duet of Cheevers

Here is a link to the March 14, 1977 Newsweek interview of John Cheever conducted by his daughter Susan.

ends from Ez

"Recomposition of Gaudier-Brzeska's Portrait of Pound" (c) 1988, by Anne Tardos, used as the jacket of Jackson Mac Low's book, Words nd Ends from Ez, published by Avenue B in 1989.

poem in English & Chinese by Yanrong

The Chinese poet Yanrong performs his poem, "Prophecy and Carnival," in Chinese, while Charles Bernstein reads an English translation. On December 9, 2010, a group of poets from Wuhan, China, visited the Writers House: Liang Biwen, Liu Yishan, Chen Ying-Song, Tian He, Wang Xinmin, Ke Yumin, Li Ming, Hu Xiang, Liu An. Several American poets read their work in English and listened while the visiting poets read their poems in Chinese.

north of north of invention

After two fabulous days in Philly, the North of Invention troupe moved to New York, where they presented at Poets House. Lawrence Schwartzwald was there and took some great photographs, including this one of Christian Bok and M. NourbeSe Philip. (Photo used by permission of Lawrence Schwartzwald; for more, click on the tag below.)

Nardone/Dowling at Lemon Hound on "North of Invention"

Over at Lemon Hound, Michael Nardone has published an interview with Sarah Dowling, creator of the "North of Invention" gathering here in Philadelphia and (starting tomorrow) in New York. Here's how the conversation begins:

Michael Nardone:
Sarah, you've arranged a great group of poets to come down to Philly and New York for North of Invention, a mixture of readings, performances and discussions on poetics. Can you talk about your curation: why these poets? where are there points of correspondence or affinity between them? where are there moments of these poets individually charting out new spaces for practice?

Sarah Dowling:
Our initial idea in planning North of Invention was to feature poets who had not read in the U.S. ever — or at least not ever in the past five years, or at least not on the East Coast in the past five years. As you can imagine, this evolved somewhat as the planning went on. Charles Bernstein, Stephen Motika and I all had particular folks in mind when we set that curatorial constraint, and I'm pleased to say that many from our initial imaginary cohort are indeed featured in the festival. However, we had to balance this ideal with the need to attract an audience, and therefore to have some figures more recognizable to U.S. audiences on our roster. We also wanted to have a good balance of emerging and established writers, writers from across Canada, and writers representing various social and aesthetic contingencies. In the end, some of the poets we had initially wanted to feature also had to withdraw their participation for personal reasons or because conflicts arose in their schedules, so to a large extent the selection of poets depended on chance: who was available in cold, dark January.

art on the Neversink River

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR SUMMER 2011:

THE STREAM PROJECT: ART ALONG THE NEVERSINK RIVER

In partnership with the Roundout & Neversink Stream Management Program of the Sullivan County Soil & Water Conservation District, the Wildcat Fellowship Program seeks projects of high artistic merit that relate to the Neversink River and its mountainous, forested surroundings.

The successful project will raise awareness of one or more of the following:

--Changing weather patterns that increase flows (winter and fall floods)
--Invasive plants that threaten forest health, water quality and fish habitat
--The value of the wilderness aesthetic (compared to the "tame" landscape)
--The beauty of log jams and gravel bars that move with high water
--Local history as it relates to the Neversink River

We offer a residency of two weeks with accommodation in a guest house, use of a small studio barn and a bicycle. We will provide appropriate publicity and a stipend of $1,000 to cover art supplies and living expenses such as for food suited to the artist's own preparation in the guest-house kitchen. For projects involving any of the construction trades, such as carpentry, a technical consultant is available.

Two-page proposals will be accepted and reviewed between now and February 15th, 2011. The selected fellowship recipient will be notified in early April, 2011.

*Project Parameters*

We particularly seek mixed-media works that are site-specific to the Neversink River, which runs from the Catskill Mountains to the Delaware River and is captured in a reservoir to become drinking water for New York City. The site will be selected in consultation with local landowners and/or municipalities.

The proposal will be for a work that:

--uses natural materials, though perhaps not exclusively
--raises consciousness of the significance and beauty of the environment and the importance of water quality and purity
--may be interactive
--does not harm the environment and is biodegradable yet leaves a presence at the site and in the community
--produces documentation that is suitable for exhibition off-site
--contains a community-building component that invites local participation


The artist is expected to be in residence the full two weeks, is responsible for transportation to and from Claryville, and must be available for a public presentation of the work at the installation site which will include a brief artist's talk with Q-and-A. The artist must also be available for the opening and closing of an exhibit of the documentation.

The artist is responsible for installation and take-down of this exhibit as well as for the creation of necessary signage and wall texts.

TO SUBMIT: Email the following by February 15, 2011 to Curator Patricia Eakins at fabulara@earthlink.net: (1) link to your website with images of your work, (2) two-page proposal, (3) project abstract of 100 words, (4) artist statement, (5) curriculum vitae. All documents must be MS Word documents or PDFs. No phone calls please.

Karen Rauter, Stream Program Coordinator
Rondout & Neversink Basins
Tel. 845-985-2581
catskillstreams.org

the last ancient Greek poet

In 2009, at the University of Michigan, George Economou delivered a performance under the appropriate title, "The Least Ancient Greek Poet." He reads from Ananios of Kleitor and then talks about the process of writing it. We at PennSound are making this recording available today for the first time. George was born in 1934 in Great Falls, Montana, the son of two Greek immigrants. He is know for his early affiliations with Deep Image poets, and, to be sure, for his 41 years of teaching at the Brooklyn center for Long Island University. He was a founding editor of The Chelsea Review (1957–60) and co-founding editor of Trobar and Trobar Books (1960–64) with Robert Kelly. It was through Kelly, I'm guessing, that he met Jerome Rothenberg. We at the Writers House glad that George and Rochelle Owens moved to Philly some few years ago and that we see them often. George called this session "the least" but I like pondering the idea of George himself as the last of the ancient Greeks. Long live George!

north of invention

At the end of his reading tonight at the Kelly Writers House, Fred Wah was joined by Nicole Brossard. They read a poem of hers, together, she reading, of course, the original French, while he read an English translation. A wonderful way to end a long and continuously interesting day of talks and readings, day one of the "North of Invention" program. Be sure tomorrow--Friday, January 21--to watch the live video stream, starting at 10:30 AM eastern time.

Albee's plays on YouTube

Video clips from performances of Edward Albee's plays have surfaced here and there on YouTube, unsurprisingly. Despite YouTube's search mechanism, it's not so easy, actually, to find all these. That's why I'm grateful to Julia Nelson, who went through as many as she could find and organized them, adding some notes. I put her findings into a crude web page, with live links. Here is your link to that document.

digital humanites

I'm pleased that on nicomachus.net, a digital humanities blog, I'm described today as a "tireless purveyor of recorded, digitized, and archived poetry readings."

introduction to 1960

My introduction to the recent symposium on poetry in 1960. It begins with a look at a late late 1959 essay by Stanley Kunitz predicting that the 1960s will in poetry be a time of consolidation and not of experiment--that experiment was all exhausted, played out.

Semina Circle and Meltzer

At left is an album cover: David Meltzer's jazz poems, 1958.

Meltzer published The Clown in 1960. It was issued by the Semina press. Jed Birmingham on REALITYSTUDIO.org has written about the Semina Circle and Meltzer, thus:

This mini-archive sat in my bookshelf for a couple of years untouched until January of this year when I purchased Wallace Berman and the Semina Circle. This book accompanied an exhibit relating to the literature and art surrounding Berman until his untimely death in 1976. This exhibit is currently touring the West Coast and will make its way to New York City (New York University to be exact) in January 2007. A complete run of Semina Magazine represents the Holy Grail for me as a collector. An early fragment of Naked Lunch (Pantapon Rose) appeared in Semina 4. As I have mentioned before, Semina is the epitome of the little magazine as art object. David Meltzer appeared in Semina as well. In fact, the entire issue of Semina 6 features Meltzer’s The Clown.

Unlike Burroughs, Meltzer was an intimate member of the Berman Circle. He published a few books including Luna with Black Sparrow. In the late 1960s, he wrote a series of avant garde pornographic novels for Essex House. At the same time, he fronted the psychedelic band Serpent Power. In 2004, Meltzer published Beat Thing. He also edited two collections of valuable interviews entitled San Francisco Poets and San Francisco Beat. A collection of Meltzer’s papers are at Washington University.

newly segmented reading by Olson from Maximus poems

Click on the image above for a larger view. We at PennSound are pleased to say that Charles Olson's reading from the Maximus poems at Beloit College has now been segmented. He read for 50 minutes total from many sections of the long work. Here is your link.

generation refusing the label of "lost"

New York Times Magazine
November 16, 1952

"This Is the Beat Generation"
A 26-year-old defines his times.
By CLELLON HOLMES

The wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation conspicuously lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation does not concern young people today. They take it frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to "come down" or "get high," not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. But ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hot-rod driver meet, and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him." Not content to bemoan His absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for Him on all sides...

In the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire t shatter the drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the "square" society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd.... Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it Is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.

In the photo above, Clellon Holmes is standing at far left.

re-tweet

definitively speaking

We shouldn't forget that definitive speaking is itself a chosen style, a tone, a tried-on mode. I think the aphorism is at base anti-political.

A little later in the conversation, Steve Benson wrote: "I like the range offered here for definitive speaking -- a range including improvised assertion and aphorism and likely much else. In my own practice, I suppose I have been very often working out whatever I can to balance prematurity and m...aturity in the preparation for and readiness to effect utterance. One might also say 'Whoever speaks definitively speaks quixotically.'"

To which I replied: "Sometimes, Steve, you pose (posit) an ideational prematurity. And at such moments I always think: he's so amazingly definitive about that." Then:

For larger views, click on the images.

social media puts college teachers in the hotseat

The site called Mashable / Social Media ran a story a while back with the news of "hotseat," which is being adopted at universities such as Purdue.

Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.

People who have attended technology conferences in the past several years are already familiar with this phenomenon, where social media is leveraged to allow the participants in a session or panel to comment and exchange questions and ideas in real-time. At Purdue, Hotseat is used to allow students to comment on the class as it proceeds, with everyone in the class including the professor able to see the messaging as it happens.

The Hotseat software allows students to use either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace (MySpace), or SMS to post messages during classes, or they can simply log in to the web site to post to and view the ongoing backchannel. Right now it’s only being pilot tested in two courses, but has already become a fast favorite for both teachers and students. Professor Sugato Chakravarty, whose personal finance course is one of the pilot tests, said, “I’m seeing students interact more with the course and ask relevant questions.”

And although it’s been optional for students to participate, so far 73% of the 600 or so in the pilot classes have used the software. We’ve seen Twitter become mandatory for journalism students at Australia (Australia)’s Griffith University to some negative reaction, but this is a less structured implementation which may perhaps account for its more favorable reception.

As Chakravarty goes on to note, though, the application is called “Hotseat” for a reason — and professors will have to be resilient enough to take any potential criticism or even corrections from students in real-time. Nevertheless, he cites it as a “valuable tool for enhancing learning. The students are engaged in the discussions and, for the most part, they are asking relevant questions.”

My first response was extremely negative: just another use of so-called social media to enable universities to continue rostering huge courses (which is obviously a money-saver). I certainly won't celebrate yet another reason why class size will continue to grow and the distance between faculty and student will increase.

But then I realize that the distance I'm thinking of is physical. Programs like Hotseat will tend to make the lecture impossible to maintain, if (for instance) students are not understanding the material, if they have questions they feel the need to pose but can't otherwise break into the competent super-confident flow of a lecture. So this might shake up some lecturers a bit, might cause them to revise their yellowed lecture notes, and to look up at the tweetflow on the monitor behind them.

Well, then, back to skepticism. Do we really need students' tweets projected in the front of the classroom? Can't we all learn, even in large classes, to ask questions, encourage students to speak, lead a real discussion? If a Hotseat-enabled tweet from the otherwise reticent student in row 26 then makes possible an interaction "outside" the social media--if this system becomes a prompt--then I'm fine with it. If it's just another excuse for pedagogical impersonality (not to mention I know/you don't antagonism between teacher and learners), then I'll sit this one out.

I'll just repeat what I've written in this blog any number of times. My pedagogy is saturated with uses of digital media and IT (I'm downright gaga about it all), but my classroom itself--the space for our meetings--is for the most part pre-tech: the students and I in the space. Not always, but often, my classroom is the only tech-free experience my students and I will have all day.

- - -

Click here for more on the end of the lecture.

Wallace Stevens: "empty of all possibilities of adventure"

Here's part of a letter Jose Rodriguez-Feo wrote to Wallace Stevens. The two had not met yet at this point. Their relationship, entirely epistolary except for two brief meetings some years after this, was both extraordinarily intimate and formal--both at once. Stevens loved letters from his young exotic friend "Pepe." Rodriguez-Feo was thrilled to be able to get to know this forbidding-seeming poet, the famously icy Stevens. The talk of Hemingway in this letter might have been a signal that the Cuban was interested in Stevens's views of male sexuality, wondering if indeed that was part of Stevens' attraction to corresponding with "a real blood and bone Latino." But Stevens would never, ever nibble on this bait. Now a self-promotion alert: my book, edited by Beverly Coyle, tells this whole story and presents all the letters between the two. Get a copy here. Or ask me for one. I have a few extras at home.

communism is the word

Over at my 1960 blog I'm pondering the use of the word "communism" in books.

the killing of the Filreis family

From the Yad Vashem archives in Israel, here are names of some of the Filreis family who were killed by the Germans during World War II. Most of them were exterminated at Treblinka:

Filreiss, Benek
Koldra, Lea, born 1881
Szejnfuks, Manja, born 1907
Akerman, Haya**
Filreis, Genia, born 1915
Filries, Szimon, born 1915
Filries, Max, born 1900
Filries Tauba, born 1895
Filries, Khaia

All were from Warsaw, Poland. I'm guessing that "Filreiss" is a real alternative spelling and that "Filries" is a mistake in transcription at some point (these are just guesses).

The names were submitted by Mrs. Idia Kcefner (I don't know who she is) in 1957, by Mr. Moshe' Koldra (ditto) in 1956, and by Zalman Akerman** in 1999.

For more about Zalman Akerman's story of survival, go here.

** Haya Filreis, married into the Akerman family, was Zalman's mother. Zalman and his mother lived for a time in the Warsaw Ghetto after the mass deportations from the ghetto had begun. Zalman is alive and well and living in Israel, and is the provider of this information, by way of Steve Filreis (my father's cousin Mel's son) and Ayelet Regev (one of Zalman's grandchildren). Ayelet (currently studying law in the U.S.) is my father's father's cousin's son's granddaugther, a closer relation that that phrasing makes it seem.

right blames left (in sum) for the failure of holocaust education

Dated January 3, 2011 - a conservative's view of holocaust education - not very positive. "Genocide Studies has become an academic specialty and a fundraising bonanza, with professional organizations and prizes. Great books have been written and beautiful museums have been built​—​all in the conviction that they will prevent the production of future mass murderers and their willing executioners." But the conviction is hollow. We give students (starting quite young) ideas about preventing genocide but no sense of what to do. Further on you realize that the failure is largely owing to the left, because, in part, they are too much on guard against scholarly and other presentations of the equivalence of Stalin's regime and Hitlers, of communism and fascism. The issue becomes a matter of "minimizers" of communist mass murder. By this point we've come a long way from the quite reasonable concern that educators are teaching their students about the holocaust in the wrong place, the wrong site - the classroom. That's, for me at least, the value of these doubts. I don't know how to get past this very real irony.

modernism & domestic help

Bob Perelman and Kristen Gallagher on domestic help and modernism (audio): mp3 (3:34).

Lorenzo Thomas, "Otis"

New at PennSound - Lorenzo Thomas reads "Otis" (3:06). Listen and be amazed.

lament for my late page

I loved my old home page and I was sorry to have to give it up a few years ago for something spare and linky/listy. I concede that the sparer style works better but I miss the narrative clutter, a non-design enthralled by hyperlinking right there in the flow of words. That little "latest news" link in the top left blinked for about a year when that was the newest thing. Fortunately I knew that blinking links were bad news pretty quickly and reverted to plain old plain old as soon as the excitement faded. The old page dates back to 1994 and it looked more or less as you see above from 1994 until 2007 or '08! I maintain a link to it and I imagine that most of the links still work. Prior to the site on top of which this old page sat I had a wonderful gopher. This was of course before the graphical browser (Mosaic was the first, I think--before Netscape) and it was stiff and hierarchical but effective in conveying information and giving users a tour, in effect, of the material you wanted to present. I loved the chaos of hyperlinking once it was possible through this thing called "the world wide web" and, let me repeat, I felt that the hyperlinky text was the way to go. Eventually another kind of design became the standard. Now--what with drupal and blogs and blog-style user-enabled sites--we're back to a more cluttered surface, but still nothing like this single-look languagy flat surface.

thanks to everyone who supported this project

And it's not too late to help send a child suffering from renal failure to summer camp next summer. Every $25 donation makes a difference, truly: here for easy site for donating by credit card.

handbook of modern & contemporary American poetry

I have an essay in this forthcoming book, and am excited to keep such good company. I expect the book won't be out for another year. And I'm probably jumping the gun in posting the contents but I'll wait 'til someone tells me to take it down. You'll get the gist of what's in it, anyway. (Below at right: Cary Nelson.)

