Arthur Leipzig, "Stickball," 1950

Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 attack on Terrence Des Pres

Today I'm making available a PDF copy of Bruno Bettelheim's angry 1976 essay-review on Lina Wurtmuller's Seven Beauties and Terrence Des Pres' The Survivor.

Stanley Burnshaw at 6 years old

Many thanks to Susan Copen Oken for providing a copy of this photograph of one of my favorite critic-poet-editors.

Barth vs. Gardner

Here is a 2004 account of the 1978 verbal battle between John Gardner and John Barth.

arts graduates doing just fine

From an article by Steven J. Tepper:

A new survey of more than 13,000 arts graduates....

The data come from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), a research effort led by Indiana and Vanderbilt Universities, supported by the Surdna Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Respondents were at different stages of their careers. They came from more than 150 arts programs from a diverse set of institutions - from Barnard College to the University of Nebraska to San Francisco State - and answered such questions as: Are you glad you went to art school? What are you doing now? Did you learn anything that is relevant to your current job? Are you satisfied in your work? Are you still making and presenting art?

One of the most striking findings is that arts graduates have few regrets. Ninety percent say that their overall art school experience was good or excellent. Nearly three quarters would attend the same institution again. If an arts degree were a bill of goods - leading to dead-end careers and a life of struggle - certainly more alumni would second guess their decision to study the arts. This is not the case.

Part of their satisfaction likely comes from the fact that many graduates end up working in some capacity in their chosen profession. In fact, of those who intended to be artists, seventy-four percent do work as a professional artist at some point in their careers. These graduates are plucky and enterprising - leading the way in our new 21st century contingent economy by fashioning careers through self-employment, working in multiple jobs, starting their own businesses, and working across disciplines.

Arts graduates experience relatively low rates of unemployment --only six percent according to the survey. Only a handful become waiters (three percent work in food services). And the vast majority of graduates, about 73 percent, regardless of whether they work as artists or not, say they are satisfied with the opportunity to work in a job that reflects their interests and personality. In fact, if you really want to stick it to Uncle Henry, tell him that people who work in the arts report some of the highest levels of job satisfaction among all occupations. Clergy and firefighters are more satisfied than artists, but artists are more satisfied than lawyers, financial managers and high school teachers.

True, the median wages of artists lag behind what other professionals make, which is probably why few arts graduates are very satisfied with their income - only about 14 percent of actors, 12 percent of musicians, and eight percent of fine artists. But social science research shows conclusively that higher wages alone have a minimal impact on general happiness. Arts graduates might not be rich, on average, but the vast majority is gainfully employed, piece together satisfying careers, and would go to art school again if given the choice.

So, if you are one of the 120,000 plus arts graduates this year, look Uncle Henry squarely in the eye and tell him that you are off to join the ranks of the creative class. He'll have to follow your interesting and rewarding career on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, because you may be too busy dancing, writing, performing, producing, designing, teaching or painting for a living to promptly return his call.

Steven J. Tepper is author of the forthcoming book, Not Here, Not Now, Not That!: Protest Over Art and Culture in America (University of Chicago Press 2011). An associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, he is the associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy and senior scholar for the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.

Dennis Barone

Watch this video and learn a little from Dennis Barone about poetry doings in Philadelphia in the 1970s.

wiffiti

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Jacket2 launches & this blog

Jacket2 magazine is now launched, I'm happy to say (as its proud publisher). At J2 we have created commentaries and I as publisher will be one of the permanent commentators. Many of the kinds of blog posts I have been posting here since 2007 will now be published in J2. I will continue posting from time to time here, but these will be less frequent and they will focus more on issues and concerns and events not related to the work and purpose of Jacket2. I hope readers of this blog will continue to check here, but I urge people who mostly like what I have to say to go to http://jacket2.org/content/alfilreis and follow me there. Very soon there will be an RSS feed there, and I will transfer my subscription service there too.

I'm in the Philadelphia Dailiy News

A link to the article.

I and Albee

I spent the last two days with Edward Albee, whom I hosted as a "Writers House Fellow." I was able to persuade him to read my favorite speech in all of his 30 plays--the pre-elegy given by A (modeled on Albee's adoptive mother) to the audience at the very end of Three Tall Women. My second favorite (while we're on favorites...): Martin trying to describe his feelings for the goat in The Goat (Or: Who Is Sylvia?), an attempt that breaks down because such longing is an experience of non-relation. He cannot "relate" it because it doesn't not "relate to anything," a foregrounding in a surface of halting words the key double meaning of (in my view) all great writers. Relation = to connect (or--mostly--not) and to describe in words (or--mostly--not).

coffee news

I'm somewhat necessarily in favor the results of this new research on the health of those who drink coffee.

