sock it to him, sweet Tito

Lawrence Felinghetti's "Baseball Canto" sits in the (I'm imagining April) sun, early-season baseball, schmoozing with the left-field bleacher-bound grungy populace. And makes the presences of blacks and Chicanos on the S.F. Giants into a reason for associating the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition and Poundian modernism and American conformity (the latter imposed by Irish umpires). Its aesthetic and ideological oppositions are all hilariously confused. Does Larry F. know that the pitcher, although Caribbean and thus blessed, is not likely to hit a home run as his means of out-performing the white players? It's a mess but I love it all the same. Yes, that's Lawrence Felinghetti's Baseball Canto. (I also have made available a RealAudio recording of F. performing the poem.)

start with Stevens

Meaghan O'Rourke began to write poetry after being assigned Wallace Stevens's "This Solitude of Cataracts" in a class. This fact came out in an interview with a student newspaper in north Texas where O'Rourke recently gave a reading.

believe you me

TV film: a young Jew helps his skinhead friends desecrate and try to destroy a synagogue. He doesn't protest when one of them urinates from the balcony, but some residual religiosity makes him urge the others to stop tossing around a Torah and put it back where they got it. He identifies with Hitler in part because the Nazis recognized the importance of the Jews.

It's The Believer.

Reviewed by Julie Salamon in 2002.

which way are you going, Walt Whitman?

Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm radio show does a tribute to Walt Whitman. For details and a link to the audio: click here.

happy Passover from the NJ Turnpike

widowhood = slapsticky humiliation

Joyce Carol Oates.

Have you thought about writing a memoir? I wanted to write a memoir about being a widow. It was going to be the opposite of Joan Didion. Hers is beautiful and elegiac. Mine would be filled with all sorts of slapstick, demeaning and humiliating things. Like trash cans whose bottoms are falling out.

Do you think widowhood is properly understood? I think that Didion took it on a very high plane, and she does have assistants and maybe a maid. But it’s actually a very hardscrabble experience. It’s not placid and tragic so much as it’s physically arduous.

From an interview conducted by Deborah Solomon.

perfers serial killer novels to poetry

A few days ago I wrote about what happened when NY City schools chancellor Harold Levy asked members of the School Board to read and discuss three poems by Wallace Stevens. Now I want to add one of the letters to the editor the Times published in response to their article about Levy's unusual move.

To the Editor:

Reacting to the possibility that Harold O. Levy, the interim schools chancellor, had put three Wallace Stevens poems and other interesting reading matter in her mailbox, Ninfa Segarra, a school board member, said, ''Probably if I had gotten it I would have thrown it out,'' and added: ''I'm not a poetry kind of person. I like serial killer novels'' (front page, May 2).

As New York City public school students face the start of an intense testing season and while the march toward more teacher testing continues, Ms. Segarra's close-minded remarks make one wonder whether school board members, too, should be subjected to academic testing.

ELLEN FREILICH
New York, May 3, 2000
The writer was an English teacher.

the prof you know personally

A year ago (3/20/08) I wrote this:

In today's NYT "Thursday Styles" section the lead story, under a huge photo of a famous crusty TV law prof, is a story about "the professor as open book." Wow! News! Now students and others can discover their professors' red wine preferences, their favorite films, their social-networking profiles, "friend" them. Or not - or not - if the academic in question does not choose to put such stuff up, which is most often the case, even at this late date into the internet age. So what really is the story here? The key perhaps is where the story runs: the "Style" section, not the higher-ed page/half-page in the main first section. This story befits the My Space/You Tube/no-one-is-private-anymore craze and has nothing to do with academics or education or the professoriat per se.

"It is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television....

While many professors have rushed to meet the age of social networking, there are some who think it is symptomatic of an unfortunate trend, that a professor’s job today is not just to impart knowledge, but to be an entertainer."

Now ponder this last part. The professor's "job" seemed to be in part to create an aura of personal impenetrability and solitariness and remoteness only when, as it happens, the technologies of personal knowing were what they were. Now that they are what they are, the "job" seems to be changing. These things are not innate. And as for entertainment, it's the Times that's asserting this by putting the "story" on its Style page. There's nothing more or less entertaining about a teacher who is known as distinct from unknown. It all depends on the teaching.

