newly released reading of Rezi's "Holocaust"

Abraham Ravett took this photo of Charles Reznikoff in Rezi's NYC apartment in December 1975. Ravett was making his diary-film Thirty Years Later (completed in 1978). He included in it film he made of Reznikoff reading from his long poem Holocaust and we at PennSound have now extracted the audio of the reading from the film. Go here to a special PennSound page and find the audio segmented and some notes by Ravett.

new review

New review to be published soon in Modernism/modernity. Earlier here I posted a draft of the review and got a response from the editors. I enjoyed that exchange.

writing through imagism

Here's H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" (1916):

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

And here is Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies" (2002):

Lavenderish dusk
strapped for stays,
pomegranates under the rubberband
chucked for a glass Oz,

letdown
splayed by the pillar-shelves
to page upon the ottoman:

his talk has wrought suit
amid citrus gapes
and pall dunked in the bowl
and grated sage
or cleaved clear paleo-pines.

Postgeist, upcast
California upon weed,
what banker yields
so fragrant a cant
as this vagrant cant?

Scappettone wrote through H.D.'s poem, substituting words but always keeping to parts of speech. She echoes the original at certain moments, creating some rhymes and in a few cases what amounts to a homonymic ("husk"/"dusk") and quasi-synonymic translation ("sought root"/"wrought suit"). The poem is a meta-commentary on imagism, a way of decorating or over-elaborating H.D. whose imagistic lines convey a "piety that veers into preciosity" (the poet's phrase).** Conch-shells become paleo-pines. "Fire on leaf" becomes "California upon weed."

"Vase" can rhyme with "maze" or with "Oz," depending on your class. (Scappettone has introduced the poem at readings sometimes by mentioning this valence, seeming to contribute to the notion that it is a commentary on imagism's social preciousness.)

PennSound's Scappettone page happens to include a recording of her reading the poem.

** Email of 1/19/2010.

Kate McGarrigle has died

Kate McGarrigle has died. Here is a YouTube video recording of the McCarrigle Sisters performing "Heart Like a Wheel." Thanks to Irwyn Applebaum, who sent me the link, I've just now watched Kate's performance of a new song, "Proserpina," at the recent family Christmas concert. "Proserpina, Proserpina, come home to mama." I'm very moved by this performance, as remarkable a goodbye as could be imagined. Come home to mama.

being frank, seeing Frank

Yes, I'm obsessed with Hill Street Blues. I apologize. My favorite single image from the show comes from the very end of episode 1 of season 3 ("Trial By Fury"--which won an Emmy for the writing). Frank Furillo, having manipulated the justice system to get the guys guilty of the rape and murder of a nun, realizes (we're meant to think: ironically) that he's committed a sin. Got the criminals but gave into mob justice--listened to the advice of his reactionary SWAT-team adjutant (Howard Hunter) and really angered his liberal-left Public Defender lover (Joyce Davenport). Now he's pulling his car into a parking spot in front of the Catholic Church, the place where Sister Carmella had been raped and killed. He'll go into the confessional, we now realize. But in the moment before we realize that, we get this perspective of him, unlike any visual rendering of a major TV series character I'd seen up to that point (1982). We can barely see him through the urban dark and the bars of the church gate and the statue of Mary standing guard.

Duncan's made place

These three discuss Robert Duncan's prologue-poem to The Opening of the Field with me in episode 27 of PoemTalk, just released today. Please have a listen. And let me know what you think: afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

writers on radio

At Kelly Writers House we are preparing to present the 79th episode of our monthly radio program, aired on WXPN-FM (xpn.org), called "Live at the Writers House." (So-named because during the first two seasons we actually went live to the air from 3805 Locust Walk in Philadelphia. Holy cow.) Here is an announcement about our newest episode, with a bit of looking back at the show's 13 years.

chronicler of guerilla goodwill

I'm pleased to have reconnected with my former student (from the mid-80s) Rob Rosenheck who is a fine photographer. He is author of The Love Book, described by the Times as "not only witty but downright courageous" and by Entertainment Weekly as "an amazing chronicle of guerilla goodwill." He's the creative director of Capobianco & Associates, based in L.A.

two new Steve Benson improvisations - video

I love this screenshot of Steve Benson performing at Berkeley last year. With help from Steve himself, and then Mark Lindsay and Jenny Lesser, we at PennSound have just now added two video recordings of terrific Benson improvised (and quasi-improvised) 2009 performances, one at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York and the other at the "Medium and Margin: Multiplying Methodologies and Proliferating Poetics" two-day conference at the University of California at Berkeley (in the Maud Fife Room, Wheeler Hall). The introduction was given by Lyn Hejinian.

