2008 December : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for December, 2008

Hevenyssh

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Like the growth of crystals: a formative will and the impossibility of adopting any other mode.

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12.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza

I have been waiting for Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Life and Times of DJ Spinoza ever since I saw his ribald virtuosic performance five years ago in some obscure midtown gallery. Yes, let me repeat that: He didn’t read. He performed. He even (and beware the white male poet who dares to rap before a podium) rapped. The rapping was 1.5 generation Russian immigrant geek rap but give the guy respect for having rhythm. His brilliant collection is finally out from Ugly Duckling Press.
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is made up of absurdly hilarious narrative poems starring the battle-happy philosopher hero DJ Spinoza who engages in lethal food fights with Andrew Marvell (“Then DJ Spinoza throws frutti di mare all over the metaphysical poet”), vanquishes Che Bourashka (notorious for “killing the emperor of China/by a fusillade of thumbtacks”) and feuds with his ultimate nemesis, the contradictory Heideggerian monster, the Begriffon. You’re not going to find too many poetry collections that are this action-packed. But while DJ Spinoza might have more testosterone fueled bravado than a pack of sauced British soccer fans, he is also prone to both meditation and action, pausing mid-battle to spew math equations or ponder the ontological nature of reality, morality, love or the limitations of language. And of course, there’s also a love story involving the Bride of DJ Spinoza, a mathematician in her own right: “I’m not an engineer, I’m a mathematician. I’m not even an applied mathematician, I’m pure.”

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12.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Linh Dinh

Faits Divers de la Poesie Americaine et Britannique,

an anonymous blog inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Nouvelles en trois lignes:
In the middle of a reading, the last on his Bretagne tour, M. Antin caught fire. This was at the beach house of Mme Scalapino and family, in the middle of a long sentence. “His reputation as a literary figure is forever assured,” said Mme Perloff, in tears.
According to bystanders, M. Simic was, for unknown reasons, walking and whistling down a dark street in a questionable neighborhood of Nancy. The homeless poet known locally as Fork-Face jumped from the shadows, stabbing him fifty-four times in the legs.
The poet Mme Peacock was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.
A nervous graduate student addressed the Professor: “How is Language poetry really radical, etc. when it’s now the most academically dependent formation since the New Criticism?” Down rushed M. Perelman from the dais, biting off the little rat’s ear.

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12.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (82)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Set aside

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Last weekend, walking along this beach, I wondered about all the bad poems and paintings this landscape has inspired. It’s the Suffolk coast between Walberswick and Dunwich (a dangerously “poetic” place because most of it fell into the sea)*.
I once sat on a judging panel for a poetry prize when, exhausted by how much was out there, we began to discuss giving a different kind of award. It would be for not writing (or at least publishing) any poems for a specified period. In European agricultural policy, where farmers have been paid to leave land uncultivated so that it can recover, this is called set aside.
Setting aside the who … how about the what? Which words, phrases, devices, angles, subjects, etc., would you pay good money not to see in a poem again?
I’d start with decorative taxonomies – those lists, in particular of artist’s colours and birds. No more alizarin, no more godwits.
And any form of epiphany other than the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, also known as January 6th.
And anything liminal, lambent or ludic.
*That is not Dunwich on the horizon. It is a nuclear power station and will have inspired bad poems all of its own.

12.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Cathy Park Hong

Cunnilingus in North Korea

(still from Paul Chan’s video)
I just noticed poetryfoundation’s video podcast section, which reminds me of Claudia Rankine’s video essays. Poets expanding into multi-media collaborations are few and far between. Unfortunately, from the handful of collaborations I have seen, art becomes mere illustration to the poetry or the poetry becomes distracting background chatter to art. The voice-over feels obtrusive, burdensome. There’s no true confluence between word and image.
In her collaboration with her husband John Lucas, Claudia Rankine manages to avoid this pitfall. The video image itself is quite simple. She uses the famous footage of Zinedine Zidane head-butting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup match, except it’s slowed down considerably and it’s voiced over by Rankine who reads a collage of quotes from canonical writers on race and colonialism like Homi Bhaba, Frances Fanon, and James Baldwin. The marriage between image and voice works for the most part due to its slowness. The spareness and speed of the now familiar clip–the expanse of soccer green, the small pixilated image of Zidane slowly making his way to Materazzi to act out the inevitable—allows you to concentrate on her almost unbearably monotone voice. It’s hypnotic.

12.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Travis Nichols

The Gracefully Over-Ambitious

The Machine Project is a little storefront gallery in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. It recently got some national attention for helping to take over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but anyone familiar with the wildly imaginative curators and artists involved with Machine know that the LACMA story was just one of many.
It’s a place that encourages “heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious” and to that end, they’ve enlisted the poet Joshua Beckman to help them get through the holiday season.

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12.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Kenneth Goldsmith

Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing 2

Flarf:

Conceptual Writing:

Thanks Brian Stefans!

12.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (84)

Javier Huerta

2008 American Book Awards

The Before Columbus Foundation announces
Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual
AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press)
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday)

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka/Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804 (University of Washington Press)

Maria Mazziotti Gillian, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions Inc.)

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins)

C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press)
Angela Jackson, Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly)

L. Luis Lopez, Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press)

Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion)
Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press)

Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press)

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12.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Travis Nichols

Booze, Bling, and the Home Video Review of Books

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Coldfront Magazine, a poetry review revue and aggregator of online verse edited by Graeme Bezanson, John Deming, and Melinda Wilson, has an occasional feature called Poets Off Poetry, described as “where poets talk about what they’re listening to, and its sometimes ancillary results.”

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12.10.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS