Silliman's Blog

2009-11-21T00:01:00.003-05:00

Jeanne-Claude

1935 – 2009

2009-11-20T00:01:00.003-05:00

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Rising of the Ashes ,translated by Cullen Goldblatt, City Lights, San Francisco 2009

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Some Very Popular Songs, translated by Mark Terrill, Toad Press, Claremont, CA 2009

Cathy Eisenhower, would with and, Roof Books, New York, 2009

Ben Estes, Cymbals, The Song Cave, no location given (but Northampton, MA) 2009

Garth Graeper, Into the Forest Engine, Projective Industries, Chicago & Houston 2009

Mike Hauser, Psychic Headset, Mitzvah Chaps, Lawrence, KS 2008

Margo Lockwood, More Than I Want To, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2009

Gina Myers, A Model Year, Coconut Books, Atlanta 2009

Amanda Nadelberg, Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married, The Song Cave, no location given (but Northampton, MA), 2009

Karl Parker, Personationskin, No Tell Books, Reston, VA 2009

K. Silem Mohammad, The Front, Roof, New York 2009

Barbara Jane Reyes, Easter Sunday, Ypolita Press, San Francisco 2008

Karen Weiser, To Light Out, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2010

Maged Zaher, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2009

Journals

Area Sneaks, no. 2, Los Angeles, 2009.Includes Edgar Arceneaux & Noellie Roussel, Robert Grenier, Johanna Drucker, Peter Ciccariello, Jessica Smith, William R. Howe, Derek Beaulieu, K. Lorraine Graham, Analia Saban & Claire de Dobay Rifelj, Aaron Kunin, Doug Nufer, Harold Abramowitz & Amanda Ackerman, Franklin Bruno, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Ara Shirinyan, Mathew Timmons, Will Alexander, Richard Kostelanetz, Jody Zellen, Nick Moudry & Kerry Tribe, Jen Hofer & Hillary Mushkin, and Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Grain, vol. 37, no. 1, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, October 2009. Includes Jiang Jie, Tim Lilburn, Sue Goyette, Dani Couture, Don Domanski, Eleanor Wachtel, Xi Chuan, Kyle Borner, Wang Jiaxin, Warren Heiti, Myrna Kostash, Chuqiao (Teresa) Yang, Tamara Bond, Steven Hayward & Melanie Bell.

Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, No. 1, Strathroy, Ontario, Fall 2009. “The Martyrology: Survivors’ Retrospective,” guest edited by David Rosenberg. Includes David Shapiro, Frank Davey, Chris Tysh, Victor Coleman, Alice Notley, George Bowering, Lewis Warsh, Tony Tost, Fred Wah & Susan Wheeler.

Tinfish, no. 19, Tinfish, Kāne’ohe, HI 2009. Includes Jill Yamasawa, Gizelle Gajelonia, Ryan Oishi, Jody Arthur, Aurora Brackett, Barbara Jane Reyes, Janna Plant, Jennifer Reimer, Daniel Tiffany, Emelighter Kihleng, Dennis Phillips, Ellen Welcker, Mandy Luo, Kenny Tanemura, Brandon Shimoda, Rachel Loden, Oscar Bermeo, Deborah Woodard, Michael McPherson & Paul Naylor

Vanitas, no. 4, New York, 2009. Includes Yuko Otomo, Eileen R. Tabios, Michael Schorsch, Jonathan Mayhew, Raphael Rubinstein, Stephen Vincent, Ed Sanders, Catullus, Horace, Theodora Danylevich, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Charles Baudelaire, John Tranter, Arthur Rimbaud, Valery Larbaud, Mario de Andrade, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Dino Campana, Vincente Huidobro, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Tadeusz Browski, Henri Michaux, Juan Luis Martinez, Paulo Leminski, Francesco Clemente, Laura Solorzano, Alberto Masala,Lindsey Boldt, Frank Andre Jamme, Anne Waldman, Paul Violi, Lisa Jarnot, Ray Di Palma. Translators of various works include Tim Atkins, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Bernstein, Lindsey Boldt, Augusto de Campos, Sean Casey, Mark Du Charme, Alan Davies, Brandon Downing, Joanna Fuhrman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jack Hirschman, Jen Hofer, Ron Horning, Mary Maxwell, David Meltzer, Jess Morse, Ron Padgett & Bill Zavatsky, Ray DiPalma, Charles Perrone, Kit Robinson, Raphael Rubinstein, Ed Sanders, Barry Schwabsky, Cedar Sigo & Sara Bilandzija, Mónica de la Torre, John Tranter, Lewis Warsh, Dalt Wonk, Laura Wright, Elizabeth Young, and many more.

Just a tiny stack of books
still waiting to be noted here

2009-11-19T00:05:00.001-05:00

Keith Waldrop
has won
the 2009
National Book Award for poetry
for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

2009-11-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

For the past couple of days, I’ve been toying in my head with which goofball baseball analogy to employ to start off a review of Alan Bernheimer’s The Spoonlight Institute, just out from Adventures in Poetry & deserving of every award they give to books in next year’s round of awards. My options are:

(a) Alan Bernheimer is the Sandy Koufax of poets, recognized & cherished for the brilliance of his writing although the absolute quantity of that work is rather slender;

(b) Alan Bernheimer is the Bert Blyleven of poets, his mastery of the startling phrase – like Blyleven’s of the curveball – unequaled for all time.

Perhaps I should go with the former. People routinely acknowledge Koufax as the best pitcher who ever lived, even though he won just 165 games (to, say, Cy Young’s 511) & retired at the age of 30. Blyleven’s not even in the Hall of Fame, tho it’s easy to make the case that he was a better pitcher than many who are.

What makes these analogies goofy isn’t that they aren’t true – both are – but rather than Bernheimer is one of the last American poets I would think of yoking to a metaphor of baseball. It’s a little like asking which football lineman John Ashbery is most like. It just doesn’t compute.

Not computing is something that Bernheimer does very well. Actually, much better than just very well. “Carapace” is an early poem, predating Bernheimer’s move to the Bay Area in 1976 (it first appeared in Provincetown Poets), but it already shows him to be a master at the effortless slide of metaphor:

The face of a stranger
is a privilege to see
each breath a signature
and the same sunset fifty years later
though familiarity is an education

who likes what most?

high rounded cornices with baby
moon hubcaps played by the wind

electricity travels from time
to time on the surface of these lips

thoroughly tropical pleasure
forms the customary features
combination eyeteeth and semaphore

everything I touch turns
to flesh and vice versa

Most of us, myself included, will go our entire lives without writing a poem half so perfect as that. The first time I read “Carapace,” in Bernheimer’s first book, Celestial Mechanics (one of the last great works of the mimeo revolution), I remember thinking that somebody had just raised the entire stakes of the game. As indeed he had.

Not that Bernheimer is without his influences. He attended Yale in the late 1960s alongside Kit Robinson & Steve Benson, studying literature with Harold Bloom & A. Bartlett Giamatti¹ & poetry with that most unlikely trio of Yale professors, Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl & Bill Berkson.² While one can, at moments, as in the above, hear the faintest echo of Berkson, Robinson has had the deepest impact over the decades, the two friends collaborating on Cloud Eight, an aspect of Bernheimer’s career that is not represented in The Spoonlight Institute, Also absent is Bernheimer’s translation of Valery Larbaud, The Hamlet of the Bees, first published by Whale Cloth in 1981.

The Spoonlight Institute is in this sense a new & selected: it proceeds roughly in reverse chronological order, starting with a dozen new poems³ written in the decade since Billionesque was published by The Figures. Then come the 14 poems of Billionesque, published in an edition of 350 copies by The Figures in 1999, and essentially including everything written between 1981 & that year. The first 49 pages account thus for over a quarter century of work at roughly one poem per year, omitting only the Cloud Eight collaboration. The poems are brilliant &, perhaps most important, they don’t have the petrified feel one might get with texts that have been labored over for months at a time. Here is “The Opposite of Proust,” the very first poem in the book:

Old families last not three oaks
but stave off elimination
with endless paper and unmatched shoes

seeing film stars everywhere
set big machinery in motion

and never know what to do
in the presence of heartbreak

Could success amount to nothing
more than showing off
particles of the world?

