Giorno's first one-person show

John Giorno at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery at 526 W. 26th St. Giorno presented his exhibition, "Black Painting and Drawings." He performed "Lorca, please help me!" and other poems. The show runs from until June 12. ArtSlant says:

For his first one-person show in New York, John Giorno will exhibit paintings and drawings that reveal the evolution of the poem painting. Filling the walls of the gallery are twelve stenciled poems; over these hang black paintings at close proximity. The installation echoes the artist’s statement in a recent Artforum interview: “From emptiness, form arises.” Giorno’s poem paintings serve as one more aspect of his role as a poet and artist—connecting words and images in unexpected yet elegant ways. A video of Giorno performing the poem THANX 4 NOTHING will be on display in the gallery’s project room.

The Black Paintings and Drawings represent the visual aspect of John Giorno’s commitment to confronting audiences with poetry in different contexts—inviting us to rethink how we perceive words and images. As with many downtown artists in the 1960s rebelling against Abstract Impressionism and inspired by Duchamp, Giorno sought alternative ways of writing and presenting his poetry: using the telephone (Dial-A-Poem), recordings (Giorno Poetry Systems) and multiples (poem prints). As he said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, given the influence of Warhol, Rauschenberg and Johns, he began to see “the possibilities of found images through words. The way I found and used the material, . . . became a poetic form.” The first Poem Prints were part of a Dial-A-Poem installation in the 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art.

Photographs by Lawrence Schwartzwald. For more about Lawrence's work, click on the tag below.

down the line from Williams and Pound

The Pennsylvania Current is now running a story about the legacy of poetry at Penn: "Penn’s rich poetry legacy," by Tanya Barrientos. It features a nice mention of the Kelly Writers House and of PennSound.

an assemblage of paradoxes in one body

Listen to a brief audio biography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven.

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

a book launch event in which the book was re-published

Back on April 21, Danny Snelson, Tan Lin and others spread themselves across the entire first floor of the Writers House to produce an on-the-spot re-publication event around Tan's Seven Controlled Vocabularies (Wesleyan, 2010).

"Edit: Performing Networked Publishing," organized by Danny, focused on editorial strategies and textual conditions in contemporary writing. It was a roving events series exploring innovative performances, critical archiving, and live editing toward an exploration of editorial activity in contemporary writing and the arts. Featuring a team of poet-editors including Chris Alexander, Alejandro Crawford, Kareem Estefan, J. Gordon Faylor, Kristen Gallagher, Lawrence Giffin, Diana Hamilton, Eddie Hopely, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Patrick Lovelace, Jeremy Thompson, Sara Wintz, and Al Filreis accompanying Tan Lin in the re-publishing of SCV on the spot in a variety of formats. The event began at 1pm, with a reception and Q&A that happened at 6pm. The works to be published include "Handmade book, PDF, lulu.com, Appendix, Powerpoint, Kanban Board/Post-Its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (xerox) and a film.

goodbye Arlen, hello Ike

You like Ike. I like Ike. Everybody likes Ike. Ike for President, Ike for President. We'll take Ike to Washington. Hang out the banners, beat the drum, we'll take Ike to Washington. You like Ike. I like Ike. Now is the time for all good Americans to come to the aid of their country. Ike for President, Ike for President, Ike for President, Ike for President....

It's a gem. A thirty-second television ad from the 1952 campaign. Yesterday, arriving home after voting against Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primary election, I thought it might be apt to honor mindlessly for a few minutes the candidate who didn't know what party he belonged to until not long before he declared his candidacy for the presidency, whose centrism was real, whose legislative record had been nil, and whose campaign (quite aside from his Vice Prez choice) was innocent to the point of silliness. Then I washed my hands, cleaned out the hallway closet, and breathed the cool late-spring air. Ready to have my political lungs filled up again with the usual soot.

Anthony, Nate, Greg

From left to right: Anthony DeCurtis, Nate Chinen, and Greg Djanikian. Nate, my (and Greg's) former student and later a Kelly Writers House staffer, is now a regular music critic for the New York Times. See his NYT pieces.

