America's spatial incompetence

We at PennSound are pleased to release our newest author page - that of Marcella Durand. The earliest recording we have is her Segue series reading at Double Happiness, dated February 12, 2000 - when she read with John Yau. Among the others is "A Night of New Translations" at the Writers House in 2003. The most recent recording is from the benefit reading for Will Alexander at the Bowery Poetry Club in November '07.

Here's Marcella Durand speaking with Anselm Berrigan: Well, the most basic root of America's spatial incompetence is that they/we stole the land in the most brutal, unfair, low-down ways possible. But the U.S. also has a tradition of ecological awareness and appreciation of "encounters with the wilderness" that definitely comes from both the overwhelming physicality of the land and influence of the native tribes. Cabeza de Vaca, Willa Cather, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Black Elk, Aldo Leopold are some earlier American writers who wrote with a particularly interesting spatial consciousness. I just finished Cape Cod by Thoreau where he experiences nature in a full-frontal (literally at times!) way that I just don’t think is possible anymore, at least, not where I live! Douglas gave me this book about the Grand Canyon which talks about how the early Spanish conquistadors who first saw it were unable to perceive it; their previous experience did not allow them to really see the magnificence and enormity of it. We’ve become able to perceive nature — Thoreau looks and looks into the darkness until his pupil becomes large enough to see — and what’s happened after that moment of perception? I’m being rather retro in my poetical aims by trying to drag back a sense of unpredictability, but I’m also trying to encompass, or maybe perceive, the industrial, genetic, and silicon revolutions.

Wallace Stevens, motivational speaker

A web site called PinoyBusiness.ORG, for "Global Filipino Business and Investing Community," has a daily feature that provides motivational sayings, a link to "free motivational quotes," another link to "Harness Your Own Power," and finally a link to "Depression Quotes" (presumably meaning an emotional rather than financial crisis). Today's motivational saying is from Wallace Stevens: "The summer night is like a perfection of thought." I suppose in January this does motivate one...to daydream of a better moment.

The line is from "The House is Quiet and the World is Calm," a late poem that actually celebrates, if anything, the final rest of the old reader-poet. No blazing artifice there.

A little further googling and I realize that the line has been passed around from web hand to web hand, obviously further and further from its context, until it is simply axiomatic that it's a "motivational saying." It is, for instance, "Quotation #31277 from Laura Moncur's Motivational Quotations." This is one of those rare moments when I wish Stevens was still around to respond to such "use" of his poetry. He would surely fire off a quip that would be memorable in itself. The world is not calm.

Doctorow on Whitman and other topics

E. L. Doctorow was here visiting in March of 2005, and I moderated a discussion with him for about an hour one Tuesday morning late that month. Now I've edited a 20-minute excerpt of that longer interview - as the 20th episode in the Kelly Writers House podcast series. You can subscribe to these through iTunes and you can download the Doctorow podcast now just by clicking here.

fast becoming

Gosh, thank you Alex Davies at Openned! (Here's the entry to which he refers.)

don't know butkus about football

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dial-a-poem

Dial now: 215 746-7636, or: 215 746-POEM.

Happy '09 from all of us at 3805 Locust Walk in Philadelphia. With the new year we launch another new project. Call the phone number above any day, at any time, and hear


1) what's happening tonight or very soon at the Writers House
2) highlights of upcoming events
3) a featured poem read at the Writers House, from our archives
4) a featured recording of Writers House-affiliated students

We urge all friends and fans of the Writers House to add this number - which we call "6-POEM" - to their contacts list, speed dial, and address book.

"What's happening" will be updated almost every day. The other features will be updated frequently.

- - -

The responses I've received so far typically say: "Geez, this is so retro it's cool," and "Everything seems to be converging on the phone," and "Telephony rocks."

war inaugural

The blog "Change in the Wind" does more with the choice of Elizabeth Alexander to give the inaugural poem, and refers to my earlier entry on this topic.

poetry happens between speakers

Pierre Joris is working on a super-translation of Paul Celan's Meridian Speech, and he's releasing pieces of it on his blog, Nomadics. The speech is full of important ideas. One of them is the "site of poetry" (Ort der Dichtung). And he began there to outline what he called the "In-Between" (das Inzwischen) that happens between speakers in talk. The "site of poetry" and "In-Between" are related concepts. Knowingly or not, many contemporary poets assume the centrality of these notions: a second space outside the poetic subject, made through intersubjectivity. A poem is as much Other Minds as it is the writerly self out of which the words are written.

two favorite characters

The Times City Room has a blog and the January 2 entry was a piece about the recent donation of the books and papers of the famed bookstore, the Gotham Book Mart, to the special collections department of Penn's Van Pelt Library. Actually, a donor paid the bookstore a sum for its contents, whereupon the donor anonymously donated them to Penn. Penn announced this major acquisition back in mid-December, but now the City Room blog takes a broader look at this once-important literary watering hole and the context of its demise. And they run a great photo of some denizens, including writers who have long interested me, such as Horace Gregory and his wife Marya Zaturenska. Below is that photo. Here I want to point out two characters I find especially fascinating. One is Jose Garcia Villa, a Flipino-American poet who did some writing but also some editing in the modernist milieu. Some time ago I had something to say about his experiment with poems in which all words were separated by commas; see "why,can't,traditional,meter,be,an,effect,too?" Garcia Villa is the slight dark-haired fellow standing under the man on the ladder (who happens to be W. H. Auden). Another favorite of mine is the fellow sitting cross-legged on the floor: Charles Henri Ford, a novelist, poet, editor, photographer, collage artist and driving force behind the surrealist magazine View. He was born in Mississippi and I'm guessing he picked up the handle "Henri" in Paris. He had escaped to France pretty early, and ran his first periodical there, titled Blues and subtitled "A Bisexual Bimonthly." Returned to NYC in '34 and lived there with his long-time partner, the quasi-exiled neo-romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew. My favorite Ford story: he typed Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood for her, while visiting Morocco in 1932 at the suggestion of Paul Bowles.

sound at an impasse

The forthcoming spring '09 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal collects articles written about Stevens and the sound of poetry. I have a piece here, based on a talk I gave at MLA a few Decembers ago. The papers and other contributions have been expertly edited by Natalie Gerber.

the perfect gift

This bag is plated with solar cells. It generates enough power to charge a cell phone, iPod, or camera. It's the creation of Joe Hynek, a doctoral student in electrical engineering. It was his project in a class on experimental garment design. (Joe, if you're reading this, will you send me your prototype?)

Coover - Didion - Gordon

Kelly Writers House Fellows 2009 is both a seminar and a public program featuring three eminent writers. This spring we'll be visited by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, and Mary Gordon. I've put up the beginnings of the seminar site. Choosing four or five works by Coover and Didion each was very difficult, and I only hope I made good choices. Are my Coover selections too basic/easy? I just re-read The Universal Baseball Association of J. Henry Waugh, Esq. and realized once again what a fine introduction to experimental narrative it is. And Didion's The Book of Common Prayer! What sentences! And Miami, with its watery paragraphs. Florida itself! We'll read both of Mary Gordon's recent memoirs - her early '90s grappling with her father, he who wasn't really anything he had told her he was, a turn that threatens her own writing, the very writing we are reading. And, instead of reaching back to the well-known early novels (e.g. The Company of Women) I've decided that we should read Pearl, the novel that comes between the memoir of the father and the very recent memoir of the mother, Circling My Mother. The programs are free and open to the public. Check out the schedule and let us know if you want to attend: 215 573-9749.

poems are little machines made out of words

One of Tony Green's word sculptures. If you're intrigued, be sure to visit accumulations, a site I check often. Lately Tony's been adding "words that come to hand" more than his word-machines, but scroll back to earlier entries for various media. I happily own one of Tony's "sliding accumulations." I also recommend this flickr page with its nice photos of Tony's work. Below are some of Tony's word-smokes, which certainly confuse Jacques Lipshitz' famous dictum about why he makes sculptures - to avoid or deny death.

what is non-commercial?

