2007 July : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for July, 2007

Kenneth Goldsmith

The 365 Days Project, Part 2 (2007)

The 365 Days Project, Part 2 (2007) UbuWeb is pleased to be co-hosting and archiving the second installment of Otis Fodder’s magnificent 365 Days Project. The first project was completed in 2003 and can be accessed here as well. 365 days of cool and strange and often obscure audio selections. Some words to describe the material featured would be… Celebrity, Children, Demonstration, Indigenous, Industrial, Outsider, Song-Poem, Spoken, Ventriloquism, and on and on and on. The best thing to do is to simply listen. UbuWeb’s archive will be updated monthly. For day-to-day updates, be sure to visit UbuWeb’s partner WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

07.23.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Ange Mlinko

Frivolity

This villain, who puts words together with no intention of stating, hoping, praying, or persuading … only imagining, only creating … is to many immoral, certainly frivolous, a trivial person in a time of trouble (and what time is not?), a parasite upon whatever scrofulous body the body politic possesses at that moment. And roses are intolerably frivolous too, and those who grow them, snowmen and those who raise them up, and drinking songs and drinking, and every activity performed for its own inherent worth.
That’s William Gass again. I have to go back to this essay (”Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses”) once in a while to remind myself that the writing that really brings me to my knees almost never has to do with politics, “memory,” or any moral imperative. But I was surprised — not unpleasantly — to find a persuasive ethical account of “pure” poetry in W.H. Auden’s 1957 essay, “Music in Shakespeare.”

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.23.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Patricia Smith

I’m working really hard. Really. I am. Really.

I am sitting in the living room of one Mr. Garland Thompson Jr., who at the moment s a very, very busy man. He is a one-man whirling dervish, a battery-operated bulldozer, a little-bleary eyed at the moment. He is pretty much single-handedly organizing the 10th anniversary version of the West Coast Poetry Slam Championships, and just watching him is making my head pound.
It’s a massive undertaking. Ten teams, a few errant slammers with unbridled egos, posters, ID badges, brochures, newspaper coverage, food vendors, a DJ, travel arrangements, finding campsites for the teams, staging, lanyards, competition rules. And as it gets closer to to the big day (today, in fact), Garland gets a little snippy. His eyes glaze over a little. OK, a lot.
I’m in awe. I’ve always enjoyed the fruits of the festival organizer’s labor. I get my all-access pass, nibble on cheese in the green room, get on the stage when someone says “Get on the stage.” So, staying with Garland for these couple of days, I”m learning a lot. He’s a madman. He has to be.
First, the details, just in case you’re in Cali and want to have a huge amount of fun: The show’s today and tomorrow from noon to 6 at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Yes, that’s BIG SUR, the lush and luscious jewel of th California coastline. It’s such a cool event that it’s worth logging off right now, getting a last minute flight and winging your way there–here–just so you can hang out and party with the po’ people and say you did.
That’s it from the sun. Garland’s going on about badges right now. Should be a kickass show.

07.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Patricia Smith

Ashes to ashes…

I know that many of us submit our work to contests. I know for a fact that at least two Harrieteers, Ange and myself, have sent manuscripts to the annual National Poetry Series competition, and were lucky enough to have books published as a result. (Harrieteers…I like that. It’s like Mouseketeers, but without the ears or simmering psychoses…)
Sending your poems off to be judged is a little like dressing your daughter up in her finest clothes, making sure her skin is sparkling and her hair is perfect, kissing her goodbye, and putting her on a first-class flight to a college that hasn’t even accepted her yet.
The key is to keep it all in perspective. I enter fewer and fewer competitions (just no time), and when I do it’s for the perverse thrill of having my passion, my lifeblood, fondled by an stranger (OK, maybe there’s a simmering psychosis after all, and maybe it’s not so simmering). For me, the contests are still fun. Most of them anyway.
We’ve got a couple of categories to deal with, of course. Some contests are looking for a damned good poem, and the author of that ditty gets cash money and publication in a mag or literary journal. Other contests, usually sponsored by publishers, ask for a completed manuscript. If yours is chosen as pick o’ the crop, the book gets published and maybe you get little spending money besides. Then there are the immensely popular are-you-worth-it contests–although I’m sure organizers are cringing at the word “contest”–sponsored by the NEA and various regional grant-giving entities. They have money and they want to give it to you–but only if you can prove to them that you’re a worthwhile investment.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Ange Mlinko

The Ear

Somewhere in his essays, William Gass says that in reply to the foolish question, ‘Who do you write for?’ he says ‘The ear.’
This recurred to mind this week while perusing American Religious Poems: An Anthology, which I had gotten for my mother-in-law and which now served as fresh reading material for me, away from my own books. What a satisfying reading experience it was, and how easily conflicts over different compositional methods — say, Gjertrud Schnackenburg vs. Michael Palmer — are subordinated to a similar goal: addressing the pure and perfect Ear.
Even in circles where religious sentiment is taken to be a kind of failure of imagination (”middlebrow”), it’s hard to escape the air of transcendence that hovers over literature. I mean, delete the references to God in Annie Dillard and you practically get W.G. Sebald. Yet their audiences probably don’t overlap that much.