- - -

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
Edited by Cary Nelson

1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
Cary Nelson

2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
Rachel Blau DuPlessis

3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
Robert Dale Parker

4. “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
Melissa Girard

5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
John Marsh

6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
Linda A. Kinnahan

7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
Peter Nicholls

8. Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
Charles Altieri

9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
Edward Brunner

10. Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
Tim Newcomb

11. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry
Scene, 1920-1960
Susan Rosenbaum

12. Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
Mike Chasar

13. “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
Philip Metres

14. The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
Karen Jackson Ford

15. Asian American Poetry
Josephine Park

16. “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
Walter Kalaidjian

17. American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
Jahan Ramazani

18. The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
Michael Thurston

19. The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
Al Filreis

20. Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
Lytle Shaw

21. “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
Mark W. Van Wienen

22. Disability Poetics
Michael Davidson

23. Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
Lynn Keller

24. Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
Timothy Yu

25. “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
James Smethurst

26. Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
Adalaide Morris

the design economy will be democratic

Ted Forstmann takes the philanthropic pledge

PoemTalk #39 is out

PoemTalk episode 39 is out. Have a listen.

an unfinished film

At right: Yael Hersonski.

Pier Marton, whose ideas about film and video I completely trust, has written a blurb-length review of Yael Hersonski's An Unfinished Film, a work I haven't seen (but will soon, somehow) and, based on what I've heard and read so far, want to consider using at the end of my course on representations of the Holocaust. Be sure to re-read the review on Pier's good site. Here's Pier:

- - -

Beyond the Visible: A Vital Film (w. review)

December 28, 2010 at 12:35 pm

Yael Hersonski’s An Unfinished Film
Had posted a trailer back in August, but this film requires much more attention. My short review: One of the sharpest media literacy lesson to be found: the set-up and staging stink… we are indeed all actors in a terrible movie, but it is clear that whatever the word “hell” stands for, these images were conceived through one of the most vicious deceptions ever devised in “that place.” As the indictment reaches us all, the images in all of their obscenity (in the sense of what should be “off stage”) scream for the possibility of an “ethical viewership,” away from our scopophilic universe. An urgent and vital film which like the Holocaust and ALL mass murders cannot be digested. Not to forget, and to do something now before it is, once more, too late. –>A+

the other tradition

Per Larry Sawyer, Andrew Whiteman has asked the following:

I’m interested in poetry of the ‘other tradition,’ as spoken about by Jerome Rothenberg or Marjorie Perloff or blogged by Al Filreis or Lemon Hound. It’s not simply contemporary work. It’s a way of reading poetry through types of restlessness of being in the world. It could be Pound translating “The Seafarer” or it could be Linh Dinh’s photo blog; the poet is engaging with the ‘soul of the world’ which he or she finds to be fucked up in some way or another. The stance of being against the zeitgeist. Saying that, I definitely am not a fan of all types of ‘rebellious’ / ‘disruptive’ poetry, whether abstruse or ‘slam’, just because it speaks out. Nor do I dislike the haiku of Basho or the ‘everydayness’ of Berrigan and the New Yorkers. I suppose the way I read these writers is that their voices are implicitly rejecting of what society-at-large was pimping at the time. I feel like the times are hurtful, solipsistic to a new level and cruel and ignorant to staggering degrees. Poetry is a way to make vision clear. What’s my fucked up version of Shelley? “Poets are the true legislators of the unacknowledged world.”

Andrew Whiteman is a Canadian musician and songwriter. Forming the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir in Toronto out of high school, he eventually left the band in 1993 after eight years and went on to produce a solo effort, Fear of Zen, in 1995, as well as an album with the band Que Vida in 1998. Leslie Feist subsequently invited Whiteman to collaborate with herself and what was then essentially the core of Broken Social Scene—Brendan Canning, Kevin Drew and Justin Peroff.[1] The chemistry was successful and Whiteman became one of the band's four members to consistently appear in every tour. Whiteman also fronts the band Apostle of Hustle with bassist Julian Brown and drummer Dean Stone.

eholiday

Thanks to Beth Kwon.

the pure products of America

On July 8, 1999, we at the Writers House held our first live interactive webcast. The discussion was all about William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie" (the pure products of America go crazy) from Spring and All. I hosted and was joined by Bob Perelman, Shawn Walker, and Kristen Gallagher. We fielded questions from people watching on the internet, among them Jena Osman and Terrence Diggory.

