Author Archive
Alan Gilbert
Interpretations of dreams
Dreams are corrosive agents. Although dreams are usually imagined as expressions of unconscious desires or fears, it’s their form that’s most important: a fluid attack on the least secure parts of the psyche’s structures. That this happens while a person is sleeping doesn’t qualify this action but amplifies it. Dream imagery and narrative are secondary to their flow through trembles and tremors.
I want a poetry that’s as corrosive as dreams. I want a poetry that finds vulnerable spots in the facades, and that seeps around or beneath what it can’t confront directly. Poetry is to presumption as sappers are to a castle, as love is to need. Its content is for each constituency to decide; what gets shared is its yearning for freedom.
Dreams have a morality in which no one is right. Their logic comes after the fact. They seek to discover the hidden, without ever finding anything except their own fierce and tender movements. This makes them impervious to categories though not to interpretation. A dream can never be paranoid, but neither does it heal. Like a poem it’s always in between.
Alan Gilbert
Switch it up
Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.
Alan Gilbert
Art or propaganda? Both.
I just spent two late evenings at Matthew Barney’s massive studio in Long Island City watching grindcore and death metal bands play, along with a bizarre and hilarious “diarrhea humiliation” performance. (Not sure if coverage of this might turn up, though I don’t have a sense Artforum.com was there.) I also had to write two short reviews over the weekend: of Takahsi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut for The Believer and Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman for Modern Painters.
Alan Gilbert
Taking the bait
The question Mark Nowak has raised a couple times concerning the devaluing of politically progressive poetry in comparison with work that appears less socially engaged would take a book, not a blog entry, to fully answer. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the frame of the discussion keeps slipping within and between Mark’s two posts and the numerous reader responses to them. His sets of examples are dissimilar; so, too, are the cultural historians he cites. For instance, in his June 29 post on Linton Kwesi Johnson he wonders whether Johnson’s work might “speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, [Tom] Raworth or [Bernadette] Mayer or W. S. Merwin.” In his July 15 post, he asks why a poem such as Kenneth Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” has completely disappeared—to the point that even Patchen’s biographer wasn’t aware of it—while James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” is widely anthologized.
Alan Gilbert
This is what democracy looks like
It’s interesting that the posts which have generated the most discussion during the past couple months—Lucia Perillo’s “Why are poets aligned with the left?” from June 23 and Mark Nowak’s “Cannon fodder” from a few days ago—both deal with the relationship between poetry and politics. I can’t tell if this is the result of people being deeply engaged by the topic (certainly, that’s part of it), or if a rhetorically charged statement—regarding poetry and war, or the racism and sexism of a particular poem—is what in fact springs the dialogical trap in these kinds of forums. I’m guessing it may be more the latter.
Alan Gilbert
My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part II)
So my second favorite poetry reading is one I never would have predicted: Clayton Eshleman reading the entirety of his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. There was a reading series in the late ’90s held in a gallery in New York City at the corner of Broadway and Houston that was dedicated to a single poet reading from her or his work for an hour or more. The series lasted for a couple years, although I can’t remember who ran it, and the only other poet I recall reading in it was Bernadette Mayer.
Alan Gilbert
My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part I)
It’s hard to estimate how many poetry readings I’ve attended in my life, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds. If I’ve been going to poetry readings regularly for eighteen years, and I’ve averaged about fifteen to twenty a year, that would put the total at around 300. That doesn’t sound right, especially since I have very little recall of at least 200 of these, but it’s a reasonable ballpark estimate. (I’m guessing I’ve seen double that many gallery and museum shows. Music concerts might be closer to 100.)
So it’s probably ridiculous to try to list my top three (plus a few more) poetry readings ever (and my apologies in advance to any sensitive friends), but here goes (in order of most memorable):
Alan Gilbert
Identity and culture
Each of the four weeks at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program is organized around a theme. Invited faculty and the workshops they teach, the panels they sit on, and the talks some of them give are loosely grouped according to these themes. The one for this summer’s fourth week is “Performance. Community: Policies of the USA in the Larger World.” Monday’s panel focused on the performance side of the equation, and included Dodie Bellamy, Bob Holman, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, and Steven Taylor.
Alan Gilbert
Different kinds of messages
Saturday night’s reading concluding week three of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program traced a large arc. It featured Eileen Myles, Daisy Zamora, and Anne Waldman. Myles read from a forthcoming work entitled The Inferno: A Poet’s Novel. Much more than a novel, the manuscript is part ars poetica, part memoir, and part underground cultural history, rescuing from oblivion poets such as Rene Ricard and Bill Knott, along with Myles’s own wild, East Village bohemian past. “The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste,” she read at one point, invoking both a pre-gentrified New York City and the way in which some of the best personal poetry is a version of time shaking out its detritus through the mind. It’s also a reference to the fact that despite being “of all the art forms . . . the most economical” (to quote Audre Lorde), poetry seems strangely dependent on lots of unproductive free time.
Alan Gilbert
Summer school
I’ve never attended summer writing programs at Bread Loaf, Squaw Valley, Iowa, Juniper, Aspen, etc., but I feel confident in saying that the one held each year at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado is the most progressive—aesthetically, intellectually, politically. Perhaps Cave Canem’s Summer Retreat approximates it, although it’s only a week long and includes a half-dozen faculty, compared to Naropa’s sixty or so who rotate in during the course of a month.
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RECENT COMMENTS
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I mean that words in poetry are more than Play-Doh. You can use words ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.10.10 -
Moabit Sonnets
http://www.amazon.com/Moabit-Sonnets-Albrecht-Haushofer/dp/0393045323/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268252970&sr=1-1#noop
Written in a Nazi prison camp. Recovered from the executed body of their ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.10.10 -
We are in agreement about disliking pontification...which I will attempt not to do in my ... MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.10.10 -
An erudite & imaginative peroration (thanks for pointing this out).
I must say, however, ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.10.10 -
Exactly. Which is why it's important to recognize the flexibility of the design, as well ... MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.10.10
Poetry podcasts, online resources, oh and... (13)
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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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