An interview with Ben Lerner
§
Ellen Willis
has died
§
Those who have drunk the Kool-Aid
wait for it
to take effect
§
Reader’s digest
(literally)
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
My page
on Poets.Org
from the
Academy of American Poets
§
Paul Auster
is useless,
so says
Paul Auster
§
Geez,
why haven’t
American book awards
thought of this?
§
Choreographer
Margy Jenkins
used to say
”The essence of dance
is fund-raising”
§
Who made
Howl
an icon?
§
One view
of the poetry scene
in Taiwan
§
The $5 Pollock
§
Books
vs.
personal budgets
§
Prose
vs.
prose in comix
§
Commentary
(the journal, that is)
on
The Shakespeare Wars
§
Saturday, November 04, 2006
To watch
Bruce Andrews
spar with Bill O’Reilly
on The O’Reilly Factor
click on the image above,
then scroll down
to “Other Features”
& click on the image of Bruce
§
Sometime early on Sunday,
this weblog will welcome its 900,000th visit.
Thank you.
In 2002-03,
it took 50 weeks
to get the first 50,000 visits.
The last 100,000
came in just 14.
§
Farouk Shousha
off the air
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Susan Weil,
an artist at
§
Mose Tolliver
1920-2006
A good collection
of his work
§
The anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
1926-2006
§
Lewis MacAdams
on Allen Ginsberg
And this
more skeptical
perspective
§
Here, Bullet
A hit book
of poems
from the war in
§
“Ennui,”
a new poem
by Sylvia Plath
Surrounded by hype
§
The love life
of William Empson
”through all the booze and battiness”
(a slightly more literary review)
§
Critiquing
in Tehran
§
The “first novel
by an African-American
woman”
Saturday, October 28, 2006
§
Good news for Salt
(It’s not every day
I find my name in
The Guardian)
§
Salt’s web site
has received
over 1,000,000
hits this month
& over
7,000,000 hits
over all
§
§
Yes!
§
A contemporary poet
of ghazals
§
Of poetry
in Persia
§
§
§
Be true
to your strange
§
The mood in Armenia
as seen from its poems
§
Paul Muldoon
interviewed by an Irish daily
(Muldoon,
who writes rock lyrics
on occasion,
neglects to mention
a work of the same name
by one
Jim Morrison)
§
A piece on Howl
on All Things Considered
§
My note on archives
neglected
to include
the very great collection
online
from
Naropa
§
Both
the Archive of the Now
&
PENNsound
inform me
that I undercounted
the number of poets
for whom
they have recordings
available
(Hear
J.H. Prynne
read
John Wieners
”Cocaine”
here)
Mea
big
culpa
Friday, October 27, 2006
The top 40
American
magazine covers
ever
And for 2006
§
This being
“the premier trade association”
for consumer magazines
§
Penguin Books
gets virtual
with a
Second Life
§
Katherine Dreier
and
Marcel Duchamp
§
Inventing the kwansaba
§
The winners
of the Whiting Award
are announced
§
The book thief
who got probation
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
What Nikki Giovanni said
§
Steve Evans
on
Poets for Bush
§
The passing of
a linguist of the old school,
Bill Bright,
(also the father of Susie)
§
Multimedia Friendships:
A panel on
Saturday, October 28
in Paris
§
Microsoft signs deal
to compete with Google
in the “digitize everything”
sweepstakes
§
70 years
after Millay’s fire
§
The value of
Robert Bly
§
Alice Quinn
stuck in the Wayback Machine
interviews
Galway Kinnell & Phil Levine
§
Who sets the curriculum?
(U.K. version)
§
“More people write poetry
than go to football matches”
§
Old poets in
The New Statesman
§
The “other woman”
in the life of
Ted Hughes
§
Reading report:
Charles Dickens
§
Translating pidgin English
§
“On Englishness,”
a top ten
list of books
chosen by
Billy Bragg
§
The “885
greatest artists
of all time”
(on which
Billy Bragg
is 295)
§
If you can get the cops
to read, then…
Sunday, October 15, 2006
When I think of Shirley Kaufman
I think of a poet
who attended
roughly the same years I did,
not of somebody
who is 83!
