click on image for readable version; or go to hi-res

"Paradise Lost," New York Post
Nov. 1, 2009

Recordings made on the occasion of Jerome McGann's 70th Birthday in 2007

1. For Love Has Such a Spirit that if It Is Portrayed it Dies (from Controlling Interests)(6:01): MP3
2. The Simply (from The Sophist)(15:58): MP3
3. from Lines of Swinburne (from The Sophist)(1:15): MP3
4. A Foin Lass Bodders Me by Louis Zukofsky (6:04): MP3
5. Don't Get me Wrong (from Girly Man)(1:30): MP3
6. Shenandoah (from Girly Man)(2:39): MP3
7. Lenny Paschen Redux (1:00): MP3
8. Wherever Angels Go (from Girly Man) (1:37): MP3
9. Sad Boy's Sad Boy (1:25): MP3
10. Loneliness in Linden (1:16): MP3
11. from Canti Antichi (from Girly Man) (1:00): MP3
12. Dea%r Fr~ien%d, (3:38): MP3
13. Shenandoah (2:39): MP3

Caroline Bergvall
on the Serpentine Poetry Marathon
at the Poetry Foundation web site

" ...
The Poetry Marathon used the idea of “poetry” very loosely, nearly archaically. It is more to do with doing and making (language) than with applying the stricter and formal bounds of any art form per se. Indeed the remit for “poetry” this weekend is “performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars, and musicians.” As such it is an umbrella term, a reminder that everybody writes, sometimes. However, in the context of a highly secluded British poetry culture, perhaps they’ve taken the idea one step too far. ...

...A closer look revealed that only a very small handful of poets from the many (established and less established) scenes of Britain were represented. The gender and ethnicity count among these was also troublingly unequal, where this is in fact the one thing the Brit Po establishment has represented quite systematically, even at the expense of other, more formally pertinent values. This struck me as the clearest sign of the scission between visual arts and poetic practice in Britain. ...

....Furthermore, although a number of the chosen artists are known for dealing with writing and language pertinently and intrinsically as part of their artwork ... it was something of a disappointment to see so many of them react with undisguised anxiety at that same word, “poetry.” Otherwise lucid, articulate artists found themselves in the throes of open self loathing, “I don’t know poetry,” “I dont know what to read,” choosing to calm the audience by reading from known values such as Eliot, Ted Hughes, Lorca, and Hamburger’s Celan, rather than tracing their own engagement with writing as part of the event. Here, poetry itself was treated as a historical, in the sense of acquired, decorative, rather than productive, mode of functioning. ....

"

read more

Conversation with Charles Bernstein (29:27): MP3
Reading (34:52): MP3

Segmented Reading: Translations Read by Bernstein

1. Introduction (2:15): MP3
2. El Mataa (1:08): MP3
3. El Mataa (1:09): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
4. "Imagem impossível," interspersed with "Image Impossible"(3:12): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
5. Outra tempestade (0:42): MP3
6. Another Storm (0:48): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
7. Poema sério (0:48): MP3
8. Serious Poem (0:37): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
9. Tatugem (0:55): MP3
10. Tattoo (2:11): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
11. Azulejo (0:34): MP3
12. Blue Tile (0:27): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
13. Azulejo (0:26): MP3
14. Caminho de hamster (1:12): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
15. The Hampster's Way (1:14): MP3
16. Definitions of Brazil with Charles Berstein (7:21): MP3
17. Cocaine Kate (3:58): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein and Maria do Carmo Zanini
18. Prosa (0:55): MP3
19. Prose (1:04): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
20. Untitled (1:05): MP3
21. Sem título (1:14): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3
ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson
Panel and Reading
at Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania
Oct. 7, 2009

Complete Discussion (1:22:09): MP3 / MOV

Complete Reading (1:46:24): MP3 / MOV

segmented reading:

1. Introduction by Charles Bernstein (3:41): MP3
2. Introduction by Michael Gamer (4:46): MP3
3. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffery Robinson (11:51): MP3
4. Charles Bernstein (12:12): MP3
5. Jerome Rothenberg (3:38): MP3
6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (12:04): MP3
7. Jeffery Robinson (6:29): MP3
8. George Economou (13:33): MP3
9. Jerome Rothenberg (3:02): MP3
10. Rochelle Owens (16:05): MP3
11. Jeffery Robinson (1:50): MP3
12. Bob Perelman (13:33): MP3
13. Jerome Rothenberg (1:23): MP3
    

N.B. cut 4 [(12:12): MP3] is a montage
For Emma:
After Edward Lear’s “The Old Man of Whitehaven”
My tr. of  an 1847 poem from Hugo’s  Les Contemplations
From Swinburne, “The Ballad of Burdens”
My tr of Heine’s "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht" followed by my poem after "Der Tod" from Shadowtime:
“The Introvert,” after Wordworth’s The Hermet
An excerpt from Whitman’s “RESPONDEZ!”
My tr. of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous”: “Be Drunken”
Blake’s “The Sick Rose” from Song of Experience

Publishers Weekly web edition
starred review

  Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism
Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein. Seal, $19.95 paper (256p) ISBN 9781580052733
Embarking on a road trip across the U.S. to engage with contemporary women, writer Aronowitz and the late artist Bernstein (1985-2008) assert that “all we want is conversation.” Through 127 casual discussions with female college students, burlesque dancers, musicians, nuns-in-training, single mothers, abortion clinic staffers and others, the authors privilege the unique experiences and perspectives of both established activists and women who hesitate to identify with any notion of feminism. Coupling luminous, enigmatic photography with insightful diary entries, the pair contribute sharp commentary on modern womanhood and gender issues. The project is most striking when exploring the personal stories of interview subjects, but the authors’ ambitious scope makes some encounters feel repetitive. Clearly a work of passion for Bernstein (who committed suicide before the book’s publication) and Aronowitz both, the authors share of themselves generously, imprinting the “open-ended, fluid conversation” with their voices, feelings and personalities. (Oct.)

