subjects ramble and so should you

"Any sentence is in itself an organization of experience.... Any subject naturally rambles around by itself and to keep to it one has to ramble around after it." - Gertrude Stein, in an interview. For the complete transcript of the interview, go here.

does a poem do any good?

I'm leading a session during Penn's Homecoming Weekend on whether a poem "does any good."

angry middle-aged editor meets Kerouac

James Wechsler's memoir is titled Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor. In one chapter, "The Age of Unthink," Wechsler recalls a frustrating encounter with Jack Kerouac during a symposium on "the Beat generation" at Hunter College in 1958. Here is the text of the entire chapter.

Here's the moment when Wechsler first encounters Kerouac:

As I walked a trifle uncomfortably down the center aisle to the stage, I got my first view of the leader of the Beat Generation. He was attired in a lumberjack shirt unadorned by tie, but there was nothing especially ostentatious about his lack of dress. A little more flabbergasting was the discovery that he was holding what proved to be a glass of brandy, and throughout the evening he made several trips to the wings for a refill. Kerouac acknowledged my arrival by observing, "You ruined my sentence," and then resumed a discourse which I am obliged to describe as a stream of semiconsciousness.

There it is: "You ruined my sentence." One writer's half-attentive opening remark to another.

see Jane run

Poster depicts a student fleeing a mounted policeman during an anti-war protest, c. 1970.

killing the language?

The August 4 entry on the blog, "A Poetic Matter," is called "On Metaphor," and takes Kenneth Goldsmith to task, as follows:

[Owen] Barfield asserts that language needs poetry because through poetry language and meaning grow. I agree with Barfield. The point? If we keep theorizing about poetry (langpo, flarf, conecptualism, quietude, blah, blah, blah) we lose sight of meaning. Now, to someone like Goldsmith, meaning doesn’t even mean anymore so why try. But I think it’s a cop out. I wonder if this is why there is such a disconnect between the p-a crowd and everybody else. To say there is no meaning but in words is ludicrous as Barfield points out, because words and meaning depend on experience. So I would say this whole idea of poetry existing only through theories leads to a dead language, where people like Goldsmith dwell. Take the experience out of poetry, and you’re left with flarf and other regurgitations rather than humanity and a growth of language.

A reader replied:

KG does not dwell in dead language even if he thinks he wants to, or pretends to want to. His way of being boring is very exciting, actually. As is flarf. As are many other … I don’t think you need worry about “dead language” because there’s no such thing. It’s not even possible.

To which the blogger replied:

I don’t think KG dwells in dead language, but rather that purposely avoiding meaning can kill language. And I wouldn’t say that flarf is boring at all–I’ve read many examples that I thought were truly engaging and exciting. Language builds meaning, but not without some sort of experience.

For the record (it hardly needs to be noted), Goldsmith never says language is without meaning, nor does he want it to be. On the contrary, language is so always already meaningful that attempts at original writing are unnecessary. The ambient language--words in the world--is plentifully sufficient.

honoring Gil

This photo was taken at the Writers House gathering in honor of Gil Ott. For more about this event, go here.

denied to those who only drive & surf

Speaking of the poetics of street life, and of blogs, over at Detainees, Linh Dinh's blog, Linh and Murat Nemet-Nejat are having a back-and-forthish exchange in response to Linh's photographs taken along Philadelphia's streets. At the end of which Linh has now said: "A tangent to this discussion is our shared interest in street life, how the body needs to regularly swim through a common space while being exposed to a multitude of mostly unknown others. This intercourse, both comforting and menacing, is denied to those who only drive and surf."

