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As with every year since Hopkins poems have been published, new pastiches of his work take to the air like dandelion fuzz to both procreate with other flowers and bother our nostrils. My own Hopkins period ended quite sometime ago -- the fruits of this brief flirtation with the closeted Jesuit are contained in the recently republished (or should we say, resurrected?) Gulf. This is the most successful one, and seems a fitting commentary on this blog and my views on literary "debate" -- or shall we say "grand-standing" -- which I've been both suspicious of and susceptible to since well before my thirties fat. Those of you in the know will recognize the title of this poem as that used by the poet Edward Taylor for his famous -- and very excellent! -- series of poems, written as preparations for his sermons. In fact, the Preparatory Meditations might be America's first "serial poem," and indeed it's best -- a sort of Cantos in embryo.
(And who would have thought you could buy the Preparatory Meditations at Wal-mart? Ah... they must have thought they were Preparatory MediCAtions.)
Preparatory Meditation
Here moment’s moments’ ague
like ash doth fly
temperaments
(inward spiraling fashion)
to the pit
speechifying no reconciliation with
New England’s perfidy.
The boss
of All all
forgets:
idleness a pitched & parched Winnebago gone
(& wheel carburetor spark plug) gravewards, wind’s
toy
no ballast.
The season’s seasoned savior savors
nothing like record’s recourse or
pushy preacher’s discourse
pyramiding
(peach fuzz) framed
intimately (matted)
lore’s lozenge
in cerebratory time, tuned
weakly.
Weekly
(arguing stiffly) we
gambol gambling premise or
promise
to laxity.
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This year's titles range from the visually sophisticated Concrete poetry of Gustave Morin, a native of Windsor who spent 10 years on his "novel" A Penny Dreadful, to an obscure volume of satirical translations of Baudelaire by the English poet Nicholas Moore, from the experiments in frame and format that Caroline Bergvall and designer Marit Muenzberg explore in their daring resetting of the poet's Eclat, to the equally daring, if entirely unscrupulous, logorrhea that is the 130 pages of another "novel," Name, by Toadex Hobogrammathon.
The big news this year might be the introduction of color into the pantheon of effects being used in our e-books: both Bergvall's Eclat and my own Alpha Betty's Chronicles rely heavily on it, in ways that would have been unsuitable to html and impossibly expensive to print in a book. Likewise, the volumes by Morin and Lytle Shaw - two of his uniquely low-tech Shark chapbooks - are primarily graphic works, while the titles by Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman and Larry Price attempt to re-conceptualize the page of an Adobe Acrobat file as a middle-space that ironizes the permanence of type (Dworkin's use of Courier fonts) or digital flow (Fitterman's box-like containers) as well as the "writing on the wall" soixante-huitard-style (Price's poster-style typography).
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Of the republications, we are happy to present the final section of Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts, The Chinese Notebook, probably the most influential of his early books outside of Kejtak, two small works by the increasingly-prized Jean Day, whose 1998 Atelos volume, The Literal World, woke so many up to her understated talents. Robert Kelly's quasi-fiction - yes, yet another "novel" - called The Cruise of the Pnyx has long been one of my favorites of his, but has never appeared in another book, nor has the original Station Hill edition of 1979 been republished.
New writers include the playwright Madelyn Kent, whose Shufu plays - part Butoh, part Richard Maxwell-like deadpan, with a touch of Clark Coolidge -- are bound to become recognized as innovative theater, and Aaron Kunin, who is becoming known in New York and elsewhere as a writer of uncommon intelligence and tremendous technical precision. The English poet Ira Lightman drops in on the series like a lightning bolt, spreading his art in a sort of spirit of personal renaissance, while Barbara Cole's Foxy Moron - a text I see as existing somewhere between poetry and drama if only because she reads it so well in public - strikes a little lower, not so much toward "renaissance" as sexual catharsis, over and over again.
Lastly, we are especially happy to have Deanna Ferguson's long-awaited follow-up collection to her 1993 book The Relative Minor (which appears as a reprint in last year's series). Several of the poems in Rough Bush have already played parts in some of the signal poetics statements of the nineties; it's good to finally have such a stash of Ferguson's recent writings in one place.
Enjoy!
[If you happen to be in London in early May, I'm coming for a visit and appearing here.]
The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) Birkbeck presents:
The Birkbeck Contemporary Poetry Conference – ‘On the Language’
Friday May 7th 2004
13:45 - Introduction by William Rowe.
14:00 to 15:30 - Language Now session
- Bruce Andrews – [‘Reading & Poetics’]
- Redell Olsen – [‘Visual Performance, Process and Poetics’]
- Jed Rasula – [‘Licence for Nonsense: Mystification and Opportunism in the wake of Language Poetry’]
- Robert Sheppard – [‘The Poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan’]
16:00 to 17:30 - The ‘Edges of Language’ session
- John Cayley – [‘Undeferred: Poetics, Inscription & Time’]
- Rob Holloway
- Brian Kim Stefans – [‘Circulars as Anti-Poem’]
19:00 to 21:30 (-ish) - Readings [1]
- Caroline Bergvall
- Ulli Freer – [‘BURNER ON THE BUFF’]
- Bill Griffiths – [‘The New North East’]
- Rod Mengham – [‘Terra Infirma’]
- Jed Rasula – [‘Tabula Rasula’]
- Brian Kim Stefans – [‘Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics’]
Saturday May 8th 2004
13:30 to 15:30 - Language & Design in Poetry Session
- Caroline Bergvall
- Bill Griffiths – ['Variations of Language']
- Pierre Joris – [‘Towards a Nomad Poetics: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age’]
- Peter Middleton
16:00 to 17:45(-ish) - Movement – Image – Text Session
- Brian Catling – [‘Muffled Blurs’]
- cris cheek
- Iain Sinclair [‘The City of Disappearances’]
- Lawrence Upton
19:00 to 21:30(-ish) – Readings [2]
- Gilbert Adair [‘Here as a Genre’]
- Bruce Andrews – [‘Recent Performativity’]
- Brian Catling – [‘In Advance of Puppeted Words’]
- Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte – [“S U M E R I C A V E –’]
- Redell Olsen – [‘Recent Work’]
- Aaron Williamson [‘Of Lives and Saints’]
Venue : Birkbeck College, Mallet Street, London WC1E 7HX, room b36
Nearest Tubes: Russell Square, Euston, Euston Square, Warren Street
Admission:
2 days £20/£10 concessions, 1 day £12/£8
Readings only £6/£3 per day
Tickets on the day.
Contact:
Stephen on 020 72444670 or at estaphin@hotmail.com
Piers at 07780 767099 or at piershugill@hotmail.com