Our friends at Creative Commons conducted a study on the meaning of the term "noncommercial" with respect to copyright, the dissemination of copyrighted material easily or indeed for free, etc. I wish I had come across this a month ago. I would have urged all my poet friends to fill out the questionnaire. I dare say that in the world of poetry and poetics, for the purposes of making the work as widely available as possible, a rather limited definition of noncommercial suffices.

And yet at the same time we should all want the term defined widely for general general purposes. If music and film can break the logjam, definitively less commercial realms such as poetry will be in good company as makers of online intellectual property. The more public the domain, the better. And I wonder, now** that capitalism is less adamantly said to be ipso facto self-correcting, if that economic system will continue to be used as the main reason for keeping art and creative work out of the public domain.

Noncommerical. Is the key quality (number 1 in the attributes list in dictionary definition, e.g.) that a work be unremunerative? Or that it be out of the mainstream? (These are more difficult questions than they at first seem.)

** I mean, since September or so, the many discussions about how perhaps capitalism itself is not the natural incentive-providing machine we had thought.

turn the page, please

Joe, made-off, follow (as in subscribe), subprime, 2.0 (used as a suffix), so (used to begin two of every three sentences), bailout, TARP (something to get under?), shovel-ready, mavericky, twittering, ponzi. Toast. Game over. See ya.

1970s

I took a break this morning to look at photos taken by Kaplan Harris at the June 2008 conference on poetry of the 1970s held in Orono, Maine. I missed this gathering, but back in June followed it somewhat from afar.

Hem as poet

Man, Ferlinghetti and company were bold: announcing that their edition of Hemingway's poems was "PIRATED." For more, click here.

wormwood

"WORM WOULD BITE-CHEW" begins the wording on the oft-eccentric jacket of an issue of the Wormwood Review, edited by the pharmacologist Marvin Malone for 30 years from 1960 to 1990. On my 1960 blog I took a breezy foray into Malone and the mag's founding.

this is the color of my dreams

Philippe de Montebello — whose long career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art has spanned nearly a third of the institution’s entire history — is retiring after more than thirty-one years as director. Now the curators of the various departments have each dug around in their collections and chosen to feature acquisitions made during the de Montebello years, their favorites. And that's one of the current exhibits. Some pieces have been chosen more because the story of the acquisition is fascinating than because the artwork itself is tops. So it's a hodge podge, arranged, room by room, according to the date the work came to the museum rather than its year of creation. So you'll get whiplash moving from the 18th-c. wooden bust of a powerful Russian politician to Segovia's favorite Spanish (actually Austrian) guitar to some Tahitian faces drawing by Gauguin in 1899.

Jane and I went last night. We saw an especially large Brancusi bird-in-space sculpture, made in 1923 and acquired in 1995. We saw and loved Jasper Johns' 1955 White Flag. Prior to getting this big canvas the Met had never owned a single Jasper Johns. The director and modern painting curator went to Johns' place in Connecticut to purchase it from the artist himself. White Flag is the largest of Johns's flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. It's been described as having a "lush reticence," and I'd say that's exactly right.

And, to my mind, the most compelling piece in the show: Miro's 1925 "Photo: This is the color of my dreams," a fine instance of peinture-poesie. Miro was thinking about a photograph and then painted a painting "about" it while at the same time making not effort to reproduce the photo visually. It's not a painting about a photograph but, rather, a painting about the poetics of photography.

Damn, I forgot to bring my good camera and so took these not-so-clear shots with my phone. Forgive me, but you get the idea.

- - -

The Miro painting/anti-painting show at MoMA is open until January 12. "I want to assassinate painting," said the artist in 1927 and these works date from '27 to '37. (Thanks to Kaegan Sparks for reminding me of this exhibit, which I haven't yet seen.)

have app will travel

Using a new iPhone application called blogwriter I'm able quite easily to create text entries on any of my blogspot blogs from the phone. Not that I will do so very often but the extreme mobility of the mode seems apt. I'm composing this at the gym after 60 tough minutes on the crosstrainer made unboring only by the great Bookworm podcast interview with Marilynne Robinson I listened to. I learned once again that among cultural conservatives are a few very very interesting people.

rest in peace, H. P.

