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[Here's the second of my St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter columns about poetry on the internet. It's not quite as giddy as my first one, and not quite as long, but it's equally as uncomprehensive, if not incomprehendible.
The Mini Festival of Digital Poetry went really well, not a technical hitch in the house. A good turnout, about 50 or so, maybe half poets (or at least whom I recognized) and the rest folks I hadn't seen before. I'll be posting pictures and commentary soon. Paul Chan, who does the alternumerics site (see below) seemed to be the crowd favorite.
My first web column for St. Mark's can be found here.
The Days of Our Blogs
So it didn’t appear in 18-point bold-faced type on the NYTimes website, but "Silliman Has a Blog" has managed to change a few minds – mine, for instance – about the possibilities for this website format, once thought strictly the province of public diarists.
(A "blog" – short for weblog – is a site that is easily maintained via an application one downloads for free — blogger.com has a popular one, but the trend lately has been with movabletype.com, which creates a blog that accepts reader comments among other perks. Minimal HTML knowledge is needed, and each new entry requires merely filling in a field and hitting "publish." If you don’t have a website, you can get free server space at blogspot.com.)
(And "Silliman" is short for "Ron Silliman.")
Silliman’s Blog – yes, that’s what it’s called – is sure to be a big hit; it’s already chock-full of his characteristically elephantine-memoried accounts of the strands, major but mostly minor, of literary influence in American poetry — Actualism, anyone? – not to mention his frank evaluation of the 50 or so books he’s reading by the likes of Tan Lin, Besmilr Brigham, and Anselm Hollo.
Other blogs out there include Katherine "The Blog Queen" Parrish’s squish, Rochesteronian Brendan Barr’s texturl, Torontonian tyro Angela Rawling’s nether, and my narcissistically titled Free Space Comix: The Blog. Lying Motherfucker boasts entries by writers as diverse as Martin Amis, Dr. Seuss and Ernest Hemingway: "Thursday, 21 february 2002: Went to bullfights. Matador a pansy; jumped in with a beachtowel and cocktail umbrella to show Ramon how it was done. Bull makes nice pet: more effective than dog at dissuading missionaries." Raw fun!
Let’s open the mailbag… An announcement from John Tranter that the complete collected poems of Henry J.-M. Levet (1874–1906), translated by Kirby Olson, are now available in translation for the first time ever on Jacket no. 18, news indeed – clicking through, I really liked this stuff, all the seemingly heady allusions of Nerval in sonnets and quatrains and, like his predecessor, an entire ouevre limited to 11 pages of mature poems.
I’m very happy to inform you that it’s not a joke – Ben Friedlander, Jacques Debrot and Kent Johnson did not cook him up over a bottle of Veuve Clichot – and kudos should be aimed at Dehli, New York’s own Kirby Olson for translating him. Rhyming "fiancé" with "ennui" might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but Valery Larbaud idolized Levet, and Blaise Cendrars and Phillipe Soupault are said to have taken a major cue from him. I’m sure the detourned posters of Levet in jeans are only a few weeks away, not to mention the movie starring Leonardo.
David Chan’s Alteranumerics – a set of fonts that toss up constellations of Fouriest principles in diagram form with each letter, so that a sentence becomes an outline for a heady, hot utopian daydream — made a recent appearance in Shark, and can be downloaded for free. And stephaniestrickland.com now contains the latest hypertext poem by the author whose name is cleverly embedded in the URL – she’s one of the few with a significant print and hypertext reputation and one to watch!
But the one you will thank me forever for is the Blonk Organ a Flash application that puts you in the driver’s seat of Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk’s incredible vocal chords, the bizarre things that he does with them, and the many many faces of thwarted semantic desire.
THE MOST HIDEOUS POSTER YOU HAVE EVER SEEN
arras.net/mini_digi_fest.htm
was created to announce:
THE SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
Mini-Festival of (so-called*) Digital Poetry
:::featuring performances and presentations by
Angela Rawlings (Toronto): www.commutiny.net/
Patrick Herron (Chapel Hill): www.proximate.org
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (New York): www.impermanenceagent.com
Paul Chan (New York): nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics/
Aya Karpinska (New York): www.technekai.com/aya/
Loss Pequeno Glazier (Buffalo): epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/
The Prize Budget for Boys(Toronto) who are: Neil Hennessy (The Jabber Engine and Basho's Frogger, at www.ubu.com), Jason Le Heup & Ian Hooper
:::and?
