenty poetry chapbooks. His works include Rana Rana!, Arbor Vitae, Flame and Scales. Some of his poems will appear the forthcoming Oxford anthology British and Irish Poetry since 1900. He lives near the Dublin Wicklow border with his wife and four daughters. Some of his work can be found at the Sound Eye website: http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm Máighréad Medbh was born in Newcastle West, Co. Limerick. Following her first poetry collection, 'The Making of a Pagan' (Blackstaff Press 1990), she has worked mainly in performance poetry with many tv appearances and gigs nationwide and in Great Britain. Her poems have been published in several anthologies including 'The Virago Book of Wicked Verse'; 'Ireland's Women : Writings Past and Present'; 'I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine' (Viking); and several others. She has done support for Christy Moore and performed at the 1997 Famine Commemoration in Millstreet. In 1998, she came second in the Nora Fahy Literary Awards and won Dublin's first Poetry Slam, to gain the title 'Bard of Temple Bar'. 'Tenant', which was published this year by Salmon, is a historical narrative sequence based during the famine years, 1845-49. Máighréad's website is at: http://expo.nua.ie/wordsmith/MaighreadMedbh/index.html Visit the Sound Eye website at: http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm or find more Irish writing at: http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr7/contents.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 06:36:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: general usage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit randy, thanks for your thoughtful comments which i'll respond to at greater length when i have an opportunity. let me just say for now that the worst aspect of so-called exp or oppostional poetry at the present moment is *our* pervasive careerism. in some ways reading an exp poem has become as easy as reading anything in the new yorker & as straight-jacketed by aesthetic conventions. whatever else it is, the apg is also an expedient for attracting attention--that is, for advancing the careers of the poets associated with it. there are other ways of doing that of course--start up a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc., etc., & publish people who you think will be helpful to you, or write glowing reviews of books you are only lukewarm about, or . . . I could go on & on. & I don't pretend to stand above this trend at all--like everyone else i swim in the same swill. of course i'm not alone in thinking this--not by any means-- but the next move too often seems to me to be a conservative one--a return to a more "natural" poetry, etc.,--& i'm wondering instead how an oppositional poetic can take new forms? --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:43:52 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: Prunty and general usage In-Reply-To: <221575.3156522836@321maceng.fal.buffalo.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" "One use I have not often seen the list put to by its subscribers, and to which it may lend itself quite well, is as a forum for comprehensive remarks on specific books or poems - or, as Komninos Zervos has just pointed out, remarks on web-based writing and art." Chris 1. i would like to invite people on this list to check out some sites and let the list know what they think of them. the first one is a site run by luigi bob drake and is a site for web poets/cyberpoets/net poets, to post new works and get comments from other poets. it is a sort of experimental site for poetry, but not necessarily experimental poetry. http://www.burningpress.org/wreyeting/index.html 2. another great introduction to the kinds of things that poets are doing on the world wide web, is this french site, but you will need the flash plugin(easy download from the site) http://www.aix-art-contemporain.org/cine_video/imageswebart/anims_f/anims.html 3. and for an individual site, well a site created by two people, reiner strasser and christy sheffield sanford, an individual piece of cyberpoetry called 'water'. http://workxspace.de/div/water_p.html let me briefly review this poem. these days texts are made up of many elements, sound, images, words, and interactive devices which allow flexible navigation. virtualization of the text has produced new actualizations in cyberspace, poetry which operates in spaces rather than surfaces. 'water' is an example of post-hypertext poetry on the web. what we associate now with the term hypertext is that kind espoused by landow, eastgate software, and others. hypertext which is largely text-based and actualizes post-structuralist and postmodern literary theory, and so its potential is fully realized, as such. 'water' is a text which stimultes all of the senses. 'water' works the field of nostalgia, past associations, evolutionary associations, images and sound drawing you into its being, its unfolding, its realization, seemingly from nowhere(you cant see the next bit on the next page, or even know there is a next bit). the piano is a nostalgic device, slow, calming, the initial image is blurred and misty and fills the screen, a harbour, but this is not a static image and i am not a static observer. as i move my mouse, over the image from top to bottom, the image gets sliced into five or six bands, certain bands either getting foggier or becoming more sharply in focus, each band throwing up a dialogue box of text, a few words, a sentence, and each movement over a band causing some change in the other bands of images, sometimes switching to a band from another misty image, a river marina, a river or lake in flood. clicking on the bands takes you to other scenes with similar fragmentation of image into interactive bands which deliver text, sound and image. one navigates till there is a sense of i've seen it all, till nothing new seemed to happen. the journey through this poem gave me the feeling of floating, immersed, involved, self-reflective. i didn't even check the source code. would like comments regards komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:41:49 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: APG field notes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (Report from Hank Lazer) Field Work: APG, January 5, 2000 With some trepidation, I drove slightly over 200 miles eastward = to spend an evening reading and conversing with the APG. I = met two senior members of the APG at a holding facility (Caf=E9 = Diem) about an hour before the official meeting. While in the = holding facility, we began an energetic discussion of poetry and = poetics, and we began to pass around recent books and = magazines. Then, we adjourned to the primary meeting, in an = apartment (well-stocked with books, records, CDs, and cats) = on a street aptly named High-land. Seven members of the APG = were in attendance, and the evening began with informal = conversation and a meal of (excellent) vegetarian pizza and beer = (the brand names in no way revealing a particularly imitative = allegiance to Buffalo or San Francisco). The lighting in the = meeting room was a bit dark, and I could not determine if that = had been a natural effect or the result of the much mentioned = shadow cast over the group by langpo. Both food and = conversation seemed quite genuine, and I must note that my = initial observations did not reveal an over abundance of = excessively derivative or imitative behavior. Then we moved into the readings portion of the evening. John = Lowther began with several new poems, some working with = materials about Marcel Duchamp. He also passed around a = framed found-object and a mounted poem-object. His readings = were energetic and engaging; the methods for the Duchamp = poems quite interesting. In response to his Duchamp poems, I = read the first poem from my Negation series (which includes a = spine-text from Hegel=92s Phenomenology of Mind). I suppose = that there was some element of call-and-response in reading my = poem back to John. My memory grows a bit hazy on the exact = order of reading, but the readers included Randy Prunty (poems = working out of his recent readings of Oppen), Brian (I=92m = blanking on his last name=97a poem which seemed somewhat = Creeley-ish in its use of short lines and odd line breaks; the = poem sparked an extended discussion of Creeley=92s work, and = also of =93zen=94-elements in the poem), Dana (again, blank on last = name; short O=92Hara-ish poems, some with found elements, = stemming from recent family/home visit in NYC), Tedd (several = poems, one in particular with a rather interesting spatial = arrangement on the page, as if two columns of poems engaged = one another in a kind of implied dialog), James Sanders (read an = absolutely hilarious selection from his booklet Haikus to Chuck = Woolery, titles include Despair Bunny; Some Kind of Keanu = Reeves; Sitting Next to You, Shining; A Mind Hiding an = Acoustic Panel; Bureaucracies of Joy; and Cary Grant Meets = the Incredible Hulk); and Mark Presjnar played tapes of his = multi-voiced compositions (the beginning, I think, of an exciting = new direction for Mark=92s work). After a run to restock the = beer, I read from a new series of poems. It seems like I read = for about thirty minutes, but my sense of time had begun to fade, = as I had worked a half day that morning at my desk job, and I = was beginning to fall under the spell of the local community. My = poems included words like =93god,=94 =93soul,=94 and the hebrew word = =93teshuvah=94 (meaning =93a turning=94). These were designed, of = course, to call out (by means of aversion) the spirits of derivative avant-gardism and imitative fragmentariness among the practitioners of the APG. There were, however, no screams, and no one, to the best of my recollection, collapsed in an Oz- witch-like pool of goo. In fact, what followed was a rather stimulating discussion of modes of lyricism, with lots of reference to John Taggart=92s work (I am quite enthralled with hi= s new book, When the Saints) and Robert Duncan, as well as to a discussion of some foundational contradictions and tensions within the current (many different) practices of =93new=94 poetries. Except for the occasional lighting of incense and praying in the = direction of the axes of Buffalo/New York and San Francisco / = The West Coast, and except for the lighted shrines in memory of = the first generation of langpoets, I noticed nothing that would = suggest that this version of the local and that this version of the = group was in some way inauthentic and utterly unoriginal. In = fact, I was impressed by the variety of writing that had been = presented. And the group dynamics=97mutual respect and = consideration=97struck me as quite admirable. Indeed, the = members of the group admit quite openly that they are each at = quite different stages of acquaintance/knowledge/development in = their reading and writing. Their professions are quite = varied=97from librarians, to lawyers, to some part-time returning = students, to managers, to caregivers (for an elderly couple). = And, as someone who grew up in San Jose but who has now = lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for twenty-three years, I = wondered how well others living in more vibrant, =93cooler=94 cities = could understand the particularities of living in Atlanta, or = Tuscaloosa, and how and why and in what ways people might = come together to read and write and eat and converse. I returned early the next morning to Tuscaloosa (to resume a = fairly busy desk job), and found myself on and off over the next = few days thinking quite pleasantly about a thoroughly enjoyable = evening with the APG. With this brief summary, I send to the = Poetics List an account of my sojourn among the APG. = I am also reading and reflecting upon a rather marvelous book = by Ed Foster, Answerable to None, which itself raises, in a fine = Emersonian way, serious questions about community and = individuality. Ed, for example, in writing about Bronk and = Thoreau, suggests, by way of Thoreau, that man thinking and working alone is by no means = merely solipsistic or self-deluding; there are =93common = interests=94 from which we all proceed. Thoreau=92s ideal = was the self-sufficient man, he who welcomes solitude = and silence, not institutions and laws, as the origin of = truth. Friendship in turn is not a matter of getting along = with others, a purely social function; friendship arises = from a mutual ability =93to nourish and care for the spirit.=94 = Thoreau in short provides the example of the man who = does not exile himself from society and is no = misanthrope yet understands that truth is not a social or = communal matter; you don=92t reach truth by way of a = committee. If there is an ideal community, it is a group = of people thinking and working alone=97the antithesis of = what community has generally been assumed to be. I suppose that I personally am drawn to both notions of = community, writing as I do in some kind of alone-situation in = Tuscaloosa (and in correspondence with others working = similarly, such as John Taggart, Jake Berry, and Ted Enslin), but = also being quite drawn to instances of a more tangible, local = community of writers, as I experienced in visiting the APG. I = find it well worthwhile to think through these complexities of = affiliation and mutuality, of how to proceed socially in this activity of reading and writing. Hank Lazer January 8, 2000 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 23:02:19 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: HeatherHNA@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Prunty and general usage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I've only been on the list for a short time, and looked into it because I am now gaining an interest in seeing what else is out there. I, for one, (or to add another) would be greatly interested in hearing what those on the list have to say about this or that piece. It's fact enough when a novice to the poetic community enters, there is a throng of information attacking them before they can even adjust their sight. For me, it would prove very beneficial to have a few ideas and thoughts thrown out there by other's reviews to aid in what I decide to pick up next. Just contributing my enthusiasm for the idea. Thanks Randy, for bringing it up and Chris for pointing it out again. Heather Allen ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 23:37:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Wheeler Subject: Sons of Captain Poetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Do any of you know if there is a VHS copy of Michael Ondaatje's 1970 film on bpNichol in circulation out there? Any information received with gratitude! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:17:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: winter / Allegrezza MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "alegr5" To: Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 10:08:16 -0600 the winter issue of Moria is online at http://www.moriapoetry.com. poems by: a. di michele john bennet jennifer bonafiglio martin downs les wicks articles: dima cioran on derrida alex blazer on barrett watten=20 past issues include poems by: shelia murphy, peter ganick, ivan arguelles, tim gaze, irene duyen. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 07:03:46 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Organization: Sun Moon Books Subject: Re: contact info request MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit She can currently be contacted at Bard College. Douglas Messerli Brian Lennon wrote: > > Anyone have email, phone, or surface mail for Joan Retallack? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:19:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: jokes, racism, the ire-ish / Magee MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Date: Tue, Jan 11, 2000 10:30 AM -0500 From: Michael Magee Hi all, I've caught this thread sporadically so I don't want to make a specific argument regarding who said what to whom, who's on the ball regarding when a joke is funny, etc. But I strongly sympathize w/ Brian Stefans insistence on the labyrinthine complexity of race-matters in U.S. space (as in other multiethnic spaces I would think). I've been thinking alot about this question of "Irish negritude" as we might call it. Michael Gizzi has a joke in one of his new poems which will be in the next COMBO: "Is it any wonder," he muses, "that ivory hunters are music lovers or that black Irish are often black." Likewise, I saw a bumper sticker once - less complex to be sure - that read: "I'm black Irish: Top o' the mornin' to yo' ass." The "black Irish" joke is quite real, having to do, as has already been mentioned with a very long history of British figuring of the Irish as a "dusky race" etc. But it's more than this: Cromwell sold Irish people into slavery in the West Indies, something WC Williams brings up in PATERSON: "Cromwell, in the middle of the seventeenth century, shipped some thousands of Irish women and children to the Barbadoes to be sold as slaves. Forced by the owners to mate with the others these unfortunates were succeeded by a few generations of Irish-speaking negroes and mulattos. And it is commonly asserted to this day the natives of Barbadoes speak with an Irish brogue." I happen to have a friend who's a scholar in this area (luck o' the Irish?) and have included below her response to a query of mine regarding what Williams says here. Suffice to say, it's true. One classic tactic of the powerful is to pit the marginalized against each other by inventing the myth of upward mobility ("our people have the nicest apartments in the projects!") and then let 'em duke it out on the margin. When I read about the NYC conscription riots of the 1860's, or the Boston busing riots of the 1970's, in which racism *by* the Irish and violence *by* the Irish against African-Americans was so vicious, I get nauseated. The irony and sadness and absurdity of it is too much. I have a grandmother, June Rooney, whose eccentricity we've always "explained" within the family by calling her "shanty Irish" - is that a common term? I don't even know; but it stands in in lieu of a complex description of how a history of poverty makes you nuts, even if benignly so. How this fits in with what I've said above I'm not completely sure, but anyway, perhaps something here is food for thought. I've read some of the articles & books listed below and they're quite illuminating. -Mike "Magee" ("son of fire," I'm told) According to Jean Feerick: > > Hi Mike, > So nice to hear from you and what an interesting issue you raise -- > as for the issue Williams raises, yes, it is true. I have an > article before me which provides a plethora of sources and citations > that you could look into -- the author, who has written a lot on the > Irish in the West Indies, is Hilary McD. Beckles, "A 'Riotous and Unruly > Lot': Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, > 1644-1713" in _William and Mary Quarterly_, Vol. XLVII, No. 4 (1990): > 503-22. The bibliography he provides is extensive. It seems that they > were shipped to Barbados, more than any other West Indies destination, > first through merchant trade, to secure jobs as indentured servants, due > to grave unemployment at home (they seemed more willing to do so than > their English, Scottish, and Welsh counterparts, who were also sought > out as indentured servants to help with labor crises on the emergent > plantations). Then under the Cromwellian regime, Beckles indicates, > Barbados came to be the "favorite West Indian dumping ground for > political prisoners during the Commonwealth"; Cromwell went further as > to define hundreds of Irish as "social undesirables" who should be > transported to the West Indies to deal with labor shortages. Any Irish > "vagabonds" were thereby picked up and sent shipping. > > A few promising sources he mentions are: > > Jill Shephard, _The 'Redlegs' of Barbados: Their Origins and History_ > (1977) > > Hilary Beckles, _White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados_, > 1627-1715. > > Many more appear in the article. > > Good luck with this project -- of course, it goes without saying that > I'd love to see it when and if it comes to completion. > > I'm plodding along with the diss, interrupted by teaching and an > ever-growing family (I'm expecting #2 early in the New Year). I'm > determined to finish and move on, but have reconciled myself to a slower > pace to accommodate the competing demands on my time. > > Take care and keep in touch - do let me know how the job at Wheaton came > about, as I'm expecting to cobble together similar short term > arrangements when and if the time ever comes. > > Best, Jean > Michael Magee wrote: > > > > Hi Jean, > > > > This probably seems like a message really out of the blue but I have a > > question which I think maybe only you can answer since it involves Irish > > miscegenation. In William Carlos Williams big groundbreaking book > > PATERSON, there's a short prose section describing a group of people in > > colonial New Jersey called "Jackson's Whites." They had isolated > > themselves in the Northern lakes area, and were a crazy mutliethnic tribe > > composed of poor proto-urban NYers, fugitive slaves, Hessian deserters > > from the British army, and (here's where your knowledge might come in to > > play) Irish-Barbadians. As a result of this last contingent the area > > became known as "New Barbadoes Neck." Here's how Williams explains the > > this last group: "Cromwell, in the middle of the seventeenth century, > > shipped some thousands of Irish women and children to the Barbadoes to be > > sold as slaves. Forced by the owners to mate with the others these > > unfortunates were succeeded by a few generations of Irish-speaking negroes > > and mulattos. And it is commonly asserted to this day the natives of > > Barbadoes speak with an Irish brogue." > > > > So, I'm wondering, is this true? If only partially true, which parts or > > right and which wrong? Williams got his info from Seamus McCall's > > THOMAS MOORE (London, 1935). Are there good histories of this phenomenon > > out there? (providing its accurate) Any help you could give me would be > > much appreciated. I'm thinking of doing some writing on Irish/Af Am > > tensions around Civil War conscription and thought this might make an > > interesting introduction. > > > > Hope you're well. I've recently (mercifully!) finished my diss and am > > teaching as a visiting asst prof at Wheaton College in Norton, MA - a nice > > little lib arts college and a lucky gig for me to have gotten. Thanks for > > your help! > > > > -Mike. > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 09:55:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Buuck Subject: TRIPWIRE update Comments: cc: histcongrads@hum.ucsc.edu Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII tripwire: a journal of poetics edited by Yedda Morrison & David Buuck call for submissions---- Tripwire 4: WORK Material v. intellectual labor. Class, production, productivity, economy. Practice, handiwork, wordwork, work ethic, workplace, co-worker. What is significance of one's work to one's writing? Of one's writing as work? Labor, capital, use value, industry. How does one participate in and against local and global economoies/cultures? Work force, workbook, workshop. In a small-press economy, what are the standards for "just compensation," for exploitation? Knowledge industries. Cultural workers. "Model post-industrial employees?" Exploitation, task, effort. Mission, service, vocation, career(ism). End-product, by-product, opus, oeuvre. Tripwire invites submissions of essays, translations, interviews, art & book reviews, bulletins, letters responding to previous issues, and visual art. Visual art submissions should be reproducible in B&W; artists are encouraged to include a statement about their work. At this time we are not accepting unsolicited poetry for publication. All submissions should include a hard copy. Deadline for submissions to Tripwire 4 is April 1, 2000. Copies of Tripwire 3 (Gender) still available, featuring Diane Ward, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Norma Cole, Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian, Kevin Killian, Elizabeth Robinson, Rob Halpern, Claude Cahun, Brian Lennon, Linda Russo, Elizabeth Treadwell, and many others, for $8 ($15 for two issue subscription). Tripwire is also available through Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA, and in many local bookstores in the Bay Area. TRIPWIRE c/o Morrison & Buuck PO Box 420936 SF CA 94142-0936 Inquiries: yedd@aol.com ----- Sent using MailStart.com ( http://MailStart.Com/welcome.html ) The FREE way to access your mailbox via any web browser, anywhere! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 15:41:08 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: RaeA100900@AOL.COM Subject: Millennial reading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It's a bit late, I guess, but here's my short list of books, what I've been dipping into in the last few weeks: Bob Perelman's new selected poems, Ten To One (it's great to have so many of his old and new poems under one cover and to be able to follow the development of his style or sensibility or whatever) The Darkness of God by Denys Turner (a serious overview of epistemology in Catholic mysticism.) The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders (abt consciousness, information sciece and thermodynamics. Provocative though just slightly dated.) Pierre by Melville (a very strange book, I think.) So do I get the last word on this subject? Rae Armantrout ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 16:50:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Peggy and Fred in Hell - Whitney Musem - MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII (I'm forwarding this because I love Leslie Thornton's work and urge you to see it if you have the chance - it's a relatively rare opportunity. The films touch directly on issues of virtuality, language, subjectivity, and body, and play into issues of poetics and philosophy as well. Alan) Announcing: PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL a film and video serial by LESLIE THORNTON January 20, 2000, 6:00pm at the Whitney Museum in the program The Cool World: Film and Video in America 1950-2000 [Part 2 of The Art of the Century] "Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell is one of the most astonishing and complex achievements in avant-garde cinema in the last twenty years." - Patrick Friel of Chicago Filmmakers Peggy and Fred in Hell is a feature-length serial of film and video episodes drawn broadly around the adventures of two small children living in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The children flit in and out of the picture, as the noisy remains of our familiar world spin out of control. Hilarious and disturbing, Peggy and Fred unsettles the categories of film and video art: it is a continuous work in progress, a proto-narrative of enduring suspense-a document of the vivid domain of childhood contaminated by the ghost of constant television. This eclectic serial comes on like The Perils of Pauline meeting Eraserhead via Godard. The screening/instal- lation at theWhitney includes all nine episodes, with film and video running simultaneously. For over twenty years Leslie Thornton has helped keep the horizons of avant-garde media open and relevant. Her sustained interrogation of narrative, beauty, and culture is a refreshing departure from the cynical tendencies of post-modernist art-making. Bill Krohn writes in Cahiers du Cinema, that "[Thornton's] place in cinema history has already been assured for the sole reason that she is the author of Peggy and Fred in Hell. Forever unfinished, [her] magnum opus resembles nothing else known. . . No matter how she chooses to complete Peggy and Fred -if she ever does-the film will live eternally as a psychic landscape of the 90's, unraveling into a never-ending poem or nightmare." Leslie Thornton is a Recipient of the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the first Alpert Award in Media, two Rockefeller Fellowships, and numerous other grants and awards. She lives in Brooklyn and Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches filmmaking at Brown University. The Whitney screening presents two new episodes: Chimp for Normal Short, which premiered at the 1999 New York Film Festival, and the American premiere of Bedtime. The program includes the complete series: -Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, 16mm, b/w, , 21min.,1984 -Peggy and Fred in Kansas, video, b/w, 11 min., 1987 -Peggy and Fred and Pete, video, sepia, 23 min., 1988 -{Dung Smoke Enters the Palace}, b/w, 16mm & video, 16 min.,1989 -Introduction to the So-called Duck Factory, video, b/w, 7 min., 1990 -Whirling, video, color, 2 min., 1996 -The Problem So Far, 16mm film and video, b/w, 7 min., 1996 -Chimp for Normal Short, 16mm, sepia, 6 min., 1999 -Bedtime, video, b/w, 2 min., 2000 Leslie Thornton has five other works showing in different group programs in The Cool World: Film and Video in America 1950-2000. These include Adynata (1983, 16mm), ...or lost (1997, 16mm), Strange Space (1993, video), and The Last Time I Saw Ron (1994, video). Another Worldy (1999, 16mm film/video) For information on these screenings, please contact the Whitney Museum Film/Video Department at 212-570-3617. For more information on Leslie Thornton please contact: Karen Cinorre or Thomas Zummer at 718-643-2897 e-mail: n_rayyy@yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 18:10:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: verbal herpes:simplex syntaX MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit verbal herpes:simplex syntaX never really thought of poetry as insidious insidious poetry and innocuous or of iniquity of discretion personal discretion or taste a naïve a naïve notion of poeletics value or what is of value is an interrogative? is an exclamation! is determinable. n/ever a critic suppose to say i suppose a supposition to say a supposition is something a tangible naïve to say i iam one with god is just something I say agenda if i were to say woman agenda or if to have a particular someone in mind maybe just an ass or to say a person is that correctness or in-accurateness? and seems to me if to dwell on things to not write to assume a. seems also reflective or of short sighted-ness nessty as a jew is that something that is something human not a thing really or a poetic is an id as a jew to say iam a nazi requires a context and a responsible (ity) reader a nazi-reader-nazi an experience is an offer is a poetry as if change was something we do now and again (change) instead of something that we are embodied in poetic herpes (which are tangible?) -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 21:01:13 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: New From Avec Books MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit New From Avec Books: Walserian Waltzes by Gad Hollander The "Walserian" in the title refers to the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who Kafka named as one of his greatest influences. Perhaps the politest writer of the early 20th century, Walser was also a diagnosed schizophrenic, and Hollander's use of his tragic biography is subtle, moving, and brilliant. o GAD HOLLANDER'S Walserian Waltzes is a sequence of meditations on madness, writing, death, and identity. Focusing on a character split between the first-person singular pronoun and his own name-a character who may or may not be dead and may or may not be insane, a character whose goal is to become "a self-made failure"-Hollander skillfully leads us to contemplate the paradoxical trajectories of language, the subjective and objective worlds it seems to create and destroy. Anyone looking for prose that combines the compressed and elusive qualities of poetry with the abstract resonance of philosophy will find Walserian Waltzes a richly satisfying experience. -Stephen-Paul Martin, author of THE GOTHIC TWILIGHT and FEAR & PHILOSOPHY GAD HOLLANDER has the mind of a philosopher, the heart of an artist, the language of a poet-and the literary soul of a modern-day Kafka. Walserian Waltzes takes us on an unforgettable tour through the devastated landscape of a ruined mind. The access to Perception is through a revolving door. -FIRST INTENSITY MAGAZINE List Price: $11 . 92 pages. ISBN:1880713-21-7. Please visit Avec's website: www.instress.com/avec for additional information, or to read an excerpt from the book. NOTE: Walserian Waltzes is currently a featured title at SPD (under fiction). Mention the code WEB while ordering and receive a 20% discount. ___________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:02:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Knoebel Subject: oh ver 3.14 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The current version of this new year's poem at http://home.ptd.net/~clkpoet/ohanf/oh.html works with a Java capable browser. A sound card is optional. -- David Knoebel http://www.clickpoetry.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:59:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: parable MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Parable Why dogs don't have horns. In bygone days, male dogs had horns centered in their high and bony foreheads. The horns were symbols of their prowess, and many a villager was kept awake at night by ferocious fighting - the horns clattering against each other. One day Nikuko was wending her way from the hotsprings in Oita - an enlightened being, she allowed her mind to drift. Suddenly, a ferret crossed the road in front of her. In a split second, Nikuko and the ferret changed places, Nikuko now running low upon the ground, working the roads as cross-walks, heading in and out of the deep forests surrounding her. Sure enough, a dog approached, its horn hard against the sky. Nikuko was sweating and naked, her skin scratched by brambles, her breath hot and heavy from running. The dog lowered its head, Nikuko exchanged places with the horn. The horn fell useless to the ground and disappeared forever; Nikuko, astride the dog, changed places with a bee, a bird, a plant, a butterfly, and a ferret, in just that very order. Now cooled by the shadows of dusk among the bamboo, she continued on her way. A monk passed by, laughing, and asked, Nikuko, after all this play, are you any the wiser? Nikuko replied, not in the slightest, Izanagi, not the least little bit. _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 08:24:15 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marla Jernigan Subject: of Sithiwong and Mangoes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Poetics List, I thought Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong's poem beautiful, dark but beautiful. I don't know _Les Chants de Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's got to be in English too. "L'Arbre without any trees/ Sixteen died that week no food to eat (the rats were cracking cottonseed)" This really gives me chills. But then the mangoes... I've always thought of mangoes as the sexiest fruit. A perfect peach is quite nice but even bruised mango seems to suggest more. And so the conflict comes as I find myself swirling in associations, associations building off of "And lay thinking in the baths made for Pauline, of her song..." associations in my imagination of haiti as hot and bright, thoughts of sweat and mangoes, rich colors... and then death. And I don't like death with my sex or violence with my sex and so this gets under my skin and I guess that's something of why it's a powerful poem? Sincerely, Marla __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 08:45:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher Reiner Subject: Prose Chapbooks Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit MARGIN TO MARGIN is a new series of chapbooks publishing innovative prose. The first two are now available: GAPS IN THE SYSTEM By Stephen-Paul Martin and NOTES FOR THE IMAGINATION By Noah de Lissovoy They're $5 each. Checks payable to Christopher Reiner, PO Box 40012, Studio City, CA 91614. Excerpts can be found on the web site: http://www.litpress.com/margin (MARGIN TO MARGIN is seeking manuscript submissions for this series -- but *please* check the web site for guidelines before submitting.) --Chris Reiner ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 08:55:55 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marla Jernigan Subject: Am I regional or local? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Poetics List, I'm not sure what I have to offer to the thread about the local. I'd never thought about my poet self as a local poet self or a regional poet self. I've heard people called "regional writers" before and that seemed to mean that they wrote about the region. And when I've heard of someone as a "local poet" I just assumed it meant they were nearby. Maybe an ism-word is called for? A regional-ism? A local-ism? But ism-ending words make people (maybe I should say me) uncomfortable, they suggest exclusion somehow even if when I think about it more there is no reason that would have to. And then I think about my own poems and though they are always an outgrowth of my life, my desires, the things around me that repeat and start to become luminous somehow, I cannot help but to agree they are, like I am, set down here in the South. My job takes me into South Carolina and all around Georgia and sometimes, rarely, to Florida and Tennessee. And I wonder if by being parts of my life, as it moves through this region, whether they might not also be "regional" or "regionalist" in some way. With the idea of localism I keep thinking about audience. I think this is because until I bumped into the Atlanta poets I didn't think of there being an audience for my poems. I have two friends who are poets, Gina and Joseph, but they've been friends for years and so I never thought of them as an audience any more than I thought of myself that way. But now that there are other poets in Atlanta who know me a little and who I know a little also it does feel like I have an audience, a very small one, for whom I seldom appear, but still an audience. That has made think more about poetry. And my interactions with this list wouldn't be, if I hadn't heard about it from them. And come to think of it, two of my favorite books I wouldn't know about it if weren't for these other locals making a loan and a suggestion. There have also been interesting contacts from this list too, but I don't know if it feels right to call these fine folks "local" (hi). I don't feel like I have done much to help the thread along. But maybe my position as someone, settled in a region and aware of a local, if still floating along by myself, might mean something to someone. Sincerely, Marla __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:18:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: 3rd On-Line Poetry Workshop with Hoa Nguyen Comments: To: writenet@twc.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hear ye hear ye hear ye!!! Legendary Austin, TX poet Hoa Nguyen is getting ready to run her third on-line workshop on WriteNet. This is a wonderful opportunity for your students and/or children (grades 9 - 12 only, please) to have a weekly resource/community to discuss their own writing. Hoa provides students with bi-weekly poetry writing assignments, and then analyzes and critiques their responses to her exercises. To view the previous two workshops, go to www.writenet.org and hit the "Virtual Poetry Workshop" link. If your students are interested in participating, please tell them to send 2 - 4 poems to Hoa via e-mail at nguyenhoa@hotmail.com NO LATER THAN THE 27TH OF JANUARY. Hoa will read the poems, choose 9 students to work with, and run an eight-week long workshop. Regular and committed participation on the part of your students is absolutely required. It's a great thing, it's free (funding thanks to National Endowment for the Arts) and young poets should shriek with delight and jump at this opportunity. best, --daniel ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:07:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Weishaus Subject: Re: The Local MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- Original Message ----- From: charles alexander To: Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 4:26 PM Subject: Re: The Local > I'm reluctant to drastically re-define the local, thinking it might be > better to come up with another description for those intensities which are > not characterized by a proximity of spacial relations. Space does count for > something, doesn't it? I do believe those other intensities exist, but I > think that even though most of my closest literary relationships are quite > distantly extended, the most intense ones have benefited greatly by times > when those involved have been in the same locality, even if only for a few > days. And that periodic renewal of such direct ties by collapsing the far > spaces during various visits have been crucial to the relationships. My > take on this, with the last twenty-two years having been spent in Madison, > Minneapolis, or Tucson -- all places where such relationships, for me, were > primarily long-distance and constantly changing ones, is certainly > different than those who have maintained presence in communities where > their main relationships have been local and constant. Yes, "collapsing the far spaces" periodically seems almost essential, especially for those of us raised in "literary centers" like New York City and/or San Francisco, but have left for less congenial places. Automobiles, trains, airplanes, already seem primitive modes of transportation to me, time-consuming, expensive, and polluting. And the web, at this point, like the first telephones, engenders a "phony" communal ring. The rupture of centers does, however, encourage the publication of serious work from sundry places. I can remember when if you didn't live in New York you weren't taken seriously by publishers. It was a few farsighted editors, like Don Allen and James Laughlin, who began to change this. This aside, an aspect to electronic communication that I haven't seen discussed is that one is, or could be, ageless on the web. Thus, although the web can't collapse "the far spaces" in a fleshly manner, it can collapse the space between generations. This brings up a whole new set of social, and institutional, values. -Joel Joel Weishaus Writer-In-Residence The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM ARCHIVE: www.unm.edu/~reality "Inside the Skull-House": [up-to-date draft] www.unm.edu/~reality/Skull/intro.htm "Inside the Skull-House": [at Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts] http://caiia-star.newport.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/skullhouse/Skull/index.htm l ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 12:58:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: (?) Xonnets for the Buffalist MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } 1. hello. it's me again. i know. i know what i said, and yes i called my last posting "Last Words" meaning it to be my last words to this list for the time being. call it a failed new year's resolution. you see i concocted that prong of my multipart new years res some months ago. i even posted about it. back then. you can check the archive if you want. but don't bother. it doesn't matter. it seems that many people have assumed that i decided to ditch the list b/c of jacques' recent comments about the a.p.g. it's an understandable assumption. but. 2. it's not the case. jacques may actually be why i've decided to rejoin the list so quickly. that and i started reading the archives of other lists and didnt see a hell of a lot that made me want to sign up anywhere else. i'm not slagging any other lists by saying that, just noting that i didn't see much to get ~me~ going. and then i've been touched. warmed. (in the "cockles" of my heart) (what the hell are cockles? did i spell it right? it's something my dad used to say) (anyway) a number of people wrote me saying they were sorry i was sighing off. signing off. you know what i'm 3. going for there. anyway, i was surprised by that. & a few folks had things to say that made me think: hey! i like that, that thinking, i'd listen to more of that, etc... so here i am. back where i was. wondering what's to talk about. i thought it was funny that david bromige, in quoting a bit out of my last words post called it a "poem." maybe it was. does putting something into tercets make it a poem ? i've never been sure about that but thanx david. there are lots of things that i have never been sure about. i'm sure you feel the same way. but, feel free to contradict. i think it was judith roitman, who, before i peeled out of here some days ago 4. asked "what is language poetry" and some folks did respond i think altho i didnt see all the posts that went by, a few were mentioned to me. bob archambeau (did i spell that correctly, sorry if not) referred people to an essay by n.tarn and said something about "disjunctivitis." i read the essay a long time ago and didn't really get much going with it then. perhaps i should read it again. i don't think i will. but maybe i will. anyway, if i'm recalling this correctly, ron silliman responded to the disjunctivitis thing and wasn't very impressed by it as a characterization. who wd be ? bob archambeau ? it seems to me at least that there are some grave difficulties in using "langpo" 5. in a sentence. on the one foot, there is good reason to delimit "langpo" (broken out into "language poets") to a finite number of people and a certain period in recent memory. but it seems that the tide of usage is turning the other way. since signing off this list a few days ago i have occupied myself with a bunch of house related chores. in particular there is a plant, or actually a number of different plants. an "invader species". theyve taken up residence in the front corner of my yard. the neighbor on that side isnt pleased as they send out runners and sprout all over. somebody told me that if you let one go for a couple of years you'll never get rid of it. i tried 6. digging it up. it seems that it sprouted first in two maybe three spots. and they're widely spaced. but theyre also connected. which is pretty cool in some ways. that is, as i crawled across the lawn chopping at the ground a bit to loosen the dirt and then pulling up another foot or two of root, i started to have a good deal of respect for this invader species. i think it may be called privet. i don't know for sure. it doesnt matter to me. anyway, one root stretched a good 20 feet & shot off smaller roots that also had to be chased down and pulled up. it was 7. a monsterous undertaking and if i am to succeed in getting all of these plants out of my yard it will take a lot more than the 4 or so hours i've spent doing it. i'm guessing 20+ hours will be needed to pull up the three main sites and chase all the roots and get the little spots too. this plant is pretty adaptable it seems. if it comes up in good light or even bad light it makes a healthy sized bush in no time. if it comes up under a tree or screen of bushes (as has happen once in my yard) it climbs up whatever is in the way of the sunlight and overwhelms it. 8. so far i've only pulled up one of these sites and it was a major battle. me standing in the rain. using two shovels for added leverage. hacking and chopping until finally it came up out of the ground. then it wasnt an "it" exactly but two different plants so closely twined that it was difficult to tell they were two. i was curious about them and wanted to see what the roots looked like so i rinsed them off pretty best as i cd and marveled at the number of roots radiating from each hub in this one site that was actually two. it also 9. seemed that there were 3 or maybe even 4 types of roots. the big runner ones that i'd chased into the neighbor's yard. the smaller ones that went out a foot or two and then popped up with a new above-ground plant. the very small and still strong web-like roots that went everywhere around the thing. and then the downward roots that escaped me by heading straight down into hard clay and finally breaking off after much pulling. it seems that most of the people that use the term "langpo" these 10. days are designating something like style of writing, or a subgenre. and treating it, it's parameters or characteristics, something like one of the justices i believe it was treated porn. "i don't know what it is but i know it when i see it." (thanks mark for that comparison.) and while i can't quite give up my misgivings and "go with it" completely. i know that i also can't do anything about it. david antin wrote to one of the editors of _boundary 2_ who was trying to throw a lot of heidegger at him something to the effect of "just 11. because, by a trick of the language, we can nominalize 'be' does it mean there is anything to correspond to the term 'being'?" (that's not a quote but my best remembrance) bouncing off that i think i'm saying that it might be time to state that 'the language poets' don't write 'language poetry' that they just write poetry. period. but as i said, that isn't the way the tide seems to be turning. i also like the idea that perhaps "language poetry" is being written, but not by the "language poets." that is, "language poetry" can only be written by someone who thinks that 12. it is "a" thing, semi-unified and describ- able, that one can study and replicate. i remember reading an interview with branford marsalis someplace and the interviewer said something to him about wayne shorter and branford talked a bit about him but also said that b/c he had talked about shorter so much that weird things happened. his example was playing a gig someplace and after the encore someone came up and knowingly said of the last solo he'd played "i can really hear the influence of wayne in that" marsalis notes that the solo in question 13. was a note for note sonny rollins solo that he'd learnt and transcribed himself. would that put branford in a most un- original position vis sonny rollins ? (what about wayne shorter ?) maybe this is a bad example as in poetry we don't see much note for note copying. maybe we should see more. i'll have to think about that. but what about if it was something procedural, say using a method like mac low's diastic ? (which is available on the web in fully automated form --- just add text) is jackson mac low a language poet ? ignore that question. 14. wd using his method be like playing his solo ? wd it out you in a most unoriginal position vis mac low ? a few years ago i wrote to mac low and i was all excited about procedures and methods and shit like that and i still like them but anyway, i'd enthused about using some method of his to write something and his response surprised me he said something about how someone using his methods was writing his poems. i thought that was really weird. i still think so. he illustrated it with a ref. to john cage who apparently said something once to jackson about how it was nice that they did things differently 15. as that way they didnt "step on each other's heels." well, out of respect for his wishes i stopped using any of the methods that he talked about in _representative works_ (altho i have used the web based diastic for various amusements, i always edit after, and rarely does it lead towards a poem, mostly i just use it to break up emails from friends or most recently a marketing strategy that someone i know had to write) but i've never really been able to agree that in using his method one was writing his poem. that doesnt quite work in my head. but whatever. or not whatever. as it suggests 16. something else to me that i have difficulty with. "the politics of poetic form" --- i'm sort of referring to the book of that name but not specifically. that is i'm not about to start quoting or whatever and i havent read the whole thing anyway. but the notion itself, that poetic forms have, in some discernible way a politics; i have a lot of trouble with that idea. of course much hinges on just what you mean by form in this instance. bernstein has an essay on pound in _apoetics_ and it's a very interesting essay and i know that my buddy mark p. thinks it's one of the better things written about pound. i read it 17. when that book first came out and the way i recall the argument running was something like this: 'pound's form in the cantos is radically democratizing and undercuts his own avowed politics, and further the poem is multicultural, non hierarchical etc.' now i'm sure that bernstein among others wd have something to say in response to my quick paraphrase. but take it for now as *my* take, however partial and limited it is, on what he said in that essay on the cantos. there is certainly something to the observations about the organization of the cantos, they do make it rather difficult to see any clear hierarchy of values, they do 18. consequently set any passage on a potentially even ground with any other. ok. but if every passage were as hateful as the most hateful of them ? some *are* kinda bad right ? bad in that respect, i mean; hateful. what wd the politics of a text be that put nothing but statements of hatred on even footing with other statements of hatred? wd this be democratizing and non hierarchical in a way that wd be worth talking about ? now in saying that, i'm *not* saying that forms are vessels empty of ideological attachments waiting to be filled with whatever. that's just the other side of coin that i don't care to flip. 19. as eloquently as the case can be made for either side, and it can be made either way, i still find that i come out feeling unsatisfied by it. now maybe this is a characteristic of "langpo" (however defined) that it takes as given that linguistic form is political thru and thru. i don't know. it cd be. but then i don't really know what "linguistic form" is. and i seriously doubt that any two of you reading this will have the same take on what it is either. and so it may be that "form" like "langpo" is deserving of scare quotes. it does seem to me tho that if you are going to say of anyone that theyre 20. in an unoriginal position vis langpo or to say with a smidge more detail something like "the lang poets are probably the best am poet/critics of the century, but there is a tendency to take them entirely on their terms & so our inheritance of their work -- and all of its possible or most counter- intuitive implications-- is diminished. it's (particularly) presjnar's too simple understanding of lang poetry & his very easy & uncomplicated adoption of oppositional terms & the way in which this is manifested in his poems-- that i object to." (that's jacques debrot again in case there was 21. any doubt) saying that you've put yrself in a very serious position of debt. you owe someone some explication of what the hell you think "langpo" is and how exactly youve discerned a person's poetics from stray comments and the example of a few poems. jacques concludes the post that i took the piece above from with the following, "my references to the "apg" actually reflect my reluctance to criticize, by name--or even, in any specific terms, the work of-- poets who are not in some sense already "established." even now i am very reluctant to criticize presjnar's & lowther's work at length in this venue (though, if i thought 22. there was any interest i would do it, i suppose, in an essay--but would anyone run it?). but this has been, obviously, on my part, an unsatisfactory inhibition as it seems to have spared nobody's feelings." indeed. and while i find what jacques says here comprehensible it also strikes me as ultra strange in many ways. it's as if i were to say (or say again, as it happens) "jacques debrot is a pedophile. but i don't wish to consider any actions that he's taken with children as he's not an established pedophile" and in this instance i think my saying he's a pedophile makes a lot more sense than his comments about the a.p.g. because he is 23. at least a unitary being, or at least bounded by a body which we name 'jacques debrot' and b/c most of us have a pretty clear idea what's involved in pedophilia. what cd a criticism without names, specific terms or examples be ? shucks y'all i dunno... name calling ? where do we go from here ? well, i posted to the a.p.g. a few days ago and asked that everyone bring work to the next weekly meeting and that i wd put this stuff together into a care package for jacques. maybe he will read it. i don't know. it wd be nice to think that he wd but it may be that he won't have time. or that he'll feel that it's an imposition. but i figure at least he'll have the stuff, that way if he 24. wants to deal with it in any substantive way, he can. one of the assumptions that seems common in the poetic environment in the wake of langpo (however defined) is that the work of a poet embodies a poetic. exactly how do you embody a poetic anyway ? did pound fail at embodying the poetic his politics' craved ? if i were to devote the time to articulating "My Poetics" is there any reason to believe that it wd feel like an adequate statement of the poetics you might derive from my poetry ? one of the assumptions, and perhaps this is a "langpo" trait as well, that jacques seems to hold is that a poetics can be gathered from a person's poetry and 25. that the relations between them are in some sense sure. if i said that i had grave doubts about that wd i still be a language poet ? when will i stop writing language poetry ? (when will you stop beating your wife?) i langpo you, you langpo me and we all sing "langpo langpo lang---po----" by the xmas tree until the word reveals itself as senseless ? maybe that's another characteristic of "langpo" (but which langpo?); the notion that as poets we "let language speak" or "see what language will do." it seems like i've heard that sort of stuff a good deal. but rather than chase that let me ask; if as i wd contend, i disagree with much 26. of the criticism of the language poets (even when i like it and enjoy it for the thinking it causes) how is it that i'm *still* replicating their poetics ? and further afield, how is it that the langpos (whoever they are) have been so good at infiltrating everything such that they can get blamed for everything from grade inflation to the end of poetry ? how is it that jacques cd, seemingly without a wink wink, insinuate that silliman's comment about the local as "important" in his mind was actually some kind of bid to anaesthetize all the poets in their local environs leaving the status quo 27. (langpo, again) in place, unquestioned, dominant ? and it's not about jacques now, ok ? this streak of accusation is all over the place. i hear it delivered in such passionate seeming tones with fair regularity and i just can't get my head around it. why does the discussion of "langpo" cause so much emotional response from so many people ? "you are!" "no, you are" "i am not" "you are so" etc. you neednt look far for a case in point. i'd really just like a beer. is the wide-spread suspicion of all things "langpo" an embodied conspiracy poetic of paranoia ? quick everybody out of the pool ! again, do we need to rethink the assumption a poetics has even 28. an unambiguous relation to "its" poetry ? think about john cage for a moment (and i choose him as i love him and beyond that b/c if there are any poets / artists whose work has had fundamental and lasting effect on me, such that when i'm working i often feel i am 'responding' to their work, then john cage is certainly one of these). are the aims and intentions of john cage's poetic reached by his work ? does the use of indeterminacy in his score actually leave the performer free to respond in the moment to "whatever eventuality" ? it's a beautiful idea, a wonderful utopian intention and the spirit 29. of it does, it seems to me, infuse his work... but does it work ? i don't think so. i think that instead a performer spends a good deal of time and hopefully discipline to learn a new method of scoring and to create music (let's say) in a way that is unfamiliar for them initially but which to perform it well, they must eventually learn in much the same way that they wd a complex score in standard notation. maybe i'm being narrow minded about that. but that's the way it seems to me. if there is a chance for the performer it's in a piece like 4'33" or it's varied successors. but the effects i've experienced from dealing with john cage's words and music 30. and thought, while instilling a certain zen-like centeredness in the moment or a flow state of sorts have more commonly been flashes of insight of a more conceptual nature. reframings of what one thinks poetry or music or art, is or can be. their relation to "whatever eventuality" is oblique in the extreme. or maybe i'm missing it. i don't know. all i know is that in my mind the articulated aims and the works & scores left behind aren't related in anything like a clear way one to the other. in cage's case, and in the best of most cases,. the stuff that we might want to call "poetics" seems to me simply to be poetry. which if we are sure 31. that a poetics is extractable from poetry we cd then again extract a poetics from this poetry that was called poetics and if it was well done it wd be poetry again and again we cd extract a poetics and eventually what ? we'd get bored ? we'd "figure it out" ? we'd feel like we knew the work at the bottom (under all the turtles) ? somebody's mumbling "go in fear of abstractions" but well come equipped with hip waders and there is nothing but swamp as far as the eye can see. that's the 'local' if 'poetics' is the terrain. but with all those caveats i do think that we can find, think about and even construct a poetics, that 32. it might be easy (like falling down) or it might be hard (as in pulling up roots) and that it might be useful in thinking about one's own work or someone else's. but what *use* is making pronouncements about the current scene ? how about if i go at this another way and say that i am a "langpo" imitator ? it's not a false statement exactly. that is i was very turned on when i read bernstein's books _dark city_ and _content's dream_ and if anyone out there has seen my first book _.1_ then you'll note a poem written there dedicated to charles, written as it say "fore(&after charles bernstein." i was never 33. very bunged up about originality. i wrote many imitations of whitman, dickinson, creeley, snyder, ginsberg, simic, keats, bishop, stein, ashbery, etc etc (the list cd go on and on,... like this post) and so when i was excited about charles' work i wrote imitations of charles or tried to at least. it's very hard to write like someone else. you end up learning a lot about what you think theyre doing and how theyre doing it and you also run right up on all yr own slurs. i can't see anything wrong with doing this. and i didn't stop b/c i'd "outgrown" it as a way of working i stopped b/c my slurs 34. became too numerous, i wasn't able to stick with the plan anymore. in short, the poems were clearly mine no matter how hard i tried to disguise them and so it seemed more fruitful to attempt to frustrate this by using methods and procedures and complicated problems to shake them. but yr slurs are you, in a big way, and it doesn't take long if youve a certain kind of discipline about it for the slurs to catch up and the surprises and the otherness of any particular method to diminish in the face of them. so you move on. or at least i've tried to. 35. and having a chance to meet on a weekly basis with mark prejsnar starting almost 3 yrs ago was an enormous benefit to me. then came mike magoo- laghan, randy prunty, james sanders, dana lustig, rebecca hyman, tedd mulholland, maryanne del gigante (sadly only by email and phone as she's in australia), colleen dunne, brian mcgrath, karen phillips and most recently zac denton. i.e., the APG. AKA the "naive and self-aggrandizing." 36. now i had only been writing poetry and thinking that "poet" was a thing i wanted to be (with qualifications such as 'never admit to it at parties' etc) for about 2 years when mark and i hooked up (which now that i think about it was engineered by charles bernstein and fredrik hausman... hmm....) and i don't think either of us thought about ourselves as a group tho we did want to find other people to talk to who cared about poetry. then mark jokingly called us the atlanta poetry mafia. a name that perhaps we should have stuck with. 37. but see, i'd started writing in the miserable isolation of southeastern kansas (beautiful country i suppose, once the bottom of a shallow inland sea) an hour south by southeast of wichita, to which i drove every day to work and where for poetic conversation i had one friend who i worked with (anne pelletier) and one customer who knew a bit about poetry (albert goldbarth) tho the one who gave me subtle nudges initially and helped me find out about interesting stuff was sandy feinstein (work out in xcp and some forthcoming i think in fracture). 38. but the reason, such as it is, for this bio-digression is simply to contrast my relative isolation with the slow build up of the APG to its current state. now many folks have written encouragements to us since jacques started posting stuff about us, perhaps as one suggested "no publicity is bad publicity." but for me there is still a question about why it is that people are uncomfortable with groups ? i certainly was in high school. i hated and feared much of the football team and all the guys who were into hunting (a lot of overlap there). and i know many were 39. made miserable by cliques and stuff like that but thru out school until i dropped out i maintained a pose of being unaligned, or if i was a part of anything i was somehow vaguely associated with the 1 or 2 other punkers in the school (and the schools i went to had only 2 or 3 me included). still i never developed the aversion to the mere idea of being in a group, i just didnt want anything to do with the ones i knew of. but why do so many of us seems to fear them ? i'd really like to understand this. and why do so many people like big team sports vote pro-life, support the death penalty and fear groups ? why is poetry a minor genre ? is it ? 40. i'd like to think that it isn't actually, but that the common understanding of it, the common sense of what fits within it's frame has been drastically reduced & was inadequate to the language art to begin with. but i'm often optimistic and many arent. "if somebody walked up and started talking a poem at you, how wd you know it was a poem?" forget the 'fear of groups' thing for a minute & consider jacques' more recent posting again in another light, he writes "i think you are probably right though in seeing in my desire for an "outside" a buried nostalgia for some 41. fantasmal objective cultural authority--a feeling i definitely want to keep in check--but don't you ever feel that way? naively, perhaps, what i had in mind was the situation of the visual arts &, more specif- ically, i was influenced by the latest artforum in which something like 15 art scholars listed their favorite exhibitions of the year. now i know about all of the corruptions, compromises, etc. etc. in the artworld, but i was still impressed by the fact that there was an audience for contemp visual art (which is almost generically experimental) that includes people as impressive as krauss, and buchloh, and foster, and martin jay, and bryson, and jacqueline rose, etc. etc.-- but nothing like that for exp poetry." 42. one of the things that immediately strikes me as a difference between exp. poetry and contemporary visual art (besides the huge $ on one side of that seasaw) is that the successes of the art world are sustained and promoted by critics ("something like 15 art scholars") and while clearly the financial differential is part of what makes this the case i'm not sure that i wd be at all interested in a poetry world where this was the case to such a glaring degree. contrary to what i think it was that tom orange was saying i don't feel that my (our, apg) reaction to labeling was to assert our authenticity. as many folks 43. pointed out, the apg hasn't been around long enough to evolve our own "idea" and i think we all acknowledge that we're just taking what seems useful and making it up as we go. rather than authenticity as a counter, i think the gripe was with an all too easy labeling, and one that i suspect artforum falls into over and over, save that in the art world the dominance of critics and curators is de facto. can we make a distinction between the sort of criticism that brandishes labels without much attention to the work and the kind which might as well be called engagement, that accepts its limited scope and turns uses as much attention as possible resisting the simple fix ? 44. "...a conversation, shall we have one later ?" shall we ask what the connections between us *as* poets means to us and our work ? shall we question the notion of a group and what it does for and against it's insiders and outsiders ? if it does anything much ? shall we inquire into the emotional core of the many complex reactions to "langpo" ? shall we investigate the relations of poetries to "their" poetics ? shall we wonder how else we might frame things so that other, perhaps more useful distinctions cd be made ? i'd be interested to see any of these threads picked up and run off looming with. tho, i suspect, before much of that happens, a backlash against over long posts. i give. i also suspect that it will take much more than 20 hours to get that invader out of the terrain. _____________.out )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 16:32:43 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Milletti Subject: Carto-Graphics Conference Addendum MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Apologies for the re-posting. The previous conference description was incomplete. Best, Christina Milletti CARTO-GRAPHICS: Bodies of Production, Migration, and Subjectivity DATE: SATURDAY APRIL 22, 2000 The Department of English at the State University of New York at Albany invites one page abstracts for our first annual Graduate Student Conference: "Carto-Graphics: Bodies of Production, Migration, and Subjectivity." We welcome papers from all intellectual perspectives and traditions, and encourage participants to consider the trans-disciplinary and extra-academic dimensions of the conference theme. "Carto-Graphics" arises as a means to address issues of mapping, representation, and the discursive production of cultural bodies and spaces. We hope to further examine the plurality of contexts in which these artifacts--virtual, technical, biological--assume (and presume) intelligibility. Possible conference topics are: * Poetics, Place, and Praxis * Displacement and Identity in Contemporary Culture * Expatriates, Exiles, and "Other Communities" * Creative Geographies/Geography & Literature * Global Economies, New Industries, Class * Textual Production and the Future of the Subject * Space and Meaning in Contemporary Theory * Cognitive Mapping and Cultural Identities * Charting Virtual Terrains * Visual Culture and Nontextual Media * Travel, Tourism, and Sustainability * Bio-logics, Ecology, and Cultures of Production * Dis-ease, Trauma, and Becoming-Cyborg Deadline for Submissions is February 15, 2000 Please send one page abstracts for panel presentations to: Carto-Graphics Graduate Student Conference University at Albany, SUNY English Department Albany, NY 12222 For further information, contact Geoff Manaugh , Shealeen Meaney , or Christina Milletti ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 11:27:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Nielsen, Aldon" Subject: call for paper Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I have one spot open on a panel for the American Literature Association meeting in Long Beach , CA, May 25-28 -- The panel is sponsored by the African-American Poetry society, and the topic is "New Poets / Poetics" -- email title and abstract to me ASAP if you're interested in participating -- since I have only the one open spot, it will probably go quickly! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:01:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: "Cyberpoetry" Comments: To: "komninoszervos" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hi Kominos, I read your post today on the EPC -- it seems to me that you intended this post for another list? At least that's what the last line suggests. I'm planning on checking out your sites, along with the work of Reiner Strausser whom you mention. I'd lke it if you could recommend some sites that you think are successful in presenting something like "web poetry" -- this is my own preferred term, since as you demonstrate neologisms can be as confusing or limiting as this rather mundane term. The drawback with my term is that most people don't ask me what I mean by that when, in fact, they should -- they assume I mean posting poems on the web, in which case I would just call it poetry. The drawback with "cyberpoetry," it seems to me, is that a cluster of images come along with it (like mirror shades, virtual reality gloves and Keanu Reeves) that I try to discourage in my own use of images in my "web poems." Anyway, I'm presently working on a short paper and statement on my own work and others, so would appreciate it if you had any sites that really blew you away. At this point, my favorite stuff seems to be European experiments in Flash and Director, or the more anarchic style of jodi.org, etc. -- i.e. work not called "poetry" usually. I have a hard time getting excited by those too tied to ideas of "dirty concrete" (i.e. exposed technology), but think it's more useful, at this point, to just go ahead and make beautiful things. My own work can be found at www.ubu.com, under Brian Kim Stefans. The one to really look at, if your interested, is "The Naif and the Bluebells," which is in fifty parts, some 4 or so words long, some with intricate javascript interfaces, and a few java kinetic poems. As for why people don't discuss web poetry on the poetics list, it would be tough to say, but in New York, which is supposed to represent the "forefront" of poetic English-language activity (at least in that dim old 20th century), is pretty devoid of people dong work in Java, javascript, C++ etc and tying it to poetry. I don't have any friends here who do this work (in the poetry community), the only exception being Kenny Goldsmith, who's more of a visual artist. I actually think that, as with the Brazilians and concrete poetry, it will be artists from outside the traditionally main areas of literary commerce (i.e. not Paris or London or here) who will make the most invested, impassioned dive into this art. There are tons of web designers in New York, obviously, and they make my stuff pretty crude looking, but I don't sense that there's a general interest in the "community" for grabbing this toledo by the torontos, and taking it as far as it can go. But as far as I'm concerned that's fine -- there are few enough general authors in common for a general discussion, so a very specific thing like this might be alienating -- I don't expect anyone else to program in C++, and I wouldn't myself if I didn't learn BASIC before puberty (I should have learned basic puberty, I would have been better off). (I've decided to just post this to the list since it would be great if you put up some links for us out here on the borders. I'd also like, for my own conscience, to know what people DON'T like about web poetry -- a lot is stinky. Perhaps you could periodically post things that seem of interest of you -- that would be a great resource. I'll try to do the same.) Brian Eno, by the way, has what I think is a much better term for "interactive" art, which is "unfinished" art. "Interactive" art is usually just something in which you click along a more or less preordained set of channels until you reach the punchline, etc., whereas "unfinished" is kind of like a finger-painting set -- you are given a set of tools, a set of options (in the case of painting, the white page, for the computer any variety of interfaces -- that's the art for me, the interface), and more or less whatever you do leads to something called "art" and you can actually improve at it as you go along. Imagine a piece of art you could improve at "interacting" with -- wow, that was the best session with "In Memoriam" I've ever had! The trick is not to make it stricly "eye candy," or a "schizophrenic" hodge podge of more or less useless, superfluous, spiritually ungratifying options (I can go to Pizza Hut for that). I suppose you know the Rhizome list and website. I've only just joined but, though often very pretentious (but what is "pretentious"?), there seems to be a different vibe there which hasn't made it into poetry in any way that I know of yet. Anyway, liked your post. Best, Brian ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 12:49:27 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Nielsen, Aldon" Subject: taking dictation from Peter Gizzi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Frequenters of this space may recall that some time ago Peter Gizzi published "lonely tylenol," his only, he tells us, palindrome. Frequenters of the New York Times Book Review may have spotted these lines quoted in Sunday's edition from a new book of poems by David Lehman, on opening a bottle of Tylenol: "it spells lonely backwards with / only the initial T added, signifying / taxes no doubt." Now this would be unremarkable, perhaps just a sign of the times, an indication that poets tend to the same mode of pain relief, were it not for earlier writings by Lehman (under the influence of Tylenol?). In justification of his charge that "some of these self-styled, university trained experimentalists appear to spend half their time dismantling syntax and referentiality, and the other half taking dictation directly from Derrida," Lehman pointed to the fact that Carla Harryman, "a poet who gets consistently high marks from her 'Language school' colleagues,' had appropriated several lines from Derrida at the opening of her book _Vice_. ah well . . . ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:10:55 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: PhillyTalks # 15 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "PhillyTalks" #15 takes place Tuesday, January 18, 6pm, Writers House (3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia). Hope some of you can make it! Featured in dialogue are the poets Kevin Davies and Diane Ward. Diane Ward's work has appeared in many magazines including The World, Ribot, Big ALLIS, Raddle Moon, Tripwire and Crayon. Work has also appeared in several anthologies including Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman), Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & UK (Reality Studios), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and In the American Tree (National Poetry Foundation). A new book, Portraits & Maps is due out from ML & NLF in Italy and is a bilingual (Italian & English) edition as well as a collaboration with Los Angeles visual artist Michael McMillen. She lives in Santa Monica, California. Kevin Davies was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration and lived through Carter, Reagan, and most of Bush in Vancouver and Toronto. Since late Bush in New York. Formerly a member of the Kootenay School of Writing Collective. Books include Pause Button (Tsunami Editions, Vancouver, 1992) and the forthcoming /Comp./ (Edge Books, DC, 2000). As you might know, "PhillyTalks" invites two poets to begin a dialogue on each other's work, then have the resulting exchange published in newsletter form & made available to readers prior to the event. (The Davies/Ward newsletter is now available by subscription from me at lcabri@dept.english.upenn.edu.) The poets, following their poetry reading, informally extend their dialogue. The audience then joins in. A future newsletter will feature a transcript of the event, as well as written responses to previous newsletters. Louis Cabri ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 21:02:22 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Emery Subject: Salt Publishing information In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Salt Publishing News With over ten years of publishing history, Folio(Salt) has been relaunched as Salt Publishing. Founded by award-winning Australian poet John Kinsella, the newly configured business will continue developing its exciting list of linguistically-innovative, contemporary literature from the English-speakin= g world, with particular emphasis on poetry and poetics from the Commonwealth= . Volume 12 of the international journal "SALT", entitled _Working Conditions= _ is due out next month. Contributors include: Kate Lilley, Peter Larkin, Alison Croggon, Ron Silliman, Andrew Zawacki, Jeri Kroll, Joseph Duemer, Dorothy Porter, Louis Armand, Ric Caddell, Charles Bernstein, Lisa Jarnot, Fred D=B9Aguiar and many more. New books forthcoming from SALT Publishing. Susan Schultz, "Aleatory Allegories" Andrew Duncan, "Anxiety Before Entering a Room" Drew Milne, "Sorted" Douglas Barbour, "Fragmenting Body etc" Ed. John Kinsella, "Catalyst - an anthology" Ed. John Kinsella, "Interactive Geographies" Those interested in subscribing to SALT or with any general queries can contact me directly at: cemery@cup.cam.ac.uk Many thanks Best wishes Chris _____________________________________________________ Christopher Hamilton-Emery Production Manager Salt Publishing PO Box 202,=20 Applecross 6153=20 Western Australia email: saltpublishing@hotmail.com web: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/1664/index.html _____________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 15:37:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: White rage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I received a brief report today from someone who attended the MLA '99 session on "Poetry and the Inauthentic" and was somewhat surprised to hear what I did. Brian McHale presented a paper there arguing that the "inauthenticity" of Doubled Flowering is fundamentally aesthetic in deed and intent. I was familiar with this paper, having heard it at another conference. And apparently Charles Bernstein also gave a talk, arguing that Yasusada constitutes a "punitive" sally, aimed at shaming politically-correct editors and amounting to an instance of "White rage". I'm not asking for a thread of debate on the topic, but I would be interested in hearing more details from any others who might have been there, impressions, etc. front or b-c. thanks, Kent ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 18:07:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Arielle C. Greenberg" Subject: Re: Peggy and Fred in Hell - Whitney Musem - In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Oooh,I second that emotion...all you lucky chumps living in the City go see Leslie Thonton's work. What I love about Peggy and Fred is how she dips in really deep into childhood ritual, desire, into voice and the compulsion to repeat. I also want to say that she has a really cool house with thousands and thousands of books everywhere and a kind of Moroccan tent and she looks a bit like Amelia Earhart. Arielle From Alan S: > (I'm forwarding this because I love Leslie Thornton's work and urge you to > see it if you have the chance - it's a relatively rare opportunity. The > films touch directly on issues of virtuality, language, subjectivity, and > body, and play into issues of poetics and philosophy as well. Alan) > > > Announcing: > > PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL > a film and video serial by > > LESLIE THORNTON > > January 20, 2000, 6:00pm > > at the > Whitney Museum > in the program > The Cool World: Film and Video in America 1950-2000 > [Part 2 of The Art of the Century] > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:28:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Taylor Brady Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" In-Reply-To: <200001122202.RAA26863@interlock.randomhouse.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brian, You might want to take a look at stuff linked from www.m9ndfukc.com, and anything else by "antiorp," aka =cw4t7abs, the author of that site. It (I'm guessing from some rhetorical cues that antiorp is probably male, but I'll respect its wish to remain gender-indeterminate from here on) first came to my attention as a member of a computer-music list I'm subscribed to, where its provocations touched off a flame war that led to its banishment Much of the work is verbally pretty crude (might you guess from the URL?), and doesn't really fit within "poetry" even as a digitally-altered category - but the engagement of an "interface poetics," manipulating the visceral responses to the vocabularies of indecipherable error messages, nonstandard browser behavior, random redirects, etc., is pretty compelling, at least as a suggestion for some of the technical lexicon available to such a practice. Helps if you have good audio capabilities, as, last I checked, bursts of shrieking noise were a favored tactic. Not sure yet what to do with =cw4t7abs' habit of adopting some of the thematics of a kind of techno-fascism in what seems to be an opposition to that politics as a program - though certainly there's a whole troubled modernist heritage of that sort of thing, and more recently (probably more relevantly for =cw4t7abs) the fascisized aesthetic of much anti-fascist punk and industrial music. There's a Videodrome-ish "become-the-machine" thing going on in this work that's disquieting, to say the least... Anyhow, there's a whole slew of related links, none too conscientiously updated but still useful, at: http://re-lab.lv/rezone/a/msg00489.html It would be a good idea to reboot and run your browser without anything important up in the background before you surf to any of these pages: even on a well-equipped and fairly stable system, I've seen a lot of this stuff cause crashes. Nothing malicious that I know of, but some of it will tax processing capabilities until you'll have to do a manual restart to get away from it. Best, Taylor Brady -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU] On Behalf Of Stefans, Brian Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 2:02 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: "Cyberpoetry" Hi Kominos, I read your post today on the EPC -- it seems to me that you intended this post for another list? At least that's what the last line suggests. I'm planning on checking out your sites, along with the work of Reiner Strausser whom you mention. I'd lke it if you could recommend some sites that you think are successful in presenting something like "web poetry" -- this is my own preferred term, since as you demonstrate neologisms can be as confusing or limiting as this rather mundane term. The drawback with my term is that most people don't ask me what I mean by that when, in fact, they should -- they assume I mean posting poems on the web, in which case I would just call it poetry. The drawback with "cyberpoetry," it seems to me, is that a cluster of images come along with it (like mirror shades, virtual reality gloves and Keanu Reeves) that I try to discourage in my own use of images in my "web poems." Anyway, I'm presently working on a short paper and statement on my own work and others, so would appreciate it if you had any sites that really blew you away. At this point, my favorite stuff seems to be European experiments in Flash and Director, or the more anarchic style of jodi.org, etc. -- i.e. work not called "poetry" usually. I have a hard time getting excited by those too tied to ideas of "dirty concrete" (i.e. exposed technology), but think it's more useful, at this point, to just go ahead and make beautiful things. My own work can be found at www.ubu.com, under Brian Kim Stefans. The one to really look at, if your interested, is "The Naif and the Bluebells," which is in fifty parts, some 4 or so words long, some with intricate javascript interfaces, and a few java kinetic poems. As for why people don't discuss web poetry on the poetics list, it would be tough to say, but in New York, which is supposed to represent the "forefront" of poetic English-language activity (at least in that dim old 20th century), is pretty devoid of people dong work in Java, javascript, C++ etc and tying it to poetry. I don't have any friends here who do this work (in the poetry community), the only exception being Kenny Goldsmith, who's more of a visual artist. I actually think that, as with the Brazilians and concrete poetry, it will be artists from outside the traditionally main areas of literary commerce (i.e. not Paris or London or here) who will make the most invested, impassioned dive into this art. There are tons of web designers in New York, obviously, and they make my stuff pretty crude looking, but I don't sense that there's a general interest in the "community" for grabbing this toledo by the torontos, and taking it as far as it can go. But as far as I'm concerned that's fine -- there are few enough general authors in common for a general discussion, so a very specific thing like this might be alienating -- I don't expect anyone else to program in C++, and I wouldn't myself if I didn't learn BASIC before puberty (I should have learned basic puberty, I would have been better off). (I've decided to just post this to the list since it would be great if you put up some links for us out here on the borders. I'd also like, for my own conscience, to know what people DON'T like about web poetry -- a lot is stinky. Perhaps you could periodically post things that seem of interest of you -- that would be a great resource. I'll try to do the same.) Brian Eno, by the way, has what I think is a much better term for "interactive" art, which is "unfinished" art. "Interactive" art is usually just something in which you click along a more or less preordained set of channels until you reach the punchline, etc., whereas "unfinished" is kind of like a finger-painting set -- you are given a set of tools, a set of options (in the case of painting, the white page, for the computer any variety of interfaces -- that's the art for me, the interface), and more or less whatever you do leads to something called "art" and you can actually improve at it as you go along. Imagine a piece of art you could improve at "interacting" with -- wow, that was the best session with "In Memoriam" I've ever had! The trick is not to make it stricly "eye candy," or a "schizophrenic" hodge podge of more or less useless, superfluous, spiritually ungratifying options (I can go to Pizza Hut for that). I suppose you know the Rhizome list and website. I've only just joined but, though often very pretentious (but what is "pretentious"?), there seems to be a different vibe there which hasn't made it into poetry in any way that I know of yet. Anyway, liked your post. Best, Brian ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 10:00:37 +1000 Reply-To: k.zervos@mailbox.gu.edu.au Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Komninos Zervos Organization: Griffith University Subject: Re: an irish joke) Comments: To: George Bowering In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT > Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:23:15 -0800 > Reply-to: UB Poetics discussion group > From: George Bowering > Subject: Re: an irish joke) > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > All my life I have noticed that people who do not get certain kinds of > humour get resentful or angry and try to defend themselves against some > attack that has not happened. They must make strange readings indeed of > Samuel Beckett. > George Bowering. it's great to be mates with a koori to know a gay man or two to have five lesbians for dinner to cook them a vegetable stew it's a-m-a-z-i-n-g to have your chart done consult the tarot and the i-ching to have a therapeutic massage and give the naturopath a ring it's sound to be found at the rallies waving banners and shouting abuse at the c.i.a.'s involvement in wars and military coups it's hip to sip coffee at rhumba's whilst having an artistic chat drink pots and pots of earl grey tea at baker's or the black cat it's grouse to pronounce spanakopita the way the greek people do make houmus at home in the blender tsatziki and babaganouge it's great to relate as a person and not as a woman or man how dare you assume i'm heterosexual and hug friends as hard as you can but who do you see in the mirror when there's only yourself and you and who really knows the truth of the fascist that lives inside you. komninos zervos, 1984 sure we all know what political correctness looks like, and some of us know when a simple apology is much better than defending a bruised ego. komninos komninos zervos cyberPoet lecturer cyberStudies school of aRts griFfith uniVersity GolD coaSt campuS pmb 50 gold coast mail centre queensland 9726 tel +61 7 55 948602 http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:34:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: *autosurveillance* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In coat pocket: Anna Karenina In backpack: Early/Electric Refund, Sparrow/Antler, Counting the Hats and Ducks, A Serious Earth, and Disarming Matter, all by Edmund Berrigan Pamela, a Novel by Pam Lu Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:35:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: *more for the dossier* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Spotted on hall table: Poems (J Prynne), Empire Life and several stapled items by George Albon On the hamper in the bathroom: Thought and Language by Teju Vaswani Piled on the nighttable: Zippy by Bill Griffith Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs Poetry by Bernadette Mayer Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:37:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: *conclusive evidence* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Staring at the bed from on top of the bookcase across the room: Beyond a Boundary by C L R James Fairfield Porter by Justin Spring African Profiles (Penguin paperback, can't remember the author) The Poems of Emily Dickinson, facsimile ed. Piled up on the living room floor: novels by Faulkner, Nwapa, Kafka Boxed up in bedroom closet: poetry A-L, unfinished notebooks In linen closet: philosophy, math, reference, lit. in translation In front closet: fiction, poetry M-T, ??? Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:02:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: derek beaulieu Subject: help? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ya'll i knew to get in touch w/ adeena karasick - i had her address & phone # but accidentily deleted. does anyone out there know how i can contact her? please back channel me. thanks derek ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:34:58 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jan richman Subject: sunday! Comments: To: 70550.654@compuserve.com, 74013.352@compuserve.com, abie@paraffin.org, absinthepress@altavista.net, adamwade@pacbell.net, adrian@gravity7.com, agreen@stmarys-ca.edu, Akpoem@aol.com, albert@zytek.com, ALO@atkn.com, amarsh@sfgate.com, amym@slip.net, andreabdlp@earthlink.net, andrew@sulli.org, anna@banane.com, anne@well.com, anunez@mprinc.com, anya@glasnet.ru, ap5150@aol.com, bakatalk@rocketmail.com, bam@egroups.com, bcclark@igc.apc.org, beth@citizen1.com, bjg@kvn.com, blisick@sfgate.com, bolotnikov@compuserve.com, brk@socrates.berkeley.edu, bucky@protozoa.com, CACarolina@aol.com, cara@gettingit.com, carl_macki@mailcity.com, case@sirius.com, cel@kumr.lns.com, cell@sirius.com, charlesmister@yahoo.com, charley@acialloys.com, chungking1@hotmail.com, cjohnson@socrates.Berkeley.EDU, clrquest@aol.com, coralgypsy@aol.com, cosh33@hotmail.com, cptime@aol.com, crosen@lucasdigital.com, cyanosis@slip.net, d@poeticdream.com, dannyc@leland.stanford.edu, daphne@concinnity.com, daphneg@slip.net, dark-river@excite.com, darksandal@juno.com, davemaze@yahoo.com, dblelucy@lanminds.com, deb77@slip.net, dj@ednet.net, dgscott@leland.stanford.edu, dlp@silcom.com, dmitry@hpl.hp.com, doconne@itsa.ucsf.edu, dpthibod@jps.net, dwkozak@aol.com, eavonka@hotmail.com, editit@hotmail.com, editor@akkadian.com, ellynmaybe@hotmail.com, eshender@usa.net, kieridge@aol.com, kpotterf@us.oracle.com, ezekiel@amati.com, fastb73@hotmail.com, firebrat@serve.com, fix@outerband.org, fmsbw@hotmail.com, ftpg@best.com, fuego@best.com, gabriel@rlan.com, gadget@best.com, gassia@ibm.net, gastony@ibm.net, gaufred@leland.stanford.edu, gay.pierce@forsythe.stanford.edu, geigerj@ibm.net, ghostmonkey@yahoo.com, GoodBoySF@aol.com, golston@leland.stanford.edu, markg@thestandard.com, gsignore@visa.com, hankhyena@mindspring.com, hieronymo@hotmail.com, hsteinb@sirius.com, hwyone@aol.com, iaro@aol.com, jf1f@aol.com, poezine@bigbridge.org, idler@earthlink.net, info@wyt.com, ivanchaj@uclink4.berkeley.edu, jacobus@slip.net, jag@rahul.net, jamb@leland.stanford.edu, janemm@rocketmail.com, jaquino@therecorder.com, jazzymae@sirius.com, jbrown@sirius.com, jeannec@sfgate.com, jelike@slip.net, jesse@goffphoto.com, jlind@sirius.com, jocelyn@sfsu.edu, jodi623@yahoo.com, john.faulkner@autodesk.com, josh@sfgate.com, juliaann@cruzio.com, julienpoirier@yahoo.com, karenr@sfgate.com, karimiyque@aol.com, karryn@ialfredo.com, karsten_bondy@zd.com, katchild@hotmail.com, kathyd@mills.edu, kaufer@csli.stanford.edu, kklioutc@library.berkeley.edu, klobucar@interchange.ubc.ca, miki@evenings.org, juliechungkim@excite.com, kurtb@unfinished.com, kwongo@hotmail.com, labalinese@msn.com, ladams@ucla.edu, layers@sirius.com, layne@sonic.net, lbugwhittle@yahoo.com, leeannh@netgate.net, lenka000@yahoo.com, lubensky@interval.com, luckykittn@hotmail.com, lunfan@aol.com, lydlink@sirius.com, mabelev@uclink4.berkeley.edu, madnax@aol.com, mancall@sirius.com, manicd@sirius.com, manuela@bigmouthad.com, MarcoUg@aol.com, marleyk@sfsu.edu, martijn@vhamill.com, mashabr@socrates.berkeley.edu, matesos@aol.com, matt@vainglorious.com, mcbyer@earthlink.net, melissastein@worldnet.att.net, merz@apple.com, michellek@solomonarchitecture.com, minka@grin.net, minx@concinnity.com, mkriebel@solomonarchitecture.com, mmuldoon@excite.com, musick@netscape.com, nachmann@hotmail.com, Narkleptic@aol.com, neurofibrillary@hotmail.com, nicolerae@earthlink.net, nla_arts@sirius.com, npdeluca@aol.com, ofaeon@yahoo.com, office@nationalpoetry.org, gail@sirius.com, eegudas@ucdavis.edu, oxygen@slip.net, pbn@kvn.com, pierr@leland.stanford.edu, pkmurray@sirius.com, pliska@haas.berkeley.edu, poemedy@aol.com, poetryslam@hotmail.com, prouslin@pacbell.net, sabinac@itsa.ucsf.edu, sacoxf@fatnet.net, sasha@slip.net, sepp@leland.stanford.edu, sarahhenderson@mindspring.com, serenarain@hotmail.com, sfsunday@aol.com, shiftsf@hotmail.com, simej@uclink2.berkeley.edu, sloth3@slip.net, smoke@toke.com, sofasurf@usa.net, songbear@prodigy.net, rsyalom@sirius.com, spit@tarin.com, spot@noirrecords.com, squash@sirius.com, steinefa@t-bird.edu, stills@vom.com, sunnycafe@aol.com, taitl@usa.net, thinman@sirius.com, thrust@ecst.csuchico.edu, timerman@klaud.com, tracey@leland.stanford.edu, triadcon@triadcon.com, unbounded@aol.com, uncleblue@earthlink.net, valeribcv@hotbot.com, valerie@vhamill.com, valeries@lonelyplanet.com, vitamineli@hotmail.com, vive@socrates.berkeley.edu, voxx@forsythe.stanford.edu, waxwing1000@cs.com, Yedd@aol.com, yyuen@mediarevolution.com, zak@novoironlight.com, zyzzyvainc@aol.com, mprice@newcollege.edu, mrdave@grin.net, adamdegraff@hotmail.com, golston@leland.stanford.edu, mlatiner@looksmart.net, adrian@mad-lab.com, zfrances@pacbell.net, rosnell@juno.com, jacobuswagener@hotmail.com, felixmacnee@hotmail.com, samurai@sirius.com, kunstler00@yahoo.com, scooterboy@rocketmail.com, swechs@idt.net, lee@gtni.com, ostashev@earthlink.net, ofaeon@yahoo.com, je@dartmouth.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Do people really bare their poetical nonsensical reprehensible innermost thoughts on a Sunday night in San Francisco in exchange for drink tickets? PEOPLE DO. JAN RICHMAN, author of =B3Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything=B2 a= nd associate editor of 9X9=B9s magazine =B36,500=B2 (second issue due out later= this month!) and MARYA HORNBACHER, author of =B3Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulemia=B2 a= nd the upcoming =B3The Center of Winter=B2 will bleat their pithy bleats this Sunday, January 16 upstairs at the Paradise Lounge, 308 11th Street (@ Folsom) 8 pm sharp There=B9s an open reading afterward, so bring your scribbled musings. See you there! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:19:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: POETICS: approval required (48006F48) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --On Wednesday, January 12, 2000, 11:12 PM -0500 "L-Soft list server at University at Buffalo (1.8d)" wrote: This message was originally submitted by levitsk@ATTGLOBAL.NET to the POETICS list at LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU. You can approve it using the "OK" mechanism, ignore it, or repost an edited copy. The message will expire automatically and you do not need to do anything if you just want to discard it. Please refer to the list owner's guide if you are not familiar with the "OK" mechanism; these instructions are being kept purposefully short for your convenience in processing large numbers of messages. ----------------- Original message (ID=48006F48) (83 lines) ------------------- Received: (qmail 29437 invoked from network); 13 Jan 2000 04:12:16 -0000 Received: from out1.prserv.net (HELO prserv.net) (165.87.194.252) by listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 13 Jan 2000 04:12:16 -0000 Received: from herbert ([32.100.113.94]) by prserv.net (out1) with SMTP id <2000011304121325204j3kmse>; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 04:12:14 +0000 Message-ID: <050f01bf5d7c$7f062420$5e716420@herbert> From: To: "UB Poetics discussion group" Subject: Belladonna January 27, New York City Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 23:13:05 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative The Belladonna Series presents Two Brooklyn Poets with new books Kim Lyons, author of Abracadabra (Granary Books) Prageeta Sharma, author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective) 7:30 pm Janurary 27, 2000 at the Bluestockings Women's Bookstore,=20 172 Allen Street, between Rivington and Stanton=20 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Contact: (212)777-6028 for more information. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 20:22:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Subject: Cox & Treadwell READING/Berkeley, CA Comments: To: twoswirl@aol.com, Jilith@aol.com, brandon downing , cburket@sfsu.edu, mmagee@english.upenn.edu, neave@mindspring.com, adrian_wiggins@optusnet.com.au, Cydney Chadwick , kristenwhittle@hotmail.com, Dana Teen Lomax , dbuuck@sirius.com, Jerrold Shiroma , Rebecca Wolff , grace@hirschdevelopment.com, Gwyn McVay , intrsect@wenet.net, ixnaypress@aol.com, John Tranter , jdebrot@aol.com, jessica.grim@oberlin.edu, jenho@mindspring.com, Johanna Isaacson , Joe Ross , juliette guilbert , Kathy Lou Schultz , degentesh@earthlink.net, kenning@avalon.net, laura@spdbooks.org, lgudath@yahoo.com, Bary Leslie , lvrusso@acsu.buffalo.edu, lwaldner@cornell-iowa.edu, Marcella Durand , Mary Burger , margie_cronin@hotmail.com, J Kuszai , Batshira@aol.com, murphym@earthlink.net, mudlark@unf.edu, neavey@hotmail.com, npinsky@earthlink.net, nguynn@aol.com, Pamela Lu , clarkd@sfu.ca, sarathal@concentric.net, smang@earthlink.net, selby@slip.net, smithnash@earthlink.net, knezevic@cinenet.net, djmess@sunmoon.com, teresa moore , yedd@aol.com, kfraser@sfsu.edu, jocelyn@sfsu.edu, WOM-PO@listserv.muohio.edu, glamatron@hotmail.com, tisa@sirius.com, Atticus40@aol.com, immerito@hotmail.com, Stein-L@ucdavis.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sarah Anne Cox and Elizabeth Treadwell will read new work & from a new collaboration at Cody's Books on Telegraph Berkeley, CA JANUARY 19, 2000 (next wednesday) Sarah Anne Cox is the author of _Home of Grammar_ (Double Lucy, 97) and _definite articles_ (a+bend, 99). Her work has appeared in _Arshile_, _Five Fingers Review_, and _Mirage_. She is an editor of _Outlet_ mag. Elizabeth Treadwell is the author of _Populace_ (Avec, 99) and _Eve Doe: Prior to Landscape_ (a+bend, 99). _Stolen Images of Dymphna_ is forthcoming from Meow Press. She is an editor of _Outlet_ mag. --- Ok, I'm reading. _Outlet 4/5_ is still available, also! Just sent out a mailing to all those who ordered thru Dec. And am a new aunt! Happy 000 all Elizabeth ps: I'm reading _Holy Blood, Holy Grail_ by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln. It's totally millenial and all about oddly found and misplace documents and Jesus faking his own death. Also it's ALMOST as much of a page turner as _The Talented Mr. Ripley_, which I am so pleased to have read before Matt Damon. ___________________________________________ Elizabeth Treadwell Double Lucy Books & Outlet Magazine http://users.lanminds.com/dblelucy ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 20:44:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Subject: Cox & Treadwell reading at Cody's, Berkeley Comments: To: twoswirl@aol.com, Jilith@aol.com, brandon downing , cburket@sfsu.edu, mmagee@english.upenn.edu, neave@mindspring.com, adrian_wiggins@optusnet.com.au, Cydney Chadwick , kristenwhittle@hotmail.com, Dana Teen Lomax , dbuuck@sirius.com, Jerrold Shiroma , Rebecca Wolff , grace@hirschdevelopment.com, Gwyn McVay , intrsect@wenet.net, ixnaypress@aol.com, John Tranter , jdebrot@aol.com, jessica.grim@oberlin.edu, jenho@mindspring.com, Johanna Isaacson , Joe Ross , juliette guilbert , Kathy Lou Schultz , degentesh@earthlink.net, kenning@avalon.net, laura@spdbooks.org, lgudath@yahoo.com, Bary Leslie , lvrusso@acsu.buffalo.edu, lwaldner@cornell-iowa.edu, Marcella Durand , margie_cronin@hotmail.com, J Kuszai , Batshira@aol.com, murphym@earthlink.net, mudlark@unf.edu, neavey@hotmail.com, npinsky@earthlink.net, nguynn@aol.com, Pamela Lu , clarkd@sfu.ca, sarathal@concentric.net, smang@earthlink.net, selby@slip.net, smithnash@earthlink.net, knezevic@cinenet.net, djmess@sunmoon.com, teresa moore , yedd@aol.com, kfraser@sfsu.edu, jocelyn@sfsu.edu, WOM-PO@listserv.muohio.edu, glamatron@hotmail.com, tisa@sirius.com, Atticus40@aol.com, immerito@hotmail.com, Stein-L@ucdavis.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" That Cody's reading is at 7:30, I forgot to mention. At the Telegraph store, never the 4th street. Elizabeth ___________________________________________ Elizabeth Treadwell Double Lucy Books & Outlet Magazine http://users.lanminds.com/dblelucy ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 11:21:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: is the swill just swell? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Jacques writes: " whate ver else it is, the apg is also an expedient for attracting attention--that is, for advancing the careers of the poets associated with it. there are other ways of doing that of course--start up a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc., etc., & publish people who you think will be helpful to you, or write glowing reviews of books you are only lukewarm about, or . . . I could go on & on. & I don't pretend to stand above this trend at all--like everyone else i swim in the same swill." ***************** mark responds; The short answer to this might be...Lighten up! why so glum, chum? There are certainly many aspects of contemporary society filled with hypocrisy, oppression, monadic self-regard, and so on. But the poetry scene is probably one of the brighter spots.. All the activities you describe could also be seen as elements of community-building. As indeed they are. Especially here (outside the well-funded sturctures of support of the workshop establishment) the people doing this just AIN'T "in it for the money" .. Jacques, if most of the poets i know are doing it as "careerism" then they've got to be about the sorriest and stupidest bunch of cretins on this green earth! It would be rather like saving string in the confident expectation of winning the Nobel Prize. If *you* write glowing reviews of books you're only luke-warm about, i guess that's between you and your conscience... But i don't know many who do, and i don't do it, and in fact in general most of the stuff you enumerate is done with a huge investment of passion and excitement, at least by the folks i know who do it... Even many people outside atlanta! (gasp!) And i would not go along with any appeal to "cultural capital"; in the amerika of Reagan and clinton, it is fiscal capital that counts... and even the cultural kind, is not going to come in any huge amount to most of the people active on the poetry scene today... Real capital, fahget about it.. Your reading of things seems unnecessarily histrionic *and* depressed... Swill? There isn't a poetry scene, and people can't be in touch with each other and share things, without " a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc.," If to you that's piggish, it's unclear why you're hanging around! i wouldn't, if those were my perceptions! mark ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 11:52:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: is it swill or is it swell? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Jacques writes: " whatever else it is, the apg is also an expedient for attracting attention--that is, for advancing the careers of the poets associated with it. there are other ways of doing that of course--start up a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc., etc., & publish people who you think will be helpful to you, or write glowing reviews of books you are only lukewarm about, or . . . I could go on & on. & I don't pretend to stand above this trend at all--like everyone else i swim in the same swill." ***************** mark responds; The short answer to this might be...Lighten up! why so glum, chum? There are certainly many aspects of contemporary society filled with hypocrisy, oppression, monadic self-regard, and so on. But the poetry scene is probably one of the brighter spots.. All the activities you describe could also be seen as elements of community-building. As indeed they are. Especially here (outside the well-funded sturctures of support of the workshop establishment) the people doing this just AIN'T "in it for the money" .. Jacques, if most of the poets i know are doing it as "careerism" then they've got to be about the sorriest and stupidest bunch of cretins on this green earth! It would be rather like saving string in the confident expectation of winning the Nobel Prize. If *you* write glowing reviews of books tat you feel luke-arm about, i guess that's between you and your conscience... But i don't know many who do, and i don't do it, and in fact in general most of the stuff you enumerate is done with a huge investment of passion and excitement, at least by the folks i know who do it... Even many people outside atlanta! (gasp!) And i would not go along with any appeal to "cultural capital"; in the amerika of Reagan and clinton, it is fiscal capital that counts... and even the cultural kind, is not going to come in any huge amount to most of the people active on the poetry scene today... Real capital, fahget about it.. Your reading of things seems unnecessarily histrionic *and* depressed... Swill? There isn't a poetry scene, and people can't be in touch with each other and share things, without " a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc.," If to you that's piggish, it's unclear why you're hanging around! If (of course) you have new, alternative institutional practices that will point in striking and subversive, less piggish, directions, than i for one am delighted, and can't wait to see you put them into practice... Or describe 'em... But otherwise " a reading series, a magazine, a small press, etc.," will probably continue, or i hope they will, 'cause otherwise i don't get to read the new work that other people are putting down.... mark ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 10:52:08 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: apology with jokes / Herron In-Reply-To: <12839.3156685516@321maceng.fal.buffalo.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >From: "Patrick Herron" >Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:08:05 -0500 ... >And to the posts from others on this subject (Randolph, Maria, Brian, = >George), I have managed to come to my senses. =20 > >Apparently anti-Irish prejudice has never existed in this = >world, and still does not, except of course in my "pea-brained" = >imagination. ... this is such a complete miscontrual of my post that i find it hard to believ you actually read it in its entirety. of course there is prejudice against irish people --as well as hundreds of years of institutional oppression and racism, and its traces come out in jokes like the ones we have read on this list among others. i never meant to imply that there wasn't; i just wanted to add the historical dimension. btw, i think the joke below is brilliantly metaphysical, reminding me of Groucho Marx's impassioned avowal of interest to Margaret Dumond, or whatever her name was: "Your eyes remind me of you, your hair reminds me of you, etc etc, everything about you reminds me of you except you." i tend to think of these types of jokes as somehow, though i can't articulate it clearly, the ingenious subterfuge of the dispossessed. > >Two Irishmen met and one said to the other, "Have ye seen Mulligan = >lately,Pat?" Pat said, "Well, I have and I haven't." His friend asked, = >"Shure, and what d'ye mean by that?" Pat said, "It's like this, = >y'see...I saw a chap who I thought was Mulligan, and he saw a chap that = >he thought was me. And when we got up to one another...it was neither of = >us."=20 > > >Thank you, >Patrick ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 10:57:40 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Sons of Captain Poetry In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000110233452.00945250@mail.earthlink.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 11:37 PM -0500 1/10/00, Susan Wheeler wrote: >Do any of you know if there is a VHS copy of Michael Ondaatje's 1970 film >on bpNichol in circulation out there? Any information received with >gratitude! frontchannel puh-leeze!!! (hi susan!) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 12:18:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: one swill makes you taller, another swill makes you small... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Go ask Alice? Can cynicism be a productive affect? This is the somewhat abstracted question I hear in Jacques’s last post, which in effect asked, How can oppositional poetics take new forms when most of the structures available for bringing about forums for such forms contain some sort of careerist virus? Kevin Davies says we’re allowed fexibility in the details. Except don’t ever try and mess with the structure itself, because it will crush your spine. (It’s in a poem that he says that, too.) Kevin isn’t only or even at all talking about the structures of the poetry world, of course. But this is exactly what makes his line relevant to Jacques’s open-ended question. If Kevin's line is relevant to begin with. The negativity of the cynical, previously, has been characterized as an affect of liberal complacency (these last two are words that have come up, separately and together, in recent posts by Brian and Jacques): ie, previously cynicism has not been a productive affect, unlike nihilism. I’m thinking Jacques must be imagining cynicism as a productive affect because otherwise, with his associating the reading series, the magazine, the "small press, etc.", with careerism, he seems to be erasing some of the basic space and time coordinates of poetry. Where else might it exist, then? And that sort of erasure and assessment is surely a cynical move, one furthermore that does not question the erasing act itself. I haven’t yet read the APG Mirage, nor seen yet Poetics@, two objects of this recent debate. I am responding as one who has been a reading series organizer, a magazine editor, and an etcetera. I think you, whoever you are, would be a fool to think that a career of any sort advances your poetry -- yes, even a "career" as an organizer, and also, even a career as poet. I personally feel sometimes that a career especially in the world of poetry is a serious setback to your own poetry. Although I’ve never admitted it before, I’ve always been a reluctant organizer, coming in at the last minute, and have only ever organized out of a sense of sheer implacable desperation of circumstance (except recently, with the PhillyTalks). I’d much rather have nothing to do with organizing the basic space and time coordinates of poetry, and often have had the fantasy of entirely disconnecting from the poetry worlds in any shape or form, simply writing from wherever that leads to. . . . Nice fantasy, Robinson Crusoe! Except he’s not the only model, I guess. It’s like the horror I felt as a kid when I realized that people were waking up and actually recreating to the detail exactly what happened the day before, and they were doing it. The world’s existence seemed nightmarishly contingent on an accumulation of these acts, but at the same time, nightmarishly the same for being identical to yesterday. To even think from a position where a poetry scene can be described as "swill" strikes me as a kind of weary cynicism more appropriate to the compromised but economically comfortable existence of a journalist employed by Warner ("ah, journalism, it’s all just pigswill & porkbarrel") -- that is, if this journalist once aspired to doing investigative work for a public sphere. Maybe it’s not that exp. poetry can be read as easily as the New Yorker, as that the presumptive flex of critical prose has taken a journalistical turn -- but not, if that is the disciplinary orientation, an investigative journalistical turn, not even an investigative journalistical turn as sometimes, very infrequently, appears, alongside an Ashbery poem, in the pages of the New Yorker. But I'm really interested in models, or forums, and their space-time frames, for poetry, the effects of those affective contexts. Anyway. louis ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 21:29:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: web poetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Yes, it seems there's lots of unlearning to do in order to approach poetry on the Web with the gusto it deserves. I've put together an incomplete but useful list of annotated links to web poetry at http://vispo.com/misc/links.htm I actually think that, as with the Brazilians and > concrete poetry, it will be artists from outside the traditionally main > areas of literary commerce (i.e. not Paris or London or here) who will make > the most invested, impassioned dive into this art. Regards, Jim Andrews http://vispo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 11:29:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: web work... In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000111234352.007a5630@pop-gc.gu.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" komninos, thanx for the link to the 'water' site... again, for those who haven't had a look yet, http://workxspace.de/div/water_p.html i finally have a box fast enough to appreciate such work (!)... i found the site pretty stunning, in all, an imaginative use of word/image/sound/graphics... i believe one of the key issues raised in such artistic fusions (if you will) is that of collaboration... in fact the 'water' site is itself a collaboration (one that accounts, it would seem, for transatlantic distances), as is the mark amerika site you mention in a prior post http://www.holo-x.com and this has implications for authorship, our sense of ourselves as authors-creators (whether as poets, writers, artists)... and of course the model here has been explored (and exploited!) for most of this century, in film... which, however auteur-driven, tends to surface the more collaborative dimensions of producing/creating/distributing... given the communicative potential of this medium, seems to me that one of the more hopeful realities of the online world is that it can bring together various artists even as it brings together (whether more peacefully or through outright collision) various arts... something to chew over, i would think... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 11:06:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Catherine Daly Organization: e.g. Subject: Re: web poetry review MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I have a pretty decent home computer; 192MB of RAM, DSL line, etc. I go to the water site where there's a small brown picture. I click on it. "javascript water()" appears on the status bar. A second page with a background graphic of water, a grid, and another title page appears. The grid is an anomaly: I don't think it is supposed to appear. The window is resized just enough to be annoying to navigate, but not to full screen. I click, nothing happens. Then I double click. The first page was a single click -- when was I supposed to learn to double click? It took me over a minute. I gave up, then navigated back, since kominos had asked. I had time to think: I do want to figure out the state of this poetry programming stuff -- for example Christy Sheffield Stanford is soliciting love poetry projects at trAce & I did all that work for a love poetry class that only four people signed up for. A whole bunch of windows showed up before Netscape crashed: some purple italic text on a light blue background, very difficult to read, a partial ring of clickable fuzzy pastel graphics: a lot of work went into this. Compared to academic moo environments (I think I recently went to see a moo by ... Alan Sondheim? recently), something like this could be more appealing to me, with some type of change from single to double click on page one, and some sort of testing to see if it works on an average computer. After that, of course, my personal taste is very anti-pastel. I started to do a site for one of my UCLA classes, and ended up picking a "poetic" looking script font and pictures of clouds and water, since UCLA wanted to appeal to -- oh, I don't know, people who would like script fonts and pictures of clouds and water, I supposed -- and I was so disgusted with myself I had to stop. I'm rambling on like this because web poetry is aesthetically challenging in a way that traditional programming and poetry is not, and more like interior design, it seems to me, subject to the "ooh, that's tacky" reaction. The way we imagine poetry could look, or what we see when we read it -- has that been so subject to scrutiny before? Rgds, Catherine Daly cadaly@pacbell.net > 3. and for an individual site, well a site created by two people, reiner > strasser and christy sheffield sanford, an individual piece of cyberpoetry > called 'water'. > http://workxspace.de/div/water_p.html > > as i move my mouse, over the image from top to bottom, the image gets > sliced into five or six bands, certain bands either getting foggier or > becoming more sharply in focus, each band throwing up a dialogue box of > text, a few words, a sentence, and each movement over a band causing some > change in the other bands of images, sometimes switching to a band from > another misty image, a river marina, a river or lake in flood. > clicking on the bands takes you to other scenes with similar fragmentation > of image into interactive bands which deliver text, sound and image. > one navigates till there is a sense of i've seen it all, till nothing new > seemed to happen. the journey through this poem gave me the feeling of > floating, immersed, involved, self-reflective. > i didn't even check the source code. > > would like comments > regards > komninos ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 14:26:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: complacency ( r e a d i n g ? ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain { p o e t i x } i wonder if, rather than assuming that there is a crisis of complacency in the world / institution / culture of experimental / avant garde / innovative writing ---- what if, rather than that judgement taken as given and then ruthlessly replicated ---- what if, we started with the judgement itself ? ---- it wd seem to me ( and fallibility is a maxim, i assure you) that to make this call, to say in effect "the state of what's called experimental writing today is complacent, stagnate, resting on laurels, riding on inertia, habituated (etc)" --- that to make this call you wd have to read the stuff, right ? (i'm not headed down the line which says "but as you can't have read it all you can't make a total judgement, there is a point in that trail but let's skip it for now) ---- cd it be i wonder, that instead, that the input data, all the poems by all us so & sos', wasn't handled as best it cd be ? that's perhaps it was fitted into a box and capable of being fitted into a box but not necessarily well fitted to the box ? lots of things besides shoes will fit in a shoebox, no ? ---- what i am backing around and leading up to all at once is the idea that it might be an over-pervasive and limiting READING that is causing the seemingly bland taste and uneventful terrain more than the poems being considered ---- consider for a moment derridean deconstruction, as dazzling as it appeared perhaps at one time, it seems now to somehow a foregone conclusion, insert text, output deconstructive reading with fundamental binaries, traces and aporias printed in red for convenience (now i know that some feel very close to the thinking i've just slighted and many do interesting things with it, but my point about reading styles wd stand with any number of other examples.. who, for instance grants, the freudian talking cure much efficacy ? has anyone had their humors balanced lately ?) ---- now you might say i've simply shifted things to the other foot, maybe ---- all i really have to base this feeling on is that more often than not when i pick up a new magazine, say the new issue of _ribot_ or the premiere of _zazil_ and when chapbooks arrive in my mail i find that i am frequently confronted with something that i don't have any immediate or habituated reading-response to ---- we're only so creative, can only get so much done in little time, nevertheless i feel like most of what i read deserves an idiosyncratic site-specific reading rather than one that grows out of a quick note that, indeed, it fits in the old shoebox yet again )L ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 10:10:29 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Nielsen, Aldon" Subject: Re: White rage In-Reply-To: <21A24E39C0@hccstudent.highland.cc.il.us> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 03:37 PM 1/11/00 -0500, you wrote: >I received a brief report today from someone who attended the MLA >'99 session on "Poetry and the Inauthentic" and was somewhat >surprised to hear what I did. > >Brian McHale presented a paper there arguing that the >"inauthenticity" of Doubled Flowering is fundamentally aesthetic in >deed and intent. I was familiar with this paper, having heard it at >another conference. And apparently Charles Bernstein also gave a >talk, arguing that Yasusada constitutes a "punitive" sally, aimed at >shaming politically-correct editors and amounting to an instance of >"White rage". > >I'm not asking for a thread of debate on the topic, but I would be >interested in hearing more details from any others who might have >been there, impressions, etc. front or b-c. > >thanks, >Kent I can understand why Kent might be interested in hearing more on this topic -- I hate to be the one to tell him, but it never happened -- I was there -- Some other guy appeared instead of Charles Bernstein and read an obviously faked paper, probably intended precisely to smoke out Kent and get him on-line ,hungry for details -- The entire affair appeared some strange stunt indeed -- I actually met somebody in the room who pretended to be Hank Lazer -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 15:09:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: whatever else it is . . . MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit last night I had a vision from god who said that the answers to all the questions within this post are to be found within this post and a previous post entitled verbal herpes: simplex syntax I recommend using the sacred methods of the cabala. I am a member of the Cult of The Phoenix previously know as the Keepers of the Secret (see Borges' "Cult of the Phoenix") "whatever else it is, the apg is also an expedient for attracting attention--that is, for advancing the careers of the poets associated with it." well jd the assumption above reminds me of a moment in an American Lit. class from several years back during a discussion of the last sections of "leaves of grass" a fellow student busted out with we are all hypocrites and all this and all that and long live whitman (he was responding to whitman's assertion that he contained within him multitudes and contradictions and what not and that he whitman was a hypocrite) it was at this point that I thought of starting the anti-whitman society of non-hypocritical college students not that I don't give whitman great reverence as a poet (the society by focusing on whitman would be a sort of living shrine) but because I disagreed with where whitman's assertions/suggestions led the impressionable I think I disagree with your assumptions concerning the apg as a reflection of a similar logic (my classmate assumed that because he felt hypocritical and had found this through whitman he too contained multitudes that naturally we all are hypocrites) if I seem less than articulate at times it is a sign that iam a member of the cult 'an expedient for attracting attention' in what sense in whose sense in what opinion in your opinion or is there a college of elders hurling down judgements . . . is the apg a tool for attraction I think not at least not for me and this is far more important than what it is to you at least for me the apg may be many things to many of its members for some it may be a facilitator of some kind for various this and thats I really don't know (brandish me as something im an easy target) is the poetics list a means of attracting attention . . . are you being a bit self aggrandizing (I do find it an interesting thought mirrors and labyrinths and all myths) is pursuing a degree at harvard a bit aggrandizing to a career possibly when you first mentioned the apg several months back I back channeled you through john and asked you to make judgements based on Work (I would have done it on the list but I was not yet a member and I still think the only things you've read of mine if indeed you've read them are via the list) YOU have recently commented on some work (sort of) but I notice that there was no mention of two poets in the group Mark and John is there a mystery to solve here hmm, there may be a question of access to work, but I offered then and I will continue to offer you work if you want it . . . But the above is mostly secondary to the grossness of the career motive you mention . . . and the certainty with which you proclaim it (the subjunctive mood-and greek optative-is the hardest to grasp) iam a musician I have not played publicly in several years and have not even played with other musicians in quite a while I could never imaging not playing though I play everyday am I advancing a career in music and if I were to let's say play for the apg one evening which is very possible would I be advancing a career as a musician/poet music is a sort of poetic no? I have a career sort of (at lest a steady income which is why I decided not to go to the university of london to pursue a 'career' in ancient history) and career goals that have nothing to do with poetics I have written poetry since 'bout age 14 I threw most of my poems away for several years I think I threw them all away (for the best I think seeing as how I could not spell very well) maybe someone found them in the trash and furthered my career as a poet I will continue to write when I move to California later on in the year would that be considered a "career" move seeing as how maybe ill be closer to San Fran and the scene there if I told you the main reason I am moving to california is to be closer to the mountains to snowboard which is true what would you say I enjoy poetry a great deal I enjoy writing and reading poetry a great deal if others enjoy my company and enjoy or find my work interesting so be it if iam influenced by others whom I share a similar interest so be it if you are furthering you career by pursuing various options great but I urge you to hesitate when you reflect your own insights on other individuals I feel that you may be furthering your own career as a critic I don't know its just a hunch nor do I care if you criticize my work but my associations to criticize a poetic 'association' or 'group' seems perverse or at least strange to me something *I* don't quite understand (I look at it this way: it is far more important to me what a member of the cult of the phoenix does than why s/he is a member of the secret cult-'does' in the sense of I WRITE POETRY-or what a nazi does like KILL-does it matter that a nazi hates jews or blacks or etc.-or that he acts on this hatred--does it matter if a poet holds to this or that aesthetic or that s/he writes) iam interested primarily in your opinions concerning the apg (I know that others on the list find your other ideas concerning various this and that's to be probably more interesting and im sure they are) but as I mentioned earlier I ve never considered poetry as possessing an agenda or given much thought to: how an oppositional poetic can take new forms? Or *our* (whose?) pervasive careerism. these are things that don't have much to do with my "poetics" as I see them which is something else I just don't think much about (it is more of a something I do) (see verbal herpes my naïveness I would suppose im not sure I just don't waist energy on certain topics . . . I don't care for much philosophy though I enjoy Nietzche like I enjoy a good poet) I guess what I want to say if you are going to make comments about the apg it might be best to justify or qualify them (a simple 'in my opinion' may do) you may feel it unnecessary to do so but I sense in your posts an agenda I think you are using the apg as an example for a purpose I can't fathom im sure that you will have some sort of response which I would prefer to be public I feel this is a rather 'public' or societal issue im a very public-self aggrandizing-person I guess I would prefer no back channels 'at least from jd' on these topics I will retain the right to post any mail from jd regarding this post just to keep everything and everyone on the up and up (to be read as a disclaimer not an attack or a personal judgement) my vision implores jd to seriously analyze what ive had to say regarding the apg and his mention of the apg im not sure that there would be anything left --for me-- to say in response using acrostics you might even find the name of god TEDD -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 16:09:03 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jason Nelson Subject: new trailer park hypertext Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed All of you are so pretty and smart and good smelling, that I'm pleading for any thoughts, advice etc... on a new Hypertext project I just finished called Gorgeous Oaks: a hypertext poem in couplets and tercets. the url: http://members.tripod.com/bomarfelt/ cheers, Jason Nelson ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:51:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: POETICS: approval required (780AFF92) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --On Thursday, January 13, 2000, 1:21 PM -0500 "L-Soft list server at University at Buffalo (1.8d)" wrote: This message was originally submitted by Atticus40@AOL.COM to the POETICS list at LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU. You can approve it using the "OK" mechanism, ignore it, or repost an edited copy. The message will expire automatically and you do not need to do anything if you just want to discard it. Please refer to the list owner's guide if you are not familiar with the "OK" mechanism; these instructions are being kept purposefully short for your convenience in processing large numbers of messages. ----------------- Original message (ID=780AFF92) (145 lines) ------------------ Received: (qmail 3308 invoked from network); 13 Jan 2000 18:21:53 -0000 Received: from imo13.mx.aol.com (152.163.225.3) by listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu with SMTP; 13 Jan 2000 18:21:53 -0000 Received: from Atticus40@aol.com by imo13.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v24.6.) id i.c8.142bab (3893); Thu, 13 Jan 2000 13:05:31 -0500 (EST) From: Atticus40@aol.com Message-ID: Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 13:05:31 EST Subject: Fwd: FW: Vermont..... To: Twoswirl@aol.com, Jilith@aol.com, bdown68@hotmail.com (brandon downing), cburket@sfsu.edu, mmagee@english.upenn.edu, neave@mindspring.com, adrian_wiggins@optusnet.com.au, avbks@metro.net (Cydney Chadwick), kristenwhittle@hotmail.com, dalink@sfsu.edu (Dana Teen Lomax), dbuuck@sirius.com, jerrold@durationpress.com (Jerrold Shiroma), rwolff@angel.net (Rebecca Wolff), grace@hirschdevelopment.com, gmcvay@patriot.net (Gwyn McVay), intrsect@wenet.net, IxnayPress@aol.com, jtranter@mail.zip.com.au (John Tranter), JDEBROT@aol.com, jessica.grim@oberlin.edu, jenho@mindspring.com, johan_is@yahoo.com (Johanna Isaacson), jjross@cts.com (Joe Ross), glibert@bellsouth.net (juliette guilbert), kathylou@worldnet.att.net (Kathy Lou Schultz), degentesh@earthlink.net, kenning@avalon.net, laura@spdbooks.org, lgudath@yahoo.com, lxb1801@bp.ucs.usl.edu (Bary Leslie), lvrusso@acsu.buffalo.edu, lwaldner@cornell-iowa.edu, mdurand@sprynet.com (Marcella Durand), mburger@adobe.com (Mary Burger), margie_cronin@hotmail.com, kuszai@hotmail.com (J Kuszai), Batshira@aol.com, murphym@earthlink.net, mudlark@unf.edu, neavey@hotmail.com, npinsky@earthlink.net, Nguynn@aol.com, pamlu@sirius.com (Pamela Lu), clarkd@sfu.ca, sarathal@concentric.net, smang@earthlink.net, selby@slip.net, smithnash@earthlink.net, knezevic@cinenet.net, djmess@sunmoon.com, gomeztmoore@earthlink.net (teresa moore), Yedd@aol.com, kfraser@sfsu.edu, jocelyn@sfsu.edu, WOM-PO@listserv.muohio.edu, POETICS@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu, glamatron@hotmail.com, tisa@sirius.com, Atticus40@aol.com, immerito@hotmail.com, Stein-L@ucdavis.edu Please read this and send an email to the Vermont Gov. Please respond, it's important to us. Thanks > > > > As you may know, the Supreme Court of Vermont recently ruled that > > committed homosexual relationships should have the same rights > > and privileges afforded to married straight couples. There are > > over 1,000 rights that come with marriage which are currently denied to gay > > couples - including hospital visitation/medical decisions, rights of survivorship, filing > > joint tax returns, etc. etc. > > > > This is a VERY important first step towards equality in America. > > > > However, the Governor's office of Vermont has been BOMBARDED with phone > > calls by anti-gay individuals opposing the recent decision - primarily > > fueled by the "Doctor" Laura radio program which gave out the phone number. > > > > > > I called the Governor's office, and spoke to the secretary, who was VERY > > nice but said that I was one of only a HANDFUL of callers who SUPPORT this > > huge step towards equal rights. > > > > > > Please take the time to contact the Gov's office and register your support in this vital issue. > > > > Governor Howard Dean's office - (802) 828-3333 > > 8AM-4PM. FAX (802) > > 828-3339 > > > > or e-mail the Lieutenant Governor - Douglas A. > > Racine at > > ltgov@leg.state.vt.us > > with a brief note to > > register your support. > > > > > > PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE! > > > ----------------- End Forwarded Message ----------------- --part1_c8.142bab.25af6deb_boundary-- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 17:22:51 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Carol Hamshaw Subject: [Fwd: Poetry Blues II] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Carol Hamshaw wrote: > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE > The Capilano Review and Talonbooks, Issue/Book Launch > February 10, 1999 at 7:30 > The WISE Hall, 1882 Adanac Street, Vancouver > For more information: 984-1712 > > Poetry Blues II > > The Capilano Review's second evening of poetry and blues on February 10 > will launch our Winter 2000 issue in conjunction with Talonbooks' launch of > new books by Sharon Thesen and Mark Cochrane. Readings will be given by > Mark Cochrane, Daphne Marlatt, Norbert Ruebsaat, and Sharon Thesen between > musical sets from the Jelly Roll Blues Band. The event starts at 7:30 at > The WISE Club's upstairs hall, on February 10, 2000. ADMISSION IS BY > DONATION; buy a $5 membership and get a copy of the new issue free. > > Author Bios: > > MARK COCHRANE's first collection of poems was Boy Am I (Wolsak & Wynn, > 1995). His second, Change Room, is forthcoming from Talonbooks in Spring > 2000. He lives in Vancouver and writes for MIX, the Saturday books and > culture section of The Vancouver Sun. > > DAPHNE MARLATT's most recent title is Readings from the Labyrinth (NeWest > Press, 1998), a collection of essays, letters and journal entries over > fifteen years. Her novel, Taken, appeared from House of Anansi in 1996, and > her previous novel, Ana historic (originally published by Coach House > Press, 1988), was reissued by Anansi in 1997. Her poetry titles include > Salvage (1991), Ghost Works (1993), Touch to my Tongue (1984), and > Steveston (1974/84). > > NORBERT RUEBSAAT has published stories, poems and articles in numerous > journals and newspapers, including Geist, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and > Mail, Prism, Event. He is a regular contributor to CBC Radio's IDEAS > program, and works also as a translator of German plays and operas. He > teaches media studies at local universities and colleges. > > SHARON THESEN has published over half a dozen books of poetry beginning > with Artemis Hates Romance. Her latest collection is News & Smoke: Selected > Poems (Talonbooks). She has also edited or co-edited anthologies, special > issues of literary journals and critical works inlcuding The New Long Poem > Anthology and Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondance. > > About The Capilano Review > Since its inception in 1972, The Capilano Review has published some > of the finest fiction, poetry, drama and visual art in Canada and > throughout the world. The magazine has been recognized for its superlative > content by five National Magazine Awards, two Western Magazine Awards and a > citation from the Canadian Studies Association. We have published Phyllis > Webb, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Evelyn Lau, Susan Crean, Roy > Kiyooka, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood,Robin Blaser, Brian > Fawcett, John Newlove, Duncan McNaughton, bill bissett, Audrey Thomas and > numerous other internationally acclaimed writers and artists. > The Capilano Review gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the > Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, through the > British Columbia Arts Council, and the Capilano College Humanites Division. > > Carol L. Hamshaw > Managing Editor > The Capilano Review > 604-984-1712 > > http://www.capcollege.bc.ca/dept/TCR > > For submission guidelines, please see > > http://www.capcollege.bc.ca/dept/TCR/submit.html -- Carol L. Hamshaw Administrator Edgewise ElectroLit Centre http://www.edgewisecafe.org ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 17:01:03 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chuck Stebelton Subject: Re: taking dictation from Peter Gizzi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >From: "Nielsen, Aldon" >Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: taking dictation from Peter Gizzi >Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 12:49:27 -0800 > >Frequenters of this space may recall that some time ago Peter Gizzi >published "lonely tylenol," his only, he tells us, palindrome. > >Frequenters of the New York Times Book Review may have spotted these lines >quoted in Sunday's edition from a new book of poems by David Lehman, on >opening a bottle of Tylenol: > >"it spells lonely backwards with / only the initial T added, signifying / >taxes no doubt." > >Now this would be unremarkable, perhaps just a sign of the times, an >indication that poets tend to the same mode of pain relief, were it not for >earlier writings by Lehman (under the influence of Tylenol?). In >justification of his charge that "some of these self-styled, university >trained experimentalists appear to spend half their time dismantling syntax >and referentiality, and the other half taking dictation directly from >Derrida," Lehman pointed to the fact that Carla Harryman, "a poet who gets >consistently high marks from her 'Language school' colleagues,' had >appropriated several lines from Derrida at the opening of her book _Vice_. > >ah well . . . Those pesky Trained Experimentalists. Maybe, misusing from memory a line from "lonely tylenol," it doesn't register with Mr. Lehman that "You are not alone in your palindrome." Which reminds me to not limit this to him. There are many out here whose originality (mode of niche) ain't what she used to be. A real headache. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 20:38:52 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Jim Andrews Subject: REINER STRASSER AT DEFIB THIS SUNDAY MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit REINER STRASSER AT DEFIB, JAN 16, NOON PST (1900 GMT) http://webartery.com/defib DEFIB Defib is webartery.com's Internet Relay Chat live discussion that happens first and third Sundays at the above time. We feature a different Web artist each time, ie, typically somebody involved in writing and also in visual art and sound for the Web. No plugins are required to participate; all you need is a Java enabled browser. The live discussions are recorded, and hypertranscripts of the events are produced and available at http://webartery.com/defib/pastevents.htm. Past shows have featured Talan Memmott, Claire Dinsmore, Bill Marsh, Miekal And, and a l y r i c m a i l e r. JAN 16: REINER STRASSER Reiner Strasser was born 1954 in Antwerpen, Belgium. He studied art, art history and philosophy at the University of Mainz, Germany in the 70's. His web works, international collaborations and web art projects date from 1996. His exhibitions/publications since 1997 include Parallel Notion Network, 1997; online exhibition at the Room without Walls, Canada, 1997, 1999; Wr-eye-tings Sketchpad, USA, since 1997; ZINEn new media art gallery, Canada, since 1998; ArtQuadrat ,Germany, 1998. His work has appeared in The East Village Poetry Web (Journal of Art and Poetry by Jack Kimball); Volume Five, Japan, February, 1999; POTEPOETTEXTEIGHTEE, electronic magazine, published by Potes & Poets Press and edited by Peter Ganick, New York, 1999; The Little Magazine CD 22 Gravitational Intrigue (an anthology of emergent hypermedia) University of Albany, NY, 1999; Aix Art Contemporaine Web en Provence, 1999; Apertutto, Biennale Venice 99; DWB (Dietsche Warande & Belfort), Elektronische Literatuur, 4/99; 'Amour et Conscience' art show, Paris (web+installation); AJAC exh., Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo 99 and NOWninety9 Festival Nottingham. His Weak Blood international project attracted 76 participating artists from around the world April-June, 1999. FUTURE EVENTS http://webartery.com/defib/futureevents.htm is the Defib future schedule of discussions, which includes Komninos Zervos, Jennifer Ley, Carolyn Guertin, David Knoebel, Martha Cinader, Steve Duffy, Dajuin Yao, Loss Pequeño Glazier, and Charles Sheppard. DEFIB URL: http://webartery.com/defib ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 21:12:35 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Organization: @Home Network Subject: Re: Prunty and general usage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Koninos, Can I pass the information you posted to poetryetc2 a list I belong to which has shown some interest in webpoetry? tom -- //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\ OOOPSY \///\\\/\///\\\/ <><>,...,., WHOOPS J K JOVE BY HHH ZOOOOZ ZEUS'WRATHHTARW LLLL STOPG [ EMPTY ] SPACER index of online work at http://members.home.net/trbell essays: http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/criticism/gloom.htm ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 08:55:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Tapeworm Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 DQoNCiAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgTG9vayBhdCB0aGlzOg0KDQoNCg0KpLqwYLC6pPgs uLgs+KS6sGCwuqT4+KS6sGCwuqT4LLi4LPikurBgsLqk+PikurBgsLqkpLqwYLC6pA0KDQoNCg0K DQoNCiAgICAgICAgICAgIE5vdyB0cnkgdG8gZXhjaXNlIGl0IGZyb20geW91ciBtZW1vcnkuDQo= ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 21:21:01 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hamish John Dewe Subject: Re: NZ In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Thanks for the mention Tony. Those interested in Salt (NZ ed. Scott Hamilton) can check out the partial online version at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~mbellard/index.htm Hamish Dewe ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:54:13 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: one swill makes you taller, another swill makes you small... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Louis, Your post has already lead me to consider--and reconsider--the implications (some intended, and some not) of my earlier note to Poetics. Which is to say, that it is challenging in the most *positive* sense. But the question remains as to the value of *negativity*--or, at least, the value of the negativity of cynicism. Cynicism was not what I thought was the dominant tone of my remarks. Disgust might be a better description (more on this in a moment). But I won't back away from your characterization because 1. without my having been fully aware of it, you are right, there is an element of cynicism in my outlook, & 2. imagining cynicism as being a productive affect is something I think I have attempted to do. In an earlier post I alluded to the possibilty of embracing one's symptoms (an entirely *cynical* strategy of course). I was thinking, then, about Warhol and Salle as practical examples of how this might be done. And, further back in my mind, was Baudrillard. Indeed, one of the symptoms of the contemporary poetry scene is that (as Baudrillard says of society as a whole) opposites have collapsed--the left & the right, the experimental and the mainstream, the local and, for example, the (virtually) international (the Buffalo list being one instance of this). Since the poetry scene is thus, practically, a closed system, a Baudrillardian response would be to counteract the system's equalibrium by moving to extremes--the extremes, say, of ecstacy, or fascination before the mass cultural products of consumer and media society. (As contrasted with the oppositionality of banal theory, which is fatally tautological.) Baudrillard would in fact point, as a model, to the "masses" whom he sees converging towards the potentially disruptive extremities of the system of signs. If *I* had the time--and *you* the patience (since I know from my own experience of reading posts that the longer ones tend to get skimmed) I would develop this, as a kind of oblique rebuttal, to Charles Bernstein's fascinating article in _Shark_ 2, "Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name." One poet who I think has begun to write poetry that exemplifies the symptoms of contemporary culture is Tan Lin (though he himself would probably deny this was his intention). Specifically, I have in mind his most recent work, "Interviews for an Ambient Stylistics," excerpts of which you can find in _Tripwire 1_ and on the _Boston Book Review_ website. The poems--all culled & reworked from mass media sources-- have the form of interviews, and take up the problem of lying and truthtelling, reproductuion and simulation, the real and simulacral. What is remarkable, too, about this work, is that while it is not at all difficult at the level of the signifier-- a difficulty that has become, to my mind, badly conventionalized (though, let us hope, not entirely routinized *yet*)--Lin proposes instead a poetic of "relaxation." But the poems--or interviews--offer, by means of seeming transparency of their language--a new and different kind of difficulty, or resistance. I promised to talk about disgust--maybe another time--but Louis I was thinking something along the lines of _Open Letter_ Winter '98, which i know you know well. & I am also sorry not to respond--at least now-- to your perceptive remarks about erasure (though I am dying too) or your more personal observations about being an organizer (except to say, as much as I genuinely like the _Philly Talks_ series, it is structured around a kind of apprentice/master framework (most of the time, the Perelman issue being one important exception) that does support my earlier contention. Extended posts, as Henry Gould ironically noted not too long ago on the sub*sub*list, are for those too lazy to develop their ideas into essays. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:54:23 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chicago Review Subject: New Chicago Review Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The new issue of Chicago Review is now in bookstores. We welcome direct orders, too. Price: $8 (it's a double issue) Contents include: - Special section of writing & art by Peter Blegvad - New translation from Robert Walser's _The Robber_ (1925) - Fiction by Martha Ronk & Dennis Barone - Poetry by David Gewanter, Jesper Svenbro, Marcin Sendecki, Lucia Perillo, Anselm Hollo, Ray DiPalma, Alan Williamson, Ciaran Carson, and Frank Samperi - Essays by Paul Hoover & Mark Halliday - Interview with novelist Richard Stern - Plus reviews, notes & comments, and much more... TO ORDER: Send an e-mail, and we'll mail you a copy with an invoice. Note that our special web subscription price of only $15/volume is still in effect. We're happy to exchange subscriptions with other mags, too. Andrew Rathmann Editor ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Check out our new website! http://humanities.uchicago.edu/review Chicago Review 5801 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago IL 60637 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 11:06:00 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chicago Review Subject: Chicago Readings Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" These upcoming readings will take place as part of the ongoing Poetry at the Millennium Series, co-sponsored by Chicago Review. Jan. 20 & 21: JORIE GRAHAM Thurs. 5:30 Classics 10. Poetry Reading. Fri. 3:00. (NOTE UNUSUAL TIME). Talk. "On Description." Franke Institute (just inside the east entrance to Regenstein). Jan. 24: CARL PHILLIPS Mon. 4:30 pm. Classics 10. Poetry Reading. Classics may be entered at 1010 E. 59th St (the archway just east of Ellis Ave). Regenstein Library is on 57th, between University and Ellis. Hope to see some of you there. Andrew Rathmann Ed. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Check out our new website! http://humanities.uchicago.edu/review Chicago Review 5801 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago IL 60637 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 13:15:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" In-Reply-To: <000001bf5d54$ae7e1dc0$17000001@doswlan> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I want to second Taylor here - there _are_ a lot of crashes, but nothing permanent; sometimes the location URL gets pretty strange - and a lot of things happen there. It's the most exciting work online by and large. Empty your cache first and I'd empty it afterwards as well. Odd, have the feeling antiorp is a woman. Might also look at our (Barry Smylie/me) http://barrysmylie.com/flash/alan/youwill.swf http://barrysmylie.com/flash/alan/dancer - Alan Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 13:29:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Much of the work is verbally pretty crude (might you guess from the URL?), and doesn't really fit within "poetry" even as a digitally-altered category - but the engagement of an "interface poetics," manipulating the visceral responses to the vocabularies of indecipherable error messages...." As someone just struggling with the rudimentaries of computers/web, I am stunned by this proliferation of technical language. (Unlike Taylor, in my puberty, I was struggling with my bird and the b's). My sense is that experimentation is being equated with mastery of techniques. I think this is an error. The opposite is true. Art is created through one's medium's resistance to one's vision, through some kind of failure of the medium. Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art power creates. In Chinese history, it seems, the ability to read and write separated the haves from the have-nots. The result: a rulership by scribes, hierarchy of document handlers and a poetic evolution of infininitesimal (what is called subtle) variations. Here is my bit on the ongoing joke debate. First, I found the Irish joke really funny and hadn't really heard it before. I think, the post should allow all jokes, including the Jewish, the Black, the Polish, the Irish, the gay, etc., etc. Did ever a joke exist that was not at somebody's expense? For a group of poets who put such a stock on experimentation and linguistic edge, which this list claims to be, I am truly amazed by the number of posts which contain apologies or requests for apologies or avowals of errors, etc. With a friend of mine I tried to construct a joke which has no referrable "butt." My friend thinks it isn't funny; I think it is. What's your opinion? Here is the joke: Two cockroaches were walking along together. Suddenly, one of them turned and stepped on the other one, squashing it. The first one cried, "Jesus, stop it, what are you doing?" The other said, "Shut up, you are in no position to talk." Perhaps we can start a tanka of non-referrable jokes? Murat Nemet-Nejat ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:07:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Elaine Equi & Gary Sullivan at the Poetry Project / Sullivan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris -- Date: Fri, Jan 14, 2000 10:54 AM -0500 From: Gary Sullivan E L A I N E E Q U I & G A R Y S U L L I V A N At the Poetry Project at St. Mark's 2nd Avenue & 10th Street Wednesday, January 19th, 8:00 p.m. Elaine Equi's latest book, Voice-Over, received the San Francisco State Poetry Award for 1998. Earlier books include Surface Tension and Decoy both from Coffee House Press. She lives in New York City where she teaches at The New School and CCNY. Many of you are probably familiar with her work, but if not, she's got some of it online at: http://www.nashville.net/~bryrock/Equi/equi.html http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuefour/equi4.htm http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/9/holman9.htm (review of Voice Over) Gary Sullivan is the author of Dead Man (Meow, 1996), and the forthcoming books, The Art of Poetry and Correspondence (with Nada Gordon). His cartoons appear regularly in Rain Taxi, and a collection of them will appear later this year from Poetry New York. He also edits the webzine r e a d m e: http://www.jps.net/nada Poems and other stuff are available online via his home page: http://www.jps.net/nada/gsull.htm Hope to see you there! Gary ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:07:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: R e a d m e # 2 / Sullivan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris -- Date: Fri, Jan 14, 2000 11:09 AM -0500 From: Gary Sullivan R e a d m e / I s s u e 2 / W i n t e r 2 0 0 0 Is mostly up, with a few things still forthcoming ... http://www.jps.net/nada I n t e r v i e w s Phoebe Gloeckner / Adeena Karasick / Wendy Kramer (in progress) Hoa Nguyen / Laurie Price / Rod Smith (in progress) Scott Stark / Eileen Tabios / Tod Thilleman E s s a y s Leny Strobel on Eileen Tabios / David Hess "Slam Diary Extra" (in progress) P o e t r y Carol Mirakove "from WALL" / Hoa Nguyen Six Poems Laurie Price "Under the Sign of the House" (Work by Adeena Karasick and Tod Thilleman forthcoming) R e v i e w s Catherine Daly on Lee Ann Brown and Jeff Clark Nada Gordon on Drew Gardner David Kirschenbaum on Aaron Kiely (in progress) Joseph Safdie on Rachel Loden (in progress) )ohn Lowther and Randy Prunty on Brian Lucas Tom Devaney on Sharon Mesmer Ramez Qureshi on Armand Schwerner Henry Gould on Tod Thilleman "In progress" pieces should be up Monday, January 17th, with the possible exception of my interview with Wendy, cuz she's out of town for a week or two ... we'll try to get it up soon, though. Poets getting this email should check out esp. the interviews with filmmaker Scott Stark and cartoonist/novelist Phoebe Gloeckner (I mention them just cuz maybe you're not already familiar with their work, & these are nice entries to a couple of really wonderful artists ...) Have fun, Gary Sullivan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:19:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Questions on the APG Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" [Pardon the overly-careful tone of the following, but I don't want any bombs going off...] I've been more or less eavesdropping on the APG discussion here, mostly because I don't much care what poets think that they themselves are doing since, while not a "private" matter -- we wouldn't be doing this list if we thought poetry, its meanings and dissemination were a "private" matter -- it is a matter that can only be, or is best, described with "private" terms. That is, however the APG talks among itself, one must assume its a language that is not general enough to be widely understood -- even if the terminology is the same, the skids that they talk off of "general" understanding of them will be, perhaps, their most defining, confusing and original aspects -- since it operates based on factors that are peculiar to Atlanta, or the feelings those poets have about their relationship to other urban poetic entities, historically and geographically (i.e. entities that either critics have created, such as the "New York School," or that the poets have created for themselves to foreground questions of locality, such as "the San Francisco 'front' of the Language School"), their sense of the history of forms, etc. However, nonetheless a lot of text is produced by writers associated with the APG, much of it quite syntactically elegant and carefully composed, but rarely to I get a sense, in reading it, of what this private language is. Another way of looking at private is to use this useful term which I found in the writings of the only philosopher I've talked about on this list (so I'll skip his name, because I want you to think I'm an interesting guy), which is "redescriptive." How is what the APG is doing in terms of poetry and theory redescriptive? And if it's not redescriptive, or if there is no concern with this, then why all the text? I hope you don't think I mean that you shouldn't write, or try to work these issues out publicly -- this would be a first, anyway, a group of poets working out their self-identity publicly, in a quasi-hostile or critical field, and I'm always in for some good history -- and quite often what you write is interesting. But much of what I read from that corner concerning this issue tends to have a few qualities which raise an tiny alarm in me, such as 1) high volume, 2) somewhat undialogic aspect, and 3) self-reflexive, or defensive, in a "personal" way. With this last point, I mean only that the undercurrent of the writing seems to be a justification for the APG calling themselves poets at all, as opposed to stating claims for particular aesthetic properties The cumulative effect, in some but not all cases, is that these posts are more exhibitionastic rather than dialogic (if I am using this last word correctly) or "promoting dialogue." There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- you can't respond to Alan Sondheim's posts either, there's tons of them, and they don't make any great claims to originality outside of their abundance (I do think they're original myself, more along the lines of how "I Love Lucy" is original as comparied to Moliere's originality -- the effect of the serial, etc.). But what are the ideas to latch on to in terms of the question of the APG? Is there a sort of research being done by this group that could be of interest to others (such as that of the "Toronto Research Group" of McCaffery and nichols, which involved a whole new pantheon of critical figures and terms, and uncovered loads of work that had been neglected for ages, sort of what Steve McCaffery is continuing to do now; or the claims Zukofsky made for the objectivists). Are there political or philosophical ideas in the APG? Is there any connection of this writing to the arts or music scene in Atlanta (outside of the obvious "I like this stuff")? Is there any substance to the claim that John Lowther makes occasionally that there is a larger field of activity called "the language arts" that poetry (or poetry as it is discussed on this list) is only a small component of? One thing that I ask, concerning the work that I have seen: is there anything in the form that resists the completion or continuation of the work, or is it possible to just continue writing consistently and endlessly? I.e. where is the sense of doubt that so many poets, such as Valery and Hopkins and Williams, seemed to have about form that inhibited writing rather than produced it? Or is this doubt necessary (Cage might say no), and is that a concept of the APG? I remember trying to introduce a friend of mine to the writing of Frank O'Hara at college. She was all Nietzschean self-creation, Sartrean abysses of meaning, and more than a touch of the revolutionary (she's now in Cuba, I think). She was also a writer, and has had plays performed in New York, and had worked editorially for Conjunctions. Anyway, she thought it was the most facile, idiotic junk she'd ever seen, and couldn't see any sort of value system in it at all (which is to say no aesthetic quality either, not that they're synonymous or symbiotically linked in any easy way). I only mention this since it seems that "we", being the outside (in this case she was the outside) mostly spot the negatives before we spot the positives, and in the cases where there is really no opportunity for positives to make themselves felt (i.e. rendered invisible by the paradigm), the combined effect of the negatives is that what you are looking at is facile. Another way to phrase it, using the above terms, is that you would like to spot the resistances in the work since it is that which gives you the first note of understanding of why a work is "art" and not something like a letter, or a call in the wild. I guess I'm trying to justify Jacques assertions about the APG's relationship to the language school -- which I think were a bit crude but not entirely, since forceful rhetoric can be absorbed in ways that are helpful, I feel, and he's generally a very responsible commentator so I give him the benefit of the doubt. I think there are posts that respond to these issues already, I feel, and my reading of this issue is completely off-the-cuff -- I haven't gone back and collected pros and cons, backs and forths, etc. Actually, I just have, and noticed that Randy Prunty, for example, has posed some meaningful, well-stated questions to Jacques -- but why all this reliance on Jacques point of view, and why addresses only to him? Is it because he's the only one who seems to particularly care enough to even rag on the APG? It would be like me directing all of my comments on "new younger poets" to Ron Silliman because he made those statements in the Philly Talks -- it would be a mighty small range of focus to just narrow on his opinions (by this I mean that Ron's just one person, a considerable one at that, and to his credit has always, I feel, spoken as "one person" and not faceless authority), and to always be adopting his descriptive terms to do so. Another example would be me to confine my statements on Asian American poetry to the terms provided by 1) the Asian American critics, and 2) non-readers of this work, such as all those Yasusada defenders who think Asian Americans are just uptight and narrow about poetry (I've had many interesting conversations on this event with "white" poets in which I've felt rather "narrowed.") I know, myself, that the terms provided in both cases are often incomplete and narrow themselves, and hence have taken (or tried to take, I'm a pretty terrible essayists) up new ones. If the scale of the discussion is not there in fact -- i.e. 50 people writing on the APG [including, say, Harold Bloom, grandma and Benchmark the gardener] -- then maybe it would be worthwhile imagining it, if only for peace of mind, rather than fixating on someone else's terms. Anyway, just some thoughts. (I've been meaning to respond to some other posts, by the way, such as the one on Australian poetry, but haven't had time). By the way, Patrick, I've forwarded those Irish jokes to the director of my department, who's from Dublin, and now she's not speaking to me! (Just kidding.) Brian ++ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 12:57:22 -0700 Reply-To: Laura.Wright@Colorado.EDU Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wright Laura E Subject: Left Hand Reading (Boulder) 1/20 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit LEFT HAND READING SERIES PRESENTS JACK COLLOM TOM PETERS & RICHARD WILMARTH THURSDAY, JANUARY 20th at 8:30 pm at the LEFT HAND BOOKSTORE in Boulder, CO. The Left Hand Bookstore is located at 1825 PEARL STREET above the former Wild Oats Market (between 18th and 19th Streets). Jack Collom is a distinguished poet who has graced Boulder with his presence for many years. The author of 16 books of poetry, including the recent _Dog Sonnets_, Collom has also recorded two spoken word CDs with local musician Ken Bernstein, and been twice awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his writing, Collom has taught for over 20 years as a poet in the schools. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing & Poetics at Naropa University. Tom Peters is best known to local audiences as the colorful proprietor of the Beat Bookshop in Boulder, and the host of the long-running Monday night poetry series at Penny Lane. His books include _100 Missed Train Stations_, _Listen To My Machine_ and the recently reissued _Over the Roofs of the World_. Richard Wilmarth is the author of _Alphabetical Order_, _The Henry Miller Acrostics_ and _Voices in the Room_. In addition to being a writer, Wilmarth is also the publisher of Dead Metaphor Press. He was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and has lived in Boulder since 1991. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Rhode Island and an M.F.A. in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University (formerly the Naropa Institute). There will be a short OPEN READING immediatedly before the featured readings. Sign up for the Open Reading will take place promptly at 8:30 p.m. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 16:26:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: tiny press center & readings next week Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" First, a public service announcement that is to say that Tomorrow, Saturday, January 15 at 4 pm, Mitch Highfill will read with Heather Fuller at Double Happiness, since Lee Breuer had to cancel. Mitch Highfill is the author of The Blue Dahlia (Detour), Turn (Situations) and Liquid Affairs (United Artists). He has work forthcoming in the anthology, Heights of the Marvelous (St. Martin's). *** Due to overwhelming demand--well, actually supply--of tiny press publications, we have divided the Big List into three slightly smaller lists: specifically, Tiny Books & Chapbooks; Tiny Journals & Magazines; and Tiny Mysterious Publications. They are at, respectively, http://www.poetryproject.com/books.html http://www.poetryproject.com/journals.html and http://www.poetryproject.com/pleasure.html. And in addition to all this subdivision excitement, there are many new entries and more on the way! *** NO READING MONDAY in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Wednesday, January 19th at 8 pm Elaine Equi & Gary Sullivan Elaine Equi's latest book, Voice-Over, received the San Francisco State Poetry Award for 1998. She is also the author of Surface Tension and Decoy. She will be appearing this Sunday on WKCR at 8:30 pm to talk about her upcoming reading, so tune in! Gary Sullivan is a cartoonist, poet, and former Californian. He is the author of Dead Man and two forthcoming books: The Art of Poetry, and Correspondence (with Nada Gordon), and is the editor of the fantabulous online webzine, readme. Friday, January 21st at 10:30 pm Kings Untied: Drag King Spoken Word Show Regina Cabico, hostess, model, actress, and poetess, lets drag kings Niss Igny, Madame Bra, Ms. Ter, Alix Olson, Lizerace, the Backdoor boys, Dred, and Emma Gay wail. *** All readings, unless otherwise noted, are $7, $4 for seniors and students, $3 for members. The Poetry Project is wheelchair-accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information. *** Some books (and yes, I am biased in favor of books) some books are transparent ice cubes of amusing narrative in what the French call the invisible style and they can be terrific, like radio, with the pictures much better than those on TV. Some books are high-density constructs, thus more opaque, and they, too, can be terrific, like Ulysses or Lunar Baedeker or unbelievably boring, like certain religious texts. Those, I think, are the edges, and most books exist somewhere inbetween. --Anselm Hollo, from brand-new _Caws & Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets_ *** If you would like to be removed from this e-mail list, respond to this message with "please remove me" and we will absolutely sure to do so. *** ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 13:39:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marla Jernigan Subject: Fatigue and Cynicism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Poetics List, Steve Evans, quotes Peter Gizzi (Sorry, but I don't know either of these folks) "the heart of poetry is fatigue" and then adds, "This not only seems, but is, true--until a poem proves it false." And I guess I'm thankful that poems are so constantly proving this false. In my life, fatigue, rather than the heart of poetry, feels like the single most serious obstacle to it. I can hardly read at night when I get off work, but at breakfast, it's poetry time! Mr. Evans says many other things of course, but I just wanted to put in my thought about fatigue. A "frisky" thought? And of cynicism, I don't know. Louis Cabri asked "Can cynicism be a productive affect?" Maybe in life. My cynicism has probably helped me see through some bullshit that has come my way. But then I know that I've missed out on some things on account of being suspicious and cynical. But cynicism in poetry? It seems like it would deaden my desire for poetry, just as it makes the world less luminous, squashing it's chances. Being cynical don't we have to say, "I know what that's really about" about most of our world, never trusting the sparkle that something might have, surprising you , from the corner of your eye? Sincerely, Uncynically and Just Awakened, Marla __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 11:13:31 -0500 Reply-To: Patrick Herron Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Organization: p r o x i m a t e Subject: Re: jokes about misreading MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 SGkgTWFyaWEgLSANCg0KV2hhdCB5b3UgZXhjZXJwdGVkIGZyb20gbXkgbWFpbCBpcyBhIHBhcnQg b2YgYW4gZW50aXJlIHNlY3Rpb24gdGhhdCBkZWFscyB3aXRoIGFsbCBvZiB5b3VyIG1haWxzICBU byBzYXkgdGhpcyBvbmUgc2VudGVuY2UgcmVmZXJzIHRvIHlvdXIgbWFpbCBtYXkgYmUgaW5hY2N1 cmF0ZS4gIFNvcnJ5IGZvciB0aGUgbWlzdW5kZXJzdGFuZGluZy4gIA0KDQpBbmQgSSB3YXMganVz dCBoYXZpbmcgYSBsYXVnaCwgYXMgdGhpbmdzIHNvbWV0aW1lcyBhcmUgbm90IGFzIHRoZXkgc2Vl bSwgcmlnaHQ/ICBBcyBpcyB0aGlzIHdob2xlIGRlYmF0ZSBhYm91dCB0aGUgam9rZSBhbmQgaG93 IGl0IGNhbiBiZSByZWFkLiAgIEFuZCByZWFkaW5ncyBjYW4gbXVsdGlwbHksIGFuZCBubyBvbmUg Y2FuIGNyaXRpY2l6ZSBhbm90aGVyIGZvciAibWlzcmVhZGluZyIgYW55b25lIGVsc2UncyBtYWls LCByaWdodD8gICBUaGVyZSBpcyBubyBzdWNoIHRoaW5nIGFzICdtaXNyZWFkaW5nLCcgcmlnaHQ/ DQoNCihUaGVzZSBsYXN0IGNvbW1lbnRzL3F1ZXN0aW9ucyBhcmUgbm90IHBvaW50ZWQgYXQgeW91 IE1hcmlhIHNvIG11Y2ggYXMgdGhlIG90aGVycyBvbiB0aGlzIHN1YmplY3Qgd2hvIGZvdW5kIGl0 IGNyaXRpY2FsIHRvIGRlZmVuZCB0aGUgaHVicmlzIG9mIHNvbWVvbmUgdW53aWxsaW5nIHRvIGJl IGEgInNwb3J0aW5nIGNoYXAiIGFuZCBvZmZlciBhIHNpbXBsZSBhcG9sb2d5IGZvciBwb3NzaWJs ZSBvZmZlbnNlcy4gIEkgcmVhbGx5IGRvIG5vdCByZWNhbGwgZXhhY3RseSB3aGF0IHlvdSB3cm90 ZSBhdCB0aGlzIHBvaW50LCB0aG91Z2ggSSByZW1lbWJlciB5b3UgZGVmZW5kaW5nIERhdmlkIGlu IHNvbWUgd2F5IG9yIGFub3RoZXIuICBJIGRpZCBub3Qgc2F2ZSB5ciBtYWlsLikgIA0KDQpQYXRy aWNrICANCg0KLS0tLS0gT3JpZ2luYWwgTWVzc2FnZSAtLS0tLSANCkZyb206ICJNYXJpYSBEYW1v biIgPGRhbW9uMDAxQE1BUk9PTi5UQy5VTU4uRURVPg0KVG86IDxQT0VUSUNTQExJU1RTRVJWLkFD U1UuQlVGRkFMTy5FRFU+DQpTZW50OiBUaHVyc2RheSwgSmFudWFyeSAxMywgMjAwMCAxMTo1MiBB TQ0KU3ViamVjdDogUmU6IGFwb2xvZ3kgd2l0aCBqb2tlcyAvIEhlcnJvbg0KDQoNCj4gPkZyb206 ICJQYXRyaWNrIEhlcnJvbiIgPHBhdHJpY2tAcHJveGltYXRlLm9yZz4NCj4gPkRhdGU6IE1vbiwg MTAgSmFuIDIwMDAgMjI6MDg6MDUgLTA1MDANCj4gLi4uDQo+ID5BbmQgdG8gdGhlIHBvc3RzIGZy b20gb3RoZXJzIG9uIHRoaXMgc3ViamVjdCAoUmFuZG9scGgsIE1hcmlhLCBCcmlhbiwgPQ0KPiA+ R2VvcmdlKSwgSSBoYXZlIG1hbmFnZWQgdG8gY29tZSB0byBteSBzZW5zZXMuID0yMA0KPiA+DQo+ ID48c2FyY2FzbT5BcHBhcmVudGx5IGFudGktSXJpc2ggcHJlanVkaWNlIGhhcyBuZXZlciBleGlz dGVkIGluIHRoaXMgPQ0KPiA+d29ybGQsIGFuZCBzdGlsbCBkb2VzIG5vdCwgZXhjZXB0IG9mIGNv dXJzZSBpbiBteSAicGVhLWJyYWluZWQiID0NCj4gPmltYWdpbmF0aW9uLiAgLi4uDQo+IA0KPiB0 aGlzIGlzIHN1Y2ggYSBjb21wbGV0ZSBtaXNjb250cnVhbCBvZiBteSBwb3N0IHRoYXQgaSBmaW5k IGl0IGhhcmQgdG8NCj4gYmVsaWV2IHlvdSBhY3R1YWxseSByZWFkIGl0IGluIGl0cyBlbnRpcmV0 eS4gIG9mIGNvdXJzZSB0aGVyZSBpcyBwcmVqdWRpY2UNCj4gYWdhaW5zdCBpcmlzaCBwZW9wbGUg LS1hcyB3ZWxsIGFzIGh1bmRyZWRzIG9mIHllYXJzIG9mIGluc3RpdHV0aW9uYWwNCj4gb3BwcmVz c2lvbiBhbmQgcmFjaXNtLCBhbmQgaXRzIHRyYWNlcyBjb21lIG91dCBpbiBqb2tlcyBsaWtlIHRo ZSBvbmVzIHdlDQo+IGhhdmUgcmVhZCBvbiB0aGlzIGxpc3QgYW1vbmcgb3RoZXJzLiAgaSBuZXZl ciBtZWFudCB0byBpbXBseSB0aGF0IHRoZXJlDQo+IHdhc24ndDsgaSBqdXN0IHdhbnRlZCB0byBh ZGQgdGhlIGhpc3RvcmljYWwgZGltZW5zaW9uLiAgYnR3LCBpIHRoaW5rIHRoZQ0KPiBqb2tlIGJl bG93IGlzIGJyaWxsaWFudGx5IG1ldGFwaHlzaWNhbCwgcmVtaW5kaW5nIG1lIG9mIEdyb3VjaG8g TWFyeCdzDQo+IGltcGFzc2lvbmVkIGF2b3dhbCBvZiBpbnRlcmVzdCB0byBNYXJnYXJldCBEdW1v bmQsIG9yIHdoYXRldmVyIGhlciBuYW1lDQo+IHdhczogICJZb3VyIGV5ZXMgcmVtaW5kIG1lIG9m IHlvdSwgeW91ciBoYWlyIHJlbWluZHMgbWUgb2YgeW91LCBldGMgZXRjLA0KPiBldmVyeXRoaW5n IGFib3V0IHlvdSByZW1pbmRzIG1lIG9mIHlvdSBleGNlcHQgeW91LiINCj4gDQo+IGkgdGVuZCB0 byB0aGluayBvZiB0aGVzZSB0eXBlcyBvZiBqb2tlcyBhcyBzb21laG93LCB0aG91Z2ggaSBjYW4n dA0KPiBhcnRpY3VsYXRlIGl0IGNsZWFybHksIHRoZSBpbmdlbmlvdXMgc3VidGVyZnVnZSBvZiB0 aGUgZGlzcG9zc2Vzc2VkLg0KPiA+DQo+ID5Ud28gSXJpc2htZW4gbWV0IGFuZCBvbmUgc2FpZCB0 byB0aGUgb3RoZXIsICJIYXZlIHllIHNlZW4gTXVsbGlnYW4gPQ0KPiA+bGF0ZWx5LFBhdD8iIFBh dCBzYWlkLCAiV2VsbCwgSSBoYXZlIGFuZCBJIGhhdmVuJ3QuIiBIaXMgZnJpZW5kIGFza2VkLCA9 DQo+ID4iU2h1cmUsIGFuZCB3aGF0IGQneWUgbWVhbiBieSB0aGF0PyIgUGF0IHNhaWQsICJJdCdz IGxpa2UgdGhpcywgPQ0KPiA+eSdzZWUuLi5JIHNhdyBhIGNoYXAgd2hvIEkgdGhvdWdodCB3YXMg TXVsbGlnYW4sIGFuZCBoZSBzYXcgYSBjaGFwIHRoYXQgPQ0KPiA+aGUgdGhvdWdodCB3YXMgbWUu IEFuZCB3aGVuIHdlIGdvdCB1cCB0byBvbmUgYW5vdGhlci4uLml0IHdhcyBuZWl0aGVyIG9mID0N Cj4gPnVzLiI9MjANCj4gPg0KPiA+DQo+ID5UaGFuayB5b3UsDQo+ID5QYXRyaWNrDQo+IA0K ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:19:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: revised joke for billy mills In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I wish that everyone on the list could be as intelligent as David Bromige. That is how benevolent I feel toward humankind. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:38:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: ideas MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Brian - Would you mind saying a little to the list about what you mean by the term "ideas"? A while back you mentioned the opinion (possibly not yours?) that there may be a group of younger writers who lack ideas, and in your most recent post on the Atlantis poetry group, you also said something about the presence or absence of ideas. What I'm getting from these mentions of this term is a sort of litmus test for inclusion/exclusion--into and apart from what, I couldn't say. Since this inclusion/exclusion seems so much like the mechanism of taste (or judgment?) at work, though, could you also say something vis a vis possible connections and disjunctures between what you're calling ideas and what I might call things? (As you know, I myself would probably have had to report back to the good pediatrician: "No ideas there either!") If it turns out that ideas are things, and as such, are part of a lusciously catalogued consumer culture of their own, vell, vot then? Ahoy, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 15:29:19 -0500 Reply-To: Patrick Herron Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Organization: p r o x i m a t e Subject: defending poets MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 aGVsbG8gZnJpZW5kcyBhbmQgY3liZXJuZWlnaGJvcnMgLSANCg0KdGhpcyBhcGcsIHdpdGggdGhl IGxlbmd0aCBvZiBwb3N0cyBnb2luZyBhZnRlciBKYWNxdWVzJyBjcml0aXF1ZSwgaXMgc2VlbWlu ZyBtb3JlIGFuZCBtb3JlIGxpa2UgYSBNYWZpYS4gIChIb2xkIHVwLCBBUEcsIHRoaXMgaXMgIGEg c3Ryb25nIHN0YXRlbWVudCwgYnV0IHBsZWFzZSByZWFkIHRoaXMgYmVmb3JlIGZpcmluZyBvZmYg YW5vdGhlciBtaXNzaWxlIGRlZmVuc2UgbGF1bmNoLikgIE1hcmssIFRlZGQsICApb2huLCBpZiBh cGcgaXMgYSBsb29zZSBncm91cCB3aXRoIG5vdCBtdWNoIG9mIGFuIGFnZW5kYSwgd2h5IHRoZSBs b25nIGRlZmVuc2VzIG9mIGl0cyBwZW9wbGUsICB3aGF0IGZvciB0aGUgdmVyYm9zZSBleHBsYW5h bmRhPyAgSWYgeW91IGFyZSBqdXN0aWZpZWQgaW4gZXhpc3RpbmcsIHdoaWNoIHlvdSBhcmUsIGNh 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ICAgICAgICAgICB0aGF0IHRoZXJlIHdvdWxkIGJlIGFueXRoaW5nIGxlZnQgLS1mb3IgbWUtLSB0 byBzYXkgaW4gcmVzcG9uc2UNCj4gDQo+ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgdXNpbmcgYWNyb3N0aWNz DQo+ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgeW91IG1pZ2h0IGV2ZW4gZmluZCB0aGUgbmFtZSBvZiBnb2QN Cj4gDQo+ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgVEVERA0KPiANCj4gDQo+IC0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0t LS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tDQo+IEdldCBmcmVl IHBlcnNvbmFsaXplZCBlbWFpbCBmcm9tIEdURSBhdCBodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmd0ZW1haWwubmV0DQo+ IA0K ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:48:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Welcome Message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Welcome to the Poetics List & The Electronic Poetry Center .sponsored by The Poetics Program, Department of English, College of Arts & Science, the State University of New York, Buffalo /// Postal Address: Poetics Program, 438 Clemens Hall, SUNY Buffalo, NY 14260 Poetics List Moderator: Christopher W. Alexander Please address all inquiries to . Electronic Poetry Center: =3D Contents =3D 1. About the Poetics List 2. Subscriptions 3. Submissions 4. Cautions 5. Digest Option 6. Temporarily turning off Poetics mail 7. "No Review" Policy 8. The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) 9. Poetics Archives at EPC 10. Publishers & Editors Read This! ___________________________________________________________ Above the world-weary horizons New obstacles for exchange arise Or unfold, O ye postmasters! 1. About the Poetics List With the preceeding epigraph, the Poetics List was founded by Charles Bernstein in late 1993. Now in its second incarnation, the list carries over 750 subscribers worldwide, though all of these subscribers do not necessarily receive messages at any given time. A number of other people read the Poetics List via our web archives at the Electronic Poetry Center (see section 9 below). 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 is a =3Dfully moderated=3D list. Due to the increasing number of subscribers, we are no longer able to maintain the open format with which the list began (at under 100 subscribers). All submissions are reviewed by the moderator in keeping with the goals of the list, as articulated in this Welcome Message. We remain committed to this editorial function as a defining element of the Poetics List. 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. For further information on posting to the list, see section 5 below. Publishers and series co-ordinators, see also section 10. 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 for details. We recognize that other lists may sponsor other possibilities for exchange in this still-new medium. We request that those participating in this forum keep in mind the specialized and focussed nature of this project. For subscription information or to contact the editors, write to . ------------------- 2. Subscriptions Subscriptions to the Poetics List are free of charge, but formal registration is required. We ask that when you subscribe you provide your full name, street address, email address, and telephone number. All posts to the list should provide your full real name, as registered. If there is any discrepancy between your full name as it appears in the "from" line of the message header, please sign your post at the bottom. To subscribe to the Poetics List, please contact the editors at . Your message should include all of the required information. Please allow several days for your new or re-subscription to take effect. PLEASE NOTE: All subscription-related information and correspondence remains absolutely confidential. To unsubscribe, send this one-line message, with no "subject" line to : unsub poetics *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 receive mail from the Poetics List. To avoid this problem, unsub using your old address, then return to your new address and send this one-line message, with no "subject" line to : sub poetics Phil Spillway Remember to replace "Phil Spillway" with your own name. If you find that it is not possible to unsub using your old address, please contact the editors at for assistance. *Eudora users: if your email address has been changed, you may still be able to unsubscribe without assistance. Go to the "Tools" menu in Eudora, select "Options" and then select setup for "Sending Mail": you may be able to temporarily substitute your old address here to 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 increased quota from your system administrator. (University subscribers may wish to argue that this subscription is part of your scholarly communication!) You might also 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, you may re-subscribe to the list by contacting the list administrators at . All questions about subscriptions, whether about an individual subscription or subscription policy, should be addressed to the list's administrative address . Please note that it may take up to ten days, or more, for us to reply to messages. ------------------- 3. Submissions The Poetics List is a =3Dfully moderated=3D list. All submissions are reviewed by the editors in keeping with the goals of the list as articulated in this Welcome Message (see section 1). Please note that while this list is primarily concerned with poetics, messages relating to politics and political news or activism will also be considered. Other sorts of news or queries are welcome occasionally; please use "common sense" when posting and keep in mind that your message, if forwarded, will be distributed to 750+ persons the world over. Feel free to query if you are uncertain as to whether a message is appropriate. All correspondence with the editors regarding submissions to the list remains confidential and should be directed to us at . We encourage subscribers to post information on publications and reading series that they have coordinated, edited, published, or in which they appear. Such announcements constitute a core function of this list. Also welcome are other sorts of news, e.g., event reports, obituaries, and reading lists (annotated or not). Queries may be posted to the list when deemed appropriate; if responses are received backchannel and are of interest to the list (i.e., if they are on topic), we suggest that the posting subscriber may wish to assemble "highlights" from respondents' messages to be published to the list. Solicited submissions (by subscribers or non-subscribers) may also appear on Poetics from time to time. The editors reserve the right to contact any subscriber regarding possible submissions. Posts to the Poetics List should abide by the rules of "Fair Use" when quoting material for which the posting subscriber does not hold copyright. Please do not post to the list personal or "backchannel" correspondence, or other unpublished material, without the express permission of the author! If you want someone to send out information to the list as a whole, or supply information missing from an post, or want to thank someone for posting something you requested, please send the request or comment directly to that individual, and not to the list or to the list editors. Send messages to the list directly to the list address: Please do not send messages intended for posting to the list to our administrative address . When sending to the list, please send only "plain text". The use of "styled" text or HTML formatting in the body of messages sent to the list appears not to be compatible with the Listserv's automatic digest and archive features; as a result, inclusion of HTML tags disrupts the list archive and may have a similarly pernicious effect on the digest form of the list. Note, however, there is no problem with sending clickable URLs in HTML format. Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Communicator users take note! You may need to specify "plain text" or "ASCII text" in the outgoing messages section of your application Preferences. Check your application's Edit | Preferences or Help menus for further details. Please do not send attachments or include extremely long documents (1,000+ words) 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. Messages containing attachments will be presumed to be worm- or virus-carrying and will not be forwarded to the list. Like all machines, the listserver will sometimes be down: if you feel your message has been delayed or lost, *please wait at least one day to see if it shows up*, then check the archive to be sure the message is not posted there; if you still feel there is a problem, you may wish to contact the editors at . As an outside maximum, we will accept for publication to Poetics no more than 5 messages a day from any one subscriber; in general, we expect subscribers to keep their post to less than 10-15 posts per month. Our goal is a manageable list (manageable both for moderators and subscribers) of twenty or fewer messages per day. For further information or to contact the editors, please write to . ------------------- 4. Cautions It may take up to a week or more to respond to your questions or to subscription requests or to handle any other editorial business or any nonautomated aspect of list maintenance. Submissions to the list should be in ASC-II (text-only) format and should contain NO HTML TAGS! HTML tags interfere with the automatic digest and archive functions of the listserv program, and will not be forwarded to the list. Subscribers using Microsoft Outlook, Netscape Communicator and like applications to manage their email service should check the "Preferences" or "Options" section of the program in question to be sure that HTML formatting options are disabled before posting to the list. Attachments may not be sent to the Poetics List. Messages containing attachments will be presumed to be worm- or virus- carrying and will not be forwarded to the list. Please do not publish list correspondence 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". "Flame" messages will not be tolerated on the Poetics List. In this category are included messages gratuitously attacking fellow listees, also messages designed to "waste bandwidth" or cause the list to reach its daily limit. These messages are considered offensive and detrimental to list discussion. Please do not bother submitting such messages to the editor. Offending subscribers will receive only one warning message. Repeat offenders will be removed from the list immediately. Please do not put this policy to test! ------------------- 5. Digest Option The Listserve program gives you the 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, with no "subject" line to : set poetics digest You can switch back to individual messages by sending this message: set poetics mail NOTE!! Send these messages to "listserv" not to Poetics or as a reply to this Welcome Message!! ------------------- 6. 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 this one-line message, with no "subject" line, to : set poetics nomail You may re-activate your poetics subscription by sending this one-line message, with no "subject" line, to the same address: set poetics mail When you return you can check or download missed postings from the Poetics archive. (See section 8 below.) ------------------- 7. "No Review" policy For the safety and security of list subscribers, the "review" function of the Poetics List has been de-activated. Non-posting subscribers' email addresses will remain confidential. Please do not ask the list editors to give out subscriber addresses or other personal information. ------------------- 8. What is the Electronic Poetry Center? The World Wide Web-based Electronic Poetry Center is located at . Our mission is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the United States and around the world. The Center provides access to the burgeoning electronic resources in new poetries including RIF/T and many other electronic poetry journals, the POETICS List archives, an AUTHOR library of electronic poetic texts and bibliographies, 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. ------------------- 9. Poetics Archives at the EPC Go to the Electronic Poetry Center and select the "Poetics" link from the opening screen. Follow the links to Poetics Archives. Or set your browser to go directly to . You may browse the Poetics List archives by month and year or search them for specific information. Your interface will allow you to print or download any of these files. ------------------- 10. Publishers & Editors Read This! PUBLISHERS & EDITORS: The Electronic Poetry Center 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 for our users and ENCOURAGE you to participate! Send a list of your press/publications to , 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 or 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. You might also 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 MSG ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 09:48:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Remembering Lori Berenson Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" From: MARBB@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Mark Berenson) To All Supporters of Lori Berenson This is day 1,507 of wrongful incarceration LORI'S HUNGER STRIKE The Peruvian prison authorities have announced, and the U.S. Embassy has confirmed, that Lori began a hunger strike on Tuesday morning, January 11th, the day that we were holding vigils across the country to protest her wrongful imprisonment. No one should be surprised that Lori decided to commence a hunger strike on the 11th of January -- after all, it was the fourth anniversary of her unjust conviction and sentence to life imprisonment. She is innocent and this wrongful act is something that is uppermost in her daily thoughts. Although the Peruvian media indicated today that Lori made demands upon the prison system, we want you to know that this is not true. The written statement Lori gave to the prison director makes no such demands. In it she confirms her commitment to human rights and outlines the violations of fundamental rights in the Peruvian prison system including complete isolation and the physical, moral, and psychological destruction of the prisoner. As Lori's parents, while we are not surprised, we are very anxious about her health, which is already impaired and undermined by spending these past four years under extremely harsh and debilitating conditions. We respect her courage and her commitment to her beliefs to help the poor, and end injustice and suffering. Rhoda and Mark Berenson Information about Lori can be found on the Web at the following new site: WWW.FREELORI.ORG/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 21:27:34 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Kuszai Subject: CALL, by Liz Waldner, New from Meow Press Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" New from Meow Press: Call by Liz Waldner 32 pages 5x7" with color printed cover plates of a photo by the author $6.00 Now available. http://www.sunbrella.net/meowpress/waldner.html ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 18:04:04 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Freedman Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Freedman Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > I think, the post should > allow all jokes, including the Jewish, the Black, the Polish, the Irish, the > gay, etc., etc. Did ever a joke exist that was not at somebody's expense? > > For a group of poets who put such a stock on experimentation and linguistic > edge, which this list claims to be, I am truly amazed by the number of posts > which contain apologies or requests for apologies or avowals of errors, etc. > Murat Nemet-Nejat Well, finally a post that I fully understand, but I must ask if Murat Nemet-Nejat is a representative of one of the first few groups--or any of the ones he pulled out of the air. To have left his group out would have been a perfect example of why it's sometimes a good idea to be "politically correct." If he is represented on that list, I'm tempted to offer an apology, but he would prefer not to receive one. And "etc." does not qualify! Bob Freedman ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:05:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Taylor Brady Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" In-Reply-To: <6d.61de42.25b0c4f1@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "As someone just struggling with the rudimentaries of computers/web, I am stunned by this proliferation of technical language. (Unlike Taylor, in my puberty, I was struggling with my bird and the b's)." Actually, in puberty I struggled with crystal meth and police curfews, along with the birds and bees you mention - more like fried chicken and mosquitoes, though, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Computer and web didn't surface as issues for me until my unfinished stint in grad school, and then only in the most irresponsibly amateurish way. So now that I have my jargon of authenticity in place, maybe I can address your concerns about my inauthentic jargon in a more substantive manner. First, it's entirely possible that I just wasn't being clear - I usually post to the list on my lunch break, and in my rush to send something off, I've caught myself more than once gravitating too easily toward a kind of notational shorthand that generates all sorts of misunderstandings. If this is what happened, I apologize (suspect etiquette though that may be). That said, I want to make it clear that if I'm not (clear, that is), I might respond better to a request for clearer writing on the subject than the quick recourse to an anti-egghead invidious comparison. Hey, just because I'm a poet it doesn't necessarily follow that I'm a good writer. If it's not coming across it's not coming across, and I'll be the first in the mea culpa line. (Which is like a conga line, but rhythm is frowned upon and no one touches anyone else). To move on from that, this question of technical language, specialist knowledge, etc., touches more meaningfully on the question you raise in the following sentences: My sense is that experimentation is being equated with mastery of techniques. I think this is an error. The opposite is true. Art is created through one's medium's resistance to one's vision, through some kind of failure of the medium. Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art power creates. Let's disregard doubts about that slide from "experimentation" to the more generalist "art" - I don't think all art is equivalent to experiment, but I'll certainly confess an interest in what's been described as "experimental art," and I'd be willing (provisionally) to describe antiorp's project as such, so it'll work in the present context. Which leaves us with "art is resistance in the materials," or whatever the precise quote is. And let's leave aside those instances in which that might (_might_) not be an adequate description: say, in the case of ambient music, or Tan Lin's writing which emulates some of its methods. (Thanks for the reminder, Jacques). Certainly antiorp's project seems, on the face of it, to be about shock, resistances, grinding gears, etc. And, sure, I Iike William Morris, even if his reliance on Ruskin's idealization of the Gothic as a jumping-off point in his own thinking seems a bit dubious as an aesthetics or a politics after the intervening hundred and thirty or so years. Alternately, I like Kathy Acker, and your proposal of the value of failure sounds like her "weight-trainer's" aesthetics, in which she likens one of her writing tactics to lifting, which isolates a muscle group in order to work it to the point of failure. (Anyone remember what essay or interview that's from?) Already here, though, the relationship between mastery and failure gets more complicated, since the weight trainer's set toward her activity is one of mastery (ideally, at least) desiring and practicing its own failure. Which would make of mastery, in some sense, both medium and technique at different moments in such a practice. And that perhaps positions us well to consider the antiorp entity's project. Whatever else you might say about the Internet, as a medium it's fairly saturated with issues of mastery - hell, of rule outright. From state sponsorship of its development, to the increasing corporatization (and even, in my opinion, emergent corporate-statism, i.e., fascism) of many of its polities, to the complex undergirding of technical, specialist intellectual labor that maintains a certain inaccessibility in the "how" of its various (comparartively few, really) interfaces. (I don't want to exaggerate this inaccessibility - it's true, as you imply, that there's been something of a generational shift, to the extent that my teenage brother pretty much does "breathe in" computer operation and web design as part of a normal public-school ambience. By the same token, though, I wouldn't want to minimize it - there are a lot of people, perhaps, who learn things like Java and C++ just for the hell of it, but they sure ain't a majority, even among computer users, most of whom operate within default systems as a simple necessity of _getting things done,_ however you want to parse that). This sense that basic questions of interface and access are shot through with domination is the background against which antiorp's project emerges. And I guess for me, the question of whether it's good or bad art hinges on whether it fulfills, or suggests, even, some means to break through that scrim of domination, or some way of reconceiving it to give the work a certain "margin" in which to move. I'm not particularly interested in whether or not it's art _as such,_ though others might find that a more compelling question. This is where my discomfort with the work emerges: antiorp's use of exaggerated gestures of control, informational secrecy, inflexible defaults, "the revenge of the technician," etc., etc., is very successful in calling attention to how such things function on the Internet. At the same time, they often seem to me hard to distinguish from the "ambient" (that word, again) characteristics of power and rule that saturate the medium with or without antiorp's intervention. So is this a breakthrough or a breakdown? I don't have an answer, and didn't post in the presumption that I'd be finding one anytime soon. My experience with this work is still very tentative - comparison would be with certain musics it takes a while to "hear." Cecil Taylor was disjointed flailing to my 13-year-old ears, but by 18, and at the repeated insistence of a weird uncle, I'd discovered depths of lyricism there I'd never previously suspected. Hearing Xenakis for the first time was like getting punched in the head over and over again - now it's more like the not-quite-unpleasant sensation of a really intense all-over acupuncture session. Not to be glib about it, but I'm still processing this work. So my posting wasn't meant to imply, "Hey, this stuff is where it's at," but rather "Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?" This sense of there being something at stake in the present tense is operative, for me, in the wonderfully uncertain syntax of your sentence, quoted above, and here again: Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art power creates. Is that inversion? Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art, power creates. or hypenation? Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art-power creates. Thanks for the questions, Taylor, aka Mr. Jones -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU] On Behalf Of Murat Nemet-Nejat Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 10:29 AM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" "Much of the work is verbally pretty crude (might you guess from the URL?), and doesn't really fit within "poetry" even as a digitally-altered category - but the engagement of an "interface poetics," manipulating the visceral responses to the vocabularies of indecipherable error messages...." As someone just struggling with the rudimentaries of computers/web, I am stunned by this proliferation of technical language. (Unlike Taylor, in my puberty, I was struggling with my bird and the b's). My sense is that experimentation is being equated with mastery of techniques. I think this is an error. The opposite is true. Art is created through one's medium's resistance to one's vision, through some kind of failure of the medium. Of course, mastery of technique may achieve power, and a certain kind of art power creates. In Chinese history, it seems, the ability to read and write separated the haves from the have-nots. The result: a rulership by scribes, hierarchy of document handlers and a poetic evolution of infininitesimal (what is called subtle) variations. Here is my bit on the ongoing joke debate. First, I found the Irish joke really funny and hadn't really heard it before. I think, the post should allow all jokes, including the Jewish, the Black, the Polish, the Irish, the gay, etc., etc. Did ever a joke exist that was not at somebody's expense? For a group of poets who put such a stock on experimentation and linguistic edge, which this list claims to be, I am truly amazed by the number of posts which contain apologies or requests for apologies or avowals of errors, etc. With a friend of mine I tried to construct a joke which has no referrable "butt." My friend thinks it isn't funny; I think it is. What's your opinion? Here is the joke: Two cockroaches were walking along together. Suddenly, one of them turned and stepped on the other one, squashing it. The first one cried, "Jesus, stop it, what are you doing?" The other said, "Shut up, you are in no position to talk." Perhaps we can start a tanka of non-referrable jokes? Murat Nemet-Nejat ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 07:44:13 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Fatigue and Cynicism In-Reply-To: <20000114213906.13307.qmail@web803.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" yes and no. the root of the word "shaman" is "to exhaust or fatigue" --in the sense of having had to go through something, some liminally and fundamentally existentially exhausting experience --at the same time, i agree that fatigue in the sense of being a single working mother etc etc is prohibitive of the kind of excess energy needed to create what the straight world calls "art".... At 1:39 PM -0800 1/14/00, Marla Jernigan wrote: >Dear Poetics List, > >Steve Evans, quotes Peter Gizzi (Sorry, but I don't >know either of these folks) "the heart of poetry is >fatigue" and then adds, "This not only seems, but is, >true--until a poem proves it false." > >And I guess I'm thankful that poems are so constantly >proving this false. In my life, fatigue, rather than >the heart of poetry, feels like the single most >serious obstacle to it. I can hardly read at night >when I get off work, but at breakfast, it's poetry >time! > >Mr. Evans says many other things of course, but I just >wanted to put in my thought about fatigue. A "frisky" >thought? > >And of cynicism, I don't know. Louis Cabri asked "Can >cynicism be a productive affect?" Maybe in life. My >cynicism has probably helped me see through some >bullshit that has come my way. But then I know that >I've missed out on some things on account of being >suspicious and cynical. But cynicism in poetry? It >seems like it would deaden my desire for poetry, just >as it makes the world less luminous, squashing it's >chances. Being cynical don't we have to say, "I know >what that's really about" about most of our world, >never trusting the sparkle that something might have, >surprising you , from the corner of your eye? > >Sincerely, Uncynically and Just Awakened, > >Marla > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. >http://im.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 20:46:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: Re: Questions on the APG MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit BRIAN (USING CAPS NOT TO SCREAM BUT DIFERENTIATE . . . ) However, nonetheless a lot of text is produced by writers associated with the APG, much of it quite syntactically elegant and carefully composed, but rarely to I get a sense, in reading it, of what this private language is. Another way of looking at private is to use this useful term which I found in the writings of the only philosopher I've talked about on this list (so I'll skip his name, because I want you to think I'm an interesting guy), which is "redescriptive." How is what the APG is doing in terms of poetry and theory redescriptive? And if it's not redescriptive, or if there is no concern with this, then why all the text? I HAVE MENTIONED BEFORE THAT I AM NOT MUCH A PHILOSOPHER AND DON'T TYPICALLY THINK 'PHILOSOPHICLY' ESPECIALLY WHEN I WRITE . . . I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH 'REDESCRIPTIVE' AND IF NOT WHY THEN WRITE . . . I THINK THIS IS INTERESTING . . . BUT NOT SURE WHERE IT GOES OR HOW IT APPLIES TO ME OR MY WRITING AND I WOULD PREFER TO DISCUSS HOW IT APPLIES TO ME OR LET'S SAY JOHN AND IT MAY APPLY TO JOHN AND NOT TO ME AND WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE THE APG? I hope you don't think I mean that you shouldn't write, or try to work these issues out publicly -- this would be a first, anyway, a group of poets working out their self-identity publicly, in a quasi-hostile or critical field, and I'm always in for some good history -- and quite often what you write is interesting. But much of what I read from that corner concerning this issue tends to have a few qualities which raise an tiny alarm in me, such as 1) high volume, 2) somewhat undialogic aspect, and 3) self-reflexive, or defensive, in a "personal" way. With this last point, I mean only that the undercurrent of the writing seems to be a justification for the APG calling themselves poets at all, as opposed to stating claims for particular aesthetic properties I BELIEVE I CAN ONLY REPLY TO THE LAST POINT OF ALARM: I WAS HESITANT TO POST MY RESPONSE TO jd BECAUSE I FEEL-AND THIS IS ONLY ME TALKING HERE-THAT JD HAS A PERSONAL PROBLEM TO WORK OUT WITH APG THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE POINTS HE WANTS TO DISCUSS ARE NOT VALID BUT THAT THEY IN THEMSELVES HAVE AN AGENDA I MEAN WHY MENTION THE APG IN THE POST REGARDING CAREERISM HE COULD HAVE MADE A CLEAR POINT WITHOUT "US" THIS SEEMS STRANGE TO ME AND WHY LEAVE OUT JOHN AND MARK WHILE COMMENTING ON MIRAGE? I WOULD LIKE TO FORCE THESE ISSUES A LITTLE AND MY ONLY CONCERN IS LOOKING LIKE AN ASS DOING IT WHICH I MIGHT HAVE ALREADY DONE . . . BU THEN AGAIN I CAN CONTAIN MULTITUDES One thing that I ask, concerning the work that I have seen: is there anything in the form that resists the completion or continuation of the work, or is it possible to just continue writing consistently and endlessly? I.e. where is the sense of doubt that so many poets, such as Valery and Hopkins and Williams, seemed to have about form that inhibited writing rather than produced it? Or is this doubt necessary (Cage might say no), and is that a concept of the APG? I STRUGGLE WITH THIS ISSUE AS I STRUGGLE WITH THE CONCEPT OF THE 'ORIGINAL' I HAVE FOUND THAT THOUGH IM CONCERNED WITH 'FORM' I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS AND THEREFORE IT DOES NOT INHIBIT MY WRITING JUST AS I DON'T KNOW WHAT 'ORIGINALITY' IS SO I JUST WRITE AND I THINK ABOUT IT A GREAT DEAL AND HAVE EXPRESSED MY THOUGHTS ABOUT 'ORIGINALITY' AND 'QUALITY' WITH PEOPLE IN ATLANTA BUT HAVE STRESSED THAT IT DOES NOT INHIBIT ANYTHING IM NOT SURE THAT IT IS NECESSARY EITHER . . . SO ALL I KNOW IS THAT I KNOW NOTHING I SUPPOSE I DON'T KNOW (AND WASN'T THAT KIND OF SILLY) HOW THIS ALL APPLIES TO THE APG I HOPE TO LET JACQUES FIGURE THAT OUT I GUESS I guess I'm trying to justify Jacques assertions about the APG's relationship to the language school -- which I think were a bit crude but not entirely, since forceful rhetoric can be absorbed in ways that are helpful, I feel, and he's generally a very responsible commentator so I give him the benefit of the doubt. SEE HERE I AM HONESTLY TOO INEXPERIENCED TO COMMENT AND FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND THERE IS CONFUSION ON WHAT LANGUAGE POETRY IS AND WHO LANGUAGE POETS ARE - I STILL REALLY DON'T KNOW - BUT IF JACQUES HAS A CLEAR VISION THEN LET HIM PROPHECY I GUESS BUT IM NOT SURE WHAT HIS AUTHORITY OR HOW HE OBTAINED AUTHORITY ON THE APG - AND IM NOT BEING IRONICLAL OR NASTY-BUT DO YOU? Randy Prunty, for example, has posed some meaningful, well-stated questions to Jacques -- but why all this reliance on Jacques point of view, and why addresses only to him? I FOR ONE AM WAITING FOR JACQUES RESPONSES TO RANDY AND OTHERS AND AM VERY INTERESTED IN THEM THAT IS ONE OF THE REASONS I POSTED JACQUES FASCINATES ME . . . I MEAN REALLY WHY MENTION THE APG? IM STILL CONFUSED? TEDD -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 21:25:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: Re: defending poets Comments: To: Patrick Herron MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit HELLO PATRICK (AGAIN USING CAPS JUST TO DIFERINTIATE) with the length of posts going after Jacques' critique, is seeming more and more like a Mafia. (Hold up, APG, this is a strong statement, but please read this before firing off another missile defense launch.) WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MAFIA ALWAYS WANTED TO BE ITALIAN-IM A JEW THOUGH AND THEY WOULDN'T LET ME IN . . . Mark, Tedd, )ohn, if apg is a loose group with not much of an agenda, why the long defenses of its people, what for the verbose explananda? If you are justified in existing, which you are, can you not accept the criticism of apg for what it is? SEVERAL THINGS ON MY END HERE I PERSONALLY DON'T HAVE AN AGENDA WITH THE APG OUTSIDE OF ENJOYING POETRY -DISCUSSION READING WRITING USW - IM NOT SURE THAT I HAVE DEFENDED ITS EXISTENCE THAT IT EXISTS SURE BUT WHAT IS IT - DO YOU KNOW - I ONLY KNOW WHAT IT IS TO ME - WHICH SEEMS MUCH DIFFERENT THAN WHAT IT IS TO JACQUES - IT DOES NOT SEEM A THING TO ACCEPT CRITICISM - I MEAN IT REALLY ISN'T A THING TO ME - IT IS PEOPLE - A GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS I ENJOY SPEDING TIME WITH ON OCCASION AND WRITING WITH ON OCCASION - THAT I AM A CAREERIST SEEMS ABSURD TO ME - SURE I COULD LET IT GO - BUT WHY NOT WRITE ABOUT IT I would expect that you must understand the positive and negative implications of your efforts. I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS WHAT IS THE NEGATIVE SIDE TO MY WRITING WOULD I BE RESPONSIBLE IF IT STARTED A WAR? I VIEW SOME JACQUES STATEMENTS AS ABSURD IN THEIR APPLICATION TO MYSELF I DON'T FIND THEM NEGATIVE . . . THEY ARE AFTER ALL JUST OPINIONS - AND PARTS OF MY HOPES THAT HE REALIZES THAT THEY ARE JUST OPINIONS But there is something clear about careerism in general that is a valid sentiment, one that I do agree with Jacques very highly, YES BUT IS THIS SOMETHING THAT EVERY POET IS-A CAREERIST? even if it does mean I am treading on being a contradictory human being. (I actually believe we are all hypocrites, and acknowledging our own hypocrisy is the first step towards minimizing hypocrisy.) AHMEN BROTHER Some of us have this "romantic fantasy" that poetry is or should be some kind of safe haven from the ugliness of capital culture. I RESPECT THIS BUT DO NOT SYMPATHISE WITH IT I believe half-wittedly such a fantasy because such poets and those in love with poetry of such poets will not compromise their love of poetry itself even if it leaves poets and critics with the want of friends or the want of a list of publications. IM NOT TOO CONCERNED WITH PUBLICAITONS We are all perhaps a bit careerist just by being on this list. THIS IS SOMETHING I DON'T THINK ABOUT - I JOINED THE LIST -SOMETIMES IM NOT SURE WHY - ONE IS BECAUSE I KNEW SILLIMAN WAS ON IT AND WAS INTERESTED IN WHAT HE HAD TO WRITE - IVE ONLY READ TONER AND ENJOYED IT A GREAT DEAL - BUT TO JOIN THE LIST WITH THOUGHTS OF ADVANCING A CAREER - I DON'T GET THIS - MAYBEY OTHERS DO - FROM WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT ME - AND IM MEAN ME PERSONLALLY - WHATEVER THAT MEANS RIGHT - AM I ADVANCING A CAREER - HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OF MY WORK? But keeping the careerism to a minimum is perhaps a pretty good thing to support. I THINK THIS SOMETHING I DO I think Jacques was at least trying to do that, to minimize the stink. I HAVE PROBLEMS HERE ALSO-IF I WAS A CAREERIST I WOULD BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT IT-WHY STINK?-MY PROBLEM IS THAT I DON'T THINK OF HAVING A CAREER IN POETRY-I HAVE A GENUINE INTEREST IN THE PEOPLE ON THE LIST-AMAZING BUT TRUE I GUESS-AND IM FEELING A BIT NAÏVE-AND I THINK THAT SUCKS A rationalization of careerism in the realm of poetry seems like deciding to deal smack to children just because you know some of these kids will one day take opium anyway. (The APG defense of careerism argument seems of the same logical form. I just use extreme values for my X's and Y's to drive my points home. I hope the logical form is not lost.) NOPE RIGHT WITH YOU . The reality of our time is, well, is that there's a power structure here, an _included_ and an _excluded_, as epitomized in part by Henry's removal, epitomized in part by the apg defense of careerism, which seems to me evidence of a will to form a political structure which strikes me as Mafioso mind. Mafia, yes. WHERE IS THERE A POWER STRUCTURE WHO IS INCLUDED AND EXCLUDED? OH I SEE HENRY-DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HENRY G EXCEPT THAT HE IS NOW GONE AND APPARANTLY WAS A LITTLE TO FORCEFUL WITH HIS WORDS . . . Some people are powerful in the world of poetry, oftentimes through no efforts of their own to possess that position of power. I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THIS ALSO-WHAT IS A DEFINITION OF POWER-AND WHAT IS POWER OVER POETRY-THE ONLY THING THAT WILL STOP ME WRITING IS DEATH-AND THAT IS ALL THAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME-HAVE YOU READ THE VARIOUS COLLECTIONS OF WRITING-SOME OF THE MOST MOVING FROM CHILDREN--THAT CAME OUT OF THE GHETTOS DURING THE BIG ii-MAYBE THIS POWER APPLIES TO THOSE PURSUING A CAREER IN POETRY-WHAT ABOUT THOSE THAT ARE NOT? Poetry seems for me at its root _individual expression_, a "damn what other people think about what I'm saying and how I'm saying it." ALL RIGHT . . . And the desire to share poetry is contradictory (hypocritical?) on that aspect, at least superficially, but on another aspect poetry is a blessing, a gift of individual expression which demands by its own virtue to be shared. PREACH ON . . . But write poetry for yourself, be true to your own passions, even if the expressions of such passions and reasons fly in the face of established aesthetics, even if no one likes the poetry. WHAT IS AN ESTABLISHED AESTHETIC AND WHY SHOULD IT INFLUENCE ANYONE? or a reminder that I'm not a poet worthy of the _power and glory_ of such a list. WHY THIS STATEMENT? I have looked for mentorship and inspiration and camaraderie. I am young on the poetry scale and feel I have so much to learn about writing, about poetry. Sadly, I have learned on POETICS that mentorship and inspiration and camaraderie are all rare (or nonexistent but oft rumored) stones in a field of rocks. HMM . . . THAT IS WHAT I GET FROM MY ASSOCIATION WITH THE APG-CAMARADERIE-AND IF YOU MEAN BY MENTORSHIP-EXPOSURE TO DIFFERENT POETS AND POETICS-THEN LET IT BE MENTORSHIP--BUT NOT THAT REALLY-ATLANTA IS NOT THE CITY IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE IN MANY ASPECTS IT IS NOT A CITY AT ALL AND THE APG IS VERY MUCH AN ANOMOLY-THERE IS JUST NOT MUCH POETRY IN ATLANTA . . . Do not try to solicit my response if I am fortunate enough that this has even been read thus far; you will not receive my retort, as I have none. Hmm AGAIN . . . "The crowd erupts with a roar!" If I do respond, I pray someone sink me fathoms below, grant me saturated soggy sea-lungs and leave me gill-less in the murk. MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SET OF CRABLEGGS SCUTTLING UPON THE OCEAN FLOOR? I ask that poets share their poetry here as well as their poetics more frequently, and also that our more able poets share their gifts and curses with us here in this space. AS FOR A POEM -MY NEXT POST WILL BE A POEM I JUST FINISHED--FOR WHAT IT IS WORTH: tedd -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 10:17:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: (?) Xonnets for the Buffalist In-Reply-To: <5D5C5C8C3A41D211893900A024D4B97CBAD562@md2.facstaff.oglethorpe.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" i think john lowther's comments to the effect that language poetry is what language poets write---while on the surface a tautology---is actually one of the more perceptive observations i've seen on this topic... while it doesn't exactly unpack what formal attributes may be at work in the work of this so-named (ever-increasing?) cluster of writers, it suggests that these writers, once understood as a group (historically, critically), produce work that is understood as same *poetically*... i *do* think that one may identify specific poetic attributes of language poetry-writing (else, a whole lot of valuable formal critique out there wouldn't, well, work)... at the same time, as i remarked in a prior post, the critical-creative nexus that seems to have followed the language poet-writers since their inception as such itself contributes (to put it mildly) to the reception of said work (whether individually, or as above, en masse)... little surprise then, right? that as the work spreads out over time, over region, and through institutions, it will likely sacrifice its local (ha) cachet to more various readings... which leads me to this hotly contested controversy over the apg---criticism of which latter seems to me at this point to be largely a matter of innuendo... hate to disappoint you critical eyes & ears out there, but i continue to be nonplussed at remarks which, by design, seem to be putting apg-ers on the defensive---and there was clearly another way to have begun what looks now, via brian stefans's recent post, to be simply a "please clarify your poetics" request... patrick herron's post is doubly confusing (sorry patrick), in that i didn't hear a defense of "careerism" in the various apg-ers' response to the charge of careerism (if not "charge," then insinuation)---rather, i heard an attempt to deny that such & so *were* in fact careerist in any but the more, uh, titular sense of the latter (i.e., epiphenomenally)... which denial would *seem* to have been validated somewhat by the ensuing jacques/louis exchange on "cynicism" (which term might be understood differently too)... and as to patrick's comments re things poetic over and against (i take it) this list: there's a great line from the (incredibly macho) flick, _emperor of the north_, "you got the juice, but not the heart"... sometimes i feel this way about things around here in general... but that's another digression... in any case, re the apg situation, i have an, uhm, idea (i mean, for you apg-er's), esp. as i've noted that 'apg' appears occasionally hereabouts as 'agp': why not switch around a few of those letters?... i think "gap" would be nice, as would "gpa" (i'm a prof, after all)... me, i'd shy away from 'pga' (not much for golf, yknow)... and of course 'gap' or 'gpa' might suggest a sublimely parodic oppositional stance vis-a-vis our acronym-infested, globally commodified, institutionally saturated 'globe of frogs' (which *was* one of the proposed poetic contortions, no?)... well anyway, just an idea... barring which, here's another idea: can we PLEASE start the apg thread all over again?... pretty please?... /// best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 12:44:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Re: Questions on the APG MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brian writes: <> Actually, this is exactly the way I feel about *my* own critical writing & poetry--I can't even justify its existence to myself (which is one reason I've found all of the posts addressed to me--both back & front channel--a little ridiculous). But I've been thinking that, if, in the 1950s, it was supremely admirable for O'Hara to have had, as Koch says about him, "a way of feeling and acting as though being an artist were the most natural thing in the world," today I'm almost convinced that this is the least sympathetic thing you could say about someone. Rather than over-compensating for one's alienation though, I think it might be interesting to write out of this feeling. Poetry, as Standard Schaefer recently said to me, is always in some way about failure. & I, myself, am interested in the possibility of exploring stupidity, boredom, bad taste, etc., etc., as qualities that poetry might creatively explore. Brian, I think you yourself do this in "Pretentious Picturea"--a work I've already mentioned. Bill Luoma would be someone else--particularly in "My Trip to New York"--a poem which, besides so blatantly self-promoting the fact of self-promotion itself finally implodes--is also written in such an incredibly & wonderfully dumb --yet sophisticated-- way that poetic "stardom" begins to seem like the most mundane & boring thing imaginable. Of the 3 blurbs on the back cover of _Works & Days_, only Ben Friedlander seems to have a handle on what Luoma is doing--the others compare him to Thoreau (!) or minimalism and so on--so despite what Alice Notely characterizes as the book's "readibility" (on the level of the signifier) like Tan Lin's work, there is also an illegibility on other interpretive levels. & Louis, perhaps, too, it would be interesting & valuable to explore the latent possibilities of *disengagement* --but w/ as much creativity as someone like yourself has brought to your *engagement* in the poetry scene (the example of Duchamp perhaps? or Valery?). I mean, I suppose, I've begun to feel that the word "community" in our discourse is actually *concealing* a lot of things. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 21:32:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: a poem: s MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit i have inserted / to indicate line breaks (i fear that it will be re-formated) s/ does the s/ a serpent/ also plural/ itself/ something apocryphal/ an apocryphal know-/ the landscape we approached and the-/ ledge we thought we knew/ well enough to believe in/ the primacy of letters/ and a city of im-itations-mortals/ an encyclopedic Mimi-r before Ygdrasil pi-/ cking branches/ i think you called knowledge/ a giant/ but wisdom is wet/ and yields not to the swing of an axe/ and roots of language/ in the sense of tributaries/ are fuliginous waters/ blind as homeric eyes/ or remembrances/ * when the s/ grabs its tail/ does that reproach touch/ * when i touched the tributary/ i did not know it was a tributary/ i am no cartographer of the mind/ * when you minded the warmness of the water/ did you take mental notes/ or where your hands feverish/ * the bulls are red fired/ and the vases have been figured/ and the bases have been signed/ cryptic and the mountains are declivitous/ the distance thought you would stroll not scale/ distance made language seem peneplain/ a land to lionize with ease/ * the distance made you laugh/ * the laugh made you distant/ * the water was tainted with nepenthe/ when i went to drink/ you forgot my name / and the name of the pendragon/ you hid in an ancient grotto/ * it was there i first etched/ the name of god/ a bull/ * or was it a foul/ whose name i have now forgotten/ s -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 11:06:36 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: web poetry review In-Reply-To: <387E223C.33115139@pacbell.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" thanks for checking out the suggestion; and so thoroughly. i'm sorry you had trouble with the mechanics of the poem, because these bumps in the journey unsettle the immersive power of multimedia/hypermedia/cyber/poetry, you cannot be drawn into a piece if you are constantly being reminded of its construction. At 11:06 AM 1/13/00 -0800, >Catherine Daly >cadaly@pacbell.net wrote: >The way we imagine poetry >could look, or what we see when we read it -- has that been so subject to scrutiny >before? i don't think so, placing poetry into cyberspace is making us look at all aspects of poetry and making me realise that the publishing of poetry onto paper and organising that into a book, is only one possible way of actualizing poetry, that there are many other ways of actualizing poetry, in spoken word performance, on the world wide web, on cd-rom, on records and videos, in dance and music. that, in fact, poetry describes a process rather than a product and is more virtual than actual. komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 11:16:54 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: web work... In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" "one of the key issues raised in such artistic fusions (if you will) is that of collaboration.." joe amato "one of the more hopeful realities of the online world is that it can bring together various artists even as it brings together (whether more peacefully or through outright collision) various arts..." joe amato i would have to agree with these statements joe, as this list can be proof of, at times. i'm reading pierre levy, "becoming virtual", plenum press, 1998, at the moment and he argues for a collective intelligence developing through/on/via/ the web. interesting stuff. komninos zervos. komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 10:10:10 +0200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT Subject: Cobbing interview in Swedish MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I've done an interview with Bob cobbing, not yet published, written in Swedish, which I can backchannel to anyone who's interested. -fredrik hertzberg ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 03:30:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 12 Jan 2000 to 14 Jan 2000 (#2000-11) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Much of the work is verbally pretty crude (might you guess from the URL?), > and doesn't really fit within "poetry" even as a digitally-altered > category - but the engagement of an "interface poetics," manipulating the > visceral responses to the vocabularies of indecipherable error messages, > nonstandard browser behavior, random redirects, etc., is pretty compelling, > at least as a suggestion for some of the technical lexicon available to such > a practice. Yes. Mezflesque.exe or Mez Mary Anne Breeze, is doing exciting writing that seems to have in part come out of the net-art linguistic reconfigurations I saw in cw4t7abs's work (different though) and see to some extent in some other net art. There's quite a range of that, from Ted Warnell's work (http://warnell.com); Mark Napier's (http://potatoland.org); the work at http://hell.com; to Jodi's work (http://jodi.org); and to Mez's work (anybody have urls for Mez's work?). Helps if you have good audio capabilities, as, last I checked, > bursts of shrieking noise were a favored tactic. Not sure yet what to do > with =cw4t7abs' habit of adopting some of the thematics of a kind of > techno-fascism in what seems to be an opposition to that politics as a > program - though certainly there's a whole troubled modernist heritage of > that sort of thing, and more recently (probably more relevantly for > =cw4t7abs) the fascisized aesthetic of much anti-fascist punk and industrial > music. As punk/industrial blares, so does this work glare. And there's a speed thing that accompanies it as well, quickly changing screen flashing with text and image through a range of destroyed stuff from various sources: chopped ASCII computer output through human writing; political propaganda; the salesman's hype; email... more...quite a range of concerns. Nothing 'finished' in either sense, usually, instead an emphasis on a quick stream of juxtapositions and mixing it all up. In a sense, this work is familiar from punk and industrial. Jodi has been the most high profile, I suppose, of these artists. It is in some sense an extension of punk and industrial. But it introduces science fiction and the whole mess of the web. It draws intelligently on the content available on the Web and otherwise digitally toward a deeper articulation of that sensibility. Not that it's the same sensibility exactly; we're talking heavy duty geeks here, down and dirty in javascript and java and video and the whole digital gamut of programming and image/sound/text manipulation. But it shares in the high energy of punk and industrial and in fascination and repugnance with technology and what is done with it. It is loud and proud about freedom but shares everyone's apprehensions also about what that word means. It is angrily anti-corporate and well networked. I wonder when etoys.com realized that they could not have played into etoy.com's program any better than to try to claim ownership of their domain name? etoy.com is a very amusing and intelligent net-art collaboration, but they were never so mobilized and effective as recently defending their existence against a corporation. Good on them. We're talking about people putting themselves passionately at some risk, 'become the machine' as you point out, in the case of antiorp. So there's the self-destructive element of punk there also. People worried not only about what the world is via the machine but what they themselves are becoming in this full artistic dive into the machine. Uncertainty about that, at this point, perhaps, as with many of us. And the emphasis on speed glosses over some of these things. One thing though. There was a time for poetry when it wasn't clear that the best minds were pursuing it any more. But with the immersion of poetry into the digital, and the destruction of the boundaries between what poetry is, once and for all, and the other arts and programming and the whole digital culture, the brightest are diving deeply into poetics of digital culture. There's a Videodrome-ish "become-the-machine" thing going on in this > work that's disquieting, to say the least... My own work is not particularly net-artish, but I do recognize the strength of this work. Jim Andrews http://vispo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 13:56:41 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lawrence Upton Comments: To: british-poets-digest@mailbase.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit A DAY FOR BOB COBBING is proposed by Adrian Clarke and Lawrence Upton. Something along the lines of the 92 celebration for Gilbert Adair is in mind, with those who wish to making whatever tribute they wish, with an equal share of the time over quite a long day, and Cobbing asked to poetry us out at the end of the day Venue and time to be announced, but early autumn, a little after the man's 80th birthday is envisaged Ideas etc welcome. Those who are potentially interested in contributing should let me know so that numbers can be assessed Cobbing celebrates himself at SVP in July and, on Tuesday 18th, the late Eric Mottram: Upstairs, Churchills, Mount Pleasant, London WC1 8 p m L5/2.50 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 01:05:56 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: Re: cyberpoetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Checked out some of antiorp's work. There's a lot of work. Do you have a few fave URL's you could post of his/her work? I'd be particularly interested in Director pieces, muddling through it now myself. Glad you brought this up. I like the sophistication of the coding and the diversity of media, and I like your linking this with poetry. Of course, there's all sorts of ways to interpret a "become the machine" message. Someone as deeply into multi-media as antiorp, or any artist deeply into the medium they're working in, takes it in, up as an extension of their being in startling ways. Taking up painting or the pen in this way is not as challenging to our conception of what it means to be human as taking up the digital which, as you point out, has deeply disquieting dimensions... > You might want to take a look at stuff linked from www.m9ndfukc.com, > http://re-lab.lv/rezone/a/msg00489.html Regards, Jim Andrews http://vispo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 15:14:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Sherry Subject: Re: roof books new title offer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I have put this offer up twice on the list, but have not had a lot of you responding to the offer. I assume that there are people interested, but you don't have the time to write a note with a check. So if you want to order the book, please simply respond to this e-mail telling me what books you want and where to send them. Respond with an email to and Roof will send you the books for the prices listed below. I trust you'll pay for it when you receive the books. So please order the books today. The offer expires January 31, 2000. ***** ROOF Books has just published two new titles: poetics@ edited by Joel Kuszai ($18.95/192pp) 133 e-mails from this list & Gorgeous Plunge by Michael Gottlieb ($11.95/96pp) new poetry ROOF would like to offer them to this list only for a substantial discount. Orders from members of this list can buy the books for: ******************************** poetics@ $15 & Gorgeous Plunge $9 including postage (which costs us $3) If you order both books, total cost including postage is $20 You'll save $14 To order, please send your check or money order with your mailing address to: Segue Foundation 303 East 8th Street New York, NY 10009 OR as I said above, just send me an e-mail to jsherry@panix.com Contact: James Sherry 212-353-0555 jsherry@panix.