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the sun came

New recordings at PennSound: Etheridge Knight's 1986 reading. Knight was introduced by Gwendolyn Brooks. If you listen to her introduction in combination with Knight's reading of his own poem "The Sun Came," you'll hear a dialogue between the two poets. So, please, listen to Brooks first (MP3) and then hear Knight's "The Sun Came" (MP3).

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.

mad about folded cut-ups

The new issue of Private Circulation features Erica Baum's Dog Ear. The piece reproduced here is the one called "Mad." Baum's work, as always, is photography and it's also conceptual poetry. Private Circulation is a monthly PDF available only by email subscription.

literary practice at the edge (...in the snow)

Conference at Banff in February. Click on the image above for a better view.

those debilitating dreams

My dear friend John Giannotti, the noted sculptor, reminded me yesterday that Jean Shepherd once called for a "Dream Collection Day." Here's what Jean said:
John writes: "Although meant to show the utter uselessness of the creative spirit, it had exactly the opposite effect on me -- which Shepherd probably knew anyway."

9/11 at KWH

After 9/11 we at KWH organized a program called "Finding the Words." Believe it or not, readings and commentaries started with the WWII wartime/home-front experience of that seemingly nonpolitical poet, Marianne Moore. And yet the responsiveness to 9/11 was, for me, not oblique and completely interesting. LINKS: (1) earlier blog entry introducing the event; (2) link to podcast later made for the program.

Dominick Dunne

Friends and family today buried Dominick Dunne, and of course Joan Didion was there. Stephen Sondheim was a pallbearer. Dunne died on August 26. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald/Splashnews.

obsessed with details but oblivious

Our narrator is super-attentive to details but otherwise entirely oblivious. Yes, it's Heinrich Boll, one of his post-Holocaust stories about German society: "Across the Bridge". He works for a company whose business is suspect, but he doesn't inquire. He carries parcels and messages but doesn't know what they are. He relishes his routine trips, though, seeing in one house along the way the perfect rhythms of regularity: a woman keeps scrubbing windows, on schedule. The routine is an aesthetic, and it is associated with those first postwar months: he had crossed the bridge almost daily in those days, but then it was rickety and war-torn, and he remembers feeling that dread and emptiness. Would the train ever get across? Sometimes classic literary psychoanalytic readings work sufficiently. In this case, for sure. Let's call it - with the Mitscherlichs, who wrote on it about postwar Germans years ago - "the inability to mourn." By the way, I feel the same dread watching all those slow-moving Holocaust-related trains in Shoah and The Truce and elsewhere.

3 new PennSound Daily entries for your iPod

Here is an audio recording of the three most recent PennSound Daily entries on PennSound - on new materials in our archive by Abigail Child, Ken Jacobs, and Bruce Pearson. The recording was made using SpokenText and the voice you'll hear is that of an avatar, better than most. So download this and take your PennSound Dailies along with you today while you shop, wait in line at the DMV, wash the dishes.

PennSound Daily is written almost daily by our Managing Editor, Mike Hennessey.

meta-beer

In Addis Ababa. Does the sign indicate the beer of beers? A beer the taste of which makes one think of beer-ness?

Thanks to Mara Gordon for the photo.

I wish I were an Oscar Wilde weiner

Apparently we at the Kelly Writers House have a new house band. That's what a hear. In any case, the group performed at the recent SRO inaugural 2009-10 "Speakeasy" (open mic night) in the KWH garden. The song is "I Wish I Were an Oscar Wilde Weiner."

lessons in hate

Jim Keegstra taught anti-Semitism in his high-school history class for 14 years in rural Alberta. He went way beyond--shall we just say--the curricular guidelines set out by the county, so there was little give in the decision county supervisors should have made to warn him first and then again and then fire him. But, again, it took fourteen years. He had tremendous local support and the school board (and others) were overwhelmed by the popular defense.

He taught that the American Civil War was a Jewish plot. He taught that World War II was caused by the Jews and that Hitler didn't kill any Jews. (Where did they go? "Hundreds of thousands went to Madagascar.") He made his students memorize the "fact" of the story of the Illuminati - a sect of Jews in colonial America who were given their instructions by the devil. He taught that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish. When a student wrote in a paper that Lenin and Trotsky were athiestic, he scrawled in the margin that that was incorrect--that they were Jewish, for the communist revolution in Russia was primarily a Jewish plot against the state. He says he most fears "that hard-core communist Jew, the financier, that hard-core rebel, that rabbinical Jew."

"The people who oppose me just do not know their history," says Keegstra.

