Arts : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for the ‘Arts’ Category

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.

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11.04.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Anselm Berrigan

Steel Nests, pt. II

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Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:

The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation.

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10.26.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Anselm Berrigan

steel nests on their own terms, part I

This past Sunday, a very wet, windy and gray version of a day, I paid a visit to a small, piano-shaped storefront at 266 W. 37^th street to see an installation consisting of one hundred steel nests of varying sizes made by the sculptor Alison Collins.

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10.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Melissa Friedling

Sarah and Heather

10.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Abigail Deutsch

And how should I begin?

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In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

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10.14.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Anselm Berrigan

More Internal Data

Barbara’s comment-response to Terreson’s question as to her own ideas and way about poetry – that her choices of subject in her blog posts are reflective of her overall interests and commitments to and within writing, if I’m hearing her right – has me recalling my first foray into reading John Ashbery’s art writings collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 some years ago,

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10.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Abigail Deutsch

Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak. Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

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10.09.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Melissa Friedling

Nirali

10.06.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Edwin Torres

The Cultural Workhorse

Hello Harriet, glad to join the blog-o-sphere. Looking forward to spilling secrets and divinity on words-works-wonders, many thanks to Travis Nichols for inviting me to the party. That being said, my first posting starts on a sad note, but a life note all the same.

Suzanne Fiol, the founder and artistic director of Issue Project Room, has died. Those words are still shocking to write, she had so much more to do, but she did in fact pass away on Monday, Oct. 5 2009, from cancer. Someone passes and memories of their action, their motion, the waves that have followed them to create their story hover. Suzanne’s immediate impact, her love for her daughter and her tireless devotion to the arts, performance, music, poetry…are what I hold onto. From its beginning as Issue Project Space in the East Village to its current home as Issue Project Room,

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10.06.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)