* Benson PennSound page
* video of Bowery Poetry Club/Segue Series performance
* video of Berkeley performance

drawing poem images

More Bob Grenier goodies today. Through Whale Cloth (which has published his Sentences online as well) Grenier has released "Penn Scans": the 71 drawing poem images he selected for presentation during his October 2009 visit to the Kelly Writers House. Go here and read Grenier's notes on these, see links to the 71 images, and a link to the video recording of the KWH presentation, which only permitted time to consider a handful of the 71.

Grenier says: 'Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—-so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—-remains an animating question.'

love of my life

Zach Djanikian performed one of his own songs, "Love of My Life," on our Live at the Writers House radio program, aired on XPN. The first voice you hear in the recording is that of Michaela Majoun, the show's host (and XPN's morning show host for many years).

Fitterman redux

The other day I mentioned Rob Fitterman's new conceptual poetics project, and got a lot of positive response to it. My favorite literary photographer (as regular readers of this blog already know), Lawrence Schwartzwald, found this wonderful photo of Rob standing in front of the Ear Inn. We think the date was January of 1992.

Bob Grenier, student of Robert Lowell (and more)

A few months ago, during Robert Grenier's most recent visit to Philadelphia, I sat with him--joined by Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman--and talked about his life and work in the early period, covering roughly 1958 through 1964. We talked a lot about his experience (in two stints) at Harvard. During the second of these he met and was taught by Robert Lowell. In between he wandered to San Francisco and met Robert Creeley in New Mexico. The recording of this 1 hour, 16 minute discussion is available on the Grenier author page at PennSound. Here is a direct link to the audio.

conceptual writing project: holocaust

I'm pleased to have had a chance to read the manuscript of Rob Fitterman's new massive conceptual writing project, called Holocaust Museum. It is now being sent around to publishers. The book will consist of a list of archival materials, organized under headings ("the science of race," "shoes," "mass graves," "uniforms"). The image above (sorry--it's taken from a Word document version of the typescript) shows a portion from the chapter of "family photographs." The effect of the project is realized most acutely only after one has read dozens or hundreds of items on the lists. One begins, blearily, weakly, to be half-conscious of the upsetting juxtapositions. Of course holocaust materials are loaded ipso fact with dramatic ironies, especially all the prewar stuff. The caption of the last-listed photo is of course a poem: "A group of young people pose outdoors in the snow." I could write three interpretive pages--traditional poetic close reading--of that line. That, too, would be ironic. Click on the image above for a larger view.

new Susan Howe at PennSound

New at PennSound. When Susan Howe visited Rachel Blau DuPlessis' class at Temple University, in December 1986, Rachel had the presence of mind to record the conversation. And years later she re-found the tape, gave it to us at PennSound, whereupon we converted the recording from cassette to digital audio. Now Jenny Lesser has segmented the whole recording into short "singles," by topic. Here is the list of the topics (and recording lengths). Links to these, and to the whole discussion, are of course available at PennSound's Susan Howe author page:

