Our 12th PoemTalk show is being released this week. Here it is. You've not heard PoemTalk yet? Well, it's 25 minutes of talk about a single poem. Tightly focused talk at moments, but mostly rather loose. Which is why I say "a close, but not too close, reading of a poem." Some poems are left largely unsaid by us by the end, but for some few poems we're really able, it seems, to cover the ground. I think we cover most of the ground this time, talking about Ezra Pound's broadly satiric - and wonderfully performative - early poem, "Cantico del Sole." Give a listen and let me know (afilreis [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu) what you think. The thought of what America would be like if PoemTalk had a wide circulation. (I don't flatter myself.)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
wide circulation
Our 12th PoemTalk show is being released this week. Here it is. You've not heard PoemTalk yet? Well, it's 25 minutes of talk about a single poem. Tightly focused talk at moments, but mostly rather loose. Which is why I say "a close, but not too close, reading of a poem." Some poems are left largely unsaid by us by the end, but for some few poems we're really able, it seems, to cover the ground. I think we cover most of the ground this time, talking about Ezra Pound's broadly satiric - and wonderfully performative - early poem, "Cantico del Sole." Give a listen and let me know (afilreis [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu) what you think. The thought of what America would be like if PoemTalk had a wide circulation. (I don't flatter myself.)
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