Swaps, caps, floors, and costless dollars –
they’re not real
and too many eggs in that basket
are not performing

Errors approach infinite sparseness
as the Lord raptures your hand
and the way up is rounded and slow

with small lamps at the clearance points
for the unknown relation between objects and beings

Though the gap between “The Opposite of Proust” and “Carapace” is almost certainly over thirty years, the deft hand at correlating image to line is just as sharp. The sense of logic has shifted a little over the decades, a smidgen less surreal than in the mid-seventies, a little closer say to the work of Rae Armantrout, of whom his poems sometimes remind me. As readers of this blog will recognize, that’s about the highest praise I can accord anyone.

The last 59 pages of The Spoonlight Institute, the selected portion, operate somewhat differently. First, Bernheimer flips the order in which volumes of work originally appeared, presenting his edit of Café Isotope, published by The Figures (this time in an edition of 500 copies) in 1980. Fourteen of the 32 poems in the core of that collection have been omitted here, in particular prose poems and those whose lines stray from the left margin. Celestial Mechanics, which is reprinted from its 1978 edition in Café Isotope as a final suite, appears here in exactly the same position, followed then by a taste of State Lounge, originally published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press in 1981. That volume included just three works, “Passing Strange,” a poem in Bernheimer’s signature style, “Wave Train,” a five-plus page prose poem not included here (but which can be found in In the American Tree), & a 16-page prose work, “State Lounge,” reduced here to just 1½ pages. Finally, Bernheimer includes Particle Arms, his 1982 play for Poets Theater, originally printed in Hills 9 the following year.

If I have any qualm with this edition, it lies with the reduction of so much of Bernheimer’s work in prose. His sense of phrase to line to logic is so powerful that it’s interesting – beyond interesting – to see him try to work without that key element of the verse line functioning as a sort of safety net. You really can’t get a sense of the balance of sentences vs. lines, alternating between italics & roman fonts, in “State Lounge” in less than 5 or 6 pages, and what we have here is a single fork’s worth of a great entree. You catch glimpses of just how good he can be in the dialog of Particle Arms, tho that’s not prose in the usual sense, as it’s written to be voiced & even directed at others on the stage. Consider this passage spoken by Eileen Corder’s character Nyla. Also on stage in the original production were Karp, played by Tom Mandel, and Bunker (possibly Nyla’s ex-), portrayed by Steve Benson, who is attempting to get out of town:

My personality does not evaporate. There are times I need a ballad, but the feeling is not for your amusement. Someone your shape shouldn’t wear those shades. I’m having a hard enough time with underlings without contributions from the bemused. Minerals thrive on benevolent neglect, while biology sheds a tear for the uninvited. You opted for a limited scenario. On-the-job habits become dream metaphors. Now you spend nights touching up days, a little twist here and there, up and down the chain of command.

Anyone who was present at Studio Eremos when Particle Arms was first performed will recall just how riveting it was.

I’ve known Bernheimer for over 30 years, been his upstairs neighbor & worked with him in the computer industry, so I’m not a disinterested party when I argue that The Spoonlight Institute positively glows in the dark with brilliant writing. This is a book we have needed for a very long time, and it’s great to see it here.

¹ A legit baseball reference here. Shakespeare scholar Giamatti went on to become the president of Yale University & then the Commissioner of Baseball. His sons, Marcus & Paul, went into acting, with Paul bringing the family full circle when he played the seminal literary figure Harvey Pekar in American Splendor.

² In 1969, Bernheimer co-edited (with David Watson) an issue of the Yale Literary Magazine that included Berkson, Schjeldahl, Michael Brownstein, Steve Carey, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, James Koller, David Lehman, Phillip Lopate, Ron Padgett, Carter Ratcliffe, Johnny Stanton, Tom Veitch, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Trevor Winkfield & Bill Zavatsky.

³ I’m counting “Directions for Five Poems” as one work, albeit in five sections.

2009-11-17T00:01:00.002-05:00

Photo by Keith Tuma

Mark Weiss’ introduction to
The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry

The drama of Jimmy Schuyler

9 unpublished poems by Schuyler

Talking with Beverly Dahlen
(part one) (part two)

Is Tim Gunn
the perfect literary critic?
(Stephen Burt tries to make it work)

A profile of Keith Waldrop

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
at Bard

William Carlos Williams’ Poems (1910)
& other burnt books

Rae Armantrout on NPR

Close-reading “New” from Versed

Bob Perelman, Al Filreis & Ron Silliman
all talking with Robert Grenier

Graham Foust:
Jack Spicer resisting print

Small Press Traffic’s
lineup of events this fall
is the best I’ve seen in years
from any venue

The Guardian
on Tao Lin’s
Shoplifting from American Apparrel:
“deliciously odd”

Guess who authored
Karri Koko’s Next Work?

The trouble with type

Reliving the mimeo revolution

H.D. & the image

An H.D. feature

Avant-garde formalism

The case for including
flarf & conceptual poetry
in the next economic stimulus package

Three cheers for The New Sentence

Which you can obtain right here

This Thursday in Boca Raton,
Barrett Watten

The celeb poetry quiz

This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore tale
involves 200 stores!!

How Waterstone’s killed bookselling

“We did not!”

Spoonbill & Sugartown turns ten

Using nationalism to save a bookstore

Jonathan Lethem’s own bookstore

The publisher’s enemy
(hint: it’s not Jeff Bezos)

A win for the stacks

Why Chinua Achebe
is still the father of African fiction

“No I’m not”

What does risk encompass in a poem?

Terrible poetry jokes

More terrible poetry jokes

Even worse poetry jokes

An obit for Donald Harington,
“Ozark Surrealist”

Mahmoud Darwish’s translations live on

“American Poetry after 1975” –
a special issue of boundary 2
edited by Charles Bernstein

Beckett the tinkerer (part two)

Mun Dok-su’s Postman

Gina Myers’ A Model Year

“Best books of 2009” –
the No Tell Motel lists

“The 100 Books
That Defined the Noughties”

Dennis Cooper,
talking & reading

Terrance Hayes,
painter as well as poet

Google revises its book deal

Details of the (new) deal

Fighting for
Carol Ann Duffy’s banned poem

The Siegfried Sassoon Collection

One more reason
not to trust
reader reviews

Wordnik

Talking with Wu Ming,
sort of

Wednesday at St. Marks:
Kit Robinson & Ted Greenwald

Churchill, Hemingway, Burgess
flunk computerized exams

Dickens & Austen do no better

Anne Bradstreet:
“To My Dear and Loving Husband”

The “dynamic turn”
in cognitive linguistics

Talking with Graham Masterton
about William Burroughs

William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac
& the “gay panic” defense

Bill Burroughs & the history of junk

Norman Mailer & William Burroughs

The myths & manuscripts of
Naked Lunch

Justice Kennedy (mis)interprets the passive

John Taggart’s Unveil

Poetry Review’s ahistorical history

Stephen King’s
Under the Dome

Russell Brand & Katy Perry
do Edward Lear

Nabokov’s Laura:
From Humbert Humbert to Hubert Hubert?

Nabokov’s dream book

Martin Amis:
A genius in decline

A curiosity for the completist

The reviews pour in

Little videos of
Jennifer Bartlett & Bill Kushner

The Internet Archive

The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku

& a haiku registry

The Historical Thesaurus of English

The Thesaurus of Old English

Creeley as typesetter

On shelving books

Good local newspapers are worth saving,
but not these

Talking with Damion Searls
about Thoreau’s Journal

Anger metaphors in English

Hay(na)ku

Poetry in motion

Talking with James Galvin

The “essays” of Wallace Shawn

Robert Frost on campus

Not Much Fun:
The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker

Here comes Philcon

Relearning your library

Death masks of Keats, Blake, Dante,
& maybe Ben Johnson

Words in brains

A new Paul Auster

Revision & identity
in the early work of Joyce

Opacity is not the problem

A skeptic’s view
of Zukofsky’s “A”

Paul Zukofsky,
meet Rupert Murdoch

Carl Sandburg & John Crowe Ransom
in the Virginia Quarterly Review

Soul-searching in Shakespeare

How to write badly well

How memoirs
overtook the literary world

Reading James Dickey
on Veterans’ Day

Provincetown poet
lands in Poets Corner
@ the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Gopi Warrier’s
Varaha – The Secret Evolution

One Fast Move
& you’re a dreadful movie

Talking with Jeanette Winterson

Lamb & Donne

Talking with James Ellroy

The best book you never read:
a (consciously) conservative reading list

Talking with Robert Pinsky

Rethinking synonymy

4 poets walking:
Fanny Howe @ Oxford
W.S. Di Piero in San Francisco
Kay Ryan in Marin County
Peter Cole in Jerusalem

Must Read: GirlDrive

Feminist road-trippin’

Truthout on GirlDrive

Maya Angelou:
“Fine as wine in the summertime”

Dave Eggers on Kurt Vonnegut

A John Ashbery parody
that’s not quite as funny
as it thinks it is

The pirate Prufrock

Jung at heart

From Here to Eternity’s
gay storyline

The most widely read woman in America

Philosopher Nazi?

The Matrix
as a Charlie Chaplin short

Winnie-the-Pooh
goes to court

Rudy Wurlitzer’s revival

Judith Malina on
The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater,
1945-1985

An improbable As You Like It
takes shape

Anne Carson’s
Cassandra Float Can

Tony Trehy explains all

Cool Men in a Golden Age:
Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara

Martha Buskirk’s
The Contingent Object
of Contemporary Art
(reg. req.)

Same-sex couples
making marks as arts donors

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
(reg. req.)

Publish or perish

The photography of Jonathan Williams

An amazing Jonathan Williams feature

Damien Hirst:
“Anyone can be Rembrandt”

Arthur Danto’s “The End of Art:
A Philosophical Defense”
(reg. req.)

Isabel Rucker’s long, long memoir

Why hasn’t Tracey Emin
crossed the big pond?

The 11^th International
Collage Exhibition & Exchange

A party for the new Barnes

Polish art on tour

The painter of writers’ portraits
you already know

Cornelius Cardew:
Stockhausen Serves Imperialism
(reg. req.)

Beatles’ ©s down the legal rabbit hole

Green Day to Broadway

Why computer music sucks
(reg. req.)

“thousands of shows
have curdled his voice
into a viscous, gut-shot croak”

Scratch Orchestra scores
(reg. req.)

Kris Kristofferson, poet?

Rockpile comes to Chi-town,
Nov. 19

Art D’Lugoff has died
& with him, The Village Gate

The clues in Synecdoche, New York

Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Philosophical Investigations
(reg. req.)

Adam Savage on obsession
(yes, that Adam Savage)

Remembering Roland Barthes

Talking with Slavoj Žižek

Žižek on the fall of the wall

Malcolm X was bisexual,
get over it

Talking with Noam Chomsky

2009-11-16T00:01:00.001-05:00

Of the 633 books, chapbooks,
songs, films, magazines, websites, exhibits,
“and other cultural phenomena”
cited in this year’s Attention Span survey,
just 78 were mentioned
by more than one of the
60 contributors.

Barbara Guest, Anne Boyer,
Yedda Morrisson & I
had more than one book
mentioned more than once.*

Works most often mentioned
included Jennifer Moxley’s Clampdown,
Rachel Loden’s Dick of the Dead,
Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip,
Mel Nichols’ Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon
& the magazine Try!

Steve Evans
has now conducted this survey
for seven straight years,
proving each time
the incredible diversity
of contemporary verse.

*Rob Fitterman’s
collaboration with Vanessa Place,
Notes on Conceptualisms,
was multiply mentioned,
as was Rob the Plagiarist.

The other collaboration
cited more than once –
Clark Coolidge & Bernadette Mayer’s
The Cave –
was likewise cross-gender.

2009-11-15T00:01:00.004-05:00

2009-11-14T00:01:00.001-05:00

2009-11-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Ryan Adams, Hello Sunshine, Akashic Books, New York 2009

Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend 2009

Adrian Blevins, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 2009

Ana Božičević, Stars of the Night Commute, Tarpaulin Sky, Grafton, VT 2009

Neeli Cherkovski, From the Canyon Outward, R.L. Crow Publications, Penn Valley, CA 2009

Jeff Clark, Ruins, Turtle Point Press, New York 2009

Alison Hawthorne Deming, Rope, Penguin, New York & London, 2009

Graham Foust, A Mouth in California, Flood Editions, Chicago 2009

Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature, Penguin, New York & London, 2009

Matt Jasper, Moth Moon, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Hayden Saunier, Tips for Domestic Travel, Black Lawrence, Brooklyn 2009

Jordan Stempleman, Doubled Over, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Terese Svoboda, Weapons Grade, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville 2009

Novica Tadić, Assembly, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref & Maja Teref, Host Publications, Austin 2009

Anne Valley-Fox, How Shadows are Bundled, foreword by V.B. Price, U. of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2009

Liz Waldner, Play, Lightful Press, New York 2009

Books (Poetry Anthology)

Billy Collins, Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, Columbia University Press, New York 2010. Includes Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, John Ciardi, Amy Clampitt, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Annie Finch, Carol Frost, Linda Gregerson, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Daniel Halpern, Seamus Heaney, Bob Hicock, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, John Hollander, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Marianne Moore, Carol Muske-Dukes, Howard Nemerov, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Plumly, Lawrence Raab, Kay Ryan, Delmore Schwartz, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Wallace Stevens, James Tate, John Updike, David Wagoner, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, many more.

Mark Weiss, The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, UC Press, Berkeley 2009. Includes Nicolás Guillén, Eugenio Florit, José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Samuel Feijóo, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina García-Marruz, Lorenzo García Vega, Carlos Galindo Lena, Francisco de Oraá, Roberto Branly, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Fayad Jamís, Heberto Padilla, José Álvarez Baragaño, César López, Antón Arrufat, José Kozer, Miguel Barnet, Belkis Cuza Malé, Nancy Morejón, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Lina de Feria, Delfín Prats, Excilia Saldaña, Raúl Hernández Novás, Amando Fernández, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Abilio Estévez, Iraida Iturralde, Ruth Behar, Ángel Escobar, Ramón Fernández Larrea, Roberto Méndez, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Ismael González Castañer, Juan Carlos Flores, Pedro Llanes, Sigfredo Ariel, Frank Abel Dopico, Alberto Rodríguez Tosca, Omar Pérez López, Antonio José Ponte, Heriberto Hernández, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Damaris Calderón, Alessandra Molina, Carlos A. Aguilera & Javier Marimón. Translated by many hands.

Books (Other)

Archestratos, Gastrology or Life of Pleasure or Study of the Belly or Inquiry Into Dinner, translated by Gian Lombardo, Quale Press, Williamsburg, MA 2009

Tony Green, Poussin’s Humour, Paravail, Somerset, UK 2009

Kevin Killian, Impossible Princess, City Lights, San Francisco 2009

Brian Kiteley, The River Gods, FC2, Tuscaloosa 2009

Red Pine, Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching, with Selected Commentaries from the Past 2000 Years, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend, 2009

Aram Saroyan, Door to the River: Essays & Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age, Black Sparrow, Boston 2010

Helen Weaver, The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties, City Lights, San Francisco 2009

Journals

Gerry Mulligan, no. 1, Red Hook, NY, 2009. Includes Stephen Jonas, Mary Ferrari, John Godfrey, Rae Armantrout, Jack Collom, Simon Pettet & Elio Schneeman, Raymond Queneau, Steve Malmude, Tony Towle, Lewis Warsh, David Rattray, more.

Aufgabe, no. 8, Brooklyn 2009. Includes Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Epstein, Keith Gessen, Peter Golub, David Hock, Yuliya Idlis, Christopher Mattison, Max Nemtsov, Eugene Ostashevsky, Natasha Randall, Stephanie Sandler, Simona Schneider, Zachary Schomburg, Elena Fanailova, Dmitry Golynko, Linor Goralik, Sergey Kruglov, Dmitry Kuzmin, Kirill Medvedev, Anton Ochirov, Andrey Sen-Senkov, Aleksandr Skidan, Maria Stepanova, Dmitry Vodennikov, Sergey Zavyalov, Igor Zhukov, Tatiana Zima, Olga Zondberg, Diane Ward, Kimberly Lyons, François Turcot , Nathalie Stephens, Karen Weiser, Ari Banias, Alan Mills, Dolores Dorantes and Jen Hofer, Phil Cordelli, Corina Copp, Matt Reeck, Nathan Austin, Elisabeth Whitehead, Akilah Oliver, Geoffrey Detrani, Sarah Gridley, Damaris Calderón, Laura Sims, Tyrone Williams, Rachel Levitsky, Tim Peterson, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Inti García, Román Luján and Brian Whitener, Paula Koneazny, Eduardo Milán, Garrett Kalleberg and Laura Solórzano, Suzanne Jacob, Dana Ward, Jasper Bernes, Paolo Javier, Catherine Mavrikakis, Alan Davies, Kimberly Lyons, Noah Eli Gordon, Trish Salah, & Margaret Ronda

Still a big stack of books
waiting to be noted here

2009-11-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

Alas, it turns out that I’m a better forecaster of Project Runway than I am of baseball. To wit:

If I had to guess today (and that’s why I’m writing this), I would project an all-female finals consisting of Althea Harper, Carol Hannah Whitfield & – most likely to win – Irina Shabayeva.

I posted that sentence here on October 15, and I turned out to be exactly right. Not that it was as easy as it seems in retrospect. Althea sort of fell apart on the final challenge and was nearly taken out by Gordana Gehlhausen. The other final contestant eliminated on the cusp of going to Fashion Week was Christopher Straub (the Shakopee, Minnesota, designer who deserves the Where’s Andre? award for the contestant most likely to shed tears at the eensiest provocation). Straub was, to my eye, no better than the third strongest of the male designers & even he seemed to shocked to be, in his words, “the last boy standing.”

All three of the finalists had made it top the top three in at least six of the show’s twelve episodes to date. Shabayeva – “Meana Irina” to at least one of her competitors – has finished in the top three seven times, winning three episodes, Althea has been in the top three six times, winning twice & Carol Hannah has also been in the top three six times, winning once. No other designer won more than once, nor finished in the top three more than three times, and the two who managed that were Gordana & Christopher.

So the three showing at Fashion Week had 19 of the 36 top-3 finishes. I still think Irina is going to win – I think she’s heads above the other two women, and if you don’t believe me, check out her collections on her own website. One could reasonably argue that she’s the best female designer the series has had to date. But it’s a feature of the competitive pressure and simple constraints of Project Runway – the final challenge included a “tour” of the Getty museum that lasted all of 30 minutes(!) – that none of her designs for the show have come close to what she can do working by herself.

Which may be one reason why this has been the most tepid season Project Runway has ever had. They really need to rethink the challenges. One wonders what will become of this show if its standard sink any lower. Runway has been a huge hit, at least by basic cable standards, and there are now knock-offs of it in 13 other countries. But as Tim Gunn likes to remind his protégés, they need to make it work.

2009-11-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

Alexei Parshchikov 2008 (photo by Eugene Ostashevsky)

Back in the early 1980s, before I had heard such names as Zhdanov, Kutik, Iskrenko or Kondakova, I twice used the term “realism” to describe what has come to be known as language poetry, first in Ironwood in 1983, as the title to a selection of poems by my peers. My preface to In the American Tree, published in 1986, is entitled “Language, Realism, Poetry.” In both instances, I was trying to underscore the fact that there was nothing un- or anti- realistic about this new American writing, but rather that it was questioning, here directly, there obliquely, much that we had been taught to think reactively about realism, and indeed about the real.

When I learned through Lyn Hejinian that there was a group of poets in the then-Soviet Union who were known as “metarealists,” I was immediately intrigued. The realism I got, and also the meta-. Metarealism is one of those terms – social formalism is another – that I have always thought could have just as easily, and just as accurately, been deployed to characterize language poetry.

Then in 1988, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko visited the U.S. and I & others had the opportunity to talk poetry & poetics with someone who seemed very much like a reflection of ourselves, refracted through language & history. Finally, I got to meet many other Russian poets of the same generation when I attended the First International Summer School of the Soviet Cultural Fund in what was then Leningrad in August 1989, two months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and concluding just eight days before Hungary removed its defenses from the border with Austria. 13,000 East German “tourists” defected in the month of September in the run up to events that culminated symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, events whose consequences are still in play & very much in contention to this day. It was an auspicious time to attend a conference in a society that was, to use the Russian word I heard most often in Leningrad, remont: under repair, or, perhaps optimistically, renovation.

It makes sense that American and Soviet poets – I’m using that term deliberately, in its limited & historically specific sense – born in the 1940s & ‘50s would feel a substantial connection to one another. Both nations were and are sprawling multicultural ensembles with a pervasive ambivalence to that territory in between – Europe. Both are nations with deep racial & ethnic tensions. And both are societies that are – present tense as well as past – deeply addicted not just to power but to the mythology of might as right, leaving many in each society deeply disaffected by the gaps & contradictions.

When our conference was maybe halfway through, a number of us were on our way to the flat of linguist & psychologist Dmitri Spivak on Nevsky Prospekt. So as not to arrive too early, we stopped first in a small Georgian café only to discover that it had almost no food. Still, we settled in. It was at this point that a gang of four or five skinheads noticed our group, and fixed upon Alexei Parshchikov sitting with us, his hair dark and curly, his skin an olive tone, the sort that in Philadelphia might be mistaken for Italian. In our collective memoir of this trip, Leningrad, Barrett Watten writes that “the drunk anti-Semites were poking at Parshchikov, who looks strikingly like Pushkin, while insisting to us that ‘the good guys are north guys with blue eyes.’” To the skinheads, we quickly realized, Parshchikov looked like a Tartar, or possibly Jewish. Alexei slowly rose to his feet, so that he was facing the lead thug, separated by a few inches.

At this point, the four Americans in our group began to calculate what we needed to do. One among us, Michael Davidson, is a hemophiliac and we were all envisioning just how dangerous a barroom brawl would be for him, and not just a barroom brawl, but Soviet medicine on top of it. During the week, we had been regaled repeatedly with stories about Soviet hospitals, in part because a veteran’s rehab facility was located right next to our hotel. The stories had not been reassuring.

Later, Barry Watten, Lyn Hejinian & I all found that each of us had plotted some method of protecting Michael and getting him out of the café safely. We didn’t know if any of our hosts knew about his condition. We had no idea what Alexei might have in mind.

In fact, Parshchikov did nothing. He simply stood there, staring impassively at this raging anti-Semite, until Zina Dragomoshchenko came up behind the skinheads and intervened. “My little sons,” Watten’s account indicates she told him of her words, “you and I, we understand all things about our Soviet problems, but these Americans, they don’t understand. Let’s let them eat and worry about their own problems, little sons.” Her tone was so cordial, unmistakably motherly, that it drained all tension from the room. We were soon safely out of there and on our way to Spivak’s.

I remember marveling at the time at Alexei’s calmness & stillness in all this. He said nothing. We didn’t tell the skinheads that they were insulting one of Russia’s great poets. There is a figure in U.S. literary history of rectitude & resolve in the face of bigotry, Harper Lee’s fictional lawyer, Atticus Finch. That is who Parshchikov reminded me of that afternoon, the image of the man I never will be able to erase. And yet I realize that what Parshchikov did, simply standing still, not arguing but not backing down, required more strength than any test of Lee’s character. For Finch had never been the direct target of the racism he confronted, while Parshchikov was. In not striking his assailant, he may well have saved Michael’s life.

I have wondered since then whether or not this event was unique – just how often Parshchikov might have had to deal with such behavior. While Alexei made light of it that evening, it seemed to have an impact on him. For the rest of the conference, Parshchikov was withdrawn and quiet, and not often sober, completely different from the brilliant, animated person he had been before, or for that matter the fellow I would run into at a Kit Robinson party in Berkeley, shortly after Parshchikov moved west.

For this is where my reflection metaphor breaks down. Whatever parallels might exist, or have existed, between the historic context surrounding American & Russian poetries, the incommensurate moments exceed them, and not just after 1991. It is not that the Soviet system collapsed & ours did not, or even (more accurately) that the Soviet system failed first, or that poets in the U.S. are immune to bigotry here, but that the component elements of two civilizations, whatever their parallels, never fully add up. I look at Alexei Parshchikov’s quiet bravery that afternoon & know that no context I could bring to it will ever be sufficient.

2009-11-10T00:01:00.002-05:00

Photo by David Highsmith

A polished apple for David Melnick

Secret © treaty leaks – & it’s bad

Murdoch’s plan:
block Google search

What’s going on in Russian poetry?

Bolaño, Inc.

