Bob Holman, about as passionate about poetic orality as anyone, is visiting Senegal, Gambia, and Mali for the next seven weeks filming endangered languages and presumably, too, doing a series of wildly entertaining performances. He's set up a blog for the trip, the Griot Trail.
In the summer of '99 a group of us gathered to talk at great length about a single poem by William Carlos Williams - "To Elsie" ("The pure products of America / go crazy"). At one point Bob Perelman, one of the participants, said something about the way the poem leaves elements open and contradictory, and then implied (and then at one moment said outright) that this became and still is a key idea operating in contemporary avant-garde poetics. I think Bob frames the point very nicely here, so have a listen to this very brief excerpt from the longer discussion of the poem.
Writers without Borders presents Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh on November 18 at the Writers House. The program is co-sponsored by the Middle East Center and Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture.
A few of us created the project (one of the first of its kind in the U.S.) through which undergraduates received "front-line" computing support in their residences. House calls, as it were. It was, at the time, a revolutionary approach: after all, think, circa 1994-96, of how "computing support" was conceived. You have a problem with your computer, you pick up and carry it to a centrally located "Help Desk." But by '95 and '96 the first issues were those of connectivity - not something well done away from the connection! And then of course, after a while, students need less strictly technical help - and more in the way of guidance about using software, connecting with academic materials on this newish thing called the web, and playing, sandbox-like, with the new tools. We needed people who wouldn't mind getting sand on their hands and knees. Thus: the ITA, Information Technology Advisor. At some point KYW Radio (all news all the time) got wind of this and did a super-quickie little radio story about it. Very slight and barely broke the surface. I recently found the cassette they sent me after airing the story and now have converted it digitally, so here it is.
Poets & Writers, quite pre-professional, nonetheless fairly often admits or implies that young writers who get MFAs might want or need to do things other than join the academy, where "Creative Writing" programs as such are often if not mostly deemed fringe zones of mere practice. Anyway, I was pleased to see that the magazine's latest stab at alternative options includes advice for young writers to "Help out a literary organization," and mentions the Kelly Writers House as one such site. Below is the relevant passage (click on the image for a larger view). And click here for the whole article.
Partly because I create and produce a regular podcast series in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation of Chicago (PoemTalk), partly because I've become about as electorally wonky as anyone in the past year or so, and partly because I subscribe to about two dozen ongoing podcasts....there was no way I'd miss the new "Poetry Off the Shelf" episode, which (surprise!) features poems for and about Obama. Here's your link to the Poetry Foundation site's link to the audio. You can also get it (and subscribe to the series) in your ITunes music store. Just search for "Poetry Foundation Shelf".
Shout out to... the 40 or so schoolchildren on the public school bus that drove by our polling place on Tuesday.
I've downloaded a few useful apps to my new iPhone. One is an RSS Reader that allows me to pick up top news and magazine items, features under various topics, as well as links to new web stuff in fields of my interest, without the strain/time of having to download these items. The thing gives a quickly loaded look at stories and links of the moment, and then I can go follow up by reading full web versions if I want. Not that the iPhone is slow to browse the web, but it's slower than this RSS feed gives me a top look.
One of my students today observed that she has felt, already, a lessening of the snarky tone she's heard and read all around her pretty much all her conscious life. I think she believes that tone will be at an end, that sincerity, rhetorical calm, un-irony will wash over the language. My guess - still plenty of the snark in me, I suppose - is that it will last a few months. Snark is here to stay.
Every recording - in whatever medium - that we've made in a dozen plus years since the founding of the Writers House has been indexed on a page we clumsily call "medialinks". This is kitchen-sink web databasing but we love it.
Howard K. Smith did a news report on "the Beat revolution" in 1960. Smith intended to be even-handed, although today his commentary and questions (in interviews) will strike us as amazingly condescending. These poor deluded children. Charming, but oh how misguided. My favorite moment in the report is a 56-second segment from what must have been a longer, perhaps much longer discussion with a teenaged girl - who had fled her square suburban parents and had migrated to Venice, CA. Listen to her. I'm entranced by her utterly sincere critique of American conformity, in the high sweet tone that anticipates the classic flower child of seven or eight years later.
Yes, speaking of Dickinson... The sculptor, maker of media art and film (and who specializes in public art) Lynn Tomlinson created a series of very short 35 mm films. One of these is an animation of the Dickinson poem, "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –". Go here and click on the third-from-left little thumbnail below the main screen.
