Cheever, Albee, Perloff

Our 2011 Kelly Writers House Fellows are featured on the main news page of the Penn web site.

Bruce Andrews

Episode 35 of PoemTalk is being released today: here. Tan Lin, Sarah Dowling and Chris Funkhouser discuss Bruce Andrews's poem from Moebius, "Center."

Poetry mag "versus" beatniks

There isn't any conflict of interest between the universities and POETRY. Quote, unquote.

featured podcast

Today the University of Pennsylvania's main news page features a program in the Kelly Writers House Podcast series. This is a conversation I hosted with Jessica Lowenthal and Jamie-Lee Josselyn about the book Jamie-Lee has been writing about her mother's death. The direct link to the podcast is here.

four new Creeley recordings

Thanks to the work of Henry Steinberg, we've just added four new recordings of Robert Creeley reading his poems: "The Dishonest Mailman," "Please," "After Lorca," and "The Ballad of the Despairing Husband." We've also included links to four YouTube video clips of the same reading. Go to PennSound's Creeley page and scroll down to the bottom.

Joan Didion stays on the linguistic surface

another Filreis survivor of the Holocaust

Zalman was born in Warsaw in 1927 as the only child of Izaak and Haja Akerman. Before marrying Zalman's father, Haja's name as Haja Filreis. I believe that Haja was a sister of my father's father--my grandfather--Ben. That would make Zalman my father's first cousin. Ben and his brother left Warsaw to come to Brooklyn in the 1910s, so the family was permanently split up even before World War II.

He calls himself the only survivor of his family. But now, finally, he knows that other Filreises survived.

Zalman's father Izaak was a hat-maker who specialized mainly in leather hats. His mother Haja--formerly Haja Filreis--was a senior nurse in one of the hospitals of Warsaw. Zalman who was an only child studied at the Polish School on Ptasia Street.

As you will see, if you read on, Zalman is a survivor of the Holocaust. He was involved with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fairly far into that battle. The rest of his story is told through a web site called "Virtual Stetl," an attempt by some people in Israel to record the memories of Eastern European Jews who eventually found their way to the middle east.

"I had a happy childhood", says Zalman, yet he remembers very little from his childhood days and from his parents. "All what happened before the war was almost entirely erased, except for a few remembrances". For instance, Zalman remembers a colored painting of him when he was four, painted on canvas, which was hanging on the wall in their living room. From the house he remembers the opening sofa in the living room and the round table, which stood in the middle. The cooking stove in the kitchen, which was heated by fire-woods, and the portable stove from cast iron. One of the rooms served as a workshop for his father Izaak, including special models which Izaak sewed his hats on them.

His grandmother (on his mother's side) lived together with their small family and took care of the household and of Zalman, since his mother was working at the hospital.

"I don't remember the face of my mother clearly. What I picture in my mind is her image dressed in the white uniform of a nurse," Zalman sums up his vague memories of that period.

"My Holocaust started when I was 12", relates Zalman. "On September 1st, 1939, the Germans bombed Warsaw. A bomb fell on our house and miraculously we were saved. We were put in a ghetto. One day, during one of the actions, the Germans caught me and I found myself, together with several dozens of other Jews, marching towards the Umschlagplatz - the place from where the Warsaw Jews were sent to extermination camps. We waited for the train inside a large building. When the sign was given, we were ordered to march towards the train, escorted by armed Ukrainian soldiers.

Then one minute I ran away. I hid under a pile of feathers in a garage nearby. When the Germans entered the garage - I held my breath so that no feather would fly.

At night I left my hide-out and returned to the ghetto".

On April 1943, the Jews' uprising in ghetto Warsaw broke out. All the ghetto residents went down to the underground bunkers. Zalman and his mother stayed in one of the largest bunkers in the ghetto, on 22 Franciszkańska Street (his father Izaak was taken away and sent to extermination already in 1942).

On April 20th, the fighters were given an ultimatum to put down their weapons till 10.00 o'clock in the morning. The Waffen SS forces, which arrived at the place faced strong resistance. At that stage, the Germans began setting the ghetto houses on fire. When the fighters fled from the upper burning floors to the underground bunkers, the fire from above took all the supply of oxygen down below and turned the bunkers into suffocation traps. The Germans pumped poisonous gases into the sewage canals and the Jews who had to leave their hide-out were shot dead.