"altogether now" altogether

Just a few hours ago today at the Writers House, with me from left to right: Alice Eliot Dark, Moira Moody, Beth Kephart. Alice and Beth read beautifully from their work. I was ready to explain the interlocking connections of these four, and planned to link from here to Beth's blog, which I read regularly. So naturally I went to Beth's blog to pick up the URL for the link and, lo and behold, Beth had driven home and had already written out the convergence. So I need only refer to you her blog, which I do so happily. Let me just add that I've been a pleased and moved reader of Alice's "In the Gloaming" for years and was gratified that she chose to read from that very story this afternoon at KWH. Pretty soon we'll have a recording available and you can listen too.

a question for Milch

holiday trilogy

I'm proud to have helped fund this play: "The third in [Cecilia] Corrigan’s holiday trilogy, Memorial Day combines live performance with video 'news reports' and carefully culled quotations on the subject of patriotism and nationhood. Corrigan describes this as a 'collage of influences,' noting that the play features words from Ann Coulter alongside those of Ralph Waldo Emerson." For more, go here.

Philly the day I arrived 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago to the day I arrived in Philadelphia, having been hired as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As I flew in a Piedmont Airlines jet over the city, I looked below me and saw huge plumes of black smoke rising up from a neighborhood west of the west bank of the Schuylkill River. What the hell is going on? What is this city I've come to? The mayor and police had firebombed the MOVE house on Osage Avenue. Welcome to Philly, Al. Now, a quarter century later, I live on Osage Avenue.

proletarian's table, no top

poetry on & off the page

In January 2000, Lingua Franca asked me to write very, very briefly in praise of a then-recent book. I chose Marjorie Perloff's Poetry On & Off the Page and here is what I wrote:

This fine collection of occasional essays is concerned with the way supposedly ordinary language becomes poetic. From The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) forward, Perloff has confidently, helpfully mapped contemporary poetics during a period of almost constant change. (She herself is one of the few constant features on that landscape.) Wary, as always, of holistic paradigms for the literary history of poetry, in POETRY ON & OFF THE PAGE she describes not the replacement of hip canon for square canon, "political" for "formal" poetries. Rather she shows shifts within (usually coinciding with the growth of) aesthetic movements that range across interests, forms and social formulations. Although a number of the essays have less to say about poetry per se than about, for example, Johanna Ducker's bookworks, the video art of Bill Viola, the photographs of Eugene Atget, and Christian Boltanski's simulated documentaries, I cannot think of a better introduction to contemporary poetry and poetics. Such commendation tells much about the special mode of Perloff's writings as well as the dynamic, interactive condition of experimental poetry today.

Stevens, China, wine

Edward Ragg is a poet, an expert on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, a resident of China, and a writer about wine. With Fongyee Walker, Edward blogs about wine at "Dragon Phoenix." His new book, "Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction," is due out from Cambridge this summer. Stevens' love of wine is naturally part of the book:

"Stevens was something of a wine lover, especially of the wines of Burgundy and one of the book’s chapters is entitled ‘Food, Wine and the Idealist ‘I” (the ‘I’ is a special case of the first person speaker in several of Stevens’ 1940s poems). The book proffers a long reading of perhaps Stevens’ most baffling gastronomic poem ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, a text whose relationship with Burgundy and with Occupied France of 1942 is both ingenious and has previously remained tough for Stevens scholarship to decipher. Part of the book’s argument is that Stevens’ embrace of an abstract aesthetic was not confined merely to poetic or artistic concerns, but involved his everyday imagination, interests and needs, including a love of the finer things in life, with wine being no exception...."

summertime & 2010-11

Audio announcement about summertime at the Writers House and a glimpse at our 2010-11 program year: mp3.

art: clothing in piles

Christina Boltanski's artwork/installation, "No Man's Land": a huge crane and a 25-foot-high mound of salvaged clothing rising from the floor of the Park Avenue Armory’s big drill hall. Every few minutes the crane’s giant claw will pluck a random assortment of shirts, pants and dresses from the mound and then release them to flap back down randomly. Visitors can watch the action — set to a ceaseless, reverberating soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats — from ground level, standing amid dozens of 15-by-23-foot plots of discarded jackets that extend in all directions from the mound and that may - should - evoke refugee or death camps.

"No Man's Land" is described in today's New York Times: here.

the PennSound mothers

For Mother's Day selections from the PennSound archive and a whole lot more, follow PennSound on twitter. Click here.

the ghostly presence of New England in Robert Grenier

Back in mid-March, I traveled to Manhattan and met Charles Bernstein and Robert Grenier at the East Side apartment of Michael Waltuch, Grenier's old friend and collaborator. We recorded part 2 of what is now a long 2-part interview with Grenier about his early years. Part 1 focused on 1959-64, with a bit of a look back to Grenier's high-school years just before that period. Part 2 goes back a bit into the early 60s but then moves forward, covering 1965 to the early and mid 1970s. If last time the central topic was Harvard, this time the central topic, as it emerged, was New England: New England in the specific biographical sense (Bob G.'s wanderings there, especially on trips shooting outward from Harvard) but also in the meta-geographical sense--New England as a haunt, a crucial (it would seem now, in Grenier's way of thinking) ghostly presence in his thinking and in his writerly development.

