Poets & Writers has launched a series of online guides to literary cities! Portland, L.A., Boston and Chicago are first up. We’re biased, so we’ll focus on Chicago for now. Writes Zach Dodson:

Thinking of literary places in Chicago invites nostalgia. For this roundup I was tempted to fall back on some old clichés, to ride Stuart Dybek’s El, or trace the footsteps of Nelson Algren or Studs Terkel as they canvassed seedy neighborhoods for stories.

But he restrains himself. Why?

These mythologies really have nothing to do with what’s going on in the Chicago lit world these days, so instead I asked myself: Where do I experience literary Chicago? The answer: mostly bars.

Uh-huh. We know exactly what you mean.

Dodson continues:

Bars are also the settings for many of the city’s best readings. The number of dynamic series is now so large it’s hard to keep track. When readings started to slant toward entertainment (a backlash against “boring readings”) a pressure cooker was created here, and series began to employ varied themes and devices, all meant to ensure that attendees of readings in Chicago have fun. So I thought I’d take a look at where this fun takes place, a pub crawl of the Chicago literary landscape, with a few stopovers along the way.

To join him on his tour—which includes such gems as the Hideout, Danny’s Tavern Reading Series, and, uh, the Sunday Night Sex Show—click here.

Hooray, Bookforum has got former editor Eric Banks in imaginative territory avec none other than Raymond Roussel (France, 1877-1933). Roussel’s writing can be mapped from being “un peu obscur” to achieving cult status, and now–with two new English translations in print–quite accessible, if you can grant such a word to “the enigmatic snare of his snaking language and its cul-de-sacs of text.” Banks discusses both the prose work Impressions of Africa, translated by Mark Polizzotti (and is that a Trevor Winkfield cover we spy?), “[which] more closely hews to the techniques Roussel elaborated in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, unfurling an extravagant fabric of bizarre scenes engendered by the author’s complex method of linguistic free association,” and “New Impressions of Africa (translated by Ford, Roussel’s biographer and a poet), a four-canto poem written in rhyming alexandrines that nominally spins off from a number of Egyptian settings, obeys its own beguiling rabbit-hole logic in a way that anticipates the Oulipian games decades in the future.” The poem took 17 years to complete, and was written while Roussel was serving in the French Army during the First World War. And now:

What is remarkable about Roussel’s torturous commitment to his literary career is that he ever entertained the notion that his intricate, tautly rendered feats of almost impenetrable brilliance would appeal to a mass readership. Never has a writer so misgauged the nature of his work or the scope of its appeal. It is thanks largely to the avant-garde he spurned that Roussel’s fragile literary standing was secured. With the exception of Michel Leiris, whose father was Roussel’s accountant, those who most appreciated his proleptic ingenuity discovered him in the decades after his death. Alain Robbe-Grillet found in Roussel’s obsessive attention to the mundane thinginess of the world a predecessor to the nouveau roman: His first novel, Le Voyeur, was originally titled La Vue in homage to Roussel’s long 1904 poem of the same name, a work that minutely describes a variety of miniature scenes, including a fifty-page digression dedicated to the spa pictured on the label of a bottle of mineral water on the narrator’s table. Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec admired his remarkable ability to spin thickly structured narratives from a hidden network of obscure puns, buried double entendres, felicitous homonyms, and devilish mondegreens, the “special method” of linguistic gamesmanship he revealed in the short volume published after his death, How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Michel Foucault wrote a critical study, Death and the Labyrinth, after the chance discovery of one of Roussel’s volumes in an antiquarian shop across from the Luxembourg Gardens. And in several critical essays, John Ashbery enthusiastically imported Roussel, extending his influence to the New York School of poets.

Read the entire piece, which also includes great detail on Roussel’s approach to language, imagination, and story, here.

Is it worth doing stuff that you don’t get paid for?

Earlier this year, I was emailing a friend who had just attended a really entertaining magazine release party that I — and eight or so people — had read at, and I closed my message with “I hope I’ll get to hear you read sometime — keep me posted on any events you’ll be doing?”