Nancy Spero 
(1926 - 2009)

Reading as Belief
Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

Joel Bettridge

Palgrave Macmillan, 10/27/2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61942-5, ISBN10: 0-230-61942-8
cloth only, $75

here is the publisher's informaiton:

Reading as Belief advances the provocative idea that the disruptive techniques of recent innovative poetry require readers to become believers, occupying the same philosophical ground as the religious faithful. Pairing the poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews with John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and drawing on the work of diverse thinkers such as Wendy Brown, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, William James, and Gilles Deleuze, this book demonstrates how belief, faith and language-attuned critical inquiry share an epistemology, one concerned with making meaning in the absence of certainty. Bettridge argues that recognizing such common ground helps overcome the cultural and philosophical impasse following the collapse of modernity’s central narratives about language and liberal subjectivity.

“Bettridge’s Reading as Belief is surprising, provocative, and engaging.  On the surface of it, to link Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews to John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and to do so around issues of faith and poetics will strike most readers as quite peculiar.  And that is precisely the heart of the book’s attractiveness: providing us with a truly fresh perspective for considering the premises of experimental poetry and poetics as modes of faith.  Bettridge asks us to consider the ethics of reading, instructing us to think about the relationship of poetics to faith. The result is a strange, wonderful book that points toward an ethics of engagement that applies equally to poetry and scripture and that leads us toward a mode of reading that links fully with the conduct of a life.”—Hank Lazer, author of Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008

“Bettridge offers a dare. He dares you to read the notorious Language poets as if they professed a faith. What faith? A faith that creative readers, residing in the gap between words and the world, can constantly remake themselves and what they know.”—Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame

IDIOT SAVANT
 (World Premiere) 
Written and Directed by RICHARD FOREMAN 
With WILLEM DAFOE 
Presented in association with Ontological-Hysteric Theater at

The New York Public Theater
October 27 - December 6
$65/$75 Saturday evenings.
But for readers of this site:
$40 tickets.
Valid performances are 10/27--11/15.
The code is SAVANT4

Marie asks the Idiot Savant, "But what makes certain words - magic?" What follows is a wild theatrical odyssey that could only have sprung from the fantastical mind of Richard Foreman. This new work is a philosophical comedy, in the great tradition of Ionesco and Preston Sturges. From precise existential and metaphysical acrobatics, to a ridiculous game of inter-species golf with a Giant Duck, IDIOT SAVANT is a fresh, bracing and hilarious exploration of the boundaries of the legitimate.

Tickets and more info

F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)
MP3 audio

.mov video for download

Mina Loy, "Aphorisms on Futurism" (1914)
MP3 audio

.mov video for download

Charles Bernstein,
"Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums & Implausibly Deniable Links" (2008)
MP3 audio

MP4 video for downloading

THE IMPROBABLE POETRY OF THE AMERICAS

Régis Bonvicino   

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the world’s superpower, a condition that was confirmed in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union.  To speak, then, of a “Poetry of the Americas” is, to a certain extent, to speak of a poetry of centrality. The advantages achieved by the force of American capitalism have given American poets worldwide visibility. The usual cultural flow was inverted: American poetry came to influence and nourish the various poetries of Europe and—to a lesser extent—of Latin America. Through the opposite mechanism, the United States exported its modernism (Objectivism, Imagism, Gertrude Stein) to Europe and fascinated the other Americas.
continued here on Sibyl, Sibila's English Language Portal

Bonvicino will present this talk on Weds.Oct. 14 at the Poets House in NY at 7pm, along with a bilingual reading (details at my post last week). He will also be reading and talking with me at the Kelly Writers House at Penn on Tuesday, October 13.

Raymond Federman
(1928-2009)

Some questions for Raymond Federman

Raymond, what is the use of fiction? What is the use of stories? And what is the use of telling them, the same ones or different ones, over and again?
            How about historical memory? Collective memory? Does fiction serve to spark or to spank memory? To make sure people don't forget or to be sure they remember the right things, and also remember the right things about the right things? You are a survivor of the Holocaust, your family was killed during the systematic extermination of the European Jews during World War II. We have many memorials of this systematic extermination.  What do you think that such memorials should represent? Your work, which I would say is one of the most significant of the memorials to the systematic extermination process, in many ways veers into abstraction and digression — it refuses to represent those events.  Why do you evade history?  Is it that facts, or not any facts but those facts, refuse representation? But then do they refuse memory too? In any case, you make light of facts rooted (or is it rotting?) in that dark history.  But whose history? Your history? Our history? You refuse to be solemn in the face of those horrendous events that have, in all actuality, in living color and dead black and white, occurred historically, but also hysterically. What gives you the right ­— moreover, what gives you the nerve — to be funny about this? Why aren't you, not only a real survivor but a famous one, terribly solemn and profoundly serious, like the memorials that we have all grown accustomed to, that make us weep and in our weeping comfort us?  Your work seems to mock not only the possibility of accurate representation, but also the idea that mourning should be dignified. Do you think mourning is a joke? Why do you make readers so uncomfortable with your laughter, your self-consciousness? Why do you still kick up a fuss instead of writing with poignant, eloquent, tearful resignation?   
            What is 'The Voice in the Closet'?  Whose voice? What is the voice saying?
            When you speak of Federman, is that you? If so, why do you refer to yourself in the third person? Or are you not you to yourself? Did you lose that you in the closet? Or later? Who or what are you calling attention to when you name yourself, as you do so often, so insistently? Why do you call so much attention to this anxious act of self-naming? Is it because the name names an absence? Or is because in the absence of this naming you cease to exist to yourself, for yourself? Or for "us"?
            Do you think your work is better understood in Germany or in Europe than it is in the United States? In Germany, do you represent a response to a German catastrophe and is that why you take a place of honor as a witness of, and commentator on, that catastrophe? In the U.S., are you seen as just another unintelligible experimental novelist refusing to give the dignity of sense to the catastrophes of your lifetime? Is your work American in its refusal to represent, in its insistence that response and representation are mutually exclusive? Were your works made possible because they are grounded in a cultural space that is non-European or anyway (for you) post-European? In what ways would you say your works portray a coming of age in America that is also the coming of age of America?
            Ray, are you a poet or are you a fiction writer, and does it make any difference?
            Your work is often immersed in some of the seamier sides of male culture, and it has sometimes been read as sexist. Yet, why is there is so little reference to the outdoors, to men doing virile things in open spaces? Why is there so little male bonding? And what about the sexual desperation of the men in your books? How do you imagine male sexuality?
            Who is this guy who drops down by parachute into an Army barracks in the South in the 1950s? Why tell your story from the point of view of the man who fell to earth, or let's say to America? Why do you blur memoir with fiction? Why don't you take out the rough edges of that first encounter with America? Why does what is most 'experimental' about your books – the typography, the digressions, the multiple point of view, the insistent intrusion of aesthetics and philosophy – seem at first playful and then deadly, uncannily serious?
            How about improvisation, Raymond? Your work plays a lot with a feeling of spontaneity, of just going on, with the pleasure of telling the story as it is happening. But if that's true, why does your work seem so composed that it decomposes in its own afterburn?