Now some Facebook friends and I have discussed the matter further and here are some of their comments:

[] M.L.: The professor's "job" seemed to be in part to create an aura of personal impenetrability and solitariness and remoteness only when, as it happens, the technologies of personal knowing were what they were. Now that they are what they are, the "job" seems to be changing. / If you remove the word "personal," 2x above, isn't this the same argument for all learning these days? Do you think that job is actually changing?

[] B.R.: Unsurprisingly, while I wholeheartedly agree with your general sentiment, and while I think you are actually a fascinating case study of someone who's utterly webbed up (2.0, natch) yet almost never in the "bethou me" sense -- in fact the contrary: almost always in a pedagogical or at least intellectually engaged/evangelical sense -- unsurprisingly, I'm not sure that, for some people anyway, the personal sh!t isn't possessed of some potent magnetism. Prof as celebrity, as it were: that same bone gets tickled. / But then, OTOH, isn't the poetic (STS) fallacy of YouTube & Facebook & whatnot that we can all be like celebrities, and have our wine preferences and our bunny suit escapades broadcast for consumption? YouTube -- to paraphrase Amis, "'TV, innit?'" That's a sexy promise. I suspect that demurrals about "the job" are, in some cases, cloaks for its indulgence.

[] D.M.: Personal impenetrability, solitariness, and remoteness are part of the mix when someone has a title that makes them the smartest person in the room. If it makes you feel better, those three qualities are minor superpowers.

[] J.F.: In a public school setting, administrators would frown upon this kind of formalized personal contact between teachers and students. (I have former students as facebook friends, but no current students, no matter how close I might be to them in class.) But you're right -- artificial boundaries inhibit education. I have, on more than one occasion told my students, "You're smarter than me; I just have 35 years on you, that's all." And the longer I do this (10 years now) I realize the absolute value of personal connections with students.

[] K.A.: blah blah blah ...what page are we on!?

artists: we will pay much of your rent

Through our ArtsEdge residency program, we will give you a place to live and work - and will pay half your rent! Deadline for applications for the 2009-10 residency is April 15. Here is more info and contact info for applicants. Our 2008-09 ArtsEdge resident is playwright Greg Romero.

digitizing reel-to-reel tapes

Will Creeley sent us this great note after hearing the newest PoemTalk about one of his father's poems:

I saw word of this latest episode via PennSound's excellent & useful Twitter feed, and figured it was a good opportunity to say thank you again to Al, Charles and everyone at PennSound & Kelly Writers House for taking in our big cardboard boxes and digitizing the reel-to-reel recordings inside with such care and precision.

Being relatively handy with capturing digital audio, I figured I could convert the reels myself with Dad's trusty old Sony reel-to-reel player. It was not to be: When I first plugged in the player and turned on the power, thick gray Hollywood-style smoke started escaping from the set! Dramatic and slapstick, but disappointing. Once the smoke cleared, I knew I needed help - and graciously, that's where you guys came in.

It's a real pleasure for me, Hannah, and our mother to know that Dad's recordings are where he would have wanted them to be: online! As his many e-mail correspondents knew well, Dad was thrilled by the possibilities presented by the internet's ability to facilitate access and discussion - the power of inclusion! - and podcasts like PoemTalk demonstrate exactly the reasons for his excitement. Thanks again.

-Will Creeley

Creeley driving the car

We've just released the newest episode of PoemTalk. Click here for more.

a New Zealander among us

Wystan Curnow, art critic and poet, spoke at the Writers House this evening on curating as a critical practice. The event was shown live on KWH-TV and is already available as a video recording. Wystan was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, and studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, Penn. So his two-week visit here is actually a return to his alma mater many many years later. This afternoon he joined me and Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman to record a PoemTalk episode on a poem by Louis Zukofsky--which will be released in a few months. Then we all went downstairs for his very good talk on curating. Have a look.

Frank over here

Frank Sherlock read from his poetry recently at the Writers House. Here is a video recording. Frank is the author of Over Here (Factory School 2009) and the co-author of Ready-To-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink 2008), a collaborative work with the Poet Laureate of Dumaine Street, Brett Evans. A duet with CAConrad entitled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems is forthcoming from Factory School in fall 2009.

theory-mongering and the holocaust

"An iron law of avant-garde art is that theorizing expands to fill a void of talent." And when the untalented theory-mongering avant-garde approaches the Holocaust, there's special trouble. According to George Will.