AND there will be a panel discussion afterwards immoderated by Brian Kim Stefans (curator and organizer)
AND it's 2-fer-1 drinks and it's not shameful to start at 4pm for a poet/poetry goer
AND you may know what they've done online but we guarantee that the presence / performance / presentation will be entirely new (to you)
AND there's a rumor the legendary Toronto sound poetry group The Four Horsemen may perform (wink wink wink)
:::where?
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON, NYC, USA
:::when?
SATURDAY, NOV 23rd, FROM 4 - 7 PM
:::and what, pray tell, does it cost?
$5 admission goes to support the readers
all of this information is repeated on the
THE MOST HIDEOUS POSTER YOU HAVE EVER SEEN
http://www.arras.net/mini_digi_fest.htm
I hope you can make it -- should be fun, an eye opener, and bring your questions!
* The use of the phrase "so-called" prior to an aesthetic categorization is an old experimental poetry tradition; please disregard if it causes you unusual discomfort.
I've been working on creating a flyer for the Mini Digital Poetry Festival and have had little inspiration except to drop things in here and there, make jokes, etc. So here is a version of it -- I think I will clean it up considerably, but there's something to be said for the scotch-taped-to-a-bus-stop feel of this, kind of old school punk poster / ransom note (but different):
[What follows is a "little review" one the short, occasionally opiniated summaries that I've posted to listservs and on websites from time to time. This one was written quite a while ago, but I thought to include it now to help advertise the Little Reviews section of arras.net, as well as to debug the "more" button that you see below.]
With Strings
Charles Bernstein
publisher: University of Chicago, 2002
isbn: 0-226-04460-2
price: $12
"Readers are cautioned that certain statements in this poem are forward looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. Words such as 'bluster,' 'rotund,' 'interstitial,' 'guerilla,' 'torrent', 'prostrate', and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and projects about the aesthetic environment and assumptions made by the author and are not guarantees of future performativity." [73]
writes Bernstein in "Today's Not Opposite Day," one of many cagey, slapstick satires in his large new book. But even when this poet -- in his best vaudeville bureaucrat's voice -- just tells you what to expect, buckle up for a plateful of much weirder fare (the mixed metaphor is apt).
Bernstein has never been an easy pleasure, from the early minimal work of his Language years to his recent incarnation as professa-widda-(Yiddish)-attitude, but the more recent work reflects a growing comfort with his role as public intellectual and avuncular proselyte for all things counter-hegemonic, hence a huge turn toward satire and even lyric in his work.
The Bernstein "lyric," of course, takes on every convention one could imagine lurks close to the humanist heart:
"the toilet seat is down now
it's there I plan to sit
until I find that doggy bag
I lost while just a kid" [39]
By making the poems so nail-scratchingly obvious in their form -- as in "Besotted Desquamation" in which every line in the poem contains four words beginning with the same letter "marshalling muted might majestically" -- Bernstein anchors the aesthetic object (art always want to rise into the aether) in deep engagement with the most mundane modes of culture.
This rationale for writing very "bad" poetry makes one put all aesthetic -- and by extension social and moral -- judgments in scare quotes, pitting the reader against the very value system that may have brought him or her to the poem itself:
"& the moral of that is: Better
a loose potato chip than a
hot tamale. & the moral of that
is: It is a rocky road that's
filled with bumps. & the moral
of that is: If you kill the spirit
in others, you kill it in yourself.
& the moral of that is: Watch the
slings and arrows & the automatic
weapons will get you every time." [33]
While some of this "companion to My Way: Speeches and Poems" (as he states in the intro) seems filler -- those few poems that avoid kitsch and in which the poet seems merely to have failed achieve an effect -- or maybe too annoyingly bathetic, there is no real way to determine where "filler" ends and the "quality" writing starts, and where the poem ends and the jacket copy starts, which just goes to show that everything good comes with strings attached.