Zalman and his mother were caught and sent by train to one of the extermination camps. Zalman jumped off the train and ran away and since then he never saw his mother who continued her way by train till her bitter end.

Zalman wandered among the villages. He looked for partisans in order to join them and continue fighting the Germans, but he didn't find any and since he was afraid of being handed over to the Germans by the local peasants, he decided to return to Warsaw. He was captured again, and again found himself on a cargo train, this time on the way to Majdanek.

After several months in Majdanek, Zalman was sent to several concentration and forced labor camps. He prefers to avoid the details of those hard experiences he went through in that road of torment and he just sums them up in a few words: "It was very hard !!!"

Zalman was liberated by the American Army in Gedburg, Germany, wherein he arrived with the death march. After his liberation, when Zalman was eighteen he returned to Warsaw, but didn't find any family relative of his. He turned for help to the Jewish Committee in Warsaw, among whom the leaders of the ghetto Warsaw uprising, Izaak Zukerman and Cywia Lubetkin, were active. They sent him to the “Dror” Zionist youth movement. Zalman joined the Kibbutz of the movement (a group of youngsters who were preparing themselves for immigration to Israel and settling down there in a kibbutz). During their training, Zalman was sent to a seminar for youth instructors and for two years he was training children who were Holocaust survivors, most of them were orphans. "That work left in me a deep sense of responsibility towards the children and gave me great satisfaction. That period actually influenced my entire life", says Zalman. On April 1947, he sailed together with a group of 43 children, from Marseille, France to Israel (which was then still Palestine), on board the ship "Theodor Herzel". But when they reached the coasts of the country, the British Mandate authorities prevented their ship from anchoring in Haifa and they were driven away to Cyprus.

They were released at the end of 1947 and left Cyprus and arriving in the land of Israel. The children were sent to Kibbutz Beit Hashita while Zalman volunteered to the Palmach (the military force of the Hagana organization).

In the Independence War of Israel, Zalman enlisted to Battalion 6 of the Harel Brigade, where he served till the Palmach was dismantled and its fighters joined the Israeli Defense Forces.

"After the war ended and I was released from the army, I felt lonely and therefore the Kibbutz way of life seemed ideal for me", tells Zalman, "and choosing to join Kibbutz "Lohamei Hagethaot" seemed only natural. Many members of the "Dror" movement were there, and I knew some of them from the time I was activein the "Bricha" organization.

(The organization was established by the soldiers in the Jewish Brigade and the emissaries of "Aliya Beth" (Hebrew: the second immigration). The "Bricha" operated during '44-'49 to transfer Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe to western Europe and the coast, in order to bring them to Palestine. Survivors of youth movements, partisans and fighters from the ghettos also participated in the "Bricha" activities.)

Zalman continues: "Kibbutz" Lohamei Hagetaot" was founded in 1949, in the Western Galilee, by Holocaust survivors, partisans and fighters from different ghettoes. At the Kibbutz I was instructing immigrant youth".

There at the kibbutz he also met Sheila Feingold, a new immigrant from England. They married on May 3rd, 1953. Their first daughter, Amit, was born in 1956.

In 1959, Zalman and Sheila together with their daughter Amit moved to the youth village of Ben Shemen, where their second daughter Anat was born in 1962. In Ben Shemen he worked as a teacher in the Aliyat Hanoar immigrant youth movement. Sheila started working as an English teacher on Educational Television since it was founded in 1964, and continued working there for the next 32 years.

Zalman decided to complete his education, since he managed to study only six years before the war broke out. Although he was then already married and a father of two, he took his matriculation exams and along the years completed three university degrees in education. His doctorate work for his Ph.D Degree was about Janusz Korczakwho had interested him since he was a child. "Kortchak was my guide along my work in the educational field", he used to say. And so Zalman, who started as an unqualified teacher, ended his role in the educational system as a boarding schools’ inspector on behalf of the Ministry of Education.

Another passion of Zalman was theatre. Already in 1945, in Poland, he directed a theatre play about ghetto Warsaw, in front of an audience of Jewish survivors. In Israel, while he was a school director in the city of Ramle, he founded a puppet theatre. After his retirement Zalman founded a marionette theatre, "Bubonoa", which performed most successfully for six years all over the country and received the recognition of the Ministry of Education.