It was streamed as video in RealVideo format and preserved as a video later in the same format. (Those who have RealPlayers installed still can watch the grainy video.) Later we extracted the audio from the video and now we've segmented that audio into topical segments. Here are the segments:

[] Bob Perelman reading "To Elsie" (2:21)

[] Kristen Gallagher on facing alterity (4:30)

[] Al Filreis on the poem's uncertainty (1:54)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on "the pure products of America" and the issue of control (5:26)

[] Shawn Walker, Al Filreis, Kristen Gallagher and Bob Perelman on Williams' position towards Elsie (6:44)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on imagination (8:26)
audience comments and Bob Perelman on "peasant traditions" (3:17)

[] Bob Perelman on how the open architecture and "unsuccessful" quality of Williams' poems are relevant to poetics today

[] Al Filreis on Williams' attraction to the new "mixed" American culture

Here is the link to the page with links to audio and video.

PennSound's Williams page includes eight recordings of the poet reading this poem. Check them out! Here is the text of the poem:

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie--
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

children with renal disease

This holiday season I have been raising money to send kids with kidney failure to camp next summer. My goal is $13,000 and I'm now at $11,770. I invite readers of my blog to go here (frostvalley.kintera.org/yearend2010/afilreis) and consider--please--making a donation. The gift you make for this kids is fully tax deductible, and the online system is good and secure, I promise.

I've been associated with Frost Valley since I was 8 years old. I was a camper, then a counselor, then a director for many summers and now proudly serve as a member of the Board of Trustees.

In 1975, Frost Valley partnered with the Ruth Gottscho Kidney Foundation to become the first camp in the world to offer children with kidney disease a chance to experience summer camp ("mainstreamed" with healthy kids) while also receiving their dialysis treatments. These children have experienced sleepaway camp while gaining confidence and independence in what is typically their first time away from family and home. Most learn new skills for managing and coping with their medical condition. I've seen this program succeed miraculously for 30 years.

The cost of sending one child on dialysis to camp for a two-week session is $1,500. Will you join me and please make a donation today?

paid summer internships

Today we announced our summer 2011 RealArts@PENN paid internships. Click here for more. We created this program because we began to feel that the standard summer internship--especially in the arts--was exploitative. Orgs and companies want free smart help from college students desperate for a line on the resume and "real" "experience." An already bad trend has gotten worse because of the bad economy and because in newspapers and publishing there are the additional pressures of the changing "business plan." Our internships have been created each through a special partnership. Since we pay the stipend we are able to shape the process of selection (although finally the interns are chosen by the staff of the host entities).

romantic and neo-romantic poems (audio)

At left: William Blake, "The Ancient of Days," 1794.

On October 7, 2009, Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, editors of the third volume of Poems for the Millenium, came to the Writers House, gathering some friends and colleagues - and we all put on a show: readings from the anthology of romantic and post- and neo-romantic poems. The readings ranged from Black to Heine to Whitman to Perelman.

Now we (thanks to the talented Anna Zalokostas) present a fully segmented set of recordings from this event.

Download some romantic poems to your iPod this holiday and listen while you shop or while you drop.

Here is a link to the PennSound page, and here, below, are the segments described:

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Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffery Robinson reading "The Ancient Poets" and "The Voice of the Devil" from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; "Athenaeum Fragment 116" from Friedrich Karl Vilhelm von Schlegel; "To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818" from John Keats; an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book; and "An Archaic Torso of Apollo" from Rainer Maria Rilke (11:51)

Charles Bernstein reading a poem after Edward Lear's "The Old Man of Whitehaven"; CB tr. of an 1847 poem from Victor Hugo's Les Contemplations; "The Ballad of Burdens" from Algernon Charles Swinburne; CB tr. of Heinrich Heine's "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht" followed by poem after "Der Tod" from Shadowtime; his own "The Introvert," after William Wordsworth's "The Hermit"; excerpt from Walt Whitman's "RESPONDEZ!"; CB tr. of Charles Baudelaire's "Enivrez-vous": "Be Drunken"; William Blake's "The Sick Rose" from Song of Experience (12:12)

Jerome Rothenberg reading a Samuel Taylor Coleridge and JR tr. of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Mignon's Song"; Coleridge on urine (3:38)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Book Five; followed by a brief selection from her own "Wanderer" (12:04)

Jeffery Robinson reading "Ode: Composed on A May Morning" by William Wordsworth; followed by his own "Vernal Song of Blithe May after William Wordworth"; an excerpt from Wordworth's "The Triad"; his own "Poem on the Letter 'A'" (6:29)

George Economou reading "The Shark" from Dionysios Solomos; "The Maldive Shark" from Herman Melville; "Shipwrecks and Sharks" from Isidore Ducassee, comte de Lautreamont; his own "The Amorous Drift of the First Hoplite on the Right Wing" (13:33) [At right: George Economou reading from Melville.]