We are pleased to release this second interview through PennSound - available, along with part 1 and many other Grenier recordings, on PennSound's Robert Grenier author page. It's a long recording (2 hours and 11 minutes) but I hope you'll find listening to it rewarding.

short film about Second Life

Some innovative IT colleagues of mine here at Penn have made a short film about our use of the virtual world "Second Life" here. They interviewed me for it, but I'm not nearly the most lucid proponent of experimenting in SL. Watch for others.

Creeley on prosody and pacing

Back in 2000 I interviewed Robert Creeley in front of a live audience of 80 people or so at the Writers House. The recording (video and audio both) of the interview have long been available, but recently Michael Nardone has begun to draft a transcription. Note that it's not by any means finalized yet. Toward the beginning of the discussion Creeley brought out a small laptop which had loaded in it a software program called "Libretto." It was a primitive version of the much better voice transcription programs or voice recognition programs now available. In this early version a rudimentary avatar would speak a piece of text fed into it. Creeley was experimenting with prosody and wanted to dehumanize (for instance) the ballad stanza, to hear the words performed without subjectivity--as a machine would sound them. In this part of the transcript we find Creeley struggling a bit with the machine. Once it works, we hear the ballad (but it is by now unrecognizable so we've left out the verse itself in the transcript) and then Creeley discusses. (Here is a link to the audio segment transcribed.)

CREELEY:
It will come. I still have to get the appropriate file. I just took two verses from actually a very — it doesn’t use the syncopation quite at all very much, but I am also interested in pacing, what the intervals apparent are. Again, as I say this voice is in no way expressive or interpretive. I was visiting in a pleasant school, masters school, in just Dobb’s Ferry in New York and one pleasant teacher there, a Chinese-American, said “Sounds just like my uncle.” So here we go.

Wait a minute.

Speak.

COMPUTER MONOLOGUE READS:
[INAUDIBLE]

CREELEY:
Wait a minute I’m sorry. Let’s start again.

FILREIS:
In the room, if Aaron does some—-

CREELEY:
Let me just stop this. Abort.

I haven’t got the speaker turned on.

I’m an old man. I’m totally confused.

FILREIS:
He’s an old man with a libretto playing a voice synthesizer.

CREELEY:
Be that as it may.

FILREIS:
A cool old man, Bob.

CREELEY:
Come on, speak. Why do you never speak?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s tired.

FILREIS:
That ended that argument once and for all.

CREELEY:
Wait a minute, we’ll try again. Come on, I want to get it louder.

Louder, louder.

As loud as it can go.

Patience. Resume.

Speak

COMPUTER MONOLOGUE READS:
[Computer reads poem.]

FILREIS:
That was monotonous Robert Creeley.

CREELEY:
This program also allows you to slow down the tape and shift the pitch. It’s rudimentary. This is noted as a US English male H.L.

FILREIS:
H.L.?

CREELEY:
H.L.

H.L. Mencken or something.

Okay, that’s enough.

FILREIS:
All those lines are end-stops?

CREELEY:
Yeah.

[TRIUMPHANT COMPUTER SOUND]

FILREIS:
Whenever you don’t want Bill Gates, he appears.

So your sense of the line, your sense of rhythm at the level of the line. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about William Carlos Williams. Was that In the American Grain that voice?

CREELEY:
Yeah, I wanted something that would not, I wanted something that would not express or read into the language overly. I didn’t want it to be necessarily a drab voice, but I wanted it to be a saying of the words that would be dependent upon their pattern than my interpretation of it.

To me one of the problems in poetry, at least one that my particular company spent a great deal of time on, was the question of the register of the text and how that might be used as an information for the person reading it, presuming he or she would be hearing it in his or her head or reading it aloud.

Olson, for example, spends a lot of time on this problem. Duncan, literally toward the end of his life, acquires what’s then a state-of-the-art word processor so he can actually set his text and have it actually reproduced as the text of the published book. Groundwork, it seems to me, it was not In the Dark, but Before the War is thus composed. Denise Levertov has the same concerns. Paul Blackburn, et cetera.