Tom Matrullo, a very interesting writer/blogger with one foot in journalism and one in more speculative literatures -- his interest seems to be where the apparent fetishism of fact impinges on the freedoms of opinion and art -- has posted a series of commentaries on the letter that I received from the Times demanding that I take down the Vaneigem pieces. I've taken them down from public view (they are stashed in a secret folder) and put up a special 404 for those of you have linked to it. I've also been interviewed by the Washington Post by a writer named Jennifer Balderama for a possible story on it but I haven't heard from them since Saturday. Tom's writing on the affair is below, kind of scattered around his blog; some of his ruminations are very interesting:
http://tom.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$1329
and Tom writes the following on http://tom.weblogs.com/2002/11/08
"Why does this agon of journalism against poetry get to me? It has to do, of course, with intellectual property issues; with the borders between journalism and something larger which for want of a better term could be called writing; and with the presumptive clarity or lack of it about representation and realty that underlies the journalistic gesture toward self-definition. As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has noted, there is little theory in Journalism's understanding of facts. Meanwhile, as Goethe has noted, facts are simply frozen theories, or words to that effect."
SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
SATURDAYS FROM 4 - 6 PM
$4 admission goes to support the readers
Funding is made possible by the continuing support of the Segue Foundation and the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.
Curators:
October/November--Brian Kim Stefans & Gary Sullivan
Phoebe Gloeckner, a critically-acclaimed cartoonist originally from the Bay Area (where she performed in a number of Kevin Killian's plays), recently moved to Long Island. She is the author of the searing and occasionally banned A Child's Life and a brand-new hybrid novel/journal/comic book, Diary of a Teenage Girl (both from North Atlantic Books). Read her work at www.ravenblond.com/pgloeckner/.
One of the Bay Area's most beloved poets, Kathleen Fraser was a founding editor of How(ever) and its online manifestation, How2. More importantly, she is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, each more inventive than the next. About her Selected Poems, Patrick Pritchett notes her "devotion to discovery, her willingness to risk, and her profoundly lyrical sense of the intimate." Her homepage is at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/fraser/.
I haven't had much to post lately. Just trying to finish up the new /ubu series of .pdfs for Kenneth (yes, he's Kenneth now) Goldsmith's site, which will feature new collections of poetry by Michael Scharf, Jessica Grim and others, along with reprints of classics like The Age of Huts by Ron Silliman and What the President Will Say and Do!! by Madeline Gins. Between these two categories are to-be-classics like Darren Wershler-Henry's The Tapeworm Foundry, published 2 years ago as a book by Anansi, and Kevin Davies' Pause Button, which is his first book from 92 or so, don't quite remember. And then there are the plays -- one by Richard Foreman and one by Mac Wellman in this first run. We'll see where all that goes.
Other than that, you can view my bank account here and my credit card account here. My student loans here and pictures of me with long hair here.
My blog templates need to be fixed -- as others have noted, some pages come up in ALL CAPS. Kind of like Alan Davies' emails.
There's also the Mini Digi Po Fest that I've been working on for Nov. 23rd as part of the Segue Reading series in NY. Featured artists include: Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Impermanence Agent fame, The Prize Budget for Boys (Neil Hennessey and Jason LeHeup), Angela Rawlings of LOGYOLOGY fame, Aya Karpinska, Paul Chan of alphanumerics fame, Patrick Herron of proximate.org fame, The Pet Shop Boys (only kidding), Holly Hunter (just joshing), Kiki Smith (now that was a joke), and John Cayley and Loss Glazier if they make it.
Other big news: ergonomic furniture has freed me from those "Patrick Rafter-like" pains and unlike the tennis star I will not be retiring from my chosen profession any time soon.
I was reasonably perturbed about a recent post on Silliman's blog (what follows is two paragraphs of a longer one):
***
Which reminded me of how seldom this is the case for me with poets from English-speaking countries other than the United States. With the very notable exception of Basil Bunting, I find there to have been shockingly few poets from the old Commonwealth on either side of the equator whose work I would characterize as having a strong ear. More often than not, I can't hear it at all, not even in Hopkins' so-called sprung rhythms. Whatever the other values the poem might propose - & often enough they are many - the prosody of so much non-Yank Anglophone verse strikes me as jumbled, prosaic, "a dozen diverse dullnesses."
