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.

poets walk

Last night Poets House sponsored the 15th annual poets' walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Tina Chang, the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, read midway on the bridge: "Brooklyn Bridge" by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Bill Murray, who's been a supporter of poetry through Poets House projects, came along for the walk. Murray read several poems to the crowd before the walk on the Manhattan end of the bridge: "Supermarket in California," Levertov's "The Rights," Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind."


Photos by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

poetry on & off the page

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

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

Emily the gardener

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

elective affinities

It's time to check out the poets featured on ElectiveAffinitiesUSA, a blog managed by Carlos Soto-Roman.

Aaron Kramer

We at PennSound have now created a new author page - that of the left-wing poet Aaron Kramer. Kramer was (for a time, and perhaps for a long time) a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. He was involved in just about every radical issue, cultural and straight-out political, of this time: the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps his first big break as a poet was his inclusion in the anthology, Six Poets in Search of An Answer (1944), which at a (brief) hopeful moment in the liberal-left alliance brought Aaron in with Max Bodenheim, Joy Davidman, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg (by then a vintage modernist who'd joined the radical left), Martha Millet, and Norman Rosten. His "Garcia Lorca" memorialized that poet murdered by Spanish fascists. "Berlin Air Raid" begins: "For ten years they were listening to different / sounds." "Natchez" is about southern racist violence, a place where "a hundred tabloid writers ran to the flame." I have been in touch with Aaron's daughter Laura for years. Recently she went through the attic and gathered together three shoeboxes of cassettes and VHS tapes and delivered them to us at PennSound. We are slowly going through them, digitizing them, and make them available--as always--for free download through our archive. Thanks to the work of Rebekah Caton, the first three readings are now up. Coming soon: a recording of a radio program featuring a discussion and performance by Kramer of poems from the sweatshops - verse of radical Jewish immigrants of the first years of the 20th century.

modernist democracy

Turns out that WCW's "no ideas but in things" is a localist's advocacy of direct representation. (There! That's a political reading.)

get rid of the workshop

If you want to get rid of the workshop poem, you have to get rid of the workshop. (Click on the image below for a larger view of the Facebook discussion.)

Michael Heller

Michael Heller at Poets' House today, where he gave a presentation on modern poetry. Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald. Here's our Michael Heller PennSound page.

top PennSound poets for January

Most oft-visited PennSound author pages in the past month: 1) Ginsberg, 2) Pound, 3) WC Williams, 4) Ashbery, 5) Creeley, 6) Olson, 7) Howe, 8) Baraka, 9) Christian Bok, 10) Spicer, 11) Reznikoff Holocaust page, 12) Berrigan, 13) C. Bernstein [60-Second Lecture page].

This last item is the video recording of a 60-second lecture given by Charles Bernstein on the topic, "What Makes a Poem a Poem?" It has a punchline ending, so be sure to watch.

new PoemTalk on Jack Spicer

Today we've released the newest episode of "PoemTalk"--number 28 in our series. This one is about Jack Spicer's early poem, "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." Here's your link.

nothing [was] being done with sound

Marjorie Perloff speaking at a panel discussion in 2000: "[M]y main objection to a lot of the poetry being written today is that nothing is being done with sound and the visual. And even in Stephen [Burt]’s talk just now I didn’t hear him say one word about sound. To me, the sound of a poem is at least as important as the semantics; so is the visual. Both are aspects of poetry, and I had a terrible experience just the other day when we were judging Mellon fellowships, doctoral fellowships, for the West Coast region in San Francisco. We talked to a young man who had done very well; his whole honors thesis was on Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion.’ He went on about gender, he talked about masculinity and femininity, and how Shelley wanted to be a mother. But when I asked about the sound structure of the poem, he said ‘what?’ I asked, ‘what’s it written in? Is it written in terza rima?’ and he drew a complete blank. I really did find that quite shocking. Obviously Shelley had a reason for writing the poem as he did, as any poet does, and I think inattention to sound structure has produced the kind of flaccid free verse that a lot of poets use today; it’s not really poetry at all. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good poetry; I don’t think it’s poetry."

[from Jacket issue 12, 2000.]

3 Stevens poems

I was asked to choose three of Wallace Stevens' poems to represent his entire body of work. An impossible--and perhaps irrelevant--task, but I was game. This short essay is the result, published a few months back.