At the end of the 1990's, Zalman and Sheila moved to a Home for Retired people, called "Migdalei Hajam Hatichon" in Kefar Saba. Zalman received a studio from the house management, where he creates puppets from different materials (some of them are recycled) and also instructs a study group among the house members how to create marionettes. Each year the study group members present an exhibition of their own hand-made marionettes.

Yet Zalman declares, "The main thing in my life was and always remains my family". Indeed, as the only survivor of his family, all alone in the world, Zalman was fortunate to raise a wonderful family. Sheila and Zalman have seven grandchildren. Their eldest daughter Amit has four children: Yuval, Eyal, Razi and Dani. Their second born daughter Anat has three children: Guy, Omer and Ayelet.

Amazon review of "Counter-revolution of the Word"

Counter-revolution of the Word explores in great depth the antimodernist literary movement of the mid 20th century. Alan Filreis, author of Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism, here investigates the question: Why did American conservatives react so strongly against modernism?

In preparing for this book Filreis dug deeply into archives across the country, sifting through original documents and correspondence, to examine how the anticommunist witch hunt of the mid 20th century combined with, and helped fuel, antimodernist attacks on new poetry and experimental writing.

To conservatives, the language of modernism was a 'linguistically heretical' mode that sought to 'destroy the designed order.' Conservative poet Robert Hillyer and others considered linguistic 'difficulty' part of a grand design to reduce Americans to a state of helpless confusion.

All this seems surreal, almost unbelievable. Yet look around and see how some people even today brand others as 'unAmerican' simply because they prefer to think for themselves and draw their conclusions independently of what the power structure would have them believe.

Times music critic

Nate Chinen, now a music critic for the New York Times, was a Writers House regular as a student and for the year or two afterward. Nate visited us again this past spring and here's a video of Anthony DeCurtis introducing him.

dementia blog

I've read Susan Schultz' Dementia Blog - the ongoing blog project and also a book published under the same title (excerpts from the blog). The blog is the diary of a daughter who cares for her mother as the parent's memory quickly fades, one crisis and change after another, in the usual sad and disorienting progression. But "progression"? Or "regression"? That, in short, is the key question. What is it that we call this human anti-narrativity? How do we describe it? Blogs, written in order, happen to feed to the browser last entry first, and so we read a blog, as it were, from last page to first page. Books conventionally turn this around. The reversal revealed itself to Susan as she wrote. Her primary response (to her mother's changing identity) yields to a secondary response (what is the apt mode for telling others of this) and then the primary/secondary distinction dissolves. To witness is to adjust. The illness becomes the medium.

As you read this work you go backwards into the daughter's recent past to a point just when the mother begins to lose a grasp on her past. Ironically, conventional novelistic progression is repurposed for the digital mode that would normally undermine it. As we move toward the end (the beginning: Susan's return home from a vacation abroad to deal with her mother's first crises), we arrive at wholeness. Not Pip realizing his realistic place in London, nor Emma right-siding the world into appropriate family pairings, nor even Clarissa Dalloway's party which brings the whole fractured cast together, but a happy-ever-after that is a moment in time just before the decline begins. In the end are things as they were.

I recently asked Susan if she would make audio recordings of her reading selections from Dementia Blog and I'm happy to say that she obliged and that PennSound's Susan Schultz author page now features recordings of nine of the diary entries, moving backward in time of course. In addition, we have a 1-minute "about me"--Susan on herself.

the end of your daily Al

Google has announced that they've discontinued supporting the Google gadget called "daily me," which was a personalized easily updated RSS-style feed one could view on one's iGoogle page. I was an early and happy user of this, calling mine--as some readers of this blog will know--"your daily Al." Well now, as I say, Google has decided this gadget is not worth supporting, and so I have had to close down. I apologize to those who are used to seeing me on their iGoogle pages. You'll have to find me elsewhere now: this blog, my Twitter feed, my Facebook page, my Selected Works page, my PennSound page or my PoemTalk blog.

cool down

The Writers House garden, summertime oasis.

nature is the original sports commentator

Click on the image for a larger view.