Join us for a live interactive online discussion of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The discussion will be led by Al Filreis and Jessica Lowenthal on Monday, November 10, at 7 PM (eastern time). The session will last about an hour; we will discuss several poems in detail; participants will be able to pose questions and responses by email and phone.
When she was at Brown University, poet Lee Ann Brown assigned her students to write according to a rule or constraint they chose from among a list of possible writing experiments she provided. She has learned the technique from Bernadette Mayer (who has always kept lists of such experiments). Lee Ann called this "Multiplicity Sisters" and I once excerpted a few of these for my own poetry class. My students took this up with interest, wanting to see if paradoxically constraint would free them from the typically trite things they were writing.
Allen Tate called John Crowe Ransom "modern without knowing it." For more, click here.
For about a decade I've been teaching in the executive education program of the Wharton School here. For three hours the execs--here for five weeks of intensive courses--and I talk about modern poetry. We do some Dickinson, some Williams, occasionally a little imagist Pound, often some McKay and Cullen, and Wallace Stevens' "Gray Room" (a poem about desire unperceived by the diffident poet-speaker). We also discuss Duchamp's "Fountain" (the readymade that is an turned-upside-down urinal). That's hilarious and, I think, edifying. Perhaps someday I'll write at length about my experience with these businesspeople, but for now I only want to point out that when the Wall Street Journal ran a round-up on unusual Executive Education Program pedagogy, I made the story. Quite astonishing, really. Here's a link to the article. (WSJ 9/30/08, p. R2.)
Why am I irked? Maybe it's the absolute way in which northward movement is naturalized. It happens, the young southerner doesn't see it, can't see it, won't see it, and the logic (it's a certain season and "therefore" they go north) is fixed. Sure, in the poem he's a young boy and so "I do not know what was happening in my heart" we ascribe to innocence and inexperience. And yet this is not the kind of northern migration that one will ever actually come to know by experience; it's a priori true. There's a dishonesty here in the slight implication that later one will know what is in one's heart.
These interviews formed the basis of Warren's 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro?, an exploration of the Civil Rights movement from the point of view of a "reformed racist." After four years of negotiation with Yale's Beinecke Library, conducted mostly by Dan Traister and Ancil George and instigated by the research of Kristina Baumli, Penn's Van Pelt library acquired copies of these tapes which, so far as the Yale people knew, had not been heard by anyone. In April 2005 Kristina organized with the Writers House a panel discussion about these recordings, co-sponsored by CPCW and the library.Dear Al—since I wasn’t irked but fascinated, I thought I’d write about Warren (whom I hardly have ever thought of...). Writing admiringly to you as usual. Chalk this one up to “not being able to participate in PoemTalk and missing it.” First, the division into stanzas mirrors an attenuation and sense of loss. 3 lines together, then 2 + 1 (twice). The one liners sort of match emotionally. Second, and I need to say: I liked this poem, innocently. I liked the off-rhymes of stanza 1. I liked the alliteration of great/geese and stars/sparse [that one fabulous] and even dirt/dark and the vowel assonance between dirt/heard (tho my accent might be different from his) as well as hoot/moon/blooms. It is a remarkable skilled poem - also the way the syntax moves from short phrases separated by commas whenever he talks about “I” (that is, in the first 5 lines of the 9 line poem) UNTIL the key line “I did not know what was happening in my heart.” At that line, the “I” is syntactically, not to say lyrically! integrated in a great sweeping, global line. From that point on “they” are the agent, and also “it.” “Logically” the poem reads: SINCE he does not know what is happening in his heart, THEREFORE they are escaping and going away. That is “if” he had known, then they would have stayed?? No—they are “geese” and not beholden to him. So the illogic of this mixed up sense of agency is part of the strangeness of the poem. Geese always fly north in the spring. His agency has nothing to do with it. Their migration is completely about nature. By the way—since “migration” is then one of the secret words, do we know whether when RPW wrote this poem (and when was that), the northward movement was called The Great Migration? A historical question. Anyway, in the Great Migration, and here you are dead on, Blacks were leaving (and were very beset AS they left as well as before, of course—cf. Jacob Lawrence’s series). The speaker’s agency in a very indirect way is responsible, but he is just a “boy.” If this is autobiographical, we can say RPW has no direct agency for (his and others’) racism and social/economic cruelty at that moment. Responsibility is already always “ELSEWHERE.” A space off the map of this poem “matches” the space off the map of this poem where the geese are going. "Kentucky" may be precise as