1. background to class discussion on Stein, Plath and Niedecker (4:35)
2. the poetics of "The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" and self censorship in the work of female writers (10:58)
3. the sense of crime in Howe's work (5:19)
4. female symbols in "The Defenestration of Prague" (8:01)
5. on pastoral components and female space in "The Defenestration of Prague" and "The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" (3:16)
6. on Howe's beginnings in the theater and as a visual artist
7. on the use of contradiction and fragment in the work of female writers (7:28)
8. duplicity in the works of Howe and Wallace Stevens (6:37)
9. Emily Dickinson as an experimental poet (0:58)
10. intertextuality in Howe's work (3:18)
11. on "The Liberties" and reaching an audience (7:08)
12. on Howe's writing strategy as a "post-objectivist" strategy and the idea that when nothing is said everything is said (6:20)
13. on equality and difference in feminist debates, power, and fascism (3:53)
14. how Emily Dickinson abolished categories (2:16)
15. the multiple audiences and functions of poetry (5:22)
16. on embedding in "The Liberties" (4:44)
17. on the meanings of birds, days of the week, and sculpture in "The Liberties" (7:26)
18. deciphering codes in "The Liberties" (4:14)

to put it simple

If you want to find a cogent explanation of the difference between late modernism and postmodernism, don't by any means go to TudorDaily.info. The site announces that it's "a place to ask questions about Learning and Teaching." Someone, presumably a student somewhere grappling with a paper assignment, posted this question: "What are the differences between Late Modernism and Post-Modernism?" And here is the response: "To put it simple, late modernism is the easiest form of modernism and post-modernism is a more fine sort of painting."

the fan (2)

Baseball is a language, and, for the fanatic, it is language. It is the baseball fan who continues to make language baseball’s lingua franca. No more attentive fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers than the poet Marianne Moore ever attended games at Ebbetts Field or read accounts of their ultimate failures in the New York Times the next morning, and the evidence of that strange attention is of course in the poems. Her Dodgers finally won a World Series in 1955, and she combed through New York Times sports-page coverage, pulling phrases that specified her exultation, and made “Hometown Piece for Mssrs. Alston and Reese” something of a collage. From its rhymed title on, the poem seems to poeticize the unpoetical and thus create high-low ironies, but when one lays the poem beside clippings from Times coverage of the Dodgers, and carefully compares them, one realizes the extent to which this writing about baseball—this writing through baseball writing—doesn’t so much restate as rewrite the already published journalism. In doing so it discloses the latter’s myriad normative phrasings, utterly inconsequential and fascinating only when considered out of context. How could contextless phrases such as “get a Night” and “stylist stout” sufficiently convey Dodger mania? Yet they do. Moore is typical of the baseball fanatic in internalizing sportswriting diction only in the particular, and into her own writing—a fan’s writing—assimilated this quality beyond the need of quotation marks; she was beyond creating scare-quote ironies: irked by one misplay, a specialist versed in an extension reach, Podres on the mound. These, though borrowed verbatim from the New York Times, are simply presented in the language of the poem. Are they her words now? She implies no claim of authorship, nor of methodological uniqueness, for the poem itself implies, of its readership, that almost anyone who listens to or reads about baseball over the course of a sufficient numbers of days, or seasons, will be capable of reproducing phrases like "a specialist versed in an extension reach," despite its odd abstraction, its slightly unidiomatic quality, its seemingly contrived “poetic” assonance and consonance. Marianne Moore’s point is that such phrases are not poetic. They are in the ambience. The fan dating back to the 1930s, for instance, makes the mere substitution of “skein” for “string” and in doing so sufficiently conjures a whole ethos. “On August 3rd [1933],” Roger Angell remembered, “Lefty Grove shut out the Yankees, terminating a string (sorry: a skein) of three hundred and eight consecutive games . . . in which the Bombers had never once been held scoreless.” This is not merely adept verbal imitation. It is the word as entrypoint for whole contact. Possibly our most self-conscious writer of baseball writing, Angell has frequently claimed to despise the baseball-is-life/life-is-baseball conceit. Yet an essay in Once More around the Park and Game Time finds its way—-characteristically moves toward its unanticipated main point—not narratively and certainly not thematically, but along an associational sequence of words and phrases conjured from someone else’s account of a game. Finding himself at one point rewriting the play-by-play account of a Fourth of July weekend game between the Giants and the Cardinals, his writing of the old words merges into those of reporter John Debinger, and here are some: “dazzled a crowd,” “bewildered the Cardinals,” “master lefthander of Bill Terry’s amazing hurling corps,” “broadshouldered Roy Parmelee strode to the mound.” He comes to the point of remembering his father’s love of the game, and then his own love of his father, by way of remembering his own love of the language used by others, in his father’s era, to describe the game. He bears out his hatred of baseball is like life but affirms baseball is like language.