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

 Raymond Federman LINEbreak from 1995(29:13): mp3
Dada Poem for Two Face to Face" with Raymond Federman & Charles Bernstein (40 seconds)
Federman EPC author page
*
Wiki page
Mark Amerika interview
Rain Taxi interview
Federman at 80: Buffalo Artvoice (Buck Quigley and Charles Bernstein)

photos ©Charles Bernstein, at Buffalo 10/18/08

I will be giving a talk at
Verbale Pupiller
in Århus, Denmark
on October 20

& a reading in Copenhagen at
Forfattersk2len
on Oct. 21

then I will be appearing at
Oslo Poetry Festival
October 23 and 24
giving a reading and delivering the keynote
in their annual "Attack on Poetry" lecture series
introduced by Caroline Bergvall, who will be performing in the festival.
also  Ellen Ugelvik will peform "Opus Contra Naturum" from Shadowtime

Wednesday, October 14, 7:00pm
CORRESPONDENCES:
A Reading & Conversation with Charles Bernstein & Régis Bonvicino

Charles Bernstein speaks with Brazilian poet and editor Régis Bonvicino
about contemporary Brazilian poetry, translation and, more generally, the poetics of the Americas. 
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members.
(Photo: ©2006 Bernstien/Pennsound)

Friday, October 16, 7:00pm
Living in Advance: A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corinna Copp, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Levitsky, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino, Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Geoffrey Young & Others . This evening celebrates the life and work of poet David Bromige (1933–2009), who was born in London, grew up in Canada, and arrived in 1962 in Northern California, where he spent the rest of his life, teaching and writing more than forty books of poetry. Cosponsored by the Poetry Project. Admission Free

Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY 10282

A. L. Nielsen:
Close Listening Reading and Conversation

& as written up by Mike Hennessey on PennSound Daily

Nielsen in conversation with Charles Bernstein (31:24): MP3

Nielsen's Reading of Selected Poems (25:38): MP3

Mira Schor on Close Listening
August 23, 2009

Reading
Mira Schor reads several of her essays: "Figure/Ground" from Wet and "Email to a Young Artist," "Recipe Art," and "Modest Painting" from A Decade of Negative Thinking. Schor is an artist, writer, and editor.

Conversation
Mira Schor discussion "wet" painting versus dry dogma, the state of art criticism, the relation of feminism to art and its reception, "modest" art, her use of language in her paintings, and her dual work as essayist and visual artist.

Schor is a painter living in New York. She is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. She is the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, published by Yale University Press in 2009. In early 2010 a second  collection of her writings, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life will be published by Duke University Press. She lives and works in New York City and Provincetown.

Peter Seaton on Eclipse

Agreement

Crisis Intervention

The Son Master

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry
Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman

This is a thrilling book and one that will be a foundational for the Poetics of the Amercas as we come to terms with it in North  America. 500 years of poetry from south of the U.S. border, in just 600 pages; this book is synoptic, a starting point, a map, a guide book. Short, concise, useful headnotes for each poet, the English translation, then the "original" (condensed by / horizontal lineation). And the translations are often fresh and engaging, bringing into English not just new voices but new tones, textures, and possibilities.

608 pages
ISBN13: 978-0-19-512454-5ISBN10: 0-19-512454-5

there will be a couple of events celebrating the book

Launch reading/celebration
Tues., October 6th, 2009, 7pm
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue, 
New York, NY
Cecilia Vicuña, Charles Bernstein, Sergio Bessa, Michelle Gil-Montero,  Clayton Eshleman, Molly Weigel, Liz Macklin, Monica de la Torre, Mark Lokensgard, James Scully, Odi Gonzalez, Daniel Shapiro, Gary Racz

note also


The exhibition, through October 31, features the work of poet/artists including Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidobro; illustrated books and periodicals by Torres-García; pre-Columbian ceramics, a Quipu fragment; a site specific sculpture by Cecilia Vicuña; and photographs and photocopies documenting pre-Columbian times to the present. Signed copies of the bi-lingual anthology will be available.

SoHo, New York

George Kuchar

Photo: Charles Bernstein/PennSound © 2009

Close Listening
readings and conversations at 
ArtOnAir

Recorded in Provincetown, Mass.
August 13, 2009

Program #1:

George Kuchar in conversation with Charles Bernstein (28:59): MP3

Program #2:

Program #3:

George Kuchar at PEPC: The Kiss of Frankenstein (2003)

just begun to learn
(PoemTalk #22)

Bob Perlelam, Wystan Curnow, Charles Bernstein
and host Al Filries (r to l) discuss
Louis Zukofsky's "Anew" #12 ("It's hard to see but think of a sea.")
which is collected in the the LZ Selected Poems from Library of America

Listen or download:
MP3

_____________________

Allen Fisher's Ekphrastics
published in the new on-line issue of Spine

here is one of the two published
with painting and poem by Fisher:

Proposals 31

Ocean series in
a rhythm of orange
squares of light
turn on and off are distant
lorries taking the hill
out of town
and return commodities
to an earth and methane
exhaust quarry

>

Proposals 31. Commentary.

Stratospheres are spreads of surfaces with boundaries and stimulate the discussion of identity and category.

Café Buffé
in rehearsal yesterday ...
a thrill to hear a run-through
Dean Drummond has written a fabulous score

Dean Drummond

Jared Soldiviero on Bamboo Marimba

Beth Griffith as Hilda Honey

photo: Bernstein/PennSound © 2009

Ken Jacobs

on

Close Listening
readings and conversations at
Art International Radio / ArtOnAir.Org
Clocktower Studio
New York, August 4, 2009

Program #1:

Program #2:

Program #3:

Not to be missed ...
Belladonna conference at CUNY in New York
The Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism Gathering
Sept. 24 and 25
Schedule

_______________

Bezoar
Paul Kahn's Gloucester-based magazine of the 70s, now online:

____________________

the kind of poetry I want ....