a locale, but it is hardly up to matching those two other mysterious "elsewhere's." This is a poem about the loss of agency, a tremendously pained and nostalgic poem. It also somewhat confesses ….something. Something about desire, yearning—goodness only knows — certainly a desire for whatever is passing out of his life. Could he have been in love, connected to, cathected to someone who was leaving, and he remembers being troubled and aroused and upset by the loss, feelings which he had to suppress??? Since the birds will return, and one could have talked about that cycle of nature in the poem, part of the coiled contradiction in the poem is that he is mapping a human loss upon a natural cycle, claiming the loss to him of self-knowledge is just “natural.” So “what is happening in my heart” (and his inability to know what WAS happening) appears permanent (“the sound was passing northward” not “the geese were passing northward [and next winter would return]”). WHAT IS UNSPOKEN in this poem gives it its evocative quality. And this is doubly distanced by that bizarre title. After talking about ‘sound,” the title shifts to “story” as the naming of something. Story is solid; sound is more like Nate Mackey argues-—an emotional pipeline to a sense of orphic orphanhood. The title makes me ask: What story? Is he framing the poem as a “story”—just another tale? The title seems to contain and dry out the exposed yearning of the poem. Who is speaking this title? to whom? The title sounds like a child asking for a story from an adult. What child? What adult? THUS the detail word of condensation: “elderberry”—which is broken into components “older person / small fruit” is striking to me. I can’t go further with that, but it is acutely visible. The poem is a poem of mixed-up agency and mixed-up desire, and these two very buried things are mixed up with each other. How we are not certain...
You are so right that it's not "just" the geese. And therefore I really wonder about the date of the poem and how it does encode the Great Migration. I think yours is a wonderful "contrapuntal" reading in Said's sense--that which is off the map of the text is central to the text. Said says this about slavery and fortunes made with it in relation to an Austen novel--I think it's Persuasion. I liked your
reading a lot; I just also like the poem, too.
The poem "Tell me a story" is a section of a larger piece: "Audubon," which is an eight-poem cycle -- so it is out of context with the other poems in its group.
Warren is fascinated by birds, but in his ornithology (he has a poem that makes that taxonomy clear) geese are not an admirable species--with connotations of silliness, etc. And these are unseen geese-- mythic geese--heard but not seen. I think that it is making an ironic commentary on the values of the times--southern ideas are being replaced by northern ideas--or that's what people say, but they don't really do anything about it. The title undercuts the rest of the poem--Tell Me a Story--puts this shift in values as a fable, fiction, not fact..
In Who Speaks? Warren doesn't "know what is happening in his heart" when confronted with a lynching and he didn't know what was going on with his aesthetic when he "retracts" "The Briar Patch" on aesthetic not political grounds. And he never retracts the insane racism of "Pondy Woods." ("In fact, while writing it[The Briar Patch], I had experienced some vague discomfort." [WSFTN?, p. 11])
Warren hides behind ambivalence, irony, and damn fine poetry.
I've been keeping up with news of Steve Earle and lately, on Earle's main site, learned that the newest bio-documentary on Johnny Cash includes an interview with Earle about Cash. I'm DVR'ing the bio on Biography (cable) and will catch Earle talking influences--Earle who has been far more overtly political than Johnny C ever was but otherwise derives a great deal from this gone elder.
Okay, quick. Take this SAT question. Answer. If you selected D, you were right and should consider re-taking the test after all these years. Do you even remember the damned things? I remember the pencil. It hurt to hold it so tightly for so long. I remember having a mantra that I would repeat to myself so that I would concentrate and do well. I remember having the mantra but I forget the mantra. (The thing about mantras.)
Recently we took the recording of my February 14, 2006 interview with novelist Richard Ford and segmented it into short recordings on various topics, taking one question and response at a time, one topic at a time. Here's your link to the Ford page, where you can stream or download all this audio.
Recently I interviewed Gerald Stern, who wrote a book about the 1972 Buffalo Creek (West Virginia) mining disaster that has become assigned reading in many if not most law schools. The book has made several major contributions to the prosecution of larger owning entities, chief among them the principle and tactic of piercing the corporate veil. Jerry as an attorney was always a storyteller, and so writing a book seemed a natural follow-up to a case such as Buffalo Creek, where he prosecuted on behalf of hundreds of miners. His new book is Scotia Widows, about another mining case.
Thanks to the hard and brilliant work of Mark Lindsay, Jessica Lowenthal, and Bill Sulit (and others), the Kelly Writers House has a newly designed and re-organized web site.
