Jeffrey McDaniel

Good-bye Harriet

So I am leaving Harriet today. My fourth book of poems, The Endarkenment, was recently accepted for publication (by University of Pittsburgh Press), and I want to focus on revising the manuscript, and also developing some prose ideas.

06.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Jeffrey McDaniel

returning to the national slam as an observer, 8 years later

In an earlier post, I spoke about participating in the National Poetry Slam in the early 90’s. Here I will talk about what I saw at the National Poetry Slam in August 2006 in Austin, Texas, when I returned as an observer. I was invited back to take part in a reading of old-timers and to be on a couple of panels. Because I hadn’t been in almost a decade and because I like Austin organizers (Mike Henry and company), I accepted the invite. On a personal level, it was good to return and see people I still had love for (such as the big and smiley Danny Solis, and the wild and wacky Matthew John Conley, and many others.) For people unfamiliar with slam, “the Nationals” is when teams from all over North America assemble in one place for a frenetic 4-day competition. There are “bouts” at venues throughout the town, and teams and poets get eliminated quickly, so there’s lots of excitement and tension. The poets are stuck in this catch-22—they are taking serious a competition that was designed (by Marc Smith) to make fun of serious poetry competitions.

06.30.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kenneth Goldsmith

Frozen Words

Frozen Words, Nicole Dextras, Winter 2007.
Stay cool this weekend. These words were made out of ice and set out in the landscape and left to melt. The largest project was the word VIEW which stands 6 feet high. The other words were done with marquee letters that are about 18 inches high. The high winds off Lake Ontario sometimes blew individual letters over before they had time to melt. View full Flickr set here

06.29.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kenneth Goldsmith

Apologies

To Our Latina/o Readers,
First of all, my apologies that this piece offended you. It was not intended to. Rather, it was meant to bring some of the simmering comments up from below the fold. Also, it was meant to highlight the fact that the Spanish language was absent from this site, something I learned from all of you. And thirdly, it was meant really as a self-effacing comment regarding my — and most American’s — sad fact that many only speak only one language. It obviously didn’t fly and once again, I apologize.
I use this chunk of text when I read in countries where English is not the first language. And I read the text in the native language of that country. I always make a fool of myself, which, as implied by the text is my intention. I stumble over words, mangle sentences. It gets to the point in most places where it is simply unintelligible, particularly in countries where the language is very different from English (Helsinki was a disaster!). The result is a cultural breaking of the ice, a debunkment of American linguistic Imperialistic tendencies — most of which are almost never addressed in such situations (when was the last time an American poet apologized for speaking English in a foreign country before a reading? It never happens. Instead the reading takes place in English). I have read this piece in English in front of the entire MLA during this year’s Presidential Forum.
It’s a great piece when spoken; now I see that the point is lost when written.
The situation of non-understanding is something I use as a positive trope. I try to treat English in my work as a foreign language, hence the “utopian state we find ourselves in right now.” Here is the way the paragraph reads normally for a reading:

I am an American poet, and like most Americans, I speak only one language. When asked to read in Stockholm, I figured that the last thing Sweden (or the rest of the world) needed was more imported American culture–in English–no less (remember the Clash’s “I’m So Bored With The U.S.A.”?). Hence, I’ve decided to start my reading in Swedish, a language that I have never spoken nor written.
Most likely, you can’t understand a word I’m saying, even though it’s your native language. So, we’re even: We’re both in a situation of not understanding. All we can possibly do is listen to the way that the words sound instead of what they mean. And by doing so we are all entering into a new relationship to language that permits us to reframe the mundane in the language of the mundane.
For years, I’ve been working toward a situation like the one we find ourselves in now: one where language is purely formal and concrete; like language itself, this talk is both meaningful and meaningless at the same time. The air is now thick with sound posing as language.
I could continue and do the whole reading in Swedish but I think you get the point. Now I’ll do the rest of the reading in English, but after this rough beginning, you can better understand what I’m trying to do with my work in my native language: to approximate the utopian situation we find ourselves in at the moment, one of willful ignorance.

Thank you for your understanding and again, please accept my apologies.
– Kenneth
By the way, I love Rich’s idea of retyping Neruda’s Canto General!

06.28.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Emily Warn

Harriet is Reading You

You are reading these words because your machine is reading code. The code instructs the machine how to respond to the clicks and keyboard strokes that you make in response to reading text. This interplay between words and machine code makes up Harriet’s (inter)face.
If you wanted to create art by playing with Harriet’s make up—not just the words and images, but also the processes generating them—you would be joining the clan of electronic literature artists who create works that “are not content to let code remain below the surface but rather show it erupting through the surface of the screen to challenge the hegemony of alphabetic language.” (N. Katherine Hayles– leading theorist on electronic literature. Click here to read her primer “Electronic Literature: What Is It?”)

06.28.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Reading my Old Poems

It is at once humbling, startling, and puzzling. Every so often, I have to do a cleaning out of my office. This means going into files spilling with slips of paper, old manuscripts, unpublished poems, letters, posters, galley proofs, students’ papers and more of the detritus of a life spent collecting papers, filling pages with words and negotiating the written word. Invariably, I will come across an old note pad or a yellowing pile of sheets with typewritten text on them. Inevitably, I come across some of my writing of the past. Today, I ran across poems I had compiled and typed out in 1984. I would have been twenty-two then. It occurs to me that I was about the same age as some of the first year MFA students I sometimes teach. The same age as many of the poets I work with who are trying to shape their craft. I wish I could say that I see tremendous promise in these poems. What I see are poems that would make me think hard about what to say, think hard about what is working here, think hard about how to understand what is making this person want to write poems. I would have a lot of questions to ask this young writer about what he is reading and what he admires in poets. It is hard to see in these poems the trace elements of what I now see in my own writing. That is the puzzling part: how did I get from one place to the other?

06.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Kenneth Goldsmith

Soy un poeta estadounidense

Soy un poeta estadounidense, y como el resto de mis compatriotas, hablo sólo un idioma. Cuando me pidieron que escribiera para Harriet, el blog del Poetry Foundation, supuse que lo último que necesitaba Harriet (o para el caso el resto del mundo) era más sobre la cultura norteamericana (recuerdan la canción de The Clash “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A”?). Por lo tanto he decidido escribir este blog en español, idioma que nunca he escrito o hablado.
Lo más probable es que nadie entienda una sola palabra de lo que digo, ni siquiera si el español es su primera lengua. Así que estamos a mano: ambos estamos en la situación de no entendernos. Lo único que podemos hacer es escuchar cómo suenan las palabras en lugar de pensar en qué quieren decir. Y al hacerlo todos accedemos a una nueva relación con el lenguaje que nos permite volver a enmarcar lo mundano en el lenguaje de lo mundano.
Por muchos años he estado trabajando en aras de una situación como ésta en la que nos encontramos ahora: una en la que el lenguaje sea sólamente formal y concreto. Como el lenguaje mismo, esta entrada en el blog a la vez tiene y no tiene sentido. Esta página está cargada de sonido que posa o aparenta ser lenguaje.
Podría continuar el resto de mis entradas en español, pero creo que han entendido el punto. Después de este tortuoso comienzo, pueden entender mejor lo que estoy tratando de hacer con mi trabajo: aproximarnos la situación utópica en la que nos encontramos ahora, una de buscada ignorancia. (Tr. Mónica de la Torre)

06.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Kenneth Goldsmith

The Avant-Garde. Priceless.

Click to enlarge
This unbelievable full-page MasterCard ad ran in last Wednesday’s NYTimes.
Left to right: Jack Smith, (unidentified man), Harry Smith, Panna Grady, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol; NYC, winter 1964-65

06.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Kwame Dawes

All Memory Is Fiction

Many years ago, while embarked on the ambitious task of defining myself as a writer, I actually came up with a motto—a kind of coda that I crafted into a carefully designed logo and plastered all over what I planned to be stationery. I was ambitious, but the truth is that I was inventing a narrative for myself as a writer. I felt the need to do so having published three books of poems without seeing articles about me doing that work for me. I had imagined it would have been quite different. To comfort myself, I blamed the fact that my books were published in Canada and the UK and I was living, at the time, in a tiny southern town called Sumter, South Carolina, and teaching at a two-year college.
I had done something of the sort years before when I was primarily and comfortably a playwright. Then I began by trying to collect all the plays that I had written and staged and pulling them together into an attractive binder—a pseudo manuscript, if you will. My plan at the time was to collect these plays—nicely typed out and decently bound, to give as a gift to my father, with whom, until that time, I had never had a discussion about my writing, my ambitions as a writer or anything of the sort. In retrospect, the reason was complicated. At the time, though, I just felt that it would be an act of vanity to talk about myself to him, and I also felt that I really was not a good enough writer to engage in conversation with my father—an established author in his own right. But mostly, it was because I was Christian, and all my plays were Christian plays. I mean, I worked on these plays as part of my commitment to evangelism and as a way to work through the meaning of my faith in Jamaican society. I knew I was making art. To reassure myself that art is what I was making, I studied the work of the 17th century poets—Donne, Herbert, and Marvell—as a way of understanding the nature of faith in art. I read Shakespeare’s plays as morality plays. I studied all the Morality cycle plays, paying attention to the way in which they evolved from the liturgy of the church and moved out into the market place. I read with some fascination and a hint of affirmation, all I could about T.S Eliot’s conversion, and I found some gratification in The Four Quartets, even though I knew that I was closer in spirit to the faith of C.S. Lewis than to the more philosophical ideas of T.S. Eliot. Still, the idea of Christian literature had value for me. But I was still working it out, and when I looked closer to home, namely to my father and his friends George Lamming and John Hearne, I knew that I would find no useful models of faith and literature that I could embrace.

06.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)