§
Reading
Mahmoud Darwish
in Hebrew
§
Imagining
poets without notebooks
because they can’t
write longhand
§
More anxiety
about the web’s
impact on writing
§
A review of Sony’s
ebook reader
§
Selling off
one of the great libraries
of medieval manuscripts
§
A
poem
that I genuinely like
§
Koch fiends
”thrive on instability”
§
The next inescapable
book series
about to be transformed
into mega-movie
extravaganzas
§
A “former Dutch colonies
arts festival”
in
includes lots of poetry
§
Nate Mackey & H.L. Hix
are among
the poets on the shortlist
for the
National Book Award
Which was, for once,
not announced
in
Ever the optimist,
I’m betting on Nate
to become the
first post-avant
to win such an award
§
Maya Angelou
outpolls
Garrison Keeler, Billy Collins,
Mary Oliver & Pablo Neruda
to win
the Quill Book Award
for poetry
§
“There is no such thing
as performance poetry”
§
The depths
of
the Nobel Prize
§
But this year’s winner
seems much more
promising.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Robert Anton Wilson
needs our help
§
How indie bookstores
can change
to survive
the current market
(hint: get rid of
most of the books)
§
Fifty years
of independent books
in
§
Even more
on indie bookstores
§
In
this week
The Festival of the Book
will include
a live show
of Selected Shorts
§
The Allen Ginsberg
industry
is growing
§
Impunities:
An Experimental Writing Conference
next week
in
§
Against the concept
of progress
in poetry
§
Naming the latest
literary tendency:
(new wave fabulists?)
§
Ruining
the Poetry Room
§
The best
political reporter
on television
today
Saturday, October 07, 2006
RFID
comes to bookstores
so that book clerks
will soon need to know
even less
than most do now
Pete Doherty
of The Libertines
& Babyshambles
on the poets
who inspire him
§
Laura Bush
on the books
that inspire her:
On top
is Hop on Pop
§
George W,
on the other hand,
inspires us to
get jiggy with the arts
§
Adrienne Rich
& why
Laura Bush
won’t invite her
to the White House
§
Inside the Poetry Tent
at the National Book Festival
§
On Words:
a conference on
Robert Creeley
at SUNY-Buffalo
§
Oskar Pastior,
poet
& the lone German member
of Oulipo,
has died
§
The death of
Omran Salahi,
Iranian poet & satirist
Some of Salahi’s work
can be found
here
§
”This handbook identifies
more than 1300 poets
laureated within the Empire
and adjacent territories
between 1355 and 1804”
An interesting looking history
of Poets Laureate
in the
Holy Roman Empire
but I’d fire
the librarian
who bought this,
even at the pre-publication
”discount”
of
$537.30
This is exactly
the sort of project
that ought to be
on the web
for free.
§
That new Robert Frost poem
is not
the rare find
the press suggests
§
When the referent
gazes back
§
October
Carrboro
Poetry
Report
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Great looking "rubbish"
§
The visual art world
lags behind
poetry
in women's participation
§
Somebody
is doing
something
about this
§
Another blog’s perspective
on the same problem
§
And from a gallery owner
§
And we should not forget
A.I.R. NYC
Friday, September 29, 2006
The Sony Reader
will start out
October 1st
offering 10,000 ebooks,
all from the Gang of Six
§
§
Blogspot
is routinely blocked
in some parts of the world
(The People’s Republic of China,
but people there
can find Silliman’s Blog
here
§
Naropa’s
Study Abroad
program
in the Bowery
§
Michael Bérubé
culture war profiteer?
§
Shin Yu Pai & Daisy Fried
are two reasons
to attend
the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
this weekend.
§
Amazon’s new plan:
sell video downloads
& gain the “right”
to monitor & modify
customer PCs
§
§
A poet laureate
for children
& they missed
Maurice Sendak??
§
What goes up stays up:
Chomsky’s
Hegemony or Survival
goes thru two
additional printings
§
The NEA’s Poetry Pavilion
at the National Book Festival
will include
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
of
§
Robert Frost’s
new
”flurry bird of war”
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Hugo’s book club
pushes Chomsky
onto best seller list
§
§
Mazisi Kunene
poet laureate of
has died
§
The “farewell” column
of Jerome Weeks
The
wouldn’t print
§
O missed opportunities!
If Jim Behrle hadn’t spent his energy
blogging people to
”blow off” my reading in NYC
last week
(you can delete the words, Jimmy,
but Google & Technorati
caches reveal all),
he could have gone out to dinner afterwards
with Joan Houlihan & me.
§
Patricia Lockwood has this idea
we should all dress up
as lines from Wallace Stevens
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Steven May’s blog
reviewing chapbooks
is not just a good idea,
it’s also the 900th
blog linked in the roll
to the left
§
Something to try out
now that it’s in beta
is the
Poem Cube
Salman Rushdie
on the Nazi past
of Gunter Grass
§
Michael Graves
on postmodern design
for the physically challenged
§
§
The lost love poems
of Ted Hughes
§
§
The “best-loved English poet
of the 20th century.”
§
§
§
Another Nigerian poet profiled
(Akeem Lasisi)
§
Interviewing the poetry editor
of The Atlantic
§
Rebel poet
Donald Hall
§
Bengali poet
Shamsur Rahman
has died
§
“Don’t label him a landscape poet”:
(on that son of Pound & Blake,
Charles Wright)
§
“I really was a horrible person.
An awful person…”
(an interview with John Kinsella)
Sunday, August 13, 2006
§
One more reason why
poets should read linguistics –
Killing Time:
Metaphors & their implications
for lexicons & grammar
(PDF file)
§
Rudy Burkhardt,
Ray Johnson &
Peter Hujar
at Vassar’s
Loeb Art Center
§
The Amazon of Used Books:
The impact of
on the bookstores
of the SF Bay Area.
§
Chris Mansel has been
interviewing poets.
Sheila E. Murphy is the latest
& there’s a great one with
Hank Lazar as well.
Not to be confused with
the Australian writer
Chris Mansell
.§
An interview with
John Tranter
Monday, July 03, 2006
Some last (and lasting) images of the Naropa Summer Writing Program:
Both Naropa and the program have grown up quite a bit since I was here last in 1994. Gone is the large canvas tent that was home to all of the major events back in the day. I ran into people, even on the Naropa staff, who seemed never to have heard of this fragile bit of infrastructure, so perfect for huddling together under during thunderstorms. In 1994, the tent was virtually the signature of the program. The program seems busier & far more efficient than it was 12 years ago.
Overall, my impression is that the quality of the students as writers has risen as well. The top-level students are about where they were then, but this time I didn’t come into contact with any folks who were there just because they were lost souls.
I had forgotten just how busy they keep the faculty. If I wasn’t teaching, I was preparing to teach pretty much the entire week. I only saw Keith Abbott once, at a dinner for faculty on Monday night – and really had only two moments during the whole week where I got to do something spontaneous because I had the time: sneak off after my student interviews on Wednesday to catch An Inconvenient Truth¹ at one of the funkiest theaters in the United Artists’ chain & take an impromptu trip to a coffee house with Elizabeth Willis, Alan Gilbert, Lisa & Jenn Jarnot on Saturday.
I had not realized that Lisa has a sister who is a terrific visual artist (see here).
Poet whose work I didn’t know at all before coming to
The acronym for the Summer Writing Program, SWP, is used also by the Socialist Workers Party & Sherwin Williams Paint. So far as I can tell, Naropa is the only one of the three not promising to “cover the earth in red.”
Infrastructure secret without which the SWP could not function: the Naropa Bookstore, the best “under 1,000 square feet” bookshop I’ve ever been in. Ralph, whose last name I never caught, works wonders. The place is full with many new items in stock virtually every single day.
Largest single problem I had: less than one-third of my students knew that there were books that were required reading before they got to the first class. The SWP seems not to do a good job communicating this prior to the program. Those who did know all seemed to feel that they’d figured this out by lucky accident.
Second largest problem: US Air & its random ways with luggage. On my way to
Best laugh: Barbara Barg’s, when, halfway through dinner with myself, Chris Tysh & Maureen Owen, she realized who I was. She was part way through the sentence, “You should talk to Ron Silliman,” when this happened.
Statement you know you will live to regret the instant you say it: Richard Tuttle’s “I’m not an intellectual, I’m an artist. I don’t have to answer that.” Best response: Donald Preziosi’s “Yes, you do.”
Most well-read student: Army Sgt. Charles Roess. Teachers would compare notes on how impressed they were. Everything I said about the preparation of students in my note last Friday is not true of him. Further evidence that autodidacts have a big advantage in the world of poetry.
Roman Jacobson Day: Last Monday, when Preziosi & I both positioned Jacobson centrally in our talks on the philosophy & poetics panel, and I’m told that Elizabeth Willis also mentioned him in her workshop. By the end of the week, Roess had picked up a long-out-of-print copy of Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning.
Chris Tysh & I both taught Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics.
Unexpected audio pleasure: Totally Yodelly, a two-volume compilation of the history of yodeling by Jack Collom & Sam Fuqua. It is otherworldly & fabulous.
¹ Everyone should see An Inconvenient Truth, even if you think you know all the arguments or can’t stand Al Gore. I still haven’t forgiven Gore for picking Joe Lieberman, elevating one of the worst politicians in the Democratic party to a “statesman,” but what Gore is doing now is more important for the country – and the world – than being president.
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