Linh's caption for the photo above at right: I wasn't trying to confuse him. He had asked for a smoke. "This ain't a dollar, man." "Yes, it is!"

what's next? hand-smashed avocado

I've been reading Beth Kwon at BK 2.0 probably longer than any other blogger. Simple daily observations, life in Brooklyn, smart person with camera and satirical sensibility--yet needy and loves to see. She's at her best when snapping a photograph, often on the street, and permitting herself a momentary snark in response. Captions, in essence. Her response to this sign: I can scarcely think of anything less appetizing than avocado that’s been man-handled by a food service worker in New York City. Yet that is not stopping Chipotle’s pathetic knock-off, Qdoba Mexican Grill, from using “hand-smashed guacamole” as a way to lure customers. By the way, BK 2.0 (as BK 1.0, I think) started as a hand-typewritten (yes) xeroxed newsletter mailed to subscribers - a zine. Started in the latest zenith of such zines: 1999. It made the transition to blogging already very much bloggy in its mode and style. Mundanely observational, unapologetically personal and yet widely appealing. That it was a blog before its time I find also appealing.

Sammy runs no more

Budd Schulberg died at 95 yesterday. He wrote the screenplay to On the Waterfront and, among many novels, the unforgettable exploration of anti-Semitism in Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run. After a visit to the Soviet Union in '34 he became a communist. Later he named names before an anticommunist congressional committee. Here's the end of the Times obit:

His romance with Communism ended six years later, when he quit the party after feeling pressure to bend his writing to fit its doctrines.

Mr. Schulberg had been identified as a party member in testimony before the House committee. Called to testify, he publicly named eight other Hollywood figures as members, including the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and the director Herbert Biberman.

They were two among the Hollywood 10 — witnesses who said the First Amendment gave them the right to think as they pleased and keep their silence before the committee. All were blacklisted and convicted of contempt of Congress. Losing their livelihoods, Lardner served a year in prison and Biberman six months.

In the turmoil of the Red Scare, Mr. Schulberg’s testimony was seen as a betrayal by many, an act of principle by others. The liberal consensus in Hollywood was that Lardner had acquitted himself more gracefully before the committee when asked if he had been a Communist: “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”

In the 2006 interview, Mr. Schulberg said that in hindsight he believed that the attacks against real and imagined Communists in the United States were a greater threat to the country than the Communist Party itself. But he said he had named names because the party represented a real threat to freedom of speech.

“They say that you testified against your friends, but once they supported the party against me, even though I did have some personal attachments, they were really no longer my friends,” he said. “And I felt that if they cared about real freedom of speech, they should have stood up for me when I was fighting the party.”

The Times web site has the video of a 2006 interview.

Mojave fingerprint

Christopher Overing took the fingerprint of his right index finger, blew up it hugely, and etched it into a dry lakebed in the Mojave desert--and photographed it. Chris was my student in the late 80s and 1990.

you daily Al for August 3

Get your daily Al daily: here.

read the words

Anthony DeCurtis had a piece in the New York Times yesterday, called "Peace, Love and Charlie Manson"--Anthony's contemplation of 1969, partly written in response to Arlo Guthrie's recent assertion that other than Woodstock there wasn't really anything else to remember from that year. Because I've been on the road a lot, and knew I wouldn't be able to take time to read the piece on paper or on screen, I decided to use Read the Words to make a quick audio version of it - read by a one of the Read the Words avatars, "Tom." Tom misses his share of pronunciation but I'm at least going to hear the piece twice tomorrow when I'm on the road again. You can hear Tom read Anthony's piece here.

chip off superblock

And another old video. We've been in the convert-from-VHS biz lately. I like this one. It was produced by Penn admissions and featured George "Chip" Blaustein as a Writers House mainstay: he was on the KWH staff, member of the "Virgin House Quartet" which played in our Arts Cafe every Thursday night for several years. Click here and watch the excerpt.

When "Chip"/George graduated, we honored him and here is the recording of that toast.

Writers House on the agenda

Penn made its "Agenda for Excellence" video a few years ago (during the Judith Rodin administration) and the Writers House had its 30-second segment. Go here to watch the whole video. To see the KWH segment, click anywhere on the video image to open up a QuickTime video window. Then set your counter to 2:40.

my six-word memoir

Sometimes I have a good notion.