He responded that he’d already done two readings in Chicago in the last year, so he doubted he’d be doing more in the near future, to which I said, “Sad to hear you won’t be reading again anytime soon.” He replied that he reads all the time elsewhere, that it’s a good chunk of how he makes his living*, and that he just doesn’t see the point of reading in his own house all the time. He closed by citing a proverb that says, “Even the prettiest bird shouldn’t expect us listen to it sing ALL the time.”

I said, “Nice work if you can get it,” and he said that it does become work, which sometimes “f**ks it all up.” I said “I read out lot, but mostly because it’s fun. I should probably be more motivated by money than I am.”

But I didn’t really mean it. I mean, I meant the part about reading out, but not the part about money-as-primary-motivator. I don’t actually agree that the best determinant of the value of most activities is the extent to which one, as Beck would put it, gets real paid for doing them.

I appreciate the need to earn a living, but it the idea that readings you get paid money for are automatically worth more than ones that you don’t itself seems sort of impoverished. I don’t think money spoils readings — the Chicago Poetry Brothel, for instance, demonstrates how readings can change for the better when money is introduced into the equation — but I wouldn’t want every single reading I ever did to operate according to a flat-fee-per-poem format.

And it’s not that I don’t understand how a capitalist economy works, or that I undervalue poetry; it’s that I deliberately don’t want to act only in a way that reinforces that economy, and that I don’t want monetary value to be the only — or even the chief — kind of value that poetry holds.

I guess the handy cautionary metaphor for writers who read even when they’re not getting paid may be Who’ll buy the chicken if you give away the eggs for free? But what if nobody wants to buy the chicken regardless? What if your aim isn’t even to sell the chicken in the first place?

A saying I like a lot is: “What is the coin of poetry’s realm? Poetry is a gift economy.”

I also like thinking that maybe poetry isn’t an economy at all, but something else entirely. Perhaps it’s more of a community. And of course communities, with all their inclusivity and exclusivity, are not perfect either, as Alan Gilbert points out. But it still feels refreshing and hopeful to have spaces where people can interact and decide not to let the market determine everything.

Anyway. My question about all this is: Harriet bloggers and readers, how do you decide when to read out and when not to do so? Do you mostly say yes unless you have a legitimate scheduling conflict? Or do you say no unless you’re getting paid? Or do you have some other formula of when to say yes and when to say no, and how does that formula work?

*It seems worth noting here that — above and beyond any readings, paid or unpaid — my friend has a full-time teaching gig: salaried, with benefits.

Henri Cole, Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Maxine Kumin, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010 (W. W. Norton & Company)
Yehoshua November, God’s Optimism (Main Street Rag)
Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory {Saina}, (Omnidawn)
Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, (Wesleyan University Press)

Read all about the rest of the biz here.

Part one features John Cheever, Tom Wolfe and William Styron; part two includes Bernard Malamud, Eric Fromm and Anthony Burgess (who forgoes his fee so that editors John Tierney, Christopher Buckley, and Eric Goodman can buy themselves “a nice drink”); part three contributors range from Ayn Rand (who is still doing her part to bring about the apocalypse from beyond the grave) to John Barth, with visits from William Saroyan and Vladimir Nabokav’s wife:

VN thanks you for your charming letter. He says he is ‘trying to finish writing a novel before the end of the world.’ He regrets he must decline your kind offer.”

– Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

But the hands down winner in the apocalyptic race is Ray Bradbury who has faith that humankind can outrun the four horsemen when the time comes. In part four, alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Art Buchwald, Bradbury writes:

Gloryosky, guys, there ain’t gonna be no end to no world! Sorry to disappoint you and depress you with my exuberant good spirits and optimism, but we will build starships and move on out to Alpha Centauri and beyond and then we won’t give a damn about what happens to Earth, for we will, in sum, live forever, give or take a billion years. End of quote. Send me my twenty bucks!

– Ray Bradbury

On Thursday, February 24, at 6pm, Poetry magazine, the Poetry Foundation, the Columbia College Poetry Program, and the Center for Book and Paper Arts present: Performance Poetry in the Age of Language + Reception, featuring Edwin Torres. After the reading, the Center for Book and Paper Arts will host a reception for guests, where a selection of Torres’s visual text work will be on display, including his new book, Yes Thing No Thing.

Poetry wrote to Torres for a few words about his new book, and the interrelationship between word and image in his work. Here are a few of his thoughts on the matter, with glimpses of Yes Thing No Thing:

I know every book is a chapter in the writer’s life, and this one captures where my crossroads met at a time of great transition—leaving the city I grew up in, the urban nature, speed and vortex of a million flickering lights at once…replacing that with isolation, trees, endless sky and stars, a million pulsing lights. The graphic vocabulary in this book emerged from a wish to refrain from a global surface speed and rather construct from an interior minimal ground—a wish to listen more than be heard. The white space, the time implied, the geometric nature in the pages, the mantra-like repetitions, the language forged out of missing letters…there’s a slowing down compared to my previous books. Maybe a confidence in the words to let them just be, free in their world to meet the reader’s primal emptiness, a blank page we can all share, to create a symbiotic readership with the world we are all in. I think the pieces in this book have a sort of grounded fluidity that embraces the journey, the nomad I’ve always championed. Perhaps this destination is oceanic whereas previous ones have been more earth-bound. Showing the skeletal structures of the page is a way towards transparency for me, lowering the curtain behind the wizard. As a designer, I love showing support mechanisms juxtaposed with the organic uncontrolled—the balance of our personal dynamics at odds with our humanity. As I was creating the book I felt I had a chance here to quietly comment on a world out of control. The things that have run out of words, the yes and the no, how language filters through nature when words fail. So you see, I have no answer for this book’s ultimate challenge. No thing. A finite id…grateful to be caught.

About Edwin Torres
Multimedia pioneer Edwin Torres has been presenting his energetic blend of poetry, performance, music, dance and visual art since the late eighties. Born at New York City’s infamous Nuyorican Poets Café, as midwifed by the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, he has published and performed extensively in the US and abroad, and has given lectures and workshops at numerous universities, including Bard and Naropa University.

Thursday, February 3

12-1:15pm: Copyright and Fair Use: a legal review for poets (R158: Wilson A, B, & C Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level)

The “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry” has just been released (and it’s being talked about here, here, and here.)  Katharine Coles, inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute moderates a copyright/fair use panel with the Code’s co-facilitators, Peter Jaszi and Jennifer Urban, as well as law students from UC Berkeley and American University, who clarify copyright and fair use issues of concern to poets.

1:30-4:15pm: Copyright and Fair Use: a clinic for poets (R180: Taft Room, Taylor, Truman, Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level)

Following the 12pm panel and legal review on copyright and fair use, Coles, Jaszi and Urban re-convene to offer a three hour clinic for poets, who can sign up for brief consultations.

7-8:15pm: Poetry Foundation reception! (Maryland B, Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level)

Saturday, February 5

12-1:15pm: Writing Plays with Poetry: The Place of Verse Drama in Contemporary Literature and Theatre (S161: Wilson A, B, & C Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level)

Poetry Foundation president John Barr and program director Stephen Young join Sarah Kain Gutowski and David Yezzi to discuss verse drama written in the 20th century and reflect on the work of writers creating in the genre today. Why might a writer compose a play with poetry? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the genre? Does verse drama have a place in theatre today?

4:30-5:45pm: By Heart: the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest (S223: Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby)

Poetry Out Loud was conceived at AWP 2004 by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation. It’s since grown from a two-city pilot program to a program involving upwards of 325,000 students from all fifty states, DC, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Representatives from the Poetry Foundation and the NEA discuss the contest and how to participate with a teacher, an organizer, and a student participant.

We hope to see you at our booth, where we have a variety of giveaways and a great subscription offer (get that POETRY tote you’ve been wanting!)

Poetry magazine recently received this welcome dispatch from Chicago Review, with links to PDFs of knockouts from their latest number. From CR editor, V. Joshua Adams:

Readers of Harriet may be interested in two essays on contemporary poetry from the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:3—4). In “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry,” Peter O’Leary extols the virtues of a vatic approach in a poetry world “filled with allergies to the spirit.” His essay begins with a discussion of the noteworthy magazine apex of the M, and praises apocalyptic tendencies in the work of Joseph Donahue and Pam Rehm. Meanwhile, Keith Tuma’s “After the Bubble” takes aim at the silence of poets (of all kinds) on the relation between their world and that of the university. Tuma looks to Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson as two potential alternatives to a pervasive “aesthetic of courtesy” that prevents contemporary poetry from giving an accurate account of itself.

These essays are part of a feature of ten essays dedicated to the work of critic Robert von Hallberg. The introduction to the feature is available online, too.

The programs aim to teach students “right-brain” insights and skills they won’t learn dissecting cadavers or studying pathology slides. Schools hope the programs help to turn out a new generation of physicians better able to listen attentively to patients, show emotion and provide sensitive personal care.

As evidence of the success of such programs, the paper interviews Dane Jacobson, a student at the University of Iowa:

“I think if you write a lot of reflective pieces or emotionally charged pieces you do become more in tune with other people,” Mr. Jacobson says. “When I wrote a reflection on a patient I didn’t really like, putting it down on paper made me start to see things from their perspective.”

The crime procedural Poe follows Edgar Allan Poe as the world’s first detective. He employs unorthodox methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston. The project will tell how some of Poe’s famous stories came to be, but only some episodes will be about a specific Poe story. Chris Hollier (Alias) wrote the pilot and will produce along with Dan Lin (Sherlock Holmes).

(Sounds suspiciously like the John Cusack film, right?)

Poetry magazine recently exchanged e-mails with January cover artist Genevieve Simms, about her work. She says,

Illustration from its beginnings has always been tied to a text. I find with my personal work I am often interested in finding ways to use illustration in place of text entirely. For example, I may have forgotten the words to a song that my grandmother used to sing to me, but I can still try to tell it in pictures since I can remember the gist of it. The attached images are some pieces where I look for new ways to relate words.

Per request, she kindly wrote a little text about each image (meant to replace text).

This image is part of a series from a free-form narrative project done with a friend and fellow illustrator Byron Eggenschwiler. The idea here was that one person would do a drawing, show the other person, then over the next week the other person would do a drawing in response to the first, and so on.

Though this one does have some words on it, the idea is that it becomes its own little story unto itself. What is so interesting to me about this particular way of working collaboratively, is that each person ends up with drawings that are unmistakably their own, yet there is still a loosely woven narrative tying both sets together. The story is also something that remains mysterious to the two makers, a process I would maybe compare to using a Ouija board. The resulting imagery serves as a strange and otherworldly window of communication.

This set of drawings makes an effort to map out a folk song in Russian that my grandmother would sing to me when I was a small child. My understanding of Russian is pretty weak, and my grandmother has passed on. The song is still a favorite, even though the words, sounds, and exact meanings are lost on me. What I do have left is an overall impression of the song, which I try to slowly map out through drawing. I use the word “map” because I feel like I am taking a central point, or origin, in the form of a single image or scene that I think I remember as true to the song, and then try to retrace my steps around that using memory as a guide.

IBS Magazine (International Beauty Saloon Magazine) is an ongoing experimental book project. Each issue attempts to link a wide range of exploratory images and writing loosely based around a central theme. These two images were created for the issue themed on the word “space.” The images work as an exercise in word/image relationships. I remember from a young age having strong visual imagery associated with certain words, and attempt to articulate some of that here.

I went to the eBook Summit in New York this week in hopes of becoming a digital publishing expert. The Summit, organized by Mediabistro, was day-long conference chock full of speakers, panel discussions, and schmoozing with e-book experts, media giants, and otherwise interested parties. I went out of genuine curiousity — and fear. As a journalist, I worry my future will be limited to writing listicles and Tweets,  and as a writer of fiction, I’m not sure I’ll have a place in the new e-book world. I went to learn from the movers and shakers in e-publishing about what’s working and why so I can further my career as a writer —and maybe even making a living doing so.

Though I gleaned a ton of practical info from the media theorists, publishers, agents, writers, and editors who came to the WiFi-enabled Digital Disneyland, the most important things I took away had nothing to do with HTML or making my online persona recognizable. Above all, I was reminded that people will always yearn for well-crafted words and authentic connections with the authors who write them, no matter what the platform.

What has changed is how we connect and share. When award-winning poet and novelist Robert Hilles wanted to promote his latest book, he went beyond Facebook and Twitter.  Hilles created an account on Wattpad, an e-book network where writers can share their own work and comment on that of others. Though Hilles had already made a name for himself, (he’s the recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry) he still turned to an e-book community of emerging and established writers to tap into to what really drives book sales, whether online or in the real world: genuine connections with readers.