07.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

Hard to Master

Last night, Lindsey, the babysitter, drubbed me in Boggle. I think her score was more than triple mine. I’m not positive about this: I was having trouble keeping track of my running total. My brain is soft. Words elude me. In fact, the word “elude” eluded me for about a minute.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Poetry Foundation

River to River

Brandon Stosuy sends along this quote from a new song by Okkervil River: “From a bridge on Washington Avenue, the year of 1972, broke my bones and skull and it was memorable.”
Q: Who is the speaker?

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Ange Mlinko

Indefatiguable Romance

Sooner or later, “Cucurrucucu Paloma” finds its way to you, poets, and you swoon — because you are among the last, the very last swooners.
Looking around the web for information on the songwriter, I came upon a credit for one Tomas Mendez. Its first recording ever was by Harry Belafonte on July 20, 1956.
This is almost exactly a year after Wallace Stevens dies, on August 2, 1955. So how do I explain –

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Kenneth Goldsmith

These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make My Writing What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.

John Cage
David Wondrich
Georges Perec
Cheryl Donegan
Sri Ramakrishna
James Joyce
Abraham Lincoln Gillespie
Marjorie Perloff
Christian Bök
David Antin
Aram Saroyan
Roland Barthes
Diana Vreeland
Andy Warhol
Jan Holcomb
Ken Freedman
Sten Hanson
Larry Miller
Yoko Ono
Kay Rosen
Walter Benjamin
Augusto De Campos
Sergio Bessa
Ara Shirinyan
Geoffrey Young
James Siena
Jean Baudrillard
Gertrude Stein
Samuel Beckett
Alan Ginsberg
Abbie Hoffman
Frank Zappa
Charles Ives
Jill Simensky
Jerome Rothenberg
Wayne Koestenbaum
Verner Panton
Wallace Berman
Barbara Cole

Charles Bernstein
Johanna Drucker
Darren Wershler-Henry
Lori Emerson
Simon Morris
Craig Dworkin
Brian Kim Stefans
Michael Scharf
Karin Bravin
Swami Tagathananda
Frank Kitchens
Bobbie Oliver
Suzanne Joelson
Gary Stephan
Henry Turmon
Gary Landown
Al Filreis
Ron Silliman
Judy Hicks
Bruce Andrews
Leevi Lehto
Jesper Olsson
Pejk Malinovski
Bern Porter
Sophie Tucker
Beniamino Gigli
Maria Callas
Thelonious Monk
Neil Young
Marcus Boon
Henry James
John Giorno
Bill Arning
Raphael Rubinstein
Kurt Weill
Robert Ashley
Ellen Abramowitz
Alexander Gray
Brian Wilson

José Reyes
Joe Gould
Ezra Pound
Philip Guston
Merce Cunningham
Marcel Duchamp
Buckminster Fuller
Dick Higgins
Aleba Gartner
Émile Zola
Jackson Mac Low
Ludwig Wittgenstein
George Antheil
Eirk Satie
Rob Fitterman
Mauricio Kagel
Caroline Bergvall
Walt Frazier
Alan Licht
David Grubbs
Ruth & Marvin Sackner
Coyle & Sharpe
Brion Gysin
Vito Acconci
Samuel Johnson
Richard Foreman
E.E. Cummings
Jelle Meander
Nicolas Musin
Ron Wakkary
Joan La Barbara
Klaus Kinski
David Daniels
Gregory Whitehead
Vicki Bennett
Charles Eames
Paul Smith

Archive for July, 2007

Kenneth Goldsmith

The 365 Days Project, Part 2 (2007)

Ange Mlinko

Frivolity

Patricia Smith

I’m working really hard. Really. I am. Really.

Patricia Smith

Ashes to ashes…

Ange Mlinko

The Ear

Rachel Zucker

Hard to Master

Poetry Foundation

River to River

Ange Mlinko

Indefatiguable Romance

Kenneth Goldsmith

These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make My Writing What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.

Fred Sasaki

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

STAFF WRITERS

RECENT COMMENTS

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

SEARCH THE SITE

IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

CHICAGO EVENTS

Archive for July, 2007

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

STAFF WRITERS

RECENT COMMENTS

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

SEARCH THE SITE

IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

Follow The Poetry Foundation

CHICAGO EVENTS

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP