Have been repeatedly making failed attempts at charting my reading habits in order to detect patterns and write about those patterns on this here blog with the hope that writing about the patterns will change them. What I’m finding is they change if I give any consciousness to their identification.
The Museum of Modern Art here in Nu Yawk has a small exhibit on Manhattan’s downtown music scene during the late seventies and early eighties up at the moment, and I found myself strolling through it with various family members last week.
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”)
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
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
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.
(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.
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:
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (55)
All sides now: a correspondence with Lisa... (4)
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
Graphic Poetry Spotlight: Jai Arun Ravine’s... (3)
Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic... (30)
Copyright © 2010 Poetry Foundation Contact: mail@poetryfoundation.org Privacy Policy / Terms of Use
Poetryfoundation.org article RSS.
Magazine RSS.
Blog RSS.
Poem of the Day RSS.
Glossary Term of the Day RSS.