I don’t why it became such a remarkable question for us. But it really is a difference between our company and that just previous. The Objectivists, for example, seem to have these concerns but do not particularly involve them in their own recital or their own reading of their own work.

FILREIS:
Yesterday you said that for a long while, at the beginning, you were using a typewriter, and a particular typewriter that you needed. And then you mentioned that Allen Ginsberg had genially advised you to get rid of the typewriter so you’d be maybe more mobile. Did, at first, the acquisition of the typewriter as the means of writing have anything to do with Williams, for instance, who was addicted to his typewriter?

I guess the second question is: what was it like when you got rid of the typewriter?

CREELEY:
Well the typewriter, initially, was a great way of freeing oneself from the personalism of one’s own handwriting. I was distracted by the way I wrote. Not that I wrote incompetently but I began to be, you know, obsessed with the nature of my handwriting, which was certainly not the point of what I was doing.

I wanted something that would instantly, so to speak, objectify these words I was putting in strings. I wanted to have something, again, that would not be informed by my personal disposition in handwriting. I wanted the words to be objectified, to be actualized so to speak by being generally characterized as typewriter fonts permit, and be there on the paper as something apart from my head or my personal, physical touch. I wanted them to exist in that sense by themselves. Nothing particularly vatic or mystic. I wanted to be able to look at them the way I would look at them on a page of print, let’s say.

FILREIS:
So what happened when you got rid of the typewriter?

CREELEY:
I think by that time, let’s see that’s ’63 or so, by that time I had been writing more or less—I began writing, particularly, let’s say, in the late ‘40s, so it had certainly been fifteen years of habit. At that point, what was far more useful to me was a means of collecting and/or composing in any kind of physical circumstance.

You know, if you have suddenly an impulse or some inquiry of some way of wanting to get something done and you have to go look for the typewriter, it’s awkward. So that this ability to use quick handwriting, that was very, very useful.

new recordings

My own PennSound page is being updated with recent recordings--interviews, introductions and discussions. Soon I hope to add the recording of the talk on Henry Rago and the Chicago Poetry scene 1955-60, delivered in Chicago in mid-April.

life isn't beautiful

Some weeks ago Cynthia Ozick published a short essay in Newsweek bearing the brash subtitle "Not all Holocaust art is authentic. In fact, much of it is fraudulent." While I don't agree with all her judgments here, I like the gist - the hardness, the high standard, the fussiness about the problem of representing the holocaust. Here is a link to the whole piece. And here is a telling excerpt:

Consider a handful of movies that profess to render the Holocaust. Life Is Beautiful, a naive, well-intentioned, preposterous, painfully absurd, and ignorant lie. Inglourious Basterds, a defamation, a canard—what Frederic Raphael, writing in Commentary, calls "doing the Jews a favor by showing that they, too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters," even as he compares it to Jew Süss, the notorious Goebbels film. The Reader, like the novel it derives from, no better than Nazi porn, and drawn from the self-serving notion that the then most literate and cultivated nation in Europe may be exculpated from mass murder by the claim of illiteracy. As for Schindler's List, its most honest moment, after its parade of fake-looking victims, comes at the very close of the film, and in documentary mode, when the living survivors appear on screen.

So where can the truth be found? In Anne Frank's diary? Yes, but the diary, intended as a report, as a document, can tell only a partial and preliminary truth, since the remarkable child was writing in a shelter—precarious, threatened, and temporary; nevertheless a protected space. Anne Frank did not, could not, record the atrocity she endured while tormented by lice, clothed in a rag, and dying of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. For what we call "truth" we must go into the bottom-most interior of that hell. And as Primo Levi admonishes, only the dead went down to the Nazi hell's lowest rung.

Along the way, Ozick reserves high praise for Paul Celan's great poem "Todesfuge" ("Death is a master out of Germany"); Elie Wiesel's outcry in Night; Dan Pagis's stunted, smothered lyric; Primo Levi's sober taxonomy of brutishness. I admire these judgments (excepting that for Night - a case where I out-Ozick Ozick in deeming it too novelistic, too narratively facile).