I'm talking about a George Will column in 2002: on exploiting the Holocaust intellectually.

Will surveyed Holocaust-related games and toys and avant-garde exhibits and academic theories. He associates this stuff with "the explosive growth of Holocaust studies [which] has turned that genocide into a 'wonderful, creative teaching opportunity.'" (So such wonderfulness and creativity is tragically ironic, such "growth" lamentable.)

In the end this piece becomes another excuse for skewering liberal, facile academia, for "what hope can there be for even minimal decency and understanding when today's intelligentsia is hospitable to trivializations of a huge tragedy?" Here's your link to the whole article.

they shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Harold Levy was an interim chancellor of New York City's public school system at the end of Giuliani and the beginning of Bloomberg. Levy got his BA from Cornell at a time when people like Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) and poet A. R. Ammons held forth - and Harold Bloom, too, for that matter (I think). Levy hung out in an intellectually vibrant circle that produced (not surprisingly, when you think of Bloom's potential influence) Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives. (Wolfowitz had grown up partly in Ithaca; his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell.) Somewhere along the line--from Ammons and maybe Harold Bloom--Harold Levy picked up an absolute love of Wallace Stevens. And, many years later, when he was appointed chancellor he told all the members of the New York City School Board that they would be convened to discuss three poems by Stevens (Levy now recalls that two of these were "The Emperor of Ice Cream" and "Sunday Morning") and would be given a violin lesson by Isaac Stern. Levy's role (he was a businessperson) was to bring efficiency to the system, but he also brought what might be deemd the opposite--a conviction that Board members should be conversant in the philosophical questions of the sort that one would hope kids in the schools would face if and when presented with probing teaching. On May 2, 2000, the New York Times covered this story and here's the whole article:

May 2, 2000

Schools Chief Plays Higgins To Unlikely Eliza, the Board

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few weeks ago, the seven members of the New York City Board of Education found something odd in their mailboxes: three Wallace Stevens poems, courtesy of Harold O. Levy, the interim schools chancellor. ''Poetry,'' he wrote in an attached memo, ''can give voice to the inner souls of people who lead seemingly mundane lives.''

Then came the news that Mr. Levy was planning a series of lectures, intended specifically for the enlightenment of the board members. The first, scheduled for tomorrow night, will be on cosmology. That is, the study of the universe.

And next week, Mr. Levy will gather the school system's 43 superintendents for a group violin lesson at Carnegie Hall, taught by none other than Isaac Stern.

What is going on here?

If the school system's top officials did not have enough to worry about, with Mr. Levy pushing them to be more efficient and accountable, now he wants them to think more, too. Music and poetry are among the more esoteric parts of his plan to raise the level of debate on education policy, he says. That means focusing less on administrative minutiae, and adding intellectual rigor to the often tedious board meetings.

''The notion is to change the areas of conversation,'' Mr. Levy said in an interview, ''so that we are squarely confronting some of the great philosophical questions of our day.''

To that end, Mr. Levy has enlisted his friend, Jonathan Levi -- a novelist, jazz violinist and founding editor of the literary journal Granta -- to be the resident intellectual at 110 Livingston Street.

Mr. Levi, whose official title is executive assistant to the chancellor, says that his duties include bringing board members, school officials and students ''into the secret society that is New York City's intellectual culture.''

Whether they will go willingly is another question. After all, the members of the Board of Education -- who are appointed by the mayor and the borough presidents -- are known more for their political allegiances than their intellectual pursuits. At least one has suggested that Mr. Levy stick to being a manager and let them choose their own enrichment activities.

''For the most part I'm ignoring it,'' said Ninfa Segarra, one of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's appointees to the board, referring to the clippings that Mr. Levy has been circulating from Scientific American, The New York Review of Books and other erudite journals. ''I guess he thinks we don't read on our own. But every single board member gets Education Week. Most of us are pretty well versed on the issues.''

Ms. Segarra said she had not decided whether to attend the lectures. And as for the poems, she said she had not received them.

''Probably if I had gotten it I would have thrown it out,'' she said. ''I'm not a poetry kind of person. I like serial killer novels.''

Other board members appeared appreciative, or at least tolerant, of what one wryly described as Mr. Levy's attempt to play Henry Higgins.