Angell in “Early Innings” discovered as he wrote that recalling the language of that baseball era with more rather than less accuracy, at the level of tone and diction, meant a more rather than less complete psycho-emotional presentation of his childhood. The essay would finally about his father, or more specifically the extent of the father’s connections to the present writer, and the turning point is Angell’s admission that the topic was latent, unconscious, and that the necessary method was that of unintended disclosure—the revelation of the writing’s very topic. “When I began writing this brief memoir,” he self-referentially confesses, “I was surprised to find how often its trail circled back to my father. If I continue now with his baseball story, instead of my own, it’s because the two are so different yet feel intertwined and continuous.” And only then, three pages from the end of the piece, does the fan begin to narrate the early innings: “He was born in 1889 . . . ,” etc. The game itself, as always, begins at the beginning, but the fan’s work of writing through the game ends there. Prior to that is (for so many, so often, so continuously) the discernment through writing of the reason for this inversion. A half page above Angell’s “I was surprised to find” confession—prior to the birth of the father—the son keeps his first mitt “in top shape with neat’s-foot oil,” and only after instating the practice learns the etymology. “What’s a neat?” he remembers asking. Then they pitch and catch. Then the young emergent fan, now the older eminent writer, rediscovers the precisely appropriate diction, chooses to reproduce it and addresses us: “Yes, reader: we threw the old pill around.”

TV drama-show form/content jibe

Still in an online discussion with a few dozen adults, talking about season 3 of Hill Street Blues, 1983. We just watched episode 14, "Moon over Uranus," one of my favorites. (Watch it here.) Peter Wolk, the attorney and screenwriter, is in the group, and here is something he wrote us last night:

A couple random thoughts. It's amazing how much is going on in each episode. A typical hour-long drama today has an A story, a B story, and maybe a C story that's more comedic. [David] Milch is giving us A through G stories. One advantage he has is that the show runs 49+ minutes. An episode of Monk in 2009 is 42+ minutes.

My response is not profound by any stretch, but gave me a chance to express my admiration for an experiment in television-show narrative (a tight set of rules there, to be sure!) that today seems easy but in '83 was hard to get past the network ratings worry-warts:

You are right that Milch gives us stories A through G. And maybe H. One of us should count them all up. Someone years ago tracked them all across a season, charting which were maintained across episodes and for how long, which died out in a single episode, etc.

I believe it was in the very first show of the series, ep. 1 season 1, that two characters whom we immediately knew would be mainstays, Hill and Renko, were shot and presumably killed about halfway through the episode.** This was much commented-upon at the time. What a disruption of TV conventions! Introduce two characters and then kill them off, and not even at the end of the individual episode, let alone the end of a season! Threw us all way off, and we knew right then that we had to pay attention to our expectations and be prepared for them to be violated.

The formal/structural violations of course mirror the crazy frenetic anything-can-happen early 80s urban reality being depicted. For me, as a longtime TV watcher whose favorite subgenre was the one-hour 9 PM or 10 PM drama series, this was the first time I truly experienced that form/content jibe.

Helter-skelter reality --> handheld camera, ensemble cast, crazy audio techniques, random elimination of characters, many plots going at once.

** Episode was entitled "Hill Street Station" and aired 1/15/81. Official plot summary is: "A hostage situation arises in Captain Furillo's precinct. Public defender Joyce Davenport is looking for her client, lost due to bureaucratic mismanagement. Officers Hill and Renko are shot in the line of duty." The episode was awarded an Edgar for Best Teleplay from a Series.

