Author Archive
Alan Gilbert
Things I’ve learned while blogging for Harriet . . .
—that blogging is hard work
I have a new respect for people who blog every day. I’m a regular reviewer of art and literature for a variety of publications, and during busy periods I sometimes have a deadline a week. Yet even this doesn’t compare to the rigors of having something intelligent and coherent (not that I always succeeded) to post to Harriet circa every three days—during the easily distracting summer months, no less.
Alan Gilbert
Fast poetry
Mark’s post about the Republican National Convention site being 2.68 miles from his house reminds me—in a non-self-congratulatory way—of the various political protests I’ve attended over the past decade, many of them with poets, some with non-poets, and a few alone. I say “non-self-congratulatory” because what I’ve mostly come away from them with is a head-scratching reconsideration of the role of political protest—and of the connection between poetry and politics (an ongoing theme of this summer’s run of Harriet). In this sense, the protests that most perplexed me were the ones leading up to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. How could the largest series of protests in world history not fail to stop the war?
Alan Gilbert
Poetry’s violent dream
Blogging for Harriet this summer has felt a little bit like a slow striptease—never knowing how many personal details to reveal, or which parts to keep covered up. It’s my sense that readers enjoy a little bit of personal information (I definitely do), but too much—for me, at least—and I begin to think, Who cares? . . . or worse, if the information seems particularly self-indulgent. But it’s also a question of style. I could read Kevin Killian discussing just about anything, and those who’ve spent time with any of his nearly 2,000 [!] reviews for Amazon.com might agree. Don’t believe me?
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.
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.
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.
Alan Gilbert
Sylvia Plath—original hip-hop poet
I know that a primary root of hip-hop is Jamaican toasters delivering rhymes and declamations over portable sound systems in the 1960s, and that a version of this was introduced to the Bronx by the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, an early pioneer of hip-hop. I also realize that the Last Poets are important figures in the genre’s birth. More generally, hip-hop is part of the African-diaspora derived “signifyin’” practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so famously wrote about. This is all very true. But I’d like to make the case that Sylvia Plath is one of the original hip-hop poets.
Alan Gilbert
The politics of memory
Martin Wong, King of Pain, 1997–98
Dean Daderko is an imaginative and adventurous independent curator working in New York City. A few years back, he turned the living room of his ground-floor Brooklyn apartment into one of the more interesting alternative art spaces in the city.
Alan Gilbert
“the thing that refuses to be consoled”
In the second of his “Vast Eternity” posts, D.A. Powell quotes an extended excerpt from an interview with Philip Levine; in her most recent post, Daisy Fried links to an LA Times profile of August Kleinzahler. This prompts me to post a link (at the bottom of this entry) to my favorite poet interview so far this year: it’s one that CAConrad conducted via email with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and featured on the PhillySound collective blog (always an interesting source of information for political and poetry news that extends far beyond Philadelphia).
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