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Like many people, my interest in poetry grew out of my interest in music. As a listener, I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Joe Henry, Rennie Sparks from The Handsome Family, Chuck D, Gershwin. Regardless of the song-genre, great lyrics hit me first. My interest in reading poetry came about in a much sneakier way. I took voice classes in college and unwittingly sang art songs derived from poems. (One teacher marveled — in what I’m still not sure was a compliment — at my “gift” at turning any art song into a country tune). I had no idea that the German songs I loved were actually poems by Schiller and Goethe, nor that one of my favorite folk songs was a Yeats poem set to music by Benjamin Britten. Here’s my audio version of this last song, Down By the Salley Gardens.

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11.06.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More Answers

Many thanks to Brent E. Beltrán and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán of Calaca Press, Patrick Durgin of Kenning Editions, and Willie Perdomo of Cypher Books for their responses to my indie publishing questions.

I know my current series of posts (#1 | #2) on indie publishing isn’t garnering heaps of Harriet comments, which is fine, because I do know these posts are generating good conversation, and that others about small presses and independent publishing are happening elsewhere in poet e-world.

Over at HTMLGIANT, Rauan Klassnik asks, “What’s Right and What’s Wrong with the Small Press World?” Read responses from Reb Livingston and Justin Marks.

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11.06.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part II

(note: this is part II of a 1996 letter from the late Doug Oliver on his book Poetry and Narrative in Performance)

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

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10.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions and More Answers

Regarding my previous post on indie publishing, Glen has commented, “In some ways I feel like there’s too much poetry being published right now and not enough filtering, so it’s interesting to hear from people who feel the opposite.” To this, I’ve responded that his question “leads to the question of filtering, the criteria for filtering, and who determines the criteria for filtering.”

That said, thank you to Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books, Craig Santos Perez and Jennifer Reimer of Achiote Press, and Susan Schultz of Tinfish Press for answering my questions about indie publishing.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

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10.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part I

I remembered recently the existence of a letter my stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver, wrote me thirteen years ago to explain, on my request, the series of experiments he conducted in his study of prosody and voicing, Poetry and Narrative in Performance. The book was published in 1989, and I think the recordings that he describes in the letter and the subsequent analyses (very densely related in the book) must have taken place a few years earlier. I’m very interested in the matters discussed in the letter, and as it will have been ten years this coming April since he died, Doug is very much on my mind. But the work he did is the point, and the focus of my attention, so I’d like to share this letter. The length of the letter necessitates it being divided into at least two posts. Doug is writing from Paris; I am 24 and living in San Francisco. To a very tiny extent the language and tone of the letter is pitched specifically to me, but I think it is by and large available to any interested reader:

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10.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions and Several Answers

Thank you to Eileen Tabios, Francisco Aragón, Reb Livingston, and Rusty Morrison, for answering a couple of very broad questions regarding indie publishing for me. Below are their responses.

Question: Why did you start your small press/why did you become an independent publisher? What need was not being met by the existing presses?

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10.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Rachel McKibbens, ‘Pink Elephant’ (Cypher Books, 2009)

PinkElephant_cover

Rachel McKibbens’s lovely and serrated debut collection, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books), reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. Ex-punk rock chola and mother of five, 2009 Women’s Individual World Poetry Slam champion Rachel McKibbens writes about abandonment and abuse in stark, startling language and well-wrought fable, delivered in well-paced lines, laying bare the history of a woman who’s “fed [her] body to the hungry for years.”

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10.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (18)

Abigail Deutsch

And how should I begin?

crumb-genesis-page

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)

John S. O'Connor

Once More, in English Please

The recent announcement that Herta Muller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature came as a huge surprise to me as I’m sure it did to many Americans. While Muller has written twenty books, only 5, according to the New York Times, have been translated into English. The tiny percentage of Muller’s work translated into English is hardly an aberration. Rather, it is a sad symptom of a much larger problem. There has been a steady decline in the number of literary works translated into English, and in the United States the decline has perhaps been even more precipitous than in other English speaking nations.

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10.12.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

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)

Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

John S. O'Connor

Poemsinging

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More Answers

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part II

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions and More Answers

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part I

Barbara Jane Reyes

Indie Publishing: Two Questions and Several Answers

Barbara Jane Reyes

Rachel McKibbens, ‘Pink Elephant’ (Cypher Books, 2009)

Abigail Deutsch

And how should I begin?

John S. O'Connor

Once More, in English Please

Anselm Berrigan

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