purging libraries

In March 1953, at the height of the Cold War, with the Rosenbergs awaiting electrocution, Senator Joe McCarthy investigated the presence of certain books in State Department-sponsored overseas libraries. One writer whose books the libraries stocked was William Mandel, United Press expert on the WW2-era Soviet Union. Roy Cohen, David Schine and McCarthy's other staff named Mandel as a member of the Communist Party. Televised throughout the U.S. and watched by 40 million viewers, Mandel's defiance of the powerful Senator was unprecedented. Here is a 30-minute preview of a film about the McCarthy-Mandel confrontation. Mandel's reasonable-toned rejoinders of senators' questions permits little entry-point for senatorial bullying and he goes on to give a fairly cogent reply to McCarthyism.

your daily Al for 1/6/10

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sucked a sad poem

After looking at the photographs to be published in The Americans, Jack Kerouac said of Robert Frank that he had "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." At right is one of the 83 photographs published in the book. Kerouac wrote the preface.

baroque cop

I've been watching episodes of season 3 of Hill Street Blues on Hulu, and discussing them with an adult "class" of a dozen or so people far flung (all by email). Here are some thoughts about the speech style of Lt. Howard Hunter and Sgt. Phil Esterhaus:

David Milch inherited the hyperbolic and circumlocutious speech of Esterhaus and Hunter, but he added the baroque grammar, upped the ironic euphemisms several notches, and made especially Esterhaus unforgetttably different from your usual TV cop.

About Hunter: I never warmed to that character at all. I enjoyed episodes in which Hunter's law-'n-order ideology directly conflicted with Henry Goldbloom's the-less-fortunate-are-not-to-blame liberalism, because at such moments other characters (including Furillo) had to take sides, and not predictably. But when Hunter's conservatism was ridiculed and left dangling as a non-starter (as in "Trial by Fury"--in the bathroom scene) I have the feeling that dialogue is being wasted for mere satire.

on the rounendless talk of cut-ups

More...

words is out

I'm completely thrilled and grateful that Craig Saper--one of my favorite quirky teacher-scholar-writers--has been putting so much effort into focusing attention on the work of Bob Brown. Craig is working on a Bob Brown biography. He's just recently edited and re-published Words, working with the Rice University Press on a paper and web version. My printed copy is on its way from Texas, but I've looked long and hard at the web transcription and facsimile and am, as I say, thrilled.

is this any kind of mother...?

Click on the image at right for a larger view: the postcard produced for the current Wallace Berman gallery show, upon which, earlier, I've commented here.

things as they are are changed

An attempt at reading "The Man with the Blue Guitar" as if were voice-strumming.

sticker novel now to be published for the coffee table

A novel, implementation (2006), was published as a series of stickers. It was written (and stuck around) by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg. This site tells you all about it. Now Montfort and Rettberg are planning a coffee-table photo book version. Really. Here are two of their instructions for this new version: "2) Choose interesting places to put the stickers up in public environments and stick them there. 3) Photograph the sticker, attempting to get photos of the sticker both at a close/legible view and from some distance, showing the placement of the sticker in its environment." Here are photos of a sticker stuck in Berkeley.

miniaturist's exploding sublimation

Murad Khan Mumtaz, All Debts Public and Private, 2009. Opaque water color on dollar bill, 6.25 x 2.75 in.

New Art from Pakistan: Noor Ali Chagani - Amna Hashmi - Ayesha Jatoi - Ismet Khawaja - Nadia Khawaja - Murad Khan Mumtaz - Seema Nusrat - Lala Rukh. January 7 - February 20, 2010. Opening Reception: Thursday, January 7, 6-8:30pm. Thomas Erben Gallery (526 West 26th Street, floor 4; New York, NY 10001) presents a group of emerging artists from Pakistan. Murad Khan Mumtaz sublimates images of explosions, some executed on one dollar bills, through their execution in the miniature tradition.

til it could not be denied

Jan Karski became somewhat well known after the release of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, where Karski is an anxious, halting, intense presence in the second half of the film, with an unforgettably creased face and adz-shaped head. He was a member of the Polish underground government--one of its couriers from inside the Nazi-occupied nation after 1939. In 1942 he met with two Jewish leaders who told him what was happening to the European Jews. He listened, then visited the Warsaw ghetto twice, and then set off for London and Washington with the goal of persuading the allied governments to stop the genocide. He did not succeed, and knew from the start that "The truth might not be believed," as he put it in a document he wrote a little later.