six poets each teach a poem to high-school students

In May we hosted a visit by a class of high school students from Friends' Central School, a second annual gathering co-organized by me and Liza Ewen of the FCS English department. (Liza teaches an elective quarter-long course each spring on poetry.) I invited six poets each to teach a single poem in just 20 minutes. Rivka Fogel taught "This Room" by John Ashbery, a beautiful indirect memorial to Pierre Martory and non-narrative meditation on absence as presence. Sarah Dowling then came in and taught a section of "A Frame of the Book" by Erin Moure. Jessica Lowenthal then taught Harryette Mullen's "Trimmings." Randall Couch taught a very early poem by John Keats before revealing that it was Keats. John Timpane taught an Yvor Winters poem about the emotional complication of saying farewell to an adult child at an airport; Wintersean restraint and emotional distance abound here and strike one (strike me, at least) as a refreshing sort of illiberalism in an age of gobs of conventionally sentimental parent-child verse. Tom Devaney may have taken the pedagogical prize on this day, presenting William Carlos Williams' "The Last Words of My English Grandmother"--a seemingly easy poem for h.s. students to grasp. Yet it also does everything a modern poem does, and makes a remarkably good scene of instruction.

Each of the six 20-minute presentation is now being made available in PennSound as downloadable audio, streaming QuickTime video, and the texts of the poems are available as PDF's (digital copies of photocopies handed out to the students).

It's our hope that by presenting such materials, grouped together and well organized, PennSound will be useful to teachers and others looking for an introduction to poetry and poetics - and also to the phenomenon of the poet teaching poetry.

Here is your link to the PennSound page. It includes the six presentations from 2009 as well.

Charles Olson and the westwardness of everything

Today we are releasing episode 34 of PoemTalk. In this one I and three PoemTalkers talk about one of Charles Olson's Maximus poems, "Maximus to Gloucester, letter 27 (withheld)." Go here for much more about the episode and link to the show itself. Above is a YouTube clip of Olson reading (over-reading?) the poem.

summer poetry showcase

Tan Lin read at Poets House in Manhattan the other night. He read with Rachel Levitsky, Ken Chen and Joanna Furhman as part of the Summer Poetry Showcase. Photographs by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

liking the poets

Here is a draft excerpt from Charles Bernstein's "Close Listening" discussion with Marjorie Perloff - which was recorded in November of 2009. Of course these are candid, drafty remarks and we'll need to edit them for Jacket when and if we publish "Close Listening" transcripts there. And here are some remarks Marjorie sent after seeing the excerpt below: "I’m just back from London from the TS Eliot Summer School and it was WONDERFUL and restored my faith in poetry. The students were exceptional—from all over including Beijing—and knew their Eliot inside out and so I was kept on my toes. And when all is said and done, Eliot is a GREAT and amazing poet; the students this time convinced me (almost) even to admire THE FOUR QUARTETS. Do I like E’s poetry better than Stevens’s? I’m afraid yes I do. But that should be neither here nor there."


BERNSTEIN: How about, let me shift it to Stein/Pound, who are so different, and yet you’ve obviously written a lot about and are a champion of both.

PERLOFF: Yeah, they are very different, and both wonderful in different ways. It’s certainly a different concept of what modernism is, but I do think, actually, modernism can cover them both very well, as opposed to other people, you know, for instance, now there’s this kind of Marianne Moore cult afoot. My feelings about Marianne Moore are she’s a, yes, of course, she’s a delightful poet. She always was admired, you know, it isn’t that she was neglected. Eliot loved her, Pound loved her, Williams loved her, et cetera. But she’s just, for me, not very interesting. So there are always two things. One is a kind of broad view that one can try to have and be objective, and another is, as one gets older and gets more subjective. You sort of feel that you don’t have to like everybody anymore, and, I mean, I’ve taught Marianne Moore, for instance, but—

BERNSTEIN: Was there some time in your life where you did feel like you had to like everybody. I can’t imagine that.

PERLOFF: Well, yes. Yes, certainly I did when I was a student. You had to write about whatever you were assigned to write about.

BERNSTEIN: Sure, but like everybody?

PERLOFF: Not like everybody so much, but acknowledge them. But Marianne Moore, to me, is just, it’s precious. I don’t like all those animals, you know. It’s just not my sensibility. But any of those poets, you see, for me, I would say all those poets, and still I’ll get back to Yeats in a moment, are not as great as Baudelaire, who is the great modernist poet. Rimbaud, Mallarme. Those, to me, are even greater than the Anglo-Americans. So that the fights between Stevens and Pound or Marianne Moore or H.D.—

BERNSTEIN: Are you saying the Americans are not so good as the Europeans, Marjorie?