In the later winter of 1976, in London, I saw Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. The most memorable combination of acting, staging and playwriting I've yet seen.

your daily Al

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"school of quietude" genealogy

Tom Devaney is publishing a short essay on Poe for an exhibit catalogue accompanying a Poe show at the Philadelphia Free Library (the show is up through February '09, titled "Quoth the raven"). Tom has long had a keen interest in Poe, and so I read the proofs of this essay with pleasure. And came upon this footnote:

The phrase the “school of quietude,” which is attributed to Poe, has been used and amplified by Ron Silliman on his blog “Silliman’s Blog.” There is no direct citation where Poe uses the exact phrase, yet the general point is correct. The phrase first appears in Claude Richard’s article “Arrant Bubbles: Poe’s ‘The Angel of the Odd’,” Poe Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 3, October 1969, pp. 46-48. According to Richard: “Poe took an active part in the squabble between the ‘Young Americans,’ who were the proponents of a muscular and popular literature, and the Boston poets, who were attached to a more genteel, more traditional, more quiet conception of literature.”

utterly sad

Charles Bernstein's blog entry (posted just a few minutes ago) on the death of his daughter Emma: LINK

good bad ugly '08

Over at Lemon Hound, we have a good, bad, ugly roundup of the year in poetry & visual arts (and a bit from other genres too). There's this:

"The big American poetry sites: Ubu.Web and Penn Sound thank you, thank you, thank you Kenny, Al Filreis, Charles Bernstein--these resources are amazing. The Poetry Foundation comes third after those two, and yah, the PF has much, much more money. But money is only useful if its used. And used with vision. The Harriet blog is a fantastic start. How did Kenny Goldsmith create UBU? More people should be talking to him about that."

And also this:

"Poem Talk has some great episodes."

Note that PoemTalk is a collaborative project: PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, and the Poetry Foundation.

inaugural poet

When Elizabeth Alexander was chosen to give the inaugural poem, there was some stirring in Philly. Elizabeth got her PhD from Penn and put down some roots here. John Timpane wrote a story about her, with a "local angle," for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and asked me for a few comments. I thought about the context (four poets have read at inaugurals) and told him that she didn't have the stature of Frost (Kennedy) but was a better poet than Maya Angelou (Clinton).

PennSound has an Elizabeth Alexander author page. It features recordings of poems she read a few years ago at the Kelly Writers House. Among them is "War", which is the poem she should read on January 20 if she can't write a new work for the occasion.

A critic of the choice of Alexander writes: "Now granted, one can't determine a presidency by its poet. Or can you? Robert Frost for Kennedy, lots of glitz and stirring end rhyme with a seedy underbelly and a lack of much substance? check. Maya Angelou for Clinton, lame pandering to the masses and a seeming unwillingness to look beyond the ego of the poet? check. I guess it remains to be seen exactly what sort of poet and president this combination will bring us."

teaching with telephony

Paul Baker reviews Liz Kolb's new book about cell phones as learning tools.

rhetoric failing? roll out the poet

Rod Blagojevich, in a speech for the annals of political bluster, quoted a dozen or so lines from Rudyard Kipling's ubiquitous, stalwart, quoted-on-all-occasions "If." About a half dozen bloggers and journalists asked me to comment on this. Not sure why. I assume it's this: I've been on the web so long (since '94) posting pages and writing commentary on poetry that I tend to come up early in web searches. I'm not a Kipling guy, for sure. Am interested in but finally indifferent to the fiction, and am absolutely tired of "If," recited either as evidence of personal triumph or as pep talk for bedraggled groups (employees, students, summer campers). Bill Lucey of The Morning Delivery quotes me in today's entry: here. There are minor inaccuracies in the quote but he gets the gist of my view.

season to be generous

fire in winter, a little pulse

Louis Zukofsky's poem "Xenophanes," which begins

Water, cold, and sweet, and pure
And yellow loaves are near at hand,
Wine that makes a rosy hand
Fire in winter, the little pulse.

--was not apparently a poem that Zukofsky liked to read aloud or indeed ever read while a recorder's reels were turning, so far as we knew from the readings we have on Zukofsky's PennSound page. I had gone looking for it there, but no luck.

But wait a moment. It's there. The poet created a home-made tape recording for the Library of Congress on November 3, 1960. He read 39 poems. The 16th was "So That Even a Lover." He hardly paused after reading that short poem and then read "Xenophanes." We missed it when segmenting the mp3 we made from the reel-to-reel tape. If you listen to "So That Even a Lover" long enough you'll hear "Xenophanes."

We'll re-segment and add the link to "Xenophanes," but enjoy it in the meantime as an encore, a bonus track.

Ashbery on memory and age

Here's an audio clip of John Ashbery talking about memory and old age. (And here's the context for that statement.)

anti-existentialist existentialism

Brion Gysin is that he is and that's all there is to it. LINK

memoir of a lost mother

Yesterday Jessica Lowenthal and I spent some time talking with Jamie-Lee Josselyn about the (first) book she's writing - a memoir of her mother, who died when Jamie-Lee was just 12. And we recorded it for the Kelly Writers House Podcasts series. It's 45 minutes long, so you'll, I hope, want to download it to your iPod and listen en route to your holiday destination, on trains, planes, cars.

Links:
[] directly to the downloadable mp3 LINK
[] to the Kelly Writers House Podcasts series page LINK

snoozing over Eliot

Q: Robert Lowell wrote a poem called "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid." What supposedly immortal poem puts you to sleep?

Ron Silliman: The Four Quartets does it best, since it makes dreaming impossible. But most anything by Lowell will do just fine unless I've had tea after 9 PM.

Q. What poem do you love, love, love, but don't understand?

Ron: Hart Crane, The Bridge. Or (which I love less, but also understand less) John Berryman's Dream Songs.

Q. Can you name every teacher you had in elementary school? Did any of them make you memorize a poem? What poem(s)?

Ron: No, thank heavens. I can't memorize haiku. But Vance Teague in fifth grade made us write for an hour every Wednesday and never told us what genre. He made me a writer as much as anyone.

These are just three of many questions Ron Silliman has answered. See the rest.

mere alphabetic adjacency

Tan Lin is turning me on to the work David Bunn, who some years ago took possession of the entire Los Angeles public library's card catalogue. Tan had noticed my interest in Erica Baum's word-centered photography of old catalogues and suggested I get to know Bunn's project.

Leah Ollman wrote an article for Art in America on Bunn in 2000, and here are two passages:

As libraries replace their card catalogues with on-line databases, the cards themselves--obsolete, bulky, worn--are usually discarded. Artist David Bunn rescued two million such cards and, in his elegant installations, directs our attention to the strong poetic voice still coursing through them.

In 1990, David Bunn took possession of the two million cards in the Los Angeles Central Library's catalogue somewhat in the manner of an eccentric heir claiming the unwanted portion of an estate. To administrators at the library, the card catalogue was not so much an inheritance as the deceased itself. Its contents had been made available on-line several years earlier, and it sat, an unwieldy, inconvenient corpse, awaiting suitable disposal. Why fill a storeroom with information that can now be saved on a chip the size of a postage stamp?

And later in the same article:

Strains of both Dada and Duchamp course through these found objects rendered into found poems. Mere alphabetic adjacency is the operative force, making close neighbors of utter strangers and catalyzing all sorts of disarming associations. Some of the poems are more like quips--"Sometimes a great notion/ sometimes a hero/sometimes a little brain damage can help" (1996)--while others offer swatches of casual beauty: "The sea is a magic carpet/the sea is also a garden/the sea is for sailing/the sea is for sailing/the sea is strong" (1997). The multiplicity of meanings and contexts for a single word, the very thing that stymies subject-driven computer searches and causes them to produce a cumbersome load of search matches, is what makes these snippets blossom on the page.

