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Anselm Berrigan

Spent some time in a clinic today, the waiting turning into an interesting duration (every time I encounter the word duration I think of Kenneth Koch staring off into space during an interview saying, “everything lasts a certain period of time….that’s very odd”)

Anselm Berrigan

Controllable Git

One thing that happened the other day was the memorial, at which one found the issue in which one’s article on the other one recently passed was printed. Agh! I was blogging around trying to nosedive into ashes

Anselm Berrigan

In circulars

I’ve started several times to write something about the Tulsa School Conference since I came home to New York Sunday night. Exhaustion prevented anything coherent from happening initially. Sticking my head up my ass for a moment inside a comment box

Anselm Berrigan

a question on hearing

I’ll be heading to Tulsa, Oklahoma tomorrow to take part in The Tulsa School Conference & Literary Festival that Grant Jenkins has organized through The University of Tulsa. Never been there, but my father, Ted Berrigan, was stationed in Tulsa after the Korean War and wound up enrolling in TU via the G.I. Bill.

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part II

(note: this is part II of a 1996 letter from the late Doug Oliver on his book Poetry and Narrative in Performance)

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part I

I remembered recently the existence of a letter my stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver, wrote me thirteen years ago to explain, on my request, the series of experiments he conducted in his study of prosody and voicing, Poetry and Narrative in Performance. The book was published in 1989, and I think the recordings that he describes in the letter and the subsequent analyses (very densely related in the book) must have taken place a few years earlier. I’m very interested in the matters discussed in the letter, and as it will have been ten years this coming April since he died, Doug is very much on my mind. But the work he did is the point, and the focus of my attention, so I’d like to share this letter. The length of the letter necessitates it being divided into at least two posts. Doug is writing from Paris; I am 24 and living in San Francisco. To a very tiny extent the language and tone of the letter is pitched specifically to me, but I think it is by and large available to any interested reader:

Anselm Berrigan

Steel Nests, pt. II

1018091443

Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:

The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation.

Anselm Berrigan

steel nests on their own terms, part I

This past Sunday, a very wet, windy and gray version of a day, I paid a visit to a small, piano-shaped storefront at 266 W. 37th street to see an installation consisting of one hundred steel nests of varying sizes made by the sculptor Alison Collins.

Anselm Berrigan

The Currency of Fashions

My favorite font is Goudy Old Style. My favorite whiskey is Jameson’s, on the rocks, though I’m off the sauce. My favorite facial expression on others is the slightly astonished smirk.

Anselm Berrigan

More Internal Data

Barbara’s comment-response to Terreson’s question as to her own ideas and way about poetry – that her choices of subject in her blog posts are reflective of her overall interests and commitments to and within writing, if I’m hearing her right – has me recalling my first foray into reading John Ashbery’s art writings collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 some years ago,

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres

STAFF WRITERS

Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share

RECENT COMMENTS

  • Hi Teri, I think I'm for it. Not in a spirit of separatism, but in ... MORE »
    Annie Finch | 11.21.09
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    Terreson | 11.21.09
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    Terreson | 11.20.09
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    Wendy Babiak | 11.20.09
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    Henry Gould | 11.20.09

Señor Smith to you. (1)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)

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