There are of course exceptions, but I notice how many of them are poets who seem to have taken a particular interest in the American tradition of poetry - Tom Raworth, Thomas A. Clark, Fred Wah, Jill Jones, Lee Harwood, Gerry Shikatomi [sic]. Yet the whole idea of poetry's relationship to spoken English - & through speech to sound - is one that invariably leads back to Wordsworth & Coleridge. This makes me wonder if there isn't some disability within me that just can't hear it, whatever "it" might in this instance be, rather like the Kansan watching a British film with North Country accents who longs for subtitles.
***
I think it's been a little too fashionable to knock on the English for not producing too many "great" poets in the 20th century, and certainly if one is going to look through the frame of "speech based" poetics one will not find many satisfying English writers -- Charles Tomlinson, for example, who was very close to Williams' poetry never really, to my mind, understood the implications of his metrics. And certainly if one doesn't enjoy Gerard Manley Hopkins, probably as great an innovator in my mind as Williams, then one is really going to be hamstrung when it comes to reading poetry that has any attention at all to a formal tradition that goes beyond "speech based" poetics.
I actually think the value of speech-based meters was understood by too few writers, and led to a lot of very sloppy, boring stuff (the bit that Silliman quotes in his blog from Curnow is pretty bland to me). Part of the reason I've taken on a reading of people like Drew Milne and John Wilkinson -- even though I find these writers a bit recalcitrant when it comes to the candor that I enjoy in, say, Williams or Coleridge, or Raworth for that matter -- is because of their attention to sound patterning, verse forms, linguistic experiences that are "other," beyond the scale of what a human normally exerts when engaging in speech. Which is to say the artifice of their work, the way sound plays against each other over several lines, echoes returning from several lines previous and foreshadowing what is to come. This is one of the many virtues of the lyric, that there is a certain promise of return with every syllable included -- a sound sets up the context for another sound, which may occur several line away. It's poems that exploit these features that usually astound me as being much beyond anything I would expect language to do.
Much "speech based" stuff -- or at least the language used to discuss it, such as the idea of a "good ear," which I think is a term that needs to be retired -- does not play with these potentials. What we are left with, quite often, is meter -- sounds included to fill out some motion that it supposed to send the line across the page. Sure, it's a type of meter unique to the 20th century, but it's gotten quite conventional, not to mention disengenous as we've grown to realize that so called "natural" rhythms sprung from "breath" are certainly as learned a behavior as, say, greeting someone with a kiss of each cheek. What also happens -- in the case of Olson especially -- is a lot of bluster that is perfectly impenetrable in terms of "content," and uninteresting in terms of language itself.
Ok, I'm being vague. But I would take Hopkins, Prynne, Auden, Riley, Finlay (he did "write" poems once), an Australian named Martin Johnston, etc. over several of the writers Ron names in terms of "ear", and I'm an American damn it! John Wieners probably had one of the best ears going, but his metrics are about as indebted to folks like Herrick and, say, Verlaine, as they are to "speech." I'd rather see us be colonized for once rather than view the entire range of Anglophone poetry of the previous century through the frame of "speech" -- or anti-speech, for that matter, which I guess is where the real game for Silliman lies.
[As a last note, it's worth observing that despite what Creeley says, Williams' line went as against speech as "for" -- a poem like "The pure products of America" from Spring and All is as motivated by having a short line in the middle of a three-line stanza, a very couunter-speech tactic, as it was by listening to his speech rhythms. In fact, this poem is as far away from breaking the line based on speech patterns as any I know (I mean, of poems that pay attention to "metrics" at all), which is why I think WCW's metrics have yet to be very understood. No one talks like the voice in this poem -- it's one long ramble, and to keep that it alive one had to estrange the language continually, not naturalize it, hence the often choppy nature of the line breaks, use of commas, etc. Other poems like "As the cat..." are very regular metrically, which is why one would read it aloud without paying attention to the line breaks, the same way one would read a good lyric poem without a huge pause at the end of each line. A poem "In Breughal's great picture" are as motivated by conventional metrical concerns as, say, Pound's Usura Canto -- a relationship to rhetoric as much as lyric -- and a poem like "Old age is..." is as motivated by visual skinniness as constraint -- James Schuyler wrote "skinny" poems, according to F O'H -- as by anything like a speech based line. I guess the problem is that each poem presents its own issues, especially for WCW for whom each poem was a new venture into outer space. End digression.]
I wish I had time to touch up these lines -- I'm really just providing a little content now that my shoulder's back in shape. Stay tuned.