Jörgen Gassilewski

from boundary 2 Swedish sampler
tr, Anders Lundberg &. Jesper Olsson
>Close-reading of non-existing texts is a political act
>To Catullus

>saturation, tr. Robert Österbergh (from Jacket 37)

_________________________________

buy tickets now

Thursday September 10, 2009
7:30PM
The John J Cali School of Music
Montclair State University
presents

Café Buffé

Music by Dean Drummond
Libretto by Charles Bernstein
with New Band
Paul Hostetter — conductor

FIRST PERFORMANCE - UNSTAGED

a microtonal opera

Café Buffé is a one-act comic opera: an existential foray into food and food service. Set in a café/restaurant/bar, the cast consists of a waiter and several patrons. They discuss the menu, order food and each character tells his/her own absurdist story. The libretto is replete with nonsequitors, plays on words, hyperbole, and farce — all interlaced with a series of often bluesy songs.  The eighteen musicians — who play a mixture of conventional, electronic, Harry Partch and Dean Drummond instruments — are onstage throughout. They are the cafés house band — and they demand — and are served — ice cold water.  Everyone's voices are brought together at once for a grand finale.

Café Buffé was formally initiated in 1991, when I invited Charles Bernstein (who I knew as a fellow Upper West Side preschool parent) to create a comic farce about food.  My idea was that it would be set in a café in which my microtonal ensemble Newband, performing on the Newband/Harry Partch Instrumentarium, would be the accompanying orchestra in the form of an on stage café house band. Very importantly, Charles and I were agreed that I would make every attempt to set the text so that all words would be clearly understood.

Café Buffé is my first opera, but hopefully the first of several to be composed in the next decade or so.  It is also something I have been pondering for a long time. As I see it, I am someone who set out to compose operas, but who got sidetracked into microtonality, building instruments and directing a chamber ensemble to perform my microtonal chamber music.   For me this has been a large learning curve because I needed to develop a personal musical language (which happens to be microtonal) before composing an opera. Even after Charles created his text I needed to compose Congressional Record to develop an approach to setting text and The Last Laugh (a work for live ensemble and silent film) to develop an approach to mixing music with another medium.   

I also have to credit and thank my first conducting teacher, Hans Baer at University of Southern California, for warning me not to conduct my own music (because composers always drag the tempo in their own music) and not to try to compose a comic opera before composing numerous tragedies (because it's almost impossible to compose a good comic opera).   I have been conducting my own music for many years, and when I drag the tempo, I am fortunate enough to have musician/friends who tell me.    Hans Baer's explanation, that Wagner and Verdi waited to compose Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Falstaff respectively, was futile.  Perhaps I am merely a product of my time, growing up with movies and TV, but for me, opera is an absurd medium by definition.  I am only interested in composing comic operas.

—Dean Drummond

Note: the libretto for Café Buffé was featured in Slope 15 (2002):
archive copy here

cast list, instrumentals, and synopsis
at the New Band site

buy tickets now

Bruce Pearson

Photo: Bernstein/PennSound © 2009

Bruce Pearson
(27:23): MP3

My conversation with Bruce Pearson. Pearson describes his method of making a painting. He also discusses his use of language as a base element for his paintings and notes how this confutes traditional dichotomies such as figuration versus abstraction and visual meaning versus verbal meaning. Pearson also talks about his approaches to color and the thickness of his paintings' surfaces/depths. Pearson is a visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. He shows his paintings at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, though his first solo show was at Pierogi in 1996. He has a new web site, still under construction, at: http://brucepearsonstudio.com/

Prickly Paradigm #36

Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Or, Marx's Riddle of the Dog

Jerome McGann

A polemical, riotous pamphlet, chock full of startling passages from Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Borges, Hardy, Langer, Yourcenar, and ending with a marvelous discussion of Christian Bök's Euonia. McGann's argument moves by means of the citations, which are never reduced to examples; the essays work by a poetic/paratactic logic that McGann calla "paracriticism": the ludic, dialogic, exploratory possibility for the essay which more disciplinary and expository, and journalistic approaches, no matter how radical in "content," necessarily suppress.

Here's the catalog copy:
A spectre is haunting literature today -- the spectre of patacriticism. Nowhere is the threat more evident than in the dog riddle propounded by the late Marx: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." This book, which explains for the first time what Marx meant, works from two assumptions: 1. That the riddle conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and 2. that our explanation is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle of the dog. It therefore remains to be seen -- it is the reader's part to decide -- whether the book is a friend to man or, perhaps like Marx's riddle, too dark to read.

_________

Last days of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series "Recession Special"
Half price on books by McGann and Marjorie Perloff (key work of theirs on contemporary poetry), Ben Friedlander (his great paracritical book mapping Poe's essays onto the contemporary poetry landscape), Brian Reed (an illuminating book on Hart Crane), Mark Scroggins (on Zukofsky and epistemology), Rachel Back (on Susan Howe), Susan Schultz (collects her key essays), Jed Rasula (a marvelously wide-ranging collection); and also Hank Lazer (ed.), What Is a Poet?, and Bill Lavender's revelatory anthology of innovative poetry from the South.

_______________

New Summer on-line issue of Rain Taxi.

_______________________

Douglas Dunn on Merce Cunningham

New@Sibyl, Sibila's English portal
[RSS feed for Sibyl]

A Note on “The Kingfishers” for Arkaddi’s Dragomoschenko’s Translation

[Arkadii Dragomoshchenko asked me to write a commentary on “The Kingfisher’s” for his new Russian translation (forthcoming, 2009. PennSound features a sound file of Olson reading most of “The Kingfishers” (6:31); the poem can be found on-line here.] 

Olson’s “The Kingfisher’s” is an inaugural poem of postwar American poetry and it takes its place of honor at the opening of Don Allen’s defining anthology, The New American Poetry.

“The Kingfishers” is both thrilling and exasperating, inspiring and challenging. The date of its composition has become as emblematic as anything in the poem: 1949. Just four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, just four years after the gates of Auschwitz were broken open and the unfathomable lies of what happened there were revealed, the same year as Mao’s forces triumphed in China (Olson’s "La lumiere de l'aurore est devant. Nous nous devant nous lever et agir" [The light of dawn is before us. We must arise and act.] is from Mao). Sixty years later, and on the verge of celebrating Olson’s centennial, we are still confronted with the dogged question at the heart of this poem, “shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?,” a line that has the status of Adorno’s questioning of the possibility of lyric poetry in the wake of the “final solution” (the systematic extermination process). Is our Western heritage salvageable?