I spoke with Nina Lassam of Wattpad about how e-book communities are changing the role of the author and the way we measure literary value.  Lassam was among the Literati in attendance —including former Soft Skull press publisher Richard Nash (who spoke about his new publishing venture Cursor), Movable Type literary group co-founder Jason Ashlock, and media gurus Douglas Rushkoff and Ken Auletta—who all presented variations on a digital theme: emerging publishing platforms are shifting from the writer-agent-publisher food chain to egalitarian  ecosystems. In short, the writer-reader  relationship has evolved from an arranged marriage organized by publishers and agents to unmediated hook-ups. Utterly terrifying and completely empowering,  isn’t it?

The most inspiring aspect of the event was hearing from the digital storytellers who’ve already transformed ideas into innovations. Electric Literature co-publishers Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum spoke about Broadcastr, their forthcoming oral storytelling app that allows people to record and share personal stories. Peter Costanzo of Perseus Books Group described splicing text with old footage of JFK and Jackie O. to create an enhanced e-book about the American icons, and Jacqueline Bosnjak introduced collaborative publishing platform ThumbScribes, where stories and poems are co-authored by a creative community, sort of like a much cooler Google Wave.  Then there’s — well, you get the idea. You could practically see the light bulbs going off over everyone’s heads.

If you could stomach the digital jive talk – readers today need “engagement,” we must “cross-pollinate” between  old and new media,  content must be “curated” and have “discoverability”— then you could tap into the social media zeitgeist and enhance your online presence. Ahh! I can’t stop!

New Yorker writer and author of Googled: The End of the World As We Know It Ken Auletta capped off the conference with an anecdote about one of the founders of Google and words of wisdom about the nature of change.  He noted that we’re in the “throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks phase” – but that’s not a bad thing. Auletta mentioned that Apple’s first mobile device,  the Newton, was a complete bomb. (He was speaking to a sea of iPads and MacBooks.) His point was that great ideas are nothing without great vehicles, and no one knows what the Next Big Thing will be until it’s already here. So why not throw something against the wall, too?

Yet it was the frenetic Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and author of Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commandments for a Digital Age, who best summed up this fleeting moment in publishing: we’re trying to “poop before we eat,” meaning that we’re trying to predict outcomes before we’ve created  and processed content. Rushkoff also compared writers to “rats after the apocalypse” which I found oddly comforting.

While no one came up with HTML code for poetry e-books, and I may still be a digital dilettante, that’s really beside the point. All the new-fangled e-marketing and e-publishing tools are actually helping writers stay true to a few old adages: voracious readers make the best writers, people trust people and not computers, the revolution will not be televised, and at the end of the day, whether  it be the paper or tablet variety,  it’s still just a poet and a pad.

Sarabande

“and then looks at
the stars” from the
bed in the ambulance

looks up at boughs of
trees shifting quickly
lit in blackness

blackening soft, deep
siren’s song—she died
several times that night

and only in the weeks
to come started and
started to come back

then forward which is
real life

He is anthologized “in that famous book with all the poems.” “The Oxford Book of English Verse?” I said, “Yes,” she said but then you can’t really rely on her and titles. His most famous poem was something about his drunken Irish mother and her shaking hands. But he’s not Brendan Behan; I asked. He was probably born in the teens, since he told her a story about eating one of the queen’s swans during the Depression. She was born in 29 and said he was a little older than her.

This being the age of lightning fast information retrieval (and strangers who love the challenge of meddling in other peoples’ lives) it took one commenter all of 23 minutes to come up with the answer, and likely even less considering they probably didn’t read the post instantly. The upshot is that a lot of people are now interested in both the poet and the aunt’s paintings, but that’s always been the classic pro-gossip argument, right?

Pessoa died 75 years ago this week, but the famously glum author of the Book of Disquiet – whose central character exuded an air “born from the indifference of having suffered a great deal” – would recognise the wave of melancholy sweeping over his country.

“They talk of austerity, of self-control, and they appeal to our sense of sacrifice, so we pay tribute to the state of overall sadness,” read the Manifesto Against the State of Overall Sadness by Nunes and fellow artists as they proclaimed the death of the arts in Portugal.

“They are cutting the arts budget by 23%, even though it represents only a tiny bit of overall spending,” Nunes said. “I am trying to put together a show about the achievements of the Portuguese republic, which was born 100 years ago and brought with it liberty and great advances – but who will put it on now?”

It was not just artists who felt down. “What future? We have no future,” said Bruno Silva, a young waiter at a bar beside Rossio railway station. “We must choose between feeding ourselves or paying our debts. We can’t do both.”

MIT has just chosen a road too-often taken by lesser institutions and desperate, penny-pinching schools — one Frost, that well-loved writer and New England icon, would have despaired to look down for long — the path with no poetic translation. Next semester, if students at this great institution want to work beyond “Intro to Poetry” in honing the most essential tool of language and the longest-surviving written form, they will have to pore through the thin offerings on HowTo.Com, or walk through the cold to another school.

In response to my surprise at this rather embarrassing news, MIT poetry teacher Erica Funkhouser wrote back, “Really. I couldn’t be sorrier.”

As a student of the Graduate Program in Science Writing and a fellow victim of the budget cuts, I couldn’t be more ashamed. Shakespeare would be ashamed. William Carlos Williams, (a practicing physician and world-famous poet), appalled. I can’t imagine what that proto-Renaissance-man, Aristotle, would think.

I scoured the spring catalog for what could have possibly beaten out poetry in MIT’s judgement of what’s more important for a well-rounded student of the world to learn. Cryptic class titles like, “Word Made Digital,” “Communicating with Mobile Technology,” “Writing for Games,” and “Writing for Social Media” were still among the offerings in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies.

MIT has just sent a truly depressing message — we believe in Facebook more than we believe in the power of the poem to change, inspire, and remake the world.

Read the rest of Emily Ruppel’s post here.

From BBC News:

“Last night was a flavour of the type of event that you get poets of different cultures and languages into the same room.

“It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does. The Colombian poet William Ospina read entirely in Spanish and his poems appeared above him on a screen translated into English. Somehow that polarity between the text above him and his voice makes for this very powerful linguistic cocktail.”

Considering the language barriers and logistical issues, it’s an undertaking of, well, Olympian proportions. Armitage, however, is confident about his goal of following in the tradition of the ancient Greeks:  “I’ve always believed in aiming high and attempting the impossible – otherwise I wouldn’t have gone into poetry.”

Why would it make sense to analyze select poems by a disparate group of younger poets working today via one particular poem by Joe Ceravolo? Wouldn’t it be better, if one wanted to make the case that Ceravolo is newly relevant, to take his entire oeuvre as a reference field? And even if his poetry might presage formally (through its informality) some things some poets today are doing, surely there are many other ways they are writing that have nothing or little to do with Ceravolo, or have much more to do with a wide range of poets from diverse periods.

The fact is that there is something in the poetry of both Barbara Guest and Joe Ceravolo that is distinct from other poets of their time or later and which is becoming increasingly recognized and influential among poets working today. Let’s call it musicality . . .

We know that UbuWeb is not very good. In terms of films, the selection is random and the quality is often poor. The accompanying text to the films can be crummy, mostly poached from whatever is available around the net. So are the films: they are mostly grabbed from private closed file-sharing communities and made available for the public, hence the often lousy quality of the films. It could be done much better.

Yet, in terms of how we’ve gone about building the archive, if we had to ask for permission, we wouldn’t exist . . .

Indiewire puts all of this in the context of Hollywood and digital rights:

Just this month, a heated debate flared up on the avant-garde listserv Frameworks about the merits of UbuWeb, a website containing hundreds of experimental works, including streaming videos of many films unavailable anywhere else. Since launching in 1996, UbuWeb (usually just called Ubu) has gained prominence in academic circles for making certain rarities easily accessible. However, the site freely posts materials without always seeking the permission of its owners, and though it removes videos upon request, some people deem the entire operation illegitimate. One Frameworks contributor called Ubu’s modus operandi “disrespectful”; others eloquently rose to its defense . . .

The micro-feud surrounding Ubu sits on a vastly different plane from the piracy issues plaguing Hollywood. Yet the dialogue showcases a continual unease throughout every facet of the industry about the availability of movies on the Internet, particularly when they cost nothing. With piracy more popular than ever, many insiders have begun expressing a growing fear that the movie business will face the bleak fate that met the recording industry of America, which lost millions of dollars while vainly attempting to clamp down on illegal downloads by suing fans. Avant-garde filmmakers usually don’t have millions of dollars at stake, which is partly why sites like UbuWeb have managed to flourish. None of that placates a seasoned distributor like Doros. “We don’t have the resources to combat illegal sites,” he said. “When it’s on our level, individual filmmakers and producers get hurt.”

Wonder what the poets think.

Yoshioka presents somewhat of an enigma, not only in his choice to continue in the Modernist vein when it was no longer popular, but by the fact that he is an avant-gardist without a theory. Unlike his Modernist predecessors, Yoshioka never produced any writings on poetics, and though widely admired, never became the official “leader” of a movement or school of poetry.

Olson served as the final rector of Black Mountain College, the experimental and influential interdisciplinary liberal arts college that operated from 1933 to 1957 in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. Black Mountain launched an extraordinary number of literary, performing and visual artists of the American avant-garde of the 1960s who continue to influence a wide range of American artists today.

Olson could be considered the godfather of the critically acclaimed UB Poetics Program, founded and directed by the late UB Professor Robert Creeley, who taught at Black Mountain, and with whom Olson enjoyed a lively correspondence. In fact, Olson coined the term “postmodern” in a 1949 letter to Creeley.

(via the good folks at Harriet’s local bookstore)

Among the writers appearing during the celebration will be Diane di Prima, poet laureate of San Francisco, and Michael Rumaker, both of whom studied with Olson at the influential Black Mountain School in the early 1950s. Other readings will include Anastas himself, Ammiel Alcalay, Gerrit Lansing, Charles Stein, Ed Sanders and many others. Henry Ferrini will read his children’s book based on Olson, “Little Charlie Goes to Gloucester,” there will be accompanying exhibitions at the Sawyer Free Library and the Cape Ann Museum, and other activities including a “Maximus Walk” to landmarks written about in the poems, a presentation of Olson’s dance play “Apollonius of Tyana” (see related story), and a screening of Ferrini’s documentary about the poet, “Polis is This.”

For the full schedule, click here.

About halfway into “Howl,” the edgy, thoughtful new docudrama by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, you begin to realize that, in his uncanny recreation of Allen Ginsberg’s speech and performance rhythms, James Franco is beginning to edge into an series of incantatory rhythms not unlike that of a chasid in the throes of ecstatic prayer.

The critic follows up with some mixed, yet compelling, metaphors.

It’s a telling moment, keenly observed, that places Ginsberg not only in the chain of tradition of that master of the long line, Walt Whitman, but in the wake of the same waves of chasidism that Whitman himself apparently knew. And when Franco/Ginsberg describes his writing as seeking “a rhythmic articulation of feeling” that begins in the pit of the stomach and travels with the breath to the head and mouth, he is, wittingly or not, describing the same combination of breath and prayer that other Jewish mystics have invoked.

Discussion of “bop kabbalah” follows.

“Archaic Awe”

My name is Bossyboots.
Liza Minnelli chose me for audience

participation guinea
pig. On a pad

I doodled
Fallopian detours. Later

Liza escaped on a daisy-
festooned tangerine

bike, handlebars
shrink-wrapped, while eating a water biscuit.

From Screened:

After EA’s Dante’s Inferno, I suppose it’s no surprise that someone would want to tap more epic poetry for big, dumb entertainment projects, and I have to say that the thought of a huge battle between angels and demons might make for some interesting visuals, but stil—ugh. Whatever happened to the Alex Proyas I used to know?

Maybe it will be as good as this 2007 version of “Paradise Lost”?

From the Huffington Post:

At lunch the composer told me of how he had been germinating the story in his head for some ten years, going back to the original 1972 play, book, and film for source material, and when Edgar and Placido encouraged him to finish the work with a promise of a world premiere in Los Angeles, he buckled down and spent the past six years polishing it. The opera company’s energetic Chairman, financier Marc Stern, told me that despite the hard economic times and the all-encompassing Wagner Ring of last year, they were determined to mount a first-class production of the new work… and did they ever!