Rufus Wainwright at the Writers House

Had the pleasure of hanging out with Rufus Wainwright yesterday afternoon and evening at the Writers House. Anthony DeCurtis, above left, conducted a beautiful interview/conversation with him for an hour in front of a small audience of 50.

surrealism's anarchic tendencies

From an interview with Gene Tanta: "Dada interests me more than Surrealism. However, within Surrealism, its anarchic tendencies seem more interesting to me than its fetishistic tendencies (which American marketing has employed with such gusto). For instance, Breton had another concept called “convulsive beauty” which transgresses the boundaries of formal logic as well as the canonical categories of Beauty. Convulsive beauty, by retooling the pathology of hysteria, queers aesthetic and political norms." For more, click here.

'Shoah' in Iran (AP story)

Epic Holocaust film 'Shoah' to be screened in Iran via satellite TV
Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's renowned nine-plus-hour film includes testimony from concentration-camp survivors and employees about the slaughter of millions of Jews in Europe during World War II.
By The Associated Press

PARIS - An epic French documentary about the Holocaust, dubbed into Farsi, is to be broadcast on a satellite channel in Iran as part of a campaign to promote understanding between Jews and Muslims and to fight Holocaust denial.

Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's renowned nine-plus-hour film "Shoah" includes testimony from concentration-camp survivors and employees about the slaughter of millions of Jews in Europe during World War II.

The Aladdin Project, a Paris-based group, said the film would be shown starting yesterday over the next several days on the large Los Angeles-based satellite channel Pars. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust, and called for Israel's destruction.

The Aladdin Project tried twice to get a green light from Iranian authorities to hold a press conference in Tehran about the killing of Jews during World War II, but received no response, Abe Radkin, the group's executive director, told The Associated Press.

"If the Iranian government agrees to broadcast [the film] on a public channel, we would welcome it," he said.

TV satellite dishes are outlawed in Iran, but enforcement of the ban is spotty. Many people no longer worry about concealing the dishes. In recent months, authorities have targeted some sections of Tehran to remove dishes, but the sweeps appear to be isolated.

The Aladdin Project has also dubbed the film into Arabic and Turkish. It will be shown in Turkey at the Istanbul film festival next month, then a week later on the TRT channel, Radkin said.

The group had planned to broadcast the film on an Egyptian channel, but has put the plans on hold amid unrest that ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak.

"We will wait a bit so that the political situation in Arab countries allows the broadcast of such a film," he said. "We need a peaceful atmosphere to concentrate on this message."

The Aladdin Project has backing from UNESCO, the educational and cultural arm of the United Nations.

introduction to PennSound

Vanessa Place, March 24

Vanessa Place will be at the Writers House on March 24. Listen here for an announcement about the event.

Susan Howe and Jonathan Edwards

Susan Howe in front of an image of a Jonathan Edwards manuscript. The event took place at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Photograph by Lawrence Schwartzwald. Lawrence puts up many of his photographs of poets now on his Facebook page.

Jacket2, "pretty much the most robust place"

In the new issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, we find a nice article about Jacket2 by Sam Hughes. Here's an excerpt, quoting me:

“The poetry world is huge, vibrant, full of odd and interesting and brilliant people all over the world—and they follow everything in the field. So while it might seem like the announcement of a change in a magazine is not going to rock anybody’s world, it did. There was a big response to it, and almost all of it positive.”

Jacket2 is going to be “pretty much the most robust place where you can look and find stuff about poetry—modern, contemporary; particularly contemporary,” he adds. Including, of course, poems. He describes it as a “fully integrated site” that will play off the raw material of spoken poetry provided by PennSound. “Between the two, we’ll have a whole lot covered.”

And here is a link to the whole article.

Bernadette Mayer

Lawrence Schwartzwald took this photograph of Bernadette Mayer at a reading last night at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church.

new review of my book

Adam Piette of the University of Sheffield has published a review of my Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry in the recent issue of Modernism/Modernity. Here is a PDF copy of the review.

Kramer reads Whitman's "Song of Myself"

Back in 1974 the poet Aaron Kramer, long a supporter of Walt Whitman's importance, recorded himself performing "Song of Myself." Kramer's daughter found this recording, and many others, in boxes of cassette tapes in her father's house after his death. PennSound's Kramer author page includes many of these recordings, including the Whitman. We've of course thus added Whitman to our growing "PennSound Classics" page, along with newly acquired recordings of Poe, Chaucer, Swift, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald and others. Here is your link to Kramer reading Walt, and here is the link to PennSound Classics.

Mark Nowak

Today PennSound launched its newest author page - for recordings of Mark Nowak. Included here is an 18-minute reading from Coal Mountain Elementary - recorded at Mills College in 2009.