Alice Neel

A 7-minute video shows dozens of Alice Neel portraits, including this one of Frank O'Hara.

that good wild big life teeming along the road

William Shatner performs Sarah Palin's farewell speech as a Beat nature poem: here.

poets hate living

"Like a mole, American poets are snuffling in the dirt of the psyche’s underground, sniffing out every dark crevice of their own subconscious." More lovely sentences like this can be found in A.S. Maulucci's screed, published recently. His main complaint: American poetry has turned away from beauty. "Real poetry" has fiery passion, but much contemporary verse is written by people who "hate living." And so on.

against the current

Sarah Ehlers has written a review of my Counter-Revolution of the Word and it has now been published in Against the Current, the May/June 2009 issue. Here is a PDF copy of it.

from the annals of odd convergences

Walter Cronkite met Gertrude Stein. Here it is, as reported by the NY Times:

A 1935 profile of Gertrude Stein from The Daily Texan, unearthed by the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin and published at its Web site, was written by Walter Cronkite, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate at the university when he wrote it. (Mr. Cronkite’s memorial service was on Thursday; a report by Brian Stelter is here.)

Speaking to Stein in advance of her appearance at the university’s Hogg Auditorium on March 22, 1935, Mr. Cronkite wrote that, even though he “imposed upon her at a late hour last night,” the author was “genuine — the real thing in person. Her thinking is certainly straightforward; her speech is the same.”

After recording her attire (“a mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest affair, and comfortable looking shoes”), Mr. Cronkite talked with her about the proper role of the writer and the impact of the Great Depression, then in its sixth year.

Discussing her craft, Stein told Mr. Cronkite, “A writer isn’t anything but contemporary. The trouble is that the people are living Twentieth Century and thinking Nineteenth Century.”

Presaging former Senator Phil Gramm’s remarks about a “mental recession,” Stein said that the Great Depression was “more moral than actual. No longer the people think they are depressed, the depression is over.”

(Stein proved less prescient when she said that “those who know in France didn’t believe that there would be a war.” She added: “But then war is just like anything else. When people get tired of peace they will have war and when they get tired of war they will have peace. Don’t you, when you have been good for a long time, want to be bad?”)

After Mr. Cronkite noted the presence of “Miss Alice B. Toklas, Miss Stein’s traveling companion whose title is not ‘secretary,’ ” he wrote that she enjoyed her first trip to Texas. (“This is a beautiful big State of yours,” she told him.) And that’s the way it was.

that iambic voice

“It was as if his hand was on my shoulder when he spoke.”--Sandy Jones

60? no way

In March 2010 Charles Bernstein's selected poems will be published (to coincide with his 60th birthday).

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2010
app. 300 pp.
ISBN 978-0-374-10344-6

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together some of Charles Bernstein’s best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet, despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein’s characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark, structural invention with buoyant sound play, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry’s sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosopical reflection. Long considered one of America’s most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.

Bob's unruly inner child

Today we are releasing PoemTalk episode 19 - a discussion by Tom Mandel, Sarah Dowling and Rodrigo Toscano (above, left to right) of Bob Perelman's poem "The Unruly Child."

future of research

"The income-producing research activity will follow the trend of moving into nondepartmental locations — institutes, centers, and programs — that can be closed with less fuss if the income dries up."--MARC BOUSQUET, Associate professor at Santa Clara University, and author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008)

From: "FORUM: The Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure," Chronicle of Higher Education.

Tim Carmody, whom I admire and whose blog, Facebook updates and now tweeting I follow, has a statement here too, part of which reads:

The curriculum, especially in the humanities, valorizes thoughtful curation and recirculation of material rather than comprehension or originality. The traditional unidirectional model of knowledge transmission (best represented by the now-deprecated "lecture") has been effectively discredited, although it persists through habit, inertia, and whispered doubts about the efficacy and rigidity of the new model. Many professors periodically pause to lecture, but only apologetically, or when distanced by ironic quotation marks. / The 'teens are as widely remembered for technical innovation and radical dissemination of knowledge as the '20s are for job loss, technological retrenchment, and economic concentration. In 2019, when Google used its capital to snap up the course-management giant Blackboard and the Ebsco, LexisNexis, and Ovid databases, it effectively became the universal front end for research and teaching in the academy.

Anyone who has read this blog knows how much I would (and do) disagree with Tim's use of the lecture (his valorization of it and pre-nostaligia for it) in this scenario. His error is to tie inextricably the "traditional unidirectional model of knowledge transmission" (which he implicitly commends) to the techno-corporate consolidation of profit-making information providers.