H.D.'s desk

Lately I've been reading the blog of the Beinecke Library, called "Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities." I took special note of a recent gift made to the Beinecke: H.D.'s writing desk. Its provenance seems significant, but no one knows for sure. H.D. biographer Barbara Guest: "Said to be Christina Rosetti’s, it may originally have belonged to Empress Eugenie, who spent several years in exile in England. Bryher bought the desk for H. D. at the estate sale of Violet Hunt” (Herself Defined, 56). In the photo of the desk, in its new place in New Haven, we see a portrait H.D.'s friend and literary executor (and longtime Yale English faculty member) Norman Holmes Pearson.

apprenticeships

The current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette includes a story about our apprenticeships program. Here are a few paragraphs:

The apprenticeship program began taking shape in 2002, when faculty member and novelist Max Apple approached Al Filreis, the director of the Kelly Writer’s House. Apple had been at work on a short-story collection, and was looking for a fresh reader who could offer some perspective on how to organize it. “I thought, we’ll call this an apprenticeship, and we’ll put the word out about it,” says Filreis.

Then he went one step further. He decided to form a new program, and found two other faculty members working on their own projects who could use some help. As soon as word got out, “the students applied in droves,” he recalls. “They wanted this.”

After all, this sort of real world “lab experience” is already available to students in the hard sciences. “Typically, the physics student realizes that his own professor is actually working on some very important, cutting-edge research,” he says, and from that point there’s a well-defined path for the student trying to get from the classroom to doing advanced research in a working lab. The apprenticeship model provides the missing link for a writing student trying to make the leap from an undergrad workshop class to the professional craft. “I think with this program we’ve proved … there is such a thing as advanced research experiences in the world of writing,” he says.

By establishing the Bassini Apprenticeships under the umbrella of CPCW, these courses could become credit bearing, says Filreis. The center is devoted to pedagogy that “really works” for the education of young writers, including experiences that might not necessarily take place inside a traditional classroom. “We believe very firmly that students learn best when they are essentially getting a one-on-one experience,” Filreis says, a philosophy that he compares to the intimate size of the Kelly Writer’s House. The largest room can barely hold a few dozen audience members, and “more often it’s one person talking to five people,” he says. “Narrow that down to its extreme, it’s one person talking to one person.”

your daily Al for 4-29-2010

king of cummings

Yes, there's Larry King at a midtown Manhattan Borders, checking out the Collected Poems of E. E. Cummings. He read them, but did he buy the book? Not sure of that. Our great literary photographer Lawrence Schwartzwald found King with his camera. Always watching out for poetry's unexpected readers. It must be Poetry Month after all.

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David Milch visits

David Milch was visiting us from Sunday morning through yesterday. An extraordinary experience, at every turn. Spellbindingly smart. The guy is both brilliant and supremely funny. Every story (about himself) he tells is both far-fetched and true, and the combination slays me.

I'd felt that I'd known him already from all those years of intense watching, starting of course with Hill Street Blues. HSB provided me, during the dimmest years of graduate school, an alternative universe on Thursday nights at 10; yet getting to know him in person now was nonetheless an adventure. What I hadn't yet realized about Milch was the extent of his generosity--a better word is an old one, charity. He had every reason to be distracted (pilot of the new show, Luck, is currently filming back in LA) but he focused on every person (and there were many, and they were various in kind) who came his way in our quite open space. He refused to take our honorarium, directing it instead to a campership program set up in the town (Arcadia, CA) where Luck is being filmed. He was still his hilariously acerbic self but he also had a kind word, a real ear, for everyone he met--and this was, in the course of days, many dozens.

On Monday evening he read the first 20 pages or so of the script for the Luck pilot. On Tuesday morning (yesterday) I interviewed him. Both these sessions are already available as audio recordings (mp3) and in video (streaming). All four files are linked here.

Anyone interested in my top four moments in all of Milch's TV-making? Probably not. But it's my blog and here they are:

4. Sipowicz has hidden his prostate problem from Sylvia and so she believes their not having had "relations" in a while was caused by the revelation of her traumatic experience with rape years earlier. She lovingly tells Andy that they are going to grow old together and their bodies will be what they will be, and that they should talk about it.

3. Mick Belker, in tears, standing in Frank Furillo's office doorway, saying he's 36 years old and can't afford to take care of his father.

2. Merrick reads aloud to the camp elders the contents of the simply and beautifully written letter Seth Bullock has composed to memorialize the life of a simple Cornish nobody who's been killed by Hearst.

1. The first 5 minutes of the final episode (#10) of John from Cincinnati. John and Shaunie reappear - surfing in from the far-off oceans, while all the characters in various places waken from a shared dream. The whole thing is covered (and unified) by Dylan's "Series of Dreams."

Emily the gardener

New York Botanical Garden’s upcoming exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. The show is on display April 30 June 13, and gives visitors a new look at Emily. She was an avid gardener, and took visual cues for many of her poems from flowers such as tulips, roses, and lilies. Exhibition highlights include: Opening weekend featuring a marathon reading of all 1,789 of Dickinson’s poems; an award-winning play about Dickinson’s life; a talk about this American poet as a gardener by Marta McDowell; and more. To be part of the opening, please contact Jen Josef, Director of Public Education and Interpretation, at 718.817.8573 or jjosef@nybg.org. Poetry Walk through the Garden’s grounds blooming with spring flowers. Dickinson’s 19th-century New England home and garden are re-created in the Conservatory. Gallery exhibition showcasing manuscripts, watercolors, and photographs that tell the story of Dickinson as a gardener, nature lover, and woman of the Victorian era. Additional programming such as home gardening demonstrations, children’s events, and much more. More information is available on our website here: http://www.nybg.org/emily/.

25 minutes talking about sentences

Today we are releasing episode 31 of the PoemTalk series. This one is a discussion of Robert Grenier's Sentences. Jena Osman, Bob Perelman and Joseph Yearous-Algozin joined me. I can't remember a more challenging project: to talk about this box of 500 poem-cards in 25 minutes?

David Milch, Monday & Tuesday

I will be interviewing David Milch next Tuesday, starting precisely at 10:30 AM eastern time. We will be (as always) streaming the video live. Just go here (to our KWH-TV page) and click on the phrase "view live video." The night before--Monday evening at precisely 6:30 PM--Milch will be giving a talk and/or reading. Also streamed live, and the link for that video is the same as the other. Milch is the third of three Kelly Writers House Fellows this spring; the others were Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Howe.

seminar vs. lecture redux

John Gee has responded to my recent writings about higher education - for the blog called Penn Political Review. Here is your link. Gee's piece is titled "In Which I Take a Thought by Al Filreis and Run With It." "We will continue to evaluate students on their retention of information in addition to their analytical skills. But we might, however, stop gathering students together for the purpose of taking in that information."

the seminar (audio)

Here is an audio version of my little essay on the seminar.

Wallace Stevens comes to PennSound

After months--several years--of digitizing, consulting, traveling, etc., we at PennSound are now ready to make available the recordings of Wallace Stevens reading his own poetry. We begin our new Stevens author page with two readings he gave at Harvard near the end of his life. Our friends at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont Library (though organizationally Woodberry now is part of the Houghton Library system) have shared these with us. Peter Hanchak--only child of Holly Stevens who was the only child of Wallace and Elsie Stevens--has given us at PennSound permission to make available whatever Stevens recordings we can find. I'm personally very grateful to Peter, who clearly understands that PennSound is all about noncommercial, educational use. Thanks to Joan Richardson and John Serio who helped me work with Peter on this; and thanks to Christina Davis, new director at the Woodberry, and Don Share, former director there, for their help and advice as we've moved forward. It's our hope, of course, that the way Stevens is taught will at least somewhat change now that his own way of reading the poems is widely and freely available. Long live open access!

the seminar

This coming Wednesday, April 21 on the UPenn campus, Danny Snelson has organized an evening to celebrate Tan Lin’s recent book publication, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [or 7CV] through the event series he curates, EDIT: Processing Network Publishing. Instead of a typical book launch, the event Wednesday seeks to enact and extend a poetics of distribution and/or metadata. Which is to say, a poetics that foregrounds problems of data description/retrieval, information processing, and the status of the book as an administered object. Through the event, an impromptu workshop will be created (picture a nerdier version of Warhol’s Factory), which will extend Lin’s book through various hand-made printed objects as well as digital ones.

I was asked by Tan Lin to write a short essay for this event. I had to choose from a list of topics and I had to write it straight: accessible, informative, normalized.

The Seminar

Commercial entities run what they call seminars. You can attend them at corporate headquarters, in the "seminar room," or in meeting rooms at hotels specializing in hosting such professionalizing gatherings. Perhaps the term came into use in this context because its progenitors sought to yield some of the academic connotation from the university. In the early years of the 21st-century, the word in its business context has come to mean a commercial event.

Most people, when using the term, mean a recurring meeting, a series. At American universities it has come to mean something of the opposite of "the lecture." Here there is an expectation that learners will participate in the making of the lesson. Often this counter-intuitive methodology is never explained; the reversal of expected roles is simply assumed. When a teacher lectures in a seminar it is deemed inappropriate.

Business-school pedagogy has positioned the seminar exactly halfway between its new corporate and its traditional academic connotations. Here the learner is expected to think "out of the box," while the pedagogy is said to be both "open" and "Socratic." But the so-called Socratic Method (favored by law schools) leads learners through a discussion in which freely volunteered answers to questions lead inexorably to the lesson the teacher had in mind from the start. Thus it can be said that the seminar has become the perfect tool of hegemony: open by process, closed by content.

It is easier to lecture than to lead a truly open discussion (in which the endpoint topic cannot be predicted at the outset). It is easier to transfer the power of certain knowledge by the open-closed method than by the closed method.

The word "seminar" is derived from the Latin seminarium, a seed plot. In the post-agricultural economy of the United States - an era rung in by Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr as the time of the university as "Knowledge Factory" - idioms making use of the seed plot have withered and died. Essentially the only remaining idiom in this connotative family is "sewing seeds of destruction."

In some European countries, the seminar is not at all what it is in the U.S. It is a lecture class (often "given" by a super-eminent figure) in which there is no discussion, but a synthesizing paper (a seminar paper) is due at the end of the course of meetings. The eminence sows a seed; the learner, silently gathered around, is the relatively fertile or infertile furrow set to receive it. In this the trope makes clear sense: the lecture is given and (as certified more or less by the term-ending paper) it is received. The seminar in Europe continues to be associated with old concepts of authority (gone to seed, we might say). But in the U.S., while it would seem that the seminar augurs a new kind of authority in which listener can be talker and talker listener, the seed is gone from the scene.

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Here is an audio version of this little essay.

Chicago

Splendid day in Chicago yesterday. Began it with another run along Lake Michigan. Then down to Hyde Park early to record an episode (for later release) of PoemTalk. Don Share (senior editor of Poetry), Judith Goldman (on the U of C faculty, in the Society of Fellows) and David Pavelich (modern poetry bibliography in Special Collections at U of C) - poets all three - joined me to talk about a pair of poems: H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" and Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies." (I've written a little about this pairing earlier here.) A very good session. I begin to realize that a keen choice of poem (or poems, as in this special case) enables the conversation almost automatically (that is, with little effort needed on my part as moderator). During an hour or so between PoemTalk and the Modern Poetry Symposium sponsored by Special Collections, I met up with Brandon Fogel, a former student of mine at Penn and now, with Judith, a faculty member of the Society of Fellows. Brandon's field is philosophy and physics (not just the idea of physics in some squishy history of science sense, but real hard-sci physics). As an undergrad at Penn he majored in English and physics, the only student to do so in my 25 years at the university. Unsurprisingly, the gang already surrounding me knew Brandon, so it was a confab. Then to the conference.

Garin Cycholl gave a wonderful paper on the poet Sterling Plumpp and jazz geography; I don't know much about Plumpp so I was being well schooled. Stephanie Anderson, a doctoral student here at U of C, then gave a talk on Chicago magazine, which Alice Notley edited during her several years here in Chicago in the early 70s (and also a bit afterward--when she and Ted Berrigan were in Europe). Paired with the Notley paper was Nancy Kuhl's on Margaret Anderson and The Little Review. Both these papers made use of fabulous rare materials. Nancy is the curator of poetry collections at the Yale American literature collection at the Beinecke. (I'd corresponded with her in recent years about the various manuscripts I used to research and write Counter-Revolution of the Word but had not met her until yesterday.) Nancy is also a fine poet, as witness The Wife of the Left Hand, a copy of which she gave me yesterday.

The Alice Notley/Margaret Anderson pairing - thank you, David Pavelich - was inspired, suggesting all kinds of things about the terms "editing" and (versus) "curating"; raising questions about young avant-garde women who find themselves at the center of a writing scene ("enabling," etc.). Notley very consciously sought to do all this without much help from Berrigan, and after she gave birth (fall '72?) he guest-edited one issue of Chicago--producing a very different choice of poets. Stephanie suggested that Notley meant to show this difference to their friends and colleagues, to prove, in a sense, that the other issues bore no trace of Ted's hand.

Don Share (he of the equanimous disposition and wonderfully sure, calm voice--a "radio voice," as they used to say) and I gave a pair of papers on the editorship of Henry Rago at Poetry: 1955 (when he took over from the zig-zaggy Karl Shapiro) to 1969 (when Rago suddenly died of a heart attack, not long after an apparently final retirement). My take, in short, is that 1955-1960 is a mixed record for Rago and Poetry at best, and that in 1960 or so Rago caught some fire. Don didn't disagree with my division of the Rago years into two, and he was nicely able to elaborate on all sorts of particular matters of editorship. During the discussion afterward, we began to talk about the special burden - given its special legacy of modernism - facing any editor of Poetry, and got close to a full-out conversation about the situation of Poetry today...when time ran out. But the topic had been raised (what do the failures of Rago's first four or five years teach us?) and it was very good.