PERLOFF: Well, just as far as, if you want poetry with a capital P. I mean, you go back and you read Baudelaire and I just can’t believe anybody could be that great a poet. Let’s put it that way. And I don’t really feel that way going back sometimes to, you know, I had to go do a lot of work on Wallace Stevens and I felt that was a good exercise. And when you said you don’t do people you don’t like, I mean, once I accepted that assignment, which came about in various ways, I really did my best to read the new Stevens scholarship. I am a scholar and I go back and read what everybody else says, and I look at what is said about Stevens, and, you know, only to a point can I really get that involved with Wallace Stevens.

sunset last evening

The scene above provides one reason why my blogging is less consistent this month.

anew

This morning I added to the PoemTalk site a brief excerpt from a transcript of the PoemTalk discussion (episode 22) of Louis Zukofsky's Anew: here.

Myung Mi Kim: emergence implied in the unsaid

On March 15, 2007, Penn students and Charles Bernstein interviewed Myung Mi Kim as part of Bernstein's "Close Listening" series. Michael Nardone has now transcribed the entire discussion, for publication, later, in Jacket2. Meantime, here is an excerpt:

STUDENT:
You mentioned yesterday how each reading is different and how you would have other people come up and read your work. If you could just elaborate on that and how would someone who doesn’t speak another language experience repercussions while reading?

KIM:
Let me start with the second part of your question first, because I think it dovetails nicely with what I’ve just been saying about what are the demands on sense and sense-making that are politically and socially and culturally driven. So, when you ask that question about, well, what about a person who doesn’t speak, you know, another language, and what kind of condition would be produced for that reader, my question always, whether out loud or implicitly, is can you produce an approximation of the condition of language again unhooked from the demands of communication and communicability and transparency, and can you somehow suggest/evoke/amplify/proliferate different ways of being inside and listening to and activating the space that we call language, which doesn’t belong to any one language group, doesn’t belong to any one particular idea of how basic things that benchmarks of language like rhythm, syntax, intonation, inflection, taking all those things as resources for meaning, as resources for experience. So, in other words, even if there were no identifiable thing called the second language, there’s something produced about an experience of language, and I think everyone has access to that.

STUDENT:
So, you think that when phrases can’t be translated, so these other limits of syntax, that this is actually more resources, is what you’re saying?

KIM:
Yeah, I think the whole notion of untranslatability, unsayability, the unsayable remains a profound interest again both linguistically, culturally and politically. The what isn’t there, what isn’t, that can’t be said. The kind of immanence and the emergence implied in that state of the unsaid, I think, has to be a certain kind of social force.

STUDENT:
In listening to you last night and then a reading you did at Buffalo, I guess, before Commons was printed officially, I was noticing a lot of differences in what you were reading and what I was reading along with in the version, so I was wondering speak a little about versions of text, and when you do or don’t think something is finished. Also, you mentioned last night about conceiving of your works as one long continuum, and sort of how that might play into how you think about a finished product.

KIM:
When I finish the text, in fact, that is the finished text. However I feel that when I’m giving readings from the finished text, it’s almost as if the text literally re-presents itself to you. Even if you are the maker of that particular text, there’s a way in which you’re greeting it and reading it. So, the occasion of the reading creates a space in which that re-listening and re-making initiates itself, and sometimes that happens, say, before the event, that I’ll sit down and wonder, in a sense, out loud to myself, what will I be reading. In that process, something gets kicked up, something is, as I say, re-initiated. Sometimes it happens literally in the reading itself, in the performance itself. I don’t think of them necessarily as revisions at all. I do think of them as reformulations, re-takes, re-assembling, which is a lot how I work in the first place, a kind of process of accretion and assemblage and reconfiguration and there are many mobile parts. So, in a way, every time you come back to the text, the process can re-kindle itself. That’s been of some interest to me simply because it opens up the question of what is real time, what is compositional time, and what is the time of making a text. I think they are all different sort of filtrations of what it means to produce a written text, which is not to refuse or in any way empty out the meaning of the book or the text that might come to some kind of rest, right. So, these are things that are being held in some kind of complicity and conversation with each other so that no one part of that, processually speaking, forecloses on any other part.

full of juice but unreal

Over the weekend this wonderful poster-ad caught my eye.

Several centuries back there was a rococo moment that produced paintings of plants still-lived into human figures. Funny that--with a slight touch of or cognizance of surrealism, I suppose--the full-on broad-stroke quasi-proletarianized figurative advertisement poster art of the American 1930s and 40s gave way occasionally to the kind of poster you see at right here. Tough-guy cooperative fruit growers represented by a happy yet slightly menacing leaf-man whose belly is a fabulously "full" orange. The mix of styles, genres and tones makes one smile and, well, want a try a sip of that fullness. But I would really like to know what these particular madmen were thinking.

immigrant picnic

Readers of this blog will note a silence over the 4th of July weekend. Well, silence here at any rate. Around the rural Connecticut roads I ran, the martinis consumed and tennis played, good meals happily eaten with friends, there was plenty of noise, but not hereabouts. July will inevitably be a slower blog month, although stay tuned. I've plenty to say, but perhaps not daily. Meantime, I noted with pleasure that PBS' NewsHour re-ran a July 4thy piece featuring my friend and colleague Greg Djanikian talking and reading about his immigrant family (Armenian by way of Egypt). Here's a link to the video.

where is this leading me? - on improvisation

Reggie Watts on improvisation in Artforum:

People usually end up thinking, What the fuck is he doing? At some point in a set I’ll start doing stuff that’s not funny. It’s weird or depressing. Or on the verge of depressing. Or just confusing. Then I do something absurd, and there’s a release––and then we’re back on track again. There isn’t an obvious or logical nature to it. I’m recontextualizing things, or taking two disparate elements and making them clash. And when that happens there’s a reaction. Usually it’s something laugh-y. Or maybe the audience is just laughing because they’re nervous. Or just like, huh? Hopefully it provokes some kind of reaction. But it’s really just about absurdity. I like going down the road and taking people way down this path through the thorns and thickets and then, at a snap of the fingers, they’re in a McDonald’s and wondering, how did I get here? I like humor that really goes somewhere and takes chances. I think every joke is an experiment.

The experience of performing is very similar to channeling. The more open I am, the more these ideas come into mind ahead of time. I’m performing but I can see these options in the future and can continue performing. It’s like in Tetris when you see the preview of the next shape coming. You’re playing the game in real time and you’re placing the block, but you’re also aware of the next one. I’m performing live, and I get a preview of a potential idea. I can use it however I want. I can rotate the shape. I can put it over here or put it over there and create a strategy in real time. When I’m open, I see more pieces ahead of time.

I like abstraction because it frees you from structure. As an audience member listening to or watching Bill Cosby, or any of the masters, like George Carlin, it’s absolutely fascinating to hear what they have to say because you feel like you are there with them. But their style also follows a familiar logic. I mean, they throw some curveballs at you because that’s just the nature of the comedy. But when I’m watching Monty Python or Bill Hicks, at times they have this way of creating a psychedelic experience. I think it’s the psychedelic that I’m interested in, because after a while people ask themselves, What’s the joke, where is this leading me? And then I fail to lead them anywhere they expect. And then they let me try it again. And after so many times of being let down, you have to either go “I hate this. I’m leaving,” or just surrender to it. Then you can just go along for the ride.

male absence is the subject position of the poet

Having internalized the way in which "Young Woman at a Window" (W. C. Williams) beckons toward (a) readers, (b) WCW himself, somewhat mischievously looking in from outside, and (c) the absent, waited-for father, Matthew Abess took to the American road, and found, in Centralia, Washington, a decorative plate for sale, entitled "Daddy's Home," yours for just $2.50. I assume Matt bought it.