Jerome Rothenberg reading "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" from Percy Bysshe Shelley (3:02)

Rochelle Owens reading "Judith" from Adah Isaacs Menken; her own "Song from Out of Ur" (16:05)

Jeffery Robinson reading Emily Dickinson's "I think I was enchanted" (1:50)

Bob Perelman reading his own work "Transcription" (13:33)

Jerome Rothenberg reading his own poem "Romantic Dadas, for Jeffrey Robinson" (1:23)

Klaus Barbie: "He took pleasure in it."

Simple historical math. This kind of trial (see below) doesn't happen any more. Most perpetrators and many and probably most victims are superannuated or gone. Yet when I watched the Klaus Barbie trial in the late 1980s, I had a ho-hum attitude about it. Read the news stories and took it all mostly for granted. Then the shock--now, going back to it--of reading even the blandest standard newspaper stories about it (bland=he had a smile as thin as a knife blade). In the spirit of being shocked in such a manner, I present the full text of a March 1987 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands

Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer

LYON, France--In 1944, when she was 13, Simone Lagrange testified yesterday, Klaus Barbie gave her a smile as thin as a knife blade, then hit her in the face as he cuddled a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.

Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking one of her vertebrae with a spiked ball.

Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie "had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."

The three women were among seven people who took the witness stand yesterday to testify against Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in [Paris] during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused of torturing Jews and members of the French Resistance and deporting them to Nazi death camps.

But he did not hear their testimony because he has refused to attend the courtroom sessions since the second day of the trial, as he may do under French law.

He has, however, denied the accusations against him and has contended that his 1983 extradition from Bolivia to France was illegal.

Several of the seven witnesses yesterday sobbed as they told of arrest, torture, rail convoys to the Drancy collection center near Paris and on to concentration camps.

They depicted Barbie as a harsh, sadistic officer ready to resort to any cruelty to extract information.

Lagrange, her voice breaking, recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed in Normandy to drive back the Germans.

Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews and Resistance fighters, Lagrange and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where a man, dressed in gray and caressing a cat, said Simone was pretty.

"I was a little girl, and wasn't afraid of him, with his little cat. And he didn't look like the typical tall, blond SS officer we were told to beware of," she said.

The man, whom she identified as Barbie, asked her terrified parents for the addresses of their two younger children.

"When we said we did not know, he pulled my hair, hit me, the first time in my life I was slapped," she said.

During the following week, the man hauled her out of a prison cell each day, beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain the information.

"He always came with his thin smile like a knife blade," she said. "Then he smashed my face. That lasted seven days."

Later that month, Simone and her mother were put aboard a sealed train for the Auschwitz concentration camp on a horror ride "which turned us into different people" and that still gave her nightmares 40 years later.

From Auschwitz, where her mother was gassed, the inmates were marched to Ravensbruck, where only 2,000 of the 25,000 people who began the march arrived alive. On the way, Simone saw her father marching in another convoy.

"A German officer told me to embrace him. As we were about to meet, they shot him in the head," she said. "It wasn't Barbie who pulled the trigger, but it was him who sent us there."

Ennat Leger, who lost her sight at Ravensbruck after her arrest, was hoisted to the witness stand in her wheelchair by four policemen.

She was a Resistance fighter nearly 50 years old when she was arrested in 1944, she said, and Barbie and his men "were savages, brutal savages, who struck, struck and struck again."

"Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens?," she quoted him as saying, in an allusion to the torture chambers.

Lise Lesevre, frail and upright despite her 86 years, described the defendant as "Barbie the savage," saying she recognized him decades later because of his "pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance group, said the Gestapo arrested her on March 13, 1944, while she was carrying a letter intended for a Resistance leader code-named Didier.

She said Barbie spent almost three weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was Didier, and if not, who was. She was interrogated for 19 days, she said, and tortured on nine of them.

First she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar by Barbie and his men. "Who is Didier, where is Didier?" were Barbie's main questions, she said.

