In the documentary I Am Secretly An Important Man, filmmaker Peter Sillen chronicles the life of Steven “Jesse” Bernstein, a poet, father, artist, musician and addict who hit the Seattle scene like a bomb in the 1980s before committing suicide in 1991. Called the “godfather of grunge,” Bernstein is credited with influencing minds like Kurt Cobain’s with his fearless exploration of dark places.

The film opens with a grainy, black-and-white shot of Bernstein’s profile. He begins to read about his appearance, in his calculated canter. His face contorts and he spits and snarls the word “ugly.” His poems spoke frankly about things like this — his mother telling him to look at his face in the mirror, a girl laughing at him on the playground after he proposed to her.

With his unique approach to poetry and performance, Bernstein began to build an empire for himself. The film covers his rise, from his first small book (published by a stripper) to the highlight of his career — opening for his hero, William S. Burroughs. He was also signed to Sub Pop records, which set his readings to music — a monumental step in poetry.

The article, with videos of the trailer and Bernstein playing a song, is available here.

About Hackney Hear from Hackney Hear on Vimeo.

While the last line from Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses” has been chosen to adorn the wall of the Olympic Village, the award-winning Hackney Podcast has a more modern take on incorporating poetry into the Olympics. Hackney Hear is a new project that links up over 400 audio recordings— poetry, stories and music—with GPS data as a mobile app to navigate the borough by sound.

Contributing poets so far include Iain Sinclair, Michael Rosen and Lemn Sissay with plans to commission original works from dozens more. Hackney will be the main site of the 2012 Olympics in London and the podcast producers are planning the app’s release for January to coincide with pre-game celebrations.

But it’s the function of poetry that interests the Big Show’s Alex Gallafent. He explores what poetry does for those who write it and for the particular community that reads it through the words of people not necessarily known for being poets but who turn to it when nothing else will suffice. How does one process a profound tragedy or cope with being taken hostage, and does making a conscious, personal choice about the vocabulary one uses allow for the poem to have a greater personal impact in others? Creating a language of poetry can also be a reaction to being constricted by a narrow language in which one is forced to communicate, as in the case of a lawyer whose poetry is an escape from the confines of legalese.

“a hilarious discussion between salvador dali and edward mulhare (who was touring at the time replacing rex harrisson as henry higgins in the play my fair lady) where dali suggests a new way of intuitively articulating familiar words to make them more interesting. it’s a nice way of making everyday words sound a bit like kurt schwitters ursonate. according to the notes: “mr. dali urges that after this initial exposure to dalinguistics echo listeners will, with words of their own choosing, employ his methods to strengthen their communicating power.”

“I was an arts organizer before I took myself seriously as an artist. From 1942, the date of the first work for which I still have an affection until 1964, I still regarded myself as an amateur in the arts. The ABC in Sound, 1964, lead me to believe I could become professional, which I did full time in 1967. The habit of arts organizing is still with me.”

Collaborators on these pieces include Peter Finch, Hugh Metcalfe, Anna Lockwood and Jeff Keen.

Natasha Trethewey and Evelyne Trouillot will keynote this week’s conference From Natural Events to Social Disasters in the Circum-Caribbean hosted by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at University of Texas, Austin. The conference will discuss the long-running injustices across the region that natural disasters of the past few years have suddenly exposed to a much wider audience. With a particular focus on cultural production, the conference asks not only about the consequences, but how one communicates them now that so much (often ill-informed) attention has resulted from these disasters.

From hurricanes to earthquakes to landslides, natural disasters have profoundly shaped the relationship between humans and the environment in the region. Not unlike the earthquakes that struck Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1970s, the destruction brought to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 revealed historical and ongoing forms of social inequality, environmental hazards, and political crisis that plague the circum-Caribbean region. This conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines, artists, and activists who have been immersed in disaster relief and solidarity efforts. Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti offer the most salient examples, and these two sites will serve as focal points for the conference.

