introduction to 1960

My introduction to the recent symposium on poetry in 1960. It begins with a look at a late late 1959 essay by Stanley Kunitz predicting that the 1960s will in poetry be a time of consolidation and not of experiment--that experiment was all exhausted, played out.

Semina Circle and Meltzer

At left is an album cover: David Meltzer's jazz poems, 1958.

Meltzer published The Clown in 1960. It was issued by the Semina press. Jed Birmingham on REALITYSTUDIO.org has written about the Semina Circle and Meltzer, thus:

This mini-archive sat in my bookshelf for a couple of years untouched until January of this year when I purchased Wallace Berman and the Semina Circle. This book accompanied an exhibit relating to the literature and art surrounding Berman until his untimely death in 1976. This exhibit is currently touring the West Coast and will make its way to New York City (New York University to be exact) in January 2007. A complete run of Semina Magazine represents the Holy Grail for me as a collector. An early fragment of Naked Lunch (Pantapon Rose) appeared in Semina 4. As I have mentioned before, Semina is the epitome of the little magazine as art object. David Meltzer appeared in Semina as well. In fact, the entire issue of Semina 6 features Meltzer’s The Clown.

Unlike Burroughs, Meltzer was an intimate member of the Berman Circle. He published a few books including Luna with Black Sparrow. In the late 1960s, he wrote a series of avant garde pornographic novels for Essex House. At the same time, he fronted the psychedelic band Serpent Power. In 2004, Meltzer published Beat Thing. He also edited two collections of valuable interviews entitled San Francisco Poets and San Francisco Beat. A collection of Meltzer’s papers are at Washington University.

recordings of 1960 symposium now available

Now available at PennSound:

* segmented audio recordings of Snelson on Cage, Kaufman on Guest, Perelman on Donald Allen, Nichols on Berkson/O'Hara, Silliman on Duncan, Goldman on Brooks, Funkhouser on Mac Low, Gallagher on Baraka, Hennessey on Daisy Aldan, DuPlessis on O'Hara, and Bernstein on Eigner;

* audio recording of the complete program (downloadable mp3)

* video recording of the complete program

Click on the video player above for (obviously) the video, or go here for links to the video and all audio: link.

versions of Ike's greatest speech

Click here for more.

1960 last night

Bob Perelman presenting on Don Allen's "New American" anthology and Mel Nichols talking about the Bill Berkson/Frank O'Hara collaboration at the 1960 symposium last night at the Kelly Writers House. Stay tuned for video and audio recordings and, later, transcripts of the discussion and various essays in response.

1960 symposium, Monday December 6, 6 PM eastern time

Next Monday, December 6, at 6:00 PM, the Writers House celebrates what happened in poetry a half century ago with a symposium entitled POETRY IN 1960. Symposium host and Writers House faculty director AL FILREIS brings together eleven poets each to discuss a seminal work from that pivotal year -- work by Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Cage, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Jackson Mac Low. A Q&A and reception will follow. We hope you will join us for this exciting confabulation!

If you can't make it to Philly, watch this live as a video stream. Just go here at 6 PM eastern time next Monday and watch!

The recordings will later be made available in PennSound and the symposium will be published in Jacket2.

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The Kelly Writers House presents

POETRY IN 1960
a symposium

featuring

BOB PERELMAN
RON SILLIMAN
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS
CHRIS FUNKHOUSER
ERICA KAUFMAN
JUDITH GOLDMAN
KRISTEN GALLAGHER
DANNY SNELSON
MICHAEL S. HENNESSEY
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
MEL NICHOLS

hosted by AL FILREIS

Monday, December 6, at 6:00 PM in the Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required - this event is free & open to the public

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KWH Faculty Director AL FILREIS curates a remarkable gathering of poets to present brief commentaries of books of poetry published in 1960 – to help mark the 50th anniversary of each. Each poet will read his or her 500- to 750-word critical commentary or retrospective review, after which there will be a Q&A session and a celebratory reception. The poet's commentaries will later be published as a special feature on the poetry & poetics of 1960 in Jacket2.

BOB PERELMAN on The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen

RON SILLIMAN on The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan

RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS on Second Avenue by Frank O'Hara

CHRIS FUNKHOUSER on Stanzas for Iris Leza by Jackson Mac Low

ERICA KAUFMAN on The Location of Things by Barbara Guest

JUDITH GOLDMAN on The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks

KRISTEN GALLAGHER on Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by LeRoi Jones

DANNY SNELSON on Cartridge Music by John Cage

MICHAEL S. HENNESSEY on A New Folder edited by Daisy Aldan

CHARLES BERNSTEIN on On My Eyes by Larry Eigner

MEL NICHOLS on Hymns of St. Bridget by Bill Berkson & Frank O'Hara

1960 event, December 6th

For more, go here.

Poetry mag "versus" beatniks

There isn't any conflict of interest between the universities and POETRY. Quote, unquote.

we're in Betty Friedan country here

Dean of Penn's College for Women in 1960. Oh, the problems of separatism. Click here for more.

Bob Perelman's history

I've recently published a long essay on the poetry of Bob Perelman. It's called "The President of This Sentence." It's about the convergence in Perelman's writing of two parallel and also, at times, convergent analyses--one of modernism's rise and fall; the other of the state of Cold War at the point of giving way to New Left and countercultural skepticism. Here is a link to the whole essay, and here is the opening paragraph:

Bob Perelman a few years ago announced that he suffers from HAD (Historical Affective Disorder). He was joking, but not entirely. His history is sometimes a bit off, yet as for his historiography, especially in the verse, it is almost always perfectly pitched. Perelman disclosed his HAD in a disarming prefatory riff launching a long rejoinder to criticisms of The Marginalization of Poetry, a book of essays he published in 1996. His advocacy of a particular tracing of an avant-garde in that collection had been defended by, he had to admit, a “defiant army of defiantly non-avant-garde sentences hurled at the four coigns of the balkanized master page.” The historical disaffection here, the worst effect of the malady, was to have forgotten in his capacity as a critic the main form/content lesson of the very same modernist prose literary-historiography — learned from Williams in Spring & All and In the American Grain; and from Pound in his most dissociative essays — that was and still is Perelman’s own modernist ground zero. Or, as Ron Silliman forcefully noted, Perelman’s chief impairment derived from a move into the ivied academy, whereupon the book-length display of super-coherent strings of such “nonavant-garde sentences” (among other issuances of normative critical behavior) rendered unruly heterodoxy unlikely or impossible. Thus had our HAD sufferer tellingly — indeed, happily — placed himself at a distinct disadvantage. In the poetry, over the years, both pre- and post-Ivy League, such symptoms as issuing forth from Perelman’s special expression of historical disorder — (1) a keen and specific sense of how the American past operates in the present, mixed with (2) deliberate socio-idiomatic fuzziness and (3) a comic mania for anachronism — have always been the source of his finest and most remarkable writing. The greatest Perelmanian ur-anachronism of all — that there might not be a future of memory — produced verse in the 1980s and ‘90s that offers the most perspicacious understanding of the end of the first Cold War (the early 1960s) I have yet read in any genre. This work presents an analysis-in-verse that convincingly links crazy characterizations of anticommunist conspiracies to a generationally earlier history of the rise and later demise of the modernist revolution.

united states of nicotine

Ad in Life, 11/30/1959. There hadn't been 50 states for very long when this ad ran.

art comes presented by a carnival barker...

"Art comes presented by a carnival barker and has no longer...anything to do with 'glowing,' 'roaring,' 'radiant' creation." From Paul Celan's speech, "The Meridian." The text: >>>

on the rounendless talk of cut-ups

More...

surreal collagist at home

Tosh Berman. More...

Wormwood's return

Christa Malone, Marvin Malone's daughter, has taken up the cause of the Wormwood Review. She's created a new web site which features, among many other things, tributes to Marvin's editorship. My 1960 blog, a while back, took a look at Wormwood's founding in 1960.

Alex Katz in 1960

Click here for more.

humanities saves all

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which era is the era of The Pound Era?

Hugh Kenner's huge (and hugely important) book on Pound was published in 1973. A book of its time? Well, considering '73: maybe a book counter to the trend of its time. Ah, but never mind those assumptions. The book was first planned in....1960. Thirteen years earlier. As I learned yesterday when reading some Kenner correspondence in Chicago. Check out my 1960 blog for more.

Hem as poet

Man, Ferlinghetti and company were bold: announcing that their edition of Hemingway's poems was "PIRATED." For more, click here.

wormwood

"WORM WOULD BITE-CHEW" begins the wording on the oft-eccentric jacket of an issue of the Wormwood Review, edited by the pharmacologist Marvin Malone for 30 years from 1960 to 1990. On my 1960 blog I took a breezy foray into Malone and the mag's founding.