Will Alexander on Rothko

Will Alexander reads "Rothko" in 1993: MP3. And then he takes a minute to discuss that poem. (These sound files are part of a reading recorded in 1993, segmented for the first time today. These and more are available on Alexander's PennSound page.)

anti-leftist anti-postmodernism

When Jesse V. Drury tweeted early this morning (before 7 am) and "at"-ed me (hailed me with an "@afilreis," I mean), I followed the link. Jesse wrote: "Poetry needs form to be relevant" and "Anti-leftist anti-postmodernists?" and "Go get 'em @afilreis." I don't know, at the moment at least, about going to get 'em, but I did follow the link and found myself at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog (which is now a commentary space) and found this summary of and quotation from a conservative web site. Here is the Harriet comment in full:

Criticism
Form and Nature

It’s not everyday the website for a right-wing think tank publishes an article on Flarf. Micah Mattix’s article, in The Public Discourse, the blog of Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute, argues for a rejection of the modernist / postmodernist tendency to experiment with form for the sake of new models of reading and readership, and a return to the “natural order” of “formal” poetry. Flarf receives special scorn because it does not reflect such a natural order—is that because of its formal properties, or because of its content, which is gleaned from that most seemingly unnatural of all spaces, the web? Mattix points out (which everyone admits anyway) that all poetry is formal, and there is no such thing as an unformed poem. But which forms, precisely, are “natural?” Which are not? And where (geographically, historically) do these “natural” forms come from? Well, there’s no history in the article, so who knows. But Mattix, who seemingly hasn’t read anything ever written about poetry or aesthetics, does have some major advice for poets:

What is needed now is not more ideological poetry but a new discovery of the “fundamental and perennial rules” of poetry. Without rules, there is no order and, therefore, no recognition. In the end, it is this recognition that makes experiencing art worthwhile. Via complex forms, we recognize the paradoxes of our present existence, or our fractured, conflicting selves, our yearning for coherence, transcendence, and closure, and the infinite beauty of the Creator.

If poetry is ever to regain an audience, it must stop resisting—because of dubious egalitarian, ideological reasons—the hierarchies of complex form. Only then can it again become relevant.

praise for PoemTalk

Today we're enjoying a positive review of PoemTalk published at Geekadelphia. Here's more.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E '79

Steve McCaffrey, 1979: "The fight for language is a political fight." [Source: PDF and eclipse.]

teaching poetry all online (as of February 2001)

PennSound in Russia

cartoon from George Lichty's "Is Party Line, Comrade!" series

The "Is Party Line, Comrade!" series was selected for republication in the Conservative Book Club's Omnibus, volume 6 which included Elizabeth Bentley's Out of Bondage, Richard Weaver's Visions of Order, and Ludwig von Mises's The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.

The signs in the cartoon read as follows: "Commisar of Music Culture (Peoples Div.)" [on the door]; "Musicians of the World arise! -- Make Sour Notes" [on the wall, middle]; "Capita[list] Be-bo[p] Must Go" [behind the middle poster]; "world No. 1 'Boogie' Man" [on wall, right, under sketch of portrait].

The caption: "Is symphony I am composing from glorious sounds of Soviet industry, comrade commisar... the din of hammers, the clash of machinery, the roar of furnaces, the groans of the populace..."

Kelly Writers House on TV (WHYY's "Creative Campus" show)

John Ashbery performs Wallace Stevens

In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

PennSound podcast on letterpress publishing

At left you see Charles Alexander and colleagues working on a publication of Chax Press, which Charles has been directing for the past 27 years. Charles was at the Writers House today, to give a reading and be part of a recording of an episode of PoemTalk. We took a few minutes to talk about letterpresses and other alternative presses--and some important twentieth-century figures in letterpress publishing. This discussion is episode #20 in the PennSound Podcast series.

new PoemTalk out now

Today we are releasing PoemTalk's 40th episode - on Dementia Blog by Susan Schultz. Above: Susan and her mother.

Thom Donovan

Thom Donovan at the Bowery Poetry Club yesterday. Thom and Sarah Wintz curated a Segue Reading Series event there. Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald (for more on Lawrence, click on the tag below).

when cubism finally hit the books

The word "Cubism" was used in printed books most frequently in the year 1960. More...

new audio: Shakespeare's sonnets

We at PennSound are pleased to announce the newest addition to the PennSound "Classics" page: John Richetti reads an ample selection of Shakespeare's sonnets.

baseball companion

I have an essay in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Baseball. Pre-order your copy here.

on Feb 9 we remember Bob Lucid again

Philip Lopate comes to the Writers House on February 9 - for our annual Bob Lucid Memorial Program. Listen here for more.

Jerome Rothenberg: the holocaust & why he writes poetry

When Jerome Rothenberg visited Auschwitz, he experienced the keenest sense he had felt to that date that he should be writing poetry.