“Not a rebel”

Bolaño for beginners

My original 1979 talk on The New Sentence,
all 3 hours & 4 minutes of it,
or divided into two 90-minute sessions
(part one) (part two)

Lydia Davis & Jonathan Lethem
in Philly, Nov. 12

Keith Waldrop reading
& in conversation
with Charles Bernstein

Bay Area Lit Scene:
Books & Bookshelves

Ange Mlinko: linguistic currency

& who’s offended by Anne Frank?

Rodrigo Toscano
on the financial meltdown, the bailout & poetics

Close listening aloud:
Alice Notley

The Nook takes off

Seattle bookstores
go in for Espresso
(the book machine, that is)

Robert Kelly:
The Will of Achilles

Georg Trakl & James Wright

Nov. 14:
Stanza’s virtual vispo festival
will be online

The beauty of Black Sparrow

Paul Evans’ The Door of Taldir

Bob Grenier at Kelly Writers House
October 27
Audio / Video

The poetry of Juliana Spahr

Ed Ruscha’s On the Road

“The Bone Church,”
a poem by Stephen King
in an unusual venue for poetry

But it’s uptown for his fiction

Marjorie Perloff
Nov. 12 in NYC
on Wittgenstein’s Voice

The Stokes-Whibley Natural Index of
Supernatural Collective Nouns

Ann Lauterbach: 2 poems

Talking with 109 authors
(rob mclennan’s
12 or 20 questions, second series)

Publishers Weekly
very male “top ten” list

The list in question

Oh yeah?!?

“Great Books by Women Writers in 2009”
includes 63 books poetry!!

The futurisms of American poetry

Miami Book Fair cuts poetry

Babies “cry in mother’s tongue”

John Ashbery:
The blather is profound
& beautifully formed

Arkansas novelist Donald Harrington has died

David Antin: two proverbs

Philip Levine & Hank Lazer

Keats speaks

The Project for Innovative Poetry (PIP)
index

Kristen Wiig
reading the early poems of
Suzanne Somers

Great cities need great libraries

A library success story

Libraries – where the action is

What is narrative in poetry?

$455,000 for Byron’s
letters to Hodgson

The Poetry Hotel

The future arrives this week at Yale

A profile of Gary Lawless

Chris Pusateri on Peter Jaeger

Charles Bernstein recommends books by
Sarah Dowling, Joel Bettridge & Norman Fischer

The firm behind
all the e-readers

Sherman Alexie
@ the Free Library of Philadelphia

Talking with Alexie

Talking with Benjamin Harrell

Talking with Colson Whitehead

Poe in context in Texas

Two poems by David Lehman

Public libraries & the internet

Radio still has the broadest reach

Poetic Arts Performance Project
audio archives

Bram Stoker’s pal, Walt Whitman

The Governor General’s shortlist

The Quebec Writers’ Federation shortlist

A real scribe

Megan Burns on Summer Brenner’s I-5

Proust can change your life

Many madeleines later

The Proust Questionnaire Portraits

Nov. 16 in Paris:
Jerry Rothenberg & Jean-Pierre Faye

Poetry blog battle
“to the death”

The poetry of Abu Nuwas

“the most unjustly forgotten poet
of the 20^th century”

How to publish a literary journal

International Poetry Nights
in Hong Kong
Nov. 26-29

Poets & Writers MFA program rankings

Why people don’t like them

Talking with Cory Doctorow

Harold Bloom on Samuel Johnson

Talking with Paul Muldoon

Slow Motion Hiroshima

No place like Holmes

A new translation of The Tin Drum

Dean Young’s intentions

Allison Benis White:
Self-Portrait with Crayon

Nicholson Baker
reading in Philly

Black Face & the Poetry Foundation?

The book thief

Caducity in life

The prosody of Richard Powers

The Huntington inherits
Octavia Butler’s papers

Saving the papers of Siegfried Sassoon, maybe

Poetry, music & the spoken word
at the White House

Sestina: “Terminal Étude”

Mary Karr,
playing Anne Sexton writ small

The future of journalism

A new volume of Eliot’s letters

Talking with Gore Vidal

Rick Marlatt on Charlie Simic

The Impac long list

Reading Louis Zukofsky

& here

Considering the Big Picture

LZ & the hidden dangers of haiku

Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna

“Lauren Bans is my rival”

Barnes’ Maupassant

“Complicity”

Paul Auster’s Invisible

David Kirby on Amy Gerstler

The braggart of Oz

Talking with Annie Freud

Gerald Stern, force of nature

Marion Ettlinger’s author photos

Talking with James Ellroy

Yet another set of literary awards

Francis Bacon, Rob Halpern

Following the road to the Nambikwara

A Claude Lévi-Strauss gallery

Sontag’s Lévi-Strauss

Strucuralist villanelle

Talking with Philip Roth

Bennett’s Auden, Auden’s Bennett

Bennett’s Gielgud

Elie Wiesel speaking at a John Haggee event

Federal stimulus for the arts?
No cause for nostalgia

Classic art, classic porn

The other side of feminism

New paintings by Susan Bee

Discounts for
Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant
with Willem Dafoe

Steve Benson:
Views of Communist China (1977)

Tan Lin’s Chalk Playground

3 Backyards

The video

Talking with Peter Blegvad

The Red Book Dialogues
at the
Rubin Museum of Art

Jung’s vispo

Tom Clark:
Thinking about George Schneeman

Mary Ann Caws:
Surrealist Painters and Poets

Jenny Diski on Roman Polanski

Yoko Ono:
Imagine Peace

Peter Whitson Warren
has died

LA Times obit for Nancy Spero

Baryshnikov & Ana Laguna
in Santa Monica

Lets gentrify Florence

Josh Harris:
Warhol of the Web

Steampunk

With good reviews

Dominic McIver Lopes:
A Philosophy of Computer Art

Talking with Lopes

Avant-Guide to NYC

Yacov Gabay:
Interiors & Jerusalem

Women of the Bauhaus

Art, architecture & anxiety

Urbanism: Master Plans

AG3:
The Third International
Arakawa & Gins
Architecture & Philosophy
Conference

On John Cage’s Silence

Living Electronic Music

Electronic & Experimental Music

Tom Waits is the devil

Tom Waits podcast

“Even the birds are chained to the sky”

“He makes William Shakespeare
look like Billy Joel”

Hark! The Herald Dylan Sings

Taylor Mitchell has died

Thelonious Monk

The Tao of Wu

100 most outrageous quotes in music

Ward Sutton’s cartoon history
of Bruce Springstein

Bay Area Punk

How preserve modern dance?

Minima Moralia
(When I started blogging,
this was my model)

Special thanks to Don Wentworth
for lots of these links
& to Lynn Behrendt for updating
the 1,200 names on the blogroll

2009-11-09T00:01:00.001-05:00

It would be easy – but wrong – to misread Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel as being the literary equivalent to something akin to the late lamented (but not too much) Simple Life, the E! network TV series that starred Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie. Both cultural artifacts are hi-gloss homage to slacker youth, and both feature protagonists whose predominant surface characteristic is obliviousness. I’d even go one step further & say that each also depends upon one figure (Tao Lin, Ms. Hilton) who is in fact a cagey businessperson uniquely tapped into evolving, and previously unacknowledged, aspects of contemporary life.

Consider the following self-contained passage, which comes midway through this fragile, quite well written 102-page novella.

On Hester’s sofa in her apartment in Chelsea Sam said he had sort of been seeing someone named Paula for a few weeks but didn’t think they would see each other anymore. Hester asked why and Sam said he didn’t know. Hester asked why again and Sam said he didn’t know. Hester said she needed to pee and went to the bathroom and came back and sat on Sam’s lap and began to kiss him. Sam tasted mouthwash. Hester stood and walked around and said she shouldn’t be doing that. She said Sam was too young. She sat on Sam’s lap and they kissed and she stood and walked around.

“I’m one year younger than you,” said Sam. “You aren’t making sense.”

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” said Hester standing near her front door, almost out of view. “Should we go buy cigarettes and condoms?” she said not looking at Sam. “I’m out of cigarettes. I haven’t had sex in so long.”

“I don’t know,” said Sam after a few seconds.

“Why don’t you want to have sex with me?” said Hester.

“What do you mean,” said Sam.

“I don’t know,” said Hester quickly.

“I don’t . . . not don’t want to have sex with you,” said Sam.

