Archive for December, 2007
Ange Mlinko
“Everything Is the Nuts”
If anyone can figure out how to send Jane back to 1949 to see MoMA’s exhibition of “Italian pictures,” which gave Wallace Stevens a bad case of ennui, please send instructions care of this comment box. I thought I would take the opportunity to point out that the museum seemed to be in a lull a month before their 20th-anniversary show “Modern Art in Your Life,” and the interregnum of September in New York—“covered with the dust and withering of summer”—seemed at least partly to account for his mood. However, there’s a little bit in his sour-lemon passage that seems worth teasing out…
Ange Mlinko
Versions of Songs, Versions of Weariness
Alicia’s post in tribute to Edward Thomas’s “The Owl” moved me. Especially so since it came after a terrible experience in a shopping outlet. My four-year-old and I were looking for snow boots and while we shared a sandwich in a packed food court I realized that I was only just starting to hear the pounding music in the backdrop: Christmas carols set to frenzied electronic beats.
My favorite carol this year has been O Holy Night. It’s the music that makes the carol, and I’ve had fun dowloading different versions of it to compare. How to sing the words “Fall on your knees:” with soaring sternness like Bing Crosby, or hushed reverence like Josh Groban? You can chart a Melisma-meter with the versions on offer by Avril LaVigne, LeAnn Rimes, and Cristina Aguilera.
Steve Burt’s quote from Wallace Stevens’s letters (in Alicia’s comments section) also sent me to its source. One of the reasons to go back to a favorite poet’s letters—and Stevens never disappoints in this regard—is to confirm to oneself how uncannily history repeats itself. Or to realize maybe that it’s not history repeating itself, exactly, but our sentiments about history, our relation to it, that remains glumly constant. I had to smile, rereading a passage that I might have written on a sour day:
A.E. Stallings
The Owl
We’ll be spending Christmas in Greece this year, about which I have mixed feelings. Christmas is not a big holiday in Greece or the Eastern church generally, which has its upside (a little less commercialism, though that is changing every year). Easter is what Greeks do best. So I guess I am more inclined to homesickness of a sort. There are things I miss about Western Christmas—mostly the carols. I’ll definitely be getting down to St. Paul’s Anglican church Christmas Eve for the carol service. Meanwhile, I have been cracking open my ancient book of carols from piano lessons of Christmas Past. It was always of course the melancholy ones that appealed to me, the minor keys and the modal tunes. I used to love “We Three Kings” (perfume/gloom/tomb), “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” (which never really sounded merry, and which I suppose I associate in some way with the black & white version of A Christmas Carol that used to frighten me a little as a child), and best of all the Coventry Carol, which always gets me (whether it is the lilting lullaby or the slaughter of the innocents I’m not sure… but what a combination.) Likewise with Christmas poems, it is the poems that explore the juxtapositions of the season—pagan and Christian, birth and winter, darkness and starlight, hope and doubt—that attract me, “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” “I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different,” “I should go with him in the gloom/ Hoping it might be so.”
Christian Bök
Visual Poetics 02
—————–
Page 4
from Flatland
by Derek Beaulieu
Information as Material, 2007
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Christian Bök
More Nude Formalism
Carmine Starnino has entered the fray of our discussion about formalism by offering a spirited rebuttal to some of my provocations, doing so via his commentary to a posting by Ange Mlinko. Starnino claims to regret having published his negative comments about my book Eunoia, because his review has provided me with “lots of stuffing” for the “straw men” of my counterarguments. Rather than admit that a writer has as much right as any critic to defend, or to impugn, the merits of any claims about the nature of poetry, he nevertheless goes on to discount my right to enter into any critical dialogue with my own readership, preferring instead to attribute my counterarguments to the fact that I am a “perennially insecure avant-gardist,” unable to accept a negative reaction to my work. I might suggest, however, that, contrary to his comments, he has little reason to regret his review, since it has promoted interest in both our careers—and despite his fantasies, I do not feel threatened in the face of disputation, but always relish the chance to debate the merits of poetry historically ignored or rebuked in our country by the dominant literati, for whom the avant-garde in fact poses a threat to their own literary concepts of cultural security….
Stephen Burt
enormous snowstorms at the last minute
We had an enormous snowstorm yesterday in the greater Boston area. We I didn’t handle it perfectly, but our family got home safely in the end– and our little guy, while still no fan of snow, may even have ceased to hate his new, cute snowsuit.
The storm also got me thinking about the representation, in poems recent and not-so-recent, of really bad weather in general, and of snow and snowstorms in particular. Does it go back to antiquity? What’s the first poem in English, or in some other European language, to describe, or celebrate, a snowstorm? What are the best?