Now, as for "originality" in this context: oh, don't get me started. For another time. I promise.

(For more from me on the lecture, click on "end of the lecture" just below.)

the form of our uncertainty

Gil Ott died in 2004 and is sorely missed in Philly poetry scenes, and (to be specific about one of many such sites where we miss Gil) at the Writers House where Gil was fairly regularly a member of audiences for PhillyTalks, poetry readings, book celebrations for poetry-world colleagues (especially Philly poets). Kristen Gallagher edited a book of commentary and critical response to Gil's work (published by Chax Press) and in the fall of '01 we hosted a Gil Ott celebration, co-organized by then-director of KWH Kerry Sherin and also Kristen Gallagher. For about a year PennSound's Gil Ott page featured the whole recording of the 1.5-hour event and also segmented single mp3s of each reader. But today we're releasing the 17th PennSound podcast - a 23-minute excerpt of the whole event, edited by Steve McLaughlin. Here's a link to the PennSound podcast page.

- - -

More: When Gil interviewed Jackson Mac Low.

Bill Clinton plane ride dream

We at PennSound have put together a new author page - for Tina Darragh. Some very great stuff here. Already there are eight readings. One of them (her PhillyTalks program, with Jena Osman) is segmented into individual poems. The others we'll segment later. My favorite poem at the moment is "Bill Clinton Plane Ride Dream." Here is your link to that audio.

MJ chat

Click on the image above. My favorite line: "Yeah, it's trembling right now," where "it" is the internet. Here's the whole thing.

a thoughtful response

Recently I posted here a review of a book called Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, a collection of essays on Stevens "in" Europe and Stevens "and" Europe. I was less enamored of the latter positioning, finding it a catch-all concept which netted the editors good but conceptually miscellaneous essays. Edward Ragg has written a very thoughtful response and has given me permission to make it available here (as a PDF). I love dialogues like this; Edward's collegial response (somewhat ironically) made me more confident that writing my criticism of his work was the right thing to do (rather than the more typical blandly positive review I tend to write).

away

Regular readers of this blog will notice updates are scant these few days. I'm away. Witness the morning view from the back porch of the 1890s cottage where I'm staying.

today's daily Al

Get your daily Al, an iGoogle gadget.

Arthur Miller on poetic film? say what?

Today I've been listening (downloaded it to my iPod) a two-part symposium on the poetic film that was hosted by the poet and avant-garde film-maker Willard Maas in 1953 at Cinema 16. It's up at UbuWeb here. (Ubu surely has more Maas than any collection.) Ubu hosts a collection of rare audio from the Anthology Film Archives and this is one of them. Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas are part of the discussion--which is odd because neither seems familiar with avant-garde film, nor particular interested in the topic. For a better view of the Facebook posting/discussion, click on the image above.

Charlie Conway added this later: "I remember reading some diatribe by Thomas against Maya Deren I think... On the inverse, it's not uncommon for relatively progressive filmmakers to have rather narrow tolerances for experimental theater. Not to mention the other inverse--that is, of course, it being impossible for me to say the last time I heard ANY filmmaker even talk about Rae Armantrout or fill-in-the-blank... I've often found it strange how a person's involvement in an avant-X usually fails to translate to that person's faith in other avant's by, well, even the merest modicum of analogy... Samuel Beckett's obsession with Schubert comes to mind... Though Schubert might be considered 'news that stays news'."

impersonal & impervious to the pain of others

Of late the Wallace Stevens I especially admire is anxiously stuck—stuck and yet writing about it. He is entangled in an idiom he had come to accept, and attempts, in the very words we read, to write his way into another. Or he is seeking to reformulate his argument in the process of making it. Or he suffers a crisis of direction until the poem either does or does not make a turn. Or he believes he has come to the end of the imagination, beyond which is blank wordlessness. Or he partly but insufficiently recognizes that the counterargument made against his poetics has made its way into the poem and gotten the better of him. Stevens was remarkably smart about these predicaments, and he continued to escape them.