Here is a passage from that document:

This was the solemn message I carried to the world. They impressed it upon me so that it could not be forgotten. They added to it, for they saw their position with the clarity of despair. At that time more than 1,800,000 Jews had been murdered. These two men refused to delude themselves and foresaw how the United Nations might react to this information. The truth might not be believed. It might be said that this figure was exaggerated, not authentic. I was to argue, convince, do anything I could, use every available proof and testimonial, shout the truth till it could not be denied.

They had prepared me an exact statistical account of the Jewish mortality in Poland. I needed some particulars.

"Could you give me," I asked, "the approximate figures of the murder of the ghetto population?"

"The exact figure can be very nearly computed from the German deportation orders," the Zionist leader informed me.

"You mean that every one of those who were presumably deported was actually killed?"

"Every single one," the Bund leader asserted.

A longer excerpt can be found here.

trippy west-coast surrealism in Chelsea

Walked up to Chelsea the other day to take a look at the Wallace Berman show at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. Wonderful stuff. Most of the pieces date from 1962 or so to the late 60s, but there is one item dating from 1960 and several from the 70s. Berman edited the great Semina magazine, which published irregularly from the mid-50s through 1964; I've written about Semina, happily. Others have too. The gallery shows Berman's silent film Aleph. The day I was there (the gallery was technically closed) I didn't get to view it, but of course I knew to look at Ubuweb films, and, sure enough, there it was. The show closes January 9th, so get to 26th Street before it's too late.

freedom of information

I've used the Freedom of Information Act to get access to previously classified government documents a number of times over the years. I started making such requests during the immediate post-Reagan era and in those days the FBI in particular was moderately cooperative in its correspondence with you but otherwise extremely slow to respond. I got the FBI surveillance files on the novelist Mike Gold (Jews without Money etc.) but it took about five years. You have to be patient and persistent.

Fortunately, by now some documents, once released to one scholar or journalist, are made unclassified and available on the web. It's not as difficult as it used to be. What you get is often disappointing, though: entire pages of my Mike Gold materials are blacked out.

Those interested in trying their hand at FOIA requests need to consult two terrific web sites: one hosted by The Reporters Committee of Freedom of the Press (link) and another by The National Freedom of Information Coalition (link).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, sunshine is not a natural state.

cold-war poetry

At Franklin & Marshall's Writers House on March 10, 2010: A Lecture and Conversation: Al Filreis on "Some Poems of the Cold War: The Tranquilized 50s". "Come out from under your desks. In this hands-on session, Al Filreis will present several poems to explore together with participants within the milieu of the Cold War culture. Filreis is a Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, the founder and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Filreis is the author of 5 books on poetry, as well as numerous academic articles and essays. This event is free and open to the public." More...

Joyce the inverted nationalist

In 1944 the New York Times commissioned then widely read novelist James T. Farrell--an "ethnic proletarian" novelist who came of age in the radical context of the Depression, author of Studs Lonigan etc.--to make a commentary on James Joyce. Farrell wrote about his main topic: being Irish in the Irish diaspora. Below is the first paragraph of the essay Farrell wrote for the December 31, 1944 Times and here is a link to the whole piece.

"This race and this country and this life produced me," declares Stephen Dedalus--artistic image of James Joyce himself--in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." "A Portrait" is the story of how Stephen was produced, how he rejected that which produced him, how he discovered that his destiny was to become a lonely one of artistic creation. It is well to look into the life out of which Stephen came, to discuss the social and national background of this novel. In Ireland a major premise of any discussion of her culture and of her literature is an understanding of Irish nationalism. And it is at least arguable that Joyce was a kind of inverted nationalist--that the nationalism which he rejects runs through him like a central thread.

your daily Al for December 27

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Bob Kaufman

An early photo of poet Bob Kaufman. More...

at the Ear Inn

Charles Bernstein standing in front of the Ear Inn. It was January 4, 1992, before or after a reading at 326 Spring Street, Manhattan. That day he read with Ann Lauterbach. [Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.]