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 13:43:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Harold Teichman Subject: exemplary symptoms MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Regarding Jacques Debrot's recent interesting posts of Dec. 30 and thereafter: > it also reflects what i think is the common experience > of its offering increasingly diminished returns to its subscribers > (while remaining, all the same, indispensable) As someone who joined this list a year ago, after first skimming the archives and reading the current daily postings there for a few months, I can only confirm this. This was certainly a more substantive discursive forum in its early days. By the way, what is this 'subpoetics' list and how does one join? > is this merely another example of the incestuous > critical discourse surrounding alt poetry Ditto on this. Often so 'incestuous' that 'critical' ceases to have any meaning. I wish we could find a fruitful, incisive critical discourse that was intolerant of various weaknesses in poetry and poetics without going for the ad hominem jugular. There must be a way to review poetry and build community that goes beyond the 'critical' puff or blurb so common in the little mags now, in which nearly every new chapbook is discussed in an awed whisper or in joyous whoops. I for one don't even have time to read the stuff I want to, that I 'already know' is good -- how can current review practices help me find new good work? > this is not, however, necessarily a *bad* thing > inasmuch as it might be more useful & interesting for poetry > to make the symptoms of capitalism, etc. *exemplary* > rather than to propose "alternatives" or "solutions" It doesn't seem the place of poetry, especially a 'linguistically aware' poetry, to propose at all; to borrow Wittgenstein's Tractatus terms, poetry is probably more about 'showing' than 'saying'. But how can we distinguish between a 'captive' symptomatology and a 'liberatory' symptomatology? I think Warhol was mentioned in this connection. But is his "I'm just a Brillo box and that's ok, really" attitude in any sense emblematic of what we should be doing? > is in an extremely unoriginal position vis langpo I don't think the APG, from the little I know of it, deserves particular censure here; just about all the 'innovative' poetry I run into could be pegged this way if we want to. By the way, I'm glad to see John Lowther's return to the list, whether or not his signoff was just a feint. > what changed all of this was vietnam & post > structuralist philosophy. the lang poets were, from > my point of view (it almost goes w/out saying), > absolutely on the right side in both instances. I'm sure we all agree about Vietnam here, but what is the 'right side' on post-structuralist philosophy? Were the Language Poets right about its truth? or its usefulness for poetics? or its being poised to become the 'acadominant' conceptual straightjacket in discourse about the arts, poetry, cultural studies, etc? Some of us may be very sceptical about the worth of these philosophies while still retaining a serious interest in experimental writing, including LangPo. I'll go out on a limb and recommend a book I've only read some bits of so far: Jacques Bouveresse's 'Rationalite et Cynisme', which unfortunately hasn't been translated. He discusses Sloterdijk, Rorty and Lyotard, among many others, with a critical slant based on a deep reading of Wittgenstein and Musil (!) > while it is not at all difficult at the level of the signifier What would it mean to be 'difficult at the level of the signifier'? Hard to determine what the signifier signifies? That would be 'difficult at the level of the *sign*' in Saussure's terms. He doesn't allow much room for a problematics of signifier-recognition. (I'd like to see us take a breather from all this (post-)Saussurian chat and look at other traditions of thought about signification: e.g. Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke, if we want to go to bed with the philosophers.) Oh, and on careerism: the notion of a career in experimental writing is pretty risible; of course one could try (and this is not illegitimate) to hitch a ride on an academic career. There is such a thing as academic careerism. Sorry for the length of this, and I've left out a lot of interesting, provocative stuff that Jacques says. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 21:32:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: perforations 23 call (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII _| | _) _ \ -_) _| _| _ \ _| _` | _| | _ \ \ (_-< .__/\___|_| _| \___/_| \__,_|\__|_|\___/_| _|___/ _| "Art is magic delivered from the lie of being true." Theodor Adorno -------------------------------------- perforations 22, Personal Journals Online, is now up and running. perforations 21, Eurocentrism and the Dilemma of Deep Time, is still under preparation. The call for perforations 24, on violence, will be issued shortly. Front door for perforations-- http://www.pd.org Direct link-- http://www.pd.org/topos/theory/perf-frame.html For more info contact r.cheat/m: zeug@pd.org or info@pd.org ------------------------ Guest editor and info for perforations 24 is: John Lowther JLowther@facstaff.oglethorpe.edu POETICS : PLAY : PARTICULARS joy, surprise, delight ----- desire found in its satisfaction ----- shrugging off the vestiges of vanguardism, forgetting the pose of oppositionality, skipping thru the shreds of pervasive cynicism and laughing at the cliqueishness in the mouthed mantra's of our collective domination by state, system, theory, language... we find that under this dross, making (poeisis) is a joy, a now, a spontaneity in points and flows ----- asking anything to be a poetics of such might sound like a request for orgasm in semaphore ----- but it is uncertain whether the poetics stated for any making is truly identifiable with the act itself ----- start by dilating; for poetry read "the language art" (nothing less) and allow for any intermedial incursion that play discovers ----- for poetics read "a space within poetry that might overlap with the moment or reflect it's joy, surprise, delight" ----- for particulars read "that which play melds with, the flow of language, the crumbs on the table, the corner to peek around" -------------------- Public Domain, Inc. is a 501 (c) 3 organization devoted to exploring the intersections between art, theory, technology, and community. contact info@pd.org for more information http://www.pd.org ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 13:52:30 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Philip Mead Subject: Re: White rage In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000113100719.009607a0@lmumail.lmu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I can understand why Kent might be interested in hearing more on this topic >-- I hate to be the one to tell him, but it never happened -- I was there >-- Some other guy appeared instead of Charles Bernstein and read an >obviously faked paper, probably intended precisely to smoke out Kent and >get him on-line ,hungry for details -- The entire affair appeared some >strange stunt indeed -- I actually met somebody in the room who pretended >to be Hank Lazer -- I wasn't there either, but my paper on Ern Malley, which was read by the real Bob Perelman (as far as I know) touched on the issue of anger and the avant-garde. One of the questions that motivated my thinking about the Malley hoax (in 1940s Australia) was: why do some people get so angry about experimental art? This question is very much still with us I think. In the longer version of this paper I try to draw something out of the comparison between the rage at Ern Malley and the maximumally promiscuous opennness to influence of the young New York school poets at exactly the same time. The Malley moment and its global relations is an indicative one for Australian (post)modernism; the effects are still faintly visible in the red-shift of Australian literary culture today. But I just wanted to add a note here that might interest non-Australian listers, about the question of authenticity in relation to indigenous cultural production. There is a great deal of heat at the moment in the various institutions of art in this country over the 'authenticity' of some works of Aboriginal art. Rumours about fake paintings by Aboriginal artists like Ginger Riley, Rover Thomas, Kathleen Petyarre, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (and others) have been reported in the press and investigated on television. These are all complex stories,and are mediated by a sensation-hungry media, but one example: an Adelaide art dealer was charged by police late last year on 19 counts of criminal deception in relation to Aboriginal paintings. (He pleaded not guilty and the case won't be heard until later this year.) The stakes in the art world are of course much higher than in the literary world, given the much greater and immediate economic value of the 'signature' in visual art, but there have been analogous cases of indigenous literary fraudists recently too: the American ex-chiropractor from Missouri, Marlo Morgan's _Mutant Message Down Under_ (1993) and Wanda Koolmatrie's 'autobiography' _My Own Sweet Time_ (1994). Morgan admitted the fakery of her New Age approropriation of Aboriginal knowledge in 1996 and Leon Carmen, a while male Sydney taxi driver admitted to the deception of 'Wanda Koolmatire', whose book was published by an indigenous publishing house in Broome, Western Australia. Aboriginal and Islander people have been very angry about these literary fakes. On the other hand, the anger in the case of the (alleged) fake paintings seems mostly, though not entirely, on the side of white art dealers and entrepreneurs. I gather the Yasusada case was inflected for race too, in crucial and obvious ways. (But not Sokol?) The Toby Forward/'Rahila Khan'-Virago case of 1987 is probably the paradigmatic contemporary instance here, but I haven't come across an analytic account of this one. Whatever, from Ern Malley through to the faux-Ukrainian Austrralian novelist Helen Demidenko, Australian painting and writing is starting to look like a good subject for a culture-specific history of inauthenticity. Philip Mead >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Philip Mead School of English & European Languages & Literatures University of Tasmania GPO Box 252-82 Hobart TAS 7001 Australia + 61 - 3 - 6226 2352 (tel) + 61 - 3 - 6226 7631 (fax) http://www.utas.edu.au/docs/humsoc/deell/staff/pmead.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 14:24:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: just follow the bouncing ball MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > { p o e t i x } > > greets. lots of things i hope to get to, but first let me respond to the follow from brian stefans "But much of what I read from that corner concerning this issue tends to have a few qualities which raise an tiny alarm in me, such as 1) high volume, 2) somewhat undialogic aspect, and 3) self-reflexive, or defensive, in a "personal" way." awrightie then of the numbers 1) i am not shouting and have not been 3) granted in part, and for that part i am sorry, perhaps there are those who can sympathize to some extent with the tendency to take personal remarks made about oneself --- admittedly this is a weakness that comes from seeing, or *feeling* rather, that one's work does relate to one's self (and this is a feeling i have tried for a long time to resist or frustrate or problematize) --- i will attempt, as best i am able, in the replies i wd still like to make RE "the language art" and several other interesting issues raised by brian and others here, to speak from outside any such easy self-reflexive identification (i will fail, and anyone is welcome to point this out to me) re brian's 2nd point, to quote "2) somewhat undialogic aspect" lemme 1st say that while i recognize the word "dialogic" and the name bahktin jumps to mind (not the spelling, the spelling i simply hope for), i still don't know what it means or how its used but brian seems in the boat and himself offers the idea that something dialogic promote dialogue, ok, let's go with that... it seems that perhaps many read my Xonnets posting as being addressed to jacques (which it wasn't, and says so) and if brian's response can be extended, as clamping down on the possibility of dialogue saying i don't see it that way doesn't seem to be very useful and so i'd like to, as briefly as possible and thus with certain compromises that i am not entirely comfortable, detail some of the questions in the post which i thought sufficiently cogent, 'omnidirectional' and relevant to the concerns of this list so as to provide any number of ways to turn toward engaged interested discussion if anyone cares to, they cd look again at the Xonnets post and scroll to the final section [44] where i revisit many of the questions that i'd hoped might spark some discussion and add a more, but as many will have deleted or whatever i'll do my best to recast them below (giving cites in the Xonnets as well for any interested) ---- many of teh questions are linked and related and subsequently i've presented them in little bundles below * POETIC / POETRY ----- i asked in a variety of ways about the, in my view, rather facile assumption that an articulated poetic and its poetry (or is it the other way around? is the symptomatic of the trouble?) can be so confidently identified with one another [24-25] asked again whether this assumption deserved greater scrutiny and followed the idea out with an example, namely john cage [27-28] --- and with another example (myself) which also highlighted, the "who gets to articulate the poetics?" question [24] --- discussing mac low and the use of procedures [13-15] i tried to find an articulated something (perhaps only tangentially a "poetics") that i saw as clearly related (in some sense) to certain poems and disagreed that using a method someone else concocted insured that you were replicated their work (discussion of why i think that is scattered thru out and hinges on the notion of slurs) --- finally i suggested that what is called 'poetics' might in fact be poetry, a separate entity not so clearly relatable to "it's poetry" after all and as such might generate it's own poetic and a regress of potentially infinite magnitude [30-31] * i tried to deal with the by now ubiquitous term "LANGPO" suggesting that there was in fact a certain amount of difficulty in using it, conflict even, first offering that if read as "the Language Poets" gave you something of a roster arbitrarily set by the contents of _in the american tree_ and possibly also including silliman's lengthy list of who else might have been included [5] but noted that the tide of usage seems to be turning and that "langpo" seems to be emerging conceived as "a style of writing, or a subgenre" [10] ---- i suggested that we might want to problematize the identification of the roster of poets mentioned above and the presumed subgenre [11-12] to restate this here (in hopes of makes the edges clear) {'the language poets' don't write 'language poetry' they write poetry. "language poetry" is being written (or named?) but only by those who see it as a subgenre with definite and readily identifiable stylistic traits ---- i also asked about the "conspiracy" aspect noting that many have expressed suspicion and distrust of "langpo" (however defined) and i asked why it was that this feeling was so fraught with emotion [26-27] ---- and echoing the thread of questions preceding this one i asked how it was that if i don't agree with much of the theoretical perspective i understand as "langpo" (in my case that's limited to 4 or 5 of the american tree authors' critical work) how is it that my work (and potentially many other as well, even as has been pointed out many times, those with little or no familiarity with "langpo") is seen as replicating such a poetic [25-26] linked to this if not exactly questions, (tho i wd hope they might provoke some) are my THREE GENERIC CHARACTERISTICS OF "LANGPO" (i mean of course the emergent usage as stylistic term) 1. that it takes as given the notion that linguistic form is political thru and thru. [19] 2. that it assumes that the poetry "embodies" a poetic and that such can be discerned accurately [24-25] 3. the notion that as poets we "let language speak" or "see what language will do." [25] essentially an assertion that language has agency of some kind now i might have stated these more clearly as stylistic characters one might see "in the poem" and not as poetic assumptions (whether outside or inside) and it is perhaps telling that i do so as it is those who so blithely assume the linkage between poetry and poetics that i am addressing (and i think i cd state a fair number of specific tropes that one sees in what we might call "garden variety langpo" but wd rather leave that for a future message should a thread develop) * THE POLITICS OF POETIC FORM ---- i ref the book of same name and critique/consider the notion that a politics can in fact be imputed to "poetic form" [starting at 16] with reference to an essay by bernstein and express my own dissatisfaction with same (with further commentary clearly needed) [18-19] * the LANGUAGE ART ---- i don't wish to go into this just yet, preferring to give it a post to itself but in the Xonnets posting the question is touched on a number of times at varied angles ----- [3, 39, 40 and elsewhere] * my thoughts about ORIGINALITY are detailed and illustrated by some personal history [32-33-34] and i talk a bit about slurs and how/why recognizing them further affects my take on originality ---- this too is a topic that is worth coming back to i think and if it comes up i'll probably try to argue that it *may* be important for individuals to progress in their work, to push the envelop etc, but that none of us is responsible for the "state of poetry" or being perpetually at it's "edge" --- that in fact such an edge is at it's most real, rhetorical * i asked and other have also asked for something one might call an ENGAGED CRITICISM --- this was done negatively [19-20,23] and positively [43] it's terms described as "engagement, that accepts its limited scope and uses as much attention as possible resisting the simple fix ?" that's the end of large threads perhaps altho it leaves the questions, added at the end, about the nature of groups and communities and institutions pretty much untouched ---- on that score i'd like to toss out one risable opinion; it seems to me that the apparent *need* for an oppositionality and vanguardist posture in contemporary poetry has become so deeply entwined with poets in these waters identities that it is ourselves that we end up opposing ---- ok, so be it, i'm not happy with everything i am either ---- but, when this gets bolstered with theory and directed at others more than at self i begin to question its use for any of us ---- take for instance the french sociologist bordieau ("bord-dyoo" whatever) who is justifiably noteworthy for the depth of his research and originality of his mind, he too has taken a turn at critiquing his own institution(s), that's all fine by me, but then he does this thing we might call science where lots of empirical research gets done and hypotheses are tested the implications of statistics looked for as opposed to being imposed at the outset, whereas the tirades against the "poetry world" and "langpo" and so forth in our little puddle start with the presumption of guilt, may then fit in some anecdotal evidence and lower the gavel ---- i think it does us all a disservice )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 15:20:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: CharSSmith@AOL.COM Subject: DP & wannabe prez (from the Nation) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In rather the same way as new movies are now "reviewed" in terms of their 1st weekend gross, new candidates have become subject to evaluation by the dimensions of their "war chest." This silly, archaic expression defines other equally vapid terms like "credibility" and "electability" and "name recognition," which become subliminally attached to it. In many cases the crude cash-flow measure is as useful in deciding on a politician as it is in making a choice at the multiplex; you might as well see the worthless movie that everyone else has seen, or express an interest in the unbearably light "front runner," so as not to be left out of the national "conversation." The hidden costs, alas, include a complete erosion of the critical faculties. I am as enthralled as the next person by the sheaves of money assembled for George Walker Bush. (What did he do to be shorn at birth of his Herbert?) But I'm even more fascinated by the fact that on June 17 he signed his 100th death warrant. There was an execution on the day of his inauguration as governor of Texas, which I don't count, and there has been one every 2 weeks or so ever since. Part of a governor's job is to review capital cases: This means that Bush has either (a) been doing little else but reviewing death sentences or (b) been signing death warrants as fast as they can be put in front of him. This may also be helping him gain some of that much needed "foreign policy experience" about which the pundits have made the occasional frown. State officials from the Philippines and Guatemala have been touring lethal chambers in the United States as part of their research into improved methods, and according to Amnesty International a Filipino official was allowed to watch a killing in Texas in 1997. He wouldn't have had to hang about very long to get this job experience. The thorny question of race--always such a minefield for the aspiring Republican candidate--also gets a workout by this means. Many people remember the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again pickax-murderess who showed--at least by the standard of Christian fundamentalism--signs of having been rehabilitated. Governor Bush snuffed her in February of last year, over the protests of Pat Robertson and others. But had he commuted her sentence, he would have been faced with executing a black woman, Erica Sheppard, who was next in line on the female death row and had forgone her appeal. Spare a photogenic white girl and then kill a defiant black one? Better to do away with both and avoid the fuss altogether. (Sheppard has since recovered her determination to appeal, and recently took part in a protest against the strip-searching of female inmates in front of male guards, another feature of the Texas criminal justice system.) Then there's the aspect that touches "communities of faith," or whatever you choose to call them. Governor Bush has proposed that the social safety net be maintained by religious charities, and he hopes to make these points of light his auxiliaries in ending such welfare as we still know. It's the battiest soup-kitchen scheme since Theodore Roosevelt discussed handing over American social welfare to the Salvation Army. But it runs up against a potentially interesting conflict: At least 28 major religious groups in this country have declared against capital punishment. Might not now be the time to ask them if they will agree to ladle charity on behalf of a man who conducts photo-op and opinion-poll executions? Some Lone Star cases for your perusal: An open homosexual named Calvin Burdine was sentenced to death after being given a court-appointed lawyer who referred to gay men as "queers" and "fairies," and who fell asleep during the trial. In 1998 2 Texas defendants were executed for crimes committed when they were 17. (That year, Texas held 27 of the 74 juveniles on death row in the United States.) Both Joseph Cannon and Robert Carter had suffered head injuries in infancy, had been subject to lurid physical abuse and tested at an abysmal level for mental retardation. Their executions violated the accepted international standard that prohibits the death penalty for the underaged, as well as the presumption that it is wrong to slay the mentally ill or incompetent. You probably don't want to know how perfunctory was the presentation of the state's evidence, how tenth-rate was the performance of the court- appointed defense or how wretched was the end. (The humane lethal- injection needle blew out of Joseph Cannon's arm as the "procedure" began; the witnesses were hurried from the room and then brought back to view a 2nd and more conclusive try.) Perhaps you wonder if capital punishment is unevenly applied, as respects race and class, in the state of Texas. Wonder no longer. Just read the Amnesty report Killing With Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA (322 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10001; $6). Finally, the man who is awaiting execution as I write--Larry Robison--is a paranoid schizophrenic who, along with his family, asked repeatedly for treatment of his unstable condition before cracking up. The state that failed him in the 1st instance is now stepping in, at vast expense, to warehouse him on death row and to snuff him on the taxpayer's dime. Yet most people can still mention only 2 things about George Walker Bush--his extreme opulence and his commitment to "compassionate conservatism." This is the story, and the media are sticking to it. Every time I get on the radio or television I mention his assembly-line execution policy, and every time I do so I get treated as if I had developed Tourette's syndrome in church. Let that go, and on to the next question. Yet Bush's addiction to the death cult actually touches every important aspect of what could be described as his "politics," and perhaps only the commitment of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Bill Bradley to the same policy prevents it from surfacing as the "issue" it deserves to be. (source: Christopher Hitchens, The Nation) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 13:07:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Anne Stone Subject: Montreal Cabaret Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (I'm passing this announcement along for Alex & Kaarla, it's the long version -- but gives a sense of the cabaret, and more, a taste of the exciting stuff happening here in Mtl.) LEGbA =46ri. Jan. 28th, 2000 Lion D'Or (1676 Ontario East, Montreal, Quebec) 8:00 pm, $6 interdisciplinary cabaret, followed by dance and dj (admission free after 11:30 pm) On Friday, January 28th, 2000, Le Lion D'Or (1676 Ontario East) will host the return of Legba. This sixth episode in a series of events is once again hosted and produced by those "Legba lassies", Kaarla Sundstrom and Alex Boutros. Legba is a multidisciplinary, intercultural show that has always been about creating a space for the circulation of ideas, about providing a space for diverse genres such as dance, music and spoken word to butt up against each other, about taking the space to speak to the bizarre, the profane, the ironic, the hilarious, the tragic, the sacred, the awesome, and the unjust. Legba is also about spirit, about generating spirit with food and drink, song, dance and story, collaboration and reciprocity, respect and sometimes with complete irreverence. In this spirit, Legba operates as a non-profit enterprise. We aim to give back, to put on a display of awesome talent, sensual genres, and cultural contingency. And in so doing we infuse ourselves and our space with spirit. Call it what you will, new age mumbo jumbo, neo-pagan conglomerations, ancestor worship, on January 28th, 2000 we is gonna call down some spirit - and revel in it. Joining us, from Vancouver, at this year's Legba will be Wayde Compton, reading and ritualizing from his latest book 49th Parallel Psalm (Arsenal Pulp Press and Advanced Editions, a new imprint edited by Michael Turner, 1999). It is an epic story that spans and disrupts bloodlines, borderlines and timelines in a moving and eloquent exploration of the migration of blacks to Canada, from an increasingly racist San Francisco, starting with the first wave of migration in 1858. 49th Parallel Psalm resonates with music, rhythm and rhyme, and plays with the legacy of black lit/orature. In the pages of this incredible text you can find Legba himself wandering. We are also thrilled to host Makeda Silvera as she visits Montreal to read from her latest novel, The Revenge of Maria (Press Gang, 2000). Makeda Silvera is a African-Caribbean novelist, poet and theorist who has been at the forefront of developing writings of women of colour for over fifteen years in Canada. She is the founder and managing editor of Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press based in Toronto. She has edited numerous anthologies, including Piece of My Heart, an anthology of writings by lesbians of colour. Her own texts include, Silenced, an ethnographic collection of the oral histories of Caribbean domestic workers in Canada and Growing up Black, a resource guide for youth. She has also authored two collections of short stories, Remembering G and Other Stories (Sister Vision Press, 1991) and Her Head a Village (1994 Press Gang). The Revenge of Maria is a beautiful and detailed novel which explores how memories and secrets are carried down generations. Moving between North American and Jamaica the novel starts with an ending as Maria, a powerful and deeply bitter matriarch, dies suddenly. From this, the novel moves back and forth in time, mapping out Maria's legacy in the narratives of the three generations who have descended from her. Each generation confronts the unraveling of this family legacy with the possibility of weaving new connections, and new stories. Motion is a hiphop artist, mc, and radio host extraordinaire who will also be joining us from Toronto. She strings words together in a complex blend of rhythm and rhyme, and her work explores issues of social justice. From Montreal, Legba will play host to Nah-ee-lah. Fresh from a performance in Brooklyn, New York at Nkiru Books, Naila Belvett is back writing and performing in Montreal. Last spring, Naila and Debbie Young wrote, produced, directed and starred in Yagayah: two, womyn, black, griots. Currently this two womyn play is one of three scripts featured in Black Theatre Workshop's The Next Stage Series. Debbie is herself just back from a stay in New York where she performed to much acclaim at the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe as well as a host of other venues. Debbie, born and partially bred in Jamaica, is a self-styled dramatist and poet whose work marries such diverse genres as dramatic monologue and dub poetry into a unique form and a riveting performance. In amongst this plethora of words we hope to weave song and dance. To this end we will be joined by the Diviners (Danielle Desormeaux, Dina Rizkalla, Katherine Cram, Janey Element, and Beverly Walker), a sensational a cappella quintet which has been performing in and around Montreal since 1996. This group fuses traditional and gospel musical styles into exiting interpretations of music from around the world. It is hard to stay still when listening to them. And this is equally true of Ellementale - 5 (Lynk, Snakey, Short Circuit, Silk Soul, and Twinkle Toes), a vibrant five person breakdancing group who have gained enormous popularity with their numerous performances in the Montreal area. And if you really feel like dancing, they give lessons too. Also dancing will be the damsels in drag, Mary Ann Lacey, Alyson Vishnovska, and Cat Lipskomb who will be performing the humorous Marlene =E0 Trois, choreographed by Mary Ann Lacey, and accompanied by Annabelle Chvosteck. This laugh out loud piece plays on ideas of sexuality and plurality to the tune of About Falling in Love Again, by Marlene Deitriech. Annabelle, just back from Japan, will be joining us in her own right as the exceptional singer/songwriter she is. And to keep you moving Becky Foon (cello) and Scott Russell (buckets) will start of the midnight revelry with a bevy of beats. And to make sure that the energy and spirit generated by this epic event does not dissipate in the cold night air of January, Legba is hosting a dance after the show, with dj Mim (Moew Mixx and more) to keep us moving. And then there is us. There exists no definition that facilitates the delineation of spoken word and music. The spoken word is musical and the cadences of language harbour infinite melodies. Without backing band, beat box or synthesizer, Alex Boutros and Kaarla Sundstrom sound music by orchestrating poetry, exploring and exploiting the melodies that occur when two voices collide and elide. Sound good? Contact us at email, legb_a@hotmail.com. Thanks, in advance, for your support. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 17:26:02 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >I don't know _Les Chants de >Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's >got to be in English too. Yes it is, I believe from New Directions. I forget the translator's name at the moment, I'm sure I'll remember when I get home from work. An early (and relatively long) example of the prose poem-- in French or any other language. Was a big influence on the surrealists, and though (to moi, at least) it now seems a bit dated, it's definitely worth checking out. Mark DuCharme ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:12:50 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Prageeta Sharma Subject: C.C. Wang Exhibit January 20th 2000! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit C.C. Wang: Recent Works Opening reception Jan. 20th 6-8 Ethan Cohen Fine Arts presents C.C. Wang's recent ink paintings. Mr. Wang's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art emphasizes his role as a collector. Our show focuses on C.C. Wang the painter. We see the product of years of meticulous study and the influences of Chinese Landscape painting and calligraphy in addition to Western abstract expressionism. These works are both complex and pure of line, demonstrating Wang's mastery over the medium and the wisdom in his technique. They demonstrate Wang's "brushvoice." Today, at 92, C.C. Wang remains a vibrant link between Chinese traditional and contemporary art. Mr. Wnag first studied Chinese painting in the early part of this century under master Wu Hufan. After the Communist revolution, he moved to New York and immediately involved himself in the art world. His love for Modernism, East and West, as well as Literati painting has enabled his works to merge the Chinese and Western traditions. Please join us! 37 Walker Street, NY NY January 20th 2000 6-8 pm 212-625-1250 take the A,C,E Train to Canal Street ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 22:26:07 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Wolff Subject: Offutt and Paine Comments: To: ira@angel.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Chris Offutt, author of Out of the Woods, Kentucky Straight, The Good Brother, The Same River Twice. Tom Paine, author of Scar Vegas, coming out this month. Thursday, January 20th, at 7pm Housing Works Used Bookstore Cafe 126 Crosby Street, New York City ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:19:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Virtual States info MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII (Jerry has been a member for a longtime of the Cybermind list, and participated in the Cybermind Conference, 1996 - I can strongly recommend this work - Alan) ********************************************************************* ******* VIRTUAL STATES: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Author: Jerry Everard Publisher: Routledge London and NY Year of publication: 2000 (now available) ISBN: 0-415-17214-4 (pbk) VIRTUAL STATES challenges the idea that the nation-state is dead. In all the hype about the Internet, little thought has been given to the systematic inequalities being brought about by globalisation, and exacerbated by the global spread of the Internet. Jerry Everard argues that new disparities are emerging between the information 'haves' and the information 'have-nots'; between wealthy and poor states; and between the wealthy and poor in wealthy states. VIRTUAL STATES systematically addresses these inequalities. The book argues that there are two economies embodied in nation-states: the goods and services economy, and the identity economy. While the state's role in the first may be diminishing, its role in the latter is stronger than ever. In today's climate of change and uncertainty, people are turning to nationalism and engaging in regional conflicts over identity. Jerry Everard suggests that identity is the outcome of boundary-making processes: ways of identifying self from other; 'us' from 'them'. The Internet's ability to cross borders with impunity challenges traditional, state-based identity structures. What is needed, he argues, is a theoretical framework within which states can be disaggregated into multiple sets of identities. This book provides just such a framework. Structured in four parts, with detailed chapter summaries, VIRTUAL STATES presents a compact and accessible theoretical and historical introduction to the Internet, its relationship to the developing world, the Internet in relation to the developed world and the Internet and society. The book also covers such issues as war, censorship and the philosophical implications of hypertext, which is at the heart of the Net. Written for the general reader, this book is also a core resource for those interested in the implictions of the Internet in international relations, cultural studies and international political economy. JERRY EVERARD is in the Department of English and Theatre Studies at the Australian National University. ************************************************************************ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 21:02:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leslye Layne Russell Organization: Alliance for Creative Living Subject: SF reading 1/19 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello esteemed poets, I am featured reader in San Francisco Wednesday night 1/19 at Sacred Grounds Cafe, 2095 Hayes St. at Cole, at 7:30. I have never read here before but have heard good things, including the report that the open readings which follow the featured readers are excellent! Good venue, good people. If any of you are in the SF area, I hope to see you! Many thanks to Jim Watson-Gove who kindly talked to Jehanah Wedgwood (who runs this long-standing series) and paved the way to my reading here. Layne ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.sonic.net/layne A Quiet Place "In this rose light, time's door does not close." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:28:13 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM Subject: New @ Bridge Street: Davis, Perelman, Retallack, Silliman, Shaw . . . MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello Poetics! Sorry it's been a while, business has been too good. We'll be posting lists of what's new with greater regularity in future. Ordering & discount information at the end of this post. 1. _The Arcades Project_, Walter Benjamin, Harvard, $39.95. Quite simply, the Arcades Project is one of the twentieth century's greatest efforts of historical comprehension-- some would say the greatest, even in its fragmentary form. 2. _Chicago Review Vol 45, No 2, Special Feature: Robert Duncan_, $6. Includes a selection from Lisa Jarnot's biography of Duncan, as well as Duncan's Introductions at the Poetry Center, SFSU, ed Robert Bertholf. Poetry from John Matthais, Arthur Sze, Ed Dorn, Jeff Clark, Claire Malroux, Elizabeth Willis, others. 3. _A Geology_, Clark Coolidge, Potes & Poets, $8. Back in print. "A matter of typing residua of waters." 4. _en famile_, a poem by Robert Creeley, photographs by Elsa Dorfman, Granary, $19.95. "You won't get far by yourself. / It's dark out there." 5. _Gorgeous Plunge_, Michael Gottlieb, Roof, $11.95. "While / we are all trapped, / only a few of us / chew off our hindquarters." 6. _Dailies_, Tim Davis, The Figures, $12.50. "de riguer gregorian / louis the technique / today, divide / shinolauthority, a ray on / yon ghoulee myrrhburger / maybe no double-zero leap year" "this logo is a corrugated [ahem]" 7. _Forged_, Fanny Howe, Post-Appolo, $7. "Did I have faith or was it hype" 8. _h.j.r._, Pierre Joris, Otherwind, $8. "Keep moving" 9. _The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the 19th Century_, John Henry MacKay, Autonomedia, $12. 10. _Ten to One: Selected Poems_, Bob Perelman, Wesleyan, $16.95. Includes work from each of his previous books. "Hey I know one: The proper study of mankind is what? / Why is there money, Daddy? And why is there daddy, Money?" 11. _mongrelisme_, Joan Retallack, Paradigm, $5. "They had all and had not all seen all the shadows of all the Moors and Marranos in all the family trees." 12. _Task_, Spencer Selby, Zasterle, $8. "reproduced outside / / the need you have /to belong" 13. _Cable Factory 20_, Lytle Shaw, Atelos, $12.95. "Letters man the fill." 14. _R_, Ron Silliman, Drogue, $10. Includes "Quindecacon," circled "R," and "Skies" from The Alphabet. "Image of would: grain of condition written in sleep." 15. _between dog & wolf: Essays on Art & Politics_, David Levi Strauss, Autonomedia, $7.99. 16. _Fractured Humorous_, Edwin Torres, Subpress, $10. "I was underneath the corner of my tongue / I looked out and saw, another time zone away--my teeth" 17. _The Purchase of a Day_, Shawn Lynn Walker, Handwritten, $7. "volition knew the face a glowing or wrapped or road / gone to attract of me the centre or the incompossibilities of easy" some bestsellers: _Mexico: A Play_, Gertrude Stein, $10.95. _Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds_, Clark Coolidge, $14. _poetics@_, ed Joel Kuszai, $18.95. _THE WORDS after Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre_, Carla Harryman, $12. _In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art_, Russell Ferguson, $39.95. _Theoretical Objects_, Nick Piombino, $10.95. _Reluctant Gravities_, Rosmarie Waldrop, $12.95. _Last Instance_, Dan Farrell, $9. _Fracas_, Liz Fodaski, $9. _Rocks on a Platter_, Barbara Guest, $12.95. _at. least._, P. Inman, $9. _Medieval_, Steven Farmer, $9. _Stealer's Wheel_, Chris Stroffolino, $12.95. _Polyverse_, Lee Ann Brown, $11.95. 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 address, order, & card # w/ expiration date & we will send a receipt with the books. We must charge shipping for orders out of the US. Bridge Street Books, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20007. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:00:14 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rodrigo Toscano Subject: Query (Heather Fuller) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Does anyone have Heather Fuller's current address? If so, you please backchannel me. Thanks. Rodrigo Toscano 95 Milton St. #3 Brooklyn, NY 11222 718-383-0495 RT5LE9@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 12:36:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Perforations 23 (call for work) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain { p o e t i c s } i'm guesting as editor of a poetics issuse of the online magazine perforation (which you can access thru the larger public domain site http://www.pd.org/) --- the call for work hasn't been posted yet but should appear sometime soon --- submissions can either come to me at jlowther@facstaff.oglethorpe.edu or to robert cheatham at zeug@noel.pd.org (tho he will just forward to me) --- the theme follows POETICS : PLAY : PARTICULARS joy, surprise, delight ----- desire found in its satisfaction ----- shrugging off the vestiges of vanguardism, forgetting the pose of oppositionality, skipping thru the shreds of pervasive cynicism and laughing at the cliqueishness in the mouthed mantra's of our collective domination by state, system, theory, language... we find that under this dross, making (poeisis) is a joy, a now, a spontaneity in points and flows ----- asking anything to be a poetics of such might sound like a request for orgasm in semaphore ----- but it is uncertain whether the poetics stated for any making is truly identifiable with the act itself ----- start by dilating; for poetry read "the language art" (nothing less) and allow for any intermedial incursion that play discovers ----- for poetics read "a space within poetry that might overlap with the moment or reflect it's joy, surprise, delight"; for particulars read "that which play melds with, the flow of language, the crumbs on the table, the corner to peek around" )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 12:42:57 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Franco Subject: Anne Stone & Michael Franco @ the Poetry Project NYNY MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Anne Stone is a Montreal-based writer and performer who mixes genres of fictional memoir, fairytales, & myth. Her latest novel is Hush. Read a poem here. Michael Franco is the author of How to Live as a Single Natural Being: The Dogmatic Nature of Experience, and the director of the Word of Mouth poetry series in Boston WEDNESDAY, JAN 26TH 2000 All events at 8 pm, $7 admission, unless otherwise noted. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Schedule subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church at the corner of 2nd Ave. and 10th St. in Manhattan. Call (212) 674-0910 for more information. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:29:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Disco Immunity, Rock & the Numbers MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain {poetics} ....all strays, these thoughts.... * Jacques Debrot writes; I mean, I suppose, I've begun to feel that the word "community" in our discourse is actually *concealing* a lot of things. maybe "discommunity" ? ---- it doesnt seem to me at least that those who are interested in community are trying to level all differences ---- that's certainly not the intent in these parts ---- Jacques i'd be curios to hear you unpack this a bit more as i'm having some trouble seeing what community is concealing, even when i assume that we're all a bunch of alienated cynical monadic types and start from there i don't see much concealed (save that some of hang out, like each other etc...) anyway * i'm thinking about those near relations (in time) Prog Rock and Punk ---- it's the theory thick Prog rockers that seem the elder generation and the 3 chords and go! Punkers that are the younger theory-ignorant or theory-deprecating generation * "there are a potentially infinite number of readings possible for a poem" do we all buy that ? might we question 'infinite' but still feel comfy saying that the potential readings far outnumber the texts ? wd it be crazy then to feel (as i tried to say in an earlier posting) that the range of texts out there is staggering and that where we fail most greviously is in the readings dept. ? someone wrote me saying how she always tried to find three different ways of understanding any poem that she liked (Heather Allen btw) ---- might we be just the least bit suspicious when we see the same ways of reading given to any two poets, or even two poems ? .out )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 11:38:35 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dana Lustig Subject: Re: Questions on the APG Comments: To: bstefans@RANDOMHOUSE.COM Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain All: I've been relatively quiet on this issue, aside from several respectful conversations backchannel with Jacques, Patrick and others. Please understand that when Mark or John choose to post to the List, they are doing so only speaking for themselves. I think a lot of the commentary on the subject of "the APG" really has to do more with how the APG has been viewed based upon postings from mainly two people than it does with the APG as an actual group of individual people. I'm going to give my take on some of the questions Brian asked regarding the APG: The APG does not have an agenda--other than providing an opportunity for people interested in poetry and poetics (other than the usual Southern narrative poetry that is prevalent in Atlanta) to get together to discuss same, share what they've written, work on some ocassional collaborative works, and try to get stuff published. Perhaps the problem from the beginning was that since the APG defined itself as a "group" it allowed for others to assume that we were grouping because we had a shared (1) private language; (2) politic; (3) aesthetic approach, and; (4) careerist plan. Now, I was not there from the beginning when it was decided somehow that this bunch of people would call themselves something. When I met up with John and Randy all they told me was that they and a few other people meet weekly to talk about poetry, etc. and would I be interested in stopping by? There was no agenda, no sales pitch, no 12 step program--just "this is the poetry that we're into." Sort of like the idea for starting the List I'm posting to right now. A community of people interested in similar ideas about/works of poetry and poetics. As to political or philosophical ideas...well, those vary with everyone, and none have become our defining motive(s) for talking about poetics or writing poetry. Nope, no real hook ups with the arts/music scene in Atlanta, although some of us know people who are doing things around town. (Hell, my only connection with the music scene here is I've got some musician friends who have toured with/partied with bands like the Black Crowes, but I don't think that's what you're looking for, eh?) Is it necessary or will it somehow "validate" us if we're somehow aligned with those in the art/music scene? And, really, who cares? If we align ourselves with the happenin' people on the scene, doesn't that make us careerist in our intent? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Now, what has become increasingly clear to me is the use of the name "APG" is problematic to the theorists on this List because of the unspoken implications of naming, and ties to/breaks with historical groupings that have become named. Also problematic is calling attention to said named group because it calls motive into question. Well, I don't necessarily disagree with any of you on these points because theoretically I understand what arguments you're trying to make. But, if you're saying it's wrong or problematic, then propose a different solution. A simple one could be that the group of people in Atlanta who meet once a week and talk about/share poetry not ever call themselves "APG" again. Does that really change the fact about what these people in Atlanta do/don't do, or does that just make everyone else more comfortable? I am so disheartened by the lack of consideration some on this List have chosen to perpetuate against others of their "community." (This is not only in reference to this whole APG fiasco.) I am weary of having to defend myself and my friends (or take issue with my friends when I feel that they are increasing the agitation further--as Mark has said, we all disagree often) for the right to be present in this "community" as a poet. I strongly agree with John's post yesterday where he says, "it seems to me that the apparent *need* for an oppositionality and vanguardist posture in contemporary poetry has become so deeply entwined with poets in these waters identities that it is ourselves that we end up opposing ... but, when this gets bolstered with theory and directed at others more than at self i begin to question its use for any of us." As a "community" of people interested in experimental poetry/poetics (and a somewhat self-marginalized group, no less) it seems it would behoove us to try to seek out our commonalities and sense of understanding of one another than to try to subdivide and marginalize further. Peace, Dana ++ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 14:50:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Re: Questions on the APG Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hi Folks, I only have a few moments, but I wanted to clarify certain aspects of my approach to this APG thing, which is obviously wearying many people. My hope was to put across the idea that a group of poets need not define themselves along the terms that anyone else sets out for them, nor that they need define themselves at all. This was why I described the whole situation with O'Hara, and the apparent perception of "positives" before "negatives," etc. etc. What I wrote about the music scene, for example, wasn't intended to suggest to these poets that, were they to write about music in Atlanta, they would be legitimized as a group -- it was just a concrete example, better than a term like "how do they represent the 'local'". I think my mention of the "private language" was misinterpreted -- I'm not quite sure how it was interpreted, but all I meant was that rather mundane, but probably idiosyncratic, language that many of us use in casual or not-so casual face-to-face conversation, in bars or in homes (many poets in response to my post have specified, for example, that they have not "agenda" in their meetings -- this is an example, itself, of an element of this "private language" -- it seems to be a common element to many of these poets that they have "no agenda", a term that means something specific in their context). I think this language -- just like, say, the language of the Beats -- can be used in critical writing or poetics writing to suggest unique values, but it doesn't have to be. I wasn't suggesting much more than that. I wasn't suggesting that the APG had to have a politics (though to have "no agenda" is to have a politics, I feel), nor a common aesthetic approach. I thought, in fact, that the point of my post was that the poets concerned need not use any of the terminology that is mostly taken for granted on this list and elsewhere, by myself and others, when talking about issues of contemporary poetics. We use this terminology because we are pretty sure that it's been adopted by a wide group of people (were their more Iranians and Taiwanese, for example, we could not make this assumption, but we do), more than have adopted the word "skanky" as a critical term for describing a poem (for example), though we consign it to scare quotes anyway. This is exactly, I feel, what Dana meant when quoting John: > I strongly agree with John's post yesterday where he says, "it seems to me that the apparent *need* for an oppositionality and vanguardist posture in contemporary poetry has become so deeply entwined with poets in these waters identities that it is ourselves that we end up opposing ... but, when this gets bolstered with theory and directed at others more than at self i begin to question its use for any of us." I guess I was looking to the "APG" to make a move in trying to get past any of the given terminology -- "oppositionality," "marginality," the "avant-garde," the "local," any of the terms which are proving themselves not very useful anymore -- and so was being a little pushy. I would like to get away from these terms myself, but need the content for the new terms. What I have heard from these poets seems to suggest to me that there is little desire to do more than not "share an agenda," which is fine with me -- it's obviously a position itself, of sorts, and, were it to be tested and stuck to, will produce a new way of thinking. Imagining the "not sharing an agenda" as the paradigm, it will no doubt push itself toward something very different. Consequently, I never suggested in my post that there was anything like "careerism" involved -- it's not quite right to mix that terminology with my own. I couldn't care less about "careerism" -- it would be like suggesting that Olson wrote "Projective Verse" because he was interested in a "career" in poetry (or Hopkins wrote his diaries on "parnassian" verse, or Rimbaud wrote his "Letter of the Seer") because of careerism. I think these poets were interested in an "idea," which, concerning another post, I will try to address later, though I feel it's probably kind of boring to most people now. But concerning that post that suggests that I think poets should have "ideas" because of some idea of "exclusion/inclusion" which involves a "litmus test," this seems to me a forced reading of what I have been writing for the past several weeks, on the APG or not, since all I have written about is to suggest that a new language for describing things would collapse any sort of outside/inside, and would have no judges to decide its relative virtues, only the people actively concerned to suggest improvements (they would be only people who would care to suggest improvements). It would be a project in flux, in motion, nothign settled, no criteria. This is the power of the concept of "redescription" -- you can't hear it until it happens, but when it happens (such as "the verse that print bred" and the "page as an open field" in Olson's writing) you know it happens -- the "whole area is lifted," which is what Williams wrote of Olson's essays (or something like that). The same with ideas: if you've never had an idea, you are probably going to be confused when someone suggests that a good idea would make things different right now. If you equate ideas with "that thing that those other 'included' people have" and equate it with the language that "they" use, you will be hard put to find your own ideas because the language you are using to find them (your "private language") is not their language, not recognized by them. "Exclusion" is practically implicit in having an idea (the reverse of what you were suggesting, Jordan). O'Hara's ideas in "Personism," for example, would not have been recognized by the New Critics, partly because the terminology "going on your nerve" would have no content for them, but any close reading of this text shows that it is filled with ideas. If one is stuck on the idea of a "litmus test," that probably means that one's ideas have suffered greatly because of someone else's judgment -- that the litmus test proved one's ideas false, "unworthy." But most likely this litmus test is just the barriers between different versions of "private" languages (languages that are masquerading as the final, permanent one) and most likely it is you, not the evil doctor, who is holding the urine stick (one kind of litmus test). I do think poets today have ideas, of course, I was being flip and pushy with that one line. > Now, what has become increasingly clear to me is the use of the name "APG" is problematic to the theorists on this List because of the unspoken implications of naming, and ties to/breaks with historical groupings that have become named. Also problematic is calling attention to said named group because it calls motive into question. Well, I don't necessarily disagree with any of you on these points because theoretically I understand what arguments you're trying to make. But, if you're saying it's wrong or problematic, then propose a different solution. I was suggesting that different solutions were possible. But anyway, the subject of "naming" is one of the great philosophical questions, but has a everyday basis, too. (Go to Montreal -- the government is constantly trying to keep new words out of the language, good words like "spermicelli.") Think of how you stuttered the first time you used the term "email," how you spoke it with a slight grimace, how you thought it less substatial than a "letter" or a "poem" even. It seemed dirty and mundane (at least it did to me). But after a while "reality" sets in, or experience suggests the solidity of the category, the content for this word fills in, and it takes on substance -- it's "naturalized". Perhaps this is what is happening with the name "APG" -- it's being said with a stutter. Doesn't mean it's a bad term. Anyway, apologies if my previous posting was a total misfire. You can shut off your TV now, and at any time, and think. Cheers, Brian ++ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 13:04:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Rod Smith Interview, Rachel Loden Review, Karasick Poems now up MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit check m out http://www.jps.net/nada thanks, Gary ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:22:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 12 Jan 2000 to 14 Jan 2000 (#2000-11) In-Reply-To: <002001bf5f4b$ea3522c0$8221e7d8@mycomputer> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII What does bother me about the work is the modernist medium as message slant to a lot of it; the content is in the coding, in what it does on one's screen. With the MOO stuff or talker stuff or lpmud or programming stuff I (and others) have done, there's a working of psychological content in that I find too often missing. I love the machinic aspect of antiorp and others for that matter, but, at least for the past couple of years, it remains oddly reminiscent of, say, russian futurist design and yes, punk/ industrial as you say. On the other hand, the fact that the work digs so deep into protocols is incredibly exciting - Alan Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 18:22:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: The Parables (set) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Parables One day Nikuko was walking by the banks of a raging river. She was reading the Diamond Sutra, and stepped dangerously near the shoreline. A passing monk came up to her and said, Please be careful, or you will drown. Nikuko said, The Diamond Sutra will save me. The monk said, The Diamond Sutra has never saved anyone. He grabbed the scroll from her and threw it in the river. Nikuko, furious, jumped in after it, and with much difficulty brought it back to shore. The monk said, On the other hand, everyone saves the Diamond Sutra. There once was a lion who terrorized the villages of southern Kyushu. Nikuko was walking near Kirishimayama one day, hoping for enlightenment. The more she hoped, the farther she walked, and the farther she walked, the more hopeless her condition. Mired in emotion, she vanquished the lion in a dreamlike state from which she never recovered. Now enlightened, she continued her terrorization of the villages, plundering, raping, and mur- dering, without cause, with great effect. She knew there were no lions. It was Hokkaido's darkest winter in a long time. Outside, the ground was frozen. Nikuko sat by a fire inside the thatched hut; covered with skins, she chanted Amida, slowly drinking tea. Her eyes were half open, her child asleep in the corner. The wind howled; the flickering flames made eerie patterns on the wall. But there was something else in the wind and the snow, something not quite right with the night. Something was shuffling around the hut, and, if she tried, she heard great wings beating. She was certain it was a tengu, come to disturb her meditation. Nikuko felt a great sleep come over her, her body covered by wings, not skins. She woke in the early dawn; there were wings everywhere upon her, her muscles thick within them. Nikuko moved the wings in great swatches; they beat in all directions, and she remained immobilized. Her child had vanished. She could no longer chant, could no longer speak. She huddled there, the fire cold, beating her wings, again and again. The walls of the hut were over- come, her soul was overcome. She continued beating. She beat the air into clouds, beat the winter sun back in the sky. The day dawned warmer and warmer; Nikuko, exhausted, fell back down into a deep sleep, enlightened, as winter returned to the land. Why dogs don't have horns. In bygone days, male dogs had horns centered in their high and bony foreheads. The horns were symbols of their prowess, and many a villager was kept awake at night by ferocious fighting - the horns clattering against each other. One day Nikuko was wending her way from the hotsprings in Oita - an enlightened being, she allowed her mind to drift. Suddenly, a ferret crossed the road in front of her. In a split second, Nikuko and the ferret changed places, Nikuko now running low upon the ground, working the roads as cross-walks, heading in and out of the deep forests surrounding her. Sure enough, a dog approached, its horn hard against the sky. Nikuko was sweating and naked, her skin scratched by brambles, her breath hot and heavy from running. The dog lowered its head, Nikuko exchanged places with the horn. The horn fell useless to the ground and disappeared forever; Nikuko, astride the dog, changed places with a bee, a bird, a plant, a butterfly, and a ferret, in just that very order. Now cooled by the shadows of dusk among the bamboo, she continued on her way. A monk passed by, laughing, and asked, Nikuko, after all this play, are you any the wiser? Nikuko replied, not in the slightest, Izanagi, not the least little bit. Before there was the word, there was no beginning. Nikuko tried to think. She couldn't think. She didn't have time to think, and she itched. Nikuko scratched herself and flakes of skin fell into the water. They became Japan. Nikuko, thought, I will take a swim. Nikuko said, I am swimming, and her mouth filled with water. She spat it out and it became Lake Biwa. Did I just say something, said Nikuko. She thought, now I can say all sorts of things. Just as she thought that, all sorts of things appeared. They were grey until she said, What a colorful life. They were dark until she said, I wish it were sunny out. They were hot until she said, I wonder when it will snow, and they were too shiny until she said Good night. Another day Nikuko was walking on the long path from Sata towards the mountains; the day was overcast and uncomfortably cool. She passed several fishermen on the way, their nets heavy, their faces weathered, searching the clouds. The sun was shiny metal in the grey sky; there were mists about. Someone was walking towards her from the distance, as if in a dream. Nikuko recalled later that the woman looked like a stranger, then familiar, then a friend. It was Nikuko walking from the mountains, heading towards Sata. It's not surprising that I met myself on the road, Nikuko later said to Izanagi, but it was surprising that I would ever want to return to Sata, after all. Izanagi and Nikuko came upon a corpse lying by the side of the road. They were on the way back from Kagoshima; it was the middle of the night, but the moon illuminated the landscape. Look, said Izanagi, something is moving. Sure enough, a thin shadow flitted across the body, which was that of a young samurai. He is not yet reborn, said Nikuko, and is moving quickly through rebirth after rebirth; he continues to commit seppuku, waiting for the proper body. He is bound to the wheel, Izanagi replied; see how the body freshens every so often, as he almost returns to this life. With that, Izanagi took his sword and severed the head with one blow. He'll have to go somewhere else now, said Izanagi, turning around, but Nikuko was nowhere to be seen. This is a story that has been told many times, but is well worth the re- telling. One day Izanagi and Nikuko, for it is true that they traveled together, were passing by a ridge in the vicinity of Dazaifu. The way was steep, and suddenly, a white fox bounded across the path in front of them, disappearing into the bamboo forest. Izanagi said, This must be an omen; let us keep our eyes open for further adventures. Nikuko remained silent and thoughtful as they continued on their way. All at once, the forest grew darker, the birds stopped their singing, and the strips of sunlight disappeared from the tall stems. Another omen, Izanagi said, and Nikuko remained silent. A little further on, they came to a stone peculiarly carved in the shape of a tortoise (Why, at this height, said Izanagi), and beyond that, they saw a small stream reverse its course, wending its way uphill. Izanagi spoke again, asking Nikuko, All these omens, what do they signify. Nikuko replied, These omens announce one another, like the cycle of births and rebirths; they signify nothing but each other, the eternal wheeling of worlds. They continued along the path, passing two unicorns fighting, a woman playing a ch'in in a most mournful manner, golden birds, and dragons coursing through the air, as they made their way to the summit. A well-made shakuhachi is created from root bamboo, worked on for weeks and months, lacquered inside, a hardwood insert in the mouthpiece. When Nikuko plays the shakuhachi, whole worlds appear within the moist interior air between the five finger-holes. Bacteria thrive, stationary waves hold colonies of protozoa in perfect suspension. After the shakuhachi is swabbed, smaller life-forms cling to the lacquer, and for hours or days, cultures appear and disappear. One evening, while Nikuko played beneath her basket, two robbers approached her. Her shakuhachi was made from a single piece of bamboo without any joints, and, with the old narrow bore and wide stem, it was a strong instrument. Nikuko, swinging it this way and that, defeated them without missing a note. There are many silences in shakuhachi music, and life-within, life-without, each contains histories full of pathos, sweetness, violence and despair, lives clinging to the sounds, suspended. Nikuko invented the syllabic script; Izanagi threw it away. Nikuko inven- ted the wheel; Izanagi rolled it out of site. Nikuko gave fire to humans; Izanagi stole the flames. Nikuko invented clothing; Izanagi tore it into shreds. Then Nikuko invented all the kanji, a myriad of signs; Izanagi was overwhelmed. What can I do with them, he said, There are so many, they will prove useless to men. But men read and reread the kanji, memorizing each and every one, and out of the shapes of the signs arose the wheel, fire, and clothing. Only the syllabic script remained behind, nurtured in the lives of women, always a chance, in this or any other worlds, of sub- verting, replacing, the kanji. Thus was hiragana born, as a reminder that invention and memory can reside, not only in the signs themselves, but also in the spaces between them. How the snail got its shell. Nikuko pared her toenails, and a slug, ever- fearful of death, crawled into one of the cuttings. Why the bamboo grows so straight. Of all the plants, the bamboo first avoided the cycles of rebirth by least inhabiting the world. Nikuko rewarded it by allowing it grow the fastest towards the heavens (i.e. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points). Why water flows downhill. Nikuko made the reflection of water one of the three gifts, in the form of a mirror. In order to reflect, water had to fill the land (i.e. flow downhill into hollows). How the torii originated. Nikuko instructed a prince to build a bridge that went everywhere and nowhere at once. Why birds fly. Nikuko needed messengers to Izanagi. Why men are taller than women. One day Niku- ko was asked what the greatest blessing would be. To see beneath the surf- ace of things, she replied. Why there are births and rebirths. Once Nikuko fell asleep, tired from the creation of beings and souls. She said to Iza- nagi, perhaps there are too many, or perhaps there are still not enough. Izanagi replied, let them find out for themselves. Why bees make honey. In order to chant the Amidah in the winter. Why men fight. One day Izanagi said to Nikuko, there are too many of them, and they take too long to die. Why flowers open in the summer. To hear the bees chant Amidah. Why the shamisen took so long to enter the floating world. It took that long to steal three strands of hair from Nikuko for the strings; that is why the shamisen plays music no one can resist (i.e. the strings tie up the man in knots). One day Nikuko left Wa to see the worlds she had created. She traveled through Afghanistan and the outskirts of the Roman Empire, coming at last to Palestine. Here she walked towards the Galil, having heard of a new prophet, as prominent as Izanagi. She was disappointed; his voice was thin and his message all too familiar; he also spoke of a poverty of gods. One day she rose in the morning to the sound of weeping; it was the prophet, Jesus, forlorn and weeping. I will lose my followers, he said to Nikuko, I have prayed over and over again for a miracle, and none is forthcoming. Nikuko said, I can help you; the trouble is that men can walk on water, and there is nothing to be done here. With that, she created drowning and forgetfulness; men no longer remembered the flowing of streams and rivers beneath their feet. When the prophet walked on water, it was he alone who did so; the rest, by diminution, worshiped him as the miraculous son of God. Nikuko was resting at Dazaifu. Izanagi said, Nikuko, how many kami, beyond the eight or eighty million. There were kami everywhere, pouring from the stones, from the blades of grass, from the hills. There were kami gathered in the shrines, shadows swimming without a ripple, beneath the surface of the ponds. Nikuko replied, Sometimes it's not even me who's speaking, they're swarming within me, sometimes one or another speaks, their words escape me and new shrines are built, one even even made a world so fragile it destroyed itself. Izanagi replied, And I, Nikuko, what is within me. Nikuko replied, The blades of grass, the hills and pools here, worlds of inconceivable fragility. Suddenly Izanagi split open and the same world emerged and settled down, with Izanagi in it. This is the 'Enlightenment of Izanagi.' Nikuko and Izanagi were at Kirishimayama, walking among the mountain paths. Izanagi said to Nikuko, Who will write your parables? Nikuko replied, It does not matter, there are none about how the Leopard got his spots. Are there no female Leopards, asked Izanagi. Yes, replied Nikuko, but the blemish clothed the male. Izanagi said, But who will write your parables? Nikuko said, There are not enough things in the world for parables. What would you have, Izanagi asked. More explanations, replied Nikuko, as if causes had effects, and effects had causes. So parables lie, said Izanagi, since they imply causes and effects tied together, as men and women are tied in procreation. Exactly, replied Nikuko, the binding of parables makes causes and effects, and out of these men and women thrive, and make culture. What they do then, asked Izanagi? Forget both of us after a while, replied Nikuko; and they continued on their way. Izanagi and Nikuko walked through National Park Kirishima. It was a sunny day; like mothers, the divine mountains embraced them warmly. Let us stop for a refreshing drink, said Izanagi. Certainly, said Nikuko. They paid 500 yen each, which seemed reasonable. It is good to have a park at the base of Yamato, where this world began and gods descended and ascended, said Izanagi. Nikuko replied, It is even better that the base rotates and wobbles with the rest of the planet, sweeping the heavens above and the oceans below. Yes, replied Izanagi, we never know where our ascent will take us, but Yamato is friendly and grateful, and a good place to sit. Don't spill your drink, said Nikuko, this world has gravity. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 03:13:56 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Jim Andrews Subject: new media: Adam Badam Ate an Apple MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Have a little ditty for you to check out if you like. This is the first piece I've done using Director. It requires the Shockwave plugin. It also requires a sound card: it's an interactive sound/'music' piece with my finger snapping as percussion. It's the first of several I'm going to do in this vein. Since it's the first, there are definitely imperfections, but you get the idea. I'm still struggling with the Director program and with the audio software I'm using. Good to be back doing sound work, though. I produced a literary radio show for six years, but haven't done sound work for many years, having concentrated recently on the page and the screen and the visual. Now to combine them. Adam Badam Ate an Apple: http://vispo.com/audio/shockwave/RudeLittleSong.htm Regards, Jim ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 15:43:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Cyberpoetry / Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- From: "Brian Stefans" Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 02:32:53 -0500 Just checking out some of these links, mostly departing from kominos' = page. The "weak blood" anthology seemed pretty interesting, saw some of = my friends up there, but I'm wondering if it's bit sentimental in its = attitude toward war; i.e., in the effort that many of the artists make = to surpass what seem the limitations of the metaphor of technology -- = that it's instrumental, inhuman in a sense, alienating -- I'm wondering = if there's a tendency in "cyberpoetry," at least in that anthology (or = grouping), to try to "humanize" it too hard. It seems the emotional = effect becomes flattened after a while, and the prior commitment that I = think web artists often make to various artistic strands -- the "punk" = anarchy that one writer was talking about (on this list? I think it was = Jim Andrews), or what I read as the Luddite aspect of some artists = tendency to very low res imgery (sometimes to great effect; I think this = is the part that ties into some major strands of concrete poetry), or = even on the pure exhuberence in programming and making things fly -- is = put aside to achieve different ranges of emotion that don't often come = off. Has anybody mentioned this about this (very large) collection of = work? I haven't seen it all, I'd like to see more; it was pretty = impressive anyway. If you don't think of "emotion," I wonder who is taking up the = exploration of semiotics and "language-games" that bpNichol and Steve = McCaffery inaugurated, or really jump-started, with the Toronto Research = Project. Do you (anyone,that is) think their work is well-known in that = community (say, the Rhizome community)? One piece was a Flash piece -- from 1996! -- that seemed pretty basic to = me, lots of word morphing and photographs, even within my rudimentary = skill set (which doesn't matter, of course, it's just that a few basic = word morphs are the first thing you do). I've overheard, on the rhizome = list, in describing the positives of some site, someone use the term = "and no sh*tty flash stuff," meaning that Flash hasn't any chance. Do = web poets or artists shy away from Flash and Director because it's too = manipulative itself, or too corporate? Just wondering, since it would = be difficult to explain which is more corporate, the Pentium chip or = Flash -- I'm sure someone's brought this up. I've been working on some = pretty complex Director-based pieces, and have just started Flash last = weekend -- lot of fun (got it on ebay). I guess I've always wondered how the tradition of concrete fairs when it = comes to presenting complex emotions, or emotions that are = self-contradictory, which contain doubt in themselves. Most of my = friends who have no interest in concrete work (some of whom are = Canadians, so they've had their exposure) think it's often just = "one-liners." I forget who it was, but someone wrote that opera was = different than drama because it can't, by its nature as music, convey = "doubt," and though I don't think that's necessarily true, I wonder if = "concrete" poetries, or poetries that resemble it, can convey "doubt" = (another question is whether they can construct cultural metaphors -- = this is why I think Finlay's work is so important, in its role in the = ironized recreation and critique [some would say the unironized = promotion] of the use of metaphors, mostly centering around idealized = concepts of nature -- the scene becomes grander, more complete and = circumscribable, the shorter, smaller, muter the poem is). I like work = that attacks, like jodi.org, and which makes you question the balances = between human and machine, but I wonder if the opposite is possible -- a = machine program that says "take me!" or "I think I'm going to feint" -- = I'm being silly with these examples. How about: "I'm depressed." I wonder, also, if web art is always done in a dialectic relationship to = the gallery system, whereas web poetry is always done in relation to the = printed page and the system of publication (a much less lucrative = system), hence the different degrees of energies focused in each, and = whether there's confusion because of this (not manical confusion, just = whether this DMZ zone that web artists occupy is standing on so many = borders as to create a certain "high anxiety"). Cheers, Brian ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 22:15:08 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randy Prunty Subject: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit how seldom women are posting on this list lately? and when you/they do it tends to be announcements and rarely of the discussion nature? there are exceptions of course, but i'm asking if others see a trend that i think i'm seeing. and i know this list has always had more men posting than women, but the situation seems to be getting direr and direr. what's up? randy prunty ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 21:32:29 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Buuck Subject: contact info inquiry Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Does anyone have current contact info - email, address, whatever - for Cary Nelson? Backchannel OK Thanks- David Buuck ----- Sent using MailStart.com ( http://MailStart.Com/welcome.html ) The FREE way to access your mailbox via any web browser, anywhere! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 22:57:44 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerrold Shiroma Subject: what's in store for Duration Press... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Here is a list of what's coming up over the next few months @ Duration... After thinking about this for a while, I have decided that I simply won't have the time to work on the Small Press Bibliography project that I announced a few months back. While a project of this sort is something that could prove to be interesting, & perhaps useful, it is just something that would require more work than I can handle. I would like to thank everyone who sent me information, & who expressed interest in the project as a whole. Anyway...what will be getting underway (again) will be the regularly appearing announcements page listing new & recent small press publications. Although this time it will run once a month. The deadline for the next listing will be January 31 (a more detailed posting will come soon). Taking off from the catalog for Burning Deck & paradigm press @ duration, there are catalogs in the works for The Figures, Potes & Poets, Talisman House, & Krupskaya. Look for these soon. Work will continue on our Ethnopoetics archive, & archives are also in the works for ACTS: A Journal of New Writing &, eventually, Montemora. Anyway...hopefully some of these things will prove interesting, helpful, &, most importantly, enjoyable, for everyone. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 01:59:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss =?iso-8859-1?Q?Peque=F1o?= Glazier Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" In-Reply-To: <000501bf5ef4$a378d720$17000001@doswlan> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A note that the EPC has been working on a list in progress of "e-poetries". I'm certainly happy to receive suggestions of possible additions to this list as I hope for it to grow. Have a look at http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/ Obviously, this is only the first draft of a list in progress! (Thanks to Peter Sanders for help with this resource.) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 23:56:44 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: exemplary symptoms, of Warhol? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am about as puzzled as I can get about the following > I think Warhol was mentioned >in this connection. But is his "I'm just a Brillo box and >that's ok, really" attitude in any sense emblematic of >what we should be doing? Could Harold Teichman or for that matter anyone clarify this? I remember the song "I'm a lumberjack & I'm ok" but what is this about Warhol having an attitude about being a Brillo Box & being ok? Surely you don't mean this as a serious critical remark, Harold. best Tony Green ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:37:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Po Biz; Oppositionalism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit More scrupulous than most of us, Charles Bernstein, in _My Way_ and elsewhere, has compared a career in poetry to running a small business--a comparison intended, I would imagine, to fully implicate poetry in the everyday. Like most small businesses, though, most careers in poetry, if only in a strictly worldly sense, fail. Poetry may not be *entirely* competitive, but it is essentially *conflictual*--the conflict being not only one of values within and for the cultural field, but for the various kinds of cultural capital that can be acquired by those whose poetry (in a worldly sense) succeed. This is one thing that the *discourse* of community conceals, if the actual fact of community does not. If you think I am being reductive, let me elaborate just a little more. It would be stupid to say that, as Brian gives the example, "Olson wrote "Projective Verse" because he was interested in a "career" in poetry (or Hopkins wrote his diaries on "parnassian" verse, or Rimbaud wrote his "Letter of the Seer") because of careerism." The anachronism of the word "career" here is pretty apparent--& while I think it's rare that anyone's motives are ever entirely selfless--even the question of more plausible ambitions--fame, for instance--does not seem particularly interesting in these instances. Nor do these motivations seem very relevant to the early stages of Language Poetry either, for that matter--at least to me. It's the context, as in so much else, that's crucial. If I think that careerism (a bad word since it seems to solicit the evasive opposition "vocation") is relevant in the current context **it is because when, like today, the conflict of values is largely suppressed, the competition for cultural capital becomes dominant.** But look, I want to put poetry in an impossible situation (anything less than this strikes me as complacenct). What we most need--an oppositionalism--may not be what it is possible to have. Capitalism *already* carries its critique; everything anti-, in other words, has perhaps already been recuperated. Charles Altieri, for one, is very good at facing up to & laying out this dilemna in _Postmodernisms Now_. Cultural critique, for many of us, however, seems not to include the capacity to critique our *own* poetic culture--a blindness that is of course deeply ideological. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:49:09 -0500 Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes In-Reply-To: <20000118012602.71780.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > >I don't know _Les Chants de > >Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's > >got to be in English too. > > > Yes it is, I believe from New Directions. I forget the > translator's name at > the moment, I'm sure I'll remember when I get home from work. > An early (and > relatively long) example of the prose poem-- in French or any other > language. Was a big influence on the surrealists, and though > (to moi, at > least) it now seems a bit dated, it's definitely worth checking out. > No,the american edition was published in 1994 by Exact Change (Boston)as "Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont" in Alexis Lykiard's excellent translation. It is a superb book, translation, intro, etcetera. Only way to read him if you can't do it in French. Pierre ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those 6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim Email: joris@csc.albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 10:30:07 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alicia Askenase Subject: Announcements from Camden Comments: To: whpoets@dept.english.upenn.edu Comments: cc: wwhitma@waltwhitmancenter.org, Bonairpoet@aol.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Friends, THE WALT WHITMAN CULTURAL ARTS CENTER Notable Poets and Writers Series 2000 PRESENTS ROGER BONAIR-AGARD Friday, February 18 at 7:30 PM Reading/Performance with Slam to follow. ANNE WALDMAN Friday, March 3, at 7:30 PM Workshop, Saturday, March 4 at 1:30 PM ROSARIO FERRE Sunday, April 15 at 2:30 PM Luncheon and reading presented in collaboration with the Taller Puertorriqueno. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: ROGER BONAIR-AGARD, a native of Trinidad, is a poet, teacher, activist, slam-coach and the 1999 Individual National Slam Champion. His work has been featured in Phat'itude Literary Magazine, Spheric, the Envoy and the anthologies New Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and 360 Degrees--A Revolution of Black Poets. His first major collection of poems, ...and choas congealed...is due out this year. In addition to performing across the United States, he is a program associate with the New York Readings/Workshops at Poets and Writers in NYC and has been a featured guest on the Jim Lehrer Newshour OnLine Focus. Mr. Bonair-Agard has a riveting stage presence--his performances mesmerize, enchant, and ultimately air-lift his audience to a rhythmic spoken-word journey from which they return forever transformed. ANNE WALDMAN is a poet, performer, teacher, collaborator, editor, former long-time director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, and distinguished Professor of Poetics a the Naropa University where she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg. Ms. Waldman was one of the originators of performance poetry (forerunner of Slam) as, according to Bob Holman, she and Ted Berrigan did a poetry bout in boxing gear around 1979. She is the author of over thirty books and pamphlets of poetry, including, Iovis Books I and II, Kill or Cure, and the forthcoming Marriage: A Sentence, both from Penguin Poets. She has received numerous awards and prizes, among them, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Dylan Thomas Memorial Award, and the National Literary Anthology Award. Her MTV style video, "Uh-Oh Plutonium!" won first prize at the American Film Festival as a part of the Manhattan Video Project. A highly energetic performer, she has read across the United States and throughout the world. According to Jocelyn Saidenberg of Smal Press Traffic, she never gives the same reading twice and that, "...you've never felt anything like the roller-coaster of swoops, dives, tremolo, atman, fire-walking, fast talking, seven elements of history, myth, gossip, magic, enchantment and theatrical power..." ROSARIO FERRE, novelist, poet, feminist, satirist, and literary critic is one of Puerto Rico's most celebrated authors. Ms. Ferre had written over twelve novels in Spanish before beginning her most acclaimed novel, The House on the Lagoon in 1991, which was a National Book Award finalist in 1995. Since then she has written and/or translated several of her novels in/to English including Sweet Diamond Dust, The Youngest Doll, Tales from the Carribean, Writing from the Inside, and most recently, Eccentric Neighborhoods. Of The House on the Lagoon, translator Gregory Rabassa has said, "Puerto Rico and the rest of us have been waiting for this story...The book is essential.", and which the New York Times Book Review called "Vital...ambitious...playful...A family saga in the manner of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." ALL READINGS:$6 REGULAR ADMISSION/$4 SENIORS AND STUDENTS GUIDELINES FOR ANNE WALDMAN WORKSHOP (deadline February 4) contact the Center at: wwhitma@waltwhitmancenter.org 856-964-8300 extension 204 One last thing: Emilie Lucas, coordinator of a WPEB Camden radio program, is seeking poets and writers from the area who are interested in reading and being interviewed on her show. The program airs on Saturday mornings. For those interested, please contact Ms. Lucas at 856-963-0971 after 6 p.m. or leave a message during the day. Please come and join us for an exciting season--I hope to see and hear from you soon. Best, Alicia Askenase Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center 2nd and Cooper Streets Camden, NJ 08102 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 09:01:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: DP & wannabe prez (from the Nation) In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" just thought i might lend a crude "poetic" twist to the political aspirations of george walker bush (and yep, those are scare quotes around "poetic," fer sure)... best, joe --------- fer geedubya up & in up & in & what we wawnna know is where ya been with yer sex, hombre tex whateveh : you'll neveh be more 'n a kid with a tin star & a hard-on & a million-buck complexion, son you'll neveh be the good ole boy yer new england daddy thought to be so why strut around up there in them lights flunkin yer heads a state exam too awful smug t' be real when there's a soiree t'night, geedubya yessirreebob where ya can shake some a that dust offa that stone-white hide a yers & maybe even snort some blow as the cityfolk say & maybe even let fly a fuck er three rememberin yer godfersaken alamo & iff'n yer up to it even cryin in yer beer up & in up & in & what we wawnna know is where ya been with yer taxes, ese man whateveh : yer daddy had no business pissin on the oval office toilet seat & you ain't half the soldier he was & even if ya was that don't make ya no betteh than those c.o.'s who served time who served libehty a word that drops from yer lips like hay from a horse's ass & yer neighbehs south a the bordeh prolly figger ya fer the bagboy that ya are so go on home, why dontcha son & hang up yer tightass jockstrap cuz cuhhhz, ya don't know any betteh than a dog bent oveh shittin razeh blades & that makes ya even more dangerous, geedubya & we don't give a good damn that yer a govehneh ya jackass ya up & in up & in with you it's always been up & in & what we wanna know is where ya been : so where ya been, geedubya with yer struggle & yer pain or ain't ya felt any yet save for them blades passin through the hard stool of an easy life spent eatin mostly political shit where ya been, geedubya when the hungry went hungry when the workehs went up fer minimum wage when the lovehs a justice asked fer justice when the same folks ya long t' lord it oveh went without, within, among huntin 'round fer a few table scraps some meaninful work a few notes to hum where ya been, geedubya where ya been, friend & where ya think yer goin, amigo the country don't have no need fer a guy like you a guy who deep down inside faced with all sortsa pressin issues all sortsa human sufferin all sortsa social ills all a which ain't about to jes go away says to hisself *whatever* ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:45:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leslye Layne Russell Organization: Alliance for Creative Living Subject: Re: Lost msgs/ SF reading 1/19 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit My digest #2000-13 (to which I am responding) truncated after msg #23, leaving msgs #24 through 33 lost in cyberspace. Did this happen to anyone else? * I'm reading tonight in San Francisco at Sacred Grounds at Hayes and Cole (near USF) at 7:30.... Their traditional open reading follows. Would love to see any of you who are in the area.... Cheers, Layne ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 15:51:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Experience $lavery! / Schiff MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Date: Sun, Apr 14, 2002 9:17 PM -0400 From: Harris Schiff http://www.cyberpoems.com Featuring George Schneeman Y2K Calendar and Jack Collom's "When You Get Close" ---------- End Forwarded Message ---------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 15:52:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: re gb & revised joke for billy mills / Bromige MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Date: Tue, Jan 18, 2000 12:01 AM -0800 From: david bromige > >I wish that everyone on the list could be as intelligent as David Bromige. It occurs to me that there may be some on the List to whom the depth of Bowering's mordant humor is as yet unplumbed. While I might wish otherwise, I know--as do others familiar with this man's m.o.--that he is adding, sotto voce, "and not a percentage point more." In short, this is actually a prayer for the dumbing down of the List. For GB knows well the extent of my stupidity .....isnt he forever asking me why I live in the States? Keep marrying? Push doors marked "Pull"? In this light, his second sentence, "That is how benevolent I feel towards mankind" shows its true colors, those of sarcasm. A spite against the human race akin to Samuel Hall's, for whom we are " a bunch of ------s all," informs this bleak aside. And in truth, even if GB did mean well by such a remark, I should feel bound to pretend otherwise, out of sheer embarrasment. That is the cleft stick he has me in! Che Maestro! db ---------- End Forwarded Message ---------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 00:22:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Richard Frey Subject: Gay, Starr, Zurawski at NOTcoffeeHouse 2/6/00 Comments: To: whpoets@english.upenn.edu Comments: cc: sfrey@bu.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Friends-Being anxious to get the word out about this wonderful series, we may have included some addresses twice, and may be sending our monthly advisories to some who don't want them. Please help us serve you all better by sending a reply message telling us your preferences, if you want us to do anything differently. Thanks. The Producers (NOTcoffeeHouse) Poetry and Performance Series Sunday, February 6, 2000 1 pm First Unitarian Church 2125 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 Featured Readers: Ross Gay is interested in writing good poems that make sense. Heather Starr will read poems collectively titled "Air" that incorporate language of asthma and volcanic eruptions. A native Oregonian West Philly resident who loves to cook and laugh and has started playing the banjo, she is the Program Manager at the Kelly Writers House. Magdalena Zurawski, Minor American Poet, has had work published in a number of journals and has a chapbook coming out soon. Plus Open Poetry and Performance Showcase $1 admission. Along with a live poetry reading and performance , we invite you to join in our website poetry reading presentation. All poets and performers may have a poem or a lyric featured in theNOTcoffeeHouse website. Send your work for inclusion in the ongoing internet presentation. Tell your friends all over the world to check our site! Poets and performers may submit works for direct posting on the website via email to the webmaster@notcoffeehouse.org or works may be emailed to Richard Frey at richardfrey@dca.net or USPS or hand-delivered through slot at 500 South 25th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19146. More information: Church office, 215-563-3980, Jeff Loo, 546-6381 or Richard Frey, 735-7156. Visit our website at www.notcoffeehouse.org poets & performers previously appearing at NOTcoffeeHouse: Nathalie Anderson, Lisa Coffman, Barbara Cole, Barb Daniels, Linh Dinh, Lori-Nan Engler, Simone Zelitch, Dan Evans, Brenda McMillan, Kerry Sherin, John Kelly Green, Emiliano Martin, Jose Gamalinda, Toshi Makihara, Thom Nickels, Joanne Leva, Darcy Cummings, David Moolten, Kristen Gallagher, Shulamith Wachter Caine, Maralyn Lois Polak, Marcus Cafagna, Ethel Rackin, Lauren Crist, Beth Phillips Brown, Joseph Sorrentino, Frank X, Richard Kikionyogo, Elliott Levin, Leonard Gontarek, Lamont Steptoe, Bernard Stehle, Sharon Rhinesmith, Alexandra Grilikhes, C. A. Conrad, Nate Chinen, Jim Cory, Tom Grant, Gregg Biglieri, Eli Goldblatt, Stephanie Jane Parrino, Jeff Loo, Theodore A. Harris, Mike Magee, Wil Perkins, Deborah Burnham, UNSOUND, Danny Romero, Don Riggs, Shawn Walker, She-Haw, Scott Kramer, Judith Tomkins, 6 of the Unbearables - Alfred Vitale Ron Kolm, Jim Feast, Mike Carter, Sharon Mesmer, Carol Wierzbicki-,John Phillips, Quinn Eli, Molly Russakoff, Peggy Carrigan, Kelly McQuain, Patrick Kelly, Mark Sarro, Rocco Renzetti, Voices of a Different Dream - Annie Geheb, Ellen Ford Mason, Susan Windle - Bob Perelman, Jena Osman, Robyn Edelstein,Brian Patrick Heston, Francis Peter Hagen, Shankar Vedantam, Yolanda Wisher, Lynn Levin, Margaret Holley, Don Silver Coming to the NOTcoffeeHouse Poetry and Performance series 1 pm, Sun., 3/5/00: Barb Daniels, Daisy Fried, and the Knife & Fork Band ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 22:40:51 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerrold Shiroma Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Maldoror is also available from Exact Change, in a marvelous translation by Alexis Lykiard (sp?). -----Original Message----- From: Mark DuCharme To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Tuesday, January 18, 2000 7:01 PM Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes >>I don't know _Les Chants de >>Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's >>got to be in English too. > > >Yes it is, I believe from New Directions. I forget the translator's name at >the moment, I'm sure I'll remember when I get home from work. An early (and >relatively long) example of the prose poem-- in French or any other >language. Was a big influence on the surrealists, and though (to moi, at >least) it now seems a bit dated, it's definitely worth checking out. > > >Mark DuCharme > > >______________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 16:01:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Welcome Message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Welcome to the Poetics List & The Electronic Poetry Center sponsored by The Poetics Program, Department of English, College of Arts & Science, the State University of New York, Buffalo /// Postal Address: Poetics Program, 438 Clemens Hall, SUNY Buffalo, NY 14260 Poetics List Moderator: Christopher W. Alexander Please address all inquiries to . Electronic Poetry Center: =3D Contents =3D 1. About the Poetics List 2. Subscriptions 3. Submissions 4. Cautions 5. Digest Option 6. Temporarily turning off Poetics mail 7. "No Review" Policy 8. The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) 9. Poetics Archives at EPC 10. Publishers & Editors Read This! ___________________________________________________________ Above the world-weary horizons New obstacles for exchange arise Or unfold, O ye postmasters! 1. About the Poetics List With the preceeding epigraph, the Poetics List was founded by Charles Bernstein in late 1993. Now in its second incarnation, the list carries over 750 subscribers worldwide, though all of these subscribers do not necessarily receive messages at any given time. A number of other people read the Poetics List via our web archives at the Electronic Poetry Center (see section 9 below). 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 is a =3Dfully moderated=3D list. Due to the increasing number of subscribers, we are no longer able to maintain the open format with which the list began (at under 100 subscribers). All submissions are reviewed by the moderator in keeping with the goals of the list, as articulated in this Welcome Message. We remain committed to this editorial function as a defining element of the Poetics List. 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. For further information on posting to the list, see section 5 below. 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These messages are considered offensive and detrimental to list discussion. Please do not bother submitting such messages to the editor. Offending subscribers will receive only one warning message. Repeat offenders will be removed from the list immediately. Please do not put this policy to test! ------------------- 5. Digest Option The Listserve program gives you the 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, with no "subject" line to : set poetics digest You can switch back to individual messages by sending this message: set poetics mail NOTE!! Send these messages to "listserv" not to Poetics or as a reply to this Welcome Message!! ------------------- 6. 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 this one-line message, with no "subject" line, to : set poetics nomail You may re-activate your poetics subscription by sending this one-line message, with no "subject" line, to the same address: set poetics mail When you return you can check or download missed postings from the Poetics archive. (See section 8 below.) ------------------- 7. "No Review" policy For the safety and security of list subscribers, the "review" function of the Poetics List has been de-activated. Non-posting subscribers' email addresses will remain confidential. Please do not ask the list editors to give out subscriber addresses or other personal information. ------------------- 8. What is the Electronic Poetry Center? The World Wide Web-based Electronic Poetry Center is located at . Our mission is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the United States and around the world. The Center provides access to the burgeoning electronic resources in new poetries including RIF/T and many other electronic poetry journals, the POETICS List archives, an AUTHOR library of electronic poetic texts and bibliographies, 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. ------------------- 9. Poetics Archives at the EPC Go to the Electronic Poetry Center and select the "Poetics" link from the opening screen. Follow the links to Poetics Archives. Or set your browser to go directly to . You may browse the Poetics List archives by month and year or search them for specific information. Your interface will allow you to print or download any of these files. ------------------- 10. Publishers & Editors Read This! PUBLISHERS & EDITORS: The Electronic Poetry Center 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 for our users and ENCOURAGE you to participate! Send a list of your press/publications to , 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 or 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. You might also 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 MSG ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 13:01:02 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Reading in SF In-Reply-To: <003501bf6248$a7a15a00$15a6b2d1@u4q7n2> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII A reading and reception to celebrate the publication of TOTEM AND SHADOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Paul Hoover (Talisman HOuse) will be held on Friday, Jan 28 at 6:45 pm at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, 601 VAn Ness Avenue. Hope to see you there! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 16:08:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Little Review: Lyn Hejinian, Happily Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Lyn Hejinian, Happily ISBN: 0-942996-38-0 The Post-Apollo Press 39 pages This small book by Hejinian presents a linked series of pleasures, pleasures that are not corrupted by over-arching theoretical significance imposing its will on the structure, though, indeed, a "theory" seems to be at its base. That is to say, there is an "ambient" quality to this work, an attempt to provide the "mental furniture" (it Satie's phrase) to daily living and thinking which approaches as from a distance, but a distance that is neither exterior or interior, but is to be found in language. That it appear "far" is mostly a quality of the measured incompleteness of the phrasing, which can be contrasted to the overdetermined quality of the aphorism or rhymed couplet. The sentences have a self-containment -- they can be read individually for their contents and aporias -- but fall, when taken on a long-view, into a pragmatist's discourse of viewing thought in its moment-by-moment self-creation: "_Now_ is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated / And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently / No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something / Now is a noted conjunction / The happiness of knowing it appears" (27) The reader is guided along by a rhythmic certainty that doesn't fall into a regularity suggesting "pace" or a normative meter; likewise, "conclusions" appear -- "Now is a noted conjunction" for example -- which can spiral off into an entire philosophical thesis (suggesting closure) but which, in obedience to the method of the poem, leads only to the next moment and the promise -- the best promise of poetry -- of further discoveries, of "possible futures". ("Dailiness" seems to be some aspect of this, that one should not create thought or linguistic structures that could not, in fact, survive the contingencies of day, whether these be impositions on one's reading time or the hierarchies created when values are too much analyzed, too much banished to the linearities of, say, academic discourse.) "There is no 'correct path' / No sure indication / It is hazy even to itself" she writes, echoing, in a sense, Dante, but subverting in some ways the entire mythos of the "bildungsroman" and the promise of metaphysical certainty, in which humans are banished to the second-tier, "mundane" task of the approach to essence and the ideal. Some lines read like counter-arguments to the accusation of relativity; Hejinian opts for the approach that pragmatism relieves one not just of final vocabularies but also of any myth that contingent values fail in their relationship to the "eternal verities": "From the second moment of life, one can test experience, be eager to please, have the mouth of a scholar, hands never at rest, there is no such thing as objectivity but that doesn't mean everything is unclear and one doesn't fail to choose the next moment for a long time." (30) The poem ends beautifully, and it sounds like a beginning, subsuming within itself both Bergsonian notions of time as a tactile, immeasurable quantity but whose recognition is revelatory, and the Marcusian argument that uncontaminated "pleasure" is a quality worth fighting for in the economic/political nexus, though difficult to deduce freed of the needs of capital: "No, happily I'm feeling the wind in its own right rather than as of particular pertinence to _us_ as a windy moment / I hear its lines leaving in a rumor the silence of which is to catch on quickly to arrange things in preparation for what will come next / That may be the thing and logically we go then it departs." (39) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 15:10:54 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed In-Reply-To: <83.c0f1dc.25b6863c@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 10:15 PM -0500 1/18/00, Randy Prunty wrote: >how seldom women are posting on this list lately? and when you/they do it >tends to be announcements and rarely of the discussion nature? there are >exceptions of course, but i'm asking if others see a trend that i think i'm >seeing. and i know this list has always had more men posting than women, but >the situation seems to be getting direr and direr. what's up? > >randy prunty i participate when the debates interest me and when i have the time to get caught up in them to the degree that i allow them to interest me. we've gone through the "white rage"/yasusada thing before; i think my views are well-known, no need to re-rehearse them. when women call fellow-listers on what they feel to be sexist, often it doesn't work out so well --the guys get defensive, feel attacked, etc. the whole tenor of the list has become more announcement-oriented anyway, since last year. come to think of it, the most recent issue in which women were fairly vocal was, interestingly enough, the class thread. i haveno analysis of that phenomenon, just realized it when reading your post. i hadn't even noticed women's relative silence being more than usual. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 07:33:41 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: Cyberpoetry / Stefans In-Reply-To: <19034.3157285413@poetrygrad1.lib.buffalo.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" wow, brian, this is going to take some time/thinking to respond to your post. but some great starting off points for about four great strands. komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 16:14:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Little Review: Jose Garcia Villa, The Anchored Angel Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa Edited by Eileen Tabios With a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn Kaya Production ISBN: 1--885030--28--2 Kaya Production continues its innovative line of Asian American poetry with this selected edition of the writing of Filipino American Jose Garcia Villa. As the famous 1948 photograph from the Gotham Book Mart reception of Dame Edith Sitwell suggests -- in which he appeared with the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Gore Vidal, W. H. Auden and other luminaries -- Villa was something of an anomaly, in that he was a writer coming from a colonial property of the United States who was created a poetics that was as unquestioning of the premises of high modernism as he himself was unquestioning of his abilities and preternatural calling as a poet. The excellent essays appended to this collection by important writers such as Nick Joaquin, E. San Juan, Jr., and Luis H. Francia, along with the introduction by novelist/poet Jessica Hagedorn, present the man in a variety of guises, from the imposing, learned, often didactic, never passive literary mentor that he was to several Filipino writers in New York, to the provocateur in the Philippines who never failed to cause a scandal with his tart tongue and demanding aesthetic tastes (he was, nonetheless, put on the government's payroll, and had a troubled but intimate relationship to the Marcos). As if testament to his chosen tradition of late symbolist poetics, Villa -- like Valery, Rilke and Rimbaud -- reached a points in his life when he felt that he had "said all he had to say" and let silence reign -- in fact, he gave up writing poems after the early sixties, though he often spoke of an enormous work on aesthetics which he had been preparing. The poems that he did leave behind foreground a set of values that might strike one today as antique, and yet they are surprisingly fresh, and when focused, very powerful. The echoes one hears are from writers as diverse as Hopkins, Dickinson, Blake and Cummings, and his various innovations -- his idea of "Reverse Consonance" and the later idea of putting commas between every word (which he linked to "Seurat's architectonic and measured pointillism," and which, dismissed for many years as a laughable eccentricity, has resurfaced in practices by poets such as P. Inman) -- seem minor in retrospect compared to those of Williams or Pound, but attest to the care for the small event in poems that only surfaces upon a very close reading of the language. The purity of his approach leaves one nostalgic for a time before deconstruction and the politics of the referent had converted the aporias of language into the ironizing of essences and the critique of public values (which is to say, "before Auschwitz"): "Silence is Thought converging / Unprecipitate, like / Dancer on tight wire balancing, / Transitive, budlike, / Till -- her act finished -- in / One lovely jump skips / She to the floor, bending / To make her bows, dips / Herself in bright applause -- / Then silence is / No more. Not it is the rose / Called Speech." (15) The comma poems challenge the reader to break apart and reform meanings, as if to dissuade the imposition of final interpretation that eventually weigh on many poems: "As,much,as,I,perceive,the,Future, / Lo: the,Future,perceives,me: / A,Mutuality,of,Eyes." (45) (This suggests Karl Kraus's famous assertion, as cited in Benjamin: "The more you stare at language, the more it stares back.") His later syllabic approach to the stanza resembles, mostly, that of Marianne Moore's, but unlike Moore, he attempted poems that were not merely assemblages of "found texts" but which were based on a single sentence of a single text, hence testing the integrities of syntax. One based on a sentence from Andre Gide, for instance, permits him to escape the more fiery, messianic tones of his earlier poems and yet access the integrity of his personality which he cherished so much: "Night and sleep alone / Permit metamorphoses. Without / Oblivion in the / Chrysalis the caterpillar / Could not / Become a butterfly: The / Hope of awaking someone else / Urges me to let / The man I am to sink in- / to sleep." (83) As some of the essays in the end argue, Villa stands at the crossroads of many discourses, specifically those of postcolonialism and the transition from modernism to a postmodernism informed by the West's imposition of values on non-Western peoples. But Villa seems an unlikely candidate for this position -- he seems to ignore these issues all together. However, by his unflinching devotion to his notions of craft and calling, he becomes a diamond in the rough -- the diamond he hoped his syntax would find in language -- and it is this diamond that serves, by its aspirations to integrity and wholeness, to aggravate and permit growth to a number of concepts that swirl around the political/aesthetic nexus, each end of the axis threatening the other. Besides all that, this book, excellently edited by Eileen Tabios (who also edited the seminal Black Lightning published by the Asian American Writers Workshop), is a study in how a relatively small contribution to two nations' literatures could serve to transform an entire discourse, once the discourse if forced open by the contradictions of poetry, and a poet's life. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 18:25:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kristin Dykstra Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit it's hockey season. we'll be back again in mid-March. or maybe April. --On Tuesday, January 18, 2000, 10:15 PM +0000 "Randy Prunty" wrote: > this list has always had more men posting than women, but > the situation seems to be getting direr and direr. what's up? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:39:37 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tisa Bryant Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Lately?! ---------- >From: Randy Prunty >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: has anyone else noticed >Date: Tue, Jan 18, 2000, 7:15 PM > > how seldom women are posting on this list lately? and when you/they do it > tends to be announcements and rarely of the discussion nature? there are > exceptions of course, but i'm asking if others see a trend that i think i'm > seeing. and i know this list has always had more men posting than women, but > the situation seems to be getting direr and direr. what's up? > > randy prunty > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 20:56:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Harold Teichman Subject: Re: exemplary symptoms, of Warhol? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Please enter the de-puzzlement chamber, Tony. Ain't worth getting worked up over a pretty casual remark. I'm not really very exercised one way or the other about Warhol. Is one allowed casual remarks amid serious ones in this forum? It was a sort of reference to A. C. Danto's book of a couple of years ago that made a big deal about the Moment of the Container of Spun-Metal Soap Pads in the (meta?)history of art. That's all. (I was quite disappointed in Danto's book, which promises a sort of rigour, and then fails utterly to deliver. It's languishing somewhere in my basement, so I can't quote from it.) I really was more interested in whether Jacques might expand a bit on his suggestion about registering symptoms. Tony Green wrote: > I am about as puzzled as I can get about the following > > > I think Warhol was mentioned > >in this connection. But is his "I'm just a Brillo box and > >that's ok, really" attitude in any sense emblematic of > >what we should be doing? > > Could Harold Teichman or for that matter anyone clarify this? > > I remember the song "I'm a lumberjack & I'm ok" but what is this about > Warhol having an attitude about being a Brillo Box & being ok? Surely you > don't mean this as a serious critical remark, Harold. > > best Tony Green ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 02:20:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon DeDeo Subject: Utopias In-Reply-To: <200001200508.AAA24971@smtp3.fas.harvard.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII As a somewhat fan of some of the "smarter" science fiction utopias, I'm wondering what anybody knows of explicitly "utopian" poetry. Meaning, not poetry generally about nice places, but poetry that is aimed at an explicit construction or enumeration of a utopia. Dante comes to mind, of course, as do less worked out depictions of heaven in later authors. In the 20th, perhaps patches of the Cantos? (I seem to remember a reference early on to a city where the streets are layed out according to the directions of the stars; I don't have my copy handy, though.) In general, its not so hard to come up with "utopian" moments in particular writers, but are there people where the scare quotes, for whatever reason, aren't necessary? What's out there? -- Simon ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 08:43:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Poetry City 1/20-2/24 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Tonight JANUARY 20 at 7 pm in the offices of Teachers & Writers Collaborative 5 Union Sq 7th Fl NYC (upstairs from St. Aples' Supply Shrine*) MARIPOSA & YOUME LANDOWNE Mariposa is an internationally famous performance poet and host of the Poetry in the Heights series near City College, Manhattan Youme Landowne will have copies of her new book Both writers teach in the schools for T&W JANUARY 27 at 7: DAVID HOLLANDER & MAGGIE NELSON David Hollander's book of linked stories will be published by Vuillard early next year Maggie Nelson is the co-author with Cynthia Nelson of _Not Sisters_ Her work has appeared in The Hat and AGNI New Poets Series Take Three Friday February 4 at 6:30 TOOL, A MAGAZINE Number Three Erik Sweet and Lori Quillen's laying shed robot trade publication Readings - smurfs - pez Thursday February 10 at 7 ERIC GAMALINDA and RACHEL LEVITSKY Eric comes back to Manhattan after a brief sojourn in Hawaii He is the author of _Zero Gravity_ from Alice James Books Rachel Levitsky comes back to Brooklyn after a brief sojourn out west She is the author of _Cartographies of Error_ from Leroy Thursday February 17 at the New School LISTENER IN THE SNOW by MARK STATMAN A book party for T&W's new title, about which Vanity Fair has said "Poet Mark Statman's artful and wise essays guide those who choose the path of practicing poetry" Thursday February 24 at 7 (back at T&W) THE HAT Number Three The playground equipment issue featuring Jean Donnelly, Karen Weiser, Rod Smith, Loren Goodman, Jeff Clark, Marianne Shaneen, and Brendan Lorber* (*who offers directions to St Aples) Poetry City is hosted by Jordan Davis and Anna Malmude and is graciously sponsored by the New York State Council for the Arts All readings are free so why not buy a book ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 05:55:28 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Ellis Subject: Re: Po Biz; Oppositionalism Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Jacques, Setting aside notions of poetic practice as “career-“ or “vocation-“ oriented, I nevertheless wonder over the direction of your post with respect to “competition for cultural capital” enough to ask in what ways your own work is posed within this continuum, ie., by what means (with whom) and to what end (for whom). What form of “cultural capital” do you think to gain – or more to the point, what is the objectively get-able “thing” one strives for in the act of writing? (Is it the raft in the mind of the swimmer, or some more “real” raft several hundred yards ahead that motivates those mindful etc. strokes?) Or is there “something there” at all? I mean something that isn’t just a new form of evasion, ie., something that will have to be characterized in terms more specific than just “something.” Perhaps the “oppositionalism” you suggest is now needed might be brought to bear by using other than generic terms - “conflict of values” for example – what ARE the values, and what, then, comprises the conflict? An argument based on “buzz words” is essentially unarguable; despite an apparent “openness” in the way arguments thus may be transparently couched, in the end they come to seem rather empty, however much they also seem to point a way - more like a sales pitch, however, than a dialogue. Wch is why I enquire after what your own stake is, in the picture you present. (& why, too, I appreciate your alignment of blindness with ideology – what more have you to say about that?) S E >From: Jacques Debrot >Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Po Biz; Oppositionalism >Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:37:21 EST > >More scrupulous than most of us, Charles Bernstein, in _My Way_ and >elsewhere, has compared a career in poetry to running a small business--a >comparison intended, I would imagine, to fully implicate poetry in the >everyday. Like most small businesses, though, most careers in poetry, if >only in a strictly worldly sense, fail. Poetry may not be *entirely* >competitive, but it is essentially *conflictual*--the conflict being not >only >one of values within and for the cultural field, but for the various kinds >of >cultural capital that can be acquired by those whose poetry (in a worldly >sense) succeed. This is one thing that the *discourse* of community >conceals, if the actual fact of community does not. > >If you think I am being reductive, let me elaborate just a little more. It >would be stupid to say that, as Brian gives the example, "Olson wrote >"Projective Verse" because he was interested in a "career" in poetry (or >Hopkins wrote his diaries on "parnassian" verse, or Rimbaud wrote his >"Letter >of the Seer") because of careerism." The anachronism of the word "career" >here is pretty apparent--& while I think it's rare that anyone's motives >are >ever entirely selfless--even the question of more plausible >ambitions--fame, >for instance--does not seem particularly interesting in these instances. >Nor >do these motivations seem very relevant to the early stages of Language >Poetry either, for that matter--at least to me. It's the context, as in so >much else, that's crucial. If I think that careerism (a bad word since it >seems to solicit the evasive opposition "vocation") is relevant in the >current context **it is because when, like today, the conflict of values is >largely suppressed, the competition for cultural capital becomes >dominant.** > >But look, I want to put poetry in an impossible situation (anything less >than >this strikes me as complacenct). What we most need--an >oppositionalism--may >not be what it is possible to have. Capitalism *already* carries its >critique; everything anti-, in other words, has perhaps already been >recuperated. Charles Altieri, for one, is very good at facing up to & >laying >out this dilemna in _Postmodernisms Now_. Cultural critique, for many of >us, >however, seems not to include the capacity to critique our *own* poetic >culture--a blindness that is of course deeply ideological. > >--jacques ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 09:48:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: Joe Brainard's _I Remember_ Comments: To: writenet@twc.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS In an effort to connect the literary community with AIDS prevention and awareness organizations, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, in conjunction with Creative Time and Day Without Art, is embarking on a project that will result in an on-line web page that echoes and expands upon artist and writer Joe Brainard's book-length work "I Remember." Brainard, who died of AIDS in 1994, was a brilliant and hilarious writer who recorded more than a thousand of his memories in his book _I Remember_ (Penguin, 1995): I remember a boy named Henry who was said to have poured a mixture of orange pop and popcorn off the balcony of the "Ritz" movie theatre as he made gagging sounds.. I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling. I remember, at parties, after youUve said all you can think of to say to a person--but there you both stand. What T&W wants to do now is to encourage individuals from all around the country -- including friends of Brainard's, people involved in AIDS organizations, students, teachers, poets, writers, hospice-care workers, and so on -- to write down their own "I Remembers" for inclusion in the web page. Submissions can be as long or short as you want -- they'll be edited and placed in an order that allows each submission to interact and correspond to other submissions in as lyrical and interesting a way as possible. This web page will be made available to the public on April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, but will not be limited to this little window of time. Your "I Remembers" can be about anything. Here's an exercise that might help you get started on your own "I Remember": 1) Close your eyes and relax. Take a deep breath, in and out. Let your mind go back to something you remember pretty well. 2) Let whatever you remember happen all over again in your mind. Notice as many details as you can. 3) Open your eyes and write down exactly what you just remembered. Begin your lines with the phrase "I remember..." Send all submissions (and any questions you might have) to Daniel Kane at dkane@panix.com. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 21:55:43 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alegr5 Subject: new journal MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Check out Alicubi Journal at http://www.alicubi.com. It is a new journal based out of Alicubi Press edited by Martin Downs. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 02:06:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: Re: Cyberpoetry/Stefans Comments: To: webartery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Posted to the Poetics and Webartery lists: > From: "Brian Stefans" > Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 02:32:53 -0500 > > The "weak blood" anthology seemed pretty interesting, saw some of = > my friends up there, but I'm wondering if it's bit sentimental in its = > attitude toward war; i.e., in the effort that many of the artists make = > to surpass what seem the limitations of the metaphor of technology -- = > that it's instrumental, inhuman in a sense, alienating -- I'm wondering = > if there's a tendency in "cyberpoetry," at least in that anthology (or = > grouping), to try to "humanize" it too hard. Great post. Uh, I think you're right about a lot of the art there at weak blood. But regardless, the weak blood project is still of note. It's a wide-rangingly international protest against the war that happened during the war. One of the main promises of the net, largely unfulfilled though occasionally so, is in its poetential for international collaboration, statement, and action. Reiner Strasser attempted to mobilize this poetential in weak blood. So that even were you to judge the art as a failure, you would have to qualify it as a noble failure. And sometimes that's about the best you can do. Personally, I'm proud to have work in there, however flawed my own or others is. The frame is crucial in this case, as it often is. It seems the emotional = > effect becomes flattened after a while, and the prior commitment that I = > think web artists often make to various artistic strands -- the "punk" = > anarchy that one writer was talking about (on this list? I think it was = > Jim Andrews), or what I read as the Luddite aspect of some artists = > tendency to very low res imgery (sometimes to great effect; I think this = > is the part that ties into some major strands of concrete poetry), or = > even on the pure exhuberence in programming and making things fly -- is = > put aside to achieve different ranges of emotion that don't often come = > off. It seems to me that there is an ineluctably Frankensteinish element in Web art. I think you make a good point. To "try to 'humanize' it too hard" as you say, is to reject the medium you're working in or to be in denial about it. And we know what happens to art when an artist denies themselves the possibility of coming to grips with the very medium they're working in: it goes flat. There are extremes. One extreme is the sort of 'hard humanism' you refer to that attempts, for instance, to deploy the natural world too hard into cyberspace. Another extreme, perhaps, is a 'become the machine' attitude that falls into the Italian Futurist pit, which involves a kind of worship of the machine. Not to imply that this is antiorp's position; as Taylor pointed out in an earlier post, antiorp is maybe a bit more complicated than that, dunno. Has anybody mentioned this about this (very large) collection of = > work? I haven't seen it all, I'd like to see more; it was pretty = > impressive anyway. It's really only now that those sorts of retrospective remarks may start to emerge? After the war and more of the same. > If you don't think of "emotion," I wonder who is taking up the = > exploration of semiotics and "language-games" that bpNichol and Steve = > McCaffery inaugurated, or really jump-started, with the Toronto Research = > Project. Do you (anyone,that is) think their work is well-known in that = > community (say, the Rhizome community)? I'm somewhat familiar with that work. Talanbooks published a handsome selection of that work about ten years ago, edited by McCaffery I think, after Nichol's death called Rational Geomancy. I wouldn't think it would be Rhizome territory, though I might be wrong. Sometimes the Toronto work read more like development than research, i.e., application of 'theory'. There are still lots of people doing that all over the world. But there was also a formal innovation to some of it that carries on in this new media/um, together with deep attention to language. You might want to check out the work of Claire Dinsmore, Talan Memmott, Bill Marsh, and Miekal And at http://webartery.com/defib/pastevents.htm >Do = > web poets or artists shy away from Flash and Director because it's too = > manipulative itself, or too corporate? Just wondering, since it would = > be difficult to explain which is more corporate, the Pentium chip or = > Flash -- I'm sure someone's brought this up. I've been working on some = > pretty complex Director-based pieces, and have just started Flash last = > weekend -- lot of fun (got it on ebay). I'm just learning Director myself, primarily to do interactive sound work. Looked at Flash, but my sound card was not down with Flash. Also, the scripting isn't as extensive as in Director. What I am mainly concerned about is whether it will allow me to do multi media as flexibly as I want. How do painters choose their brushes? But we're not talking humble brushes here. If somebody visits a piece that's made with Flash or Director, they know it's using Macromedia, it tells them while loading. Or, if they don't have the plugin installed, it sometimes takes them through the installation process and you see Macromedia quite a bit. Brushes don't do that. And brushes don't cost hundreds of dollars. And companies that make brushes don't lay claim to leading a painting industry. So there's this whole tangled Web of implication, yes. But, as you point out, the technology staring us in the face at this moment from the monitor on through the phone lines etc is corporate. The machine, small and large, is corporate or governmental in its construction. We can then be pirates and anti corporate netizens should we please. But we are faced nonetheless with our place in a collective undertaking that involves the corporate and the non human at many levels. This should not be unexamined. And how can one be other than ambivalent about it, regardless of the choice you make? Nonetheless, it is important to me to avoid making work that capitulates to the default settings and the adman's language and positions. I would be kidding myself were I to suppose I can do this with while using Director, however original my work with it may be. I think of Ted Warnell's work (http://www.warnell.com). He uses Windows 3.11 and no plugins and an intelligent modicum of javascript. He's very fond of Photoshop though--and uses it with great skill and effect. But primarily his work is in the HTML itself, not the bitmaps, which is very unusual (to do it well). I mean his visual works are made primarily of HTML. That is his primary material. He posted a note today thanking another poet for posting a work he could surf without having to upgrade his system or installing any plugins. A quiet note of protest or possibly exasperation. His material is largely HTML. He doesn't need plugins. Or he has chosen his material to avoid plugins? Or what? Is his art somehow more pure or unsullied by the corporate by virtue of this? Although the question may have something to it, at this point I look to the art itself, not so much what it was made with, though some work on the Web is incompetent enough that it shouts Flash or Photoshop or whatever. > I guess I've always wondered how the tradition of concrete fairs when it = > comes to presenting complex emotions, or emotions that are = > self-contradictory, which contain doubt in themselves. Most of my = > friends who have no interest in concrete work (some of whom are = > Canadians, so they've had their exposure) think it's often just = > "one-liners." I forget who it was, but someone wrote that opera was = > different than drama because it can't, by its nature as music, convey = > "doubt," and though I don't think that's necessarily true, I wonder if = > "concrete" poetries, or poetries that resemble it, can convey "doubt" = Steve Duffy: inside the machine.artobject: http://www.debris.demon.co.uk/go/auto/object/object.html Loss Pequeño Glazier: Command: Change Folder: http://www.ubu.com/contemp/glazier/command.html I never connected strongly with concrete poetry. Part of the 'platform', after all, was to create parallelism between the look and the meaning, simple mindedly mimetic, often, was it not? To be more generous, it was an approach to cutting through complexity to the nub. But too often it was at odds with or in denial of the complexity inherent in language. Language refers to things in the world and to things not of the world with stunning rapidity. Visual poetries can acknowledge and operate within those multiples of ghosts and tables (knock on wood). And they can draw on the emotion associated with the visual and the word. But can they develop the intimate familiarity with story and fate and the course of human affairs associated, say, with stories like Jude the Obscure or Oedipus......? bp Nichol may have attempted this in the Martyrology? Dunno. Doubt: you extend your arm to draw and see a metal claw. > (another question is whether they can construct cultural metaphors -- = > this is why I think Finlay's work is so important, in its role in the = > ironized recreation and critique [some would say the unironized = > promotion] of the use of metaphors, mostly centering around idealized = > concepts of nature -- the scene becomes grander, more complete and = > circumscribable, the shorter, smaller, muter the poem is). You are obviously much more familiar with Finlay's work than I am. And whether it can "construct cultural metaphors", well, why not? What is a cultural metaphor and what is involved in the construction? I like work = > that attacks, like jodi.org, and which makes you question the balances = > between human and machine, but I wonder if the opposite is possible -- a = > machine program that says "take me!" How about "Do me" instead? http://www.vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html or "I think I'm going to feint" -- = > I'm being silly with these examples. How about: "I'm depressed." How about "I'm a pop up poem and I'm messed up about it"? http://www.vispo.com/popups/popups.htm Or how about "I'm a writing machine"? http://www.grammatron.com/ Or how about Phon:e:me? http://phoneme.walkerart.org/ > I wonder, also, if web art is always done in a dialectic relationship to = > the gallery system, whereas web poetry is always done in relation to the = > printed page and the system of publication (a much less lucrative = > system), hence the different degrees of energies focused in each, and = > whether there's confusion because of this (not manical confusion, just = > whether this DMZ zone that web artists occupy is standing on so many = > borders as to create a certain "high anxiety"). Interesting question. More than meets the eye to it. Despite the discussion above about the corporate and the machine and its place here, as a writer I am relieved to have the Web to publish on as I see fit. I never liked the print publishing routine or structures, and you don't get real successful questioning that, not playing along. Somebody else had the press. Also, given the geographically dispersed nature of the Web, it's easier to find the work that's important to you, not being limited to runs of 1000 and distribution within a single country and tied into a preposterous pr mentality without critical brains. Any high anxiety I detect is the result of wrestling with the machine in other ways. Cool post, Brian. Very interested to look at your Director work. Is it on the Web? Regards, Jim Andrews ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 21:25:32 +0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong Subject: has anyone else noticed Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I was silent for a long time, I am silent no longer. I say what I feel may be of general interest; I contribute what I can. I would also like to point to the fact that I take time to make my offerings concise out of consideration for the other members of the list and the general users of the internet. The gender debate is a tired one for me, however, I still get rather hot under the collar when my internet connection times out before I can download the digest...particularly when I find that it is burdened with autophageous discourse. I suggest that, instead of focusing on women, some men focus upon themselves. Try for illumination and wit. There you will find a womanly response... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:32:37 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Kuszai Subject: Zazil #1 Now Available Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The Sunbrella Network is happy to announce the publication of ZAZIL an eclectic sampling of work featuring: Danielle Collbert notebooks translated by Norma Cole -- Nancy Gates Madsen and Kris Dykstra translating Cuban poet Reina Maria Rodriguez -- Duncan biographer Lisa Jarnot -- Atlantapoet John Lowther -- San Diego's own Bobbie West -- DC Special: Buck Downs, Rod Smith and Heather Fuller -- Designer Guy Bennett -- Mez [Mary-Anne Breeze] in the house -- POG member Dan Featherston -- Eleni Stecopolous lives in Buffalo -- islander Steve Carll -- LA gangleader Douglas Messerli -- and our own Stephen Cope reviewing Jessica Grim's _Fray_ approx. 80 pages hand-bound 8.25 x 10.25 $5 $10 subscription for 2 issues direct inquiries/orders to Bill Marsh 1022 Emerald Street San Diego, CA 92109 wmarsh@nu.edu A quik note: It is hard, as one of four editors for this issue (Cope, Kuszai, Marsh, Ross), to explain exactly the collaboration that went into the production of this magazine and the great care with which Bill assembled the inaugural issue. Anyone who knows the work he has done with PaperBrain Press will appreciate what it means when we say: "Each issue of Zazil is hand-made with computer, printer and copier assistance, with an impressive color cover and faux-parfait binding." Plus, if you haven't seen the work of Reina Rodriguez, these elegant translations by Madsen and Dykstra are a must-have. (Sorry to hear about the Sabres, Kris. Shout out to Miro Satan!) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:21:17 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Re: Publishers Weekly Reviews MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I recently re-entered the publishing world & as a consequence I read Publisher's Weekly again. I am not sure who it is (maybe up on the masthead?), but at present there is a very good reviewer of poetry books - writes well, smart and is drawing attention to small presses including Atelos, The Figures and other "out front" critters distributed by SPD. The column also gives short takes to books that deserve attention as well, so a bunch of new title ground is covered - and, interestingly enough, the reviewer is not unwilling to take interesting critical cuts at books he or she considers down a notch in worth. The issue I am referring is probably last weeks - since we get it in the mail on the West Coast. Refreshing. Cheers, Stephen Vincent ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:31:54 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Utopias In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 2:20 AM -0500 1/20/00, Simon DeDeo wrote: >As a somewhat fan of some of the "smarter" science fiction utopias, I'm >wondering what anybody knows of explicitly "utopian" poetry. Meaning, not >poetry generally about nice places, but poetry that is aimed at an >explicit construction or enumeration of a utopia. Dante comes to mind, of >course, as do less worked out depictions of heaven in later authors. In >the 20th, perhaps patches of the Cantos? (I seem to remember a reference >early on to a city where the streets are layed out according to the >directions of the stars; I don't have my copy handy, though.) > >In general, its not so hard to come up with "utopian" moments in >particular writers, but are there people where the scare quotes, for >whatever reason, aren't necessary? What's out there? > >-- Simon Blake's songs of innocence and much else.. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:37:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: Re: po biz; oppositionalism Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Hi, this is Anselm Berrigan speaking, no other parties of the project are represented. What does "oppositional" mean, vis-a-vis poetics, as this conversation takes it? I raise the question because the portion of the larger poetry community this list represents has always seemed to me to be fixated on opposition. I am wondering if the type of critique of poetic culture that Jacques desires isn't something the poetics list is incapable of providing. And I don't suggest this with antagonism in mind, more from a feeling that I'm exposed to many critiques of poetic culture, practically on a daily basis, but they don't ever come from e-mail lists. In fact, I stopped paying attention to the list for awhile because every thread seemed to break down into a conversation that unironically centered Language poetry as it's subject. But I am uncertain as to why "an oppositionalism" is necessary (tho' I'm still catching up on what's been posted). Or is it that a public statement of oppostionalism is necessary? I am struggling to understand what is and isn't there, as deemed within this thread. Jacques' comment about C. Bernstein's comparison of a career in poetry to running a small business reminded me of a report of a talk that my father gave in San Francisco in, I think, 1981, at 80 Langton St, during which he explained that he thought of himself as a small business person, and that survival was the issue most at hand. However, there was little elaboration on the subject, and the writer of the report, Renny Pritikin (possibly misspelled by me) cited at a certain point "the lack of common terms" as the main reason for communication breakdowns between Berrigan and, as it seemed, Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten. Anyway, and I'm not going to attempt to tie this all together, I also was wondering, given the notion of "failure" as inherent to poetic practice, if my father's "career" could be viewed as a success or a failure. Is it a failure to have your work go mostly out of print withing the small publishing circles after you've died, only to have a selected come out on Penguin eleven years after said death. Or is that a success? Or is it too subjective a consideration to handle? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 09:31:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Catherine Daly Organization: e.g. Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit > what's up? At the risk of being one of a bazillion posters in reply, there are several reasons: I took it seriously when the list changed to announcements only, or now, announcements and book reviews When we had this discussion before re: women ... I don't remember what the outcome was. The poetryetc list seems more balanced, britpo, not. What can I say? 1) I would hate to be outed as insufficiently langpo. 2) I'm busy w/ Jordan Davis on cap-l reliving the West Chester conference & trying to figure out how to get even more poetry off my hard drive. uh, so perhaps some announcements and book reviews to justify this post? and a question: in an issue of Witz, Will Alexander wrote an essay called "A Small Balletic Hive". Where is he teaching & how could I sign up or who can I ask? Have you checked out my e-chapbooks online, including the one at Duration Press (http://www.durationpress.com)? Would you like to come hear me read at the exquisitely-named Espress Y'Self Cafe in Pasadena at 8 p.m. January 27? Bonus: mention you're from the POETICS list and I will not read confessional narrative free verse! (Actually, I'll be reading love poems.) Check out recent book reviews of mine at Lynx: Poetry from Bath, read.me, and Savoy (http://www.savoymag.com, after January 27th). However, the poets may not interest you: Lee Ann Brown, Jeff Clark, Laura Kasischke, Ann Townsend, Dana Levin, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julie Fay, Cathleen Calbert, and many more. Or, more informally: I have read parts of Pierre Joris' _Breathturn_ alongside my old Michael Hamburger selected, with pleasure. I am researching reader response, newish performance theory and re-researching some architectural criticism for application to technical architecture. I am making some lesson plans for logic in poetry and math in poetry, but doubt I will make the ISAMA deadline. I finally put away a lot of books I had out to review: I thought that Annie Finch/Lee Ann Brown idea someone posted was a good one, and read both together. an angeleno poets/landscape piece hasn't gelled Laura Mortiarty's non hasn't been updated in quite some time, but I didn't finish any song poems that would be good for it anyway, and put away my Chinese Poetry from the Song dynasty book I have the Silver Jews cd out because I was surprised we had it in the stacks, but I haven't listened to it I have been re-reading all of Christopher Marlowe's drama and all of Shakespeare for two projects I am doing some research about pastorals for the perforations "play" issue and this is going very nicely with the Chinese poetry and nicely opposing my marinism, gongorism, etc. investigation I am not the January *Fresh Poet*, but will be instead February *Fresh Poet* (http://www.freshpoetry.com). Rgds, Catherine Daly cadaly@pacbell.net ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:43:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "K.Angelo Hehir" Subject: Re: Utopias In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Simon, the first thing that pops into my head is Blake's Jerusalem by. I'm about to embark on an investigation of Blake as anarchist so i would love to get blakish for a while on this list as the the blake list seems to have disappeared. Also, funny you should mention dante, i have never really considered him a poet of utopia vision especially if you consider de monarchia beside the comedy. Too pragmatic. cheers, kevin Akaky Akakievich, a practical man, wanted to try it with his arms in the sleeves. Nikolai Gogol ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:05:48 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen Kelley Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'm undone by the "rigour," and all the words it takes, apparently, to attain it. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 13:15:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick" Subject: Re: Utopias MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain "Dioce, whose terraces are the color of stars..." Intriguing question, Simon. I would venture to say that Duncan, Blaser and Ronald Johnson all inhabit in one way or another a utopian poetics, if by utopia one means not so much a site of political production (though in Duncan & Blaser's case, certainly, this is not entirely true as the idea of social justice is important to their work), but rather an openly ontological project where the ongoing recuperation of presence makes available the liberation (or eleutheria) necessary for realizing the dream of some golden age. This would be utopia as tikkun, then -- a reparation of the world, to be understood and undertaken as a process, not as some permanent fixed site or totalizing system. I would even venture a little father and suggest that any poetry that is basically Orphic in nature (Stevens and Johnson both come to mind here) is lured on by the scent of paradise. There are all sorts of problems with this, of course. A purely Orphic poetics is one that longs for some kind of unitive closure -- which would be the kiss of death to the kind of utopian process I'm outlining. But throwing the net wider, there are certainly ways in which Gary Snyder might be considered a kind of utopian poet. Hell, there are moments when I even think of Joe Ceravolo as a utopian poet, brimming with a paradisical panache -- if again, by utopia we mean not some form of political management, not the ideology to end all ideologies (dream on), but the practice of play, or jouissance, or whatever one wants to call it. The ludic impulse and the utopian impulse are very close, I think. I have a feeling this is not the sort of response you were looking for. But if Johnson is not a utopian poet, I don't know who is -- and I'm smack in the middle of writing a paper for the Johnson conference so configurations of the utopic impulse lie thick on my brain. Patrick Pritchett > -----Original Message----- > From: Simon DeDeo [SMTP:sdedeo@FAS.HARVARD.EDU] > Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 12:20 AM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Utopias > > As a somewhat fan of some of the "smarter" science fiction utopias, I'm > wondering what anybody knows of explicitly "utopian" poetry. Meaning, not > poetry generally about nice places, but poetry that is aimed at an > explicit construction or enumeration of a utopia. Dante comes to mind, of > course, as do less worked out depictions of heaven in later authors. In > the 20th, perhaps patches of the Cantos? (I seem to remember a reference > early on to a city where the streets are layed out according to the > directions of the stars; I don't have my copy handy, though.) > > In general, its not so hard to come up with "utopian" moments in > particular writers, but are there people where the scare quotes, for > whatever reason, aren't necessary? What's out there? > > -- Simon ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 14:42:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: Fab NYC reading Jan 27 / Levitsky MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message had to be reformatted. Chris -- Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 13:52:21 -0500 From: ENJOY BELLADONNA* JANURARY 27, 2000 Two Brooklyn Poets with new books Kim Lyons Abracadabra (Granary Books) & Prageeta Sharma Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective) 7:30 pm at Bluestockings Women's Bookstore 172 Allen Street between Rivington and Stanton on the Lower East Side of Manhattan Contact: (212)777-6028 for more information *deadly nightshade, a cardiac and respiratory stimulant ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 14:00:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: The Resistance MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } brain stefans wrote: "Another way to phrase it, using the above terms, is that you would like to spot the resistances in the work since it is that which gives you the first note of understanding of why a work is "art" and not something like a letter, or a call in the wild." taylor brady quoting... ahh.. sorry, i missed who was being quoted: "Art is created through one's medium's resistance to one's vision, through some kind of failure of the medium." < ? > both of these quotations are fascinating to me brian suggests just above the quote i pulled that not being able to sense these resistances makes the work seem facile, as if, i suppose, it might simply go on and on and never stop and never vary the person that taylor is quoting seems to me to implicitly agree with brian and to (if i'm reading this as meant) go one further suggesting that it is the medium's 'failure to thwart' (?) the artist's 'vision' that allows art to.. uh.. you know.. become... think for a moment about the poems or artworks you've created --- yes, ~you~, not brian necessarily or taylor or the quoted unnamed poet of those words but you, poet on this list ; have you ever written a poem in one sitting ? just had it flow out and feel right ? and then as time goes by continue to feel fine, as if it didn't need editing, rewriting, rethinking, renaming, reanything ? i can't hear yr answer obviously ---- but i can easily imagine that there are folks for whom this has never happened and those for whom most of what they write "stands" as is, that is i know they are out there, both of these extremes, i've talked to poets who fit with certain reservations of course, on each end of this continuum but most of us fit in the middle i'd guess, maybe having had this sort of experience now and then but having far more things that did get reworked edited etc ---- that's where i find myself most of the time but now and then it happens that i sit down and write something straight thru boom and that's that so then the question arises; are those poems that just flow, seemingly without resistance, not art ? it wd seem that if i was in agreement with the quotes that started this posting then i wd at least need to be pretty suspicious about such a spontaneous and effortless work's art status, right ? in some cage anecdote that i recall but can't imagine how i wd find right now,. cage is told by someone who's just heard about how some composition of his was composed, "the way you write music, anybody cd do it" to which he replies "of course they cd, but they don't" but then, funny thing... if you take a method of cage's or of mac low's and use it as faithfully as you are able, perhaps even using the same materials and sources --- star charts say.... or_gitanjali_ do you think you wd end up with identical works of art ? what about just "overwhelmingly similar" works of art ? i don't believe it --- as careful and disciplined as the efforts of each were, to escape intention (cage) and ego (mac low) neither, it seems to me, do so --- mac low has said this even, and cage was continually trying new things it seems b/c he kept seeing the traces of his intention in past work ~ s l u r s ~ my own position (as temporally limited as it is) is that "the resistance of the medium" can't work as a defining trait for art in any meaningful way for me --- all it takes is one counter instance and it seems they abound --- might such a notion of resistance be crucial for someone in their work... of course --- it has been for me at times, but i've also noticed that the poems of mine where this sense of the resistance of the medium was most relevant to me in the act of composition doesnt seem to correlate with anyone else's sense of the work's resistances --- where does that leave us ? maybe art doesnt need any 'defining characters' ? maybe the 'resistances' are all internal ? and arent resistances so much as boundaries between what we're immediately conformable with calling "art" and what we might be persuaded to embrace as such ? is it any one's job to do this persuading ? )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 13:51:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Tedd J. Mulholland" Subject: Re: Utopias Comments: To: Simon DeDeo MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --poetry that is aimed at an explicit construction im not sure how to respond to this but I feel compelled to: im not sure what an explicit construction is if it means something like crafted to produce a certain response and therefore creating an intended 'utopian' sort of community/bond between author and reader then it is something that I have thought about and experimented with in my writing (in some form without those terms . . . kind of) but Im not sure this is what you are getting at I have been rather interested in borges of late he seems to create odd utopias Where languages are something like the perfect language of adam or somehow expresses "things" in a more literal or direct cognitive sense . . . Umberto Eco explores some sense of utopian language in "the search for the perfect language" which is an interesting but highly repetitive read But its bibliography may be a good reference (he devotes a section to Dante's Italian poetic language) the idea of "utopian" poetry is interesting and I wonder where it directs the writer and reader and if a utopian poetry is akin to a perfect communication (maybe, not language) I wonder more what it means in a constructive "real world" kind of way Out side of its theory and into the actual production of poetry . . . Or is it possible to conceive of a utopian poetry without a utopian language . . . Just some thoughts Simon if I have strayed far from your intended path I would like to be re-directed . . . All for now . . . I think . . . TEDD -------------------------------------------------------------- Get free personalized email from GTE at http://www.gtemail.net ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 14:19:44 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Fewell Subject: Info. on Laclau MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Does anyone have any websites that will give a general introduction to the theorist Laclau and his work? Thanks for your time. Aaron Keith ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:24:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mary Burger Subject: Contact for Juliana Spahr? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Does anyone have a current email address for Juliana Spahr? I've tried js@lava.net, but no luck. Backchannel ok. Thanks, Mary Burger ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 09:05:35 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: exemplary symptoms, of Warhol? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----Original Message----- From: Harold Teichman To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Friday, 21 January 2000 06:15 Subject: Re: exemplary symptoms, of Warhol? >Please enter the de-puzzlement chamber, Tony. Ain't worth >getting worked up over a pretty casual remark. I'm not >really very exercised one way or the other about Warhol. That is what was really bothering me about the remark. >Is one allowed casual remarks amid serious ones in this >forum? It was a sort of reference to A. C. Danto's book >of a couple of years ago that made a big deal about the >Moment of the Container of Spun-Metal Soap Pads in the >(meta?)history of art. That's all. (I was quite disappointed >in Danto's book, which promises a sort of rigour, and >then fails utterly to deliver. It's languishing somewhere >in my basement, so I can't quote from it.) It's a pity that Danto's book could discourage anyone from a closer attention to Warhol's work(s). & that that shd then become the basis for further discouragement to others (& so on....) as if the work cd have little bearing on "poetics" : saddened now, rather than puzzled. Tony Green >I really was more interested in whether Jacques might >expand a bit on his suggestion about registering symptoms. > >Tony Green wrote: > >> I am about as puzzled as I can get about the following >> >> > I think Warhol was mentioned >> >in this connection. But is his "I'm just a Brillo box and >> >that's ok, really" attitude in any sense emblematic of >> >what we should be doing? >> >> Could Harold Teichman or for that matter anyone clarify this? >> >> I remember the song "I'm a lumberjack & I'm ok" but what is this about >> Warhol having an attitude about being a Brillo Box & being ok? Surely you >> don't mean this as a serious critical remark, Harold. >> >> best Tony Green > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 21:22:02 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: "Cyberpoetry" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "So now that I have my jargon of authenticity in place, maybe I can address your concerns about my inauthentic jargon in a more substantive manner. First, it's entirely possible that I just wasn't being clear - I usually post to the list on my lunch break, and in my rush to send something off, I've caught myself more than once gravitating too easily toward a kind of notational shorthand that generates all sorts of misunderstandings....." Taylor, thanks for your carefully thought-out answer. First, your implicit criticism of my use of the word "art" is on the mark. I was being lazy, and I grabbed the the most available word to create a distinction with the attitude (technical mastery...) I was criticizing. Of course, the art "art" has its own baggage, and it only points to how hard it is to find language which can slip off its historical coil and made mean something else. (I am not familiar with Antiorp"; therefore I can't comment with its contribution to this debate.) In fact, the tendency of new terms to accumulation verbal baggage underlies my criticism. It is mental laziness, and it obfuscates. You question, why didn't I ask you to be clear directly? What kind of clarity are we talking about? The clarity of "Elements of Style"? Not at all. The clarity of British empiricism? God forbid. The clarity of Chinese poetry, of the Turkish poet Orhan Veli, of Barthes's essay "Loyola"? I am all for it. Murat Nemet-Nejat ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:57:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: look at MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII http://no-such.com http://www.dextro.org/ for two of the best sites i've seen online http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm for the end of the Yours project ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:44:25 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: A reading: Chadwick, Murphy, Prevallet at Double Happiness, New York MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Saturday, January 29th 4 p.m. Cydney Chadwick is the author of seven books and chapbooks, the most recent of which is a revised edition of Persistent Disturbances (Texture Press, 1999). In 1998 Chadwick won the New American Writing Series award. Her stories and prose poems have been translated into French, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. She has just begun her 12th year as the director of Avec publications. Michelle Murphy's book of prose poems, Jackknife & Light (Avec Books, 1998) was a recent finalist in the Pen/West Literary Awards. Murphy's work has appeared in numerous US journals as well as in Russia and Japan. One of her poems has been used as the libretto in a musical piece called "Thirteen Versions of Surrender" with performances in Germany and San Francisco. Kristin Prevallet's chapbook Selections from the Parasite Poems was recently published by Barque Press. Her essays and poems have appeared in Jacket, Sulfur, Boxkite, Object, and Torque. She recently edited and wrote an introduction for a selection of ballads and collages by the poet Helen Adam. Double Happiness is located at 173 Mott Street, just south of Broome in Chinatown. A 4$ contribution goes to the readers. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 12:28:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Clay Subject: John Zorn, editor of Arcana: Musicians on Music Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" HelveticaAnnouncing [special offer follows this post] Arcana: Musicians on Music Edited by John Zorn Answering a need for critical attention towards experimental and avant-garde music, Arcana is a ground-breaking work as far-ranging and dynamic as the current generation of musicians. Through manifestoes, scores, interviews, notes and critical papers, performer/composers address composing, playing, improvising, teaching, and thinking in and through music. Rather than an attempt to distill or define musicians' work, Arcana illuminates with personal vision and experience. Arcana is a remarkable book-challenging and original-essential for composers, musicans, theorists and fans alike. "Arcana is a vibrant testimony to the continuing vitality of new music. These exciting young composers are as idiosyncratic and eloquent with words as they are with music." -Meredith Monk. Composer / Singer "Arcana, edited by John Zorn, is filled with writings by musicians from all over the musical map. Interested in the sampling, deconstruction and reconstruction of pop hooks? The historical sociobiology of the downtown music scene? An American's reaction to the study of Gagaku? Extended contrabass techniques? A savvy take on ear plugs, amplifier distortion and pain? This is the book you've been looking for." -Steve Reich. Composer / Performer Contributors Chris Brown Anthony Coleman Marilyn Crispell Mark Dresser Stephen Drury Bill Frisell Fred Frith Peter Garland Gerry Hemingway Scott Johnson Eyvind Kang Guy Klucevsek George Lewis David Mahler Miya Masaoka Myra Melford Ikue Mori Larry Ochs Bob Ostertag John Oswald Mike Patton Marc Ribot David Rosenboom John Schott Elliott Sharp David Shea Frances-Marie Uitti Lois V Vierk Z'EV John Zorn 380pp. illustrated. Contains a discography. Should start showing up in bookstores about Feb., 1, 00 ISBN 1-887123-27-X $24.95 Publisher: Granary Books / Hips Road Further information at http://www.granarybooks.comHelvetica Available at better bookstores, our primary distributor D.A.P. (1-800-338-BOOK), SPD in Berkeley, or direct from the publisher (orders@granarybooks.com). SPECIAL OFFER: Until Jan. 31, 00 Arcana is available to list members at a flat price of $20 which includes surface postage anywhere in the world! [Only residents of the state of New York must include sales tax making the total $21.65] Send check or money order payable to Granary Books, Inc. 307 Seventh Ave., #1401 New York, NY 10001 [International orders only should email a credit card number; we prefer checks for domestic orders.] Don't miss this one! Granary Books 307 Seventh Ave., #1401 [@ 28th St.] NY, NY 10001 http://www.granarybooks.com tel 212 337-9979 fax 212 337-9774 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 00:10:06 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Golding Subject: A couple of requests Comments: To: british-poets@mailbase.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Request # 1 (mainly for state-side listmates): If any of you are interested in chairing a panel at the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference in Louisville (which I know a number of you are attending), please get in touch with the Conference Director, Harriette Seiler, at hmseil01@louisville.edu Request # 2 (mainly for UK listmates, I guess): Do you know of any poetry and poetics conferences/gatherings this summer in the UK, in July/August? I'm coming over anyway and would like to combine the trip with some kind of conference or speaking gig if possible. (I know about the one in--is it Manchester? Salford? I can't remember--but I can't make that by about 2 days.) Backchannel, please--and thanks. Alan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 09:52:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Possible_Futures_1: What I Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" am calling a Guernica figure lolls drowsily in my New! Delphi Developer is a comprehensive set of professional tools, combining the view. Take it down, you say? The nightshift can smooth over particulars. Cayenne SYNONYMS: chili, red pepper, bird pepper. BOTANICAL DESCRIPTION: Cayenne if it seems obscene, well that's Rimbaud; this is him at Stranger, if thou hast learnt a truth which needs no school of I spent one Sunday in Vitebsk. Snow on my tongue, performance of a 32-bit optimizing native-code compiler, the productivity of a visual component-based environment, and the flexibility of his most imagistic, but consequently most psychological and long experience, that the world is full of guilt and misery, is a member of the nightshade family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, eggplant, and has seen enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares, to tire scalable database development, in a robust object-oriented architecture. You get everything you need thee of it, enter this wild wood and view the haunts of Nature. Dung on my mind; it's such an old town, and henbane. It is available either as a spice, or the calm shade shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze that makes the green leaves dance, like the layout you see on an old map. Chagall and that woman shall waft a balm to thy sick heart. Thou wilt find in black lift heavily off dreaming of a nightmare. Dolorous sighs, sleek to create powerful Windows 95, Windows NT, and Windows 3.1 features, but I am always happy in this truck, nothing here of all that pained thee in the haunts of applications. The new 32-bit optimizing native-code compiler lets you in the form of dried pods of variable color and size, containing many subversive (in a juvenile way) manner. Even these verses from quickly create standalone, royalty-free executables with no runtime-interpreter DLLs men and made thee loathe thy life. The primal curse fell, it is true, upon the unsinning earth, but not I've got plenty to say for it. Seeds. HABITAT, CULTIVATION: It is a native of Central America, and was introduced to Europe and India in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese. It was then introduced to Africa, my translation, which are the most successful, are pretty awkward, from which most British supplies come. PARTS and there are more shifts in tone in the original I ignore the raven. Yes, it's true this speckled surplus USED: The dried ripe fruits. PHARMACOLOGY: The constituents of cayenne are has been provided by one of your admirers... sitting at the bar Required. Delphi applications run up to 15-50 times faster than p-code interpreted applications. And with... with an eye in the mirror, and a perfect Lucky Strike. No prime contender but waiting is always French poem which don't come through in this condensed version - a holiday in places like this, forgetful of other alkaloids, carotenoid pigments (including capsanthin and capsorubin), flavonoids, ascorbic acid and volatile oil. Of the alkaloids in cayenne, the most important is capsaicin, known to mimic 16-to-32-bit compatibility, a quick recompile of existing 16-bit applications will boost performance it is the failure to render these shifts in tone, in by 300-400% and produce 20-25% smaller EXEs! Delphi leverages the power of Windows fact, that screwed up the translation in the first place in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these holidays. Now the step turns to caramel, and after strange wads, unfinished paragraphs sticking in the toaster, that it overruns, it is shades are still the abodes of gladness... it is worth taking a look no fun, no more. Sing a new song, write the letter to that girl whose poem you missed as much as you at the "art" of "heart" in this poem. Carlyle, in Signs Of The 95 and Windows NT. You will have virtually unlimited (I realize now). In any case, that is the best explanation I Times, thought that the primary metaphor for the can give for the final lines of my poem, times was that of the disease ( was the effect of prostaglandins a skin cream called "Zostrix." Containing capsaicin has been shown to though it may make it appear a bit cheaper as an effort. I'm surprised that you would wonder memory because the compiler runs in a flat 32-bit address space. No more about the "function" of a line, since none of the lines seem, to me, really to "function" in any way, he the first? ( that an individual was healthy when improve healing in cases of postherpetic neuralgia, and to reduce pain in diabetic neurapathy. Cayenne not conscious of the mechanism of the body or mind. Hasn't Finlay used the most volatile symbol for death and illness to has also been claimed to stimulate circulatory read it, and wanted it, and yet the connections were severed. No flight though I suppose you were wondering about 16-bit 64K barriers anywhere - now you can the rather adolescent, or pornographic, nature of its sexual content. I really wouldn't create arrays, strings, records, and other data structures up that day, the clouds were revealing new seaside properties for these to two gigabytes! New multi-error compile with hints and warnings increases productivity by allowing programmers to resolve errors know how to answer that, except to say that it's in complete his image of the pastoral, and doesn't faster. It is now possible to fix multiple and digestive secretions and perspiration; the volatile oil is probably a significant he do justice to this symbol as that of problems in a single compile. And hints and warnings about possible problems death (i.e. not trivializing it, which is what an American such as Warhol might do, or theorize it factor in this activity. One suggested explanation was that the... the original - hardly adequate, I suppose, since my "translation" (i.e. the second "Language" version) makes Pound's Cathay appear rather conservative (also much more impressive) in comparison. Herb releases endogenous gastric secretagogues which increase the perfusion of the body tissues into non-existence like the French)? Doesn't he make art more (Corn, it appears, is a symbol of potency, and I know of something called a "Corn King," probably an agricultural deity, "real" this way? Or do we wish he permitted "reality" talents of ours, new inklings of stars and they felt avoiding its to keep its distance from art, at least that appears in a poem of Randall Jarrell's, but that's about it) until we feel that this reality has been company was the only proper thing to do, so we stayed down. Let's in your code make it easier to deliver bug-free applications. With 16-to-32-bit compatibility, Delphi allows you to protect your application investment while not spend much time here. By blood. In studies carried out in India, Cayenne, or equivalent amounts of the main constituent capsaicin, sufficiently historicized. Of course history is an attempt to make the please don't hesitate not to use it (obviously); no need to send it past seem stable and of course it's all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game's up. But moving to a new operating system. FREE! 16-bit Delphi for Windows 3.1 was shown to eat away at cholesterol levels, back. I hope things are well with you. You is included. This means you choose the ( though killies have green backs and white are lucky to be in New York in this weather, though I must say it's beautiful out here, now. Best platform to meet your needs. To promote excretion of excess cholesterol, and even prevents its absorption. The study also showed that Cayenne was more effective than capsaicin bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks! When we've tired of swimming we'll go climb the ledgy forest. Confute the sages. Alone, suggesting that its other constituents contribute to its potency. Cayenne also controls lipid levels. CHINESE MEDICINE ENERGETICS: Taste: acrid temperature: hot action: produces perspiration, stimulates circulation, stimulates gastric secretions, carminative, anti-septic, counter-irritant _____ for Kim Rosenfield on her birthday, 8/1/96 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 23:54:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Buuck Subject: contact info request (Raworth) Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Looking for email &or address for Tom Raworth. Backchannel OK. Thanks much! David Buuck ----- Sent using MailStart.com ( http://MailStart.Com/welcome.html ) The FREE way to access your mailbox via any web browser, anywhere! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 04:56:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: Live Radio Broadcast of Canadian Sound Poetry Comments: cc: Darren Wershler-Henry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Wherever you are geographically, please tune in with your Real Audio player for an evening of Canadian Sound Poetry live broadcast from the studios of WFMU with Darren Wershler-Henry and Christian Bok: http://www.wfmu.org This Tuesday night, Jan. 24th, from 8-11 E.S.T. Rumor has it that Christian will be performing his double-speed rendition of Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate" and Darren will be reading from texts such as "Nicholodeon." In addition, they will be bringing down a gang of vintage obscure recordings of the 4 Horsemen, etc. And what would a Canadian Sound Poetry Radio Show be without The Nihilist Spasm Band? ---------------------------- A reminder if you're in the NYC area and want to see this stuff performed live the next night: Please join Apex Art for an evening of performance poetry and improvised music on Wednesday, January 26th starting at 7 pm with: Bruce Andrews (New York) Christian Bok (Toronto) Christof Migone (New York / Montreal) Stephen Vitiello (New York) Darren Wershler-Henry (Toronto) Admission is free. Apex Art 291 Church St. New York City 212-431-5270 http://www.apexart.org info@apexart.org ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:16:59 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Nielsen, Aldon" Subject: Re: Utopias In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" clearly the closing pages of Melvin Tolson's _Libretto for the Republic of Liberia_ offer a utopian vision of great interest -- all the sadder to read today in light of present conditions in the actual Liberia, as opposed to the metaphorical Liberia of the poem -- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:17:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kristin Dykstra Subject: followup: hockey note MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit surprised and impressed by the number of happy notes I got in response to my hockey remark, I would like to say thanks to everyone who responded backchannel. Dan Waber had this to share: "Someone had written 'Jesus Saves' on a wall. Underneath it, someone else had written, 'Gretzky scores on the rebound!!!'' I also got a quotation of the famous Spicer baseball poetry. your assignments, should you choose to accept them, are to respond to Spicer about the sport of your choice ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:28:53 -0800 Reply-To: wmarsh@nu.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: bill marsh Organization: National University Subject: Job Posting: Department Chair, Writing and Communications MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Octavia Davis Bill Marsh Subject: Department Chair, Writing and Communications, National University Position: Department Chair and Professor, Writing and Communications (a non-tenure track position) National University La Jolla, California Minimum requirements: * Earned rank of Professor or Associate Professor in Communications, Rhetoric, Literature or a related field (Communications preferred). * Department Chair, or equivalent leadership experience. * Ability to oversee Writing and Communications programs (including New Media and Instructional Technology) and university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum. * Teaching success with adult or other non-traditional students. * The ideal candidate will also have experience in grant writing and grant administration, on-line and distance education, program development and assessment at Bachelor's and Master's levels. For consideration, submit a letter of interest with supporting materials and resume to: Dr. Octavia Davis and Professor Bill Marsh School of Arts and Sciences National University 11255 North Torrey Pines Road La Jolla, CA 92037 Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. For more information, contact: odavis@nu.edu -or- wmarsh@nu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:53:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kristin Dykstra Subject: Cariaga email? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit seeking email address for Catalina Cariaga please backchannel thank you Kris ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:45:32 -0800 Reply-To: minka@grin.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: megan minka lola camille roy Subject: Reading at New Langton Arts MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit LIVES AND HALF-LIVES: A Poetry Reading by Kathy Lou Schultz and Liz Waldner Saturday, January 29 8 pm New Langton Arts 1246 Folsom Street San Francisco, CA 94103 415.626.5416 ph San Francisco - On Saturday, January 29, New Langton Arts hosts readings by Kathy Lou Schultz and Liz Waldner, two young poets who investigate the matrix of aesthetics, identity, class, and sex. Schultz and Waldner write poetry that combines challenging content and formal innovation. Their work is surprising, subtle, and worthy of attention. Waldner reads pieces from her Iowa Prize for Poetry winning book, "Point Is That Which Has No Part". Kathy Lou Schultz reads poems to be announced. Tickets are $6 general/$4 students, seniors, Langton members. New Langton Arts is located at 1246 Folsom Street in San Francisco. For information call 415 626 5416 or visit the Web site at www.newlangtonarts.org. Kathy Lou Schultz was born in Burke, South Dakota in 1966, and resides in San Francisco. She is the author of "Genealogy" (a+bend press, 1999) and "Re dress" (San Francisco State University, 1994) and is a founding editor of Lipstick Eleven and Duck Press. In the past 20 years she has held numerous jobs including counselor for battered women, grassroots organizer, volunteer coordinator, Nebraska vacation guide, childcare worker, proofreader, and creative writing instructor. These days she is an editor in the high-tech industry. Schultz's recent projects include a forum on class and poetics which she co-edited with Robin Tremblay - McGaw. She is currently working on a scholarly project on the writings of poet Erica Hunt. Liz Waldner is a resident of Iowa and is the author of "Homing Devices" (O. Books, 1998). In the words of local poet Laura Moriarty, "Liz Waldner is tough with words. 'Homing Devices' is Spicerian in subject matter (sex, tarot, language, Dante, romance, gender, sex), as well as in its speechy ironic diction." Waldner has published poetry in many small magazines and is the recent recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American poetry and the Poetry Society of America's Robert M. Winner award. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 15:40:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Claire Dinsmore Organization: Studio Cleo Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit maybe it's because we're busy working / creating. I believe writers/artists often exist in cycles -- months reading/thinking learning/gestating, months working. Then, of course, there are also deadlines ... Claire > Lately?! > > > how seldom women are posting on this list lately? -- "We live in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest of the madness is art." - Henry James http://www.StudioCleo.com/entrancehall.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:59:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Little Review: Enrique Lihn, Figures of Speech Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Figures of Speech, poems by Enrique Lihn translated by David Oliphant Host Publications Inc. 188 pp. ISBN: 0--924047--17--8 Figures of Speech presents, in an all-too brief format, the life of an interesting, unsparing poet; indeed, the format of the posthumous "selected poems" often provides the illusion of a completeness to one's life, but a reading of Lihn's work demonstrates how this struggle with a sense of wholeness seemed not to be resolvable even by the prospect of death. Lihn was one of Chile's foremost poets, yet, despite a collection published by New Directions in 1978 (The Dark Room and Other Poems) and an earlier translated volume from 1969, he has not acquired the reputation in the States of his countryman Pablo Neruda. This careful, liberal selection from the poet's first pamphlet to his deathbed poems (but not including his political poems and long poems such as "Written in Cuba") by Lihn's friend and translator David Oliphant, goes far to redress this situation. The opening "Portrait" describes the poet at his most bitterly reduced but most youthful as well, a self-description that rivals such works as "The Waste Land" or Rimbaud's "Seven Year Old Poets" (and, even earlier, Nerval's writing ) as an image of the fractured sensibility taking on the ancient mission of the bard in the modern world: "Poet from head to toe / a man of bitten fingernails, convulsive, neurotic, / orphan of the eagles, father to his own increase, [...] / his soul rarely diminutive, / appeared on going away, / furious in his happiness, joyless in his grief, / abortion of his very chaste orgasm, / the gardener's dog... [...] / his secret transparent not by choice, / obscure from convergent intents." (3) It is these "convergent interests" that mark the site of the ambiguous self shoring its ruins against the request for identity, public or poetic (or, conversely, shoring its sense of identity against the request for plural universality. This image of the writer is revised in the later, more complex poem "Literature," where he considers not just himself but his South American countryman in their quixotic mission, corrupted by it is not just by self-delusion but the mundane nature of social recognition (he is almost Artaudian in his iconoclastic reduction-to-absurdity, but humbled by his unheroic, bureaucratic muzzle): "When I find myself around other writers / we do little more than speak like good or bad functionaries / of Literature [...] / When I run across such stars of the first order / and those peacocks shine with the necessary prudence / I'd like to invite them to puke, because writing as well as they / is to perform the blandest task. When I come upon myself / facing the empty page I think of peacocks / and try at least not to show off, but I write / to the extent of my hatred for literature, / and to young authors I would like to yell / cut it with the farce, you too will enter the business / because literature is the softest of jobs [...]." (41) His sonnets -- which Oliphant translates in their exact rhyme scheme thought the original Spanish is en face (these can be awkward, as when he breaks the word "chorus" into "cho-/ rus" for the sake of rhyme) -- states the case more poignantly, conjuring the image of a man just barely being kept afloat by words: "What would I be without my words / without my signs of impotence,"(55) and earlier, in which he imagines meeting his double, he concludes that he walks "in vain / behind his very self minus his literature." (49) (Ironically, one of the poems Oliphant translated was lost in its original Spanish, and Linh had to reconstruct a Spanish "original," included in this collection.) That the occupation of words, of naming, is growing ever more tenuous, and that syntax's value is fading among the proliferation of the values inculcated by telecommunications, is conveyed in the effective title of one poem, "Age of Data," which concludes "data is just the opposite of God." (39) The section "Brooklyn Monster" contains poems Lihn wrote in his travels in New York, Texas, Canada and Spain, and will, of course, evoke for American readers Lorca's poems of "Poet in New York," mostly through the vignette-like approach and empathy for the dispossessed they share, as in the poem "Brooklyn Monster" itself, in which he creates a frightening, expressionistic portrait of a lone rider: "The man / -- if it is not a woman -- dresses like a half-naked conscript, like a cadaver / they would have carried from concentration camp to the crematory oven / With feet much smaller than its destitute shoes / The woman -- if it's not a man -- with white / plaster make-up running down its face / in the ritual expulsion of sex" (107). Linh's Toronto is unlike any you will find elsewhere, but is worth reading as a contrast to the relative disinterest in mythologized "cities" in Canadian poetics. In "Europeans," which is set in Paris, his mixed-feelings about the continent's cultural legacy are most completely assayed; at one point he mocks a tenet of Godard's semiotics while, later, he admits he is "wrong," finding some value in the philosophy of surfaces, a philosophy much at odds with his Latin American (perhaps both Catholic and American Indian) need to read below the surfaces, to find correspondences. This is not to say he is unsophisticated or baffled in his outlook; in fact, he finds a way to read the paradoxes of what he experiences, such as his run-in with a European whose words contradict her own novelistic presence: "Those people that French lady those noses like / a lady's antennas and stilettos or radars [...] / We're all dead -- she repeated -- even though her / wonderful legs shouted to the contrary / and her nose flitted ecstatic over tropics / with a modesty occasionally exemplary among / her transatlantic kind / stripped of excesses of / intellectual curiosity / as ever happens / when a woman of fifty travels / universally alone be she French or not [...] (97)." The several poems from his deathbed are, the translator notes, among the most moving written on the subject, but as they are often more abstract they don't often carry over well as the earlier, satirical or expressionistic ones. The title "Pain Has Nothing To Do With Pain," for example, hints at the difficulty of translating these poems -- it sounds a bit awkward, even if those words correspond directly with the original. Nonetheless, as Oliphant writes in his introduction, this is a scathing metaphysical critique of the roles doctors seem to play in prolonging the process of dying: "Perhaps doctors are nothing but experts and death -- the apple / of their eyes -- is a pet problem / science solves it with partial solutions, that is to say, it puts off / its undissolvable nodule sealing a pleura, to start with / It may be that I am one of those who pay anything for the procedure. (153)" The "Art and Life" section contains some of Lihn's many poems on the visual arts, concerning such artists such as Turner and Kandinsky, but it also includes his most humble, and most affirmative, credo on art in society: "People who circle around the museum pieces / forgetful of their condition as museum pieces / and who seem, well, to ignore where they are / The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a work of art / accomplished by their artistic lavatories. // We are works of art momentarily alive." (65) This poem, itself called "Art and Life," envisions a unified field theory of art, speech and personhood that serves to override any neurosis about the fragmentary human self, and even death, suggesting, with a sort of nod to theories of ambience, that individuals, like art, are vessels of meaning, with the added bonus that we know something of what these meanings are. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:50:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kyle Conner Subject: HIGHWIRE READING 1/22 Comments: To: abdalhayy@aol.com, aberrigan@excite.com, abirge@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, agil@erols.com, allison_cobb@edf.org, ALPlurabel@aol.com, amille1@MCCUS.JNJ.COM, amorris1@swarthmore.edu, Amossin@aol.com, apr@libertynet.org, avraham@sas.upenn.edu, ayperry@aol.com, banchang@sas.upenn.edu, baratier@megsinet.net, bcole@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, bdowns@columbiabooks.com, Becker@law.vill.edu, bette343@hotmail.com, BMasi@aol.com, bochner@prodigy.net, booglit@excite.com, BStrogatz@aol.com, cahnmann@dolphin.upenn.edu, chris@bluefly.com, Chrsmccrry@aol.com, coryjim@earthlink.net, Cschnei978@aol.com, daisyf1@juno.com, danedels@sas.upenn.edu, dburnham@sas.upenn.edu, dcpoetry@mailcity.com, dcypher1@bellatlantic.net, DennisLMo@aol.com, DROTHSCHILD@penguinputnam.com, dsilver@pptnet.com, dsimpson@NETAXS.com, ejfugate@yahoo.com, ekeenagh@astro.ocis.temple.edu, ENauen@aol.com, ErrataBlu@aol.com, esm@vm.temple.edu, Feadaniste@aol.com, fleda@odin.english.udel.edu, Forlano1@aol.com, FPR@history.upenn.edu, fuller@center.cbpp.org, gbiglier@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, gmarder@hotmail.com, gnawyouremu@hotmail.com, goodwina@xoommail.com, HighwireGallery@aol.com, HighwireN2@aol.com, hstarr@dept.english.upenn.edu, hthomas@Kutztown.edu, icepalace@mindspring.com, insekt@earthlink.net, ivy2@sas.upenn.edu, jeng1@earthlink.net, jennifer_coleman@edf.org, jimstone2@juno.com, jjacks02@astro.ocis.temple.edu, JKasdorf@mcis.messiah.edu, JKeita@aol.com, jlutt3@pipeline.com, jmasland@pobox.upenn.edu, JMURPH01@email.vill.edu, johnfattibene@juno.com, josman@astro.ocis.temple.edu, jvitiell@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, jwatkins@unix.temple.edu, kelly@dept.english.upenn.edu, kelly@COMPSTAT.WHARTON.upenn.edu, Kjvarrone@aol.com, kmcquain@ccp.cc.pa.us, kristing@pobox.upenn.edu, ksherin@dept.english.upenn.edu, kzeman@sas.upenn.edu, lcabri@dept.english.upenn.edu, lcary@dept.english.upenn.edu, leo@isc.upenn.edu, lessner@dolphin.upenn.edu, lgoldst@dept.english.upenn.edu, lisewell@worldnet.att.net, llisayau@hotmail.com, lorabloom@erols.com, lsoto@sas.upenn.edu, lstroffo@hornet.liunet.edu, marf@NETAXS.com, MargBarr@aol.com, matthart@english.upenn.edu, Matthew.McGoldrick@ibx.com, mbmc@op.net, melodyjoy2@hotmail.com, mholley@brynmawr.edu, michaelmccool@hotmail.com, miyamorik@aol.com, mmagee@dept.english.upenn.edu, mnichol6@osf1.gmu.edu, mollyruss@juno.com, mopehaus@hotmail.com, MTArchitects@compuserve.com, mwbg@yahoo.com, mytilij@english.upenn.edu, nanders1@swarthmore.edu, nawi@citypaper.net, odonnell@siam.org, penwaves@mindspring.com, pla@sas.upenn.edu, poetry4peeps@hotmail.com, putnamc@washpost.com, QDEli@aol.com, rachelmc@sas.upenn.edu, rdupless@vm.temple.edu, rediguanas@erols.com, repohead@rattapallax.com, ribbon762@aol.com, richardfrey@dca.net, robinh5@juno.com, ron.silliman@gte.net, sernak@juno.com, Sfrechie@aol.com, singinghorse@erols.com, stephen.potter@ey.com, stewart@dept.english.upenn.edu, subpoetics-l@hawaii.edu, susan.wheeler@nyu.edu, SusanLanders@yahoo.com, swalker@dept.english.upenn.edu, Ron.Swegman@mail.tju.edu, Tasha329@aol.com, tdevaney@brooklyn.cuny.edu, thorpe@sas.upenn.edu, tosmos@compuserve.com, travmar03@msn.com, twells4512@aol.com, upword@mindspring.com, v2139g@vm.temple.edu, vhanson@netbox.com, vmehl99@aol.com, wh@dept.english.upenn.edu, wvanwert@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu, wwhitman@libertynet.org, ywisher@hotmail.com, zurawski@astro.temple.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable HIGHWIRE READING SERIES************************ tHIS SATURDAY!!!=3D=3D=3D=3D>>>>> DON'T FEAR THE COLD!=3D=3D=3D>>>> D R E W G A R D N E R (from New York) M E L I S A C A H N M A N N Saturday, January 22, 8PM Highwire Gallery, 139 N. 2nd St. POETS: +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DREW GARDNER was recently canonized in AN ANTHOLOGY OF YOUNGER (AMERICAN= ) POETS (Talisman). He edits the journal SNARE from his home in Brooklyn. = He is a jazz vibraphonist, and fronts the Drew Gardner Quartet. MELISA CAHNMANN is a doctoral candidate in educational linguisitics at P= enn. She is a co-editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly, and recently organize= d the PBQ benefit reading which took place in the lobby of the Phildelphia Inq= uirer Building. Ask her about the poetry conference in San Miguel de Allende. = =20 POEMS: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Pool House Parties at Grandma=92s Condominium Complex When we tired of ice-cream and pizza there was always something new: my best friend Sherri spotted the apricot tree, dry orange skin licking our lips with summer, tan lines where bikini straps went down. We just graduated junior high and asked Grandma to have our parties at her pool. All the boys came that summer=97 the short ones like Brad Peckler who hopped when he walked and skinny Kenny Mann who could slip through any gate, and did the night Allison=92s father told her to get inside, and didn=92t even see she was with him. There was Jeffrey Zerska with curly blond hair who never let go of his basketball, even when he was six feet deep in chlorine or floating the ball between him and Darlene for his first, thirteen year-old kiss. This bliss, the running start and splash in the deep-end where Danny Lipman clung to the edge, small muscles in his biceps showing through skin like underwear lines as he climbed up the ladder. We wanted to see what was underneath these boys, and when tired of swimming we ran into each others=92 saunas, girl-boy, girl-boy, all heat and sweat and quiet talk, thighs touching, quadriceps bursting forth like a faun through the woods, a near idea of what we=92d become: pointy triangles for breasts and the slight floss of hair around boys=92 nipples. The creak of the sauna door in Danny Lipman=92s voice before he asked me to show him the apricot tree in the pool house yard. The hair baked to our scalps with dry heat, as if we were comfortable in our borrowed bodies, as if we all held basketballs in our arms, ready to go anywhere the ball would take us. =2DMelisa Cahnman ______________________ The Advanatage of Discord in the movement of stitching a moment of salt appears, attached to the thread the air holds up to sky less of wings moving more the sound of water crowded by living rocks in years gone by fish rcognize the fake self-sacrifice by chewing off their feet then alone walking through the apples, before the heat opens in the room again _Twins falling thorugh the sea_ what does the drain keep saying? could it be, yesterday, today were wasted? cold guardians on an autumn walk wade back into the read lake angry at inanimate air =2DDrew Gardner ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 00:20:48 -0500 Reply-To: Brian Stefans Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Cyberpoetry Comments: To: Miklos Legrady Comments: cc: list@rhizome.org, livnbored@hotmail.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit One thing I might mention about poetry and the discourse on technology is that many of the founding thinkers that are often alluded to in these discourses, such as Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Foucault, MacLuhan, Derrida, etc., were literary critics (and only occasionally, it seems, art critics), concerned with people like Kafka, Brecht, the Surrealists [the writers], Joyce, Plato, etc., in the formative parts of their careers (sorry for the male-o-centric list, can't think of a woman writer this group I wrote about). Hugh Kenner, the great Pound critic, wrote a book called "The Counterfeiters" a long time ago that went through people like Babbage and Turing, and it's worth noting that the Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence was centered around language, as was his job for the British during the war, figuring out German ciphers. Finally, people like Cage, with his mesostics, or Jackson MacLow with his semi-intentional works (his books "Forties" for example), were pushing the idea of "process poetry" into the realm of the semi-automated, or computer-influenced (some will write "chance" but as we all know the random-number tables on computers are hard-coded), hence subtracting or transforming certain notions you allude to below -- the "spiritual" component of poetry, poetry as personal expression, as transcribed "overflowing" speech -- into a discourse on cybernetics, without, consequently, cramping or slanting the process by using the _language_ of technology in therr works (or, differently put, rendering the works "strange" by the use of this language), fetishizing the sheen of technology over the larger social and aesthetic aims of their writing. I was a computer programmer before I was a poet -- I had a Sinclair 1000 when I was a lad, and got the Vic 20 when it first came out, programming mostly games (o lovely peeks and pokes, where have ye gone?), but gave it all up in high school as it didn't seem, to me, to hold much promise for different sorts of communication, i.e. I felt work in computers kept me away from the world too much, it was contained on the little cassettes and went nowhere. (Also, I just wasn't smart enough to learn machine language, and being in high school, I was more interested in my libido than my own personal version of Lunar Lander.) The internet, obviously, changed all that, and since the mid-nineties I've been learning, or have learnt, C++, Java, Javascript, a handful of other web-tools, etc., and I see these studies as an extension of my interest in language. So that's my connection. ----- Original Message ----- From: Miklos Legrady To: Brian Stefans Cc: ; Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 2:03 AM Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Cyberpoetry > Dear Brian, > > >> What is the relation of poetry, written out longhand and typed with a > >> typewriter; maybe mailed to a journal and maybe not; to the technological > >> concerns of network art? > > > Is poetry dependent on tech? Should I want to write I might sit > vacant-minded, but when the spirit moves me...oh! The spirit. Let's say > when the pressure of events beyond my conscious understanding sets all > those computers (deep-down-in-the-mind) crunching through the myriad of > facts I consciously missed, sorting through the data, reassessing the > values of events scarcely noticed... Motivated by intense emotion, any > tool will do; a pen and pencil, computer and keyboard, even a quill with > human blood will serve; > > Holy Mary, mother of God... I yearn for the red of your menstrual blood. I > heard your Jesus died on the cross; was it really such a great loss? I'd > love to wield the hammer and nails, and make God feel humanity's pain; make > God feel the way we do, as you love me so I love you > __________________________________ > > Let's say there are things beyond the intellect, though intellectuals may > chafe at such remarks. > > ________________________________________ > The ancient bards had the gift of gab, > and highly respected they were, > but came television, and Gutenberg's wishing, hum.. let's say that poetry > is just as effective and reaches millions of people - as much as it ever > did, but now we call it rock and roll. The ancient bards sang their > stories... > > Thank you. > > p.s. (did you notice how few words it took to say this?) > p.p.s. postscript is for printers. > Miklos Legrady > 1086.5 Queen st. w. > Toronto, Ont. M6J 1H8 > (416) 516-6127 > ______________________________ > design@myna.com > http://www.myna.com/~design/ > ____________ > > Kapy Utca 1B > Budapest 1025 > Hungary > 011-36-1-176-4698 > ____________ > itmiklos@c3.hu > http://www.c3.hu/~itmiklos/ > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:01:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: Re: i remember!!! / Spence MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris -- Date: 1/20/00, 4:54 PM +0000 From: "pete spence" i remember recently writing this little ditty //pete spence >when i read >a Ken Bolton poem >i remember >Joe Brainard's line: >'I remember painting >"I HATE TED BERRIGAN" >in big black letters >all over >my white wall' >5th page >of I REMEMBER >published by >Full Court Press >i remember reading >I REMEMBER all >the way through!! >and wondering why >anyone >would write >a book >like that?!! >and now >i'm wondering >if after >some months >or years >will i remember >to wonder >why >i would write >a poem >like this?!! >will i remember >forgeting things >i should >remember and >remembering well >things best >forgotten >and wonder >why >that is?!! >New Years Eve! >i'm all >milleniumed out! >i wonder >if my chip >will crash tonight?! >will i wake up >with my memory >erased?! >sacre sucre! >it's morning >i'm making coffee! >dauntingly >i remember >everything! >where's >the sugar! >i wonder!! > >pete spence > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:02:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: What's new re: Lautreamont? / Glass MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This message came to the administrative account. Chris -- Date: 1/20/00, 7:42 PM -0800 From: "jesse glass" Yes, Lykiard's translation is by far the best. There's also the Penguin version by Paul Knight. Speaking of things Lautreamont....have there been any new discoveries of late regarding Isidore Ducasse? I've found the "new" letter Ducasse wrote to Victor Hugo at a great Maldoror site on the web, and of course his startling portrait has been around since the late 1970's--but has anything else turned up of note? Jesse Glass About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 08:43:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Miklos Legrady Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Cyberpoetry Comments: To: Brian Stefans Comments: cc: list@rhizome.org, livnbored@hotmail.com In-Reply-To: <001901b41e57$076fc700$636cf6d1@bway.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear Brian, Thanks for such a kind and well meant reply to my note. I've become quite sceptical of our intellectual fathers. Shattered faith, caused by reading such as "The Science of the Concrete" by Claude Levi-Strauss, realizing he completely misunderstands the praxis of painting, unable to grasp it outside his own intellectual paradigm. Foucault? Please, Panopticon me! Freud? What an egoistic monster! It seems the intellectual process contains it's own downfal in excluding all other forms of thought, all other mental functions, denying them credibility. This from being unable to grasp anything but reason as reasonable (we know what reason is, but reasonable has many variations)- the "spiritual" component of poetry, poetry as personal expression, as transcribed "overflowing" speech, as you note. Jung defines four functions in the mind; sensory informs, intellect classifies, feelings assign value, and intuition "lets us peek around corners," but it seems to me intuition also gives thought it's linear sense within a frame work of time; it may be the bridge, the leap between facts and events that confers understanding, the glue that places concept linearly into an graspable framework. In any case, spiritual seems to me a symbolic value for that which is larger than knowing, and it's assigned an odorous "churchability" so that cretins may hold it in respect. I agree more with the ancient Jews that God has the morality of a five-year-old, or with the Taoists that life revolves equally around positive and negative values. But Lordy-Lord, there's something freaky and huge in the universe. Jung suggests the unconscious is the gateway, a direct link to the infinite, and I thought that made sense since the mind can only operate according to the way carbon-based cells can think, and so structurally is tuned to universal precepts. Hence poetry, as it pours into consciousness, is more a universal product than an individual glory. We can analize it but the genius who writes valid poetry intellectually is probably using other functions unaware. Did you know that Cromwell, a superb military tactician, did not consider himself so but said that his military decisions were on-the-spot revelations from the Almighty? The religious cover to his intellectual functions were similar to the skins of web sites, the interface. I always thought intellectuals were formed by being beaten up in the sandbox at the age of five, running home and burying their noses in books to avoid having to deal with life ever again. While the intellect is nature's newest crown (we tried dinosaurs but after 400 million years, having proved that big is stable and might is right, we wiped them out and gave the little monkeys a chance). But why is a picture worth a thousand words? "The three-dimensional illusion of the socialist realist painting can be broken down into discrete signs... it is read by spectators familiar with the appropriate codes... To the viewer of the Stalinist period, moreover, it offered the additional and truly aesthetic experience of terror, since an incorrect coding or decoding could mean death."(1) >Also, I just wasn't smart enough to learn machine language, and >being in high school, I was more interested in my libido That's why I think maybe that was a smart move at that age. Language makes us, and who wants to be a machine? Those who abandonned humanitarian attitudes in the '70s to concentrate on technology also abandonned their humanity. But in all this I wantonce again to reflect on an immense universal potential which is destroyed by thought. Zen, for example, taps into this by stilling the mind with monotony, though I do believe that if we are on the wheel of reincarnation and suffering, immersion in the wheel and the passions is probably closer to the structural intent of the process that trying to run away from it. In conclusion, I don't believe that high or low tech has any bearing when the inner powers of the mind seek to express themselves. It is this inner mind thing which is so fascinating, and what is it's relation to the consciousness sitting over it? Thanks again for your patience. __________________________________________________________ (1) THE TOTAL ART OF STALINISM, AVANT-GARDE, AESTHETIC DICTATORSHIP AND BEYOND Boris Groys, translated by Charles Rougle, Princeton University Press, 1992, p.56 ___________________________________________________________ Miklos Legrady 1086.5 Queen st. w. Toronto, Ont. M6J 1H8 (416) 516-6127 ______________________________ design@myna.com http://www.myna.com/~design/ ____________ Kapy Utca 1B Budapest 1025 Hungary 011-36-1-176-4698 ____________ itmiklos@c3.hu http://www.c3.hu/~itmiklos/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:52:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: KENT JOHNSON Organization: Highland Community College Subject: Announcing Rhizomes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I am on the Editorial Board of the new on-line journal introduced below, so wanted to share this announcement. Work for the first issue is now being accepted. Poetry and Poetics will be regularly featured. --------------------------- RHIZOMES: CULTURAL STUDIES IN EMERGING KNOWLEDGE AND STRANGE ATTRACTIONS Editors: Ellen Berry, Bowling Green State U Carol Siegel, Washington State U Board members include: Crystal Kile, Tulane U Douglas Dix, Prague. Lawrence James, Prague (Editor of the Prague Review), Martin Prochazka, Prague, Charles University Mikhail Epstein, Emory U Tadesu Slawez, Warsaw Steve Shaviro, U of Washington Laura Frost, Yale U Joanna Freuh, U of Nevada Inderpal Grewal, San Francisco State U Bryce Cambell, Washington State U Michelle Kendrick, Washington State U Karmen MacKendrick, Lemoyne College RHIZOMES opposes the idea that all knowledge must grow in tree structure from previously accepted ideas; new thinking need not follow established patterns. RHIZOMES exists to promote experimental work located outside or beyond current disciplines and interdisciplines, work that has no proper location. We are not interested in publishing texts that establish their authority merely by affirming what is already believed. Instead, we encourage migrations into new conceptual territories and new critical forms, the productive mutations resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions and strange attractions. As our name suggests, works written in the spirit of Deleuzian approaches are welcomed but not required. As an online journal, RHIZOMES emphasizes the use of interactive multimedia as a way of fostering experimental, imaginative scholarship that challenges existing critical forms. Submissions to RHIZOMES need not include a developed multimedia dimension; however, authors should consider how their essays might be enhanced by multimedia presentation and be prepared to work with us to create a dynamic text suited to our electronic format. In the spirit of dialogue between contributors and reviewers, RHIZOMES engages in an extended and collaborative review process. In addition to an initial screening by editors, contributions will undergo a "blind" review by at least two members of the editorial board for content suitability and quality. All contributions will be subject to a more technical review of the multimedia options for enhancing theme as well as design. Authors of accepted and/or revised contributions will work closely with both the editorial and technical editors to establish more effective multimedia presentation. As part of this creative development team, contributors may be asked to supply relevant image and sound files or to assist in the selection and development of these options by the journal editors. All submissions should be sent as hard copies to Carol Siegel, English Department, Washington State University, Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Avenue, Vancouver, WA 98686-9600. In addition, if the document is online, please submit a URL so that the editors may view the submission in its existing web format. All submissions should conform to standards for general format and citation that govern publications in the author's field, and include a bibliography, if appropriate. We will consider short pieces, but cannot consider texts of more than 7,500 words, including notes. *** ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:22:28 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark DuCharme Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Actually, there _is_ also a New Directions edition-- I know, because I have it-- by a different translator (Guy Wernham, if memory serves; & again I apologize, because my access to email is at work, and my books are at home). I wasn't aware of this newer edition, which sounds interesting. I also have no idea whether the New Directions edition is still in print. Mark DuCharme >From: Pierre Joris >Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes >Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:49:09 -0500 > > > >I don't know _Les Chants de > > >Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's > > >got to be in English too. > > > > > > Yes it is, I believe from New Directions. I forget the > > translator's name at > > the moment, I'm sure I'll remember when I get home from work. > > An early (and > > relatively long) example of the prose poem-- in French or any other > > language. Was a big influence on the surrealists, and though > > (to moi, at > > least) it now seems a bit dated, it's definitely worth checking out. > > >No,the american edition was published in 1994 by Exact Change (Boston)as >"Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont" in Alexis >Lykiard's excellent translation. It is a superb book, translation, intro, >etcetera. Only way to read him if you can't do it in French. > >Pierre > >________________________________________________________________ >Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those >6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- >Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). >Tel: (518) 426-0433 >Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim >Email: joris@csc.albany.edu >Url: >____________________________________________________________________________ >_ ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 18:48:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Lita Hornick Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Susan (Bee) just now pointed out to me a notice in the obituary listing in todays NY Times that Lita Hornick had died. I have no information about her death except this, but I do know Lita Hornick, who was the publisher of Kulchur magazine and Kulchur, both of which made a vital contribution to the poetry of the 60s through 80s, publishing many outstanding poets and collections by poets in the "New American Poetry" traditions. I hope others on this list will fill in on the history of Kulcher and Lita Hornick herself, who was an extravagant character, and the author of one collection of poems. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:58:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Grant Jenkins Subject: Re: Utopias In-Reply-To: <0001201351579Z.26958@weba8.iname.net> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" Simon: Make sure you check out Norman Finkelstein's The Utopian Moment in American Poetry (Associated, 1988). Grant ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:59:42 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Susan M. Schultz" Subject: Re: Contact for Juliana Spahr? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit js@lava.net is it...try again Susan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 09:49:06 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit -----Original Message----- From: Karen Kelley To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Date: Tuesday, 25 January 2000 08:40 Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed >I'm undone by the "rigour," and all the words it takes, apparently, to >attain it. I'm not surprised you feel that way, Karen, since representing states of feeling is so clearly your metier -- "Venus return" -- which I did enjoy, ty Karen. Reading all postings as offering "states of feeling", not a few seem keen to assert some power over the discursive space, over listeners, -- sometimes with sheer length, sometimes with judgements "supported" with argument of (variable) cogency, sometimes with postings that seem to be demonstrations of literary critical academic professionalism. Maybe that's what is at issue in this thread. ABW Tony Green ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:58:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jocelyn saidenberg Subject: Rob Halpern & Gail Scott Reading at SPT 1/28 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="============_-1263371389==_ma============" --============_-1263371389==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Small Press Traffic Reading =46riday, January 28, 7:30 p.m. Rob Halpern Gail Scott Rob Halpern brings to the essay the gifts of fiction and poetry-their immediacy, the high stakes of the personal, the risk of invention. He proposes the baroque and ornamental as political statements in and of themselves, no longer the icing on the cake but the cakeness in excelsis. He's great-like Borges with eyes, ears and throat. Rob Halpern's essays, short fiction and prose pieces appear in HGMFQ, The James White Review, Tripwire and Narrative Website Magazine, a new on-line journal. Montreal writer Gail Scott's three novels, Heroine (1987), Main Brides (1993) and the brand new My Paris, have made her one of the great novelists of our time, for in them we see a wedding of feeling and thinking (about feminism, collectivism, character and political activism) very rare in any century or nation. She has also written a book of stories, Spare Parts, and an influential book of theory and criticism, Spaces like Stairs. In 1998 she published an English translation of France Th=E9oret's novel Laurence. A former journalist, Scott was co-founder of the journals Tessera and Spirale and is a contributing editor to the Narrative Website Magazine out of the Poetry Center in San Francisco. My Paris, a fictive diary set in 90s Paris, is authored by a sad diarist whose travel companions include Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein. Welcome back, Gail Scott! New College Cultural Center 766 Valencia Street, San Francisco $5 ---------------------------------------- Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center 766 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415/437-3454 www.sptraffic.org --============_-1263371389==_ma============ Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable CourierSmall Press Traffic Reading =46riday, January 28, 7:30 p.m. Rob Halpern Gail Scott Rob Halpern brings to the essay the gifts of fiction and poetry-their immediacy, the high stakes of the personal, the risk of invention. He proposes the baroque and ornamental as political statements in and of themselves, no longer the icing on the cake but the cakeness in excelsis. He's great-like Borges with eyes, ears and throat. Rob Halpern's essays, short fiction and prose pieces appear in HGMFQ, The James White Review, Tripwire and Narrative Website Magazine, a new on-line journal.=20 Montreal writer Gail Scott's three novels, Heroine (1987), Main Brides (1993) and the brand new My Paris, have made her one of the great novelists of our time, for in them we see a wedding of feeling and thinking (about feminism, collectivism, character and political activism) very rare in any century or nation. She has also written a book of stories, Spare Parts, and an influential book of theory and criticism, Spaces like Stairs. In 1998 she published an English translation of France Th=E9oret's novel Laurence. A former journalist, Scott was co-founder of the journals Tessera and Spirale and is a contributing editor to the Narrative Website Magazine out of the Poetry Center in San Francisco.=20 My Paris, a fictive diary set in 90s Paris, is authored by a sad diarist whose travel companions include Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein. Welcome back, Gail Scott! New College Cultural Center 766 Valencia Street, San Francisco $5 ---------------------------------------- Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center 766 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415/437-3454 www.sptraffic.org --============_-1263371389==_ma============-- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:06:38 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baptiste Chirot Subject: Re: What's new re: Lautreamont? / Glass In-Reply-To: <3833350705.948726155@poetrywkrm3.lib.buffalo.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII This is not about something directly "new" re Lautreamont, yet may be fitting as Jesse Glass used to live here in Milwaukee, where I first met him and read Glass's works via a mutual friend who had done a journal with Jesse, Tom Pharmakis. Two days ago the poet Bob Harrison introduced me to a man named Andrew who is also much inspired by French poetry. Andrew that day had been walking down a street with a copy of the good Ducasse's works in his pocket and came upon a window shrine in a home on a Milwaukee street devoted to M.le Comte de Lautreamont/Ducasse. A fitting conjunction-- A very interesting edtion of MALDOROR is that translated by John Rodker, with an introduction by Remy de Gourmount and a frontispiece by Odilon Redon. (I believe the first English translation of the work.) It is "Privately Printed for Subscribers Only, The Casanova Society, 1924". Rodker translates the title as "THE LAY OF MALODOROR"-- It should be noted, re Alexis Lykiard, that he also did a superb translation (with accompanying French original en face) of Lautreamont's POESIES AND COMPLETE MISCELLANEA (London: Allen & Busby, 1978). I would highly recommend this edition as it contains letters, biographical reminiscences, contemporary reactions, bibliography, etc, as well as excellent notes on the texts. --dave baptiste chirot On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Poetics List Administration wrote: > This message came to the administrative account. Chris > > -- > > Date: 1/20/00, 7:42 PM -0800 > From: "jesse glass" > > Yes, Lykiard's translation is by far the best. There's also the Penguin > version by Paul Knight. Speaking of things Lautreamont....have there been > any new discoveries of late regarding Isidore Ducasse? I've found the "new" > letter Ducasse wrote to Victor Hugo at a great Maldoror site on the web, and > of course his startling portrait has been around since the late 1970's--but > has anything else turned up of note? Jesse Glass > > > > > > About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. > http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:33:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: maldoror association question MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Not the address of the group that brings all its umbrellas to the operating table, BUT to the people who spoke French first, does the name MALDOROR sound like it means "Golden-evil-gold"? Wanting to know, Jordan jdavis@panix.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 20:56:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: Utopias MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Some examples of Utopian poetry which occur to me: Ben Jonson's Horatian dinner invitation the title of which I forgot (.....hurst, I think). Andrew Marvell's "The Garden." On a less conservation and more critical level: Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" (an anti-utopia) and "The Tempest." Murat Nemet-Nejat ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 00:01:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: An Evening of Performance Poetry and Improvised Music NYC Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Please join Apex Art for an evening of performance poetry and improvised music on Wednesday, January 26th starting at 7 pm with: Bruce Andrews (New York) Christian Bok (Toronto) Christof Migone (New York / Montreal) Stephen Vitiello (New York) Darren Wershler-Henry (Toronto) Admission is free. Apex Art 291 Church St. New York City 212-431-5270 http://www.apexart.org info@apexart.org Bruce Andrews, co-founder of the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is the author of dozens of books of poetry and criticism. His _Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis was recently released by Northwestern University Press and he was the subject of Aerial 9. He is the musical director of Sally Silvers Dance Company and teaches political science at Fordham University. Christian Bok is the author of _Crystallography_ (Coach House Press) and hold's the world's record for the fastest full performance of Kurt Schwitter's "Ursonate." Christof Migone is an artist and writer currently based in New York City. Recent CDs include: Vex and Hole in the Head (both of Avatar / Ohm Editions). His latest solo CD "The Death of Analogies" is available from ND (Austin, Texas). He currently has an installation at Studio 5 Beekman, "Crackers: a continuous multi-media installation featuring bodies cracking their joints." Stephen Vitiello's recent CDs include _The Light of Falling Cars_ and a collaboration with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, _Uitti / Vitiello_ (both on JdK). He is a frequent performer with Pauline Oliveros and recently curated "I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950-2000" for the Whitney Museum's American Century Exhibition. Darren Wershler-Henry lives and works as a writer and critic in Toronto, where he is the editor of Coach House Press. He is the author of _Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs_ and the forthcoming _The Tapeworm Foundry_ . ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 21:46:12 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: cultural, economic, & symbolic capital MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Just a quick note to clarify my lazy conflation of the term "cultural capital" in a previous post. According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital would refer to accumulated prestige, cultural capital to a certain cultural competence--the ability, for example, to use Bourdieu's terms correctly-- and economic capital would obviously refer to $$. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 20:59:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Katie Degentesh Subject: 9x9 = 6,501 Comments: To: katie@degentesh.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED to the READING and RELEASE PARTY for ISSUE 2 of 6,500, THE MAGAZINE FOR PEOPLE WHO READ IT. JOIN US at 6:37 pm exactly, on SUNDAY 30 JANUARY exactly, at 90 HOUSTON ST. exactly, IN THE BAR OF ZINC, NYC. A $3 donation will help. We will turn no one away. We will turn heads, probably our own. We will turn and turn until we become dizzy and fall onto the lawn, dizzy with youth and the promise of spring. We will turn like Mary, proud, proud, Mary. We will turn, yes, we will. WITH 9X9 INDUSTRIES ILLUMINATI katie DEGENTESH abie HADJITARKHANI paul LAFARGE jan RICHMAN tarin TOWERS AND FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS DAVID CAMERON SARAH ANNE COX JOANNA FUHRMAN BRENDAN LORBER JANE RANSOM JEN ROBINSON -->6,500 has a cover price of $8<-- COPIES WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE READING. Those of you who need to order 6,500 by mail may write checks payable to Paraffin Arts Project and send them c/o 9x9 Industries, PO Box 14842, San Francisco, CA 94114. Issue #1 is almost completely SOLD OUT, but copious copies of #2 will soon be available. Those of you who need to SUBMIT will do so c/o 6,500 at the very same address you see above. 9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9 6,500: six thousand, five hundred Editor: Katie Degentesh Associate Editor: Jan Richman Art Director: Eugene Timerman Creative Director: Gaston Yagmourian 9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9X9 6,500 is published yearly by 9x9 Industries under a rotating editorship. ISSUE #2 contains poetry, prose, and artwork by Geoff Bouvier --> David Cameron --> Sarah Anne Cox --> Brandon Downing --> Joanna Fuhrman --> Dan Golden --> Alex Green --> Abie Hadjitarkhani --> Paul LaFarge --> Brendan Lorber --> Jeffrey McDaniel --> Eugene Ostashevsky --> Benjamin Prince --> Jane Ransom --> Jan Richman --> Jen Robinson --> Eugene Timerman --> Elizabeth Treadwell --> Ryan Walker --> Gaston Yagmourian --> Noelia Yagmourian ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:54:00 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Quasha Organization: Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd. Subject: Utopia, poetics MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------2DBD2E58B38283E4AE61417F" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------2DBD2E58B38283E4AE61417F Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Responding to Patrick Pritchett's comment on the utopian in poetry (copy below): Yes, I agree with your specific sense in which Duncan, Blaser (add Olson, and why not Ginsberg)…Snyder, et al are aimed in a utopian way—that is, driven by the sense that a more nearly perfect world is possible on earth, some sense of Pound's "Paradiso terrestre," but I'm not sure about the "closure" of the "Orphic" if that applies to Duncan, whose particular sense of the utopian would be of course his "Open Universe." (I think I'm agreeing with you here but maybe adding a nuance with a difference.) Even Pound seems in the end to realize that his struggle for a literal earthly paradise drove him nuts and to a regrettable and regretted politics, yet he maintained, or maybe in his despair got clearer about, a sense which Duncan and later Olson had that somehow the connection of poetics with utopia is the state of being, as it were, state of mind, state of language, out of which the un-pre-knowable ("projective," "open field") possible world might emerge. This is a big subject that I short-hand here to urge the sense of utopia toward the condition of renewal that poetics itself embodies in its nature, but most explicitly in any degree of conscious transformation, and this I would say begins with Blake. Not particularly the Blake of "Songs of Innocence & Experience" except as a complete self-transforming system and in relation to the emerging later poetics that comes to fruition in "Jerusalem," all of which implies a very specific critique of civilization—theology, politics, art, poetry—and the root causes of the non-self-realization standing in the way of a more perfectly realized human condition. I consider Blake's overall opus (incl. poetry and visual work) to be the closest to a realized utopia on its own intrinsic ("open universe") principles, which includes rejection of all models of utopia as embodying the very limitations of thinking that paradoxically prevent anything truly utopian (i.e., humanly self-perfective) from arising. A big part of the problem with applying the notion of "utopia" to poetics is the word and its history—it makes me uncomfortable to use it, because of the effort it takes to shake off its overly concretized history. Like trying to imagine something great but as you get closer you realize that the mode of visualizing it has foredoomed it. Big visions are often cemeteries of imagination. Your observation that the "ludic impulse and the utopian impulse are very close" is brilliant. In that sense Dorn's "Gunslinger" is a sort of ontologic-ludic-utopian something in an odd topological focus. Again there is Blake's "Marriage of Heaven & Hell" as an inverse bible (which for Blake is never separate from the issue of utopia, since he thought about real politics every day, as Erdman established)—also a very funny poem. Patrick Pritchett wrote: >Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 13:15:03 -0500 From: "Pritchett,Patrick" Subject: Re: Utopias "Dioce, whose terraces are the color of stars..." Intriguing question, Simon. I would venture to say that Duncan, Blaser and Ronald Johnson all inhabit in one way or another a utopian poetics, if by utopia one means not so much a site of political production (though in Duncan & Blaser's case, certainly, this is not entirely true as the idea of social justice is important to their work), but rather an openly ontological project where the ongoing recuperation of presence makes available the liberation (or eleutheria) necessary for realizing the dream of some golden age. This would be utopia as tikkun, then -- a reparation of the world, to be understood and undertaken as a process, not as some permanent fixed site or totalizing system. I would even venture a little father and suggest that any poetry that is basically Orphic in nature (Stevens and Johnson both come to mind here) is lured on by the scent of paradise. There are all sorts of problems with this, of course. A purely Orphic poetics is one that longs for some kind of unitive closure -- which would be the kiss of death to the kind of utopian process I'm outlining. But throwing the net wider, there are certainly ways in which Gary Snyder might be considered a kind of utopian poet. Hell, there are moments when I even think of Joe Ceravolo as a utopian poet, brimming with a paradisical panache -- if again, by utopia we mean not some form of political management, not the ideology to end all ideologies (dream on), but the practice of play, or jouissance, or whatever one wants to call it. The ludic impulse and the utopian impulse are very close, I think. I have a feeling this is not the sort of response you were looking for. But if Johnson is not a utopian poet, I don't know who is -- and I'm smack in the middle of writing a paper for the Johnson conference so configurations of the utopic impulse lie thick on my brain.< --------------2DBD2E58B38283E4AE61417F Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; name="gquasha.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: Card for George Quasha Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="gquasha.vcf" begin:vcard n:Quasha;George tel;fax:(914) 758-8163 tel;work:(914) 758-5840 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.stationhill.org org:Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd. adr:;;124 Station Hill Road;Barrytown;NY;12507;USA version:2.1 email;internet:gquasha@stationhill.org title:Publisher note;quoted-printable:Station Hill Press/Barrytown, Ltd.=0D=0A or The Institute for Publishing Arts, Inc.=0D=0ABarrytown, NY 12507=0D=0A=0D=0AOffice: (914) 758-5840=0D=0AFax: 758-8163 (publishing) and (914) 758-9838 (GQ direct)=0D=0A=0D=0Ahttp://www.stationhill.org=0D=0Ae-mail: gquasha@stationhill.org=0D=0ABook Orders to Station Hill/Barrytown: (888) 758-0610 (Credit Card)=0D=0A end:vcard --------------2DBD2E58B38283E4AE61417F-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:22:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Claire Dinsmore Organization: Studio Cleo Subject: Cauldron & Net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------F4CB520A90A82B687763824D" --------------F4CB520A90A82B687763824D Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Call for Submissions: Cauldron & Net, an on-line magazine of the arts and new media, is currently accepting submissions to be considered for inclusion in issue no. I, vol. II which is slated to go on-line in April of 2000. The guidelines are very broad as Cauldron & Net is particularly interested in showcasing the wide variety of the diverse voices which may be found on the Net. Pretty much all is invited: literature, poetry, non-fiction (creative or otherwise), hypertext/hypermedia, theory, criticism, music, photographs of performance or other 'hard-copy' art, experiments, outlines / sketches of ideas, jottings, notes, proposals, research papers, sophistries, etc., etc., etc. Quality is really the only criterion (though of course such judgments are left to the discretion of a rather opinionated editor). Programmers and scientists who have ideas and/or work that a laywo/man could grasp are welcome to submit also. Simultaneous submissions and work that has already been published will be considered, although the preference is for unpublished work. Please send all inquiries and submissions to the editor: Claire Dinsmore cauldron@studiocleo.com The deadline is March of 2000. For a sample taste, the inaugural edition may be seen at : http://www.StudioCleo.com/cauldron/ -- "What am I, if not a collector of vanished gazes?" - Theo Angelopoulos http://www.StudioCleo.com/entrancehall.html --------------F4CB520A90A82B687763824D Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Call for Submissions:

Cauldron & Net, an on-line magazine of the arts and new media, is currently
accepting submissions to be considered for inclusion in issue no. I, vol. II
which is slated to go on-line in April of 2000.

The guidelines are very broad as Cauldron & Net is particularly interested
in showcasing the wide variety of the diverse voices which may be found on
the Net. Pretty much all is invited: literature, poetry, non-fiction
(creative or otherwise), hypertext/hypermedia, theory, criticism, music,
photographs of performance or other 'hard-copy' art, experiments, outlines /
sketches of ideas, jottings, notes, proposals, research papers, sophistries,
etc., etc., etc.  Quality is really the only criterion (though of course
such judgments are left to the discretion of a rather opinionated editor).