Infamous for his capacity to “dodge the apprehension of severe pain in others,” as Mark Halliday put it in Stevens and the Interpersonal (1991), he nonetheless sought and slowly acquired methods for putting the pain of others in such a place that the poem can hardly look away even while the speaker is enacting some version of the dodge. This convergence, says Halliday, “produces not only fascination but also an instinctive . . . sense of imperiously required response.” It might be—or at any rate might be like—a function of desire, the anxiety modeled on sexual longing. Halliday contends this, as a means, in part, of finding a personal motive in Stevens for the simultaneous exploration of abnegation and responsiveness. “[T]he apprehension of suffering in others,” Halliday writes, “is like sexual desire for another person--a second kind of importuning of the self which generated great anxiety in Stevens.” “Transforming is what art does,” writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, but art that depicts the calamitous “is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art” (p. 76).

Few Stevens poems convey as much fear of the personal poetic dead end as “Mozart, 1935,” nor present as anxiously the risk of accusations of aestheticism in the face of crisis. Indeed, Halliday’s quoted comments are to be found in his reading of that poem, where he argues that Stevens refuses to explore “this besieging pain” felt by those assailing him from the streets of 1935, because he is more interested in “writing about the problem of writing about the street.”

This is the poem in which the speaker demands that a pianist sit at his piano and play a divertimento from Mozart. But a riotous mass clamors in the street outside, throws stones on the roof of the house where the pianist plays. "They" are also in the house, and carry down the stairs a body in rags. Play on, insists the speaker. Be thou the voice of the angry people, the speaker now demands.

Your reading of the poem's politics depends on whether you see the speaker and the pianist as sharing the same aesthetic space. I see the speaker as distinct from the figure in the poem. While the artist in the poem either plays or doesn't, the speaker's topic is the convergence of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, which produces, for him, an aesthetic category larger than Mozart and inclusive of "1935."

I think Mark Halliday wants the poem to be a poem of the 1935 street, or at least to attempt such. He laments that it's instead a poem about the problem of the poetry of the street of 1935.

I don’t disagree about Halliday's description of the self-referentiality here but rather with his assumption that the more the poem obsesses over its own problem of representation the less responsive to others’ pain it is. As Sontag suggests, art that regards the pain of others is rarely so straightforward as our expectations of it. Even works of direct-gaze documentary mode—or perhaps especially them—will be assailed for daring to “transform” the atrocity conveyed. The involution is not so much a turning away as a necessary examination of poetic means.

The poem after all admits into its lines the sound of the stones upon the roof. And potentially unites such sounds with the arpeggios of the pianist. In general I want a poem of the sound of the stones, but for I concede that we require the poet, and accept that the poet transforms. Here where the personal (distinct from Halliday's "impersonal") comes in through the back door.

breaking through the clutter

Scott Karambis writes a terrific blog, "Artificial Simplicity," which I read regularly. Today he gives ten reasons why teaching is great training for marketing--and, as you'll see, he means specifically for the sort of really innovative marketing Scott does and prefers.

"2002" after the invasion

Back in October 2003 the Writers House hosted a weekend-long gathering called "Poet-invasion Poetics." On Friday night we went around the room (Arts Cafe at KWH) and most participants read and/or talked. We recorded this session. The next night we held a giant group reading. Among the seminar participants: Rod Smith, Mark McMorris, Ron Silliman, Michael Fried, Erica Hunt, Tracie Morris, Saskia Hamilton, Tim Carmody, Jo Park, Jessica Lowenthal, Kathy Lou Schultz.

Recently Jenny Lesser went back to Fanny Howe's Friday night reading. Jenny listened to the recording and segmented the two poems. They are: "Far and Near" and the poem called "2002". Of course we've added these to PennSound's Fanny Howe page.

SL Writers House

Well, ahem, we're going to take another crack at Second Life.

I made an avatar about a year ago, hoping to find decent poetry readings and other poetics events (lectures, etc.). While I found the medium relatively interesting, I found the content pretty miserable (and worse).

Well, we're back. We're working with some folks at Penn on an SL Writers House and hope to host a poetry seminar there in the autumn. Stay tuned.

Here are two views.

The first (above) is from the stairs leading down from the second floor to the first, looking at the Arts Cafe. The second is from outside - the front of the building. Not bad, huh?

imago and the Marshall Plan

I just finished reading Eleanor Cook's Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. xiv, 354. $24.95 paperback). New readers of Stevens must own this book, the ideal guide for starting out into the sometimes abstractly allusive, sometimes philosophically argumentative, sometimes indirectly referential verse of this essential American modernist.

Most of the poems are annotated here, presented in order of publication, book by book through Stevens’s career; a readable index of title directs you, alternatively, by the poem. Cook’s succinct summaries and annotations are confidently expert. If you are reading “Prelude to Objects” and come across the reference there to the S. S. Normandie, you will know from Cook that it was a famous French transatlantic passenger liner (136). Of course, even an inexperienced Googler would have that annotation in a quarter of a minute. In the same poem, if coming upon the “Ideas of Order”-like phrase “foamed from the sea” you take “foamed,” as in the idiom “foamed up,” to mean arising sea-like out of the sea, you could proceed through the verse satisfactorily. But having Cook’s guide by your side, you would also learn that this is certainly a reference to Aphrodite, whose name, etymologically, means “born of the foam” (136). You are still left with the problem of reconciling such a mythological idiom with Stevens’s famous “guerilla I,” the poem’s stealthy and aggressive subjectivity, but with Cook’s help you are several steps further along than you would otherwise be.

Long admired for her attention to syntactical word-play, Cook has a fine way here of describing meter as an aspect of form. This one sentence on section 1 of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” does the critical work of many another commentator’s full page: “Tetrameter tercets with occasional rhyme, a clavier interrupted by bass violins playing pizzicati” (74). A masterfully wrought eight-word sentence on the first three stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West”—“Their argument is tight, their rhythm is ocean-like” (94)—again precisely describes the rhetoric and form but also presents the poem’s main tension between rationally organized content of human experience and oceanic feelings about the power of the muse.

The book is littered with many other marvelous condensations. When the “firecat” of “Earthy Anecdote” is said to be found in “[m]inor Indian legends tell[ing] of a cougar or mountain lion who brings either helpful or destructive fire”—and we learn that while recent tellings use the very term “firecat” “but the relevant Smithsonian historical volumes on the American Indian do not record the word” (31)—we easily imagine hours of research done in the service of this modest qualification. It’s a valuable nuance. If Stevens did invent the word “firecat” for this bit of modernist ethnography, we know he nonetheless got his folklore just right.

These are specific advantages resulting from the guidebook format, its special constraints, which Professor Cook has mastered. The book has more conventional virtues as well—such as the finest introductory close reading of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” that has been published. This reviewer happens to agree with Cook’s assessment that “Blue Guitar” is “a pivotal, crucial series, richer than it may appear” (113), a work “packed with thought as Stevens positioned himself for the last quarter of his life” (17). Doubters of such a claim will still need to reckon with this assessment.

Evenhandedness—-giving each poem its proportionate due—-is impossible in such a project, and readers must anticipate that some significant poems are too briefly annotated. “Imago,” arguably an important poem, is presented here in 4 ½ lines, while “How Now, O, Brightener…,” a lesser work commended by few, is given four times the space. In the former poem, the line “Who can pick up the weight of Britain” is said to echo Job 38 and to refer to postwar Marshall Plan reconstruction, but nothing about Stevens’ use of imago, the Freudian concept of representations presented by the unconscious to the ego. Is there a psychoanalytic aspect to postwar language used to “say to the French here is France again”? Yes, surely. Readers will have to piece together that connection on their own.

Even when, as rarely is the case, the interpretive commentary fails to engage the poem sufficiently, or seems imbalanced, Eleanor Cook’s Reader’s Guide is otherwise an excellent companion to the more traditional bibliography prepared by J. M. Edelstein many years ago. Readers who work straight through the book—to be sure, it was designed to enable other approaches—will receive the best first lesson in the whole arc of Stevens’s work. Although this book would seem to provide an atomized, poem-by-poem experience, its reader's greatest reward is the sense he or she gets of the overall shape of the Stevensean project.

much more than night

I'm beginning to put together my fall '09 course, Representations of the Holocaust. I'm not a big fan of Wiesel's Night (not for lack of trying to admire it) but I still insist that the students read the original non-Oprah edition. Don't know if that less puffed-up version is available in sufficient quantities. Night, to me, is on one end of a spectrum of representations; Lanzmann's Shoah is on the other. My students and will watch all 9.5 hours of Shoah in one sitting on a Sunday. They complain bitterly and this itself becomes a major topic for discussion. If you look at the reading schedule, you can see that I'm convinced that Primo Levi is the one--the writer through which I feel the problems of representing this genocide can be most compellingly addressed. We also view a sampling of survivor testimonies from the great Yale video archive. Here are the links I provide the students.

Oppen at 100, in 23 minutes

Tom Devaney organized a celebration of George Oppen's 100th birthday - and the event happened at the Writers House in April '08. Soon after, we set up a special PennSound page with links to audio recordings of the presenters (myself included). Now we've released a PennSound podcast featuring a 23-minute excerpt from that event.

The photo was taken that night - George Economou, Michael Heller, Tom Devaney and Tom Mandel, listening to Ron Silliman present on Oppen.

"in" or "and"? - it makes a difference

Give me in any day.

I have just finished reading a collection of essays given the title Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg, published by Palgrave Macmillan. The many pleasures I derived from this book do not always have to do with its topic, which seems capacious but is in fact fairly well and even narrowly defined: Wallace Stevens in Europe.

The connection is rich but in several ways it’s a not-so-supreme fiction, since of course Stevens never visited Europe, never went further abroad than Cuba. Once Europe must be identified as the Europe of Stevens’ imagination, anything goes. To be sure, I’m mostly glad of this. My favorite passages generally explore the terra incognita of the subject. Frank Kermode claims, doubtless a fact, that it was he who introduced Stevens to the Swiss. George Lensing elegantly rehearses the old but nonetheless accurate generalization that Stevens “survived on postcards,” and offers a brief but good reading of “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” an under-read poem. Robert Rehder describes “mastery of the syntax of doubt” in “Description without Place,” making one doubt the relevance of “Place” beyond the many name-dropped references in that end-of-war poem, such that “without” (does it indicate dislocation or evacuation?) becomes the key term. J. Hillis Miller gives, along the way, a personal recollection of Stevens’s important reading at Harvard in 1950, and, as a bonus, a quite moving evocation of the “Danes in Denmark” passage testifying to Stevens’s unironic sense of the power of the indigene truly living the local life (“And knew each other well”).

Yet as we read this book about Stevens’s Europe, Stevens in Europe, the Europeans’ Stevens, we must remember that the “Danes in Denmark” notion was never about Denmark, nor even about Europe at large. It’s about fully occupying any place but one’s own place, and Europe is a site chosen by way of analogy rather than a cultural or geographic context. Miller, for instance, is right to wonder why Stevens landed on Denmark to make this fabulous place-unspecific point about place.

What does it mean to speak of this particular poet “in” Europe? His actual readership there? His effect on the poetics community? His relationships with individual contacts and correspondents there? Stevens in Europe; Stevens and Europe. “In” is critically a more effective term than “and,” in this regard, but it also requires higher standards of evidence and scholarship. “And” has always produced in Stevens criticism pairings suggestive at best, indulgent at worst: “Stevens and Zukofsky” (a real connection, and generative in terms of contemporary poetics); “Stevens and Heidegger” (a connection made by Stevens through a tiny bit of reading; otherwise a theoretical parallelism, and perhaps a troubling one and too dependent on the acuity of the critic). Miller’s essay here is titled “Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark),” but the locatedness of the preposition is more persuasive than the collection-befitting conjunction.

