Readings : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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I threw the book into a dark garden and let it, all that winter, rot; retrieving it before the weather turned, to transcribe what was legible. Though I considered burning it, I threw the notebook, instead, into the bin. (Then, feeling guilty, plucked it out and put it in the recycling instead.) Some notes on retrieval, on the circulatory and evolutionary intensity of “scraps“; of the notebook next to the book: the book that fails:

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02.07.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (35)

Anselm Berrigan

Two more (cups of coffee then I’ll go)

Why do so many readers at poetry readings announce having two poems left to read? When I signed my contract to become a poet there was no clause as to this matter,

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01.11.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (20)

Anselm Berrigan

“She is mirage I feverishly address as specific”

Spent some time in a clinic today, the waiting turning into an interesting duration (every time I encounter the word duration I think of Kenneth Koch staring off into space during an interview saying, “everything lasts a certain period of time….that’s very odd”)

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11.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Edwin Torres

Buffer Zone Galactica

Reading with Will Alexander at the Poetry Project recently was a fabulous experience. One of the layers I walked away with was his between-poem chatter-as-parable.

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11.06.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Anselm Berrigan

a question on hearing

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 (21)

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)

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)

Poetry Foundation

Children’s Poetry Events

The Poetry Foundation cordially invites all kids and grown-ups to the following events with our Children’s Poet Laureates, past and present:

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10.03.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Tonya Foster

ADFEMPO: Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism

Am just back from the first day of the Belladonna ADFEMPO conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The opening plenary got off to a late but energizing start. (It didn’t start so late that I should have arrived home at 2 AM this morning in the back of a police car. But here I am. Not in the police car anymore but at home, in the after burn of that experience. I’d never ridden in a police car before tonight. Can’t say that it’s something I ever imagined doing. Those back seats are surprisingly stiff, collapsible I’m guessing. The officers were kind, gentle even, and took care to get me home after a bullying cab driver met the stubbornness my family often asks me to keep in check. But I work for a living too…)

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09.25.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)