Programmers and scientists who have ideas and/or work that a laywo/man could
grasp are welcome to submit also.

Simultaneous submissions and work that has already been published will be
considered, although the preference is for unpublished work.

Please send all inquiries and submissions to the editor:
Claire Dinsmore
cauldron@studiocleo.com

The deadline is March of 2000.
For a sample taste, the inaugural edition may be seen at :
http://www.StudioCleo.com/cauldron/
 

--
"What am I, if not a collector of vanished gazes?"
- Theo Angelopoulos

http://www.StudioCleo.com/entrancehall.html
  --------------F4CB520A90A82B687763824D-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 02:47:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Walter K. Lew" Subject: Mem, Rep, Black '60s/Reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" "Memory, Representation and the Black '60s," is a two-day event organized in conjunction with "Mementos," an exhibition of the work of Kerry James Marshall on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. In "Mementos," Marshall explores the impact of public tragedies upon private lives and histories. His multi-media installation creates spaces in which people can come to terms with the losses and gains associated with the sixties. The Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project, the Center for African American Studies at UCLA, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art have invited prominent scholars, curators, and artists to reflect upon the impact of race politics during this period. Poetry Reading Friday February 11, 2000 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm Reception to follow Location: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, Building G-1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, Ca 90404 Please make reservations at (310) 586-6488 Poets: Harryette Mullen Quincy Troupe Ruth Forman Kamau Daaood Ojenke Symposium Saturday February 12, 2000 8:30 am to 5:00 pm Continental Breakfast Location: Charles Young Salon, UCLA No reservations required Speakers: Plenary Speaker: Houston Baker Elizabeth Abel Michael Hanson Richard Powell Carroll Blue Plenary Speaker: Clayborne Carson K.W. Kgositsile Cheryl Harris Louis Massiah Discussants: Adam Green and Tyler Stovall Co-organizers: David Bailey, Co-Director African and Asian Visual Artists Achive, University of East London Valerie Smith, Professor of English and Chair of Afro-American Studies, UCLA Walter K. Lew 11811 Venice Blvd. #138 Los Angeles, CA 90066 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:17:19 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Walter K. Lew" Subject: Talk: LYRIC SUBSTANCE Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies Presents DANIEL TIFFANY "Lyric Substance" Tuesday, January 25 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Herbert Morris Seminar Room 306 Royce Hall Daniel Tiffany teaches in the English and Comparative Literature programs at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard U. Press, 1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (U.of California Press, 1999). He has published several essays on the writings of Ezra Pound, and is now at work on a study of Leibniz and the image of modernity. Paper to be discussed will be distributed to all interested participants in advance. Copies of seminar paper may be obtained at 310 Royce Hall. Limited seating available, no reservations required. Parking is available in Lot 5 of the UCLA Campus. The kiosk entrance is at Hilgard and Wyton Avenues. The fee is $5. For further information, please contact Corie Goodloe: cgoodloe@humnet.ucla.edu or 310.825.9581 Walter K. Lew 11811 Venice Blvd. #138 Los Angeles, CA 90066 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:40:36 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Ellis Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed There's also a Penguin Maldoror in a translation done by Paul Knight that came out in 1978. The edition additionally contains translations of two long poems dressed out to look like prose, ie., very like Maldoror itself: "The poetic whines of this century are nothing but sophisms" - sounds like that home truth has been coming home for quite a number of years. Doubtless this version of M doesn't come up the the level of the more recent Exact Change publication Pierre mentioned, but it's one that's liable to turn up in a 25 cent bin on a street somewhere in your town, if you want to check out Lautreamont at a cost that's next to nothing. (Too bad, tho, that L's writing seems so often accompanied by terrible works of Romantic art, like "The Deluge" by Joshua Shaw that graces the cover of this one. Why not instead a diagram of Venus Mechanitis in the act of dispersing a heaven's allotment of stars across a blank blackboard at dusk, maybe with her fingernails? Tho on the other hand, too, bad taste DOES make the world go 'round ... ) S E >From: Mark DuCharme >Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes >Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:22:28 PST > >Actually, there _is_ also a New Directions edition-- I know, because I have >it-- by a different translator (Guy Wernham, if memory serves; & again I >apologize, because my access to email is at work, and my books are at >home). > I wasn't aware of this newer edition, which sounds interesting. I also >have no idea whether the New Directions edition is still in print. > >Mark DuCharme > >>From: Pierre Joris >>Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu >>To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >>Subject: Re: of Sithiwong and Mangoes >>Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 08:49:09 -0500 >> >> > >I don't know _Les Chants de >> > >Maldoror_ and don't read French, but I suppose it's >> > >got to be in English too. >> > >> > >> > Yes it is, I believe from New Directions. I forget the >> > translator's name at >> > the moment, I'm sure I'll remember when I get home from work. >> > An early (and >> > relatively long) example of the prose poem-- in French or any other >> > language. Was a big influence on the surrealists, and though >> > (to moi, at >> > least) it now seems a bit dated, it's definitely worth checking out. >> > >>No,the american edition was published in 1994 by Exact Change (Boston)as >>"Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont" in Alexis >>Lykiard's excellent translation. It is a superb book, translation, intro, >>etcetera. Only way to read him if you can't do it in French. >> >>Pierre >> >>________________________________________________________________ >>Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those >>6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- >>Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). >>Tel: (518) 426-0433 >>Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim >>Email: joris@csc.albany.edu >>Url: >>____________________________________________________________________________ >>_ > >______________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 09:12:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: Re: Lita Hornick In-Reply-To: <200001242343.SAA29921@ida.bway.net> from "Charles Bernstein" at Jan 24, 2000 06:48:32 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit According to Charles Bernstein: > > Susan (Bee) just now pointed out to me a notice in the obituary listing in > todays NY Times that Lita Hornick had died. I have no information about her > death except this, but I do know Lita Hornick, who was the publisher of > Kulchur > magazine and Kulchur, both of which made a vital contribution to the poetry of > the 60s through 80s, publishing many outstanding poets and collections by > poets > in the "New American Poetry" traditions. I hope others on this list will fill > in on the history of Kulcher and Lita Hornick herself, who was an extravagant > character, and the author of one collection of poems. > Here's what Gooch has to say about Lita Hornick in his O'Hara biography: "Married to Morton Hornick, the owner of a lucrative curtain business, Lita used to be referred to as Lita Curtainstar by Andy Warhol, who painted her portrait in 1966. In the early 60's though, before she moved full-force into the artworld, most of Hornick's friends were downtown poets...Kulchur was able to fill its self-defined niche as 'the only vanguard magazine devoted principally to Criticism and Commentary -- essays on literature, art, jazz, politics, and pop culture by leading poets.' It's board in 1962 was largely a co-opting of O'Hara's inside group. He served as Art Editor, LeRoi Jones as Music Editor, Bill Berkson as Film Editor, and Joe LeSeur as Theatre Editor." Gooch forgets Gilbert Sorrentino, who was Poetry Editor. O'Hara's letters make it clear that this line-up of editors was Baraka's doing, and that in the early 60's Hornick had given him most of the editorial control over Kulchur, where, among other things, his essay "Tokenism" appeared. Kulchur was also one of the main outlets for Martin Williams jazz criticism, which is quite good--Williams was one of the first (maybe *the* first) writers to praise Ornette Coleman in print--even before he hit NYC. That said, and whatever her role in deciding content may or may not have been, KULCHUR, especially around this time, was a *great* read. I had a terrific time going through them recently in Brown's Harris archive. And never let it be said that Hornick didn't know a good crowd when she saw one! -m. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:58:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Emails Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Anyone know the email addresses of the following: Pamela Lu Jean Day George Elliot Clarke Jean Day Thomas Sayer Ellis Please backchannel. Thanks! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:24:25 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dodie Bellamy Subject: catsitter needed in San Francisco Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Kevin K. and I will be out of town February 15 - 19. (Returning the evening of the 20th). Anybody responsible going to be in town and need a place to stay? Our apartment in a funky neighborhood, but it's very accessible to public transportation/walking distance from just about any place you'd want to go. All you have to do is feed our two friendly cats. Backchannel. Thanks. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:16:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: Request for Work (e-zine/website editors, esp.) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit R E A D M E http://www.jps.net/nada The third issue of Readme, slated for spring 2000, will feature a special section devoted to literary & arts website owners and e-zine editors. Statements, interviews, reviews of web journals/sites, and general essays about online publishing are all welcome. Please contact Gary Sullivan at gps12@columbia.edu for more information. I'll also be looking for more interviews, essays & reviews with poets, cartoonists & filmmakers, so please contact me if you're interested in doing something, even if it's not related to web publishing. Many kind thanks, Gary Sullivan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:09:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Possible Futures 1: What I (fixed) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" am calling a Guernica figure lolls drowsily in my New! Delphi Developer is a comprehensive set of professional tools, combining the view. Take it down, you say? The nightshift can smooth over particulars. Cayenne SYNONYMS: chili, red pepper, bird pepper. BOTANICAL DESCRIPTION: Cayenne if it seems obscene, well that's Rimbaud; this is him at Stranger, if thou hast learnt a truth which needs no school of I spent one Sunday in Vitebsk. Snow on my tongue, performance of a 32-bit optimizing native-code compiler, the productivity of a visual component-based environment, and the flexibility of his most imagistic, but consequently most psychological and long experience, that the world is full of guilt and misery, is a member of the nightshade family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, eggplant, and has seen enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares, to tire scalable database development, in a robust object-oriented architecture. You get everything you need thee of it, enter this wild wood and view the haunts of Nature. Dung on my mind; it's such an old town, and henbane. It is available either as a spice, or the calm shade shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze that makes the green leaves dance, like the layout you see on an old map. Chagall and that woman shall waft a balm to thy sick heart. Thou wilt find in black lift heavily off dreaming of a nightmare. Dolorous sighs, sleek to create powerful Windows 95, Windows NT, and Windows 3.1 features, but I am always happy in this truck, nothing here of all that pained thee in the haunts of applications. The new 32-bit optimizing native-code compiler lets you in the form of dried pods of variable color and size, containing many subversive (in a juvenile way) manner. Even these verses from quickly create standalone, royalty-free executables with no runtime-interpreter DLLs men and made thee loathe thy life. The primal curse fell, it is true, upon the unsinning earth, but not I've got plenty to say for it. Seeds. HABITAT, CULTIVATION: It is a native of Central America, and was introduced to Europe and India in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese. It was then introduced to Africa, my translation, which are the most successful, are pretty awkward, from which most British supplies come. PARTS and there are more shifts in tone in the original I ignore the raven. Yes, it's true this speckled surplus USED: The dried ripe fruits. PHARMACOLOGY: The constituents of cayenne are has been provided by one of your admirers... sitting at the bar Required. Delphi applications run up to 15-50 times faster than p-code interpreted applications. And with... with an eye in the mirror, and a perfect Lucky Strike. No prime contender but waiting is always French poem which don't come through in this condensed version - a holiday in places like this, forgetful of other alkaloids, carotenoid pigments (including capsanthin and capsorubin), flavonoids, ascorbic acid and volatile oil. Of the alkaloids in cayenne, the most important is capsaicin, known to mimic 16-to-32-bit compatibility, a quick recompile of existing 16-bit applications will boost performance it is the failure to render these shifts in tone, in by 300-400% and produce 20-25% smaller EXEs! Delphi leverages the power of Windows fact, that screwed up the translation in the first place in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these holidays. Now the step turns to caramel, and after strange wads, unfinished paragraphs sticking in the toaster, that it overruns, it is shades are still the abodes of gladness... it is worth taking a look no fun, no more. Sing a new song, write the letter to that girl whose poem you missed as much as you at the "art" of "heart" in this poem. Carlyle, in Signs Of The 95 and Windows NT. You will have virtually unlimited (I realize now). In any case, that is the best explanation I Times, thought that the primary metaphor for the can give for the final lines of my poem, times was that of the disease ( was the effect of prostaglandins a skin cream called "Zostrix." Containing capsaicin has been shown to though it may make it appear a bit cheaper as an effort. I'm surprised that you would wonder memory because the compiler runs in a flat 32-bit address space. No more about the "function" of a line, since none of the lines seem, to me, really to "function" in any way, he the first? ( that an individual was healthy when improve healing in cases of postherpetic neuralgia, and to reduce pain in diabetic neurapathy. Cayenne not conscious of the mechanism of the body or mind. Hasn't Finlay used the most volatile symbol for death and illness to has also been claimed to stimulate circulatory read it, and wanted it, and yet the connections were severed. No flight though I suppose you were wondering about 16-bit 64K barriers anywhere - now you can the rather adolescent, or pornographic, nature of its sexual content. I really wouldn't create arrays, strings, records, and other data structures up that day, the clouds were revealing new seaside properties for these to two gigabytes! New multi-error compile with hints and warnings increases productivity by allowing programmers to resolve errors know how to answer that, except to say that it's in complete his image of the pastoral, and doesn't faster. It is now possible to fix multiple and digestive secretions and perspiration; the volatile oil is probably a significant he do justice to this symbol as that of problems in a single compile. And hints and warnings about possible problems death (i.e. not trivializing it, which is what an American such as Warhol might do, or theorize it factor in this activity. One suggested explanation was that the... the original - hardly adequate, I suppose, since my "translation" (i.e. the second "Language" version) makes Pound's Cathay appear rather conservative (also much more impressive) in comparison. Herb releases endogenous gastric secretagogues which increase the perfusion of the body tissues into non-existence like the French)? Doesn't he make art more (Corn, it appears, is a symbol of potency, and I know of something called a "Corn King," probably an agricultural deity, "real" this way? Or do we wish he permitted "reality" talents of ours, new inklings of stars and they felt avoiding its to keep its distance from art, at least that appears in a poem of Randall Jarrell's, but that's about it) until we feel that this reality has been company was the only proper thing to do, so we stayed down. Let's in your code make it easier to deliver bug-free applications. With 16-to-32-bit compatibility, Delphi allows you to protect your application investment while not spend much time here. By blood. In studies carried out in India, Cayenne, or equivalent amounts of the main constituent capsaicin, sufficiently historicized. Of course history is an attempt to make the please don't hesitate not to use it (obviously); no need to send it past seem stable and of course it's all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game's up. But moving to a new operating system. FREE! 16-bit Delphi for Windows 3.1 was shown to eat away at cholesterol levels, back. I hope things are well with you. You is included. This means you choose the ( though killies have green backs and white are lucky to be in New York in this weather, though I must say it's beautiful out here, now. Best platform to meet your needs. To promote excretion of excess cholesterol, and even prevents its absorption. The study also showed that Cayenne was more effective than capsaicin bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks! When we've tired of swimming we'll go climb the ledgy forest. Confute the sages. Alone, suggesting that its other constituents contribute to its potency. Cayenne also controls lipid levels. CHINESE MEDICINE ENERGETICS: Taste: acrid temperature: hot action: produces perspiration, stimulates circulation, stimulates gastric secretions, carminative, anti-septic, counter-irritant _____ for Kim Rosenfield on her birthday, 8/1/96 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:51:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: Possible Futures 2: Lame Lines for Laureates Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > LAME LINES INSPIRED BY LA LODEN'S LATEST LETTER, HOPING (AS EVER) TO > AFFORD H HER (AND MAYHAP OF OTHERS A HANDFUL) SOME SMALL PLEASURE : > 'Twas the Greatest Love Tale of Our Century: > Prince Ted & Princess Sylvia, a Tragedy : > His verse while mediocre, won a bunch : > Hers, bloody brilliant, showed him out to lunch : > *What to do while waiting to be Crowned ? > She bore him children while he played around : > Sold on the Good Wife Policy, Sylvia was pressed > To find the time to write: besides, depressed > Is one half of Bipolar, which she might have been : > *(Herself did testify she was of suicide attempts the Queen) > : > We expect the movie to treat this by the book : > Prince Ted, by this light, gets let off the hook : > What's a young prince of poetry privilege to do > Who, when his gift's unwrapped, commences to unglue : > Th' Approach to Sylvia's Mansion must have been impressive : > > The Forty Miles of Bad Road on its other side, depressive : > Who'd not feel tricked? This made Prince Ted act mean : > She put her head in a gas oven just to split that scene : > Princess Sylvia then entered the anthologies: > Prince Ted lacked talent for apologies : > Another of his conquests killed herself, left-handed rhyme : > > He distracted us with animals throughout a time > When democracy slid down the tubes into the can : > Thence flushed into oblivion ; The End of Man : > The movie treats mostly of the early days > When Princess Sylvia, Prince Ted first shared The Gaze : > (Chance here to let us glimpse the Paltrow Torso : > Seductive as Sweet Sylvia's, if not even more so) > We'll hear a poem or so in the process of composition : > E'en delight in some scenes of poetic competition : > But no light shed shall be on Poetry & The Epoch of their > Sway : > When you & I loved tragically but got up for the Everyday : > Sex, Beauty, Death & Royalty'll sweep that crap away. > > > Peter Poetaster. > > > > > > ______________ > > [David Bromige, 4/26/99] ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:49:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Dickison Subject: ** Poetry Center 2000 ** Winter-Spring Calendar ** Comments: To: vala@dnai.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Greetings-- Briefly, here is the Winter-Spring 2000 Calendar for the Poetry Center's readings. Details will follow throughout the season for the separate events. If you'd like NOT to be included on this notification list, just ask to be removed. Thanks. Steve Dickison =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Poetry Center Calendar Winter-Spring 2000 Thursday Feb 10 Kenneth Irby reading & in conversation with Robert Grenier Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin at Geary, 7:30 pm. Thursday Feb 17 Edward Dorn Memorial Tribute with special guests Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin at Geary, 7:30 pm. Thursday Feb 24 Anne Carson reading Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin at Geary, 7:30 pm. Thursday March 2 Wang Ping reading at The Poetry Center, 4:30 pm Thursday March 9 Gerald Vizenor reading at Presidio Alliance, 7:30 pm, collaboration with California Indian Museum & Cultural Center Thursday March 16 David Toscana & M=F3nica Lav=EDn at Poetry Center, 4:30 pm from Mexico, introduced by Juvenal Acosta Thursday March 30 Etel Adnan & Rabih Alameddine celebration of Adnan's birth= day Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin at Geary, 7:30 pm. Thursday April 6 Trinh T. Minh-ha reading at Center for the Arts SF Cinemateque Collaboration. 7:30 pm Thursday April 13 Gad Hollander reading & film screening, Center for the Arts SF Cinemateque collaboration, 7:30 pm Thursday April 27 John A. Williams reading introduced by Ishmael Reed Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin at Geary, 7:30 pm. Thursday May 4 Elaine Equi & Thom Gunn Poetry Center, 4:30 pm (1999 Poetry Center Book Award winner & judge) Thursday May 11 Student awards reading, Poetry Center, 4:30 pm Thursday May 18 Robin Blaser reading & 75th birthday celebration at ODC Theater (17th & Shotwell, in the Mission) Details will follow for individual events. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Steve Dickison, Director The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives ~ San Francisco State Univers= ity 1600 Holloway Avenue ~ San Francisco CA 94132 ~ 415-338-3401 ~ ~ ~ L=E2 taltazim h=E2latan, wal=E2kin durn b=EE-llay=E2ly kam=E2 tad=FBwru Don't cling to one state turn with the Nights, as they turn ~Maq=E2mat al-Hamadh=E2ni (tenth century; tr Stefania Pandolfo) ~ ~ ~ Bring all the art and science of the world, and baffle and humble it with one spear of grass. ~Walt Whitman's notebook ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:05:12 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damion Searls Subject: Berkeley, CA: Geoffrey Hartman lecture, 1 Feb Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I have absolutely zero idea how much (if any) interest y'all might have in an academic lecture by a "major American deconstructionist critic" on a Romantic poet, but just in case, thought I'd share. Damion Searls ========================= A public lecture in the [University of California at Berkeley] Department of Comparative Literature / Department of English series on Literature and History GEOFFREY HARTMAN Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, emeritus, Yale University "Cultural Memory, Wordsworth, and the Birth-Pangs of the Modern" 5 pm, Tuesday, February 1 Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall Reception to follow in 330 Wheeler [If you need directions, email me backchannel -D.S.] Cosponsored by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Departments of History, Rhetoric, and Film Studies ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 20:10:06 +0000 Reply-To: kosick@sprint.ca Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Terrence J Kosick Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Cyberpoetry Comments: To: Nmherman@AOL.COM Comments: cc: bstefans@EARTHLINK.NET, list@rhizome.org, GENIUS-2000@home.ease.lsoft.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Terrence writes; While in Vernon B.C. staying at a friend's rented wartime duplex I watched a part of a program about how (un-)planned community suburban neighborhoods (like the one I was staying at) were instantly built back in the late 40-s early 50's. The dreams of developers that created the nuclear family of which a 2-3 generations have grown out of. Every family a car (ad the second car for the "House Wife" ('homemaker'). Bedroom communities connected to the city by a system of roads and highways. Individuality consumed by a network that dreams were built on. In one nightmarish flash the the connected (soo easy with AOL 52%(?!)of POP.) and a planned controlled world of entertainment news and e-com, endless BBS and idled millions on chat and those multi colored plug and play candy colored e-macs all in the row just like the GMs and candy colored (sexy) Fords took the hopes of a progressively informed and enlightened world right out of my head. What is this very disenchanting view that came into my head as I watched the history channel program? Is it true? Is that what is going to be left of our electronically infused happy and informed digitally augmented and information rich privilaged world? What can I do? I thought, artnatural. ------- Overspecialization is a method of closing minds and commodifying that which should be natural. Poetry on the web is a good place to start. It is just poetry but poetry as it should be. Actively exchanged and not set in a publication. Imagine the poems of each day spreading across the community like a mantra pushing the consumer media jingos out of your mind. A daily cleansing of the desiring mind. Like a refreshing shower in the morning. Poetry that alleviates the anxieties of a wanting world whose utility of pleasure consumption is increasingly the credit card number entry. Terrence Kosick artnatural terrence kosick artnatural Nmherman@AOL.COM wrote: > In a message dated 1/22/2000 8:50:56 AM Central Standard Time, > bstefans@EARTHLINK.NET writes: > > > And I also wonder why they seem to be blind to the idea that poets > > are not antiquated figures who are "missing the point" of technology > > What is the relation of poetry, written out longhand and typed with a > typewriter; maybe mailed to a journal and maybe not; to the technological > concerns of network art? Certainly one doesn't have to use a technology, > much less be a virtuoso with it, to comment on it or even lay it bare. > Saying otherwise is a symptom of a global culture trapped by artistic > careerism and a fetish for the art-genre. Over-specialization in ALL areas > of intellectual life is an enormous, even decisive problem. > > > -- I > > wonder if the problem is that poetry has long since lost its connection to > > public utility, or when it does connect it is very selectively so, as a > sort > > of calming agent for bourgeois lifestyles. > > Poetry has lost a lot of things, perhaps as many as it has gained, over its > several-millennia lifespan. "A calming agent for bourgeois lifestyles" is > quite true, to my mind. Poetry is sort of treading water I think, a side > dish for weekend coffee-drinkers. > > By way of illustration, let me offer this address for an on-line poem: > > http://www.geocities.com/~genius-2000/Higher_Powers.GIF > > Dan Schneider, the author, is on a crusade to salvage poetry from its > ignominious role as self-esteem booster. He rants constantly that poetry > organizations from small reading groups to large journals are crippled by > cheesy psychotherapeutic agendas. He could be right or wrong. Back to your > topic however: I wonder if "Higher Powers" is more closely linked to network > art by its connection to the Genius 2000 Network. > > I'd say yes, but the problem is a tough one. Enjoy the poem. > > Max Herman > The Genius 2000 Network > www.geocities.com/~genius-2000 > + finger for pgp! > + > + > + > -> RHIZOME COMMUNICATIONS > -> post: list@rhizome.org > -> questions: info@rhizome.org > -> answers: http://www.rhizome.org > -> unsubscribe: http://www.rhizome.org/unsubscribe/ > + > + > + > posts to RHIZOME RAW are subject to the terms > set out in the Subscriber Agreement available online at > . ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:23:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: contact info for Ann Vickery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII anyone have an e-mail or regular mail address for Ann Vickery? thanks in advance, if such is the case. please backchannel to dkane@panix.com --daniel ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:29:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: teaching Reznikoff's TESTIMONY Comments: To: writenet@twc.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII i was recently hired to teach a "reading/writing intensive" comp class (community college level) where all essays are supposed to respond to a piece of literature with an "urban focus" (we're in New York City), and related materials dealing with that literature. I'm thinking of teaching Rez's Testimony -- if anyone has any experience teaching these books, and/or has suggestions for easy-to-understand critical texts dealing with _Testimony_, I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences. Backchannel (if that is most appropriate) to dkane@panix.com. thanks, --daniel ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 08:25:02 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Organization: Sun Moon Books Subject: Re: Lita Hornick MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Saddened to hear that about Lita Hornick. I certainly did not know her well, but her support of contemporary poetry, publishing important books by Susan Howe, Ted Greenwald, and others, was a major contribution. Douglas Messerli Charles Bernstein wrote: > > Susan (Bee) just now pointed out to me a notice in the obituary listing in > todays NY Times that Lita Hornick had died. I have no information about her > death except this, but I do know Lita Hornick, who was the publisher of > Kulchur > magazine and Kulchur, both of which made a vital contribution to the poetry of > the 60s through 80s, publishing many outstanding poets and collections by > poets > in the "New American Poetry" traditions. I hope others on this list will fill > in on the history of Kulcher and Lita Hornick herself, who was an extravagant > character, and the author of one collection of poems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:36:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Kane Subject: Joe Brainard's _I Remember Comments: cc: Daniel Kane MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hope this doesn't bug anyone, but I thought I'd repost this one more time and add that it would be great to have as many poets (and friends of poets, family of poets, dependents of poets, tax assessors of poets, etc.) participate in this project, which is shaping up nicely. best, --daniel CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS In an effort to connect the literary community with AIDS prevention and awareness organizations, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, in conjunction with Creative Time and Day Without Art Web Action, is embarking on a project that will result in an on-line web page that echoes and expands upon artist and writer Joe Brainard's book-length work "I Remember." Brainard, who died of AIDS in 1994, was a brilliant and hilarious writer who recorded more than a thousand of his memories in his book _I Remember_ (Penguin, 1995): I remember a boy named Henry who was said to have poured a mixture of orange pop and popcorn off the balcony of the "Ritz" movie theatre as he made gagging sounds.. I remember that little jerk you give just before you fall asleep. Like falling. I remember, at parties, after you've said all you can think of to say to a person--but there you both stand. What T&W wants to do now is to encourage individuals from all around the country -- including friends of Brainard's, people involved in AIDS organizations, students, teachers, poets, writers, hospice-care workers, and so on -- to write down their own "I Remembers" for inclusion in the web page. Submissions can be as long or short as you want -- they'll be edited and placed in an order that allows each submission to interact and correspond to other submissions in as lyrical and interesting a way as possible. This web page will be made available to the public on April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, but will not be limited to this little window of time. Your "I Remembers" can be about anything. Here's an exercise that might help you get started on your own "I Remember": 1) Close your eyes and relax. Take a deep breath, in and out. Let your mind go back to something you remember pretty well. 2) Let whatever you remember happen all over again in your mind. Notice as many details as you can. 3) Open your eyes and write down exactly what you just remembered. Begin your lines with the phrase "I remember..." Send all submissions (and any questions you might have) to Daniel Kane at dkane@panix.com. Please include your full name and address so you can be acknowledged. #This list-serve is designed for teachers and writers who want #to share ideas on teaching creative writing workshops for students #in grades K-12. To post, send mail to writenet@twc.org. #To join the list-serve, send the message "subscribe writenet" to #majordomo@twc.org. #To join the list-serve digest, which will collect several #messages into a batch and send them to you as one message #(reducing the total amount of messages sent to your mailbox), #send the message "subscribe writenet-digest" to majordomo@twc.org. #To unsubscribe, send the message "unsubscribe writenet" or #"unsubscribe writenet-digest" to majordomo@twc.org. #To view an archive of past messages on the Web, go to # and hit the "Teachers & Writers #Discussion Group" link. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 13:40:58 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Berrigan cont. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Just a quick follow up: Anselm notes that "Renny Pritikin (possibly misspelled by me) cited at a certain point "the lack of commonterms" as the main reason for communication breakdowns between Berrigan and, as it seemed, Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten." In fact, what was also largely at stake here was the inevitable dialectic of change that constitutes the shifting hierarchical structure of the cultural field (in other words, the breakdown in communications was *not* some unfortunate misunderstanding but was intended as a direct challenge to the cultural practice in which Berrigan had accumulated symbolic capital. Since ideas were taken somewhat more seriously at this time, the poetry world wasn't able to accomodate the legitimacy of both the Lang Poets and the 2nd gen NYS. Again, the discourse of " poetic community" entirely conceals what was essentialy a conflict of power). Bourdieu writes: "the process that carries work along is the product of the struggle among agents who, as a function of their position in the field, of their specific capital, have a stake in conservation, that is routine routinization, or in subversion." The reason the List carries so many mentions of the Lang Poets is an extremely ironic one: They stand in the way of the next generation, but, as cultural values themselves don't matter really anymore (not as much as symbolic capital does) the next generation cannot dispense w/ the Language poets function to confer legitimization. Emerging poets are thus caught in the double bind evident in the Talisman anthology. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 11:33:24 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Berrigan/Po Biz MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Anselm, (I believe I have successfully retracted a post (riddled w/ lazy errors) on this same subject written last Fri. in response to Stephen Ellis-- so, hopefully, I am not repeating myself here.) First, let me try to say what is at stake when I talk about success in relation to experimental poetry. Obviously, I am not talking about economic capital, even though this is in fact obtainable by a very small minority of experimentalist poets in the form of grants (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) or in the sale of personal papers and correspondance (an unusual example would be, say, Ginsberg's selling his papers to Columbia for a million dollars). But the fact that anyone reading this post would feel at all uncomfortable with the idea of there being any possible financial renumeration for experimental writing would only demonstrate the extent to which the game of poetry is one of *loser wins*. It will always be an *oppositional* game inasmuch as it functions by the *inversion* of the principles organizing the business economy--in that cultural production exists fundamentally as (when it is as severely restricted as exp poetry is) a production for producers. Which, however, is not to say that the world of alternative poetry and the world of bussiness are not homologous. The alternative poetry world, whatever else it is, is a hierarchical social space in which agents--poets-- employ various strategies--aesthetic practices--in order to acquire symbolic capital--prestige--and power (of a certain kind). Indeed, the power resulting from the acquisition of symbolic capital is the very thing that legitimizes the authority of critical interpretations and aesthetic judgments generally (and their reproduction through the efficacy of institutional cultural authority in the form of the exp writing and literature programs, organizations like St Marks, the most influential small presses and magazines, and so on). Success in poetry thus depends not as much on intrinsic abilities and gifts (since aesthetic value is a social, not a natural, creation) as on the extent of the poet's cultural capital--that is, his or her sense of the state of the game as it being played *now*. It goes without saying, however, that both poets and critics have, obviously, a certain self-interest in disinterestedness--that is, a stake in a *belief* concerning the absolute or autonomous aesthetic value of the work per se. As for the term "conflict of values" which Stephen asked about last week, it would implicate, of course, the various investments it is possible to make re such issues as the nature of subjectivity (& its representation in poetry), the objective character of language and its relationship to the world of things, the connection of art to politics (overt? covert? transcendental?), etc. But it is my impression that these conflicts no longer really *signify* in the way they used to. Open almost any alternative magazine and you will find a bizarre mix of contradictory styles (each of which is subtended by very different values). The editorial stance of these magazines is, in almost all cases, impossible to determine. & when--very rarely-- the editor does (bravely) state her or his position, it is not unusual to find her/him dissing the very kind of poetry he/she has been publishing all along, or that the book reviews (if the magazine carries them) are extolling. But this isn't bad faith, so much as the implicit recognition that a gold standard for aesthetic judgement and pleasure no longer exists. As a result, alternative poetry simply proliferates haphazardly in a state of (almost) pure circulation (with the exception that as Warhol realized, fame (contingent, stupid, indifferent) is the single most important point of reference or criteria for aesthetic (or other) judgements). It is thus difficult to see how poetry can serve as an emancipatory or moralistic --or politically oppositional--discourse. Why, as Stephen again asked, are we "ideologically blind" to this? Because as Baudrillard puts it, "when things, signs , or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, values, points of reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after the ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these circumstances." Ted Berrigan is an exemplary case. I am not at all surprised that, like Bernstein, he also compared poetry to a small business. In fact, Padgett, in _TED_, if I remember it correctly, reveals him as being, for example, very much concerned with his inclusion in the Norton Anthology. But yes--I'd say of course that, without any doubt, Ted Berrigan was a great success (measured in terms of symbolic capital). If his books went out of print, it is because these were carried by commercial publishers (right?)--so he paid a certain price in moving from an economy of restricted production to one of a slightly larger scale (but loser wins!). Also, of course, he possessed an extraordinary degree of cultural capital insamuch as he was at the center of various avant-garde coteries--Warhol's Factory, the NY School, etc.--in which a sense of the values at stake was somewhat arcane (circulating, as it did, often in socially closed or private conditions). --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jan 1990 00:41:33 -0500 Reply-To: Brian Stefans Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: The Resistance MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi John, You write: so then the question arises; are those poems that just flow, seemingly without resistance, not art ? it wd seem that if i was in agreement with the quotes that started this posting then i wd at least need to be pretty suspicious about such a spontaneous and effortless work's art status, right ? Yes, you can. Suspicion is a good instinct to have. But that suspicion can be part of the "content," once it is accepted as a form of response, and some art flies based on the level of suspicion it raises -- like Cage's. I think your problem with what I have written, or with your use of what I have written, seems to be that you are looking for some sort of dogma supporting my sentence, but the sentence "resists" such reduction -- the phrase "first note" tips you off to that, since it implies second or third notes, or the provisionality of the experience (a "note" in this instance being a lesser form of a "perception," which implies a truth content -- "note" is more aesthetic, Jamesian). I didn't write that the "resistance of the medium is a defining trait," that is obviously very oversimplified (though Adorno's lovely essay on Valery, which I've mentioned before, is a good read if you are interested in this issue). My idea is that each reader, or receptor, of a work of art has a series of expectations it, that most of these people are not "ideal" readers who cater to the pleasures of their suspicions, and that one can play off of these searches for the "resistance of the medium as a defining trait" to create an engagement with the reader. Part of the reason I think some language poetry fails in terms of this "reader created meaning" is that the terms of engagement are so much a development of the poet's advanced views of literature (often based on a counter-agonic constructivism, or a "pure" anti-subjectivity, or maybe Cagein indeterminacy, all of which is so "right" to the poet that they can't fathom the reader not seeing these things) and there is little attention given to what might be called (with a nod to Rebecca Wolff) the "general" understanding of poetry (which can involve the "resistances of its medium") that the reader is often in the position of feeling quite put out by these terms, or even worse, completely unengaged (hence with no sense of anticipation of what a true "engagement" would feel like). It would be like inviting someone to play on the seesaw with you, and then presenting them with a geodesic dome -- the "modern" version whose utility in terms of pleasure is not very apparent -- and saying "take a seat, swing your legs" -- huh -- and then providing you with thousands of theories of "tensegrity" and economies of matter and balances, etc -- huh, woah? All of which is right, and more interesting than general news, but engagement, which needs some "organic" component, would probably not happen. Well, I don't know what I mean here, but you probably get the drift. Anyway, this is what I wrote (quoted from your email): "Another way to phrase it, using the above terms, is that you would like to spot the resistances in the work since it is that which gives you the first note of understanding of why a work is "art" and not something like a letter, or a call in the wild." It's funny that you quote and then contort it into one extreme, so that you can provide the opposite extreme. In a way, I would say you didn't see the "resistance" of my sentence, or the concept. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 22:35:24 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Jim Andrews Subject: Canned show of Reiner Strasser at Defib MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Delicious freshly canned Reiner Strasser, defibrillated for fussy readers, is now online at http://webartery.com/defib/canned/6Reiner or http://webartery.com/defib/pastevents.htm Many thanks, especially to Reiner--and all who participated in Defib--for the terrific exchange around some of the artistic concerns of this important Web artist. Regards, Jim Andrews ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 06:20:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Vidaver Subject: Time Mechanix #1 (Vancouver): Barnholden reading Dorn Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kootenay School of Writing TIME MECHANIX 1 EDWARD DORN presented by Michael Barnholden Tuesday February 1, 8 pm Robson Central 750 Burrard (Mezzanine) Vancouver BC "With the death of Edward Dorn the United States loses not only one of its finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and cultural commentator." - Tom Raworth, The Independent, Dec. 16, 1999 Ed Dorn was a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955). Born in Illinois, he worked in the Boeing plant in Seattle in the late forties and returned to live and work in Washington state in the late fifties. His novel Rites of Passage (aka By the Sound) portrays this period of his life. His work was included in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960) and his first book was published by Totem Press (Leroy Jones/Amiri Baraka) in 1961. In 1965 he collaborated with photographer Leroy Lucas on The Shoshoneans: the People of the Basin Plateau. He lived and taught in England in the late sixties, then in Chicago, Mexico, San Francisco, Boulder, Montpellier. His best known work is the epic Gunslinger. Other books include Geography, The North Atlantic Turbine, Recollections of Gran Apacheria, Abhorrences. In the eighties, with his wife Jennifer, he edited the tabloid Rolling Stock ("If it moves, print it!"). He died on December 10, 1999 in Denver. TIME MECHANIX will occur on the first Tuesday of each month at Robson Central. On Tuesday March 7, Peter Quartermain will honour Basil Bunting's centenary. On Tuesday April 4, Robyn Laba will read from Muriel Rukeyser. On Tuesday May 2, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk will reluctantly read Gertrude Stein. The series will continue in our Summer season. "A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer." - Jack Spicer "Since poets write backwards in response to their deceased poetic predecessors and forward to the eventual readers of their poems, they exist inevitably outside of their own time even as they reflect or embody it. Thus Spicer proposes that the poet is always posthumous in the act of composition - or outside the present of the poems - since the 'afterlife of the poem' exists in a time beyond the life of the author." - Peter Gizzi The KSW acknowledges the assistance of Edgecombe Realy and the British Columbia Arts Council. Kootenay School of Writing 688-6001 www.ksw.net info@ksw.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:39:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: has anyone else noticed Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hi Tony, > "Reading all postings as offering "states of feeling", not a few seem keen to assert some power over the discursive space, over listeners, -- sometimes with sheer length, sometimes with judgements "supported" with argument of (variable) cogency, sometimes with postings that seem to be demonstrations of literary critical academic professionalism." I fear the following may refer to me partly -- because I know I'm a blabbermouth and probably post too much (I mean this) -- but I'd like to know, in general, how this "power over discursive space" is enacted in something with the structure of this list (which could, for example, have as 683 posts a day if those 683 Americans would post once daily, along with the 8 Australians etc. etc.), and how one is to satisfy one's demands for this power even should that be his (in this case we would say "his") goal. And what's wrong with "demonstrations of literary academic professionalism" and how does one suss this out? What's wrong with arguments of "variable cogency" if you are available to make them cogent, or to inject a new set of insights to perhaps produce something new? I guess the question is: Are we to take no chances at all when trying to discover, or uncover, what is the nature of poetry today, or who is writing interesting poetry and why, or is one to adopt a "common sensical" approach, a conservative and not unsettling manner that leaves us secure with our sense of "art" and one as an individual is. Are we always to refer to the "eternal verities" of literary value, or do we try to see the future for what it's worth? There seem to be three ways to read this list: 1) as individual emails, 2) as a big "digest," and 3) on the web in the archives (my preferred method, it saves you from the anxiety of having to read several emails or a long one). I'd be the first to draw back if I thought I was just crowding other people out -- the effect would be most strong on the digest, I presume -- but I tend to think the forum is still open to contributions from anyone reading the thing. My sense is that, while some of the "threads" could be trimmed at the end, just like any poem one writes (Schuyler used to say that he only cut off the ends of his poems as revision, because they got pretty bad there), or even starting from the middle, that most threads at least have some kernel of value to them, and that it's unlikely a thread will be hot metal intellectual discourse throughout, or "good poetry." And since this is a group effort by a bunch of people who don't know each other, we're not going to come up with War and Peace. [Start threads!] If we choose to approach threads as involuntary geological formations, like mountains, and appreciate the shapes they adopt rather than the "human" content, it would enable one to appreciate all forms of "variably cogent" behaviors therein. At least that's the way I see it. In any case, I wonder why there are so many people who are, in general, very silent on the list, and the only time you hear from them is when they suggest that the list is merely exposing how aggressive, hypocritical and pretentious poets are. Poets have to be pretentious -- just like Max Harris (hurray!) -- it's their jobs! I don't much care if people think I'm pretentious. If I may make a rather subversive comment: if you subtract all the loose talk on this list, the pretension and so forth, you are left with a bunch of magazine announcements and reading announcements -- which, when you think about it, is really just the "voice of the art bureaucrat" -- which isn't to say that that's what these people are by any means, they are often not getting paid at all and put in long hours of work to keep these things going, and they are often poets, very good ones! I'm just suggesting that the background hum this list performs would be reduced to that component, and wouldn't have any chance of being enlivening. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:11:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: derek beaulieu Subject: housepress online MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit housepress is finally pleased to announce that it has a basic website up & available for perusal. please do have a peek at: http://www.telusplanet.net/public/housepre/ of course, comments are welcome & do look for updates and news as it happens. yrs derek beaulieu housepress ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 13:41:55 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Dickison Subject: *** Gustaf Sobin & Arthur Rimbaud *** Comments: To: Tina Rotenberg Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable *** Greetings, not to bother anybody but, I've agreed to help publicize two upcoming poetry events, happening at venues that might not have as much access to the local poetry audience. Recommended, rare local appearance by Gustaf Sobin, who lives in Provence, France, and isnt around everyday; he'll be reading at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, & later in Feb. a Swiss film on Rimbaud that looks great, coming up at the Cinematheque-- your only chance to see this one. cheers Steve =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D GUSTAF SOBIN reading from his work Saturday, February 5, 7:30pm, free @ Diesel, A Bookstore 5433 College Avenue, Oakland (2 blocks south of Rockridge BART) Poet & writer Gustaf Sobin makes a rare appearance in the Bay Area, with two new works: _Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc_ is a poetic archaeology of his adopted dwelling-place, Southern =46rance, and is new from University of California Press. _The Fly-Truffler_ is a novel new, published by W.W. Norton, a love story set in the cultural landscape of Provence. Sobin is the author of numerous books of poetry, including recently _By the Bias of Sound: Selected Poems_ & _Towards the Blanched Alphabets_, both from Talisman House. for details reply to: diesel@best.com Website: www.dieselbookstore.com =3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx=3Dx= =3Dx=3D ARTHUR RIMBAUD, A BIOGRAPHY (1991) a film by Swiss filmmaker Richard Dindo Sunday, Feb 20, 7:30 pm, $7/$4 presented by San Francisco Cinemateque @ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St (at 3rd) This film is unique in Dindo's oeuvre, for here he incorporates actors as his witnesses to the life and death of the great poet. We see and hear his mother and sister, his school mentor, the poet and lover Verlaine, an employer in Aden and a Swiss business associate speak of their relationships with Rimbaud in the very places where they shared his life (his home in Charleville, Paris, London, Marseille, Aden, Harare). Rimbaud himself is present only through the wound of his absence, made visible through the images of the places he inhabited, the voices of those who knew him, and excerpts from his poems and letters. Richard Dindo appearing In Person for details reply to: sfc@sfcinematheque.org telephone 415 558 8129 Presented as the 3rd program in the series EXCAVATING SPACE TO REDEEM TIME: THE FILMS OF RICHARD DINDO "I don't try to immortalize the present, I try to draw memories into the present. Again and again my films focus on people who are already dead=8A. My films revolve around absence. That is my subject" --Richard Dindo The Cinematheque, in conjunction with Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland, presents three recent films by Richard Dindo, Switzerland's -and one of Europe's- best known documentary filmmakers. Using testimony, written or spoken, as his point of departure, his camera insistently investigates and fixes the actual spaces of events, seeking invisible scars to reveal and redeem a past now buried in the wake of time's passage. Dindo has said that his films often focus on "politically committed people and rebels who have experienced repeated defeats. Grieving is an integral part of remembering." The three films selected here each focus on extremely different figures, each of whom lost a battle waged against an unjust or repressive society: the Swiss police chief Gr=FCninger who saves a number of Jews and is subsequently tried and condemned for his actions; the revolutionary Che Guevara who returns to Bolivia to fight his last guerilla war; and the po=E8te maudit Arthur Rimbaud who rejects his family, the socia= l order, and ultimately his own writing and Europe. Dindo will be present at the screenings on Thursday Feb 17 and Sunday Feb 20 and there will be a reception following the Feb 17 screening. SCREENINGS AT YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, 701 MISSION ST, 7:30 PM ADMISSION $7 GENERAL, $4 STUDENTS, SENIORS AND CINEMATHEQUE MEMBERS =46OR MORE INFORMATION CALL 415 558 8129 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Steve Dickison, Director The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives ~ San Francisco State Univers= ity 1600 Holloway Avenue ~ San Francisco CA 94132 ~ 415-338-3401 ~ ~ ~ L=E2 taltazim h=E2latan, wal=E2kin durn b=EE-llay=E2ly kam=E2 tad=FBwru Don't cling to one state turn with the Nights, as they turn ~Maq=E2mat al-Hamadh=E2ni (tenth century; tr Stefania Pandolfo) ~ ~ ~ Bring all the art and science of the world, and baffle and humble it with one spear of grass. ~Walt Whitman's notebook ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 20:43:50 -0500 Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: maldoror association question In-Reply-To: <000501bf66bb$062a0d80$3fcf54a6@blwczoty> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit the puns & sound-rimes on "Maldoror" are endless -- I first heard it as "mal d'aurore" "in lack of dawn" or needing a dawn -- there is also the whole aura/air / or=gold/ etc. which I played with many years ago in a section of my poem _The Book of Luap Nalec_ & then you could also hear horror, odor, sleep etc. in the word. Pierre Joris Nomadism answers to a relation that 6 Madison Place possession cannot satisfy. Albany NY 12202 Maurice Blanchot Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 Email: joris@csc.albany.edu Url: http://www.albany.edu/~joris > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu]On Behalf Of Jordan Davis > Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 5:33 PM > To: POETICS@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu > Subject: maldoror association question > > > Not the address of the group that brings all its umbrellas to > the operating > table, > BUT > > to the people who spoke French first, > does the name > MALDOROR sound like it means "Golden-evil-gold"? > > Wanting to know, > Jordan > jdavis@panix.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 21:08:03 -0500 Reply-To: Patrick Herron Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Organization: p r o x i m a t e . o r g Subject: p r o x i m a t e . o r g MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Hi there. _in the end will be the flesh and the flesh will be made word_ I have authored a web site, called "p r o x i m a t e . o r g" that you may find of interest. Please take a stroll down the gallery path. The site is a home for my internet-related poetry and graphic design. http://proximate.org/ WHAT THE NAME The site is named 'proximate' as a nod to the concept of proxemics in human communication. Proximate communications, specifically oral communications, contain extralinguistic information, _e.g._, body language & context, that remote communications such as recordings or textual communications do not have, cannot have. The hope of the internet as some sort of transcendent medium deserves serious skepticism when placed in such a light. Such a light also gives us opportunity for discovering the positive. There's always the tension, the conflict. The name "proximate" is also a pun on intimacy on the internet, as in a proxy mate. We all know sex sells, _especially_ on the internet. The internet seems to be used as a proxy for human contact and proximal communication, which gives me pause. Such an intuition adds to what I sense as a sort of growing desperation for real, physical human contact, particularly in America, with everyone working on him- or herself, never time for affection, only time for status, career, a new car. Such use of energy may be at odds with a more positive force in life. The world has some strange dynamic property to it; there's something beyond our knowledge, yet within, around; perhaps such a thing helps explain the necessity for contact. The internet is often used as a substitute for that contact, but it can't do that well. There is NO substitute. The "i" that the pun pivots on is relevant to a constant concern throughout the site regarding identity. "I"? Y? WHY THE SITE I have authored this site as a byproduct of discussions I have had regarding the internet, interface design and human gesture, the pretensions of proximity in web pages and the actual distances constructed by them, and some resulting poetry. Most of the discussions were this past summer and autumn through subsubpoetics (an e-mail list started by Jordan Davis) with Alan Sondheim and two close friends, one a writer, the other a designer. (Some material from these dialogues can be found at another web site: http://gesture.org/text.html .) I am interested precisely in the type of relationships that web pages build between people. I have observed that this internet aesthetic, this relater, is a duplicitous one (getting back to the original definition of art?) -- that the writing styles typical of e-talk and the "personalization" of web pages add up to make a user feel close, proximate, A SOMEBODY, while all along the relationship is constructed at an incalculably great distance. Such a great distance, that it allows the person or persons constructing the content, who is trying to get your attention or most likely your money, to completely disregard those at the receiving end of the communication. Like the power of a bomb; you can destroy people and not even have to suffer through witnessing it. This web site appears in lieu of a book. Besides, such material would make little or no sense _only_ in print. Of course, publishing the work on the internet pretty much guaranteed the publication. Makes it easier to work from outside the system as well. p r o x i m a t e tries to imitate this confrontational, faux-personal aspect of the internet in ludicrous ways, in some poems ("Come Closer!," "Simon Says," etc.) . Other poems engage a more sincere aspect, such as the relation between nature and the binary of computing, or my creeping suspicion that web pages are multiplying in the fashion of A.M. country stations, albeit at a greater rate, thus undermining this "personalized" bright future the internet is supposed to provide. All web pages seem the same after a while. I am primarily interested here in confrontation and the language unit of the sentence and the chord structures of poems (as I mis/read Ashbery), as opposed to the syllable, the notes of poems. I have a strong interest in interface design, as interfaces on the internet (or in all technologies, even writing?) are the starting points for my discussion, as interfaces are the most immediate contact we have with others, though letters and graphics and hypertext links. HOW THE SITE p r o x i m a t e is linear, as I wanted the site to feel less like a "Choose your own Adventure" book and more like a neglected side hallway in an old art gallery space. The site contains several poems, including 2 kinetic poems, a few RealAudio recordings of readings with some background processing in some cases, some original graphics, and some groundwork for new interfaces (which are now static). Perhaps the structure is a gesture of my sincerity, as the face of much of the material is one of sarcasm and duplicity (multiplicity?). I felt I could point out internet-style duplicity by exaggerating it. Of course, without the internet, this work would be meaningless. The internet has afforded me the opportunity to publish in such a fashion. As much as I criticize the Internet, I cannot imagine a time or place in the past where a maturing writer could develop in a fashion that is at once independent and public. Proximal and distal. For this I am not only fortunate but grateful. With this site I have something at stake, both as a poet and as a professional web designer & developer. The job pays my bills, the poetry inflates my lungs, but I wanted something devoid of such a feeble opposition, a place where the two could meet. The result is p r o x i m a t e . o r g . WHO THE SITE All work on p r o x i m a t e . o r g is Copyleft. Copyright © 1999, 2000, Patrick Herron (with some minor exceptions). Verbatim copying and distribution of any part of or all of the p r o x i m a t e web site is _permitted_ in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. For more information on Copyleft, go to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html . Submissions are encouraged, however, no submissions will be solicited in a fashion other than this general notice. WHAT THE SITE: A COMPLETE GUIDE The site proceeds linearly in the following fashion, though you can also start at the home page and click through it (as of 20 January 2000): http://proximate.org/ -- main page. Simple GIF animation. The hand (also see below) is known as, "La Mano Poderosa," or the All-Powerful Hand. It is a Caban-style sculpture from 19th C. Puerto Rico. Is the hand all-powerful? The hand has become a focal point for gesture, as communication with all its powerful extralinguistic content is trying to get through the hands, the fingers, through the keyboard. To this page I just added a flash piece called "Hello," which is properly reached from a link below the main graphic on this page. The image of the abbot is Saint Benedict, who allegedly could read minds and dispense a large set of rules. He helped change Western European languages while proselytizing across the continent in the 6 th century. He is the patron saint in effigy and he is dying to shake your hand. Like agents of the lord, people are milling about proselytizing about the internet and its divine glories in almost religious fervor. And certainly language is changing as a result. Remember, 01 is me and I am 01. Dust & ash serve as analog counterpoint. The music is a short composition of mine. The flash animation requires Flash 4. http://proximate.org/closer.htm & http://proximate.org/closer2.htm - "Come Closer!," a kinetic poem about getting close to a web page. GIF animation. http://proximate.org/hands.htm -- hands (future interface groundwork). The hand and the eye are the human part of the interface of the internet. But each finger has its own spiritual power, and together . . . . http://proximate.org/01d3c0d3.htm -- "01 d3c0d3," a poem. (I decode). This poem is about interface, whether it be a keyboard or a language or a literary device or a counting system. Something gets filtered out, yet something else gets added. the impoverished signal gets a boost somewhere. I try to add to that filter, by means of adding subliminal (nonliminal?) suggestions to the noise, as an attempt to develop unconscious coloring constituents for meaning, as if meaning were not a point but a field, a cloud. But when pushed for something better, all means of communication break down, becoming noisy yet reductive, insular. Where does something go when it is expressed? Where do we go when we express ourselves? Poetry seems to be cryptic sometimes, and in the crypt, is something lost, or is something gained, or both? We live in an age of cryptography, seemingly disparate subjects suddenly thrust upon each other. Can anything be expressed in language or any other code? Hence my reason for changing the "I" to "01," seemingly appropriate for a binary age. http://proximate.org/catching.htm -- graphics with a tribute to Vito Acconci, perhaps the most important influence on this site, at least from an ideological / aesthetic standpoint. the picture is of Vito Acconci trying to catch balls thrown at him while he is blindfolded. It's funny and yet it's not. It's other-sensory, synecdochal (to coin a word), and oddly harrowing. Like understanding art itself. The Chinese text is from a "Reelect Willie Brown" web page. I thought it was ironic without translation and even more ironic if the text is understood. http://proximate.org/image.htm -- "image," a poem for Alan Sondheim. This poem is about the technology of writing and its relation to orality. And the internet and its magnification of aspects of the technology of the written word. Echoes of Plato, Walter Ong, Julian Jaynes, Coleridge, _Max und Moritz_. T.S. Eliot, interface, the augury underlying not only science but _intent_ altogether. With accompanying RealAudio voice morphing at http://proximate.org/ra/image.ram . http://proximate.org/morph.htm - "Friends Forever!!!." A web page getting friendly, but it just _might_ be insincere. http://proximate.org/simon.htm - "Simon Says!", a confrontational poem _a la_ Acconci's way of forcing an audience's involvement by using the second person. the graphics are a reflection of reflections and dissected sexuality. Typography tries to merge the sense of language with mathematics, providing its own means for alienation. A poem originally composed for subsubpoetics. http://proximate.org/confluent.htm - A well-known poet told me last year that I needed to write a nature poem. I do not think this is what he had in mind. I attempt to express timelessness with a most deliberate conflation of distant origins and the commonplace results of today, machines spitting numbers. And this conflation came out somewhat like Glossolalia, like speaking in tongues, only more clear, like Tourette's, but not abusive. My fascination with cosmology and astronomy bubbles through the lines but always at the strain of admitting such things as black holes, the strain of admitting the reality of anything, or the construction of anything for that matter. With a RealMedia recording, morphed voice and risset tones: http://proximate.org/ra/confluent.rmm . http://proximate.org/asabove.htm - "As Above, So Below." GIF image. Another interface precursor. Overly simple perhaps, but it is also a joke on interface and even perhaps the sortilege of sexuality, like knowing which way to go at the appearance of a subway sign that says "Street (up arrow), subways (down arrow)." You always know which way to go just by merit of where you are. The sign is unnecessary. The image, to add to the entendre, is an altered detail from a large public works mural done by the fantastic brilliant realist artist, Jack Beal. I believe the mural is the mosaic in the 42nd Street Subway Station in NYC. Jack is a dear friend of a dear friend, and this mutual dear friend is the stepfather of my best friend who died three years ago. The experience of his son's death is a large part of why I'm doing ANYTHING creative today. To bring this in line with the image, the detail from this mosaic is of my friend's stepfather, who Beal actually pictured as a welder in the mosaic. Perhaps the internet is a subway, and to make navigating it simple, know where you are and have a pretty good idea of where you'd like to go. And what if you don't know where you are? http://proximate.org/subterra.htm - A poem entitled, "Subterranean Homesick Filament," with original graphics. The poem originally appeared on subsubpoetics and was written by replacing every 'a' with a 4, every 'e' with a 3, every 'i' with a 1, every 'o' with a 0, every 'g' with a 9, and some other textual substitutions as well. This poem is perhaps more sincere than the other content, perhaps more mundane and commonplace, but all such things should have a home. The empty feeling from working too much, being too deeply immersed in the mercantile world, and the effect of such feelings of emptiness on one particular personal relationship, my most important relationship. http://www.proximate.org/paradigm.htm - "Paradigm Shift." A poem about web pages as miscellaneous and vapid as country stations in a violent cowboy world soldiered by people in briefcases. The distance of web pages, the desperate need of people for touch, and the outlandish appeals for subjugation and abuse all over the internet -- all such things play a part. Perhaps because all of that time on the internet we are sitting in front of a lifeless monitor. Human contact is so hard to find, and just a little more difficult on the internet. It's as if making a bigger noise on the internet will finally bring the touch, but at that point you're already sucked in. And you are more easily commodified at that point. I guess I'm pretty much an vitalist, by way of Wilhelm Reich or Bergson, so my concerns with the technology of text, of internet, or ideas without flesh, distant media like big brothers, are all in conflict with the great deal of fondness I have for both writing and the internet. And I'm curious here about the rise and fall of the sentence, how syntax is like the chord structure of a song. Hence the unresolved sentence to introduce, and its repetition as an opportunity for resolution. A RealMedia recording accompanies the poem at http://proximate.org/ra/paradigm.rmm . http://proximate.org/lockandkey.htm - "Lock and Key." Poem with original graphics. Keys, encryption, gestures of openness and penetration/interface, the divisiveness of objectification, the gestures of body language blown apart, and the age-old philosophical riddle of other minds. http://www.proximate.org/syntax.htm - "Syntax Round." Poem with original graphics. What does a page when designed for a print layout, look like on the web? Again, another poem that plays on syntax and its relation to resolution via the avoidance of resolution and repetition. Free jazz is a big influence on much of my writing, not just here, and it has led me to some level of insight on the sentence and its music. An insight perhaps or an opportunity for an invented intellection. A sentence in language is used here in a way equivalent to a phrase of music in a song. And on the graphical design side of things, here's an attempt to see what a page spread layout designed for print would look like on a web page, and the art work, again, indulging in the compulsion of most literal interface, the display of genitalia. We humans have more in common with chimps than we like to kid ourselves. Commercial internet enterprises take advantage of our primate nature as well as our seeming ignorance of such a nature, all over the place. Sex sites in particular. http://www.proximate.org/bookends.htm - "Bookends Person Absurdities." This poem was the result of a Sunday trip to the library. The opening section is composed of the first and last sentences of books I picked up at the library, but when I rewrote them I stripped of any people. And then I incorporated the credits for each book as part of the work. The measure of the line here is in words, not syllables. The unit of the sentence takes primacy here. The "notes" section is a more personal accounting of some things that I was rubbing up against. I guess I read Walt Whitman poems now as if John Giorno were trying to read them, not allowing a breath until the line is completed. Allen Ginsburg haunts this, perhaps even my reading of it (RealMedia) at http://proximate.org/ra/bookends.rmm . Yes, this is my voice unretouched. At some point the authentic must appear, no matter how futile in theory. http://proximate.org/blackbox.htm - "The Black Box is Empty." A villanelle, with artwork. Unfortunately I cannot remember the source of the photograph. So someone is going uncredited here. Are poems part of signs? What's that monkey doing there? http://proximate.org/creation.htm - A visual allusion to Linda Nochlin's "The Origin without an Original"* and Gustave Courbet's "L'origine du Monde" and to the collapse of the end into the origin in the great cosmological cycle of things. Authenticity and a lack thereof. A return to the beginning, if you touch it, baby, c'mon. This woman, unlike Courbet's subject, is not an object but an activity, an explosion, a channeling, an interfacing. Orgasm as interface, transformation, both familiar and other-worldly. Starting with an end and ending with an origin. THANKS Enjoy. I would love your feedback, especially if you have made it this far along. Most of this material was posted to the domain server during the week beginning 16 January 2000, and is still in development. There is much more to come, both poetry and interface design. My thanks go to Alan Sondheim, Giles Hendrix, and Suzie Sisoler for their valuable insights and comments generously given to me during the development of the p r o x i m a t e site. And to Janet, for not just tolerating but appreciating my absences from working too much. Thank you. Warmest regards, Patrick Herron * - Nochlin, Linda. "Courbet's L'Origine du monde: The Origin without an original." In _Spectacles of Realism_, eds. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 339-347 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:20:53 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Subject: new from/at Double Lucy Books Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Poetix, It appears to me that this news didn't get thru. Please forgive if I am incorrect. ET DOUBLE LUCY BOOKS ANNOUNCES 3 1. a lovingly redecorated website http://users.lanminds.com/dblelucy featuring 2. LUCY HOUSE: an online anthology of prose with work by David Buuck Cydney Chadwick Brenda Coultas Susan Schultz Liz Waldner & next month, Johanna Isaacson 3. A NEW PRINT SERIES, namely Lucilles=20 (postcards, pamphlets, broadsides)=20 =20 Lucille #1=20 _The Milk Bees_=20 Elizabeth Treadwell=20 (12 page pamphlet, edition of 50; =20 first 20 handsewn & decorated by the author. $1)=20 January 2000=20 =20 =20 Lucille #2=20 "_in media res_"=20 Marcella Durand=20 (postcard, edition of 80. 50=A2)=20 January 2000=20 =20 =20 Lucille #3=20 (forthcoming)=20 Merle Bachman Lucille #4 (forthcoming) Jocelyn Saidenberg Future Lucilles to be announced. #1 & #2 are now available from Double Lucy Books PO Box 9013 Berkeley, CA 94709 cash or stamps are fine; please make checks payable to Elizabeth Treadwell subscriptions to the Lucille series: $5/5 Lucilles ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:11:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jena Osman Subject: documentary poems Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I'm trying to put a class together that looks at "documentary" poems. The first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. Also Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any suggestions? Thanks, Jena ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:25:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jena Osman Subject: poetics journals Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, Jena ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 23:11:24 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Re: teaching Reznikoff's TESTIMONY MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Daniel K: I've never taught Reznikoff, but I've read a great deal and sense an almost tactile contact within those spaces he witnessed. But I suggest, as a possibility, the recreation of some of his walks. I don't know if you are familiar with the "Re-Photography" project in the West where contemporary photographers (Mark Klett, Bob Dawson among others) have revisited and rephotographed the sites of the great nineteenth century photographs (WilliamJackson, Timothy Sullivan, etc.). As you can imagine the results can be quite ironic. A reservoir (where there was once none) with a yacht and cocktail glass on the table in the cockpit. But I suspect you could do similar "walking" revisitations with students and enact writing exercises in Reznikoff's terrain. I would envy the possibility to do so. Good luck. Cheers, Stephen Vincent In a message dated 1/26/0 1:41:39 PM, dkane@PANIX.COM writes: << i was recently hired to teach a "reading/writing intensive" comp class (community college level) where all essays are supposed to respond to a piece of literature with an "urban focus" (we're in New York City), and related materials dealing with that literature. I'm thinking of teaching Rez's Testimony -- if anyone has any experience teaching these books, and/or has suggestions for easy-to-understand critical texts dealing with _Testimony_, I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences. Backchannel (if that is most appropriate) to dkane@panix.com. thanks, --daniel >> ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 23:30:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon DeDeo Subject: Re: Utopias MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Thanks very much to folks who've posted regarding Utopias. When I was formulating the question, I was trying to pinpoint places where poets have explicitly invoked the rhetoric of Utopia from other places (the political, psychoanalytic, and so on.) Naomi Jacobs responded backchannel with an interesting collection of names which she had taken from a list by Libby Falk Jones: Piercy, "Outcome of the Matter: The Sun" Yeats, "The Second Coming" Stafford, "What If We Were ALone?" Eleanor Arnason, "The Land of Ordinary People" cummings, "pity this busy monster, manunkind" Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians" Olds, "Son" (from The Dead and the Living) Strand, "Always" Interestingly, right after posting the original message to the list, I hoped on a bus up to Montreal to see an old friend; for whatever reason, I've never run into as much Utopian rhetoric as I did in the few days I spent up there. One of the things that struck me was the general scariness of the various ideologues that were running around; much of the dialogue goes on in a sort of environmentalism meets logical positivism zone where a component of mysticism is admixed with a general desire to put things on a "rational" basis. It seems that poetry can hold a number of relationships to the idea of Utopia, and that more interesting than the particular social vision espoused is the depiction of the three point relationship between speaker, audience and this nebulous zone that is conjured up by the word "Utopia", not entirely conventional but not immediately new either. If a poem gains its power from operating in a position of dissent within a particular "structure" -- OK, political, but also generally cognitive, meaning "making it new" is more than a aconsequential activity of the mind alone -- what is going on when a poem tries to inhabit, describe, gesture towards a Utopia where being in dissent is -- ? what ? -- coopted? Dystopias are another matter, of course; there are interesting questions there, but I'm not sure that they drive as close to the strangeness of a poem that enters a Utopia and in some way leaves behind the awareness of its own ability to be "in dissent". You can be a poet gesturing towards Utopia, of course, which is a dissenting position in as much as the poem understands itself as being in the non-Utopian world. But what happens when the poem claims to be written in or out of Utopia, and where it envisages its audience as similarly unestranged? -- Simon ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 11:37:32 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Mills, Billy" Subject: the Journal Comments: To: "British (E-mail)" Apologies for cross posting. Just in from the printers, the long awaited, by us at least, 2nd issue of the Journal, the only Irish magazine devoted to alternative poetries. This issue contains poetry by: Charles Bernstein Nicole Brossard Cid Corman Ted Enslin Peter Gizzi Fanny Howe Keith Waldrop Rosmarie Waldrop Craig Watson A prose piece, Literary Youths (on Brecht and Goebbels) And Making it new again, the papers delivered at the 3rd Cork Conference on Experimental Irish Poetry by Alex Davis, Romana Huk, Karen MacCormack and Keith Tuma. Price ?5/$10 inc. post. Subs ?9/$18 for two issues. Cheques payable to hardPressed poetry. Subscriber and contributor copies will be posted as soon as the flu allows. Billy hardPressed poetry Alternative Irish poetry publishing and distribution bmills@netg.ie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:53:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Lennon Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed In-Reply-To: <200001270510.AAA21989@mailrelay1.cc.columbia.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cranky morning state of feeling. A long post is often boring. But is it really an act of aggression? Equivalent to, say, a physical menace? Literary-critical, academic, professional: I myself am all these things. Used as put-downs, they too signify the attempt to superiorize oneself. Yet I don't know that I feel menaced by capital-P Power here. Brian Lennon > ------------------------------ > > Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 09:49:06 +1300 > From: Tony Green > Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed > > Reading all postings as offering "states > of feeling", not a few seem keen to assert > some power over the discursive > space, over listeners, > -- sometimes > with sheer length, sometimes with > judgements "supported" with argument > of (variable) cogency, sometimes > with postings that seem to be > demonstrations > of literary critical academic > professionalism. > > Maybe > that's what is at issue in > this thread. > > ABW Tony Green > > ------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:23:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: POLITICAL: American Anti-Slavery Group In-Reply-To: <3c.d4317b.25c07bd4@aol.com> from "Jacques Debrot" at Jan 26, 2000 11:33:24 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, Those of you who happened to catch William Finnegan's article in the NYer (last weeks? this weeks?) about slavery in Mauritania and the Sudan might want to check out the website for the American Anti-Slavery Group: http://www.anti-slavery.org. This is already a pretty well-organized effort, w/ members of Congress on board (including the incomparably wonderful Barney Frank) but they of course need grass-roots support and money to get anything substantive accomplished. The website details the mission, and has mucg useful information, plus a petition (signed by Amiri Baraka among other notables!), etc. Check it out! -Mike. ps: this has everything to do with poetry... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 11:07:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Waber Subject: Shape and Time In-Reply-To: <388D6B60.E74C3FBF@studiocleo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" All, I've been cogitating on the discussions here and elsewhere regarding the shape of the virtual space, and I'm curious not so much as to how it *should* be conceptualized, nor as to developing a working theoretical paradgm, but how individuals wrap their brains around it. To eschew obfuscation: when you finish composing an email (to this list, or otherwise...and is it different in either case), what is you personal conception of the *where* where it goes upon executing "Send"? The second thing I'm interested in involves the flipside of space, time. I have read that, in general, humans visualize time such that the individual is facing the future, standing in the present, with the past behind them. Why this way? Isn't it just as logical to visualize time in the reverse: The past in front of us, because we can *see* it via our memories, standing in the present, the unknown future behind us and out of visual range? Most english speakers are said to view time in some sort of discrete increment linear scheme--frames of a film, bottles of beer on the wall, hash marks on a ruler...visualizing time *as* space. Some other languages do not have this side-effect. As language and usage change to adapt to the virtual space, will this can this does this affect the visualization of time? My computer is online 24/7 and I stay connected to a private chat server that I share with a circle of close friends that have become globally scattered. You type something and maybe they all are they, maybe none of them are there. 3 days later you might get an answer to a question that spawned other questions that have already been answered. I used to have the chat program timestamp other people's messages, so that when I went to review what had happened in the hours I was not physically present, I could guage the time during which it all occurred. The whole scenario is so necessarily nonlinear, that I realized the timestamping was ridiculously useless. 15 minutes has always been a quarter circle to me, 20 minutes one third. This will surely disappear when analog clocks are gone. The calendar is also a kind of circle to me. The month I'm in is largest, and the ring spreads out to my left and right, distorted a bit in shape--months immediately ahead tilted up-ish, months just past tilted down-ish, such that they meet again at the horizon of six months from now. The seasons are roughly superimposed on this ring (if I need to reference them) with something that I always thought was color, but at this exact moment of articulating the visualization I realize it is not. Inexpressable...for now. Anyway, How do each of you "see" time? Does it have a shape, and if so what is that shape? If not, are there words to describe what you "see"? Can it does it change? Thanks in advance for any replies, Dan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:33:52 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAYHEW Subject: Poetry and Time MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII "A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer." - Jack Spicer "Since poets write backwards in response to their deceased poetic predecessors and forward to the eventual readers of their poems, they exist inevitably outside of their own time even as they reflect or embody it. Thus Spicer proposes that the poet is always posthumous in the act of composition - or outside the present of the poems - since the 'afterlife of the poem' exists in a time beyond the life of the author." - Peter Gizzi I was thinking about this issue of the poet in time when I came across these quotes in a posting by Aaron V. The example I had in mind was Barbara Guest, a poet that I only really discovered (for myself) about 5 years ago. Here is my time-line: 1920: Barbara Guest is born 1960: Guest publishes first book in small, coterie edition. (Jonathan Mayhew) is born. 1962: Guest publishes 2nd book with Doubleday. She turns 42. 1966: Frank O'Hara dies at age 40. Jack Spicer also dies around the middle of this decade. 1970s: Guest continues to publish, now in smaller presses. John Ashbery wins all the awards for his Self-Portrait. The other New York school poets also gain in recognition (Koch, Schuyler, O'Hara (posthumously). I read all these poets with great interest, not thinking much about Guest, whose books I have never seen in any bookstore, not in Norton anthology, etc... 1980s: Guest's H.D. biography. Desultory publication of her poetry in smaller editions. Toward the end of the decade Guest is taken up by Sun & Moon Press. Read by the same people who read other books published by Messerli. 1990s: Guest comes into her own--in terms of audience and critical recognition, though there are still only 6 items in MLA bibliography in the year 2000. I buy her selected poems in 1995: the first book of hers I have possessed, though I own more than 200 books by poets of the "New York School." 2000: I will turn 40. Guest will turn 80. The work produced in her 80th decade has been extraordinary. I have not yet published a book of poetry but I still feel youthful. I read a poem/story in Guest's Confetti Tales called "Ars longa," about an aging actress under the harsh lights of a movie camera... Jonathan Mayhew jmayhew@ukans.edu _____________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:30:32 +0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Weldon Sithiwong Subject: Cyberpoetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" If we have learned anything as human beings these past few generations, it's that differences make life interesting. Cyberpoetry should be as diverse as our ecclectic tastes. These days we know more about the esoteric rituals of a Yao shaman than we do about those of our friends (giving rise, perhaps, to the wishful thinking of the horror genre: "I Married a Vampire"). This is not to classify cyberpoetry with scary movies, but rather, to point out that we seem to be fascinated with the different, the unknown. And what could be more fascinating than expressing it in a language of transition and device. For the machine which sits before me has evolved in a miraculous way. By using different programs the cyberpoet molds and modifies the "voice" to mark poetic space, somewhat in the way Ducasse used Lautreamont to produce Maldoror. For what is a pseudonym if not a mask. What is a mask if not a device for unfettered communication. Is the webpage, therefore, the mask of the cyberpoet? The structure of the communication is certainly ritualistic. One must be a member of the group: ie own an internet account. One must access the information through a prescribed process: opening the browser. One must know how find the information: initiation. One must perform the ritual to gain the secrets that are gradually revealed: clicking, clicking, clicking, moving in deeper and deeper as a relationship develops between the cyberpoet and the viewer/reader. That relationship is symbolized and reconfirmed with the joining of a list and the creation of one's own cyberpoetry page. Perhaps it is this aspect/ this process of revealed knowlege that is most disturbing in some cyberpoetry sites I have explored. Those sites are not films, once seen, then forgotten. They represent an interactive education in a poetic space. This, educative aspect of cyberpoetry brings to the forefront a question of ethics. Do we really know what we are doing out there? Do we understand the relationship between the screen, the eye, the mind and the heart? Nineteenth century preoccupation with the fantastic developed as we began to define the limits of our physical world. Perhaps we are curently, in fact, seeking to define the limits of the fantastic world. The life of the mind in cyberspace is certainly in this domain. This is the space into which we poets have ventured in our role as mentors of the human spirit. I hope it maintains a balanced representation. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:11:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Power poetix MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Jacques sayeth: The reason the List carries so many mentions of the Lang Poets is an extremely ironic one: They stand in the way of the next generation, and also: Again, the discourse of " poetic community" entirely conceals what was essentialy a conflict of power). ********************************* This is Jacques' hangup, but not exactly objective truth. Indeed, we might better understand Jacques' recent position in poetics debates, as that of "the Nonmainstream Harold Bloom." His primary understanding of how US poetry works, is the idea that it is a power struggle. The wish to publish, or be read, to build poetic communities, are all dismissed as a "will to power," in a highly simplified, subNietzschean model much like Bloom's. This, like Bloom's model, and like many large explanatory models that take their structure from psychoanalytic ideas (the son must defeat the father, etc.) cannot really be arguned or debated; it can no more be disproven than it can be confirmed. It represents a personal mindset.... To Jacques, apparently, everything poets do *feels* like a competitive zero-sum struggle for power and "cultural capital." But to actual poets, actually engaging in their work, and to readers of poetry who respond to it, this is not what's going on. It is going on in Jacques's head; i understand that. But it is not in fact going on in the world (any more than Bloom's similar lurid scenario of oedipal struggle is). --mp ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:50:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Thoughts and Proposals for the List MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } THIS IS A LONG POST it lists problems i have heard expressed re the poetics list it tries to construct (problematically i'm sure) an empathetic take on possible sides to some of these problems it ends with various proposals for ways that the problems might be dealt with Problems * there have been numerous mentions of postings being too lengthy (i'm a culprit i confess) * people have expressed the feeling that an overwhelming argument or debate norm in certain threads has made them uninterested in joining in (that thread became battle zones etc) * c. daly wrote (hi catherine) that she took seriously the idea that the list was for announcements and such * and the quite old (as i see looking at _poetics@_) thread concerning the lack of balance between the genders in postings as i've heard all of these things stated in varied ways ranging from resigned acceptance to angry indignation, and as i've seen evidence that versions of these problems have a lengthy history on this list, i wd like to think that, in spite of past discussions and the continuation of these troubles, that there might be something that cd be done about still (some thoughts on) Length i do understand that this is a problem people have limited time, they read the list at work, they feel that long posts require more effort to respond to than they have or want to spend, they get the digest version and resent scrolling endlessly thru things that don't interest them, they feel that long posts express an overt or covert intent to dominate or control the discussion, they feel squeezed out maybe, they certainly have many more ways of stating their problem(s) with long postings that i will think of here and all of them will be real problems now speaking as a "long poster" i find that much of what is the most interesting on the list is delivered in long posts, it seems to me that a ~dichten/condensare~ attitude has as many drawbacks as advantages and that depending on one's passions (poetic?) it cd be seriously debilitating thus the paradoxical aspects of the golden rule come to the fore Conflicts this problem is linked to the last of course but certainly rates it own heading what i've gleaned, partial as it may be, from posts to the list and backchannel discussion of the list is that many aren't interested in any way in polemics, in arguing, disputing ---- they wd like to see opinions of/on and responses to poetry posted but don't wish to feel attacked or forced to "justify" their opinions in public forum ---- or they wdnt mind at all pursuing differences of opinion or understanding but based on prior experience or observation of list dynamics they don't trust that personal attacks and struggles to have the final word about things wont derail the more, peaceful (?) pursuit of inquiry there are also those for whom debate and or argument are useful ways of finding out not just what others think about things but about their own feelings as well ---- i hope that these folks don't actually relish the air battles that develop in "poetic space" ---- i do not, while i accept that i have contributed to such, or perhaps, more to the point, have failed ~not to~ ---- on this side of the impulse (which does often hoists itself on conflictual postings) i think there is also at times a sense that those who wish to be able to not have to expand upon or be asked to expand upon their opinions or relate them to the opinions of others, are in some sense refusing or shutting down the potential for open inquiry the Announcements list all that i have to say about this is that while i value the announcements and read many of them, that if this list truly is, first and foremost, an announcements list, then i'm bored ---- the interest that reading _poetics@_ provides me has nothing to do with the announcements element of this list and i cannot help but thinking that the it is the discussions of issues of poetry and poetics and any number of other issues of whatever tangential relation to these that makes this list and exciting place to be Gender imbalance i dont think that i have anything to say about this that hasnt been said more cogently by others many times in the past and so have nothing to offer but my wish that more women wd feel like posting (10 proposals, undoubtedly of things that have been suggested, unbeknownst to me, in the past) 1. (this idea suggested to me yesterday) --- what if, as i have seen on other lists, long posts started out with something akin to an "executive summary" to allow a listee to scan a paragraph or outline or whatever and decide whether they wanted to continue 2. for those who receive the list on an account also used for work (or perhaps they take the digest b/c of this) it may be that yr email program allows you to route anything from poetics@blahblah to a specific folder so that it doesnt clog yr inbox obscuring work or other email --- and further, might it be useful to get a free account from yahoo or hotmail or something to use solely for the poetics list, in which case you wd be able to take the list daily and not on digest with the added benefit of being able to delete posts without reading them at all (say long posts from me?) 3. that "long posts" identify themselves as such at the head 4. that posters replying on list to one or more other individuals CC their replies to these folks at the same time that mail to the list so that threads might not be dragged out quite so much 5. that when a topic or thread becomes either too conflictual or begins to be the predominate thread for days on end that someone take the initiative and either a) set up a list thru one of the many free list services available to pursue that topic, or b) [on a small, maybe simpler scale] ask who wd like to be a part of further discussion of it and set up a distribution list and rely on the "reply all" function ---- then should these things take off perhaps reinviting anyone from the list to join ---- and perhaps a short lived grouping of this sort might be able to present an edited version of the discussion for anyone outside of it who's interested or even figure a way to bring such a summary back to the list to see where it might lead 6. that as conflictual posts begin to proliferate, participants all try to maintain some backchannel contact with each other and if battling must be done try to get it started and finished backchannel so that the list not be the site of such air battles (i say this as i've noted sometimes that i'll see a post on the list that seems as if designed to cause a fight and then when i've backchannelled with the poster it turns out that such either wasnt the case or was an unintended or regretted consequence) 7. that posters involved in threads which either are or seem potentially to be conflictual *not* immediately post their response to these threads to the list, instead, perhaps letting them sit for a day or until at least some hours have passed when a rereading might save one from the ill effects of "shooting from the hip" 8. that those who don't wish to be drawn into argument or debate about their opinions but wd like to be able to express them, make that desire explicit in their postings 9. (this may be a nightmare for the list administration, but i gotta suggest it anyway) that the list be split --- i'm thinking of a work related list serve that i'm on which actually comprises 4 parts so that one can subscribe to any combination of them ---- the way this one is set up there is one for "discussion" another for "programs" a third for "jobs" and a 4th which is something of a catch-all for anything that didnt fit in the others (and so might feature notices about books relevant to the field or posts from folks looking for roommates at conferences etc) so for the poetics list might this break into poetics-discussion, announcements, and poems ? there is an injunction on this multi-list entity that i spoke of that people not respond on list to announcements but only send questions to the poster of the announcement ---- there wd of course be bleedover as poets seem to be an unruly lot but i still feel that idea has some merits 10. that any one on this list who feels excluded in some way by what we all know to be a predominance of White Male Het Wasps please try, perhaps for the umpteenth time, to discuss this feeling and what might be done be any and all to address it (i know that my own limitations in empathy and blindnesses to the consequences of these problems will have produced distortions of them for many of you reading this --- i apologize for that and wd appreciate any broadening of my understanding that you might have to offer whether front or backchannel) )L ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:08:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Lowther, John" Subject: Re: The Resistance Comments: To: Brian Stefans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" { p o e t i x } ( ( ( in particular brian stefans brian, (and taylor or rather the person taylor is quoted that i in turn cited) my intention in the post "The Resistance" wasn't to pin the authors of the quotes i started with to these things as "positions" much less "dogmas" ---- i simply noted that, what to my eye was a similar or related notion was suggested in the two quotes and to explore what i thought about that notion i might not have even registered it at all were it not such a commonplace, and one that i've always had a bundle of different reactions to brian, you chide me for overinterpretting or for a too simplistic reading of what you wrote and for missing the consequences of the fact that you do say "a first note" or something like that ---- that's fine with me, but at the same time i cd easily imagine that "note" might have a presumed "truth-content" and that "perception" not ---- say in the following two statements ---- "note that i did offer any number of conditionals" "that was my perception of your statement" ---- but thanx for clarifying yr intended use of "note" ---- i will try to read it, at least in yr postings, in that light but perhaps brian, you too missed certain clues in my post ? my noting that i wasn't sure that i was reading the quotes 'correctly' or 'as intended' ---- and that i made a specific shift of the address to the whole of the list and away from you and taylor's quoted poet ---- that i noted a (to me) similar notion from a cage anecdote ---- that i referred to the idea that i was getting from the two opening lines as fascinating, a description that still holds --- that i acknowledged that i too have found myself working with the idea that resistance might be central to the work ? ? ? whatever the case, i can understand why you wd feel i was reacting to you ---- yet i feel as if i was, instead, looking to see what i thought about an idea that i still believe is rather widespread and which stated negatively might sound like any of the following "too easy" "anybody cd do that" or a funny one that i recall from a record review 10 or more years ago, the reviewer called the guitar stylings of greg ginn "free form musical masturbation" ---- and which stated positively or perhaps simply oriented toward the future might go "art doesnt happen it must be made" or "the art work is the result of a successful battle with the medium" or even quoting you brian "some art flies based on the level of suspicion it raises -- like Cage's" that last being, for me, another fascinating statement ---- i can't imagine feeling quite that way myself as my own experience of cage's work has not taken flight on account of any suspicion at all, tho i know what you mean and certainly can see how the controversy of something like 4'33" is, at a cultural level perhaps, the prime locus of its meaning or value ---- wd it help to "note" that i don't operate at a cultural level ? that while i certainly can be suspicious (increasingly perhaps on this list) that i have an aversion to a perpetually ironic stance, to a heuristic of suspicion, to the proliferation of multiplication of "scare quotes" ? (i'm not offering these as criticisms of anyone but as, as i said, ~aversions~ of my own) there are some very interesting things in yr posting tho that i wd be interested to see elaborated by you or considered by other tho ---- [quotation follows, apologies in advance removing it from a larger context] "Part of the reason I think some language poetry fails in terms of this "reader created meaning" is that the terms of engagement are so much a development of the poet's advanced views of literature (often based on a counter-agonic constructivism, or a "pure" anti-subjectivity, or maybe Cageian indeterminacy, all of which is so "right" to the poet that they can't fathom the reader not seeing these things) and there is little attention given to what might be called (with a nod to Rebecca Wolff) the "general" understanding of poetry (which can involve the "resistances of its medium") that the reader is often in the position of feeling quite put out by these terms, or even worse, completely unengaged (hence with no sense of anticipation of what a true "engagement" would feel like)." i think i agree with you thru much of this and have agreed with such assertions, in part at least, whenever i've seen them elsewhere ---- that is, i find that i am not engaged by many pieces of writing that seem to me to require that i construct the "meaning" ----- [note: i'm talking about myself, i dont wish to generalize to a general reader or general understanding any more that i wd want to posit that anyone's ideas of literature are "advanced" --- i find both ideas very troubling and not, for me, very useful {note my "truth-content" use of "note"} ] ---- i think that my own lack of engagement with texts of this sort can result from any number of reasons which might include; a sense of diminished returns; the feeling that i've already learnt this application of "meaning creation" and don't feel the need to rehearse it; that it doesnt (organically?) ~get me~; that i'm tired; etc etc ---- it seems not unreasonable to assume that others feel some of these same things and certainly many others things about their own lack of engagement with text X Y or Z in my own writing i see the "reader's creation of meaning" or whatever as something of an ever present potential but not anything that i think about or, honestly, care very much about attempting to foster or require, you can't shake the fact that people will make something out of the text, so at present i don't find the consideration of this fact very generative ---- which depending on yr attitudes toward the construct will place "my poetic" (scare quotes necessary) in varying places on your (generic, plural you possessive) poetics "map" i wd be very interested to hear what anyone else thinks about this or about the notion of resistances being central, tangential or a first (possible) note that some X is a work of art ---- let me clarify, i wd be interested in individuals discussing their own views of this and less interested or even disinterested in constructs of the general reader's (of the advanced reader's, actually) reaction to these things (tho obviously i know that others may find those perspectives interesting and individual-centered opinions unuseful) i hope that helps to clarify my thinking about this brian, as you did mention "a first note," do you think you might be willing to suggest, or note, any 2nd or 3rd or 4th observations that suggest *to you* that something is a work of art ? (anyone else is welcome obviously) best )ohn ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 15:37:45 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Patrick" Subject: Re: documentary poems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Ed Sanders' _1968_ comes to mind. > -----Original Message----- > From: Jena Osman [SMTP:josman@ASTRO.OCIS.TEMPLE.EDU] > Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 9:12 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: documentary poems > > I'm trying to put a class together that looks at "documentary" poems. The > first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. Also Rukeyser's > "Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly > contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any suggestions? > Thanks, > Jena ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:41:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetry Project Subject: next week Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Next week at the Poetry Project Monday, Jan. 31st at 8 pm Wanda Phipps & Regie Cabico Poet, dramaturg, and translator Wanda Phipps is a contributing editor to Big Bridge magazine (on the web at http://www.bigbridge.org) and a founding member of the Yara Arts Group. Wanda was also our Friday Night Series Coordinator last year. Poet, performer, and actor Regie Cabico is the Cyberjay for Gopoetry.com (http://www.gopoetry.com), the co-editor for _Poetry Nation_, and the Friday Night Series Coordinator this year. We hear rumors of music (we've been asked if the piano's tuned), so we think we can safely promise that it'll be a very interesting night. Wednesday, Feb. 2nd at 8 pm The Anchored Angel: Jose Garcia Villa A celebration of the publication of The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings from Jose Garcia Villa, from Kaya Press. Featuring readers Jessica Hagedorn, who wrote the foreword, editor Eileen Tabios, Bob Holman, Molly McQuade, and Bino A. Realuyo. The Anchored Angel reintroduced the work, out of print for more than 15 years, of this celebrated writer to the United States. NO FRIDAY NIGHT READING! But next Monday, Open Mike Night, sign-up at 7:30 pm, reading at 8 pm! More information on all readings and on the Poetry Project is available at http://www.poetryproject.com All readings are $7, $5 for students and seniors, $3 for members. Admission at the door only. No advance tickets. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Call (212) 674-0910 for more information. *** Public Service Announcement: Tues, Feb. 1st at 8 pm, Anselm Berrigan, Marcella Durand, Elizabeth Andrews & Gerry Gomez Pearlberg read in "Writers on the Verge," series curated by Regie Cabico at Dixon Place which is located at 309 E. 26th St. Info at 532-1546. From Feb. 10-13th at 8:30 pm, Dancespace Project presents Tell Me The Truth About Love, a music/dance/theater piece based on 20 poems by W.H. Auden set to music by Paul Boesing and featuring Tom Bogdan. "Inspired by and entirely based on Auden's texts, the piece illuminates the poet's insightful, campy, and poignant views on love as expressed in his poems." For more information and reservations, call (212) 674-8194. *** "With cummings, the master of lowercase poetry, there was a friendship. How they met is legendary. In 1938 and for three years after, Villa wrote cummings to let him know how much his work meant to him. Cummings never replied to his letters until 1941, when Jose wrote to say he would never again write unless the older poet responded. That resulted in an invitation to visit the poet at his Patchin Place digs. As Villa puts it in his essay 'Personalia II': 'And so it came to pass that on a Saturday afternoon in the year 1941 I met that wonderous poet e.e. cummings.' This meeting presaged a friendship and mutual respect that was to last until cummings's death in 1962. Once the older poet had read Villa's works, 'he addressed me as Master,' Villa would declare. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whom Jose knew from his Columbia days, once asked Jose to introduce him to cummings. Jose suggested Ginsberg just go over to cummings's apartment and introduce himself. Ginsberg replied that he had. 'Well?' Jose queried. 'He slammed the door shut in my face,' was the Beat's sheepish reply." --from "Villanelles" by Luis Francia in _The Anchored Angel: Jose Garcia Villa_ *** If you'd like to removed from our e-mail list, respond to this message with "Please remove me" and we will certainly do so. *** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:24:45 -0500 Reply-To: joris@csc.albany.edu Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: documentary poems In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > I'm trying to put a class together that looks at > "documentary" poems. The > first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. > Also Rukeyser's > "Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly > contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any > suggestions? > Thanks, > Jena Ed Sanders' _1968_ and _Chehkov_ come to mind immediately. At another distance Ed Dorn's _Recollections of Gran Apacheria_. -- Pierre ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris The postmodern is the condition of those 6 Madison Place things not equal to themselves, the wan- Albany NY 12202 dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}). Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 Alan Sondheim Email: joris@csc.albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:58:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Prejsnar Subject: Re: poetics journals In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Is Witz still humming along?? While it doesn't quite equal "primarily", there are more articles on theoretical stuff in Talisman than in most mags devoted to poetry, indeed i think something like "a journal of poetry and poetics" is its subtitle... i would not want to argue that the level there is uniformly high; but in fact it is almost uniformly interesting... Then there is (was?) the Impercipient Lecture Series... As with Witz, is it alive or no? Maybe i have stopped receiving these 2 items, or maybe they are somewhat less frequent of late...or is it something more dire? Also PhillyTalks --mp On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Jena Osman wrote: > A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are > devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. > Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, > Jena > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:45:33 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Patrick F. Durgin" Subject: Re: poetics journals In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Witz, Shark, Tripwire, Aerial's last couple. At 12:25 AM 01/27/2000 -0400, you wrote: >A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are >devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. >Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, >Jena > > k e n n i n g a newsletter of contemporary poetry, poetics, and nonfiction writing http://www.avalon.net/~kenning 418 Brown St. #10, Iowa City, IA 52245, USA ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:44:58 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: documentary poems In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:11 AM -0400 1/27/00, Jena Osman wrote: >I'm trying to put a class together that looks at "documentary" poems. The >first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. Also Rukeyser's >"Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly >contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any suggestions? >Thanks, >Jena i teach a unit on "documentary poetry" in which we look at Kamau Brathwaite's Trench Town Rock and Hilton Obenzinger's New York on Fire. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:46:33 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: poetics journals In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:25 AM -0400 1/27/00, Jena Osman wrote: >A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are >devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. >Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, >Jena Xcp :Cross-Cultural Poetics. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:45:51 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: poetics journals In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:25 AM -0400 1/27/00, Jena Osman wrote: >A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are >devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. >Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, >Jena Poetics Today, and if the kid reads french, Poetique. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 08:49:41 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: Cyberpoetry In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000127213032.007a4c00@chmai.loxinfo.co.th> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 09:30 PM 1/27/00 +0700, you wrote: >If we have learned anything as human beings these past few generations, >it's that differences make life interesting. Cyberpoetry should be as >diverse as our ecclectic tastes. an extremely beautiful argument. regards komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:08:15 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Catherine Daly Organization: e.g. Subject: Re: Utopias MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I am really fascinated by this utopia idea and have a lot of incoherent thoughts on it I don't even completely think yet, but one of course is that language, or poetry specifically, can be considered a paradise or utopia. Not quite a transcendental view. Another consideration is one of "virtual" structures and modern utopias -- of logic or image or idea history or etymology or etc. Are there plural paradise? I have in a poem somewhere. My dystopia poem is of course about the freeway, Greek mythical figures and whatnot. But part of an unfollowed longer essay about Los Angeles something planned communities something landscape influencing writing something: the history of LA being what it is... I went back through the poetics archive, picking up a book rec: Soja: _Thirdspace journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places_. The other big two are Los Angeles the four ecologies and City of Quartz. There is some connection to the idea of a pastoral, in my thinking. Also, of fundamentalist religions enforcing certain rules and behaviors to control the world for believers, ex. diet restrictions. The Amish are a specifically interesting case, and the way they treat their teenagers / rebellion. Um, so keep this thread going! Rgds, Catherine Daly cadaly@pacbell.net ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:29:47 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: Time/Power poetix In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Jacques sayeth: > > >The reason the List carries so many mentions of the Lang Poets is an >extremely ironic one: They stand in the way of the next generation, > Interesting notion, generation. Like race, it's a highly artibrary concept which serves to make people feel exclusive and excluded, usually the same person feeling both in different contexts. See Mayhew's biography of Barbara Guest. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.math.ukans.edu/~roitman/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 19:25:47 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Re: has anyone else noticed MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit the delete button is on the upper right hand side of your keyboard. if you only want the reading & book announcements, how come you aren't using it? to tell the truth, i wouldn't have known a thing about this thread had brian not posted to it--he's one of the list members i do make an effort to read. until just now, i had been deleting everything else on this thread unread, as i do w/ many threads. try it yourself, it's liberating. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 18:51:11 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Zauhar Subject: Re: documentary poems In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Jena Osman wrote: > I'm trying to put a class together that looks at "documentary" poems. The > first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. Also Rukeyser's > "Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly > contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any suggestions? > Thanks, > Jena Maybe Ed Dorn's Abhorrences (covering the 80s). I wonder if you can read Bev Dahlen's A REading as a documentary (that's probably a stretch). Tom Clark's Empire of Skin (the otter pelt trade in the pacific northwest). Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek. There have to be more, but that's about all that I can come up with before my supper burns. Dave Zauhar ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 20:23:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Parable MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII (full text at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/diary/lg.txt and http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/diary/lh.txt) Parable This occurred near Ise, precisely during the rebuilding of the shrine. Nikuko and Izanagi were walking as usual. They approached an old man with a huge and comical hat, wide-brimmed, of a peculiar shape. Now what, said Izanagi, smiling. Nikuko noted that the brim was very wide indeed, and the flap on the left held the Minister of the Right, while the flap on the right seemed to contain the Minister of the Left. Poor and deluded, said Izanagi. The old man looked up, and tilted his head slightly to the left. Whole trees fell down on the slopes and the ground rumbled beneath them. Then he looked at Izanagi, and tilted his head to the right. The mountain roared and great boulders crashed on the path all around them. Without saying a word, the old man slowly continued on his way. This time, it was Nikuko who was laughing, staring at the hat disappearing in the distance. He's on the brim, she laughed, he's on the brim. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:52:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: documentary poems In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I'm trying to put a class together that looks at "documentary" poems. The >first thing that comes to mind is Reznikoff's _Testimony_. Also Rukeyser's >"Book of the Dead." I'd like to generate a list of poems (particularly >contemporary ones) that might fall into this category. Any suggestions? >Thanks, >Jena I would have to suggest Dorothy Livesay's _Let my People Go_, which when it was first presented on radio and in print was termed documentary--in the true sense, that entails propaganda for a good cause. George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:52:49 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: poetics journals In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >A student of mine has asked if there are any journals out there that are >devoted primarily to poetics, such as the late _Poetics Journal_. >Strangely, I'm having trouble coming up with titles...please advise! Thanks, >Jena First one that comes to mind for me is _Open Letter_ George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 18:04:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: that Bromige In-Reply-To: <51078.3157285945@poetrygrad1.lib.buffalo.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" That Bromige. You have to put up with so much. I said, for example, >>I wish that everyone on the list could be as intelligent as David Bromige. And he comes back: > >It occurs to me that there may be some on the List to whom the depth of >Bowering's mordant humor is as yet unplumbed. I mean, I didnt say anything when four of my favourite shirts went missing after Bromige came to visit last month. I didnt say anything when I caught him with a length of hose in the gas-tank of my car last summer. >And in truth, even if GB did mean well by such a remark, I should feel >bound to pretend otherwise, out of sheer embarrasment. That is the cleft >stick he has me in! Che Maestro! Well, yeah , , , , George Bowering. fax: 1-604-266-9000 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:55:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Amy King Subject: Re: Poetry and Time - Guest MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit By Jonathan Mayhew jmayhew@ukans.edu One of the most beautiful posts this lurker has savored in a long time. AK ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 01:22:58 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Re: documentary poems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Somewhere back in the 80's, Hilton Obenzinger (poet and Melville/Twain scholar and List member) was hired to write a history of fires in New York City. The client was the New York Fire Department's Union. The publishing company (a vanity affair that specialized in doing books for municipal unions - particularly cops and firefolks) went belly up after being sued for fraud by - I believe it was - the Phoenix Police Department. An irony not lost on Hilton, who was never paid, but turned his extensive research into New York On Fire, a book of poems that constitute a unique document and measure of City pyro-politics. Gothic, dramatic, witty, informed and smart. Still in print and available (I believe) through Small Press Distribution. Cheers, Stephen Vincent ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 02:17:49 -0500 Reply-To: Nate and Jane Dorward Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Nate and Jane Dorward Subject: An Interview with Peter Riley Comments: To: British-Poets List MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi--just wanted to note that Keith Tuma's interview with the poet Peter Riley may be now found on _Jacket_'s website, issue #11: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket11/riley-iv-by-tuma.html It's a substantial piece which deals with both general issues of poetics & with books such as _Distant Points_, _Snow Has Settled_ and _Lines on the Liver_. The interview will be appearing in _The Gig_ 4/5, a book-length collection of essays on Peter Riley's poetry that's due out in March. Those interested in obtaining this collection should write me at ndorward@sprint.ca for more information. all best-- Nate Dorward ndorward@sprint.ca 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada ph: (416) 221 6865 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:05:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Readings For Cid Corman MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cid wrote in a recent letter: "...my situation needs some response before this season is over. We're [he and his wife] are not far from O. Homelessness...." Benefit readings, or book sales, as was suggested earlier on this list, would be most welcome. Cid also has lots of valuable archival material which he wants to sell. Any leads in this area would be most appreciated. I noted a great response from Milwaukee re: the Maldoror question. Perhaps you--or other Milwaukee people-- could ask the folks at Woodland Pattern to consider a benefit for Cid? Any and all information and offers appreciated. Back-channel Jesse Glass. About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 02:49:27 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Walter K. Lew" Subject: Frances Chung's booklist Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Dear Poetics, I'm sending you the list below for two reasons--as a late addition to the (it's not really a) new millennium reading-shelf thread and to seek yr help in shortening/reorganizing it since I am bored w my own efforts (I've already asked the Great Pretentious One, but he'll probably end up making another poetry machine/koch'u out of it, albeit a shapely one). What is it section C of? The Afterword to a forthcoming posthumous collection of =46rances Chung's poems. Chung, who lived from 1950 to 1990 and made her living teaching math in Spanish in Lower East Side public schools, was a brilliant, wondrous New York Chinatown poet who left behind two unpublished book mss., CRAZY MELON (ca. 1977) and CHINESE APPLE (post-1980). These, and a few pieces selected from her papers stored in her sister's house in Oakland--Bay Area "art bureaucrats" (Brian's term) please help set up readings!--form the basis of the book. If any of you have my anthology PREMONITIONS, there's a selection in there--also, see Osman & Spahr's CHAIN 5 "different languages." (If you DON'T have a copy of PREM, maybe it's bc Kaya kept it out of print for 2 years while publishing fetid novels. They've just suckered the St. Mark's Poetry Project into a 5th-anniversary celebration of it (Who celebrates the anniversary of an o.p. book?) and forgot to inform the people who played the biggest roles in making it, like the Editor and his most-consulted and -trusted poetry friend at the time. Jeez, maybe Holman will now forward this to Kaya and they'll set their K-9 attorney on me again Woof! Woof!, along w the Stealth-tongued Larry Chua--I SO Scared!!--Bob: Also ask them if they can please pay me my first cent of royalties and stop trying to steal the copyright--I still love you, thanks for the memories!) In any case, THE LIST BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY ONLY HALF AS LONG BUT IT WAS ALMOST ALL CHINESE AND JAPANESE POETRY IN TRANSLATION AND SO I ASKED HER SISTER TO =46IND MORE BOOKS LEST WE MISCAST FRANCES' WORK AS RE-REFINED POUND AND REXROTH. BUT SUDDENLY THE LIST'S TOO LONG MAYBE TEDIOUS AND DOESN'T HAVE THE SHAPELINESS IT HAD BEFORE. NOT A BIG TASK BUT I THOUGHT IT WD BE FUN SEEING WHAT SOME OF YOU DO W IT cut down redundancy, resequence it acc. to some algorithm of yrs, etc.--back-channel if you wish IF I USE EVEN JUST SOME OF YR REORGANIZATION OF IT I'LL SEND YOU A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK--PROMISE--AND /IF YOU WANT/ MENTION YOU IN THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS OR A =46OOTNOTE OR "WHATEVER" AS MY GLORIOUS GIRLFRIEND SAYS WHENEVER I MAKE LIFE L00K LIKE A MENU or at least an all-day lunch special. Thanks, Walter C. Titles from Frances Chung's library THE SELECTED POEMS OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA. Ed. Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald M. Allen; various translators. PICTURE BRIDE, Cathy Song. NO MORE MASKS! AN ANTHOLOGY OF POEMS BY WOMEN. Ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, 1945-1960. Ed. Donald M. Allen. THE VOICE THAT IS GREAT WITHIN US; AMERICAN POETRY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Ed. Hayden Carruth. =46IVE DECADES, A SELECTION (POEMS 1925-1970), Pablo Neruda. Ed., trans., Ben Belitt. SUNFLOWER SPLENDOR. Ed. Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo. COLD MOUNTAIN, 100 POEMS BY THE T'ANG POET HAN-SHAN. Trans. Burton Watson. TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. Trans. Arthur Waley. LI CH'ING-CHAO. COMPLETE POEMS. Trans. Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. CHINESE FOLK POETRY. Trans. Cecilia Liang. ONE ROBE, ONE BOWL. Trans. John Stevens. ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE CHINESE. Trans. Kenneth Rexroth. ABC OF READING and SELECTED POEMS, Ezra Pound. THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CHARLES REZNIKOFF, Vol. 1 and 2. SELECTED POEMS, Kenneth Patchen. EMERGENCY POEMS, Nicanor Parra. Trans. Miller Williams. CONFIGURATIONS, Octavio Paz. Trans. G. Aroul et al. SUN 4.2 (Spring 1975). NEW POETRY OF MEXICO. Selected with notes by Octavio Paz and others, ed. Mark Strand. QUITE EARLY ONE MORNING, Dylan Thomas. ONE HUNDRED MORE POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE. Trans. Kenneth Rexroth. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT WE ARE: A CARLOS BULOSAN READER. Ed. E. San Juan, = Jr. HOME TO STAY, ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S FICTION. Ed. Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac. TAKING TO WATER: POEMS, Roberta Spear. AMPLITUDE, Tess Gallagher. WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER, Raymond Carver. Mystery and detective novels by Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Marcia Muller, and Robert Van Gulik (The "Judge Dee" series). Short stories by Anne Beattie and Ethan Canin. William Carlos Williams. In an unpublished piece, Chung also mentions the following "voices we might listen to": my mother remembering Li Po's poem from her schooldays a 78 rpm record whose melody haunts me a Chinese Sarah Vaughn singing flowers=8Athe Book of Songs=8Aand the poets of Asian America George T. Chew Tomie Arai Fay Chiang Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Arthur Sze Jessica Hagedorn Alan Chong Lau Lawson Inada poems rooted in Chinese poetry=8AJorge Luis Borges. Much of this literature came to Chung through dedicated poetry publishers like New Directions and the Greenfield Review Press or poet-led arts venues below 14th Street that regularly held readings and workshops, such as Chinatown's Basement Workshop and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Chung emerged as a writer during a time of new cultural and political syntheses in which community-based groups looked to poetry in particular as archive, song, protest, and spiritual cultivation. Beginning in 1971 with the Asian Women's Journal edited by UC Berkeley students and up through the 1990 "New Asia" issue of The Portable Lower East Side, Chung's poetry exclusively appeared in multicultural or women-of-color publications. She was not thereby held to some rigid standard concerning the expression of ethnicity, gender, or locale. In fact, it would appear that in, for instance, publishing Chung's poem about the plight of a wifeless restaurant worker in the _Asian Women's Journal_ or her pantoum set in a Chinese village in _The Portable Lower East Side_, editors welcomed work from multiple perspectives. [...] END of excerpt Walter K. Lew 11811 Venice Blvd. #138 Los Angeles, CA 90066 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 20:36:11 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Will Work For Peace MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Just a brief note to draw your attention to the 180 page, perfect-bound Will Work For Peace, edited by Brett Axel. With a table of contents that reads like a who's who of experimental, mainstream, academic, up-and-coming, old-and-continuing, performance-driven and page-bound poets working in the U.S. and in some cases (including this one) elsewhere, this book should not be passed over. It even has a blurb from Pete Seeger! All yours from Zeropanik Press (P.O. Box 1565, Trenton, N.J. 08607-1565--ISBN 0-9666459-1-X) for $13.50. Or contact Brett Axel directly at axels@orn.net . He is looking for work for a second Peace volume. He's also seeking poems by bisexual writers for yet another anthology project. Just some of the writers in the book (in no particular order): Sherman Alexie, Diane di Prima, Elaine Equi, Cid Corman, Maxine Chernoff, Ruth Daigon, Donald Hall, Charles Fishman, Bob Holman, Marge Piercy, Rochelle Ratner, Dave Ray, W.B. Snodgrass, Alice B. Talkless (Love the name!), Joel Lewis, Martin Espada, Antler, Jennifer Ley and about 1 zillion other people I apologize to for not including their names, but I've got to hit the sack. Peace, Jesse Glass About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:15:14 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: Re: p r o x i m a t e . o r g Comments: To: Patrick Herron In-Reply-To: <00d001bf686b$5b18bb00$0c08629d@niehs.nih.gov> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" very seductive, it drew me in, congratulations, you created the interest with your novel navigation and immersed me with the content. great. komninos komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502 cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/ komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 55 948602 lecturer in cyberstudies, school of arts, gold coast campus, griffith university, pmb 50, gold coast mail centre queensland, 9726 australia. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 05:59:18 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Ellis Subject: Re: Up front and out of place Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed >The following comprises two posts written by Jacques Debrot, the first to >Anselm Berrigan, wch appeared on the List, and the second to me – the post >that Jacques mentions in his post to Anselm as having been “successfully >retracted” but which I have from him as a back channel. Since in Jacques’ >view this latter is “riddled with lazy errors”, and since in a brief post >to >subsubpoetics (subsubpoetics@listbot.com), Jacques noted that “the only >reason to post to [the Buffalo List is] the interesting back-channel >discussions the various threads somehow generate”, I thought it might be >useful to disregard Jacques’ retraction of the second post here for the >sake >of comparison, ie., to give opportunity for those interested to locate ways >in wch the thinking in his post to me may in fact BE fallible (if at all) >in >relation to the related post to Anselm, wch Jacques DID post. If the UB >list archive is indeed, as Jacques suggests, “pretty dull to read” it may >be >enlivened by getting more bc activity up front; for all the “lazy errors” >that in fact may be part of private communication, it is exactly these that >might prove to be most generative to the public aspect of the list. In >addition, it might also be interesting for UB participants to note the >tenor >over on “the other list”, and to make pertinent comment – the hybridization >of a little “cross-town traffic” after all, wouldn’t hurt what Jacques and >others have suggested is sometimes a pretty tired strain that passes >uneasily for “discussion” here. >- S E > > >____________________________________________________________________________ >______________________ > > >Hi Anselm, > >(I believe I have successfully retracted a post (riddled w/ lazy errors) on >this same subject written last Fri. in response to Stephen Ellis-- so, >hopefully, I am not repeating myself here.) > >First, let me try to say what is at stake when I talk about success in >relation to experimental poetry. Obviously, I am not talking about >economic >capital, even though this is in fact obtainable by a very small minority of >experimentalist poets in the form of grants (in the hundreds of thousands >of >dollars) or in the sale of personal papers and correspondance (an unusual >example would be, say, Ginsberg's selling his papers to Columbia for a >million dollars). But the fact that anyone reading this post would feel at >all uncomfortable with the idea of there being any possible financial >renumeration for experimental writing would only demonstrate the extent to >which the game of poetry is one of *loser wins*. It will always be an >*oppositional* game inasmuch as it functions by the *inversion* of the >principles organizing the business economy--in that cultural production >exists fundamentally as (when it is as severely restricted as exp poetry >is) >a production for producers. Which, however, is not to say that the world >of >alternative poetry and the world of bussiness are not homologous. The >alternative poetry world, whatever else it is, is a hierarchical social >space in which agents--poets-- employ various strategies--aesthetic >practices—in order to acquire symbolic capital--prestige--and power (of a >certain kind). >Indeed, the power resulting from the acquisition of symbolic capital is the >very thing that legitimizes the authority of critical interpretations and >aesthetic judgments generally (and their reproduction through the efficacy >of institutional cultural authority in the form of the exp writing and >literature programs, organizations like St Marks, the most influential >small >presses and magazines, and so on). Success in poetry thus depends not as >much on intrinsic abilities and gifts (since aesthetic value is a social, >not a natural, creation) as on the extent of the poet's cultural >capital—that is, his or her sense of the state of the game as it being >played *now*. It >goes without saying, however, that both poets and critics have, obviously, >a >certain self-interest in disinterestedness--that is, a stake in a *belief* >concerning the absolute or autonomous aesthetic value of the work per se. > >As for the term "conflict of values" which Stephen asked about last week, >it >would implicate, of course, the various investments it is possible to make >re such issues as the nature of subjectivity (& its representation in >poetry), the objective character of language and its relationship to the >world of things, the connection of art to politics (overt? covert? >transcendental?), etc. But it is my impression that these conflicts no >longer really *signify* in the way they used to. Open almost any >alternative magazine and you will find a bizarre mix of contradictory >styles >(each of which is subtended by very different values). The editorial >stance >of these magazines is, in almost all cases, impossible to determine. & >when--very rarely-- the editor >does (bravely) state her or his position, it is not unusual to find her/him >dissing the very kind of poetry he/she has been publishing all along, or >that the book reviews (if the magazine carries them) are extolling. But >this isn't bad faith, so much as the implicit recognition that a gold >standard for aesthetic judgement and pleasure no longer exists. As a >result, alternative poetry simply proliferates haphazardly in a state of >(almost) pure circulation (with the exception that as Warhol realized, fame >(contingent, stupid, indifferent) is the single most important point of >reference or criteria for aesthetic (or other) judgements). It is thus >difficult to see how poetry can serve as an emancipatory or moralistic –or >politically oppositional--discourse. Why, as Stephen again asked, are we >"ideologically blind" to this? Because as Baudrillard puts it, "when >things, signs , or actions are freed from their respective ideas, >concepts, >values, points of reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless >process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after >the >ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own >content. The paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these >circumstances." > >Ted Berrigan is an exemplary case. I am not at all surprised that, like >Bernstein, he also compared poetry to a small business. In fact, Padgett, >in _TED_, if I remember it correctly, reveals him as being, for example, >very much concerned with his inclusion in the Norton Anthology. But >yes--I'd say of course that, without any doubt, Ted Berrigan was a great >success (measured in terms of symbolic capital). If his books went out of >print, it is because these were carried by commercial publishers >(right?)--so he paid a certain price in moving from an economy of >restricted production to one of a slightly larger scale (but loser wins!). >Also, of course, he possessed an >extraordinary degree of cultural capital insamuch as he was at the center >of >various avant-garde coteries--Warhol's Factory, the NY School, etc.--in >which a sense of the values at stake was somewhat arcane (circulating, as >it >did,often in socially closed or private conditions). > >--jacques > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > >Hi, >As it will probably be Mon before this appears on the Buff List, I thought >I >would send my response to your post to you before then. As these things >are >written on the fly your remarks did seem a little unfair, but I did try >here >to be more specific--but I think this is about as much as I can affrod to >elaborate in any one post--so, perhaps more in the future? > >--j > > >Stephen, > >When you write "What form of “cultural capital” do you think to gain – >or more to the point, what is the objectively get-able “thing” one strives >for in the act of writing?" instead of getting "more" to the point, you >actually ask 2 different things. Let me try to answer them--first in a >general sense & then more confessionally, or subjectively, as you seem to >want me to do. Also, I'll try to respond (implicitly throughout) to your >other pertinent question re my use of generic terms & the specificity of >what I mean by the term “conflict of values.” > >First, I assume I'm being asked what are the forms of cultural capital >available, not only to me, but to poets--or rather, to experimentalist >poets--generally? As I understand it, there are something like 800 >subscribers to the Buffalo Listserve--of which the overwhelming majority >are >most likely poets--anyone, let's say, who has ever written a poem w/ the >idea of publishing it. Let's say, too, that the large majority of these >poets are experimentalist (for argument's sake, any poet writing out of the >New American, Language, European avant-gardist, etc. traditions--you get my >idea I hope). And now this number represents approximately what percentage >of all experimentalist poets? 1/2? 1/3? 1/10? Obviously, I don't know; >you probably have just as good an idea as I do, if not better. Whatever >the >number though, the most conspicuous forms of cultural capital would be >availabe to only a very small percentage. However, a poet of this status >might, for example, sell her/his private papers and manuscripts to a >library--one very tangible form of capital. Ginsbeg, after all, managed to >sell his papers to Columbia for a million dollars. Not a lot for, say, an >investment banker, of course--especially if one considers that it >represents >a dollar value accrued over a lifetime --but a windfall, nonetheless, for a >middle class poet. Ashbery, I'm certain, could have received approximately >as much from Harvard. And the Language Poets? The 1G Language Poets are >now about the age Ashbery was when he first began to receive serious >critical attention. Their stock, meanwhile, has steadily risen in the >academy. One could easily imagine a few--like Bernstein--being able to >sell >their papers for quite a lot of money in, say, 10 years--not for a million >dollars, but--well, I'll let you speculate. Added to this, a MacArthur >grant, for some, is certainly more likely than not, and so on, and so on. >Not to say, >again, that the money I am talking about is extravagant, or that anyone >would shape a career w/ this being some ultimate goal--though at some >point, >age 50 perhaps, it must begin to seem, if only in the back of the minds of >some very few, seductively attainable. > >To a slightly larger circle of experimentalist poets, there are forms of >cultural capital for which the common denominator is prestige. Being able >to publish whatever manuscripts one desires to publish (even if not by >commercial publishers), having one's poems in numerous anthologies, seeing >your work mentioned in dissertations, reviews, and scholarly articles, >having a (relatively) large readership for the books that result from this >publicity, achieving financial security through the teaching gigs that come >w/ a certain kind of fame, being in demand for readings, interviews, and so >on--all of this is, perhaps, a pathetic ambition, but that's not the same >thing as denying the reality of its allure. > >For yet another group of poets--again relatively few--these same >satisfactions are intermittently attainable--particularly through >institutional alliances with writing programs or university English >departments, or slightly less definable sites such as St. Marks, or the >most >prestigious small presses. (Which is to describe these affiliations too >coldly since they are all lubricated, not only by self-interest, but >through >personal friendships, etc. Indeed, I don't doubt for a second that it is >some conception of poetry "itself," of ideas and aesthetic enthusiasms, >often pursued at considerable personal sacrifice, that constitute-- just as >much as anything I have described--the reality of the poetry world. My >point, of course, is that there is no such thing as poetry "itself," that >art is never >autonomous, & that the poetry world, whatever else it is, is also a social >space with a system of schemas for certain aesthetic practices which, in >turn, have power (of a certain kind) at stake.) > >Of course, for the majority of poets, there is no cultural capital to be >obtained from poetry, except in the most meager forms--though, >subjectively, >individual poets may not *perceive* their irrelevance (here, of course I am >talking strictly in terms of status, w/out making any judgement on the >value >of the work; nor am I taking into account the tremendous enjoyment & >satisfaction that writing poetry can bring or any other of its real >emotional or psychic benefits). > >You'll notice now, certainly, that, though the term "cultural capital" >comes >from Bourdieu, this post does not have the rigour etc. a more formal, or >theoretical, account would have. If it did, I would extend my remarks to a >consideration of how these forms of cultural capital (in themselves benign) >inevitably introduce unequal power relations among poets and a concommitant >reproduction of certain aesthetic tendencies dominant, for example, in the >writing programs associated w/ exp poetry. This is something that would >require careful research, among other things, to document, but I have the >strong sense that it would be suceptible to this kind of approach. If, >Stephen, you are asking me to do that here and now--for you & maybe the 3 >others who have gotten this far in my post--you would be being very >unreasonable. > >As for the term "conflict of values," it would implicate, pretty obviously, >the various investments it is possible to make re such issues as the nature >of subjectivity (& its representation in poetry), the objective character >of >language and its relationship to the world of things, the connection of art >to politics (overt? covert? transcendental?), and on and on--you don't >need >me to spell this out for you. But it is my impression that these conflicts >no longer really *signify*. Open almost any alternative magazine and you >will find a bizarre mix of contradictory styles (each of which is subtended >by very different values). The editorial stance of these magazines is, in >almost all cases, impossible to determine. & when--very rarely-- the >editor does (bravely) state her or his position, it is not unusual to find >her/him dissing the very kind of poetry he/she has been publishing all >along, or that the book reviews (if it carries them) are extoling. But >this >isn't bad faith, so much as the implicit recognition that a gold standard >for aesthetic judgement and pleasure no longer exists. As a result, >alternative poetry >simply proliferates haphazardly in a state of (almost) pure circulation. >It >is thus difficult to see how poetry can serve as an emancipatory or >moralistic --or oppositional--discourse. Why are we "ideologically blind" >to this? Because as Baudrillard puts it, "when things, signs , or actions >are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, values, points of >reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless process of >self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after the ideas >have >disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. >The >paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these >circumstances." > >As Warhol realized, fame (contingent, stupid, indifferent) remains the only >point of reference or criteria for aesthetic (or other) judgements. And >what I am saying is that the forms of cultural capital I have very briefly >sketched, including fame, are the determinants of aesthetic value for >contemporary experimental poetry. As for how I feel personally about this, >or what I think is get-able from poetry? I suppose I have contradictory >feelings--the nihilism of extremepositions gives me a rush, but I also >deeply regret the implications of my ideas--so at times I side more w/ a >more sober skeptic like Thierry de Duveas as opposed to Baudrillard. >Professionally, too, I am both ambitious and indifferent. I've gone out of >my way to begin to correspond with famous poets & then suddenly dropped all >communication on my end--not because of any shifting feelings of mine about >their work, but because of a procrastinating and, whatever-else-it-is, >temperment. > >--jacques > > > > > > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:01:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Long Posts MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The reason my own posts are sometimes too long is that, as it takes often 2-3 days for a post to appear, and just as long to receive a response, I feel I have to be , on complicated topics, somewhat more rigorous. My posts, I noticed, were much shorter before the list was moderated, and are much shorter on the other listserve in which I participate, where there is almost no lag time between a posts being written and distributed. So the format, which is, after all, intended to discourage substantive discussion, actually exacerbates the weird form that discussion takes. But I do have a certain aesthetic interest in seeing the medium--any medium-- misused--a *poetic* interest--so perhaps there is a virtue in my boring people after all. --jacques ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:52:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Cassandra Laity Subject: New Modernisms II: 2nd CFP MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="-MOQ94908194325180e8ce1835fa416ecc05ce10b0266" This message is in MIME format. ---MOQ94908194325180e8ce1835fa416ecc05ce10b0266 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Dear Listmembers, I am posting a second Call for Proposals for the "New Modernisms II" conference to be held at the University of Pennsylvania, Oct., 2000. Hope to see you there, Cassandra Laity MSA VP CALL FOR PANEL AND SEMINAR PROPOSALS Deadline for seminar Proposals: Feb. 15 Deadline for panel proposals: March 30 “A return to modernism at the end of the millennium is not a farewell but a new beginning.” Susan Stanford Friedman In its 1999 inaugural conference, described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “giving new life for modernism,” the Modernist Studies Association created a forum wherein scholars, poets, musicians and artists could contribute to this ongoing revitalization. Modernist studies is reemerging as a dynamic and complex field, hospitable to interdisciplinary, international and multicultural approaches and energized by recent work in race, class, gender and sexuality. “New Modernisms II” convenes at the University of Pennsylvania, and will incorporate the urban diversity of Philadelphia. Our plenary sessions will emphasize the arts, and performance, but our call for panel and seminar proposals remains open. Proposal guidelines are available on the MSA website: http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa2.htm The MSA homepage can be visited at: http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa.htm Queries about seminar and panel proposals may be directed to: Cassandra Laity: claity@drew.edu or Michael Coyle: mcoyle@colgate.edu Completed proposals should be submitted to: Professor Bob Perelman Department of English University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 perelman@dept.english.upenn.edu ----- End forwarded message ----- ---MOQ94908194325180e8ce1835fa416ecc05ce10b0266 Content-Type: text/html Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Please excuse any cross-posting.


The Modernist Studies Association
“New Modernisms II”
12-15 October 2000
The University of Pennsylvania

CALL FOR PANEL AND SEMINAR PROPOSALS

“A return to modernism at the end of the millennium is not a farewell but a new beginning.”
Susan Stanford Friedman
In its 1999 inaugural conference, described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “giving new life for modernism,” the Modernist Studies Association created a forum wherein scholars, poets, musicians and artists could contribute to this ongoing revitalization. Modernist studies is reemerging as a dynamic and complex field, hospitable to interdisciplinary, international and multicultural approaches and energized by recent work in race, class, gender and sexuality. “New Modernisms II” convenes at the University of Pennsylvania, and will incorporate the urban diversity of Philadelphia. Our plenary sessions will emphasize the arts, and performance, but our call for panel and seminar proposals remains open.

Proposal guidelines are available on the MSA website:
http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa2.htm

The MSA homepage can be visisted at:
http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa.htm

Queries about seminar and panel proposals may be directed to:
Cassandra Laity: claity@drew.edu  or Michael Coyle: mcoyle@colgate.edu
Completed proposals should be submitted to:
Professor Bob Perelman
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
perelman@dept.english.upenn.edu

---MOQ94908194325180e8ce1835fa416ecc05ce10b0266-- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:30:50 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gerald Schwartz Subject: Titles MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'd like to present some reamrks on the procedure of giving a poem a title, and would very much appreciate listmember comments, either from a personal perpective...or from an at-large theoretical approach. This is, I hope, not just an excercise in mole-like pedantry. It is intended not only to seek an enhanced understanding of how an individual poem...or poems...are titled, but a query into the shape and variety of these procedures. I begin at the begining, I see the procedure of giving a poem a title (in my own practice the title is given after the poem is made), as an intention to place a central image before the reader, an image of central importance of some kind. Following this thread, the title could be seen as acting as a kind of lantern of Diogenes, prompting a reader's consciousness, and separating out the misdirection from the truth. Moreover, this procedure invites examination of the actual occurrences in which a title is deployed by a poet to see what, if any, systematic uses it has, and what, if any, organization of interaction it may be realted to. One aspect of making a poem...giving it a title...can be that onne announces the type of poem the poet means by initiating, and "I'd like to have your attention on this poem" can be understood as doing that kind of job. Obviously, (or maybe not), the titles of poems will be the ones relevant for those settings. However, not all occurrences of this kind of procedure happen this way, and many of those that are do not occur in producing a title and do not do the work of announcing the type of poem being presented. Over... Gerald Schwartz ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 09:24:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Funkhouser, Chris" Subject: new s from New ark MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Up online is Newark Review, Volume 2, set 6, featuring New Jeru writers = from the Verse 4 Verse poetry caf=E9: Kyle Abramson, Tallaam Acey, Timothy = Brown, Juba Dowdell, Jerry Gant, Michelle Kurlan, Ihsan Muhammad, Kirk Nugent, Margie Shaheed, Janice Sullivan, Yictove. Co-hosted by Ras Baraka and = Juba Dowdell, Verse 4 Verse is now held weekly at the "Lamma Lounge" in the = heart of Newark's "poetry district" (Lamma Lounge, Euphoria, NJPAC, Rutgers-Newark, & NJIT are within 6 blocks of each other). See http://www-ec.njit.edu/~newrev/v2s6. (printed editions of set 6 and set = 5 are also available) This month's Kimako's Blues People (8 p.m., 1/29/99, 808 S. 10th St), features discussion on "Revolutionary vs. Reactionary 'Youth Culture'" = then Ras B. and friends, performing word-song-music from RB's awesome CD = "Shorty for Mayor". =20 Amiri Baraka is addressing the student body at NJ Institute of = Technology at during Black History Month. His talk will focus on the Lincoln = Park/Coast Cultural District project, a grassroots approach to reinvigorating = local arts and culture within what is popularly known as the Newark = Renaissance. He'll also perform with his band, Blue Ark . This event will take = place on Thursday, Feb 10th at 6pm in the Weston Lecture Hall of the = Architecture school (located on MLK Blvd.). ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:07:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: Poetry and Time / list proposals In-Reply-To: <200001280510.AAA22099@pony.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII jonathan, i enjoyed yr barbara guest narrative and am always interested to hear how different people have "come to" different poets -- i'd even propose this as the kind of thread that might encourage rather than discourage more participation from list members. my first exposure to guest was defensive rapture, as someone who, like you say, read other sun&moon books. i was at once enamoured of it and began poking around in the earlier stuff but am by and large a less sensitive reader to the nuances of the ny school. then, on either side of defense rapture, i found fair realism to not show the same kind of subtlties of sound and syntax as defensive rapture, whereas quill solitary apparition i thought went too far the other way, rarifying or abstracting itself i.e. in a manner close to the oft-maligned abstract french lyric. these of course being rough generalizations that i'd need time and renewed attention to the texts to substantiate. i'd also be interested in hearing some "ways into" guest's earlier work. bests, tom ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:02:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Orange Subject: Power poetix In-Reply-To: <200001280510.AAA22099@pony.its.uwo.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII mark p, far from assuming the mantle of "the nonmainstream harold bloom," jacques as i read him is strictly towing the line of bourdieu, to a fault even. (tho i can see where his statement that "they [language poets] stand in the way of the next generation" might suggest such a connection.) true, both models view cultural production (or simply "poetry" for bloom) in terms of power struggle. where bloom's model becomes severely impoverished is, as you suggest, in looking solely to the abstraction of a freudian oedipal complex as the engine that drives that struggle: the ephebe is obsessed with the slaying of his poetic fathers, end of story, more or less. and it's not simply that such a model can't be proven or refuted, or that it's simply "a personal mindset," but that it's reductive and not sufficiently nuanced to, for example, material concerns. here's where bourdieu is more useful (tho i think his model stands to gain from a more sophisticated relationship to psychoanalysis), namely by taking into account the roles that actual and symbolic capital play in power struggles. part of the emancipatory gesture of not simply langpo but nonmainstream post wwII american poetry that has generally thrived on the little magazine and the small press is precisely to exercise control over its own means of production. since these things of course do not happen in a vacuum, and however oppositionally they may position themselves vis-a-vis the larger field of poetic production (i.e. the mainstream), the nonmainstream can not help but get caught up in the dynamics of the larger field. or, at the very least, its own dynamics as a sub-field can not help but be in some respects homologous to those of the larger field to which it inheres. homologous, i would say, less in terms of actual capital (i.e. the annual budgets of sun&moon, roof, the figures, etc., are likely very unlike those of random house, etc.) than symbolic capital (awards, back catalogs, blurbs, reviews, etc.). thus jacques' point, i take it, is, simply, that those publishing avenues founded and fostered by language poets, insofar as they have come to operate in part in terms of prestige, distinction, etc., i.e. they accumulate and distribute symbolic capital, are forces with which a poet working in an experimental or or nonmainstream vein must reckon. so when you claim that "to actual poets, actually engaging in their work, and to readers of poetry who respond to it, this is not what's going on," i might agree that cultural producers are not always consciously aware of what i'm describing, i.e. "i'm going to write a series of poems that are going to dethrone geoff young and doug messerli from their thrones of power." but you are also suggesting, i think, that they are operating 1) naively and with no sense of such operations, or else 2) with no desire at all to see their work appear with publishers such as those listed above. bests, t.