Emmett Williams
1925 - 2007
photo by Anne Tardos
Showing posts with label Passings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Passings. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Eric von Schmidt
one of the best
of the ‘60s folkies
has died
(2nd Row, 3rd Right
remains one of the great
albums of that decade)
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Moneyball
and
Poetry
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A view of the Nigerian poetry scene
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John Ashbery
”at his best”
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in Austin
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Before there was Neal & Jack,
there was Sam & Bill
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Marcel & James
just said no
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But did Bill
know Fletcher?
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Bidding
for Kim Addonizio’s
thong
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Interviewing Steve Swallow
about
Robert Creeley
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An interview with
Neil Gaiman
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Talking with
Nate Mackey
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Quoting
Louis Menand
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Talking with
Nikki Giovanni
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The Independent Press Association
has folded
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Modernism
comes to the Corcoran
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New music
and the blogosphere
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The ontology of
Second Life
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Writers in
have no choice
but to be
public intellectuals
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“the voice of
British Asian poetry”
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Why are there no
great Braille poets?
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The best selling book
in
won’t be published
until July
§
turns on the radio
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Jonathan Mayhew
gives
good snowclone
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Amanda Nadelberg
on
Lisa Lubasch
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The last hurrah
of the Berkeley Renaissance
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Free the Ulysses Two!
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Edwin Morgan at 86
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Look at this article in its
”printable view”
and the example
doesn’t look like
”condensed language”
in the slightest,
just a pleonast’s
sloppy prose
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“Poetry
should be as well written
as prose”
(Rebecca Brown
quoting Pound)
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Why theme-based
anthologies
are a joke
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The battle over aesthetics
sends in the clowns
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Yes,
conservatives
really are like that
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For example,
Al Alvarez
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The book as new tech,
ja?
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Molly Ivins
1944-2007
When I was the executive editor of The Socialist Review, back betwixt 1986 & 1989, I found myself reading The Texas Observer, a journal with which we traded free subscriptions, just so I could read this one fantastic columnist they had by the name of Molly Ivins. So I was not at all surprised, in the intervening years, as she went on to become famous as a nationally syndicated columnist, her razor-sharp wit, common sense & basic human decency being a killer combination of skills for anyone in her line of work. She tried to warn the nation about the man she dubbed Shrub, and she was right.
Ms. Ivins kept writing right through her three bouts with cancer, tho it cut into her regularity as a columnist & turned her magnificent head of red hair white &, at points, non-existent. Her final column, just three weeks ago, was entitled “Stand Up Against the Surge.” One way to say thank you to Molly for all of her decades of work in our behalf today is to join some one million bloggers and blog readers who will call their U.S. Senators to tell them to stop the escalation & bring our troops home now. Follow this link –
http://pol.moveon.org/virtualmarch
– and the good folks at MoveOn will help with the phone numbers and even show you when the best time to call is &, if you want, send a text message to your cell phone reminding you when that moment has arrived. If anybody asks, tell them Molly sent you.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
It’s going to take 30 years at minimum, and 50 years is more likely, to get any fair sense of which major poets & artists were born in 2006. But we know that we lost a significant number of both. Among the poets whose passing this year I’ve noted on this blog were
Irving Layton
Barbara Guest
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Gilbert Sorrentino
James L. Weil
kari edwards
Of these, edwards is the one I knew best. I’ve written of kari here & here, and I plan to do more sometime soon. I’d met Barbara Guest briefly & superficially a few times in the last years I lived in the Bay Area. And I’d corresponded with Weil in the 1960s, when I was anxious about getting my work around & Elizabeth Press was one of the best small publishing operations going. He was generous to me, but my work lacked the discipline that was the hallmark of what he really liked. That’s probably still true.
Finlay seemed far away, geographically, historically, aesthetically. My impression is that he wasn’t the most gregarious of men & my only view of the
Sorrentino is somebody I always thought I would meet & never did. I liked his fiction, loved his poetry & was thoroughly inspired by his critical writing – I’ve noted before that it is one of the models I’ve used in thinking about this weblog. But he was something of a recluse – when he went to teach at Stanford, which he did for over 20 years, I never saw him at a reading up in
Elsewhere in the field of art, some of the people who have passed include video pioneer Nam Jun Paik, sci-fi masters Stanislaw Lem & Octavia Butler (the latter due to a sad household accident, falling & hitting her head in her garden), and Allan Kaprow, who didn’t invent happenings, tho he seems to have been destined to work in that form.
2006 was also the year that
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Friday night’s MLA offsite reading can be listened to – or downloaded – here. Some photos of the event are here.
Monday, December 04, 2006
kari edwards died of heart failure on Saturday. kari was 52. kari and I read together once and I liked the work, which was at once both rough & immediate, with terrific attention to detail plus an ear to language as social. There was one trick to writing about kari – kari didn’t like you to use pronouns except to refer to yourself, because pronouns in English invariably register gender and kari’s position as a gender activist (kari’s term) was that there was no way to go about this that wasn’t wrong. Others tended to use the feminine, but when I wrote a piece that avoided pronouns altogether with regards to edwards, kari noticed & wrote to thank me.
kari always struck me as a classic instance of the person who may have great difficulty fitting into many another social context, but for whom the world of poetry offered great possibility. A kin in this regard to such divergent personalities as John Wieners, Jack Spicer, Hannah Weiner, Dan Davidson, Larry Eigner. One of the great things about the post-avant (and the most crucial way in which it differs from the old avant, let alone the
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Former Congressman Gerry Studds died last week, the victim of a blood clot in his lung. The first out-of-the-closet gay member of Congress, Studds had been in the news of late, as defenders of Mark Foley, the Republican chickenhawk who was playing at cybersex with House pages, pointed out that Studds had himself been in a similar situation back in the 1980s and had been voted back into office several times afterwards. But Studds didn’t come from the party of homophobia, and therein lies a difference. What killed Foley’s career was not pedophilia, but hypocrisy.
