the last of the three videos from the book launch for
Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here soon


The Lenny Paschen Show
The video starts with my reading of the extended monologue
then goes to performances from the opera by
Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Ben Yarmolinsky, vocal and guitar

Go to main blog page or download mp4 to see this video.

download mp4

link    |  08-19-08

one more video from the book launch for
Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here soon

The Subject
reading: Bernstein & Yarmolinsky
Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Elizabeth Rogers, piano
note: Bernstein & Yarmolinsky read first, second half of video features Silvie Jensen's arias. Jensen plays Jenny Midnight, a psychiatric patient. In my reading with Ben, I read Jenny's part and Ben plays Dr. Boris Frame, psychoanalyst.

Go to web blog page to see this player.

download or stream mp4

link    |  08-17-08

Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here in a few days,
once the PennSound page for the operas is complete.
Joel Kuszai, of Factory School,
had been working on web video of the May 5 event for the book
at the Medicine Show, New York  Here is the first part:

Blind Witness News
Deborah Karpel, soprano
Nathan Resika, bass
Leandra Ramm, mezzo-soprano
Ishmael Wallace, piano

Go to blog web site to see this video.

download or stream MP4

 

link    |  08-16-08

New EPC author pages
Donato Mancini

rob mclenanan

Gustave Morin

A couple more newspaper reviews of
OEI selected poems & essays
De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage

Klassekampen (Norway)
August 9, 2008

Svenska Dagbladet
August 12, 2008

 

What's the Word?
2003 MLA Radio Program in which I am featured along with Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman
(29:11): mp3

link    |  08-14-08

Czernin & Schmatz: Die Reise

(This is a short excerpt from “Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud (No Pun on Freud Intended), with Special Reference to the Poetics of Ressentiment,” which appears in the new issue of Textual Practice 22:2, 207-227.)

In the early summer of 1986, two young Austrian poets, Franz Josef Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz, had the idea to write poems that closely resembled the poems they found most typical and at the same time most deplorable in contemporary poetry volumes, for example the work of Rainer Kunze, Günther Kunert, and Sarah Kirsch. At first they had the idea to call the poet Irene Schwaighofer (silent court), a poet born in a little town in upper Austria, who, familiar through schooling with the tenets of modernism, would need no time to forge her own distinctive style and upon being published would proceed to win many prizes and much praise. However, Czernin and Schmatz felt this process would take too long and in order to shorten the “difficult and boring” process, decided to give authorship of the poems to Czernin. They completed the work in a few weeks and the book was immediately accepted for publication under the title Die Reise (the journey). The book received positive attention, some of which suggested that at last Czernin has given up his thrashing about in the waters of experimentation and found a more profound and authentic voice. When Czernin broke the news of his own duplicitous relation to the poems in Der Spiegel in March 1987, a furious hale of criticism descended upon him, not the least from the publisher of the book, who felt he had been betrayed. Later the same year,  Czernin and Schmatz published a book-length account of the story together with exchanges between them and several interlocking essays.

Here is of one of the poems from Die Reise: In achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt:

fahr-plan

ist mein blick
nicht eine schere,
deren beine
schritte machen,
die alle fernen
auseinanderschneiden?

hat denn die schere
keine augen,
die zu ringen werden
jener finger,
die auf ihre ziele zeigen?

und gehen diese ziele
nicht auf zwei füssen,
deren zehen
auf nägel treten,
die meine ganze reise
zusammennageln?


agenda

is my glance
not a scissor
whose leg
makes steps
that cut through
all distances?

had, then, this scissor
no eyes
which will strive
to finger
loins of desire?

and will not such loins
walk on two feet
whose toes
tread on pins
fastening together
my whole journey?
                                    [my translation]

Schmatz and Czernin created a literary scandal with this and the other poems in the collection they were able to focus the discussion of issues of quality and judgment … Die Reise is motivated by a desire to critique the jargon of authenticity. There is no claim here that these are necessarily good poems or that we should look to the “poems themselves” for the meaning. The texts here have meaning in relation to the literary valuations into which they make an intervention; their meaning is social and diacritical. Indeed, late in 1987, Schmatz and Czernin published Die Reise: In achtzig flachen Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube, a book about the affair in which they address explicitly the questions of authorship and motivation. In this book, Czernin describes Die Reise as a form of literary self-criticism. “Perhaps one must, to make a better poem, know how one makes a worse poem,” he writes. “I think it was Novalis who said that good literature is made from worse literature. He was right that there must be, in any case, worse poetry from which better poetry can originate, whereas for me it is self-evident that the contrary can also be valuable.” Die Reise, then, can be understood as an investigation of aesthetic judgment. And yet, as the Ern Malley poems also show, what is written out of a desire to expose the limits of a particular style (or rhetoric) may ultimately become exemplary of unrealized potential in the style; ironizing of the style may create a thickening of the artifice and with it an intensification of the aesthetic experience. Over time, the poems of Die Reise take on charm that goes beyond parody.In any case, Czernin is not asserting the objectivity of any such judgments but rather that “every objectivity is fictional.” His purpose then, as befits a poet who has written a study of Karl Kraus, is satiric adjudicative: the fraud remains a fraud.  

Franz Josef Czernin, Die Reise: In achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt (Salzburg und Wien: Residenz Verlag, 1987), p. 30.
Franz Josef Czernin, “Die Verdopplung des Igels,” in Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz, Die Reise: In achtzig flachen Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube (Linz-Wien, Austria: Edition Neue Texte, 1987), p. 21

link    |  08-11-08

Charles Bound

Go to web log main page for video stream

Charles Alexander
The esteemed poet-bookmaker speaks about the significance of binding.
January 15, 2007
(mp4, 33 seconds, 6.6 mb)

link    |  08-09-08

Jerome Rothenberg's new blog
Poems and Poetics
features
4 Poems, with a Note on Escape, from Rousseau to Bernstein

The four new posted poems are
Transegmental Drift
The Sixties, with Apologies
Death on a Pale Horse
No Hiding Place ("I thought language poetry ...")

link    |  08-05-08

New
Ted Greenwald EPC author page

including

• from Common Sense
• 'Anyway' from 3
• from In Your Dreams
• Ride the Big Airplane (unpublished)
  
  page edited by Kye Schlessinger

-----

Some newspaper reviews in Swedish
of my OEI selected poems & essays
De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage

Aftonbladet
July 24, 2008

DN
July 25, 2008

Kristianstadsbladet
July 28, 2008

------

more & more of the recordings I made at the Ear Inn
in the 1970s and 1980s
are coming on-line at PennSound.
With many more to come over the next year.
The 1994 CD anthology is also available on PennSound
and at SPD

-----

Listen, 1972
Radio play by Robert Creeley, performed by Robert and Bobbie Creeley.
The recording above was released on cassette by Black Sparrow in the same year. The play was first broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West Germany, on December 1, 1971 in a translation by Klaus Reichert.
Creeley PennSound page ed. Steve McLaughlin.
 
Listen (23:09)

Kyle Schlesinger on Listen: Meaning: I Hear You



Bob and me in an April 2003 photo by Kyle
at my last seminar at Buffalo.
Bob just about to head out to Brown.
Photo from Sibila on-line, which has reprinted my essay on Creeley,:
"Hero of the Local."

link    |  08-03-08

The Kind of Poetry I Want


Caroline Bergvall
Alyson Singes
New York: Belladonna Books, 2008
Bergvall overlays Chaucerian sound patterning onto contemporary sites; a dazzling realization of diachronic vernacular, the old emerging from the new like mist from a deep fissure.

Ken Edwards
Nostalgia for Unknown Cities
Hastings, East Sussex: Reality Street, 2007
Cascading prose (ch. 2 is a dazzling unpunctuated 10 pages), in which urban landscape becomes a site for projected dreaming, something like Bernadette Mayer’s Moving crossed with Blade Runner.

Peter Jaeger
Prop
Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2008

Bruce Andrews
Designated Heartbeat
Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2006
One of Andrews's most structurally varied – and scintillating – collections.

Jennifer Moxley
The Line
Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press , 2007

Rosmaire Waldrop
Splitting Image
Tenerife, Canary Islands: Zasterle Press, 2005
Mostly prose poems.
“All week I concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety.”

Rachel  Zolf
Shoot & Weep
Vancouver: Nomados, 2008

Robert Pinsky
Gulf Music
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Kenneth Goldsmith
Sports
Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2008
           " – Well what a catch!
            – My goodness.
            – What a catch! He got to the level of the seats and  just sneaked his glove in there and some … somehow made the catch. Suzyn, that’s a heck of a catch. Let’s watch it.
            – It’s a tremendous catch and, uh, hee, hee, hee, he just snapped his wrist out  …"

JonArno Lawson
A Voweller's Bestiary: from aardvark to guineafowl (and H)
Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 2008
Eunoia for children.
Good golly gosh!
Go gobble book!
Got lots of raccoons, moose, loons, but – oh – look, no lox!
Yoo-hoo!
Moo for word zoo!

Simon Jarvis,
F 0 (Cambridge: Equipage, 2007)
--
The Unconditional
London: Barque Press, 2005
This delirious pentameter extravaganza of some 6500 lines is a nude formalist bachelor machine; a work of exhilarating, mercurial, anachronism.

Cole Heinowitz
The Rubicon
The Rest, 2007

Tim Atkins
Horace
Oakland: O Books, 2007
Milton, as in Berle; Homer, as in Simpson. Salted with local poetry color (a whiff of Berrigan’s Sonnets) and peppered by indirection (name dropping and product placement abound – Nike, Buddhism, Rolling Stone, Kipling, Atkins Diet, Caesar, Pindar, Jupiter, Jeremy). In any case, “The man we are looking for is gone” (Epodes 1).  Horace who? Aren’t you glad I didn’t say Catullus again.

Colin Browne
The Shovel
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2007
Browne follows up on his remarkable (and in the U.S. almost totally overlooked) Ground Water (2002), alternating speculative, metaphysical, and conceptual short poems with  series of quasi-archival prose excavations and tall tales (many in an ingenious format: continuous prose running over three-line justified stanzas).

Craig Dworkin
Parse (Berkeley: Atelos, 2008)
Everybody talks about unreadability but few do as much for the cause as Dworkin and his Parse. Dworkin literalizes LeCercle’s délire – taking the pun on lire (to read) in his obsessive parsing/diagramming. A bachelor machine all over again.

from Hugh MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1965)
…A poetry the quality of which
Is a stand made against intellectual apathy,
Its material founded, like Gray's, on difficult knowledge …
But, more than that, its words coming from a mind
Which has experienced the sifted layers on layers
Of human lives---aware of the innumerable dead
And the innumerable to-be-born ..
---Rich in its discoveries of new problems,
Important questions so far unsuspected,
For which field research does not yet supply
The data necessary to answer them. …
A poetry that is---to use the terms of red dog --
High, low, jack, and the goddamn game.

 

link    |  07-31-08

Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping on  Fox News
"Capitalism isn't necessarily the same as freedom." 

link    |  07-30-08

VANCOUVER
N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921
:: POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM ::

} some details of this schedule may still change {

August 19 - 24, 2008
at/with VIVO Media Arts Centre
1965 Main St, Vancouver

TUESDAY 19 August
Afternoon-Evening Session only
*not* at VIVO, location TBA
4:00 pm - late
Opening day social - a party + bbq with readings by poets who have been members of the KSW board or collective.
} tentatively including {
Sachiko Murakami, Donato Mancini, Maxine Gadd, Peter Culley, Steve Collis, Ted Byrne, Andrea Actis
+ surprise guests

WEDNESDAY 20 August

Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Title / theme: "On Line: Poetics and the Distribution of Meaning"
Moderator and Curator: Andrew Klobucar
Panellists: Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Judy Radul, Sianne Ngai

1:00 pm
Theatrical presentation
Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy w/guests
"The Clifford Irving Show"

Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Colin Smith, Robert Fitterman, Clint Burnham

THURSDAY 21 August

Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Moderator and Curator: Rita Wong
Title / theme: "Alpha Bets: Language Gambles on a Gift Economy"
Panellists: Juliana Spahr, Pat O'Brien, Reg Johanson, Peter Cole

1:00 pm
Talk
Michael Davidson
"On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA."

Evening Session7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rita Wong, Juliana Spahr, PILLS (A. Vidaver, R. Johanson, R. Farr), Pat O'Riley, Peter Cole, Louis Cabri, Jules Boykoff

FRIDAY 22 August

Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leaders: Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff
Title / theme: "Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public Space"
Respondents: Catriona Strang, Colin Smith, Juliana Spahr, Nicholas Perrin, Laura Elrick, Clint Burnham

1:00 pm
Panel presentation
Moderator and Curator: Jeff Derksen
Title / theme: "Neoliberalism and the Politics of Poetics"
Panellists: Rodrigo Toscano, Rod Smith, Dorothy Lusk, Roger Farr, Laura Elrick

Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rodrigo Toscano, Rod Smith, Kaia Sand, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen

SATURDAY 23 August
Morning-Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leader: Sianne Ngai
Title / theme: "The Zany Science: Post-Fordist Performance and the Problem of Fun
Respondents: Tyrone Williams, Mark Wallace, Andrew Klobucar, Rob Fitterman, Stacy Doris, Michael Davidson, Louis Cabri, Dodie Bellamy

1:00 pm
Audio feature
Lisa Robertson and Stacy Doris
"The Perfume Recordist"

Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Tyrone Williams, Mark Wallace, Catriona Strang, Judy Radul, Laura Elrick

SUNDAY 24 August
Afternoon-Evening Session only
*not* at VIVO, location TBA

link    |  07-27-08

Tracie Morris
at
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others
Poetry Center, University of Arizona
May 30, 2008
Tucson

new at PennSound
full video and two clips, including ...

3. "It all started..."

(2:07): MP4 (5.5 mb)

Recording courtesy
University of Arizona Poetry Center

link    |  07-26-08

photo: ©2008 Charles Bernstein
link    |  07-22-08

link    |  07-21-08

Jo Stafford
(1917-2008)



"Long Ago & Far Away"
(1944)
(Jerome Kern/Ira Gershwin)

____________________________________________

Robert Grenier & Stephen Ratcliffe
in conversation
Nov. 19, 2001
new at EPC

__________________________

link    |  07-20-08

JULY/AUGUST 2008 The new issue of the Boston Review is on-line & features Marjorie Perloff on Mayakovsky Short reviews of Friedlander, Mlinko, & Laynie Brown. Free verse Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 Alan Filreis University of North Carolina Press, $40 (cloth) Charles Bernstein Alan Filreis’s Counter-Revolution of the Word is less a work of literary interpretation than a penetrating historical and sociological study. It is comparable to now-classic books like Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, Robert Von Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980, and Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Against the grain of received history, Filreis, a colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals the deep engagement of many politically progressive poets of the 1930s with modernist poetic innovation. (The converse is also true: in an earlier book Filreis reads the putatively conservative Wallace Stevens within the socio-cultural context of the ’30s.) He also tracks a number of ’30s poets, showing the dire effect of McCarthyite redbaiting on their careers. However, his principal focus is on the conflation of anticommunism with antimodernism in the immediate postwar period. Such a conflation might seem counterintuitive, since the left is often associated with populist styles that reject modernist difficulty, while radical modernism is often associated with an aesthetic at odds with explicit left political content. But the toxic mix of what Filreis calls “anticommunist antimodernism” is not only pervasive in the 1950s, but also provides an ideological foundation for the official verse culture of the 1970s onward. Filreis’s book is filled with telling examples of how the aesthetic and political right denounced non-conventional poetry as if it were a part of the Communist menace. Such poetry was smeared as unnatural and corrupting, as an affront to moral values as expressed in proper grammar, and, moreover, as foreign and therefore un-American. “The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed ‘in a phrase: it was an alien growth’ . . . ‘poison,’” while, by extension, modernist poetry was denounced as “barbarous dissonance” fomenting “death and decay.” Writing in The New York Times in 1949, influential art critic Howard Devree was already warning of the anxious conflation of Communism and modernism, noting both were feared to be “possessed of the devil and . . . dangerous to American culture and realism”: Another curious, disconcerting and, in fact, frightening part of the new attack has been the tendency of the attackers to refer to modern art in practically the same terms used by Hitler and the Communist hierarchy. It is called ‘degenerate art,’ and there are thinly veiled accompanying demands for its suppression and for censorship. Filreis is not alone in relating these images of the alien and nonhuman to the imagery of Don Siegel’s 1956 movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the charged postwar environment, the lyric became a symbol for anti-modernist resistance, clearly “identified with the postideological moment,” a bulwark against what Colonel Cullen Jones, in a 1951 article, “Abnormal Poets and Abnormal Poetry,” derided as modernist effeminacy and its “sexual abnormalities.” Jones may seem, in retrospect, a marginal figure, but according to the headnote in A. Stanton Coblentz’s 1945 collection The Music Makers: An Anthology of Recent American Poetry, he published thirty-five poems in 1944 in such widely circulated publications as The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly and would certainly qualify as representative of the official verse culture of his time. One thing the anticommunist antimodernists had right was that the poetic form of radical modernism was political; Filreis calls this the “cold war politics of poetic form.” A 1953 article by Donald Davidson targets parataxis in poetry—the juxtaposition of two images or units of sense that lack any immediately apparent connection—for its “treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists.” Just a few years earlier, Robert Hillyer, in the widely circulated Saturday Review of Literature, assailed modernism in poetry as an “illusion of independent thought” and a “propaganda” machine of “the powers of darkness.” Writing in the Bulletin of the Poetry Society of America, Hillyer accused modernists of “a cold conformity of intellectualism” that eliminated “diversity” and insisted on “a critical censorship, in its effects like that of the Kremlin.” Modernist poets were smeared as perpetuators of the “Big Lie” (that their work is really poetry), who, if they were to capture the free world, would enforce their worldview by means of “secret police, concentration camps, and execution squads,” in the words of Coblentz in 1950. Coblentz, a central figure in Filreis’s study, had been featured in The New York Times Magazine in 1946 with his article called “What Are They?—Poems or Puzzles?” In a later essay he cast modernism in the role of a “mosquito that sucks your blood,” a “parasite in the grain.” Images of purity versus degeneration abound. Consider Ben Lucien Burman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility,” published in the November 1, 1952 issue of the Saturday Review. The influences of Gertrude Stein, Berman says, are “still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection.” It gets worse: The editors of Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, described modernism as genocide: poets were being exterminated. (‘The actual mandate, to be precise, prescribes not that all poets be exterminated, but only those who respect the literary traditions of three thousand years.’) To this murderous ‘revolution,’ wrote another antimodernist, ‘there must be a counterrevolution . . . The world has no . . . use for any kind of bigotry and regimentation.’ It was ‘futile . . . to seek the cause of the rise of our poetic dictators in any agency or factor outside their own little, warped minds and hearts,’ a conservative editor wrote; so, he continued, ‘the only way to eliminate the trouble is to eliminate them.’ By imposing a ‘tabu against beauty, modern poets . . . have unwittingly signed their own death sentence.’ The connection of radical formal innovation to genocide is likely to strike contemporary sensibilities as bizarre. These ideas, however, belonged to the immediate postwar mainstream, and they underwrite the allegorical unconscious of the anti-modernist factions of official verse culture in our time. While the postwar polemic takes a sometimes-apocalyptic turn, there is nothing new about such viscerally negative responses to radical modernism. Russian Futurist poets allied themselves to the 1917 revolution while Italian Futurists allied themselves with the right; either way, those who rejected radical change expressed shock and dismay at the new art and the social disruption to which it was symbolically, and actually, attached. The confusion as to whether radical formal innovation is leftist or rightist, ethical or nihilistic, persists. In the United States, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the modernist “revolution of the word” and even the simple practice of free verse were more often debunked than celebrated. We now take Whitman and Dickinson as canonical, but the contemporary responses to their work were chilling and preemptive. Poe located the problem as quintessentially American, as a phobia of the aesthetic, a fear that sensation undermines morality. The battle erupts on many fronts, historical and contemporary. Brian Reed, in his recent study Hart Crane: After His Lights, is able to chart how both the body of this poet and the body of his work remain sites of acute aesthetic and political struggle, which plays out, in what must seem an odd passion play to the uninformed, in contemporary responses from the 1920s and 1930s and also in reviews of his work in our time. Filreis’s study traces how these anti-modernist dynamics, fully alive in the first half of the century, morphed into important tools for Cold War hegemony. In this context it becomes harder to shrug off such now-peripheral figures as Peter Viereck, who, writing in Political Science Quarterly in 1952, “argued that the modern ‘anything goes’ aesthetic led to communist (and fascist) mass murder.” Filreis associates this noxious doctrine with the emergence of the neoliberalism articulated by Daniel Bell: Bell’s social narrative telling of the convergence of communism and modernism led him to propose a “vital center”—in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s celebrated term—where limits could be placed on the urge toward ‘anything goes,’ an attitude symptomatic of both communists and modernists. While the anticommunist antimodernists claimed that modernist obscurity constituted an elitist betrayal of the general reader, they failed to recognize that this general reader was the pure product of an elitist Cold War ideology. But the greater irony is that much of what the anticommunist antimodernists rejected in radical modernist poetry was also reviled by the totalitarian governments that they opposed. In the defense of human freedom as articulated by the individual poet in the lyric poem, these Cold Warriors hollowed the lyric of its enunciative and sonic richness and undermined the articulation of human freedom through unfettered expression. The demonization of the aesthetic left in poetry is still with us. It persists, often in defensive, sometimes farcical, form in the teaching and writing of those who, ironically, may sense they are on the wrong side of history. As with anticommunist antimodernism, dogmatic protest against the dogmatism of others is the standard operating procedure. The intellectual heir of anticommunist antimodernism is a post- or neo- liberalism that underwrites its defense of dominant aesthetic values as common sense. Critiques are dismissed as unjustifiable agonism (ideology of the avant-garde), part of a struggle that is now said to be outmoded. The post-partisan creed is that the avant-garde has won its battles and now it is time to return to kinder, gentler forms—poetry with a human face. It is the end of ideology all over again. The only way not to be divisive is to accept the dominant poetic values as inevitable and natural, as craft rather than ideology, sincerity rather than artifice. Filreis provides a vivid lineage for a literary culture that promotes anti-intellectualism in the pursuit of “core values”—traditional form, the authentic subjective voice, legibility, the common reader—that are still claimed as fundamental literary virtues. The ideology of the ’50s anticommunist antimodernists is now embedded in the mainstream; it has come to shape common assumptions of popular taste about poetry. While it may be tempting to mock the anti-modernist claims documented in Counter-Revolution of the Word, Filreis’s sober approach acknowledges the social cost for many poets. Ludicrous attacks on formal innovation become ominous when they cost someone a job or erase significant poets from cultural memory. But beyond the prices paid by individual poets, demonizing aesthetic invention and poetic difference has broader ramifications, from the diminished intellectual fare served up daily by the mediocracy to the stunted—and stunting—conception of literature promoted in too many classrooms. Those who do not want to repeat poetic history in farcical form are condemned to study it. Counter-Revolution of the Word does just that. Boston Review link to article Subscribe to Boston Review

link    |  07-17-08

David von  Schlegell
artist's web page
is now up.
von Schlegell met Susan Howe
in the late 1960s and their marriage lasted
until his death in 1992

link    |  07-15-08

Broadside by Jeremy James Thompson
made for reading at the Center for Book Arts
June 2008
*click on image for high res*

link    |  07-14-08

The Dark at the End of the Tunnel

link    |  07-13-08

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Notable Books (2005)