A stirring, iconic voice rises up in this poem, one phrase tumbling upon the next, hectoring, charged, bursting through the dead silence and complacency often associated with this proto Cold War moment in U.S. history. Olson’s rhetorical power is a blast against conformity, against the postwar methodology of “prosperity” through repression. “What pudor pejorocracy affronts”: our decency, if we still have it in the human dethronement of that moment, 1949 (or 2009) is offended by the worsening rule of government. And Olson breaks beyond “the Western box” with his opening, signal, invocation of Heraklitus: all is change, stasis is Thanatos (a death wish). And so the poem enacts this very Heraklitian change/movement/dynamic/parataxis; it invokes a poetics of dynamic movement, where each phrase takes on new meaning in new contexts. One thought is overlaid on another, a veritable palimpsest, like they say.

I’ve read the poems many times over the years and I still don’t follow it, keep diving back in for more. You can never step into the same poem twice (to conflate Olson and Heraklitus). The poem is a bracing test of nonlinear reading: because it quickly loses the reader trying diligently to “follow,” since it demands another approach, one that doesn’t follow the leader but the lieder (why am I writing this way for you, Arkaadi, since my puns can’t be translated into Russian?). Guy Davenport calls the poem as a whole an ideogram, marking its unmistakle, and not entirely happy, Poundian lineage. The poem is weighted/freighted by those Poundian need-to-know (or do you?) uncited references, as for example the appropriations from Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (“the priests rush in among the people,” “of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes / of gold”).

And at or near the center: “I thought of the E on the stone”: this is not Frank O’Hara referring casually and without consequence to graffiti on Second Avenue but an allusion to the Inscrutable Inscription on the Stone at Delphi. But this is the weight that for Olson we cannot cast off: of the enigma of our cultural histories, which form us and from which we are formed. We are not one but many, and from the many threads the fabric of our possible lives will be woven. Do we weave it or let it be woven for us? Will dawn follow this dark night?  

We come late to a world that we feel, less and less, is of our making: we are estranged from that which we feel we are, by right of nature, familiar; as if our own hand was not part of our body, or our own society no longer a polis, no longer “ours” (to extend a fragment of Hekalitus quoted by Olson in his Special View of History).

Near the end, Olson quotes a couplet from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell (“Alchemy of the Word”): “Si j'ai du goût, ce n'est guère / Que pour la terre et les pierres”  (“I only find within my bones / A taste for eating earth and stones” as Paul Schmidt translates it). Rimbaud, Heraklitus, Mao, Prescott, Delphi are, for Olson, points outside the deadness that inscribes “us” in the “West” in the wake the war. They are stones with which we might build a new world, word by word; but they are also the weights of that other demonic world (of which the New World is not innocent). This dead-mid-century poem marks a liminal moment between a controlled Poundian montage (ideogram) and the possibility for a more open-ended collage that might come after.

“The Kingfisher”’s acknowledgement of the crisis for Western culture in the wake of the war is the postmodern turn, where the call of the poet is so much bird feed. "The kingfishers! / who cares / for their feathers / now?" As Jack Spicer would say a decade later, “No / One listens to poetry.”

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

 "The Kinghisers"  is collected in Collected Poems, ed. Geoerge Butterick (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987). A great deal has been written about this poem, documenting its sources line for line, see especially: Ralph Maude, What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997); George Butterick, Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and the Poetics of Change in American Poetry 6:2 (1988): 28-69; and Guy Davenport, “Scholia and Conjectures for ‘The Kingfishers’ in The Geography of the Imagination (Berkeley: North Point Press, 1981). 

Mónica de la Torre

Photo: Charles Bernstein/PennSound © 2009

from SAPPHO
THOMAS McEVILLEY

New at Penn EPC (PEPC)

Paperback $28
464 pages, first edition
ISBN-10: 0-88214-574-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-88214-574-7
Spring Publications

Introduction
Fragment 1
Fragment 2
Fragment 16
Fragment 31
Fragment 94
Fragment 96

link    |  08-16-09

rob mclennan's blog
12 or 20 questions: with Charles Bernstein

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Hard to say.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry is non-fiction.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It takes forever to start a work and even longer to finish. Initially the work comes very quickly, perhaps instantly, but I am too slow to process it. My work is copious notes.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you?

Poems begin for me somewhere in the middle of the middle (the poet is perpetually assigned the “it” role in a kind of aesthetic monkey-in-the-middle game, trying to catch things from competing and irreconcilable interests and desires).

4A. Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Yes.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I feel performance corrupts the true inner life of a poem. I eschew both performances of my own work and those of other poets. Poetry should be silent, unread, invisible, inconceivable. The true poem can never be written or heard.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Not ideas but the idea of ideas; not questions but the inadequacies of answers; not currency but against the tides.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Better a weak jaw than an iron fist.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I am too involved working with my inside editor; anyway, there is no way to get rid of that, hard as I’ve tried.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

This answer intentionally left blank

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I find it impossible not to. Not appeal, necessity.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t sleep as well as I once did.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Stalling is my inspiration.

13 - What fairy tale character do you resonate with most?

Oscar Wilde.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I keep Mr. Emerson by my bedside.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

It’s what I’d like to undo that keeps me up at night.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Night warden.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

What else?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Ah, yes, I remember it well.

20 - What are you currently working on?

This.

DNA Gallery
288 Bradford St
Provincetown, Mass.


Friday, August 14
6pm
Poetry reading with
Gordon Faylor, Liz Fodaski, and Eddie Hopely


Sunday, August 16
7:30pm
A night of film, poetry, and art
with
Mimi Gross, Charles Bernstein, & George Kuchar

Regis Bonvicino's poems

Susan Bee's graphics
ENTRE
slide show of book
with my introduction
book published by
Collectif Génération / Gervais Jassaud

+++++++++++++

On Sibyl
Sibila's English language portal
I've posted two late poems of Robin Blaser
part of a Blaser selection we are working on for EPC.
We'll be positng more poems and essays on this site.
You can can updates via the RSS feed.