She sits with
tears on

her cheek
her cheek on

her hand
the child

in her lap
his nose

pressed
to the glass

how reading is taught in school

"Reading is usually taught in school so as to walk hand in hand with assimilation. And it is at its most oppressive when taught through principles of absolute meaning. Beginning reading exercises tend to emphasize meaning as unambiguous and singular; the word 'duck' in the primer means the bird, not the verb. Further, as a learned and regulated act, reading socializes readers not only into the process of translating symbol into word with a one-to-one directness, but also into specific social relationships. Dick and Jane, to use the most cliched example of a primer, teach how to live the normalized lives of the nuclear family as much as they teach how to read. Further, much of what is read does not fully engage the resistant possibilities within reading, and as a result it tends to perpetuate reading's conventions."--Juliana Spahr, Everybody's Autonomy (2001), pp. 11-12

tests of poetry

In 2003 a forum was held to discuss the Cambridge Literature History of the U.S. One discussion featured disagreements about how to handle the history of American poetry and of literary-historical method as applicable--or perhaps not--to poetry and poetics. I was asked to comment on the debate, and my short essay was published in a special section of an issue of American Literary History. Here is a link to that essay.

monumentalist art of the sort I like

Thanks to Kenny Goldsmith who (I think) pointed this out to me some years back.

facing left

A few years ago John Serio was asked to edit the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens and expressed the hope that I'd summarize what I'd learned over the years about Stevens' response to the radical-left poetics of the 1930s, so I wrote a short paper (10 pages in print) and it appeared in that very good volume. Today I uploaded a PDF copy to my "Selected Works" site: here's the essay.

haunted education

John Reed, from a blog entry titled 'UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION, AND UPDIKE’S “HAUNTED QUALITY,'" dated March 30, 2009:
 
John Updike refers to his undergraduate education as having a “haunted quality.”  The subject recently came up in a class of mine at New School, and then with an editor friend of mine, Jacob.  The haunted quality of undergraduate education, to me, has to do with so much of the focus being outdated—an emphasis on public domain works and creative movements long gone.  Jacob’s theory was that the education was more valuable once forgotten.  That it infuses your material more naturally, easily, when you don't consciously recollect it.  Appealing to me, since I have completely forgotten everything.

Dan Hoffman on "The Raven"

Dan Hoffman, who years ago wrote Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, talks about Poe's "The Raven." (To see all Kelly Writers House videos on YouTube, click here.)

when Elvis became Che

Phil Ochs, from the liner notes of The Broadside Tapes:

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

Leaving America is like losing twenty pounds and finding a new girlfriend.

A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.

And if there's any home for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.

must read

In Primo Levi's magnificently modern book, The Periodic Table, the finest of the many fabulous sections is the chapter called "Chromium." Readers of this blog who haven't read "Chromium" should drop everything and read it now. Here's a crude PDF. Good enough. Please read.

what divide would that be?

No science without fancy, no art without facts.--Vladimir Nabokov via Stephen Jay Gould

we talk flarf

Nada Gordon, Kenny Goldsmith and Steve McLaughlin join me for the 33rd episode of PoemTalk, released today.

watch as I teach Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man"

I lead a discussion of Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" - a video that has been captured for YouTube in two parts. Here are your links to the YouTube videos:

[] part 1
[] part 2

medical students should know about Nazi doctors, don't you think?

Thanks to Sam Sharf, vigilant newspaper editor and former student of my course on the holocaust, for making me aware of this announcement:

University of Pennsylvania Students Participate in
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics
Rachel Hadler, Jin Suk Kim, and Karen Revere
Join Groundbreaking Program for Medical and Law Students

New York, NY — Rachel Hadler, Jim Suk Kim, and Karen Revere, medical students in the class of 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania, are among the 30 students chosen by the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics to participate in its inaugural two week program in New York, Berlin, and Poland for law and medical school students. Fifteen students were chosen from each field. The FASPE programs instruct students on the contemporary ethical issues facing their professions — using the Holocaust and the conduct of their professions in Nazi Germany as a framework for study.

FASPE’s goal is to provide tomorrow’s professional leaders with opportunities to increase their awareness and preparedness for the ethical issues they will confront as professionals. By educating students about the causes of the Holocaust and promoting their awareness of contemporary related issues, FASPE seeks to prevent future collaboration in genocide, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia by professional and religious leaders.

Ms. Hadler said, “The extent to which the ideal of the nameless, faceless, even irrelevant subject remains in our research is frightening….” Mr. Kim said, “The ethics of medicine are so closely intertwined with humanism. Humanism in medical ethics is what allows us to become the true healers for our patients.” Ms. Revere added, “It is uncomfortable to examine our own research methods against those of the Nazis. …to observe that a slippery slope exists, and to urge that we remain ever-conscious of its dangers.”