Once the subordinating, situating in of the first section of essays gives way to the parallelistic and of part two—a portion of the book titled “transatlantic conversation”—the critical essayist is untethered, for both ill and good. Here we get the delightful piece of Krzysztof Ziarek once again considering, indeed, Stevens and Heidegger. Yes, Heidegger was definitively German, but the essay’s large concept, the “foreignness of poetry,” turns out to have only tangential connection to Stevens’s sense of Europe, a limitation that fortunately does not thwart Ziarek’s revisionist reading of an important late poem, “Of Mere Being.” Again, though, “mere being” is an existential condition more fundamental, more culturally unspecific, than can be obtained by the category “European.”

Across the Atlantic for Stevens were Anatole and Paule Vidal, his French art dealers (father and daughter), their aesthetic-mercantile eyes on the depressed and then war-torn republics; alas, the Vidals are seen only glancingly here. Barbara Church is briefly mentioned (her postcards from a postwar driving trip are sources for several cantos in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”), but she and her husband were crucial to the development of Stevens’s view of twentieth-century Europe: Henry and Barbara Church, exiled in Princeton, gave him his clearest sense of the failure of the interwar modernist small press and salon.The Churches introduced Stevens to Jean Wahl, a French poet, detained by the Nazis in a Vichy camp; Wahl corresponded with Stevens and sent him a sheaf of poems in typescript, which we know Stevens read. Pitts Sanborn, Stevens’ Harvard classmate who was a writer and art critic and (as it turns out) fascist fellow traveler living in Germany through the 1930s, was another significant contact in the heart of Europe. Hardly did I lament the particular absence of Sanborn in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (he is a character perhaps best forgotten), nor rue the merely brief mention of Wahl by Edward Ragg in his otherwise good essay on Picasso and Cezanne. But I did generally miss a solid touching down upon the European ground of Stevens’s time. (I hasten to note that Mark Ford’s telling of Stevens’s connection to Nicholas Moore of the Fortune Press presents a plausible counter to my qualm.)

Above at right: Jean Wahl presents at a 1943 conference at Mount Holyoke College, where Stevens also gave a paper.

Through Paule Vidal, Stevens came in contact with the life and work of the Breton painter Pierre Tal Coat, a lyrical abstractionist, from whom the poet came to a particular understanding of the fate of the European artist at the moment, as Serge Guilbaut has put it, when New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris. Because he continued stubbornly to buy French works of art—in part out of a fetishizing of the Postcard Imagination—our American poet was working against the trend, the “American Century,” flowing mightily toward him rather than away. These were the sort of actual European forms and movements and Stevens knowledge of which tends to undermine the now infamously dislocated and oblivious but always powerfully contradictory notion of poetry as a description without (a sense of) place.

Feeling somewhat bereft of delineative particulars, I was greeted with the super-confident gesture implicit in Massimo Bacigalupo’s perfectly relevant and useful account of carrying Stevens’s American English over into Italian. Nothing could be more circumstantial or illuminative. Renato Poggioli, to translate the poems in 1954, queries the poet by mail word by word, seeking a culturally specific sense-making for a nation quite unlike the poet’s, balancing that with the untranslatable Americanness upon which Stevens, or at any rate the verse, insists. Bacigalupo (seen at right), a translator of Stevens himself, gives us essentially a memoiristic account of linguistic reckoning across the Atlantic. This, to me, is Stevens in Europe truly—at the level of the word.

Jews to whom nothing untoward happened (not)

Lisa New's memoir, Jacob's Cane, will be published in the fall by Perseus Books. I read it this past weekend in proofs and found it to be dazzling. I was asked to write a jacket blurb and here it is:

Elisa New’s brilliant memoir prefers convergences to chronology. That “history is a random business, made out of wanderings, guesses, and old glue” is the major idea—and also method—of the book, and its themes converge, surprisingly and pleasurably and emotionally—every which way. One moment we happily tear at Lithuanian rye jagged with caraway, its crust so tough it tugs the bones in the jaw, the next moment our guide is asking a man on the tractor to point out the spot where they’d shot the Jews. The Jews, of course, of New’s convention-defying family. These people are real, troubling every stereotype. Here is the gorgeously written, marvelously structured memoir of a person who’d been made as a child to understand why her whole clan comported themselves as though they were persons to whom nothing untoward had ever happened. But something most certainly did happen…

You can hear recordings of Lisa reading from the memoir - linked here.