++++++++

Futurepoem
call for poetry mss

Perverts Put Out

Fox News has exposed what commentator Megyn Kelly describes as an abuse of government stimulus money: a $25,000 grant from the NEA to the Pacfic Cinematheque. The sin in question: a purported future showing of the 1975 underground camp/porno classic Thundercrack! directed by Curt McDowell and written by George Kuchar (left in picture above). (Note: The Cinemateque's web site does not list any showings of this film.). Variety describes Thundercrack! this way: "Thundercrack! is an awful sexpo spoof that suggests Russ Meyer trying to do a Tennessee Williams subject." Keep in mind that the animal-human sex referred to by Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) refers to a scene with Kuchar dressed in a gorilla suit (he plays Medusa, a female gorilla). What this is really about is Kelly and Stearns abusing Fox viewer's intelligence. The silver lining in this nonsense is that Kuchar's great slogan for the movie gets top billing --

"Ecstasy so great that all Heaven and Hell become one Shangri-La."

... and you heard it on Fox!

My tribute to Budd Schulberg, "Class" audio work from 1976: "Class" uses improvised repetitions by way of the rewind button on a mono cassette player; its primary sources being Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" (1954), screenplay by Budd Schulberg; and two songs by Lew Brown and Jay Gorney from "Stand Up and Cheer" (1934): "Baby Take a Bow", sung by James Dunn, and "I'm Laughing", sung by Tess Gardella

Class, 1976 (Stereo, 10:30)
from Early Tape Works

Helen Adam Sampler
selected by Charles Bernstein

from A Helen Adam Reader, ed. Kristin Prevallet
(Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2007

Used with the permission of  The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo.
With thanks to Kristin Prevallet and Michel Basknski.
© Estate of Helen Adam, 2009.

The Fair Young Wife

The House o’ the Mirror

A Tale Best Forgotten

Counting Out Rhyme

Song for a Sea Tower

Miss Laura

The Chestnut Tree

Cheerless Junkie’s Song

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Helen Adam at EPC
Helen Adam at PennSound

Johannes Göransson
on
American Hybrid
A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John

from the summer issue of
Rain Taxi

some excerpts:

. . . There is a strange paradox at work here, however: in order to have a “hybrid” of two kinds of poetry, you must subscribe to the two-camp structure; viewing the proliferation of styles and aesthetics as more complicated disturbs the attempt to create a synthesis. In her detailed and well-researched introduction, Swensen quotes Robert Lowell’s famous claim from the 1950s that there is “cooked” and “uncooked” poetry. Swensen is trying to show how far back the “two-camp” mentality reaches, but she seems to miss the most important point in this reference: Lowell made this statement as a way to defuse the oppositionality of the poetry scene, to set himself up as a compromise between the raw emotionality of the New American poets and the overly nerdy sophistication of the New Critical poets. In other words, the ideal of the “hybrid” goes back as far as the “two-camp” system. This idealization of the middle ground can be traced back to the New Critics themselves, who aimed to clear away the “excesses” of the experimentation of the 1920s while retaining its advances.

An essential feature of this kind of “middle-of-the-road” rhetoric is that it needs to caricature a multiplicity of styles as two extremes. Ignoring the incredible sophistication and cosmopolitan influences of the Beats and the New York School, Lowell lumped them together as simplistically “uncooked,” while defining the New Critical poets (of which he was the darling) as too sophisticated. Given that choice, a reasonable person will go for the middle of the road every time. In Swensen’s and St. John’s version of this rhetoric, there is on one side a traditional poetry that is emotional but simplistic, consisting of imagery and clear narratives; and on the other side a history-less avant-garde poetry of total indeterminacy and fragmentation. From the first “camp,” these hybrids take an idea of poetry as authentic and emotional, able to capture human consciousness. From the avant-garde flank, they take a fragmented style that makes for a more sophisticated idea of that consciousness. The resulting poetry is “oblique” but emotional and “carefully crafted”—it is “complex,” a word that is repeated like a mantra throughout the book.

Curiously, the fragmentation that poets in the book take from the avant-garde seems to run absolutely counter to the fragmentation —or “shocks” as Walter Benjamin famously termed it—of the historical avant-garde. As Benjamin noted, these “shocks” were meant to jar the reader/viewer out of the “contemplative immersion” of 19th-century bourgeois humanism. The fragmentation of American Hybrid, however, demands a contemplative immersion—the reader must pay attention to subtle imagistic changes. Hybrid poetry then brings the indeterminate fragmentation of the avant-garde back into the real of the human through the epiphany, thus avoiding the monstrous and grotesque. (This may explain the startling prevalence of Christianity among the anthology’s poets, who clearly want to bring the literary epiphany back to its original meaning.)

Moderation is thus not only more sophisticated, it is also, apparently, more human. After reading the entire book, however, one might conclude that it’s not so much a moderation of traditional and avant-garde poetics, but a moderation between too much and not enough, excess and lack. The “too much” in this case is not the over-the-top sentimentality of the 1970s-style workshop poem, but the grotesque and the political. The only politics mentioned in American Hybrid involves the struggle for “the integrity of the language” against the forces of base mass culture. This is, of course, the politics of New Criticism as well.

.................................

The logic of hybridity seems to pave the way for language poetry to fit smoothly into this anthology—the work of Rae Armantrout, for example, can be seen as a kind of model for the new lyric that American Hybrid espouses. However, it is important to note that the representation of language poetry is very limited here—poets such as Bruce Andrews or Leslie Scalapino are not included in the anthology, nor could they be. These poets are not about detailed “attention” but rather what Benjamin called “distraction,” and they are excessively political, rather than sophisticated. . . . This may also explain why there is very little trace of the influence of Surrealism, Sylvia Plath, the Beats, or the New York School in American Hybrid.. . . .

full review

Go to main blog page to see this video.