Next was the bathtub torture. She said she was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater.

"During the bathtub torture, in the presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink to drown myself quickly. But I wasn't able to do it. I didn't say anything.

"After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel," she said.

"It was a beast, not a man," she said. "It was terror. He took pleasure in it."

During her last interrogation, she said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she still suffers.

"He told me, 'I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.'" But she never did, and she heard Barbie say finally, "Liquidate her. I don't want to see her anymore."

She was condemned to death by a German military tribunal for "terrorism" but was placed in the wrong cell and deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she survived the war. Her husband and son did not. She said they were both deported to their deaths by Barbie.

Lesevre said she identified Barbie in February in a face-to-face confrontation at St. Joseph Prison, where he is being held.

writing through postmodernism

Kent Johnson decribes his new writing project: "Right now I’m a little ways into a book-length project of writing through Paul Hoover’s The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, where a “stanza” gets devoted to each of the poets therein. I’ve had some sort of connection by now, however brief or silly, to most of the contributors. So I begin with an anecdote and go from there. In those cases where I don’t have anything truly anecdotal to say, I indicate that I’ve never crossed paths with him or her and then make something up, trying to be as interesting as I can. I suppose politics will come into many of the entries—references to politics inside and outside of poetry, not that inside and outside are ever completely separate, of course. It will be a pretty long poem—my first epic, I guess."

The full interview is available here at Mary: A Journal of New Writing.

burying the 1930s in 1960

In Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) he waits until the epilogue to deal the final death blow to the 1930s. Much of the book implicitly denigrates the "chiliastic" passions and utopianism of intellectuals of that decade. The fifties and, he predicts, the 1960s will be a quiet time of moderated passions and adult choices, compromise and centrism. The entire text of the epiloque is available on my 1950s site. Here, below, are the first paragraphs of a subsection of the epilogue:

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The Loss of Innocence in the Thirties

FOR A SMALL GROUP, the thirties have a special meaning. These are the individuals who went through the radical movement and who bear, as on invisible frontlets, the stamp of those years on their foreheads. The number is small. Of the four million college and high-school youths, less than twenty thousand, or one-half of one per cent, took part in radical activity. But, like the drop of dye that suffuses the cloth, this number gave the decade its coloration.

A radical is a prodigal son. For him, the world is a strange place whose contours have to be explored according to one's destiny. He may eventually return to the house of his elders, but the return is by choice, and not, as of those who stayed behind, of unblinking filial obedience. A resilient society, like a wise parent, understands this ritual, and, in meeting the challenge to tradition, grows.

But in the thirties, the fissures were too deep. Seemingly, there was no home to return to. One could only march forward. Everybody seemed to be tramping, tramping, tramping. Marching, Marching was the title of a prize-winning proletarian novel. There were parades, picketing, protests, farm holidays, and even a general strike in San Francisco. There was also a new man, the Communist. Not just the radical--always alien, always testing, yet open in his aims -- but a hidden soldier in a war against society.

In a few short years, the excitement evaporated. The labor movement grew fat and bureaucratized. The political intellectuals became absorbed into the New Deal. The papier-mache proletarian novelists went on to become Hollywood hacks. And yet it is only by understanding the fate of the prodigal sons and the Communists that one can understand the loss of innocence that is America's distinctive experience of the thirties.

Murray Kempton, in his book Part of Our Time, has looked at the small band who dreamed, and who--because of having a dream "possessed no more of doubting"--sought to impress that dream into action. But in action, one defies one's character. In some, the iron became brittle, in some it became hard; others cast the iron away, and still others were crushed. In the end, almost all had lost the dream and the world was only doubt.

The story opens, naturally enough, with Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Kempton retells the familiar story, but with a special nuance. What united the strange pair was their symbiotic relation to Baltimore, a mildewed city which was Kempton's home and whose musty character he captures so well. Hiss, from a shabby, genteel Baltimore family, fled its faded elegance to meet Chambers, the tortured man from the underground, who settled gratefully into its Victorian dust. Each found, in the secret craving of the other, the lives they were rejecting, until, locked in defeat, they both sank beneath the waters.

The story spreads out and touches on the writers attracted by the myth of the revolutionary collective, the "rebel girls," the militant labor leaders, the youth movement, and others who were riding the crest of history's waves. it is not a formal history of the left, but a series of novellas. What gives it its special cast and enormous appeal is the elegiac mood, the touch of adolescent ache in the writing.

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