Earlier this year, Trethewey released a memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast about her family’s process to after the hurricane. In her Fresh Air interview, “she explains that both the identity and future of the Gulf region are directly linked to how the region’s past is remembered,” something that will likely be an important theme this week.

Post-flarf poetry turns to the pre-modernist? There’s probably a pun about the internet and obsolescence lurking here somewhere…

I’ve been thinking a lot about this very thing lately. After my recent interview about the books I read last year, I realised I’ve hardly read any books from other African countries except for South Africa. It is easier for me to buy a book from America or the UK than is is for me to buy a book from another African country. The books are just not available. There is something wrong with that. It appears this is the same for many areas of the arts.

The limitations on African poets are bidirectional; not only is there little access to material from other African countries, their work is vetted to a global audience through outside systems, keeping a very tight, closed loop on the definition of African literature and the new work its influence produces. According to the The Africa Centre, “New voices in Pan-African poetry have historically gained their global exposure and documentation through foreign publications and academic research. These narrow channels have limited the plethora of African writers, poets, and academics from being read and heard throughout the world.” To help you catch up on all of the Pan-African poetry you’ve been missing, the site also features and impressive database of poets’ recordings here.

It’s true pirate radio, internet-style, with some of my literary friends and friends-of-friends generously donating their words and time for your listening pleasure. The readings and discussions range widely, from a short story recorded professionally in the studio of some guy named Ira who evidently has an interest in American lives, to a self-produced audio essay recorded on location in Africa, to what sounds like a writer who’s broken into your kitchen late at night to drink your bourbon and pet your dog, and when you discover him there he tells you a crazy-funny tale about the Russian mob stealing a river.

It promises to be “asynchronous as hell” in case you won’t be present for the AWP festivities themselves, though if you couldn’t make it because you’re trapped under three feet of snow, the internet may still not be much help. Analog shovels beat digital ones every time.

From the looks of the remaining poets on the list—Jack Kerouac, Tom Waits, Ken Nordine, Patti Smith, Saul Williams and Gil Scott-Herron— the documentaries will continue skipping around through various eras and dropping in on a handful of different genres along the way. There aren’t too many surprises among them, but right now KEXP has only announced nine of the ten. Perhaps there’s still room for Kenneth Goldsmith?

Wait, don’t let the spring, the clearness of the sky and the shine of the morning light fool you…
Because the darkness, the thunder rumble and the blowing of the wind are coming toward you from the horizon
Beware because there is a fire underneath the ash

Listen to the poem at NPR.

His logs have been running for 22 years to a mostly appreciative audience. Besides his rhyming skills and humor, its his keen observations of what the crimes tell us about our ordinary friends and neighbors that really grip his audience.

Nolan makes sure to pump up his vocabulary. Windows are smashed, not broken. Music isn’t turned up, it’s cranked. And he loves his puns. “On Winter Street a lady pushes a gentleman through a window to air a grievance.”

The line makes you smile until you think about what actually happened. Was it sexual assault? Was it a break-in?

Not everyone in his community thinks that crime should be treated so lightly, but then they are conflating the act of committing something to poetry with not taking it seriously. There’s a darkness and “gallows humor” in the lightest of Nolan’s light verse.

“I think you’ve got to almost take a sympathetic view of the other side of things. You know, if you can soar up above it a little bit and look down at the whole human condition you can make it a little bit more sympathetic, I think.”

Nolan expresses that with powerful sentences that capture moments in still life. “5:47 p.m. With only a crescent moon, teens fight under a street light.”

And then it’s back to Fail Blog.

“L’amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer” is one of the best known examples of Dada tonal poetry, in which several voices speak, sing, whistle, etc. simultaneously in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work. The simultaneous poem demonstrates the value of the human voice and is a powerful illustration of the fact that an organic work of art has a will of its own.

The version featured here is not an original recording but one made by the Italian Trio Excoco: Hanna Aurbacher, Theophil Maier and Ewald Liska.

“Certain clowns upset Shakespeare.”