"A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence."
Amazon has now made available almost the full text of Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and Jose Rodriguez Feo, which I edited in the mid-80s with Beverly Coyle at Duke University Press. Prior to Secretaries about 80% of the letters Stevens wrote to the Cuban poet-editor -- member of the literary movement called "Origenes" - had already been published in Holly Stevens's Letters (1966). But a number of Stevens's letters, including several of the more idiosyncratic he ever wrote, had not been published, and none of Rodriguez Feo's. Stevens's letters without the Cuban's, it turns out, are only readable in an abstract lit-crit sort of way -- in a way that left the question in one's mind: what the hell was this young Cuban saying to the great poet, after all?
Tomorrow morning early I leave for a week's true vacation. Unlikely to blog from the paradise we've chosen. Tennis, hiking, seafood, reading unassigned books more likely. Seeking such pleasure? Get in line. (Look again to this space on October 19 or 20.)
What did it mean for survivors of the concentration camps to fast during the first Yom Kippur after the war - September '45? Some reporter for the Jerusalem Post in 2006 went around to survivors to interview them about that first post-genocide fast. "Edith Cohen recalls her hunger pangs in a sealed cattle car on the way to Auschwitz from her home in Hungary. When her food ran out she chewed on one piece of chicken skin for four days just to keep something in her mouth." So fasting a few months after liberation was easy. The article that resulted from this investigation is no great shakes (and indeed full of stupid puns - one survivor faster found fasting "easy as pie") but I find it fascinating nonetheless. If going without food was still the norm, what did fasting seem to mean to them? Did they momentarily thrive on the company of sufferers? Otherwise--as nearly every account and testimony suggests--these people felt extraordinarily alone.
New at PennSound: Rae Armantrout's January 1983 talk on silence. The downloadable mp3 recording is divided into two parts. Have a listen.
The newest episode of PoemTalk is being released today. Elizabeth Willis, Julia Bloch, Jessica Lowenthal and I talk for about 25 minutes about Erica Hunt's marvelous poem, "The Voice of No," from her mid-90s book Arcade.
Thanks to an anonymous gift that allowed us to acquire state-of-the-art video equipment, we can now easily webcast Writers House events, whatever's going on in the Arts Cafe: readings, seminars, recording sessions, happenings, the whole range. (We've produced webcasts since 1999 - writing.upenn.edu/wh/webcasts - but with the new camera and specially configured computer, we've essentially automated the process.)
The schedule of events we plan to webcast is below. Events at the Writers House generally start on time, or nearly so. We will, at least, be sure to turn on the camera at the appointed start time so that you'll know something will start soon.
I'm really pleased to announce that this year's CPCW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice is Rachel Levitsky. She will teach a seminar called "Writing Practice of the Avant-Garde or: Avant-Garde Hybrid Writing" and at the Kelly Writers House will host the visits of several writers associated with the course.
I stand corrected. Earlier I snarkily noted that Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" gets a disproportionate load of parodying, and wondered why other Great Mods didn't. The author of In My Mind I'm Going posts her own snarky riposte: what about WCW's "Red Wheelbarrow"? Of course. I suppose any modernist poem that can be taken as a ditty will get parodied. Yet, still, there's something about "13 Ways": trying one's hand at the perspectival variations. A guy who admits he's something of a drinker tries his hand, and the URL has the word "everypoet" in it (as in "everyone is..."):
For Godot, subtitled "research in poetry," seems to announce "Issue 1," dated Fall 2008. If you go to their blog site you'll see that the "announcement" includes a list of authors in the hundreds. And there's a link to the issue's contents, a mere 3,785 pages of poems. So far as I know an email announcement was not sent around, so how do any of us find out about this For Godot? Well, poetry people seem to be a self-conscious, self-promoting bunch. Many have set up "Google Alerts" which by email daily report instances of, e.g., one's own name as it appears somewhere on the 'net.
A key notion of radicals at the start of the sixties was that theorizing could be done in public, with and in the midst of the people.
I suppose I'm a bit stuck on Stevens this time of year--seeing him everywhere. Because it's the season of his birthday? (The day itself was yesterday, October 2.) The author of In My Mind I'm Going is (you guessed it) in North Carolina, where she's a "professor" (otherwise unidentified) and blogs about once per week on cooking and writing. The latest of these is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Squid" and it begins this way:
At left: Ray Kroc, poet of the economy.
"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.'" MORE...
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 Truthdig.com). MORE...