The poems often read as lists, oral recitatives drummed into memory, the rhythm of repetition building density, layer upon layer:

And the band played on/and the bride wore ... / and the bridge is love/and the children came too/ and the dawn came up like thunder/and the desert shall rejoice/and the doctor recovered/and the floods came/... and the flowers showered/and the morrow is theirs/"and the next object ..."/ and the river flowed on/and the sound of a voice ... / and the third day ... / "and the two shall become one flesh"/and the walls came tumbling down/and the years roll by.

The catalogue enables Bunn to narrate what he calls "a whole constellation of stories," some focused on a particular moment in time or a brief thread of plot, others conjuring the grand, seamless narrative of existence, without beginning or end, shape or evident purpose.

a blog for the "Best"

Philip Metres, the author of To See the Earth (2008) and recent co-editor of Come Together: Imagine Peace (2008), was asked to contribute to the "Best American Blogs" gathering and I'm delighted to say that when asked "What other poetry-related blog or website should I check out?" he suggested this one--this one right here--yes, mine. What nice affirmation. Keeps one going. And here's the Best American Poetry blog version.

Above you notice the wording is "What other....?" Of course the one besides which this is the other is...Ron Silliman's great blog at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/.

old man look at my life

My son Ben and I saw Neil Young here in Philly at the Spectrum last Friday night. Wilco, warming up, was terrific. Jeff Tweedy astounds, is downright experimental with lightning-fast register and genre shifts. But Young: he was really young. "Heart of Gold," "Old Man," etc., but also some raw new political (economic) anthems, such songs seeming to us rusty even though weeks or even days since written and scored. My former student and former Writers House regular and staffer Nate Chinen reviews Young in concert at Madison Square Garden in today's New York Times, page 1 of the Arts section.

More about Nate: here's a link to Nate-only entries in the NYT Arts blog.

now twittering

I'm now twittering. Go here and sign up to receive my twitter updates. Or here to get started yourself.

writer without borders

The Philadelphia Inquirer cover Breyten Breytenbach's recent visit to the Kelly Writers House. Here is your link to the article. Breytenbach's presentation was part of our Writers without Borders series.

elegy for psychoanalysis

One of my favorite early poems of Jack Spicer is "Psychnoanalysis: An Elegy." Check it out in Peter Gizzi's and Kevin Killian's edition of the The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (subtitled "my vocabulary did this to me"), on pages 31-33. (Wesleyan published this fine book. Get thyself a copy soon.)

After reading around in the Collected, I decided to go back to our PennSound Spicer page, and listened again to this remarkably confident, resonant and yet slightly weird baritone voice. A radio voice, was the phrase we used to use for such a person. Yes, Jack Spicer had a radio voice. Which is unrelated--or, then again, perhaps entirely related--to the poet's penchant for using the radio as a conceit in his digressive commentary. See, at the bottom of this entry, my favorite Spicerian comment the wanders into radio.

So I listened to Spicer again. I noticed that we at PennSound have made available an undated 4 minute, 52 second recording of his reading of "The Song of the Bird in the Loins." Nearly 5 minutes to read that short poem. Hmm, too much time for that piece. Perhaps, I thought, he reads the poem and then offers some commentary. So I listened, eager to hear more than that one poem. Lo and behold: the recording is not just that poem but three early works. The other two are "The Dancing Ape" and..."Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." So there's my poem! Now we've unpacked the three, made separate mp3 recordings for each, and now I'll recommend that everyone reading this blog have a listen to this "elegy," a smart, luminous, and slightly unhinged rejoinder to the triumph of the therapeutic.

Q: Are you actually going through a transition in your writing?

Jack Spicer: I'm going through a transition. In fact, I don't have no job, and I...

Q: No, I mean in your actual writing.

Jack Spicer: Well, if the radio set has three batteries which are gone and one that's still left, that isn't a transition in the radio broadcast. It's a transition in the radio set, namely that you don't have very much power. And these things that happen to you in life are like that. If you're only going on one transistor and you're a four-transistor radio, you're not going to be able to get in the outlying stations very easy. KFI doesn't come in.

LINK