New, new, new...at PennSound: our Michael Davidson author page. Michael has been at UCSD since 1974, where he helped create the now utterly invaluable Mandeville Special Collections (which houses manuscripts of many avant-garde poets including George Oppen and Jackson Mac Low). He is the editor of a new edition of Oppen's collected poems (2002), has published many books of poems, and a number of critical books. Of the latter, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century is probably the most well known (1989). My own favorite is Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word which is, in part, about the modernist documentary poem and was a real influence on my writing about the same form in my Counter-Revolution of the Word.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
new at PennSound
New, new, new...at PennSound: our Michael Davidson author page. Michael has been at UCSD since 1974, where he helped create the now utterly invaluable Mandeville Special Collections (which houses manuscripts of many avant-garde poets including George Oppen and Jackson Mac Low). He is the editor of a new edition of Oppen's collected poems (2002), has published many books of poems, and a number of critical books. Of the latter, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century is probably the most well known (1989). My own favorite is Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word which is, in part, about the modernist documentary poem and was a real influence on my writing about the same form in my Counter-Revolution of the Word.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
