Readers of this blog might remember that I've admired Tony Green's poem-object "Big Mug Vodka Maker" from afar - from Philly to Auckland, to be specific. And as I've also mentioned recently here, Tony Green visited Philly, first time in 20 years, and gave a presentation at the Writers House. We did an interview for the PennSound podcast series. He read some poems, and he also read several of his poem-objects. He bought along the one I especially admired and gave it to me. It now sits prominently on display in my office at the Writers House. Best of all, we now have for our archive a video of Tony showing this object and reading it/reading from it.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
big mug vodka maker
Readers of this blog might remember that I've admired Tony Green's poem-object "Big Mug Vodka Maker" from afar - from Philly to Auckland, to be specific. And as I've also mentioned recently here, Tony Green visited Philly, first time in 20 years, and gave a presentation at the Writers House. We did an interview for the PennSound podcast series. He read some poems, and he also read several of his poem-objects. He bought along the one I especially admired and gave it to me. It now sits prominently on display in my office at the Writers House. Best of all, we now have for our archive a video of Tony showing this object and reading it/reading from it.
"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 
