Author Archive
Cathy Park Hong
Poet Musician David Berman quits Band, outs Father
File this under random gossip. David Berman, best known as singer of the Silver Jews (and former member of Pavement) and author of Actual Air, just “announced that he will quit his band and continue on as muckraker and screenwriter. It doesn’t say anything about whether or not he’ll continue to write poetry. I hope he does since Berman is a hit with the college students. He’s a good gateway drug for that stubborn student who hates poetry. I could bury one of his poem in the back of a packet, and they will say, “I find the rest of these poems boring but I LOVE DAVID BERMAN.” Can they sniff out, through his laid back, laconic lines, that he’s also in a rock band?
He also outs his family secret. Apparently, he’s always had a curdling secret about his father being a food industry lobbyist: “My life has been riddled with Ibsenism. In a way I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage.” So I guess one can interpret his decision to turn to muckraking as some serious Oedipal revenge shit.
To conclude, I’m sad about the music. I liked the Silver Jews. But one must move on.
Cathy Park Hong
Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater and Other Poetic Concerns
Mark Nowak wrote a post last week in which he asked, “How does poetry address a working world that is not so stringently nation-bound?” This is an issue that I constantly think about. I feel compelled and I admire poets (in temperament, aesthetic or subject) who critique and respond to the careening forces of Globalization as well as the destabilizing forces of digital media by expanding the barriers of poetic expression. We’ve seen that in the procedural approaches of Flarf poets but more politically so in poets published by publishers like Action Books, whose manifesto calls for a kind of “internationalism” in poetry. This is why a term like “Post-Avant” is such a weak placeholder. It’s an assumption that history has stopped, that the measuring stick for innovation has been lopped off during the 70’s and from here on out, it’s all just embroidery all in the name of indeterminacy. As Johannes Goransson (one of the co-editors for Action along with Joyelle McSweeney) wrote in his blog, “Post-Avant” seems like a relic of static, binary Cold-War rhetoric.
Rodrigo Toscano’s newest collection, Collapsible Poetics Theater, which won the National Poetry Series, is a radical book. I was caught by a quote in the back of Toscano’s collection in which the summary asks “can the poem be tested any further?” Perhaps this isn’t quite new, but there’s been quite a lot of experimental poetry that’s been rending verse by traversing into other genres. In Toscano’s case, it’s theater and poetry. Generally, I’m drawn to writers who skirt the borders between playwriting and verse, such as Mac Wellman and early Suzan Lori Parks. Verse plays lend itself to the tenets of the avant-garde. The text is not a script for voice, but a script for performance, underscoring its artifice. I’d say experimental poets in general (oh okay, it’s only those who I admire) have returned to voice, but rather than the lyric voice, the emphasis is on the artifice of voice, the voice in drag, masque, ridiculous impersonation. The voice is both synthetic and serves as a synthesis of hybrid languages. (See also Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg’s manifesto on Gurlesque Feminist poetry when the anthology comes out sometime next year).
Cathy Park Hong
Inger Christensen January 16 1935 – January 2 2009
I’m greatly saddened that Inger Christensen has passed away at the age of 73. If you’re not familiar with her poetry, she was the best known contemporary poet in Denmark. In the United States, she may have been read by few and far between but in Denmark, she was treasured by all: protesters used to chant lines from her poems during the 60’s and her poems were part of murals on building walls.
Cathy Park Hong
LA hiatus
“Garden of Eden on Wheels” at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
Apologies for the silence. I’ve holed myself in LA. And another apology for committing a blogging faux-pas. It’s always obnoxious when a blogger writes a post just to say that she hasn’t written for awhile. Who cares, right? Just get on with the program! I’m in the pit of LA and I’m trying to finish a writing project. I remember talking to Daisy Fried, a former blogger for Harriet, who said that she was fond of blogging in the morning since it warmed her up for her poetry writing. I can’t. I need to shut everything off to write. It’s terrible. So I haven’t even done much in LA (except watch an embarrassing number of hours of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation). Haven’t hit my favorite hiking routes, taco trucks, not even the Museum of Jurassic Technology. How I love the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is a poet’s museum. Every poet who’s been to this museum should write an ode to this museum. Anyway, I’ve been reading some fantastic new collections which I’ll blog about soon.
Cathy Park Hong
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza
I have been waiting for Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Life and Times of DJ Spinoza ever since I saw his ribald virtuosic performance five years ago in some obscure midtown gallery. Yes, let me repeat that: He didn’t read. He performed. He even (and beware the white male poet who dares to rap before a podium) rapped. The rapping was 1.5 generation Russian immigrant geek rap but give the guy respect for having rhythm. His brilliant collection is finally out from Ugly Duckling Press.
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is made up of absurdly hilarious narrative poems starring the battle-happy philosopher hero DJ Spinoza who engages in lethal food fights with Andrew Marvell (“Then DJ Spinoza throws frutti di mare all over the metaphysical poet”), vanquishes Che Bourashka (notorious for “killing the emperor of China/by a fusillade of thumbtacks”) and feuds with his ultimate nemesis, the contradictory Heideggerian monster, the Begriffon. You’re not going to find too many poetry collections that are this action-packed. But while DJ Spinoza might have more testosterone fueled bravado than a pack of sauced British soccer fans, he is also prone to both meditation and action, pausing mid-battle to spew math equations or ponder the ontological nature of reality, morality, love or the limitations of language. And of course, there’s also a love story involving the Bride of DJ Spinoza, a mathematician in her own right: “I’m not an engineer, I’m a mathematician. I’m not even an applied mathematician, I’m pure.”
Cathy Park Hong
Cunnilingus in North Korea
(still from Paul Chan’s video)
I just noticed poetryfoundation’s video podcast section, which reminds me of Claudia Rankine’s video essays. Poets expanding into multi-media collaborations are few and far between. Unfortunately, from the handful of collaborations I have seen, art becomes mere illustration to the poetry or the poetry becomes distracting background chatter to art. The voice-over feels obtrusive, burdensome. There’s no true confluence between word and image.
In her collaboration with her husband John Lucas, Claudia Rankine manages to avoid this pitfall. The video image itself is quite simple. She uses the famous footage of Zinedine Zidane head-butting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup match, except it’s slowed down considerably and it’s voiced over by Rankine who reads a collage of quotes from canonical writers on race and colonialism like Homi Bhaba, Frances Fanon, and James Baldwin. The marriage between image and voice works for the most part due to its slowness. The spareness and speed of the now familiar clip–the expanse of soccer green, the small pixilated image of Zidane slowly making his way to Materazzi to act out the inevitable—allows you to concentrate on her almost unbearably monotone voice. It’s hypnotic.
Cathy Park Hong
Science Fiction Poetry
I have not gotten my hands on Andrew Joron’s latest 2008 collection, The Sound Mirror, so I’d like to push his older collection, Science Fiction, published in 1992. I’ve been curious about poetry that adopts genre narratives, especially sci-fi poetry, although I haven’t had a chance to do any serious research. Of course, there are over a million links when you type in “science fiction” and “poetry”: links to contests, conventions, and essays that attempt to define sci-fi poetry (It’s speculative, it must have narrative, and “SFP fans know it when they see it.”). There’s even a handbook.
Cathy Park Hong
Revolver
I first came across Robyn Schiff’s poem “Dear Ralph Lauren” at jubilat (where I’m a guest editor) and was floored by the formal and emotional torques of this wonderfully odd poem. Put simply, it’s a poem about Ralph Lauren (real name: Ralph Lifshitz). Put crudely, it’s about the narrator’s obsessive father fixation with Ralph Lauren. But broadly, the poem touches upon the American Dream, capitalist fetishism and Jewish assimilation. It’s a complex poem brocaded with tongue-in-cheek factual details you might find in a Polo catalog (“Might I, if there’s one in stock, be sent the Ralph Lauren Winchester Tote…”) but just as you’re about to be lulled by these details, she dropkicks you with a violent or disturbing anecdote: “Why Dad, do you translate me so tormented, so raving, driving my muddy pony with death spurs and blood on my stick.”
Cathy Park Hong
It’s the economy part II: scattered thoughts
*An article that echoes my previous post on the recession and how it might affect artists.
* Travis helpfully mentioned an old NEA article on artists in the workforce. On that note, isn’t the risk-averse Bush appointee Dana Gioia stepping down to do some soul-searching in Aspen? I’m curious to see who Obama will appoint as Gioia’s successor (Art funding will probably be #70,455 on Obama’s to-do list). Perhaps the NEA will return to its pre-Piss Christ days and dole out individual grants to visual artists and launch more cutting-edge programs that promote innovative work by artists and not just arts education. This might be wishful thinking.
*Lavinia asked if the election will inspire more political poetry. I hope so. But I would think that the war, deregulation of corporations, Katrina, the pillaging of the environment, Abu Ghraib, and other corrosive abuses of power within the last eight years would be plenty reason to spur political poetry but has it? At the top of my head, I can think of a few poets whose latest collections have held a tuning fork to the world: Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, Claudia Rankine, Rodrigo Toscano, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dennis Nurkse, Matthea Harvey, and Aracelis Girmay. I’m sure there are many others who I’m forgetting…
Cathy Park Hong
It’s the economy, stupid
I will have to agree with Olena that now that Sarah is back in Alaska, I can now stop tourettically clicking the refresh button and begin to think about poetry.
To assess the last three months? It’s been an obsessive relationship I have had with the Internet. Occasionally I managed to extricate myself from the cold glow of my computer and transform obsession to action: a stint to Philly, for instance, where I canvassed for Obama in immigrant neighborhoods. While Obama’s Ivy-League education was a handicap to working-class white Americans, all I had to do when speaking to Korean immigrants was mention “Harvard” and “Obama” and they clapped their hands and demanded an extra Hope button for their minister.
But other than those rare occasions, I basically had an intravenous tube running from my veins to dailykos, FiveThirtyEight, talkingpoints, andrewsullivan, huffingtonpost (even a gander at the National Review to see who else might be defecting from the Right) and all online newspapers. I’ve had conversations with poets who moaned about procrastinating due to their helpless addiction to the Internet. Perhaps Nate Silver (he of FiveThirtyEight) should do a graph on the productivity level of writers from the month of September – November. Can you imagine the sharp downward slant marking everyday you wasted hours monitoring polls from Zogby to Gallup? Am I just speaking for myself?
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Hi Teri,
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