Tao Lin’s writing, spare to the point of anorexic, accentuates Sam’s sense of emotional & physical paralysis. Hester moves, Sam doesn’t. When Sam asks something, it doesn’t even warrant a question mark. Half of the six remarks he makes in this passage are “I don’t know” or variations thereof. His one question evokes exactly the same response. And his final comment is a little masterpiece of tangled syntax.

Sam’s only action in this narcotic instance of foreplay is to taste mouthwash. The sentence that ends with Hester kissing him for the first time is almost architectural in its construction: five separate actions on Hester’s part, all connected by and but with not one bit of internal punctuation. Tao Lin gives the impression of being someone who has read his Faulkner very carefully. The master could not have done this better.

If the author uses grammar to capture Hester’s anxiety, the closest he gets to prodding an actual response from Sam comes in the protestation “I’m one year younger than you …. You aren’t making sense.” Does Sam want to have sex? Does he even know?

Tales of alienated youth are at least as old as Holden Caufield, who first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in 1941. Whether or not you think of Sam as being a 21^st century equivalent of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (the title of a 1944 study of the use of hypnosis with criminal psychopaths before it referenced the apotheosis of youth culture sexuality) or the figure in Tom Petty’s Great Wide Open, “a rebel without a clue,” he’s carefully constructed & passionately drawn in this book that appears otherwise to eschew passion as some sort of sucker emotion. When he’s caught shoplifting (not for the first time) earbuds from the NYU computer store, Sam denies having done so just for a second, before fessing up & waiting quietly for campus security. When another busted shoplifter (Urban Outfitters, where she appears to have been part of a pack or squad of semi-organized thieves) points out to Sam that one can buy earbuds for $4.99, the blankness of his response – “No, but I wanted forty-dollar ones” – captures perfectly the degree to which Sam operates not outside of society, exactly, but in almost complete ignorance of its social / ethical norms. Both Sam & this girl believe they are in custody simply because they failed to run when doing so might well have kept them free. They’re not dishonest people, whatever their klepto tendencies, and Sam doesn’t particularly distinguish custody from the ennui of daily life on the outside anyway. The cops are polite. When a cop wants to know if Sam would like something from a vending machine, he asks for some of his vegan cookies from his backpack.

Jail, like sex, is the abrupt confrontation with Other People, and especially people of other cultures & classes. Sam hears it, sees it, but he’s so insulated that it comes across as very distant – not the reality of class so much as its faint echo. If it still has any meaning, Sam can’t hear it. But at one level, this muted effect is what this novella does best. American Apparel has the most up-to-date feel of any fiction I’ve read – it’s as if Sam (or perhaps Tao Lin) can’t remember the 1990s, as tho the past were entirely absent. That this isn’t entirely accidental is, I think, telegraphed by the abrupt way the book’s untitled sections advance time:

A few weeks later Sam was walking to the library holding a large iced coffee.

A few days later Sam met Kaitlyn in Williamsburg to go to the annual work party for the organic vegan restaurant where he worked.

A few weeks later around 1 a.m. Robert and Sam were on a bus to Atlantic City.

A few months later Sam was sitting on his mattress with his MacBook drinking iced coffee and listening to music.

About two months later it was November and Sam was at Joseph’s house in Florida.

These are not merely instances of extraordinarily fast & effective narrative set-ups (tho they are that also). Rather, one is being given a real sense of time flashing past, almost strobe-like, but in a minimalist world in which the clutter that is, say, Brooklyn is virtually invisble. If Sam doesn’t feel, exactly, whether it’s class or romance or the large questions of what to do with his own life, it’s literally because this book is all about emotion anaesthetized in a universe where the funky bodega or the corner drug dealers fade from view & are replaced by the very large Gatorade message on the digital signage: That’s G!

American Apparel is a book that thus goes down pretty easy & feels light in the process, but afterwards you can’t get it out of your mind. Once you cancel out all of Tao Lin’s publicity stunts for his work, you realize that this is the book of a terrific writer.

2009-11-08T11:13:00.004-05:00

Contact: A Symposium in Memory of
Alexei Parshchikov
(1954 — 2009)

Tuesday, November 10, 4:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Room 402, Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
(click here for map)

In 1990 Russian poet Alexei Parshchikov enrolled in graduate study at Stanford University. His presence in California for the ensuing several years was a high water mark in the interactions between Russian and American poets as the Cold War was coming to a close. "Contact" will be devoted to a discussion of this moment in US-Russian poetic history, and in particular to Alexei Parshchikov's American sojourn. Symposium participants include a number of Parshchikov's interlocutors during those years.

Program:

4:00 Welcome

4:15 Alexei Parshchikov: A Bilingual Poetry Reading

5:00: Round Table Discussion with Charles Bernstein, Dmitry Golynko, John High, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Andrew Wachtel. Kevin M. F. Platt will moderate.

6:45-8:00 Dinner Reception for audience and participants.

Participants:

Charles Bernstein
Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn. Parshchikov translated his "Artifice of Absorption" into Russian. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and Girly Man.

Dmitry Golynko
Poet and cultural critic from Saint Petersburg. Golynko is poet in residence at Penn during fall 2009. He is the author of three books of poetry in Russian. He has recently been published in English in As It Turned Out by Ugly Duckling Presse.

John High
J High's most recent book is Here. A Book of Unknowing is forthcoming. Both books are by Talisman House. High was primary editor & translator for Crossing Centuries—The New Russian Poetry as well as co-translator of books by Ivan Zhdanov, Nina Iskrenko and Alexei Parshchikov's Blue Vitriol (along with Michael Molner and Michael Palmer.)

Eugene Ostashevsky
Russian-born American poet, author of The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse) and editor and main translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP).

Bob Perelman
Poet and critic who teaches at U Penn. Books include Iflife (2006); Playing Bodies (with Francie Shaw, 2004); Ten to One (1999).

Kevin M. F. Platt
Teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at Penn. He is the author most recently of Terror and Greatness: Ivan IV and Peter I as Russian Myths (forthcoming from Cornell UP).

Ron Silliman
Author of over 30 volumes of poetry, criticism and memoirs, including The Alphabet (U. of Alabama, 2008). With Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian & Michael Davidson, Silliman is the co-author of Leningrad (Mercury House, 1991).

Andrew Wachtel
Dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern University. Wachtel has translated poetry and prose from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Slovene and Bulgarian. His most recent book is Russian Literature co-written with Penn colleague Ilya Vinitsky.

This event is sponsored by
the University of Pennsylvania
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and CEC ArtsLink

2009-11-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Lewis Turco, Morton Marcus & Vern Rutsala at Robinson Jeffer’s Tor House 2006

Morton Marcus

1936 – 2009

2009-11-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

So does the fact that what the Phillies have accomplished in the past three years – three Eastern Division championships, two National League championships, one World Championship – is more than the San Francisco Giants, the team of my youth, have accomplished in their 51 years in the Baghdad by the Bay, make up for my disappointment on Wednesday? No. Not really.

Already the mind starts to ponder just what the Phillies will need to do next year to (a) get back to the World Series and (b) be better than the Yankees (or whomever) when they get there. Seven of their eight everyday players have been there for two straight years and all eight should be back next year, although the Phillies have had a tendency of rotating out one outfielder per year, with center fielder Aaron Rowand going to the Giants two years ago and Pat Burrell to the AL champs in Tampa Bay last year. With Michael Taylor & Domonic Brown waiting in the minors that could happen again this year, tho my guess is not. Rather I think that they’ll start next season with the same outfield (including Ben Francisco as the fourth man), but bring Taylor up the instant something happens to Raul Ibañez. I don’t expect Ibañez to finish next season as a starter, but that’s okay. He’ll be a big improvement in Matt Stairs’ slot as primo pinch-hitter.

Stairs is just one of the bench players I don’t expect to see back next year. In fact, catcher Paul Bako & Francisco are the only bench players I do expect to return. The Phightins (you have to live in Philly to use that term, long i on the first syllable) had the worst bench of any team in the playoffs and it showed. It’s time to sign a better class of back-up players.