If the Foley story is noteworthy primarily because it has helped to reveal what everyone but the Christian right has known since Roy Cohn was an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, that there are plenty of gay Republicans, then the most interesting thing about the 1,490 stories I was able to find Sunday on Google’s news tracker concerning Studds is that over 400 were reprints of either the Associated Press or New York Times version of his obit, both of which referred to Dean Hara as Studds’ husband.
On the other hand, Headline News, CNN’s peripatetic network for the ADHD audience, called Hara his “partner,” which is true enough in the general sense, but fails to note that Studds & Hara were in fact married in
So how does change come, finally, in the world? In part, it’s just in the ordinariness of a noun phrase, as at the end of this opening sentence from
Gerry E. Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress and a demanding advocate for
Friday, August 18, 2006
Depression stole a friend last Friday. One of my favorite co-workers at Gartner, Bruce Caldwell, died after spending more than a year on disability. I first met Bruce a decade ago when he covered service and support for InformationWeek & I was handling marketing and market intelligence for Technology Service Solutions (TSS), an IBM-Kodak joint venture. Gartner hired him to focus on IT outsourcing right about the time that IBM Global Services folded in TSS. When I joined Gartner in 2000, focusing on infrastructure support services, Caldwell & I often found ourselves working together on specific projects. The grumpy demeanor of a skeptical journalist melted away to reveal a delightful, dour wit &, rare thing for Gartner, somebody who was as at least as good at the craft of prose as he was at technology. Bruce had been both a working journalist and a union activist, which meant that our world views were pretty much in step. The only part that I never fully got – my failing, not his – was his passion for sailing & the ocean, one reason he was no longer living in
Depression is certainly no stranger to anyone involved in the world of poetry, and the disease has been a regular visitor to my family tree as well. My grandmother, who pretty much raised me, had a severe case of chronic depression that was never treated during her lifetime, beyond taking one cruise to
Depression is one of those diseases – schizophrenia & Tourette’s syndrome are two others – for which the symptoms are often perceived as social, rather than medical, by casual outsiders. The disease – or its symptoms – is an embarrassment. People are told to “pull it together,” “suck it up,” or “get over it.” But that only happens if you are very fortunate with your particular version of the condition & the combination of medications & treatment options. My own experience is that what works for person A almost never seems to be of much use to person B, which I interpret as signaling that what we now call one disease is, in fact, a broad range of different-but-similar conditions, each with their own etiologies. It’s like ADHD, so-called attention deficit disorder, something you can almost bet won’t be seen in 100 years the way it is today, but rather as a spectrum of many different things going on, or going wrong, in one’s system.
That misperception can, I think, be particularly toxic in the world of poetry. All too often we – by which I include myself, among others – tend to engage with somebody trying to pick some fight when what is driving their behavior has little or nothing to do with aesthetic judgments & differences. And we tend to excuse behavior – substance abuse in particular – when what is going on is amateur self-medication. Partly this has to do with how open the world of poetry is – a major psychosis need not stand in the way of success, if handled right (and how many other fields can you say that about?) – but partly we do it just because it’s easier to put it all back on the individual who is acting out. There is a certain morbid fascination to it all. At its worst, you see behavior like the “pool” George Starbuck once told me about, of folks around the
What I want to say is this. If you have a problem, please seek help. It can be a frustrating, trial-&-error process, but it beats not trying. If you have friends or family with a problem, help them to get help. If you see someone in the comments stream to this (or any) blog who is acting out for reasons that have little to do with the topic at hand, don’t just jump in & verbally or intellectually rip them to shreds. That’s not only too easy, it does no good whatsoever. Poetry isn’t about one-upsmanship, or it shouldn’t be.
End of rant.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
The most expensive reading ticket
I’ve heard of in some time
promises to be a bargain.
$60 Canadian
gets you a book-length reading
of The Men
by Lisa Robertson,
a three-course dinner
& all male fashion show
Friday, July 7, in
as part of
The Scream
literary festival
& for $5 more
you get the book too.
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Soft Skull Press is bringing out a new edition of Eunoia.
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I’ve been getting thank you notes
for shutting down
the comments stream.
But there has also been a drop-off
in the number of visits per day.
Personally, I miss the serious comments
that were on topic.
But toward the end,
that had declined to no more than
ten percent of the comments overall.
So if & when I reopen that feature
it will be after I have figured out
some way to ensure
that comments stay focused.
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There will be a memorial event for
William Talcott
at Moe’s Books in
Saturday, July 8
at 7:30 pm
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One of the great presses
from the 1960s onward
finally has its own web site:
Check out those early journals
& those up-to-the-moment books
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Sunday’s NY Times Book Review
looks at the collected poems
of Ishmael Reed.
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The best piece I’ve read lately
on Donald Hall
is in the Harvard Crimson
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