Poems can sometimes help with that.

The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?

I hope no one will mind if I offer Robert Pinsky’s poem “9/11″ here. There’s a lot I like about this poem. Its unapologetically direct title. Its swerves from incisive analysis to granular reportage. Its inclusion of Marianne Moore, Ray Charles, Frederick Douglass, Donald Duck, and Emily Dickinson as American icons. I like the line “The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.” And many other things, but perhaps most of all the poem’s willingness to make large claims, and inclusive claims, at a time in our literary history when such gestures are generally scorned as de trop or naive. I think that takes some nerve, and I applaud it.

9/11

We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched

The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us

But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings–who keep so few,

More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May” or “Fourth of July.”
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes

Tell the interrogator their commanding officer’s name
Is Colonel Donald Duck–he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it’s nearly

Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.

Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor

Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve

When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?–Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,

The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed

The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans–as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together

A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?–
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities

And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle’s head

From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty–
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror

And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing “America

The Beautiful.” Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance–or in the studio

In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.

(Robert Pinsky wrote this poem for the September 8, 2002 edition of The Washington Post Magazine; I cut and pasted it from here. You can hear Pinsky read the poem here.)

He will be missed.

Merce Cunningham’s voice:
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/audio5D.html

Merce Cunningham’s dances:
http://www.ubu.com/film/cunningham.html

All Avant-Garde All The Time – UbuWeb Podcast #9: The Sounds of the UK from the 1960s To Yesterday

>>> Download

Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the latest in its podcast series, focusing on a dozen of Ubu’s hidden treasures, highlighting audio works that you really should know about about but most likely don’t. With this podcast, we continue our series focusing on the sounds of different regions. Here the focus is on the avant-garde language-based audio coming out of the UK. Beginning with Bob Cobbing and making our way through the the swinging London scene of the 60s, and the political / punk work of the 70s, and ending up with the electronics and samples of today, we cut a path through the London (and beyond) underground. Featured here are works by Bob Cobbing, Neil Mills, Lily Greenham, Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Logue, Richard Long, Art & Language + The Red Krayloa, Furious Pig, Momus, People Like Us, and Caroline Bergvall. You can subscribe to our podcast here.

Vera Pavlova (left)

I recently attended the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam – one of the best poetry-related events I’ve ever been to – meeting day and night with poets from countries other than the USA, and heard – literally – not a single word about writing programs, nor about avant-gardes, post-avant gardes, flarf, or conceptual writing .

Imagine that!  Well, I know that writing programs exist outside of the US (particularly in the UK now), and yet… we sure seem to do things very differently over here. The relative lack of toadying and jockeying for position I found among poets from other countries – and I know that a single week is nothing conclusive – leads me to wonder how and why things seemed so different. I have no answer. But among all the poets, editors, and attendees of poetry events I met or saw … most very keenly wanted to read and learn about everybody they could. There was an impressive urgency among poets to encounter the work of people who were different. Sure, we had a few passionate and even heated discussions – but never about the kind of pecking-order stuff one must take for granted day in and day out over here. We’re a big country, but our literary culture seemed quite small over there.

Two poets in particular opened my eyes in many ways; they are not completely unfamiliar to American readers. Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi poet now living in the US, with books published by New Directions; Vera Pavlova lives partly in Alaska, partly in her native Russia with her husband and translator Steven Seymour (whom you’ll hear in this recording), and her poems have appeared in places like Tin House and The New Yorker.

Click here to listen to my interview with them, which includes questions about exile, women poets, translation – and getting pigeonholed!

Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.

When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”:

It is spring & people are out repainting their front steps
Glacier blue because this village is closer to the glacier than
The volcano emits a tiny rumble & drools lava once every few
Years go by & its followers grow fat with having nothing to
Fear here is of the icy-&-slowly-approaching variety

Zeugma, besides being fun to say, delightfully interrupts any smoothly rhythmical reading of the poem, and reminds me of loosening threads in fabric with a stitch remover. A common image in Pity the Bathtub is glass, and Harvey’s poems equate the formation of glass with the poetic process itself—raw material must soar to a certain degree before it forms to perfection, or at least completion, in a mold. From section two of the title poem:

. . . it is because he works with glass
That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable
(she does not love) he knows how to take something
Small and hard and hot and make room for
His breath quickens at night

So I was very excited to read, see, and listen to Harvey’s latest project; in collaboration with the Miró Quartet, she composed a poem to be read with Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. The poem hauntingly describes girls in a glass factory, making thermometers, portholes, and, most interesting, a glass girl. Listen to the performance, recorded at the White Pine Festival as part of the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Radio Project, and read the poem, including five original photographs that serve as titles to the movements of the collaboration.

Coincidence or consequence, you might wonder, about the Glass/glass connection? When asked about beginning the process of collaboration, Harvey says, “I listened to the CD of the music over and over again and started writing down random images. The first thing that came to me was an image of floodwater going over the banks, and then I started picturing these girls dancing around and pouring liquid from one thing into another and that sort of turned into a glass factory, I think because of the name of Philip Glass.”

This initial association blossoms into a meditation on boundaries and creation; the strains of the music correspond to rising temperatures, the high heat of melting, and the low notes of formation. And the images provide an intriguing mental backdrop on the stage shared by poem and music. In a Bookslut interview, Harvey says, “My poems are friends with paintings,” and this poem is further proof of the weight images and words bear on each other.

Like great poetry, glass both magnifies and reflects objects and subjects. Or, as Harvey writes in “Self-Portrait with Glass Ball, 1936” (in a series of poems about Max Beckmann paintings):

If only I had looked
into that third eye—for though it had no ties to visions
it knew my heart, was my heart.

June 7, 2009, would have been Gwendolyn Brooks’s 92nd birthday; to join us in celebrating one of America’s greatest poets, check out the Hall Library stop on the Chicago Poetry Tour, which features archival recordings of Brooks reading from and speaking about the span of her work. The program ranges from the intimate neighborhood portraits included in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, such as “kitchenette building”  and “the rites for Cousin Vit,” to the political turn her poetry took in the ’60s as she became involved with the black arts movement:

And we did such exciting things. And we went into the park and recited our poetry and we went to city jail. And the most exciting thing we did was just to walk into a tavern, and someone like Haki Madhubuti, once known as Don L. Lee, would say, “Look folks, we’re gonna lay some poetry on you!” . . . And they would turn from their drinks, temporarily, and listen to poetry, which they hadn’t come to the tavern to hear, of course.

The Poetry Foundation website offers a critical biography of Brooks, as well as contemporary articles, including Danielle Chapman’s “Sweet Bombs,” a review of the recently issued collection The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks.

For a broader look at Brooks’s effect on Chicago poetry, listen to “Confronting the Warpland,” an original one-hour radio documentary produced by the Poetry Foundation. The show presents African American poets who have found influence and inspiration living in the city, and features Brooks, Tyehimba Jess, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Haki Madhubuti, Sterling Plumpp, and Margaret Walker in interviews, readings, and archival recordings.

Finally, Brooks is showcased in the Essential American Poets archive, selected by Donald Hall during his poet laureateship in 2006. Recorded at the Library of Congress in 1961, Brooks, in her early 30s, reads several poems not available on the Chicago Poetry Tour, including “the mother,”  “of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery,”  and “A Sunset of the City,”  which ends,

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

Nixon in China was first proposed as simply an “opera to be written in rhymed couplets” without a pre-determined subject.
Director Peter Sellars gave the couplet assignment to poet Alice Goodman, who had been thinking about poor Richard, and then charged Adams with composing the music to follow.
The result, first performed in 1987, is a haunting portrait of a pathetic hero, Nixon, stumbling through a strange new world ruled by a crafty villain, Mao, while Nixon’s supporting cast–his wife, Pat, and crony, Kissinger–flutter about, beautifully banal.
Goodman’s libretto and Adam’s post-minimal music got me thinking about Nico Muhly, a composer whose work sounds a little like Adams’ to my ears, and includes just a little poetry and a lot of text.
He incorporates the established art of Christopher Smart’s poetry as well as the found sounds of recited addresses in “Mothertongue”. In an email, Muhly told me he finds his texts through formal sources (as in, you know, books) and informal sources (as in, you know, this), but not as yet through any contemporary poetry, despite what I see as some correspondences with all kinds of contemporary poetic practice.
“I am such a huge fan of older poetry (Christopher Smart) and so not entrenched in the contemporary scene,” says Muhly, “I have a lot of suspicions that there are a lot of political overlaps (like, little fiefdoms and battles), and very under-mapped artistic overlaps.”
To which I reply: “Totally under-mapped.”
Contemporary poetry seems an awfully unruly partner. No one wants to dance with it! Especially not in the ways Goodman and Adams were able to collaborate.
There are things like Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio that pop up on the radar every once in a while, but for the most part the fiefdoms seems to rule.
Or am I just not looking in the right places?
Is there on-going, covert diplomacy between the compositional territories?

A few examples of Choose-Your-Own-Context:
A friend has been walking the few miles to work everyday, just long enough to listen to a lecture by Philip Whalen, downloaded from the Naropa files on the Internet Archive site.
Another friend has made a muxtape from his own stock of mp3’s, most of which were culled from the UBU site, or the Penn Sound site–where you can find readings by the recently discussed Robert Duncan, among many others.
This friend, Eric Baus, has his own website, To The Sound, where he discusses the cellphone relay method of widening the poetry audience, especially useful at the sparsely attended readings.
Eric also links to Steve Evans’ intermittently updated site, Lipstick of Noise–where you can read about the intriguing context of Ericka Huggins’ poem “For a Woman”– and the Slought Archive– where you can listen to a little Denise Levertov.
Additional voices welcome in the comments, including most definitely anyone else’s poetry muxtape.

Before the internet, writers interested in weird, amateurish or specialized lingos had to scrounge for them in used book stores and porn shops. There was no Google to barf verbiage onto your lap. I used to spend hundreds on magazines with names like Over Fifty and Fabulous, KO, Soldiers of Fortune and Flying Saucer Digest. Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin’ planet, stretching your horizon. In the visual arts, one artist in particular, Jim Shaw, alerted us all to the bizarre, goofy world of amateur creativity. He collected thrift store paintings and arranged them in installations. His 1991 show at Metro Pictures, NYC, was declared by critic Jerry Saltz as “one of the most important shows of the decade [...] it brimmed with dementedly entertaining art [and] unlocked the doors to scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres. It was a gold mine of overlooked pictorial information, a mother lode of untapped graphic imagination and pictorial possibility.”
The arrival of the WEB brought a flood of the suckiest English ever, an infinity of cute or frightful pornography, SPAM, flarf, YouTube, Ron Silliman’s blog, UBUWEB, babelfish, MySpace, Ebay and plenty of cheap or free graphic softwares. Within this overly-seasoned, mostly foul chowder, it’s hard to locate the bobbing head of a romping cyberpoet. That’s why we need poetry webzines that will only showcase works created for and with the internet, such as the piece below by Angela Genusa. For the lashed sick months or so, she been using her bog as a lavatory to spearmint with bad, badder and utterly atrocious English. At her worsted, she can be opined to really bloweth, frankly, but at her bestest, she suckest even wurst. Is it, like, artistic? How the focus do I know? But I no what I lika:
Or this piece by Italian poet, Gherardo Bortolotti:

So, I’ve turned to hunting the internet for compelling, downloadable conversations, short stories, news reporting, essays, literary interviews, poetry readings, live performances, and award speeches that would truly agitate my imagination, that often converts the interior of my car into a virtual classroom, concert hall, or auditorium on wheels. With the software Total Recorder from High Criteria, I can even make my own MP3 files out of streaming audio or video files on just about any subject from biodiversity to global philanthropy. I feel as if some of the world’s smartest poets, artists, thinkers, and leaders are suddenly my friends, sitting in the passenger seats, discussing the nuances of their art, politics, or scientific experiments such as Diamanda Galas on the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, Paul Celan, Pier Pasolini, Antonio Machado, and Henri Michaux; Chris Abani on the transformation of communities vis à vis language; James Baldwin at UC-Berkeley in 1974, introduced by Angela Davis; Elie Wiesel on the Jewishness of Jesus or William Faulkner’s Nobel speech.
The podcasts’s distant cousins are the legendary Books-on-Tapes, and the even older Spoken Word LPs, both of which caused alarm early on as to whether or not they would supplant print culture as primary sources of learning and textual engagement. What we’ve discovered, of course, is that each generation’s technology only enhances the reception of a given cultural work or author. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” is likely to be even more anthologized than other poems because we have that quivering voice of hers in performance to accompany the poem, itself worth reams of future, collegial essays.
Speaking of which, what will future scholars and researchers do with it all? Digital technology will leave behind youtube footage and flickr images of some of our most revered authors, scientists, and entertainers tying their shoes, brushing their teeth, and walking their dogs. There will be no mystery to contemplate; their sources, influences, and childhood traumas will be obvious and unproblematic, quite available to link up to their storehouse of mental images and imaginative ideas; and will such a glut of information slow down over time our collective mental intelligence? Still, how amazing that more of our waking lives can be captured and stored on a server for future consumption. It just all seems overwhelming.
Nonetheless, below is an unranked, non-exhaustive list of my top resources for podcasting pleasure. I hope you enjoy as much as I do. And please, add your own.
TedTalks
PEN American Center
Lannan Foundation Podcasts
Academy of American Poets
UBUweb
WGBH Forum Network
KQED The Writers Block
World of Ideas
Nobel Banquet Speeches
BBC Poetry Out Loud
BBC Radio 3
ps: I am putting in a special plug for PEN American Center’s 2007 Beyond Margins Awards ceremony podcast. It’s soooo good.