turn left in order to go right

From his book Turn Left in Order to Go Right, Here is a poem I greatly admire: "I'd Like to See It." The refrain--"I'd like to see it that way"--is offered every four or five lines. It seems to me the perfect meditative and yet arbitrary structure to frame an otherwise random series of hoped-for conditions, which range from intensely and obscurely personal to geo-political. "So I could relax, put on my enormous suit / And ring your doorbell holding my breath and flowers." And also: "For the good of the nation behind bars" and "In order to be able to end war..." The refrain itself, rather than closing off possibilities in the serial quality of the remarks and thoughts, doubles the meaning each time: (1) It would be nice if it were so; I would like to make it so; and (2) This is how I would like to see or perceive or understand this or that part of my world. There's both agency and fatedness.

We at PennSound have a recording of Fischer reading this poem aloud--beautifully. I urge readers of this blog to read the text while hearing Fischer's Zen-ish performance. Charles Bernstein describes Fischer as "incandescently tranquil" and I cannot think of a better example of this hard-to-achieve tone than this poem.

you could have just divided by 7

Americans on average read or hear 100,000 words per day. Anyone who has read Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy can compare that figure against one talkative avant-gardist's one-way talk (just Kenny going out, leaving aside what's coming in and not including his reading) for a week; just divide by seven. Here is your source for the factoid. The media "reporting" of the study that produced this information implies that it's all a disaster and that it's qualitatively as well as quantitatively new.

Oh, yes, and despite all the doomsaying about the end of reading and writing: people are reading and writing more than they did in 1980. Reading somewhat more and writing a whole lot more.

thousands of poetic flowers blooming

Despite the corny romanticism that is its basis (wilting urban flower has a dream of sunlit wind-kissed wavy fields), there's an overwhelming consensus out there that Flower is, as co-creator Jenova Chen puts it, "video game poetry." Not just "poetic" in the sense meant by the phrase often repeated in gamers' reviews--"this poetic, romantic ideal," one of them writes--but poetic in its super-explicit aestheticism and anti-ambitious alterity. It's surely not the first video game that approaches abstraction and open, non-directed themes, but it's surely the first that will receive a wide response. If its promoters can get past the obvious transcendental language ("Flower makes your heart soar as you whip the controller up, sending your petal stream high above the landscape in a tornado of beautiful colours and roaring wind...watch[ing] the blades of grass part..."), many competition-oriented gamers will discover for themselves something of the surprise of poetic experiment: What exactly was that I just experienced? I don't know what to call it. It's not that it's especially beautiful (certainly not to me); the visualities are not its innovation. What's different is that it's different--its unobvious motives, its impractical reason for being, its unintentionally deadened affect.***

To be sure, making body-oriented or body-connected poetry in digital environments such as Brown's "cave"** is not new. And Flower is retro compared to some of the work done by artists in the world of digital poetics. The difference with Flower, of course, is that it's coming through a mainstream pipe (PlayStation3) and is the work of young people not otherwise connected to the poetics community.

Your responses invited. Write me at afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

** For an example of visual/physical word flow in Brown's cave, click here.

*** I suppose it could be argued that this makes it a candidate for designation as kitsch.

"brilliant" okay in my book

Can't tell if the following paragraph was made by the publishers (in which case "brilliant" is a throw-away word) or is quoted from a reader or reviewer (in which case the term makes my day):

The poetry of Wallace Stevens has inspired generations of poets of every school. Here, for the first time, is assembled an astonishing variety of poems, by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens' life and work. In its own way, each poem exhibits the torque and feel of his poetry, yet each also is deeply personal and conveys how meaningful Stevens was and remains for poets and poetry. Whether whimsical or serious, solemn or light, the poems in Dennis Barone and James Finnegan's "Visiting Wallace" are sure to inspire delight and thought. Alan Filreis' brilliant foreword asks us to consider whether there is another modern poet who means as much to contemporary verse as Stevens: "seventy-six poems giving us seventy-six distinct Stevenses to follow and succeed."

The book for which I wrote the foreword is Visiting Wallace, an anthology of poems written under the influence of Wallace Stevens. Below is the first page of the foreword (click for a larger view).