Duncan's made place

These three discuss Robert Duncan's prologue-poem to The Opening of the Field with me in episode 27 of PoemTalk, just released today. Please have a listen. And let me know what you think: afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

turn left in order to go right

From his book Turn Left in Order to Go Right, Here is a poem I greatly admire: "I'd Like to See It." The refrain--"I'd like to see it that way"--is offered every four or five lines. It seems to me the perfect meditative and yet arbitrary structure to frame an otherwise random series of hoped-for conditions, which range from intensely and obscurely personal to geo-political. "So I could relax, put on my enormous suit / And ring your doorbell holding my breath and flowers." And also: "For the good of the nation behind bars" and "In order to be able to end war..." The refrain itself, rather than closing off possibilities in the serial quality of the remarks and thoughts, doubles the meaning each time: (1) It would be nice if it were so; I would like to make it so; and (2) This is how I would like to see or perceive or understand this or that part of my world. There's both agency and fatedness.

We at PennSound have a recording of Fischer reading this poem aloud--beautifully. I urge readers of this blog to read the text while hearing Fischer's Zen-ish performance. Charles Bernstein describes Fischer as "incandescently tranquil" and I cannot think of a better example of this hard-to-achieve tone than this poem.

thousands of poetic flowers blooming

Despite the corny romanticism that is its basis (wilting urban flower has a dream of sunlit wind-kissed wavy fields), there's an overwhelming consensus out there that Flower is, as co-creator Jenova Chen puts it, "video game poetry." Not just "poetic" in the sense meant by the phrase often repeated in gamers' reviews--"this poetic, romantic ideal," one of them writes--but poetic in its super-explicit aestheticism and anti-ambitious alterity. It's surely not the first video game that approaches abstraction and open, non-directed themes, but it's surely the first that will receive a wide response. If its promoters can get past the obvious transcendental language ("Flower makes your heart soar as you whip the controller up, sending your petal stream high above the landscape in a tornado of beautiful colours and roaring wind...watch[ing] the blades of grass part..."), many competition-oriented gamers will discover for themselves something of the surprise of poetic experiment: What exactly was that I just experienced? I don't know what to call it. It's not that it's especially beautiful (certainly not to me); the visualities are not its innovation. What's different is that it's different--its unobvious motives, its impractical reason for being, its unintentionally deadened affect.***

To be sure, making body-oriented or body-connected poetry in digital environments such as Brown's "cave"** is not new. And Flower is retro compared to some of the work done by artists in the world of digital poetics. The difference with Flower, of course, is that it's coming through a mainstream pipe (PlayStation3) and is the work of young people not otherwise connected to the poetics community.

Your responses invited. Write me at afilreis [at] gmail [dot] com.

** For an example of visual/physical word flow in Brown's cave, click here.

*** I suppose it could be argued that this makes it a candidate for designation as kitsch.

Reznikoff reading "Holocaust"

From Charles Bernstein's blog today: "Abraham Ravett, a film maker and photographer who teaches at Hampshire, made a recording of Charles Reznkioff reading from Holocaust on December 21, 1975, almost exactly 35 years ago. He has sent the recording and photographs to PennSound and we will be making them available soon." More...

black daisy chain of nuns

Your
     Frankenstein
What is the word from  Deberoux Babtiste
the Funambule   I
Desnuelu (who's he?)  to choke you
Duhamel    and you
De brouille   Graciously
Deberaux   Take me by the throat
Decraux 
Barrault
Deberaux
Delicate
French logic
Black daisy chain of nuns
Nous sommes tous assasins
Keith's jumping old man in the waves
  methadrine
 morning dance of delicacy
 "I want you to pick me up
  when I fall down"

That's part of a poem by Elise Cowan. Cowen, though dead more than a quarter century, is in many ways more present than many of the other so-called "Beat women." She is alive in the pages of Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and in the memories of many of Beat survivors whom she deeply impressd with her generous friendship. Janine Pommy Vega, with whom Elise lived for a time, says, "I still think about her every day. She was the smartest person I knew." More...


At right: Allen Ginsberg and Elise Cowan.

new How2

The newest issue of How2 has papers on Caroline Bergvall by Sophie Robinson, Nathan Brown, cris cheek, Laura Goldstein, and Majene Mafe. It also has a section on "Reading Carla Harryman" featuring papers by Laura Hinton, Christine Hume, J. Darling, Carla Billitteri, Renee Gladman, and Austin Publicover.

gorgeous katalogos

Alan Loney's book of poetry, Katalogos, printed & published by Scott King at Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota, will be available next month, in January. Details: $110 -- printed in just 90 copies, of which 75 are for sale. This is, I'm certain, a gorgeous object: printed letterpress in Dante types on damped Nideggen paper on a proof press, with two illustrations from the 1912 catalog from which half of the poem is constructed. Signed by the author. To hear a fair chunk of the poem being read, see (hear!) Loney's PennSound page. How to order or inquire: reddragonflypress@hotmail.com; or reddragonflypress.org/music/2989.