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http://www.arras.net/polaroids/weird.html
Launch number doo this Thursday...
More free things... I scanned and formatted this one in for Kenny. I'm sure we'll hear from the estate soon, so get it while it's hot. Some really excellent stuff that can be hard going at times due to SB's distinctive and excessive digressions, but if you can't get enough poetic prose of the Objectivist tradition you won't mind this at all. And look at the rosebuds ye gathers: George Méliès, David Wark Griffith, Carl Theodore Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein. With an foreword by the Creeley man himself. How can you go wrong!
My new cheap Canon digital was behaving badly at the party last Sunday to celebrate Nada and Gary's wedding, but it lasted long enough to get off a few good ones. You in blogland will recognize many of these faces -- in fact, I tended to stick to the smoking patio and the immediate environs given the heat in the restaurant. Have fun.
(Isn't there more than a faint resemblance between the Madame (to the right) and Nada below? Now if I could only find that picture of Maureen Dowd...)
Gary and Nada's Wedding 5/23/04
Who would have thought Farrar Straus & Giroux would have to lean on Arras to help move a few copies of their new book by Jeff Clark.
Music and Suicide: Poems, Jeff Clark
From the site:
"Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "Remarkable for its liveliness and intelligence" (Chicago Review), "Amazing and ambitious" (Rain Taxi), "a 120-page spell" (American Letters & Commentary), "A happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" (Boston Review), "Devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" (Arras), "[Clark's work] creates . . . our own precursors, precursors who behave differently than our supposed avant-garde" (Rhizome)."
Though I liked his book, I didn't hail it as an "unclassifiable classic" -- who would want to buy one of those anyway (well, me, I guess) -- and since there's no underground American writing, I don't know what that means. But heigh-ho Jeff, congrats on the new pub!
These actually use a little programming. Still the same basic principle, though less than flattering pictures of Rachel in the first one:
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/weird.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/subwaywoman.html
I'm working on a much longer, more complicated one based on photos of Times Square at night -- it will be more like a film, though just using 20 or so images. Fun!
I've created a directory for the "Flash Polaroids" and have fixed some glitches in the original file. The files are largish, don't look at it if you have a slow connection. The first one stars my favorite plant. The others were mostly shot in England and Williamsburg.
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/plant_dance.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/heathrow.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/countryside.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/racquelli.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/wburg_bridge.html
[Unlike the two ads I posted earlier on FSC -- this one and this one -- this new Yahoo! ad doesn't resemble Dreamlife so much as Bembo's Zoo, the superb webification of a graphemic bestiary. This Yahoo! ad is pretty ugly, that is until you realize the cluster of letters -- which is randomly arranged -- does little pop-ups with roll-overs, and becomes legible when you click on them. Pretty amazing wha tyou can do with 29k.]
Survival of the glibbest;
avant-garde terrorists
refusing to be so named;
my potluck dreams adorn
a trailer park, yes
a "post-Arcadian" blankness;
waiting for the ripped
facade, the squeal of saving face
in feinting quatrains
to come ribboning down;
satellites of youth deference
abound, we feel so
bold among the cancer lovers,
but I’m finally learning to write
again, among the baobabs and sands.
[Quick and dirty comments on some thing I read on Kasey's {limetree} recently regarding Poets Against the War and the feeling among "us" about it recently. BTW, I had to delete the comments function of my site until Movable Type comes up with some way to keep out the spam.]
I didn't like PAW at all, thought it made the mistake of:
1) making it seem natural that poets would be against the war because poets, like puppies, are against war in general, which we know has not been historically true at all -- quite the opposite. This seemed a deception and a misrepresentation at a time when we really had to make clear that poets who are against the war are free-thinking adults.
2) it equated poems with votes -- the ridiculous parading of numbers of poems contributed was embarrassing considering that numbeer of poems/votes could not have turned an election in Boise, nevermind the country (or the world).
3) the free use of the word "historical" in describing (rather immodestly, I thought) the achievement of the site and the publciation of the book was really distracting, and being a web-guy myself, I can tell you that numbers, content, email lists, all that stuff, are very easy to do on the web -- I had more spam in my inbox this morning than they had poems on their site -- and they didn't organize the site so well, it was ugly and amateurish, nothing to brag so much about (and they DID brag). It looked like the work of monks.
4) after all that, I don't think any of us can point to a single poem that managed to capture the public imagination or serve as a succinct (contradictory, emoitionally nuanced, "poetic," etc) reflection or summary of anti-war (or anti-whatever) feeling. I.e. the words didn't do the work.
So I think it did "us" more harm than good -- that, in an effort for poets to "get along" in a time of crisis (why, so that we can scare them with a united front? 40 of our strongest poets couldn't win a wrestling match with a smalltown junior high school team) we simply pretend we don't have ideas beyond public expressions of pacifism, angst, moral rage, etc -- wrong to me.
"We" poets were represented as rather inarticulate in the face of an administration that likes to walk around with their knives hanging out of their pockets, preferring rather to brandish their grandfatherly and evangelical tones on Fox and CNN. We have to find a way to defeat these tones with our own, which takes precision, practice, charisma, etc. -- not mere numbers and pious exhibitionism.
Poets are not a class, or above it all, or much better at thinking about these things, than anyone else. We fall into the same patterns that Bush falls into when he describes Americans as being naturally this or that, more just, incapable of torture, yadda yadda. We have to resist being "specialists" in anything in this regard, we have to not know our own friends -- to be in the world and outside of this "community." And stop grandstanding among ourselves. If you want to grandstand, go to Union Square.
There is a point to PAW, however, which is to improve upon it. It was still a good idea on some levels.
Oh dear, I'm in a bad mood... sorry dudes. Just stating my opinion.
Brian
[PS: Heriberto Yepez has some similar remarks on his website mexperimental.
Also, it shouldn't be assumed, because of I wrote above, that I am necessarily in favor of the various poetry anthologies coming from the "experimental" side of poetry are more successful -- I don't think so at all.
Finally, I support all efforts by poets to keep these issues alive, though I think it's quite ironic that a digital camera has done more work for "us" in this regard than any of the writing by journalists or defectors from the administration in the past months.]