Parution : 24/04/2009
ISBN : 978-2-9153-7882-5
160 pages
14,8 x 21 cm
15.00 euros

Nioques # 5
Au sommaire :

Charles Bernstein
Rémi Marie
Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
Jean-Marie Gleize
Joël Baqué
Clara Elliott
Sabine Tamisier
Guillaume Fayard
Bernard Noël
Revue bi-annuelle / issn : 1148–4896

EXTRAITS
Charles Bernstein Le renflouement de la poésie devrait restaurer la confiance des lecteurs
traduit de l’américain par Abigail Lang
“Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général, distingués poètes et lecteurs, j’ai le regret d’être dans l’obligation d’inter­rompre ce soir les célébrations pour faire une annonce importante.
Comme vous le savez, la surabondance de poèmes illiquides, insolvables et troubles, est en train d’encrasser les artères littéraires de l’Occident. Ces poèmes criblés de dettes menacent d’infecter d’autres secteurs du domaine littéraire et, à terme, d’abattre notre industrie culturelle.
Les responsables de la culture se sont associés pour annoncer un rachat massif de poésie : les poèmes à fort taux d’endettement ou non garantis, les poèmes dérivés, les poèmes en souffrance et les poèmes subprime seront retirés de la circulation à l’occasion du plus important renflouement de la poésie depuis la période victorienne. Nous estimons que ce plan apporte une réponse globale pour réduire la pression qui pèse sur nos institutions et marchés littéraires.
Ne nous méprenons pas : les fondements de notre poésie sont sains. Ce n’est pas la poésie qui est en cause, mais les poèmes. La crise a été précipitée par l’escalade de la dette poétique, causée par des poèmes qui circulent à perte dans le marché économique en raison de leur difficulté, leur insuffisance ou leur manque de pertinence.”

Charles Bernstein Recantorium (une machine célibataire, d’après Duchamp d’après Kafka)
traduit de l’américain par Abigail Lang
“Moi, Charles, fils de feu Joseph Herman, subséquemment dénommé Herman Joseph, et de Shirley K., subséquemment connue sous le nom de Sherry, de New York, en mon âge de cinquante-huit ans, cité personnellement en jugement et agenouillé devant ce Corps Estimé, très Éminents et très Révérends Lecteurs, Inquisiteurs généraux contre la dépravation hérétique dans toute la République Poétique, ayant sous les yeux les Livres des Poètes Accessibles, que je touche de mes propres mains, je jure que j’ai toujours cru, que je crois à présent et qu’avec votre aide je croirai pour l’avenir tout ce que contiennent, prêchent, enseignent et expriment les Livres des Poètes Accessibles
J’ai eu tort, je demande pardon, je me repens. J’abandonne entièrement la fausse opinion selon laquelle le Mois National de la Poésie n’est pas bon pour la poésie ni pour les poètes. J’abjure, maudis et déteste la susdite erreur et apostasie. Et j’atteste maintenant de mon propre chef et au vu de tous les vertus du Mois National de la Poésie qui en braquant l’attention de la nation sur la poésie aide magistralement à faire vivre le vers au vingt et unième siècle.
J’ai eu tort, je demande pardon et je me repens. J’abandonne entièrement la fausse opinion selon laquelle seule la poésie élitiste et obscure mérite l’éloge. J’abjure, maudis, déteste et renie l’erreur et l’aversion susdites. Et j’atteste maintenant de mon propre chef et au vu de tous que le meilleur moyen pour que le grand public se mette à lire de la poésie est de lui proposer des œuvres globalement attrayantes avec un contenu affectif fort et une ligne ­narrative claire.”

Rémi Marie Je
je marche dans la rue déserte, je me regarde marcher dans la rue déserte, j’écoute le bruit de mes pas dans la rue silencieuse, je boutonne mon col, j’ai froid à l’intérieur, je suis un peu saoul, je suis un peu saoul mais ça n’aide pas, je marche vite pour dissiper l’alcool, je suis les rails du tram, je marche vers westbanhof, je marche vite, je ne sais pas pourquoi je suis parti, je sais pourquoi, je connais le contrat, j’ai fixé la règle, je joue le jeu, je suis parti très vite, je ne m’y attendais pas, je n’ai rien dit, j’ai repris mon pull sur tes épaules, j’ai mis ma veste en cuir, je me suis enroulé dans ton écharpe africaine, je suis sorti, je n’ai pas voulu discuter, je t’ai dit ne complique pas tout, je suis sorti, j’ai demandé mon chemin à stefan, je suis ses indications, je tourne à droite encore à droite, je me guide maintenant aux rails du tram 43, j’arrive à westbanhof, je sais qu’il est trop tôt pour le premier u-banh, je continue tout droit, je marche vers le centre, je descends les rues vers le centre, je croise quelques passants, je regarde le sol, je ne regarde rien, je marche pour m’empêcher de penser, je sens les pensées qui me rattrapent, je sens les pensées en embuscade, je marche plus vite, je marche jusqu’au ring

Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson Six poèmes
traduction U.K.O Nilsson, relecture N.Quintane
je grandis
Au début je grandis très vite, à ma naissance je mesure 51 centimètres, mais très vite je ferai 52, 53, 54, 55 et 56 centimètres. Un an après le jour de ma naissance j’en fais 63, quand j’ai 2 ans j’atteins 79 et quand j’ai 3 ans et 244 jours je dépasse le mètre. Entre 4 et 5 ans je grandis de 7 centimètres et les années suivantes de 6, 6, 5, 4, 6, 5, 3 et 4. À 13 ans je fais 159 centimètres, l’année d’après j’accélère radicalement et j’en fais soudain 167. L’année suivante je grandis plus encore et j’atteins 179. L’année d’après je grandis de 3 centimètres, l’année suivante de 2, et puis encore de 2. Puis je me calme et je ne grandis plus que d’un demi-centimètre. Entre 25 et 35 je demeure, d’après mes mensurations, tout à fait immobile. Entre 35 et 38, très étonnant, je grandis de 8 millimètres en tout. Ma trente-neuvième année je rétrécis de 3 millimètres. À la quaran­tième je rétrécis de 2 millimètres. Les années suivantes je rétrécis de 2, 2, 1 et 1 millimètres respectivement. À 45 ans j’entre dans une nouvelle phase et je rétrécis (probablement la conséquence d’une maladie grave et longue) de 6 millimètres et l’année suivante j’ai encore rétréci et je mesure 183 centimètres sans chaussures. Entre 47 et 55 je commence à grandir à nouveau, en moyenne d’un demi-millimètre par an. À 55 je fais un grand pas vers le ciel et je grandis de 14 centimètres, à ma cinquante-sixième année sur la terre se produit une augmentation presque égale et à 57 ans je mesure 219 centimètres de la tête aux pieds.

