From a list of the most interesting list of of finalists ever (so says Ron Silliman), the National Book Award judges picked Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press) as this year’s winner.

Waldrop, a fixture of the poetry world of Providence, Rhode Island, has been celebrated as a translator (most recently of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) and as a publisher, with his wife Rosmarie, of Burning Deck Press.

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy is made up of three long poem sequences that mix philosophy and poetry in a style familiar to readers of Waldrop’s fourteen other collections.

“These powerful poems,” says his publisher, “at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.”

Publisher’s Weekly called the collection “entrancing” and the Providence Sunday Journal said it’s “a complex, absorbing work.”

The National Book Award judges said: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

Pennsound has a large collection of Waldrop recordings up for those who want deep immersion into the transcendental experience.

For anyone else who just wants a taste of the celebration, here’s a short clip from St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Have the NBAs transcended?  Has this award gone to a notably different poet than it has in the past (2008: Mark Doty; 2007: Robert Hass; 2006: Nathaniel Mackey)?

Many have noted the poetry latent in Sarah Palin’s speech. Now that she’s published a memoir, Going Rogue, many are noting the non-poetry of her non-prose.

But who would have imagined that Palin had a poetic forerunner, a partner in rhyme, a fellow Bard of Bad? Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), popularly called the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” produced reams of writing that soon became known as the worst of the verse. If Palin wrote a poem, I posit, it would be this definitive work of Moore’s.

To My Friends and Critics
(an excerpt)

Perhaps you’ve read the papers
Containing my interview;
I hope you kind good people
Will not believe it true.
Some Editors of the papers
They thought it would be wise
To write a column about me,
So they filled it up with lies.

The papers have ridiculed me
A year and a half or more.
Such slander as the interview
I never read before.
Some reporters and editors
Are versed in telling lies.
Others it seems are willing
To let industry rise.

The people of good judgment
Will read the papers through,
And not rely on its truth
Without a candid view.
My first attempt at literature
Is the “Sweet Singer” by name,
I wrote that book without a thought
Of the future, or of fame.

Well, looks like my time here has come to a close. It’s been interesting watching you all anonymously thumbs up and thumbs down one another. In all seriousness, thank you for reading my posts, and allowing me to introduce you all to some poets, poetry, and indie presses which may not have otherwise blipped on your radar.

I will be posting here every now and then; there have been books sitting in my growing “to review” stack, and I do mean to say a few things about a couple of them, namely these two:

INCANTATIONS: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Xpetra Ernandes / Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom / Ambar Past (Cinco Puntos Press, 2009).

KILLING KANOKO: SELECTED POEMS OF HIROMI ITO Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books, 2009). You can read more about Ito here).

And this brings me to my question: how do you write about translated poetic work when you don’t read the original language, and when the original language is not included with the translated text (you know, like when you read Lorca, and the original Spanish is included on the facing page)?

That said, it’s back to my own cozy blog for me. Do come and have conversations with me there.

There was also the other night with the video reading laced with empathy, resistance, Zidane, the wreckage of the pines, the taking of the photos of the sleeping men in their row, the cosmic interconnection of all things? Check. Futility of pain management as source of humour? Check. Controllable vices for purposes of a secondary level of interior life, echo of conscience trailing out? Check. A sense of time as discontinuous in its spread while expanding on a surface line that is only a reflection of a sense of line? Check. Total distrust of command but for the contradictory moments of necessity? Half-check. Digging the ecstasy of swinging? Yes. Laughing with the tree? Yes. Is the tree funny? Yes. Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra.

Radioactive chalk on a wet post-portal playground was the yesterday excuse for meeting skipping. Help! I was frying some puppies on the stove when I thought I ‘d start to sell them on a blog in halloween costumes! But then I found your site (great site, really informative), and now I think I’ll sell surgical gloves made out of heroees. Thanks! Can I link to your blog? Can I buy goods from your friends and snort them? Not only is your blog pragmatic, it comes with a packet of silica gel (do not eat)! I like to make shapes in the head and in the ears, and I also like to make them in the room. Is there relation in the relation you relate to?