But the pitching is the real muddle. Brett Myers and Joe Blanton are, I believe, both at the ends of their contracts. Jamie Moyer is the oldest player in baseball. Pedro Martinez is gutty but running on fumes – less than half a season was more than he could handle this year. That leaves the Phils with Cliff Lee, one of the best pitchers in baseball, Cole Hamels, one of the most talented players in the game, J.A. (pronounced Jay) Happ, the probable rookie-of-the-year, as definite starters. I would actually anticipate seeing the Kyles in the number 4 & 5 slots next year: Kyle Kendrick, a young starter who got shoved into the minors by the crowd of pitchers on the mound this year, and Kyle Drabek, the Phillies’ top pitching prospect. If I’m Ruben Amaro, Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, I recognize that Myers won’t attract a big salary coming off a year in which he was injured, so I offer him a one-year contract with a club-option for a second and lots of incentives (both as starter & reliever) to motivate him. And if I’m Charlie Manuel, he’s my number three starter behind Lee & Happ. That leaves me with six quality starters, which is the minimum you need given the proclivity for injuries that come with throwing a ball 90 miles an hour.

Hamels is the real reclamation project here. He is one of the most talented players in the game from the neck down. But it’s what’s on top of his shoulders that keeps causing him to self-destruct the instant something goes wrong in a game. He reminds me, more than anything, of a very young Randy Johnson, the Randy Johnson of the Montreal Expos or the first few seasons in Seattle, all promise and very little to show for it. Johnson was 30 years old when he finally had his first good season with the Mariners and 34 when he first won 20 games. That could very easily be the Hamels story as well, but he won’t be 30 until the 2014 season. If I’m the Phillies I basically sit him next to Cliff Lee for the next few years to see how it’s done when it’s done right. Or, in their cases, left.

Jamie Moyer has one more year on his contract. If he doesn’t retire, I would offer him back to Seattle for that very famous player-to-be-named later, picking up much of his salary to improve my options as to which player that might be. If he does retire, I make him my roving pitching instructor in the minors in about two seconds. The man has forgotten more about pitching than most pitchers ever know.

The bullpen is an even bigger problem. Between Brad Lidge & Ryan Madson, the Phillies blew 17 saves during the season. Had they won them all (as they did the previous year), the Phils would have had 110 wins in 2009 and been the obvious favorites in the playoffs. Had Lidge not blown the hold in game three of the World Series, there very probably would have been a game seven on Thursday & the Phils just might be World Champions again. This is not a problem that can solved with just the players on hand.

There are several relief pitchers who probably deserve to come back – Ryan Madson, Chan Ho Park, Scott Eyres and Chad Durbin. I would want to hold onto J.C. Romero and see what happens when he can pitch in a whole season again. But Lidge lost his job as closer in the middle of the World Series once and for all. With the season on the line in the eighth inning in game six on Wednesday, Cholly – as the Phils call their manager Charlie Manuel – went with Madson. Can Lidge win the job back next spring? I’m skeptical and he’s got one more very expensive year on his contract, so I doubt that the Phils can move him. But I don’t think that Madson is the solution there either, nor Brett Myers (whom they could not use without re-signing Blanton). If I’m the Phillies, I’m taking whatever I might save on Blanton & Moyer & going out & getting the best closer available on the market. I might even toss in Ibañez or Victorino if somebody wanted to deal. Next year my bullpen looks like Lidge in the sixth inning, Romero in the seventh, Madson in the eighth & X as the closer. Barring major injuries (Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Jayson Werth, Cliff Lee), I think the 2010 season will depend very much on just who X is, and how good they are. Without a good closer, the season will be a long six months with a very sad end.

2009-11-05T01:35:00.002-05:00

What it came down to, finally, was the fact that the Phillies almost never use the exaggerated shift that was created originally to counter the late Ted Williams, the apotheosis of the left-handed pull hitter, with the third baseman taking over at short, the shortstop playing second, the second baseman playing a short right field so that the right fielder can more or less literally back up to the right field wall. After Williams retired, nearly 50 years ago, the shift disappeared until it was resurrected against Barry Bonds during his enhanced era. Now it gets done by a lot of clubs on a number of hitters. But it’s not a great move and if the pitcher doesn’t know that he needs to cover third on any stolen base attempt or play that sets on-base runners into motion, it can lead to disastrous consequences.

So that when Yankee Johnny Damon stole second base, Chooch, the Phillies catcher (given name Carlos Ruiz), was throwing to a “shortstop” unfamiliar with the position and nobody covering third. When the throw pulled the displaced third baseman, Pedro Feliz, to the right side of the bag, the quick-thinking Damon hopped up from his slide and ran to third before anyone could get there to cover the bag.

And with the runner on third in the ninth inning of a tie game, Phillies closer Brad Lidge was afraid to throw his slider, a ball that drops into the dirt and can squirt away from the catcher. This left him in the position of throwing only fast balls to Mark Teixeira, the American League home run champion, & Alex Rodriguez, who will eventually hold baseball’s all-time home run mark. In short, batters who live off the fastball. Very quickly the Yankees were ahead 7 to 4 and it took Mariano Rivera just eight pitches to retire the side, putting the Bronx Bombers up three games to one.

From that point forward, the Phillies’ weaknesses – leaving men on base, hitting solo homers, and a pitching staff that was questionable once you got past Cliff Lee – became too apparent. The Phils held on to what had been a six-run lead in game five to eke out a two-run victory, but didn’t look especially good doing so. The Yanks twice had the tying run at the plate in the ninth inning.

Back in New York for game six, the Phillies looked like a composite of their weaknesses all year. Starting pitcher Pedro Martinez couldn’t bluff his way past Yankee designated hitter Hideki Matsui. After Matsui had driven in four runs, the Yanks tacked on three more (two of them driven in by Matsui) off the bullpen. Only one of the seven Phillies who walked off not-great Yankee pitching managed to score. Pedro Feliz failed to drive in any of the five men who were on base when he came to bat. And the Phils two biggest bats in this series coming into the last game, Chase Utley & Jayson Werth, were a combined zero for five at the plate, albeit with three walks. Jimmy Rollins & Shane Victorino, the two hitters who have to get on base for the power hitters to have runs to drive in, were a combined one for eight.

So the New York Yankees – who spent over $400 million (not a typo) in the off-season last winter to sign Teixeira, and starting pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett – have won their 27^th World Series, having made the post season in 40 of the 106 years the majors have had one. Until baseball has some kind of true spending cap, those kinds of numbers will be pretty typical. All I can say is congratulations.

2009-11-04T00:01:00.001-05:00

Photo by Irving Penn, 1970

Claude Lévi-Strauss

1908 – 2009

“Writing is a strange invention.
One might suppose that its emergence
could not fail to bring about profound changes
in the conditions of human existence,
and that these transformations
must of necessity
be of an intellectual nature….

Yet nothing we know
about writing
and the part it has played
in man’s evolution
justifies this view.”

– A Writing Lesson, Tristes Tropiques

2009-11-03T00:01:00.002-05:00

C.A. Conrad & Dale Smith
discuss Ed Dorn, AIDS & community

Kenny G:
seeking to define
“queer voice” in art

Rae Armantrout’s
reading at Kelly Writers House
Oct. 22, 2009

5 translations of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”
all by Christian Bök

Gaga for Eunoia

2 translations of Creeley’s “I Know a Man”

Jena Osman, Craig Watson, Michael Gizzi
reading @ the Chapterhouse Café

Kit Robinson
reading at Xavier University

Ben Friedlander responds
to my post on his comments
re Marianne Moore

A third perspective,
this one with reference to music

An account of
the &Now Conference

Relevance & poetry

Barbara Jane Reyes
on indie publishing
(part one) (part two)

A poetry marathon in London

6 translations of Hans Carl Artmann
all by Rosmarie Waldrop

Charles Alexander’s “Pushing Water”

Jordan Scott
on the poetics of stammer

Robert Grenier
talks at Naropa, 1992:
“Drawing from Nature”

Chalk Editions,
publishing experimentalist e-books since July
(12 to date, some fairly hefty)

Tony Trehy
on the reading as
a test installation

October is the cruelest month

Deconstructing moi

Analyze your text

Objections to Google book scans
from the Chinese Writers Association

Talking with Kent Johnson

How Ashbery writes

“The Winemakers”

Penn Kemp’s ear

Poetry is better for your brain
than prose (duh!)

Talking with Justin Marks

A less rumpled version of Justin
at the Tusculum Review

A trick question for Raymond Carver

David Buuck
on EconVergence

Juliana Spahr
at Temple,
Thursday, November 5

Literature by the tweet

The 100 “greatest” writers of all time

Granger’s Index to Poetry

Cuba gives Hemingway’s papers
to the JFK

Yet another author’s heirs
fight over the estate

Who owns the comments stream?

The PennSound Anthology
of Restoration & 18^th-Century Verse

PennSound Classics

LRB turns 30

A ceiling collapse
at Emily Dickinson’s house

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Misappropriating poetry

Fielding Dawson’s
A Great Day for a Ballgame

How to write language poetry

Reading Aerial 8: Barrett Watten

November 12 @
Columbia School for the Arts:
C.D. Wright:
“Concerning Why Poetry
Offers A Better Deal
Than The World's Biggest Retailer”

Why Brian Fawcett quit writing poetry

Arnie’s acrostic

Why save dying languages?

The “universality” of English

Why save indie bookshops?

Is this literary history?

Where are poetry’s prodigies?

What is more “unwriterly”
than a poet’s blog?

A “rebound series”
for out-of-print chapbooks

Top 10 ghost-written books

Zombies, the classics & you

Summer with Empson

Talking with Karen Lillis

The white bookcase

Talking with Jayne Anne Phillips

Orhan Pamuk’s Lolita

Love as a relic, frozen in amber

Secret love

FBI “kills” VS Naipaul

Duo Duo
wins top Oklahoma prize

NDiaye wins the Goncourt

The Good Writing Awards –
categories for fiction, even instruction manuels,
but none for poetry

What is “good writing”?

Something’s amiss with Amis

The book that changed your life

“As prose,
these lines are awkward and squeamish”

The Poetry of Birds

& of the moon

Business & poetry

Adam Kirsch
on the author of the book
that, next to the Bible,
has “most influenced” Americans

Keats-Shelley Prize
goes to
DH Maitreyabandhu

Roth steps up his Nobel campaign

A profile of William T. Vollmann

The author was packing heat

“It is startling to recall
that Larkin died
less than 25 years ago”

Alan Bennett,
on writing a play about Auden

James Wright’s “Milkweed”

Hopkins: the odd man out

Frank Kermode on the authorized Golding bio

Complaints about women
writing misogynist fiction
are a “red herring”

Southern Review
cuts back

“My God, the Suburbs!”

Newspaper circulation is crashing

The news of our demise
is premature,
warns The National Post

Profs suspended at Southwestern
may be charged

Hopeless at Hope College

Elle Magazine on Girldrive

Elline Lipkin on Girldrive

The women of Girldrive

Talking with Nona Willis Aronowitiz

“Paradise Lost”

Shock & Awe:
Futurism goes to war

Oron Catts’ bio-artwork

Bio-Poetics workshop
November 15
@ Woodland Pattern

Matthew Timmons’
Credit

The Museum of Death

Talking with Curt Worden

John Ashbery on Jane Freilicher

Hans Ulrich Obrist:
more connections between painting & poetry

Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
as fine at painting
as he is at poetry

Talking with David Hockney

Rosenquist on Rosenquist

The colorist

Liu Bolin: the invisible man

Art market bargains

One market where Lehman is hot

Slide show

Experimental typography showcases

The marvels of cathedrals

Here comes
Ice House Detroit

Art from abandoned housing

van Gogh’s letters

Lawrence Halprin has died

NY Times obit for
Maryanne Amacher

Litrock songs
(great website!)

No direction home

Bob Dylan’s secrets of aging

Norton Buffalo has died

Update on state arts funding
in Pennsylvania
from Andy Dinniman

A need for narrative

& thanks for all the fish

Readers of this blog
have now clicked on over
4,000,000 links
(plus visits are closing in on 2.5 million)

2009-11-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

Char by Man Ray (1933)

I had an “aha moment” reading René Char’s The Brittle Age and Returning Upland,the two volumes of mid-sixties poetry translated by Gustaf Sobin & released this year by Counterpath Press in a design that winks at the New Directions volumes both authors had. Char’s an Objectivist. Well, not an Objectivist really, but he is someone who echoes some of the same concerns that show up in American poetry in the work of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff et al, writers who were in fact his contemporaries. In this sense, Gustav Sobin, Char’s neighbor & protégé, whose own poetry has always struck me – as do the work of John Taggart &, in places at least, the late Ronald Johnson – as shaped heavily by Objectivism, seems the perfect person to have tackled this work.

This is not, I think, an instance of the translator turning his subject into a mirror of his own obsessions – the volume presents not only Char’s French originals, but, as an appendix, a number of variant translations by Sobin himself, apparently done in “an earlier period.” Nor is it out of any conscious parallel on Char’s part – he knew of American poetry, as it knew of him. The book’s rear cover quotes some lines by Williams directed to Char by name: René Char / you are a poet who believes / in the power of beauty / to right all wrongs. / I believe it also. While the poems of The Brittle Age (L’Âge Cassant) may look reminiscent of Stein’s Tender Buttons (& thus, by inference at least, Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations), they’re nothing like them in tone or focus:

In fidelity we learn never to be consoled

No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life.

How would the end justify the means? There is no end, only and forever the means, always more machinated.

However, these three poems could fit almost seamlessly into Of Being Numerous, George Oppen’s great poem of the same period. How is that possible? In what sense might these brief pieces conceivably capture the essence of Williams’ comment about beauty? If anything, the emotion of the first poem relies entirely on Char’s own obsessive commitment to fidelity in language, which is everywhere manifest in this volume.

It was Char, after all, who was Roland Barthes’ template of zero degree poetry in Writing Degree Zero, even if Barthes’ description sounds for all the world like early period Clark Coolidge. For Char does, like Zukofsky, like the best of Oppen, represent the turn toward language in the poem. Not in the aesthetic sense that one might think of, pointing to Baudelaire or Mallarmé or even Stein, but rather in the ethical one – where Char has a lot in common with Oppen, say, or with Ponge. Francis Ponge is the poet whom I’ve always thought of when I imagined a French equivalent for Objectivism. It is not simply his obsession with objects – “The Object is Poetics” the title of a key statement, intending very much both senses of that first noun – but the degree to which language & voice are intertwined in his thinking.

I don’t think of Ponge particularly when I think of Char, nor vice versa, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part. Both were born within the same time frame as the Objectivists (dating from Reznikoff in ’94 through Oppen in ’08) – Ponge in ’99, Char in ’07. Both French poets died in 1988, four years after Oppen, a decade after Zukofsky.

All of these poets had their lives & careers disrupted by the Second World War. Char & Ponge were both active in the French Resistance. Oppen saw combat. In the U.S., the anti-communism & anti-semitism that led to the disappearance of most of the Objectivists from print & literary society between 1940 & 1962 prevented them from having the kind of international discovery of one another that one sees much more commonly today. It was, in fact, Cid Corman whose Origin first put both groups of poets together. But I don’t think I ever got the genius of Corman’s editing on this until I read Sobin’s translations.

As translations, they seem serviceable, but the appendix of variant translations – there are ten in all – tend to be more direct, more colloquial & more well constructed. Consider the opening lines of “Septentrion,” a word that is obsolete in English, refering to the North:

—Je me suis promenée au bord de la Folie.—

Aux questions de mon coeur,
S’il ne les posait point,
Ma compagne cédait,
Tant est inventive l’absence.

Here is the main translation from the body of the book:

—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —

To the unmentioned questions of my heart
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.

Here is the version from the appendix:

—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —

To the questions of my heart,
If none were forthcoming,
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.

I might have prefered “Which it failed to pose,” or even “Which I failed to pose” to “If none were forthcoming,” but there seems to me no way of avoiding the fact that Sobin’s earlier, rejected version is superior to the later “main” one. It better captures the cadence of Char’s logic that get irretrievably lost in inserting “unmentioned” into the first line of the second stanza. “Unmentioned” not only bloats the line, it’s a less exact rendering of Char’s original: unspoken would have been better.

This isn’t particularly a criticism of the book, however. Sobin has complete translations of the two volumes, and that’s what’s rendered here in the main body of the text. But he also has these other variations, some of which are considerably better than their counterparts in the completed project. One could have, I suppose, combined the two & only published the best versions. But this seems the much fuller view, showing Sobin approaching these poems not once, but twice. One wonders what cut short the earlier attempt. Either way, this is a wonderful book. Just be sure you read the appendix – some of the very best work is there.

2009-10-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

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