After just a few minutes with Nancy Kuhl I remembered that I read (at the Regenstein, in fact; in the Poetry archives) about Lee Anderson's recordings of modern poets--recalled that Anderson (in the late 50s?) was preparing to give these recordings to Yale. Nancy of course knew about the Anderson recordings. There they are, still at Yale. Might it be possible for us at PennSound to collaborate with our pals at Yale to make available some of these recordings? You can be sure we'll be on the train to New Haven soon to discuss.

On the drive from Hyde Park to Chinatown for dinner last night, we passed by Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House. The horizontal flat stone thing looks so utterly natural in its urban prairie setting. I was a little shocked by this. I can usually see architecture in photographs and get it sufficiently; but Robie House needs to be seen as it is, just there, on a residential corner in this sweet little university town on the flat south end of its broad-shouldered city.

celebrate Tan Lin with us

TAN LIN is coming to to the Writers House. On Wednesday, April 21st, the EDIT series (Danny Snelson) will host this poet, whose work, says Charles Bernstein, “sparkles with unoriginality and falsification.” Join us for a live publication event entitled “Handmade book, PDF, lulu.com Appendix, Powerpoint, Kanban Board/Post-Its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (xerox) and a film.” A reception will open at 6PM, to be followed by Q&A, printing, and micro-lectures beginning at 7PM. For more information call 215-746 POEM or email wh@writing.upenn.edu.

democracy and lists

Recently I listened again to my conversation with Ian (Sandy) Frazier, recorded in 2006. Now we've segmented this audio recording into topical segments. Go here here and listen to portions of the discussion on populism, Francis Parkman, the connection between democracy and the writing of lists, on the idea of an "open-hearted" American place.

Bob Perelman's history

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

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

Imperial Beach alienation

“You know that’s flapping your fins for an audience. That’s letting dipshits define you by a number so other dipshits can compare you with other numbers so the other dipshits know who to pay to wear their sunglasses so that dipshits in the malls know which ones to buy."--Mitch Yost, John from Cincinnati, episode 3

they have the routine of the Indians and the colored folks

From a column by I. F. Stone publisehd in the Nation magazine on November 8, 1947, at the time of the anticommunist HUAC/"Hollywood Ten" hearings:

If a Congressional committee can investigate ideas in the movies, it can investigate them in the press. The purpose is to terrorize all leftists, liberals, and intellectuals; to make them fearful in the film, the theater, the press, and any school of advanced ideas the Thomas committee can stigmatize as "red." ... [T]he committee is out to give the moguls of the industry no rest until they not only take from the screen what little liberal and social content it has, but turn to making films which would prepare the way for fascism at home and war abroad. There were two revealing moments in the producers' testimony. Jack Warner, explaining the "subtle" methods of "red" screen writers, said, "They have the routine of the Indians and the colored folks. That is always their setup." And when Louis B. Mayer said he was going to start making some "anti-Communist films promptly," Thomas leaned forward with a grin and asked, "These hearings haven't anything to do with the promptness, have they?"

essential poet

Daisy Fried's review of Charles Bernstein's selected poems (All the Whiskey in Heaven) will be published in this weekend's New York Times Book Review. It's extremely positive. Millions will see it, maybe many thousands will read it. It might sell a few copies, a prospect that makes me glad. The photo at left is of the poet, reading just last night at the party we threw for him in honor of the publication of the book and his 60th birthday.

Here are some passages from Fried's review:

"[T]his calculating, improvisatory, essential poet won’t tell you the truth wrapped up in a neat little package. He might show it to you when you’re least expecting it."

"Bernstein is identified with the Language poets, who emerged in the 1970s. Interested in the materiality of language, they are politically left, theoretically grounded and deeply suspicious of the lyric “I” that speaks from the heart in traditional poems without examining its own existence in a sociopolitical power structure. Their work is often most subversive when both joining and satirizing that weary old, dreary old genre, poetry about poetry. Early Bernstein can be opaque, annoying those who see difficulty as elitist and who want poetry to be cuddly and educational. But everyone should love the later Bernstein, a writer who is accessible, enormously witty, often joyful — and even more evilly subversive."