As lists go, to shatter the mindage of yea who built them, they may think of indolence in its softer terms, menu-like in its array of dreams in parti-colored favors: this brown face with those pink eyes cut out of these yellow cans, the artifice of neon whiskers, the textolatry of dirt in the form of specks riddling the dino-acts thinking through the objectification of feeling. So what if the rain is friendlier than your ever-slithering definition of work? What is most ordinary every day is defeating this desire to harden into respectable indifference.  I’m learning the characteristics of the space.

“So when I’m setting up I have to learn how to make the kind of shapes, the power of music that I want to generate in that place. I mix during performance only in one place, so I have to know the rest of the space by heard. It involves a tremendous amount of time, walking, listening, going back to the mixing-board, establishing levels and discovering what kind of world you want to make. In that sense you’re even composing, because you haven’t been in these spaces before. Do we perceive the sound in the room, in our head, a great distance away? Or do we experience these three dimensions at the same time? At Tokushima in these wonderful spaces it was even more possible to realize that. Or we perceive just enough to trigger patterns, melodies, created deep within our neural sensitivities, shaping some responses. Do we experience a sound dimension as though blocks away or very near, moving beside us, outside and around one ear only, do we feel melodies as they develop inside, within our ears, and we move our head, and we raise a hand to rub away a melody that’s circling our nose, does the sound drift, or does it fall like rain, does it make such a clear shape in the air we seem to see it, in front of our eyes? There are so many ways. Do we continue to hear sound as our mind processes aftersound, or music perceived minutes ago? And that affects how structural changes in sound happen in music.”

And it was very good to hear Claudia Rankine and Mom read, and to think about the above on sound from Maryanne Amacher, and to feel like the fresco of a collage at George Schneeman’s memorial, and to see into the future for no good reason, and to subdue verification for an angular tremulous wish in fastidious contrast to simoom for Will Alexander, whose Exobiology As Goddess caused the writing of my object is an emptiness on which words appear, and, much as one bends, to chalk the strong present tense against all rumours of wrath past and to come.

The crowd arrives in a burst of flashlights and tango. The ears primed for tin can cantatas. The white-dressed flamenceros waltzing with the cubists. The anti-history mechanics arriving with sheepskin mandelas. El Museo Del Barrio, on the north end of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, is an orange and green sherbert in glass light, hosting tonight’s event: “Viva Futurism! Revolution, Vanguardia, and the Modern Metropolis.“  The music man dressed in vertigo, mechanizes his mixing wheels — industrial torque scaled down to the size of a CD. Hola, to the pre-period-costume under the strobed feather. Looking good, to the lipstick gazzarellos chewing tobacco to Satie. Welcome to Futurismo in Latin America. This posting was supposed to be a pre-review of what hadn’t happened yet, but it was finished after it happened. Tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever you read this…the future will be happening one more time, again.
 

Sponsored by Performa ‘09, the festival is under an umbrella of multo-multo Futurist events this year. Excerpts of Marinetti’s manifesto are read in English by a peacock-eyed woman in bowler hat, shirt and suspenders…and in French by the evening’s curator and master of ceremony, Nicky Enright, doing his best Futurist-scowl with Nicaragua-tinged vowelings. While Futurism’s mandate of speed is as present as ever, its rebellion against the old is ironically antiquated. Those cringey end-of-the-world lines may come off a bit dated, but the basis of its attempt to change the world with the excitement of transformative art permeates now and forever. Señor Nicky provides the live soundtrack to go with the video he also created as both backdrop and feature, mixing period-music with contemporary-atonal, feeding it through effects and choosing to isolate an instrument to echo as a solo warble through walls and skin. 

I need a breath of air to go over some lines…pardon me the student with the happening skirt, excusé mois the elegant nuyo-taino couple vaya reprazent…stepping out of the space-zone, the view from the courtyard, glassy and modern with spins of tropicalia accenting a burbling wash of light. The museum’s recent renovation has given it a much-needed polish of now, a visual clavé beat announcing its arrival from the street. Time to step back in.

The harmonica player, Ernesto Gomez, rides the island mood against drum beats with rare restraint, a sublime moment, alternating music with recitation. Electronic swoops against a conga that filters in and out of his harmonica, playing folk-island riffs under a tragic backbeat. I felt I was hearing the future looking back at its mirror — a beautifully unresolved mirror. Next is Mariposa, badass in crisp white men’s hat and suit, performing her ode to women, Mujer-nifesta, the perfect piece for this crowd, her crowd. Then Noël Jones powers through to a performative jam on the trans-human movement. All of us could be considered Spoken Word poets, all of us could be considered Futurist poets, all of us could be considered Latino poets. Meanwhile, my antique white lab coat from the south of France had popped two of its three major buttons just before I was going on. I wouldn’t be able to wear it along with the stringed cans that thread through its sleeves. Visual setback. I pretend my tin cans are really supposed to fall and can’t tie them to my goatee so I need to hold them now. One hand lost. The other holding paper. I inch close to mic. Tune out distractions and launch into a chant written specifically for the event…Future Chant Futopo.

Built around steady reveals of syllable, escalating in rhythm, eg. this / this is my / this is my man / this is my manifestic vibration, etc. Over the course of 10 minutes, it borders on sonic water torture slash island history slash mantra seeker. The effect of a steady vibration against the video in this museum with a stationary audience, makes me think about speed (its lack of in a static setting) as catalyst for transformation. 

The motion inside the poem when it stands still. The line waiting to find its next landing. The crowd in sequins. The sound bed. The rhythm sprung free. The two women dressed for a tango, a dance company called Bared Souls. Beginning with Argentina and ending with Contact Improv. A perfect jumping off point from Futurism…the speed in language. Contact Language. More likely, the speed of listening. Contact Listening. Of translating. Of reviewing an event that hasn’t happened, until its time to happen presents itself to you. Contact You. To step inside something that moves slower than you, by letting it catch up. To give yourself that time. I don’t think the future’s supposed to be here. That’s the lesson from Futurism, maybe.

Regie is an old friend who has visited my students many times over the past 10 years or so (he lives in the Boston area, but used to live in Chicago). So, I know how magical my students find his performances. But what is the magic behind a spoken word performance?

Partly, my students responded to a new voice – and an actual, real-life, present day writer. They also responded to the poem’s topics: “we be young, virile/sweatin’ passions/ya gotta experience to understand.” One student said she had never heard a writer talk about “the things that really matter to us.” Another said Gibson was “talking to us and not at us.” The same student, by the way, had giggled when I first suggested he might want to hear a poet read. “You mean read to us, like in kindergarten?” he said.

He was inadvertently on to something. Personal writing, and personal connections through writing, disappears the older students get. Writing about lower school classrooms, educational theorist Courtney Cazden calls this connection “sharing time,” and says lower schools may “still be the only time when recounting events from personal, family, and social life … is considered appropriate in school.” This must be one reason why poets-in-the-schools projects are always so well received. It is a legitimate sharing time.

After Regie’s last performance, a student name Jon, whom I had never met, asked if we could start a slam team at our school. Jon’s in a metal band and couldn’t believe spoken word poetry (without high amp guitars) could be such a profound way to connect with an audience. With over 4,000 students in our school, you wouldn’t think it’d be hard to recruit young poets. But with so many competing activities and with so little exposure to poetry ‘that really matters to [young people]” it hasn’t always been easy. But at our first meeting after Lit fest we have 4 prospects, including Jon. I’ll offer an update later.

We love poetry at Poetry. We especially love poetry that comes over the transom, wrapped in fine ink on paper, accompanied by missives that state: “This is the most important letter you have ever received.” This week we’re abuzz over Ryan Murphy’s latest art press incarnation (The North Beach Yacht Club) and its newly minted Hokku Notebook, by Jack Spicer. Here’s a teaser:

… And that’s all you get. Some things live in print and print alone, so you’ll have to do some hunting to find your own (i.e. there is no website). Murphy says, “there is no way to get them but dumb luck word of mouth or to find me, and I generally prefer not to be found. They are simply sent out via USPS into the world haphazardly.” His list of careful creations include Ange Mlinko’s The Children’s Museum (Prefontaine Press), Elizabeth Marie Young’s Sonnets (Omahrahu), and Joseph Massey’s Within Hours (The Fault Line Press). If the books’ elusiveness embitters you, take a cue from Spicer himself. Here’s the first poem of this elegant chapbook:

Bitterness
Bitter – ness
People worry more about bitter than they worry about -ness
Worry more about -ness,
Damn you.

Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, caretakers of the Spicer estate, selected this one notebook from among dozens. Spicer’s use of the hokku contextualizes his developing work in serial forms; his writing “as an Asian” provokes new questions about the designs behind his alter-ego, “Mary Murphy.” See the July/August 2008 issue of Poetry for more of the newly-published Spicer work edited by Gizzi and Killian. Check also Geoffrey O’Brien’s article on Spicer (and don’t miss the embedded slideshow of Spicer’s original books, posters, and photos).

But before you go, see below for a few more looks at the gorgeous books you (probably) won’t get. When pressed about his thinking behind these printing projects, Murphy replied, “Ahhh I don’t know what the hell I’m doing kid, that’s the point.”

Hell yes. Chalk one for “-ness” and stuff we don’t see enough of.

I own a pink skirt, a pink dress, a pink scarf, a pink coat, three pink sweaters, and six pink shirts. Each time I shop for clothes, my eyes wander toward another rose tee, and my fingers fondle another salmon sarong, and I ask myself, Why?

But I know why. I love pink because I am Woman.

Obviously.

The more serious implications of being Woman—and Literary Woman in particular—have lately drawn a lot of press. First, as poet Steve Fellner noted in his blog, men beat out women four to one in the prestigious, and historically male-skewed, Whiting Awards for emerging writers. Second, in a move that attracted much more attention than the Whiting wrong, Publishers Weekly compiled a boys-only top 10 books list of the year. The extended list of 100 best books featured 29 female writers.

In response, Women in Letters and Literary Arts started a list of their own. The purpose is “to note great books by women that Publishers Weekly missed in their all-male top ten ‘Best Books of 2009.’” Given that Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, and other stars published books this year, the task shouldn’t be too onerous. As of today, the WILLA list features so many books that this blogger felt dizzy at the prospect of counting them.

So many books, in fact, that as I skimmed down the page, one of the central mysteries of the issue emerged—a mystery that doesn’t necessarily pertain to sexism or feminism, though it might. Why the obsession with listing and besting? Does anyone believe in those lists? Are they just conventions that help readers, writers, and publishers navigate a confusing landscape? (Even if everyone agrees they’re just convention, of course, they still matter—they still affect sales and recognition.)

I haven’t noticed anyone puzzling over that question, but Lizzie Skurnick of Politics Daily writes a cutting, entertaining meditation on the subject, and Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin offers the usual biting sound byte:

Women are making their own lists, with no men on it. That’ll teach em! But don’t we expect this now from places like Publishers Weekly? The only surprise being that. . .no one at some point said, “We should put a lady on there, or the feminists are going to make a fuss about it” (or maybe they did and the next line was, “Actually, people might read us if that’s true”).

In unrelated developments that nonetheless appear related, The Guardian has amped up its coverage of Gender across Genres. British writer Joanna Trollope chews on chick lit. Jo Shapcott, who chaired an event called “The Female Poem,” raises the question: “Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the ‘female’ poem?” No one’s sure, which seems like the right answer. In her summary of the event, Shapcott proposes advantages of being a female poet:

The panel was convinced that a poet ought to be an outsider. The edge, the discomfort makes for clearer vision. Maureen Duffy reminded us of the audacity and courage of Aphra Behn in this regard. Virginia Woolf pinpointed the feeling of an outsider beautifully in A Room of One’s Own: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”