More insights here

Nowak explains how Coal Mountain Elementary is a poetic pastiche that weaves newspaper reports and mining pedagogy together with narratives about the disaster in Sago, West Virginia that left 12 miners dead and mining communities in China, where it is not uncommon for a dozen miners to lose their lives in a single day. Nowak considers himself a “documentary poet” because his work draws upon contemporary cinema and nontraditional musical mash-ups. Through the “different but all too similar” stories of Chinese and American miners, he examines the long-term effects of the industry on mining communities and the social and political forces that shape dangerous mining practices – and how we are collectively responsible for them.  

You can read more about Nowak’s project and where it took him in Justin Hopper’s feature, “From Sago to Xinjiang.”

When we interviewed CD Wright for our story “Deborah Luster: One Big Self” she read some of her poetry for us from her collaboration with Deborah, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Here are a few poems from the project. Some written. Some spoken.

The podcast is an edited version of a talk given by Antjie Krog at the 2008 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. It provides the perfect historical and linguistic context and illustrates just why this World Cup is so special.

Listen here.

“There have been pop musicians in the past—Joni Mitchell and Loreena McKennitt, for example—who have set poems to music, but no one has ever done anything of this scale or range. What Natalie has done is to create art songs, in the old sense of taking preexisting poems and setting them to music. She’s the Franz Schubert of folk-rock.”

In an audio clip on the Two Words site, Marlon Hom discusses the poetry etched by Chinese immigrants into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay.

For 30 year the Angel Island Immigration Station processed over 200,000 immigrants, most of them Chinese. Confined to a small cell and awaiting their fate, Chinese immigrants found various ways to assuage their anxiety: one of them was poetry, which they carved into the station’s wooden walls. These poems speak of anger, frustration, uncertainty, and hope, and they contradict the myth that Chinese immigrants were illiterate laborers . . .

Sean Nevin didn’t have any kind of personal connection with Alzheimer’s when he first began writing about memory. He and a fellow poet had an idea to go into assisted care facilities and see if they could use poetry to reconnect Alzheimer’s patients to their memories. Then his own grandfather began struggling with dementia. Sean Nevin talks with Dick Gordon about how writing about memory for his book, “Oblivio Gate,” became an obsession that was quite uncomfortable at times.

Jennifer Karmin makes a three hour walking poem for the city of Chicago over at How2:

I wanted to navigate a city using writing as my map. During October 2006, I sent out a call for submissions with the goal of gathering writing about walking in cities. I specified that the writing could be about any city and take any shape or form. In addition to their writing, I asked contributors to send me a number from 1 to 92, and a direction: forward, backwards, right or left. My plan was to take all the writing I received and perform Walking Poem for the 1st annual Chicago Calling Festival. The festival showcases collaborative projects between Chicago-based artists and artists living elsewhere, in the U.S. and worldwide. Founder Daniel Godston chose Pablo Picasso’s birthday, October 25th, to be the date for the inaugural festival. I chose the Chicago Picasso sculpture, located in Daley Plaza, as a starting point for my Walking Poem navigation. 50 feet high and weighing 162 tons, it was the first major public art piece in downtown Chicago. Picasso refused to accept the $100,000 fee for this work, stating that he wanted to give a gift “to the people of Chicago.”

1. Andy Warhol – The Plastic Exploding Inevitable Newspaper
2. John Cage – Memogram Correspondences
3. Vito Acconci – Two Track (1971)
4. Yvonne Rainer – Hand Movie (1966)
5. Ernst Jandl – Sound Poems
6. Carl Fernbach Flarsheim – Visual Poems
7. Morton Feldman – Audio Works
8. Steve Reich – Score for Pendulum Music, 1968
9. Al Hansen – Incomplete Requiem for W. C. Fields (1966)
10. Ian Hamilton Finlay – Wave/rock

“Can you start here at ‘blab of the pave?’”

Listen here.