A Canadian TV magazine - like 60 Minutes - ran a 20-minute segment on Keegstra. It was called "Lessons in Hate." I'm now making this segment available here.

only the ideology you hate indoctrinates the young

Per one Texas parent fearing the Prez' talk to schools: the "socialism" here is in the very fact that Barack Obama wants to "get to kids when they're young." In other words, socialism = indoctrination. Presumably this mom's ideology - whatever it is, but from the context (in an NBC Nightly News story aired last night) it would seem to be conservative Republicanism - is not one of those belief systems that, if exposed to the young, would constitute an effort to indoctrinate, but, rather, merely to teach. Hmmmm, well, this is the Culture Wars all over again.

Alex Katz in 1960

Click here for more.

if it demonstrates form, they can't read it

Marjorie Perloff on Ron Silliman's "Albany":

As in his long poems Ketjak and Tjanting, both written a few years earlier, "Albany" relies on parataxis, dislocation, and ellipsis (the very first sentence, for example, is a conditional clause, whose result clause is missing), as well as pun, paragram, and sound play to construct its larger paragraph unit. But it is not just a matter of missing pieces. The poet also avoids conventional "expressivity" by refusing to present us with a consistent "I," not specifying, for that matter, who the subject of a given sentence might be.

At the same time--and this has always been a Silliman trademark--indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude an obsessive attention to particular "realistic" detail. Despite repeated time and space shifts, the world of Albany, CA. is wholly recognizable. It is, to begin with, not the Bay Area of the affluent--the Marin County suburbanites, Russian Hill aesthetes, or Berkeley middle-class go-getters. The working-class motif is immediately established with the reference to "My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room." And this is the white working class: "Grandfather called them niggers." Later, when the narrator is living in a part of San Francisco where, on the contrary, many ethnicities are represented, we read that "They speak in Farsi at the corner store." The poet is a political activist: he participates in demonstrations and teach-ins, is briefly jailed, avoids the draft, and so on. There are many explanations of everyday things the activist must deal with: "The cops wear shields that serve as masks." But the paragraph is also filled with references to sexual love: couplings and uncouplings, rape, miscarriage, and abortion. And finally, there is the motif of poetry: "If it demonstrates form they can't read it." And readings: "It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers." Writing poetry is always a subtext but one makes one's living elsewhere: "The want-ads," as the last sentence reminds us, "lie strewn on the table."

From her essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject." Here's the entire section of the essay devoted to "Albany."

visiting Wallace

I wrote the preface to a volume of poems inspired by the life and work of Wallace Stevens, edited by Dennis Barone and James Finnegan. Visiting Wallace has just been published and here is a PDF copy of that preface.

kids are game

Last spring I taught a series of workshops on contemporary poetry to high-school students. Great fun. Click on the image above for a readable view.

reading Emily not quite blithely

Readers of this blog will recall that Lawerence Schwartzwald often takes photographs of well-known people in the act of leading their literary lives. Dustin Hoffman reading Ginsberg. Patti Smith reading a book of criticism on Wallace Stevens. Here Blythe Danner, who was the voice of Elizabeth Bishop's poems in the Bishop Voices and Visions documentary, is seen yesterday in the Meat Packing District (just north of the West Village) reading Emily Dickinson and her Culture. By the way, Lawrence is (by avocation mostly, I think) what might be called a "literary photographer." Is this a unique category?

Credit: (c) Lawrence Schwartzwald 2009.

planning on seeing "Inglorious Basterds"?

"I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience." - Quentin Tarantino

Creeley near the end

A beautiful late reading given by Robert Creeley, CUE Art Foundation, January 18, 2005. We at PennSound provide the video and also the audio-only recording of this event.

"When I think of where I come from....of what a life is, or was...," the first poem in the reading begins. Creeley died in March of '05, just a few months later.

1968 from another angle

Currently watching...the amazing documentary called Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, made by the same guy (Kevin Rafferty) who filmed The Atomic Cafe. Interviews with many players on the two teams spliced with video from the game. Yale was the much better team but Harvard came back to tie in the final few minutes. Meantime it's all about--of course--1968. Netflix users: this film is available to stream right to your computer. Factoids: The guy who was dating Meryl Streep was on one of the teams, as was Al Gore's roommate and several pals of George Bush. Above: the two-point conversion reception that tied the game in the final seconds.

writing a community, as always

Click on the image for a closer view, and click here for more.

on the brink of fetish

Poetry is an art of constitution. Not only plastic "composition." But not a graceful maneuvering of representations or descriptions or stories or denotations, all of which teeter precariously on the brink of fetish. - Bruce Andrews, "Constitution/Writing" (1981)

It turns out that people can't hear words in isolation very well. - Bob Perelman in "Sense"

Andrews: Open Letter 5th ser. 1 (winter 1982): 154-165. Perelman: "Sense" in Writing/Talks, p. 76.

running and writing

Joyce Carol Oates (in an interview with Grace Waltman and Jessica McCort) talks about running and imagination.

JCO: Oh yes? Are you a runner?

GW: I am a runner, and I like to be in movement.

JCO: Just like me.

GW: So I was really struck by your experience, when you that you were in London, but you were dreaming of Detroit, even though all the while you were actually running in Hyde Park (in London, England). I was interested in how a person can envision one geographic location, even while they're in another one. And, so, my question is - for example, if you might be running - do you find yourself more aware of the surroundings you're envisioning, or [of] those that are actually around you? And, how might that function in your creative process?

JCO: Well, it's kind of a complex question because the act of running is a really a manifold. Sometimes you're working on a problem that's formal, and you're looking for language, or you're looking for a way into a text that hasn't been written yet. Sometimes when you're running, you're looking for a way to edit the text that's all finished. And so, these are kind of formal preoccupations. I find the act of running very meditative and almost trancelike. I don't like the treadmill nearly as much as running, but I can do the treadmill if it's really cold out. I almost go into a kind of trance, and it's very good for figuring things out spatially - the way the text itself is like a paragraph set that maybe could be reshuffled or eliminated, and that somehow is a very different sort of activity from running and envisioning a different land - or cityscape. And, I think, probably, I don't do that much of envisioning another landscape. I tend to be very interested in what I'm looking at and what I'm seeing, and I find landscape to have a spiritual, or psychological, or emotional value in the text, and that becomes like a character. So, my apprehension of, say, the city of Detroit, would probably not be somebody else's. You know, I'm looking at it as a landscape or a cityscape of heightened drama in which something's about to happen - as some of the backdrop. But we know that a landscape or a cityscape is basically an entity that has no animation in itself. You know, we're bringing to it, or we're projecting onto it. It's a very interesting question. I often feel that the solution to a formal problem will be found on a run, or at the end of a run, or coming back from a run, whereas if I stayed home at my desk, then I wouldn't get it. And sometimes when I travel - I'm getting off an airplane in a different city and walking very quickly along in an airport - I sort of feel that I'm coming to something, and sometimes I have these strange little revelations that help me with a knotty problem. And so I think, though I'm not a mystical person at all - I'm actually quite skeptical - so I think that if I had stayed home and hadn't come to St. Louis, you know, would I have figured out about how to end the story? Because I figured something out about an hour ago, and I felt as though it was kind of waiting for me here in St. Louis. But if I'd stayed home, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten it, maybe ever, or not so quickly.

event & sound in poetry

I just received a copy of English Studies in Canada volume 33, issue 4. (It's dated December 2007 and so I assume it's been delayed.) This is a special issue edited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, with a "digital sound editor" - namely PennSound's own Mike Hennessey. The issue is titled "On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry." The table of contents is tantalizing, including: Bob Perelman on listening to WCW's "The Sea-Elephant," Brook Houglum on Kenneth Rexroth and radio reading, Brian Reed on Gertrude Stein speaking, Sarah Parry on the "LP era" in poetry, and Geoffrey Hlibchuk on the relationship between shortwave number stations and 20th-century poetry. Can't wait to read this stuff! And listen: comes with a CD of recordings edited by Hennessey.

restlessness in 25 minutes

See the PoemTalk blog for a description of and link to the newly released 21st episode of the PoemTalk podcast series - this one a discussion of a poem by Charles Bernstein. Above, from left to right: Marcella Durand, Hank Lazer, Eli Goldblatt, and myself, in my office at the Writers House which doubles as a recording studio.

“Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.” Thomas Edison said that.

last leader of the uprising

"The Ghetto Fights," by Marek Edelman, was published in a pamphlet called The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising by Interpress Publishers. Hard-to-find document I've made available through my Holocaust site. Marek Edelman (born December 31, 1922) is a Polish political and social activist, cardiologist, and last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. For more, go here.

daily Al back

Your daily Al is back after various summertime hiatuses. Get your daily Al daily. It's a Google gadget.

online advising

In 1999 I was interviewed for the local television news (Channel 6, an ABC affiliate in Philly) about the online pre-freshman advising course I was teaching. Here is the recording.

ride Manhattan

For 40 late-afternoon minutes yesterday I took a hot but otherwise lovely bike ride up and down the bike path and parkland along the Hudson River downtown. Down to Battery Park City and back up to the Intrepid at 44th and back down to the West Village. One of every ten bike was a fold-up bike (like my own). Nice to see!

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.