2007 July : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for July, 2007

Kenneth Goldsmith

I Am Unpacking My Digital Library. Yes, I am.

In answer to my own call for a pro-consumerist poetry, I was reminded that writers have long been the ultimate consumers. This has been true in analog times — the relationship between library and writer is a paragon of consumerism — and is even more pronounced in our digital environment. In navigating the enormous field of available textual material in our collective networked digital dispensaries, the craft of writing lies in the acquisition, collecting, organization and archiving of existing texts rather than in the creation of new ones. In doing so, our traditional relationship to textuality, where the struggle for meaning trumps all, is inverted; the acquisition of text becomes more valuable than the content of the acquired texts: quantity trumps quality. How I navigate — rather than how I create — is what distinguishes me from another writer. I am an intelligent agent carving a unique path through the this thicket of language; what distinguishes my practice from yours is the particular swath I carve.

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07.16.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Ange Mlinko

Sketches for a Krzysztof Kieslowski Film

On May 10 of this year Gabe Gudding reprinted a poem by Henry Gould on his blog; the poem incorporates a bit of pink chalk graffito Henry found on the sidewalk in Providence RI when he walked home from work one day. Signed “Clio,” as in the Muse of History, it seemed like a sign of some sort.
Years later, he sent the poem to Gabe because Gabe’s daughter’s name is Clio. Unbeknownst to Henry, she had lived on that street in Providence, and was the author of that graffito.

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07.16.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Patricia Smith

Whew. It’s over.

Finished with 3rd MFA residency. Incredibly tired. Just back from lobster bake thingie where no lobsters were visibly baked. Ten days in creative nirvana. Maine cooperated, kinda (rain). Shunned TV and most internet, have no idea at all what’s going on in the world. Got some incredibly luscious news, but can’t tell ya yet. My Spenserian stanzas worked! Fell in love with May Swenson and fell in love again with June Jordan. Thrilled to learn the connection between Sanchez and Bogan. Third-semester critical essay looms. Studying quite intensively with the inimitable Annie Finch. Woman never met a dactyl she didn’t like. I will be worked mercilessly. It will be exquisite. Let’s get that party started. Stonecoast feels like my home now. I’m tired. Really tired. Wanted to say hi to you guys. Tired. Six-hour drive looms. Tired.
Tired.

07.15.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Fred Sasaki

Long Live a Hunger to Feed Each Other

The best book-publishing story of the year is from Open City in New York.

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07.15.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Song of Songs

Apart from the Psalms, there is only one other biblical book that seems wholeheartedly and unequivocally devoted to the art of poetry. Of course, virtually all the minor prophets make their pronouncements in verse, and there are lengthy stretches of verse in far more areas of the Old Testament than there are not. The Book of Proverbs, The Book of Jonah, and Job, for instance, are beautifully rendered long poems that one imagines to have been written with a clear sense of Hebraic Prosody. I think I understood something about the poetic patterns of the bible before I even understood that they represented a certain formal Hebrew poetics. And even now, much of what I know has not come from a careful study of Hebraic prosody. It has come from the habit of reading the scriptures a lot and mining them for the poetic turns that prove to be so enduring in their clarity that I learn so much from them all the time. I have even threatened myself to one day attempt a “translation” of Psalm 119, patterning the extremely demanding acrostic that the psalmist used in the Hebrew. Of course, this is one of a long list of impossible poetic challenges that I have given myself—few, if any, that will ever be attempted much less completed.

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07.14.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Kenneth Goldsmith

I Promise To Write Better Poetry

Ara Shirinyan “Resolution: I Promise to Write Better Poetry” [PDF, 5.2 mb]

07.13.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kenneth Goldsmith

T=A=S=T=E

Lord Whimsy’s favorite shoes. So precious. Limited to indoor use.
Ange, I’m going to not only agree with you, but trump you one and say that it’s not only temperament which is a motivating force in the creation of art, but even more important is the notion of taste. Any avantist who made a point of killing art did it with impeccable taste, hence its ultimate absorption into the canon of art. Take Duchamp. Every objet trouvé of his reeked of his taste. What if, for example, Duchamp had chosen a light bulb (as Johns did later with impeccable taste) instead of a urinal? a shoe (as Warhol did later with impeccable taste) instead of a bicycle wheel? What made these anti-art objects essentially Duchampian was his great taste. In writing, Jackson Mac Low, too, had amazing taste: he made all the right choices to free himself of choice-making.
Contrary to my own claims, I’m always banging my head against the realization that no matter how hard you try, you can never remove the individual from art. I have made arguments for ego-less art, found art, art driven by chance operations and many other strains, but in fact there’s always someone behind the curtain, manning the machines. I have yet to encounter tasteless art. We try too hard, which is why I’m always in favor of doing less. If there’s one thing that the avant-garde has shown us, it’s that regardless of form, non-expression is impossible.

07.12.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Ange Mlinko

t=e=m=p=e=r=a=m=e=n=t

My sons’ pediatrician is keenly interested in temperament. Observing my chest-beating, bellowing, early-walker of a one-year-old this morning, he suggested a book that might help me negotiate the difference in temperament he perceived between mother and son. Little does he know the general consensus in the family is that this baby bull is a Mlinko. His placid father and brother look on in amusement as Mom wrangles with genetic payback.
I mention this — the fact of temperament and its ability to mask itself, to go undercover, like that demur mother in the doctor’s office — because of an interesting exchange between two poetry blogs this week. Musing on the brilliant work of Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988), Jack Kimball i.d.’d the great American poet as eccentric by temperament. Gary Sullivan pointedly disagreed. He took the stock avant-garde position that art is social and that great art — art that advances its genre — is a group effort. He accused Kimball of perpetuating that old bourgeois-individualist cliche of the loner artist.

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07.12.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Fred Sasaki

The Price is Right

How much would you pay for a first-edition, one-of-500, Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot of your very own?

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07.12.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Kwame Dawes

“The Afterbirth, 1931″–the Poem

Two blogs back, I wrote about Nikky Finney’s poem, “The Afterbirth, 1931″, but what I did not do is quote much from the poem and so I fear I deprived us of the chance to look at the poem. Some of you have gone to find the poem, but I thought I would share it with you. The entire Rive is a beautiful book and worth picking up, and this is just one of many really lovely poems in the collection.
The Afterbirth, 1931
We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk
who threw soil not salt
over our shoulders
who tendered close the bible
who grew and passed around the almanac at night
so we would know
what to plant at first light

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07.11.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Archive for July, 2007

Kenneth Goldsmith

I Am Unpacking My Digital Library. Yes, I am.

Ange Mlinko

Sketches for a Krzysztof Kieslowski Film

Patricia Smith

Whew. It’s over.

Fred Sasaki

Long Live a Hunger to Feed Each Other

Kwame Dawes

Song of Songs

Kenneth Goldsmith

I Promise To Write Better Poetry

Kenneth Goldsmith

T=A=S=T=E

Ange Mlinko

t=e=m=p=e=r=a=m=e=n=t

Fred Sasaki

The Price is Right

Kwame Dawes

“The Afterbirth, 1931″–the Poem

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