Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part I) August 24, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

“Apolitical poems are also political” August 22, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

Sustenance and abandonment August 19, 2008: 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. (more...) by Alan Gilbert

Sylvia Plath—original hip-hop poet August 9, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

The politics of memory August 5, 2008: 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. (more...) by Alan Gilbert

“the thing that refuses to be consoled” August 4, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

Interpretations of dreams July 31, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

Switch it up July 31, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

Art or propaganda? Both. July 28, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert

Taking the bait July 21, 2008: 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 [...] by Alan Gilbert