''There is a very fine line between sharing information and being viewed as arrogant,'' said William C. Thompson Jr., the board president. ''But I don't think Harold has fallen on the side of arrogant. I see this as Harold constantly thinking and sharing ideas he finds exciting.''

Jerry Cammarata, one of the three board members who fought Mr. Levy's appointment, said his attempt to spark intellectual discourse was appropriate because the board's primary responsibility should be to debate and create policies.

''I think 110 Livingston should be an intellectually enriching experience for anyone who walks through the doors,'' Mr. Cammarata said. ''We should be continually thirsting for information. If he thinks this stuff is relevant, it would be imprudent and disrespectful of us not to give it a shot.''

But whatever their reaction to Mr. Levy's recent efforts, the board members pointed out that they had been mulling ideas long before Mr. Levy's appointment in January.

''We're always swapping stuff around,'' said Terri Thomson, the Queens member. ''The more we can learn together, the better.''

So far, Ms. Thomson and five other board members have signed up to attend the cosmology lecture, at the Museum of Natural History. The speaker will be Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, who will provide insights on how to teach such a complex subject. In addition to board members and administrators, Mr. Levy has invited several dozen of the city's science teachers. For the second lecture, Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia, will discuss the civil rights movement.

''This is a chance for them to exercise their minds,'' Mr. Levi (his name is pronounced with a long i), the son of a philosophy professor at Columbia, said this week. ''We want them to be doing mental push-ups.''

For the district superintendents, Mr. Levy has already brought in speakers like Jonathan Kozol, who has written extensively on urban education, and Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based advocacy group for poor and minority students. And, of course, they have the violin lesson to look forward to.

Mr. Levi said he and his boss would not be foisting lectures and clippings on the board -- and violin lessons on the superintendents -- if they did not believe that their audience was already highly intelligent.

''Henry Higgins was assuming that his audience was unsophisticated,'' Mr. Levi said. ''We're assuming our audience is sophisticated enough to listen to lectures at the highest level, but that in the course of their normal days as educators, they don't get the opportunity.''

But Ms. Segarra pointed out that Mr. Levy, a Citigroup executive, was hired for his corporate expertise, not his intellectual vigor. She said he had not used his managerial skills as much as she had hoped, and that he should be focusing on the coming summer school program, which is to be the largest in the city's history.

''He has a very limited amount of time to do some very critical things,'' Ms. Segarra said.

But while the plan to create a literary salon of sorts at 110 Livingston Street might not seem to fit in with Mr. Levy's efforts to make the Board of Education more businesslike, Mr. Levi said that in fact, the two efforts fit together seamlessly.

''To run a business you need to find the best resources and apply them as efficiently as you can,'' he said. ''My job is to look at the issue of resources more broadly, in terms of the artistic and intellectual resources of New York City.''

Mr. Levy did not deride his predecessors, but said that, as career educators, most were focused on a handful of initiatives directly related to classroom instruction. Many of those initiatives were abandoned when the next chancellor came in, he said.

''I don't want to blow through here with an initiative or project that won't withstand the test of time,'' Mr. Levy said. ''What I want to do is have a public debate about the methodologies and what the true needs of the system are.''

But whether such a debate will lead to permanent change is as open a question as whether Mr. Levy will become the permanent chancellor after his temporary contract ends in July. Quite possibly, his friend Mr. Levi said, people are reacting enthusiastically to Mr. Levy's initiatives simply because they do not expect him to stick around.

''The chancellor's office is such a revolving door,'' he said, ''you never know whether people are genuinely interested or just nodding politely and waiting for you to depart.''

spring hint

The dogwood in the Writers House garden was starting to flower. A just-arrived Joan Didion at left, the amazing Jamie-Lee Josselyn at right. Thanks to Barbara Brody Avnet, who took the shot.

telephony is so retro it's cool

For his newest "Poetry off the Shelf" podcast, Curtis Fox interviews me about our new dial-a-poem service. Just dial (215) 746-POEM and press "3" to listen to today's poem. Have a listen. Here's the first announcement of the project.

student will explore eastern Sephardim

I'm pleased to announce that Emma Morgenstern has won the Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant at the Kelly Writers House. We received dozens of fine applications.

Emma (class of 2010) is majoring in Linguistics. She has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine and Penn's own F-Word. Emma is also founder and editor-in-chief of Penn Appetit, Penn's first-ever and only student-run and -written magazine of food writing. Emma has also participated in the Penn Reading Initiative at Huey Elementary School.

Enabled by this grant, Emma will travel to Greece and Turkey to research and conduct interviews with the Jews of Thessaloniki and Istanbul, to learn about their culture, customs and linguistic behavior. She hopes to learn how being the member of a religious and ethnic minority affects attitudes toward religious, ethnic, and linguistic heritage. She will present her writing next fall at the Writers House.

As a way of memorializing her mother, Terry B. Heled, and of honoring the students of her alma mater in gratitude for the encouragement her own research and writing received while she was at Penn, Mali Heled Kinberg (C'95) has created this endowed fund at the Kelly Writers House that, each summer, will enable a student to travel for the purpose of conducting the research that will lead to a significant writing project.

For more about the Heled Grant, see:

writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/heled.

modernist skin

Irene Gammel and I corresponded on and off during the time she was writing her fine biography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. It's the only fully/carefully researched book about the Baroness that's been published. Here is the blurb I wrote for it:

The Baroness cut the most compelling modernist figure. She literally wore New York dada, thus inventing it as a pattern of aesthetic costume to be worn so tight that it was her skin, her self. She was, as Irene Gammel puts it in this remarkable biographical study, an "assemblage of paradoxes embodied in one body." That the Baroness knew and inspired or inspiringly repelled nearly everyone associated with the rise of modernist practice in New York has been already part of the story, but it has never been so richly detailed. In Gammel's presentation the Baroness emerges as far more than an ingenue. She became a mature, self-conscious dynamic artistic force--and remarkably productive in her own right, not despite but because she exhausted herself up from the inside out.

My students and I study the Baroness briefly during "chapter 2" of my course on modern and contemporary American poetry. Scroll down to the last lesson on this page and see various links to Baroness materials.

from Miami to magical thinking (not so far)

Both audio (mp3) and video (streaming) recordings of Joan Didion's two-day visit to the Kelly Writers House are now available, linked here: LINK. And a few photos are here (taken by John Carroll).

I spent a good measure of my time and energy, during our various discussions (several public, others informally), focusing on the continuity between her early writing and The Year of Magical Thinking which so many people say marks a big change. But grab your paperback copy of that recent elegaic memoir and look at the bottom of page 7 and top of 8. She begins there to say that the manner of her writing has always been--increasingly in fact--a matter of hiding "thoughts" (she doesn't say feeling but means that) behind an increasingly untransparent, impenetrable skein of words. In other words, she does with language what I and many others who enjoy modern (and experimental) writing have always admired: the significance is in the words and the manner means something, so don't think you must find the true feelings below in symbols of some truth under or beyond the language that is itself no more or less itself the truth of what is being said. In that prefatory passage Joan Didion seems to say that now--now that the trauma of loss has struck her--she wants to be less impenetrable, since she herself is her writing and she wants that self no longer to hide what's really true about her feelings. Yet that's just a prefatory expression of hope. If you read the book closely you'll see that she "fails" to do what I think is the cliche of writing about the death of a loved one--that is to say, she does not change--but rather she reaffirms--that being made in the writing. It's the writing and only the writing. Indeed it's the main lesson she learned from the love relationship with her writer husband. It's the writing. That's where one is. So in the end, the fact that Magical Thinking is no more "personal" in its writing than Miami is the most remarkable thing about the newest development of his great writer.

When (in '67 or so) Joan Didion wrote through her first major breakdown she described a rejection of the conventional American narrative mode (a mode that tried to prevent improvisation, for one thing), she charted a move from narrative to image, from "ethical" to "electrical," and her mantra was--it still is--the Poundian call for juxtaposition: petals on a wet black bough. If one reads The Year of Magical Thinking as a Poundian foray rather than a self-help manual for grieving, one won't have it quite right but will be close enough, and, I believe, will derive tremendous pleasure from the reading. Read or re-read the passage about the family photographs along her hallway and I think you'll see what I mean.

idea for writing experiment

Write about the "two-track approach" of Reagan-era foreign policy with a grammar such that each sentence means what it means & also its opposite.

which man is it that I know?

That's the late Stanley Kunitz taking a break at Poet's House in Manhattan. He happens to stop and pause beneath Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man," which has been inscribed on the large window. Ah, juxtaposition!

Finally, then! An answer to the darkly imponderable Creeley question:

the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it

The answer is: Stanley Kunitz!

books are not themselves symbols

Ken Krug has painted a series of book-and-thing still lives. A simple and yet--to me, anyway--endlessly pleasurable juxtaposition. Ken takes a favorite book and then quasi-intuitively reaches for the object that "catches my eye," as he puts it. Ken is a brainy guy--always reading and always intellectualizing--but for his paintings, at least these, he suspends the way he thinks about the book and sets the object with/against it in the spirit of an alternative (opposite) mode. For Durrell's Alexandra Quartet it's a pair of sunglasses. For Whitman's Leaves of Grass a single Adidas sneaker. Borges with a Mets cap. Spiegelman's Maus gets accompanied by a salt shaker and a pepper shaker (this is the painting I myself own). Kafka's Complete Stories and a can of Campbell's tomato soup (not a nod to Warhol). Krazy Kat gets painted with an iPod. And Samuel Delany's Dhalgren poses with a cell phone. Krug does these in one sitting, working oil paint on board only with a palette knife.

Book with object does not mean book as object. The object tends to defer to the book, challenging any easy categorical assignment. Ken Krug, it seems, is not opposed to the hegemony of reading, even when its representation is objective, even though, rendered in these works, it bears depictive qualities--color, shape. The book is desymbolized in order, paradoxically, so that its value as a repository of ideas and aesthetics can be reclaimed from the world of things.

The painting of Van Gogh's Complete Letters and a wristwatch is not meant as a temptation to interpret (O, Time!), but it is that. Resist the symbol-making impulse!

agh, petals maybe

Still transferring old Real-format audio and video materials into the more accessible and less proprietary mp3. Today it's a short discussion--by me and Shawn Walker--of William Carlos Williams's poem "Portrait of a Lady," which, perhaps oddly, I ask my students to read not when we study the rise of modernism but, a little later, when we are preparing to enter the postmodern. Here's the chapter of the course where it occurs. And here is the discussion of the poem.

Portrait of a Lady

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze—-or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
—As if that answered
anything.—Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore—-
Which shore?—-
the sand clings to my lips—-
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
—the petals from some hidden
appletree—Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

Above: a detail of Fragonard's painting "The Swing."

New York School types

For my survey of modern & contemporary American poetry (English 88) I once made a recording of a really basic mini-lecture on three fundamental types of New York School poems: anti-narrative, non-narrative, pastiche. The whole thing is plausible enough, although obviously there are more "types" and much more to say about pastiche. Recently we converted a RealAudio file of this recording and produced a new mp3, which I've linked to "chapter 8" of the course. So here is that old talk as an mp3.

editorial presence

The late Ted Solotaroff--one of the most important literary editors of the '60s and '70s--visited us in 2003. He had recently published his very frank memoir, First Loves. He had been an editor of Commentary and the editor of Bookweek before he founded the influential literary journal New American Review. He is the author of The Red-Hot Vacuum, A Few Good Voices in My Head, and First Loves: A Memoir. He taught at the University of Chicago, Yale, Columbia, the City College of New York, and the University of California at Berkeley. He lived in East Quogue, Long Island, and in Paris.

It was in the pages of the New American Review where I found Max Apple's amazing short fiction for the first time. Even then, as I handled the paperback-sized magazine for the first time, I had a sense of Solotaroff's editorial presence. It was strong and clear somehow.

[] Solotaroff at the Writers House: LINK

[] audio recording of his talk: LINK

[] New York Times obit: LINK

reference, like the body itself...

In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews wrote that:

[C]onfusion about the nature of this exploration flourishes. For instance, the idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one-on-one, to an already constructed world of "things." Rather, reference, like the body itself [and there, again, is the body, the "plan"], is one of the horizons of language. . . . It is the multiple powers and scope of reference (denotative, connotative, associational), not writers' refusal or fear of it, that threads these essays together. It is a renewed engagement that comes from the recognition that the (various) measuring and questioning and composition of our references is the practice of our craft.

Kit's balance sheet

Kit Robinson's 1993 reading at the Ear Inn has now been segmented into individual poems. Here's our Kit Robinson page.

moody Moody & the coming of the modern

At right: William Vaughn Moody.

When I teach my students (in English 88) the literary-historical context for the rise of poetic modernism in the U.S., I know I don't have a lot of time and I know I don't want them to be reading more than a few poems from that pre-modern interregnum after Victorianism and before modernism. So I have them read--among a few others--some poems by William Vaughn Moody, he whose verse has tons of modern sentiment and mood but whose form is facile and traditional. Some years back I created an audio mini-lecture on this topic, in which I consider Moody's "Gloucester Moors" and its context in the final demise of Victorianism and the coming rise of the modern. It's pretty basic stuff, but some readers of this blog might enjoy it at least as a pedagogical exercise: MP3.

This is the final stanza of Moody's poem:

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,
What harbor town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,
Shall crowd the banks to see?
Shall all the happy shipmates then
Stand singing brotherly?
Or shall a haggard ruthless few
Warp her over and bring her to,
While the many broken souls of men
Fester down in the slaver's pen,
And nothing to say or do?

Here's a longer excerpt from the poem.

translation boom

John Timpane writes in today's Philadelphia Inquirer about translation. He wants to know why there's such a surge in translations of poetry? And he quotes me on the point. Here's a link to the article.

Here is Murat Nemet-Nejat's response to this article:

Translation has always been crucial in the development of a country's literature, in France, in England, in Germany, until recently in The United States, to name just a few, at least in the West.

I disagree with you on one point. In the last fifteen years or so, American poets, particularly those considered avant-garde have shown an amazing lack of interest in, creative involvement with the poetry of other languages. The last American examples of such a non-American focused interest would be poets of earlier generations, for instance, Rexroth's Chinese translations, Jerry Rothenberg's anthology The Technicians of the Sacred, original New York School poets's interest in French poetry and Dante, Zukofsky's interest in Catullus, etc,. and in its early years Language School poets' interest in European thinkers. The best example of the change is, in my view, Ron Silliman's blog, which, to the best of my knowledge, had never had a serious discussion of a non-American poet, without even acknowledging the lack of it.

I agree with you that in the last five or six years a change has begun to occur among younger American poets. Whether this is due to globalism or a realization of the sterility of the previous attitudes, I can not tell.

fascism=communism, with Obama thrown in

This morning I'm having a discussion with two Facebook friends, Dave and Peter (they don't know each other). It started when I posted a Facebook "note" with a photo of Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and a link to the New York Times obituary of her published after her death at 101 in 2003. Dave started us off by likening the Obama inauguration to the Nuremburg rally. To view the thread of Facebook comments, click on the image at right.

Didion live

During Joan Didion's visit to the Kelly Writers House as a Writers House Fellow, two of the sessions will be available as a live streaming video, and you are more than welcome to tune in. These sessions are:

1) a reading beginning at 6:30 pm ET on Monday, March 30; and

2) an interview/discussion moderated by me beginning at 10:30 am ET on Tuesday, March 31.

To connect to the KWH-TV video stream, just go here:

writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv

- and at the time of the program clicked on "view live video."

Kelly Writers House Fellows since 1999 are made possible by a generous ongoing grant from Paul Kelly. Among our previous Fellows: Grace Paley, John Wideman, Robert Creeley, Susan Sontag, June Jordan, Tony Kushner, Art Spiegelman, John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, Cynthia Ozick, Roger Angell, Adrienne Rich, Lyn Hejinian, E.L. Doctorow, John Ashbery, Michael Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Russell Banks, James Alan McPherson, Gay Talese. For more: writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows.

weekend tweets

Follow me on Twitter.

just a few lines along a certain line of thought

In '99, as I prepared to teach my modern and contemporary American poetry course all online, I made some audio and video recordings of mini-lectures on various poems and topics. All very basic stuff. We've been converting these from RealAudio to mp3. The most recent mini-lecture converted is a short audio on William Carlos Williams's poem "Lines," which I love. Shawn Walker joined me for this discussion.

choosing to live in the city

From the Daily Pennsylvanian, March 20, 2009. Click on the image above for a larger view. Oh, yes, and I'm also the quote of the day. Back in July '07 I wrote a little bit about how I got to West Philly in '98 and provided a link to a Philadelphia Business News article about it.

poet urges creative campus

Last night we made available the full video recording of Hank Lazer's reading at the Writers House. (A few days ago I posted here a 50-second video clip.) While Hank was here, Charles Bernstein recording one of his Close Listening - featuring more reading from Hank's work and also a half-hour conversation between them, which is already available. This is and will be on our Lazer PennSound page. Check it now and come back later too.

Charles Bernstein provides this summary of his talk with Lazer: "Hank Lazer talks to me about the confluences of his identities; about Southern poetry; about the poetics of jazz and transition; about the forms of his work; about the purported conflict between creativity and critical thinking; and about his poem 'Figure.'"

Hank Lazer is an associate provost at the University of Alabama and in that capacity heads up the university's museums and art entities. He directs a project called the Creative Campus Initiative, which is "dedicated to building a collaborative environment where students can connect with each other, faculty, and their community in turning innovative ideas into action." There's a good deal of b.s. in that general description/mission statement, but I sense something very real here. I'm guessing that Hank and others saw a campus where the artsy students were isolated and probably suffering from institutional disrespect. So CCI becomes a holding place or project site for them--in part by merely moving into one virtual place all the related activities already happening, so it seems to be more than it is, rather than, as before, less than it is. After that administrative convergence, new things (added things) begin to happen. During his visit Hank and I had a chance to talk about this--but most of what I've said above is a guess made from looking at the situation from the outside.

Chomskybot

The Chomskybot, which I've been using for years, recently located to a new server. So I've changed my links variously and found a renewed fascination for what it does to and with the language of Noam Chomsky. Chomskybot takes sentence parts from Chomsky's linguistics writings and organizes them into randomly formed paragraphs.

It works by what its programmer and others call the "American Chinese Menu" principle, viz. One from Column A, One from Column B. There are four sets of phrases: Initiating Phrases, Subject Phrases, Verbal Phrases, and Terminating Phrases The program, called "Foggy," simply selects one of each, at (pseudo-)random, and then strings them together into a sentence. Five sentences make a paragraph. Foggy never even gets down to the word level; everything is phrases, and most of the phrases don't mean much. "In this," says the programmer, "foggy resembles a large proportion of real language.

Here's the Chomskyian paragraph I just read:

Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is not quite equivalent to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. It may be, then, that a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is unspecified with respect to an important distinction in language use. Let us continue to suppose that any associated supporting element is rather different from a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. To characterize a linguistic level L, the descriptive power of the base component does not affect the structure of a parasitic gap construction. Suppose, for instance, that an important property of these three types of EC is to be regarded as the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol.

Now here's another:

By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, any associated supporting element is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. Nevertheless, the descriptive power of the base component appears to correlate rather closely with the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not affect the structure of problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that an important property of these three types of EC does not readily tolerate an abstract underlying order. Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction cannot be arbitrary in a descriptive fact.

children of survivors

I have long admired Pier Marton's film consisting of interviews of children of Holocaust survivors. It's called Say I'm a Jew.

"Pier Marton is a second-generation artist who has wrestled with problems of his parents' survival and the impact of contemporary anti-Semitism. This led him to merge the video interview of children of survivors, called Say I'm a Jew, with an installation entitled Jew, set in a cattle car. Being a member of the second generation and experiencing European anti-Semitism in France in the 1950s and 1960s led Marton to the inability to openly express his Jewishness. Drawing from his own experience, Marton was obsessed with the question of how children of the second generation have coped with growing up in Europe after World War II. While attending a convention of second-generation survivors, Marton advertised for individuals willing to tell the story of their European and Jewish identity experiences on camera. Many volunteered. Marton edited bits and pieces of the video together to form an engaging artistic and psychological work. The American-European painter R. J. Kitaj has represented what he terms "diasporism" as a major component in contemporary artistic life. This is a useful concept to explain the works of many artists in this show, who constantly have to deal with a Jewish identity problem in a world that is potentially enticing and supportive and also contains anti-Semitism, denial and insult. Marton's space was made to represent a blend of cattle car, barracks and a mausoleum. As Marton has written, "Memory can fuse separate locations in an inextricable blend." [19] Within the installation area were seats where the video played continuously. Those attending the show were encouraged to write their responses on the walls of the entrance and boxcar itself, recalling the memory of how deportees did the same on their way to death camps." -- from Stephen Feinstein, Witness and Legacy

renewed dance of the intellect

Hank Lazer reads from his poetry an hour ago at the Kelly Writers House.

more poets in my office

From left: Marcella Durand, Hank Lazer, Eli Goldblatt, Al Filreis - this afternoon. (Well, they came to record an episode of PoemTalk.)