Inconclusive, underinformed musings, suggestions for further reading, and snippets from favorites, below the fold.
A.E. Stallings
Interview with the Sonnet
Our special guest today is the sonnet. No stranger to controversy, gender bending, political debate, the tug-of-war between the avant garde and the retrograde, the sonnet again finds herself a topic of discussion.
Her Sophia Loren Italian incarnation is top-heavy and wasp-waisted. When showing her English-rose side, she can seem a little more logical and four-square, her Barbour jacket and wellies obscuring her shapeliness (not to mention the Elizabethan ruff). On closer look, though, her graceful measurements, approaching the Golden Ratio, put you in mind of the human face or the Parthenon. The sonnet takes some time out of her busy schedule (she is in the midst of a revival, with talks of a movie deal, hot on the heels of Epic) to speak with Harriet blogger, A.E. Stallings.
Rigoberto González
And Songsongsonglessness
Here’s an unusual little book from my shelf. I say unusual because it’s the winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize for a book whose author is of Italian descent. The prize includes an honorarium, publication, and the promise that the winning manuscript will be published in a bilingual edition, face to face with its Italian translation. It certainly is an honorable gesture, this effort to preserve the legacy of the Italian language, but also to recognize that Italian American literature is part of Italy’s cultural lineage.
Kenneth Goldsmith
UbuWeb – New Additions : Late Fall 2007
UbuWeb
All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #2:
Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the second in its podcast series, focusing on Ubu’s hidden treasures. As the site has grown so large, these occasional audio guides might shed some light on things you may have overlooked, forgotten about or simply never knew about. This podcast explores the mass of recordings by Giorno Poetry Systems (aka The Dial-A-Poem Poets), a series of double LPs put out back in the 70s featuring artists such as Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, John Cage, Richard Hell, Frank O’Hara and hundreds of others. UbuWeb’s first podcast, a general introduction to the site and to sound poetry, can be found here. You can subscribe to our podcast here. The next one, focusing on the audio archives of Aspen Magazine, will be ready in mid-January.
Komar & Melamid “The People’s Choice Music” (1997)
With the collaboration of composer Dave Soldier, Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted Painting project was extended into the realm of music. A poll, written by Dave Soldier, was conducted on The Dia Foundation’s web site in Spring 1996. Approximately 500 visitors took the survey. Solder used the survey results to write music and lyrics for the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted songs.
>The Most Wanted Song: A musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably “liked” by 72 ± 12% of listeners.
>The Most Unwanted Song: Fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population will enjoy this.
More details and liner notes here.
Four Films by Gordon Matta-Clark:
Includes Tree Dance (1971), Fresh Kill (1972), Day’s End (1975) and Office Baroque (1977). Gordon Matta-Clark’s (1943-1978) artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from 1971 to 1977, his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: performances and recycling pieces; space and texture works; and his building cuts.
Audio Selections from The Sackner Archive:
Hundreds of MP3s ripped from rare sound poetry LPs, tapes & 45 RPM vinyl. The Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual & Concrete Poetry in Miami Beach is the world’s largest collection of text-based art. Of the audio files here, curator Matthew Abess states: “The work presented here comprises a portion of the Sackner’s tremendous compendium of sonic works. The range of geographic origins runs the circumference of the globe. The time span is nearly a century. It witnesses histories: of poetry, literature, music, visual art, technology, politics, religion, theoretical contentions and practical abstention.” Artists include John Cage, Merzbow, Anton Bruhin, Laurie Anderson, Bob Cobbing, Lily Greenham, Velemir Chlebnikov, Aleksej Krucenych and Jean Jacques Lebel among dozens of others. UbuWeb is also pleased to feature a full-length documentary about the Sackner Archive, Concrete! directed by Sara Sackner.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
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RECENT COMMENTS
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Gary Geddes has offered us some amazing anthologies, among other things. Thanks for the reminder. MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.18.10 -
WARNING. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY. DO NOT READ. MENTALLY ILL FAILURE AT WORK. ALERT. ALERT.
Do you know ... MORE »
Eric Landon | 03.18.10 -
I like what Patrick Kavanagh wrote, thanks Don.
Poets don't have careers. That's what everybody ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.18.10 -
Hopelessly old-fashioned, yes, but perennially radical. MORE »
pam lu | 03.18.10 -
Gwynn,
You are perfectly right. I should have thought of that. I apologize for that comparison. ... MORE »
Ron Silliman | 03.18.10
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
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Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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