Sarah Ehlers review of Al Filreis's
Counter-Revolution of the Word:
The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960
pdf

my review from Boston Review

Merce Cunningham
(1919- 2009)


Cunningham (and Cage)

In tribute Douglas Messerli has posted
an appreciation of Carolyn Brown's Cage/Cunningham memoir

Washington Post obit

Fall Preview
from the summer
Brooklyn Rail

Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (Holt, 2007) was something of a companion to his delightful and ingenious movie, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which, more than any other film I can think of, centered on the acts of writing the movie unfolding before us—with a sharp dose of Orpheus and Euridice and lots of delightfully classic Auster moments. With Travels in the Scriptorium, the magic of imaginative making (poesis) occurs right before our eyes. Auster’s new novel, Invisible, is something else again. What begins in 1967, with the memoir of a budding poet at Columbia University getting an opportunity to start a literary magazine melts into a thriller revolving around an apparent murder, replete with sexual passages as explicit as Henry Miller’s. Two interconnected traumas puncture the narrative: the accidental death by drowning of the would-be poet’s very young brother, and his subsequent, and apparently joyous, incest with his sister. Formally, Invisible is made up of a series of stories within stories, written in the third, second, and three first-person perspectives, which bring into active play the illusory borders between the imaginary and the real. These borders are the invisible protagonists of the novel; or you might say the invisible is the protagonist. Invisible provides a staging area for experiencing unconscious processes, which, in the psychoanalytic sense, can be approached only through memory and recollection. The undecidability of what actually happened (the textbook case: did the incest actually occur?) is, here, just another part of the story. Invisible unveils through its rhythmical serial veiling.

Jed Rasula
Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth
Palgrave, 2009
Everything Jed Rasula writes is endlessly fascinating and marvelously illuminating. The proof of his work is in its extraordinary details, but the significance is in the stunning constellation he creates with these details. Modernism & Poetic Inspiration is an immensely original, playfully digressive, and sumptuously engaging work.

Ann Lauterbach
Or to Begin Again
Penguin, 2009
Or to Begin Again is a culmination of Lauterbach's worldward journey.
Worldward: how a person grounds herself or himself in the world over time,
like gravity in Simone Weil's sense.
These tunes leak into the air like ink mourning grace.

Rachel Levitsky
Neighbor
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009
Nearly touching are the ethical realm of our obligation to others and the aesthetic world of our freedom from such obligations. Levitsky's Neighbor confronts this imaginary dividing line—in the process, creating a poetry that both provokes community and critiques our social habituations. This is my neighborhood.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

John Ashbery conference in Paris
March 2010
call for papers

*
Grumeaux
new French magazine

In the mid-70s, I made a number of audiotape works, some of which were collected and published as Class. Working with Danny Snelson, and in collaboration with Ubu, I have now made a PennSound page of these works. The PennSound page also includes the restored stereo cuts from Class, which I haven't listed here. All of the works listed here are being released for the first time.

Early Recorded Works
Homemade Tapes, 1975-1976


Accused (45:06): MP3
In 1974, City College’s History Department erupted into a bitter political dispute in which older faculty members Stanley Page, Edward Rosen and others accused their younger colleagues of disruptive leftist agitation. In this work, I perform the 1975 CUNY faculty senate report on the matter.

Afternoon Tape (28:34): MP3
          Greg interrupts Phyllis; it's caught on tape.
          Greg and Charles reflect on the problem.

#4: a portrait of one being in family living (1975)
(22:11): MP3

• narrative
  
• Casablanca (collage)
  
• father: speech
  
• David Cooper (the family)
  
• narriative (“why can’t it")
  
• Casablanca (“one woman …”)
  
• narrative (on O! Pioneers)
  
• parents (“my jewells”
  
• narrative (“valued you too much”)
  
• David Cooper (paranoia)
  
• Billie Holliday (tyring)
  
• Casablanca (insistence)
  
• Billie Holiday (beaten)
  
• narrative (alone, my fear)
  
• Billie Holliday (what?)
  
• Poe (from Pym)
  
• Fats Waller
• Poe (in the light ahead)
  
  "#4" will be featured, alongside an essay and a series of edits, remixes and transcripts in the forthcoming volume "Counting Each Step of the Sun" released with independent label/publishing house Edition in late 2009.

Early Poems (4:15): MP3

to be an married (0:40): MP3

Asylum (from Asylums) (11:35): MP3

Lo Disfruto (from Poetic Justice) (8:04): MP3

My/My/My (from Asylums) (11:13): MP3 [single track feed for Class version]

Three-voice Performance of "Sentences" from Parsing (1975) (Bernstein, Susan Bee, Greg Ball) (6:56): MP3

Asylums/Parsing medley (with Bernstein, Susan Bee and Greg Ball) (1975) (11:51): MP3

Coco-Rimbay (1975) (Bernstein & Edmund Chibeau) (13:40): MP3

Sen-Sen (1975) (Bernstein, Chibeau, Bee) (4:34): MP3

SHOFAR
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Vol. 27, NO. 3 (Spring 2009)

Special Issue: Jewish Poetry, ed. Daniel Morris

soon also avail. via Project Muse and Ebsco

Articles
Partisan Experiments: Communism, Poetry, and the Liberal Imagination,1934-1940
Ethan Goffman
"Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom": Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman's Pound
Alan Golding
Tracking the Word: Judaism's Exile and the Writerly Poetics of George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Finkelstein
Burt Kimmelman
Jewish Counterfactualism in Recent American Poetry [DuPlessis, Bernstein, Friedlander]
Joshua Schuster
Is There a Distinctive Jewish Poetics? Several? Many? Is There Any Question?
HankLazer

A Portfolio of Poems
Mandelstam tr. Charles Bernstein and Kevin M. F. Platt, David Epstein, Thomas Fink, Norman Finkelstein, Benjamin Friedlander, Arielle  Greenberg, Jamey Hecht, Michael Heller, Alan Holder, Burt Kimmelman, Joseph Lease, Deena Linett, Bonnie Lyons, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel  Morris, Alicia Ostriker, Warren Rosenberg, Steven P. Schneider, Daniel R. Schwarz, Nikki Stiller, William Wallis, and Henry Weinfield

Review Essays
American Jewish Poetry, Familiar and Strange Alicia Ostriker
Passing Through Henry Weinfield

link    |  06-26-09-xx