Archive for August, 2008
Alan Gilbert
Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part II)
Alan: In “Four Ground-breaking Things In Five Issues of Civil Lines or, Ways to Get Your Head Out of the Postcolonial Sand,” you make equations between particular historical moments in India and its literature. Here in the United States, writers and artists have worked for eight years under the cloud of the Bush administration, and, to a certain extent, the lingering effects of September 11. While some might argue that this has led to a renewed politicization among writers and artists, in fact it’s also been accompanied by an increased interest in the fantastical, the grotesque, and the nihilistic. Are there political conditions in India informing current poetic and artistic practice?
Alan Gilbert
Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part I)
I first met Vivek Narayanan here in New York City at the Beats in India: A Soul of Asia Symposium hosted by the Asia Society, which I blogged about back in June. I really enjoyed talking with him, and he agreed to being interviewed via email once he returned to India in August. Because it’s a bit long, I’ve divided the interview into two parts.
Linh Dinh
Soccer, Sex, Literature and Immigration
I took a four-hour train ride from Rhinecliff to Philadelphia, with a switch in NYC. I sat on the right side to take in the Hudson’s wide span, cliffs, bridges, canadian geese and an eccentric faux castle on a shaggy islet, but I was too drowsy, my mind drained from teaching a month at Bard College. Talking one-on-one with dozens of writers, artists and musicians, I had tried my best to be useful and encouraging. I didn’t jive, I don’t think. I never recommended books I had only glimpsed on amazon.com. Rarely did I say something, mention John Zorn, for example, and thought later, “?!” Kidding aside, I inspired confidence and awe with my expansive, expansionist, imperialistic and full-spectrum knowledge.
There had been a gristly crime the day before. On a Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Winipeg, a Chinese man had stabbed, decapitated and started to eat his dozing seatmate, a young carnival hand going home. They didn’t know each other and there was no argument. The killer was simply insane. “Please kill me,” he would mutter at court. The murderer had arrived in Canada only four years earlier. Married without children, he swept dirt from a Baptist church, levered a forklift, seared and flipped slyly perfumed, frozen beef patties for the golden arches multinational corporation. I’m lovin’ it. He also tossed plastic-sleeved, tightly rolled bullshit onto lawns, porches and driveways, depriving some pedaling boy of a summer job.
Alan Gilbert
“Apolitical poems are also political”
In mid-August of 2004, I visited the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams with poets Kristin Prevallet, Roberto Tejada, Tonya Foster, David Buuck, Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, and my then 1 1/2-year-old daughter Sophie (all of whom have gone on to big things, including Sophie). We were there to check out the various exhibitions, including a great show of political art called The Interventionists, an installation set up as part of William Pope.L’s Black Factory tour, and a small exhibition of work by Matthew Ritchie, an artist I somewhat inexplicably really like. We then stayed for a concert later that evening with the “afro-baroque cabaret” band Stew.
Travis Nichols
Not Winning the William Carlos Williams Award New Best Way to Get Thoughtful Critique
Question: Has anyone ever read the slush pile as assiduously as Ronald Silliman?
His long-running catalog of the non-winning WCW books on his bloggo should give us all hope that if and when we get the silly notion to send poems off to a contest that the judges will actually read the work–not just glance mockingly at our fonts in between slurpy bites of Pepperoni Hot Pocket. (That is, after all, how all contest readers read, right? Otherwise they TOTALLY would have picked my manuscript! That Hot Pocket was too good! It distracted them from my genius! Screw you, Hot Pocket!)
Don Share
Top ten things you may not have known about G.M. Hopkins
1.) His nickname as a teenager at school was “Skin.”
Mark Nowak
Fences, Workers’ Theatre, & the CPT(s)
One of the unadulterated joys of living in the Twin Cities is the presence of the Penumbra Theater just a few blocks down the road from my house. Founded in 1976 by director Lou Bellamy, Penumbra has embarked on a five year project to stage each play in August Wilson’s 20th century magnum opus—which is, as many of you may know, a bringing home of the native Pittsburgh playwright, who lived in St. Paul from 1978 to 1990 and wrote a good portion of his 10-play cycle here. And as Chuck Smith, resident director at the Goodman Theater, recently said, “If you want to see an August Wilson play done right you’ve got to go to Penumbra. Those guys know him, they know how to speak that language, because they developed it with him.”
Last night while I was at the Bellamy/Penumbra preview of Wilson’s Fences—which runs through late September if you happen to be anywhere near St. Paul—and again this morning while I was rereading sections of the play and thinking about Chuck Smith’s statement, I latched onto the concepts of reciprocities, development, and the dialogism of collective action that have propelled me in the past decade to experiments in articulating poetry to documentary/workers’ theater within transnational social movements.
Lucia Perillo
I just had coffee with Reginald
That is, his fine new poems in the Sept/Oct American Poetry Review. The poems are accompanied by a short interview that focuses on the way autobiography collides with myth in his poems–among other subjects, including how Reginald used blogging in the creation of his recent prose work, among which is his book Orpheus in the Bronx. Sorry–can’t figure out italics. Too old for the phrase “shout-out”.
Alan Gilbert
Sustenance and abandonment
The release in paperback this month of If I Were Writing This, the final book of poems Robert Creeley saw into print before his death in 2005, provides a good opportunity to think about his late work.
Lucia Perillo
Lojong has nothing to do with Mahjong
I’m interested in spiritual practices and like to attend demonstrations of them, such as Catholic masses, which is the tradition within which I was raised and which still seems frightening to me, but also beautiful (the stained glass interiors, in such contrast to those rented office spaces I’ve looked into and seen people swaying with raised hands—I haven’t entered there, but would like to, though I suspect I’d feel extra tourist-y in this environment).
But I have been trying to pursue, as of the past few years, the practice of Lojong, or mind training, which derives from about 40 proverbs from the Buddhist tradition, You don’t have to be a Buddhist to mind-train (I’m not—too much vocabulary and enumeration) (though I liked hearing Uma Thurman’s father, who IS a Buddhist, say that when he got mad at Dick Cheney he meditated on himself as Dick Cheney’s mother, as she was sixty years ago, nursing baby Dick Cheney at her breast).
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
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Don Share
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)
Graphic Poetry Spotlight: Jai Arun Ravine’s... (3)
To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (54)
Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (30)
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
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- On the matter of career
- Who or what is a poet critic and why is the academy so up in Poetry’s face?
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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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