I wanted to shout out Rachelle Cruz, whose work I was introduced to a couple of years ago at the San Francisco Litquake’s boisterous Litcrawl, where she read for the API arts org, Kearny Street Workshop. I picked up her chapbook, honey may soon run out, because I was impressed with how concrete, meticulous, and emotionally well-considered her poems and her reading were. She’s a young and energetic poet, a recent PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, and I am confident we’ll be seeing all kinds of good work coming from her in years to come. Currently, she is the host of the weekly The Blood-Jet Writing Hour online radio show.

Why a radio show/podcast? What was your way into conducting the live interview?

I met Rafael Alvarado, poet and host of “Moe Green Poetry Discussion” at the Poetry Stage of the Los Angeles Festival of Books in spring 2009. I spent most of the two-day festival meeting writers and listening to the work of poets I admire: Jeffery McDaniel, Sesshu Foster, Barbara Hamby, among others. Rafael, always on the move for new writers to interview, invited me to be a guest on his show. Rafael later offered me a show on the Word Wide Radio Network on BlogTalkRadio, which presented me with the opportunity to speak with writers whose work I’d fallen in love with, in addition to emerging writers, some of whom were friends, others I’d never met and was curious about. “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” was born with Sylvia Plath’s quote in mind: “Poetry is the blood-jet; there is no stopping it.” Although Plath’s life ended prematurely, her work is alive and still beats with this blood. I loved the tension and immediacy that this quote brings forth. For me, poetry is sustainability, allowing this blood-jet to flow and spurt. Other than taking a journalism class in high school, I honestly had no experience in conducting live interviews, so it was mostly trial and error.

I think it’s crucial to hear the sound of the poet’s voice. Poetry is the oldest song; an oral tradition. On the show, I’ll occasionally read along as the guest poet performs their work, but for the most part, I enjoy the music of their work. I discover new things when I simply listen. I love hearing the choices in tone and pacing a poet makes when performing their work. I hope for poetry lovers who live in areas where their favorite poets aren’t visiting or in some cases where, unfortunately, poetry readings just aren’t happening, online shows like “The Blood-Jet” are a resource. These shows can be conveniently streamed live from the comforts of a living room or office or anywhere with internet.

How do you select poets to feature? Who/what kind of poets interest you? Who are your influences (1) for hosting/radio/podcasting, and (2) for your own poetry/writing processes?

I select poets using any number of the following criteria:

I admire and am moved by their work and use “The Blood-Jet” as an excuse to let out my inner fan-girl.

I seek to showcase a diversity of poets (personal background, craft, style, education) who are underrepresented in the “mainstream” literary community. In addition, as a Filipina poet, I strive to bring as many writers of color, especially Asian American poets on the show. I try my best to invite newer, emerging writers who have experience in community spaces, such as the PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellows; Tara Betts, who is a Cave Canem Fellow; Ellen Hagan, who teaches youth in New York City through arts organizations, among many others.

I also invite poets who have been recommended by listeners of the show.

My radio influences include Poetry Foundation podcasts (I like Poetry Off the Shelf the best), the PennSound podcast through University of Pennsylvania, and iTunes’ Meet the Author series.

For my own poetry and writing, I read and revisit the work of Toni Morrison, Barbara Jane Reyes, Aracelis Girmay, Patrick Rosal, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda, Lorca, Sylvia Plath….

Can poetry community be created and maintained via radio?

Yes, I think poetry community can be created and maintained via radio. The Word Wide World Radio Network on BlogTalkRadio maintains close to ten shows varying in style and structure but they all focus on writing, poetry, and prose. WWWRN just celebrated its its third anniversary of poetry and prose on the radio. As far as “The Blood-Jet” goes, I try to stay in the loop with poets and writers who’ve been on the show by linking blogs, posting their events on “The Blood-Jet” blog, etc.

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“The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” is an online radio show, hosted by poet and host Rachelle Cruz, where poets and writers share their work and discuss their craft, process, and the pulse that keeps them writing. It’s streamed live at www.blogtalkradio.com/onward on Friday mornings Pacific Standard Time.