$110,000 in energy saved in one hour yesterday

This figure is now official. By powering down yesterday afternoon between 3 and 4 PM, the University of Pennsylvania consumed less energy to the extent, figured as cost, of $110,000. Yes, $110,000 in less energy used in one hour by one large institution. This meant: people across the university switched off or dimmed lights, unplugged computers, turned off air conditioners and fans. (I noticed that many folks went outside for meetings and breaks.) I'm sure the office of the Executive Vice President will announce the savings in kilowatts, which will of course be the most significant data. But, still, $110,000 that would otherwise be unavailable?* I hope Craig Carnoroli, whose office organized this (in conjunction with PECO), decides to spend the money on something very visible and very green. On 364 days of the year I am glad I'm not doing Craig's job, but today I would feel more certain than ever that large institutions can push hard to cut back. This might seem a small step, but let me give an example of collateral effect. Carton Rogers--the wonderful, kind, smart and thoughtful director of our libraries--asked his staff to turn off all lights for this first-ever trial in powering down. He was told by his building folks that some of the lighting in the stacks was so old that they worried about whether they could be successfully turned back on again afterward. This of course would be a hazard so they made the right decision to leave those lights on. But don't you think that today Carton is looking into rewiring those lights? These are 1950s-era bulb types, copper-wired no doubt, wires winding their way through a large building whose open stacks are like a rabbit warren. Let's get back deep into these old buildings and see what green economies can be achieved.

Well anyway, Craig, if you're reading this: I can think of a poet I'd like to hire. With an okay salary and all the wonderful Penn benefits, it would come to around $100,000 annually. You can keep the $10K for whatever. I promise to hire someone in the field of eco-poetics.

* I suppose we need to balance this against loss of productivity. This is probably why such a stunt is no good during the height of the academic year. But it is perfect for a summer afternoon. Maybe 4-5 would be better. We should consider shifting full-time staff work hours to 8-4 instead of 9-5. That 4-5 time is in Philly one of the hottest hours of the day (I'm betting that 2-3 is the hottest).

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "Truth" is an early poem - probably written in the late 1940s, perhaps 1949. She mentions this poem in the introduction she gave to Etheridge Knight before Knight's reading on February 26, 1986. The recording of that introduction is available on PennSound's Etheridge Knight page. Here is a copy of the text of Brooks' poem.

Winston Churchill for black counter-violence?

It has always been assumed that Claude McKay's sonnet, "If We Must Die" - a poem calling for counter-violence as a response to racist hatred in the context of the 1919 race riots in U.S. cities - was later recited by Winston Churchill on the BBC (and/or in a speech before the House of Commons) as a World War II-era rallying cry for Britons. McKay himself later said (in the late 40s, by which time his political views had changed) that he felt the poem to be universal - and was not about race. If indeed Churchill recited it and it could be used--presumably with pride and affirmation from its author--to rally the British against the Germans, then its historical, national/ethnic specificity would be in question.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

The Shakespearean sonnet--a strategic choice of form by McKay--would seem to endorse the notion of Churchill's use of the poem. After all, he chose on other occasions to buck up beset Britain by reminding them of their bard who believed in the green isle as sceptered in noblest, complexest high forms. Defense by poetic rhetoric.

I've for some time tried to find the recording of the speech in which Churchill quotes McKay's poem. No luck. I tried again recently, with some help from Emily Harnett. No luck still. We did find a footnote in a book by David Caplan that seems to conclude that Churchill's use of the poem is a myth. Here is a PDF copy of Caplan's note.

Here is a recording of McKay reciting his poem.

oh yes, subject matter

Barbara Guest in reply to a question about subject matter:

"Oh, yes. The subject matter. The subject matter. I know I was talking to some students in Santa Fe and they were very worried about when I said well what have you been writing, and they said, well, not very much. I realized that they were disturbed more by what they thought was in front of them that they didn’t want to write about, so I told them that the subject matter wasn’t important. And this released them. They were thrilled. They went around for days saying she said the subject doesn’t matter. Because the idea is that sometimes you find the subject as you proceed with the poem. It’s a good rule. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good rule."

This comes from a transcription recently done of Charles Bernstein's LineBreak interview with Guest in 2005. The full transcript will be published in Jacket2.