New@Sybil

Harvard University
Barker Center
October 5, 2009
my complete reading (59:19): MP3
& segmented:
1. introduction by Stephanie Sandler (1:53): MP3
2. In the Middle of the Way (tr. of Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem) (1:01): MP3
from Recalculating (work in progress):
3. The Sixties with Apologies (1:38): MP3
4. Fold (3:07): MP3
5. The Honor of Virtue (0:14):MP3
6. Sad Boy's Sad Boy (1:10): MP3
7. Loneliness in Linden (1:07): MP3
8. On Election Day (3:45): MP3
9.: Dear%r Fr~ien%d, (3:01): MP3
10. The Twelve Tribes of Dr. Lacan (2:05): MP3
11. The Truth in Pudding (13:19): MP3
12. Morality (1:25): MP3
13. Won't You Give Up This Poem to Someone Who Needs It? (1:07): MP3
14. Stupid Men, Smart Choices (1:25): MP3
15. Two Stones with One Bird (1:12): MP3
from All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems:
16. Dear Mr. Fannelli (4:42): MP3
17. from "The Republic of Reality (0:50): MP3
18. Rivulets of the Dead Jew (0:32): MP3
19. Doggy Bag (1:14): MP3
20: from "Today is not Opposite Day" (0:35): MP3
21: every lake (1:08): MP3
from Recalculating:
22. Catullus 85 (0:10): MP3
23. And Aenigma Was His Name, O! (0:16): MP3
24. tr. of Hugo, Les Contemplations #XIV (Demain, dés l'aube ...) (1:05): MP3
25. If You Say Something, See Something (0:36): MP3
26. Today Is the Last Day of Your Life 'til Now (0:39): MP3
27. Time Served (1:25): MP3
28. The Introvert (O:45): MP3
29. Sapphics (0:34): MP3
30. tr. of Baudelaire, "Be Drunken" (1:10): MP3
31. tr. of Apollinaire, "Le pont Mirabeau" (1:22): MP3
Coda:
32. "Madame Moiselle" from Shadowtime (0:34): MP3
33. “All the Whiskey in Heaven” (1:16): MP3
Recorded by the Woodberry Poetry Room Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard.

Jacket magazine: An Announcement from John Tranter and Al Filreis


Dear friends:

We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting. 

By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket (jacketmagazine.com). It began in what John recalls as "a rash moment" in 1997 - an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. "The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental." (So said _The Guardian_.)

After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite. 

Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. 

The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.

Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor. 

More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude -- as many in the world of poetics do -- to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they've done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.

- John Tranter & Al Filreis
  http://jackemagazine.com

full set of placards

Spring 2010 Schedule

Go to blog page to see the Flash stream.

Rae Armantrout interviewed
in The Chicago Weekly
by Daniel Benjamin
January 29, 2009

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Returning to the Closet (on Raymond Federman)
Douglas Messerli
Sibyl

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Mimeo Mimeo 3
Danny Snelson does a remarkable close reading of two magazine issues: Form from 1966 and Alcheringa's 1975 "Dwelling Place" feature edited by Ron Silliman.

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95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics

**********

from Joan Retallack's
PROCEDURAL ELEGIES  / WESTERN CIV CONT’D /
forthcoming from Roof Books (New York)

A I D /I/ S A P P E A R A N C E

for Stefan Fitterman

The disappearance moves through the letters of the alphabet (and the source text) in this way: Beginning with letters A I D S, it spreads to adjoining letters B H J C E R T, to F G K Q U,  to L P V,  to M O W,  to N X,  to Y. ....

The poem was composed in 1994 and first published in Object 5 (1995): it was first collected in Retallack's 1998 collection How to Do Things with Words.  For a discussion of this poem, see “AIDS and the Postmodern Subject: Joan Retallack's ‘AID/I/SAPPEARANCE’” by Bryan Walpert, Poetics Today 2006 27(4):693-710.  

in Sibyl

full set of Fall 2008 Election Placards

Charles Reznikoff reads from Holocaust
New York City, December 21, 1975
recorded and with photos by filmmaker Abraham Ravett

from Mike Hennessey's PennSound Daily entry today:
" While Holocaust, as a text alone, serves as a viscerally pointed indictment of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, not to mention a marvelous example of documentary poetics, in these selections, the auratic resonance of these appropriated testimonies are amplified dramatically, particularly when framed by the frail yet determined voice of the seventy-nine year old poet — who would pass away a month and a day from the date of this recording session — lending the work a gravid anger, a grand sense of monumental enormity."

1. audio check (0:32): MP3
2. Research 1 (take 1) (1:49): MP3
3. Research 1 (take 2) (1:36): MP3
4. Ghettos 8 (1:13): MP3
5. Massacres 4 (2:03): MP3
6. Massacres 4 (end) (0:29): MP3
7. Massacres 5 (take 1) (0:46): MP3
8. Massacres 5 (take 2) (0:41): MP3
9. Work Camps 1 (1:10): MP3
10. Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks 1 (9:15): MP3
11. Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks 1, strophe 9 (retake) (0:53): MP3
12. from Work Camps 3, final (5th) strophe (1:19): MP3
13. Children 2 (0:52): MP3
14. Children 3 (1:15): MP3
15. Work Camps 6 (2:26): MP3
16. Work Camps 8 (1:59): MP3
17. Entertainment 1 (0:56): MP3
18. Mass Graves 5 (2:40): MP3

Emma Bee Bernstein (1985-2008):
Masquerade, A Retrospective

(photographs and a slide show)

DOVA Temporary Gallery
University of Chicago
5228 South Harper Avenue
February 5 through February 27, 2010.
Co-curated by Kat Griefen and Laura Letinsky.
There will be a reception for the show on Friday, February 12th, from 5 to 8pm.

Gallery Hours: Weds.-Sat., 12pm-5pm. Tel: 773-324-2089. 
A catalog is available for the show with essays by Kate Bussard and Matthew Jesse Jackson.

---

Charles Bernstein
a reading for Emma
on Sunday, Feb. 14
at 2pm
at the Renaissance Society
University of Chicago
(free and open to the public)

----------------

Girldrive
by Emma Bee Bernstein & Nona Willis-Aronowitz
reading at Bluestockings
172 Allen St., NYC
on Thursday, February 4 at 7 p.m.
Nona Willis Aronowitz, Jennifer Baumgardner,
Una Aya Osato, Likwuid Stylez, Susan Bee..

Below is the official Kenning announcement of the poets theater anthology, officially being released on January 19.
The volume is filled with treasures, not the least is the extensive set of notes in the back, which is detailed and illuminating and chock full of elusive historical details and contexts. The editors, and publisher Patrick Durgin, deserve many congratulations for this milestone achievement.
(Cover image of V.R. "Bunny" Lang.).
Much more to say about this, and poets theater, but for now just this ...

Kenning Editions
THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985
edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil.

Order online from Small Press Distribution
or postage paid by ordering directly from the press.
Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions.

With new interest in poetry as a performative art, and with prewar experiments much in mind, the young poets of postwar America infused the stage with the rhythms and shocks of their poetry. From the multidisciplinary nexus of Black Mountain, to the Harvard-based Cambridge Poets Theatre, to the West Coast Beats and San Francisco Renaissance, these energies manifested themselves all at once, and through the decades have continued to grow and mutate, innovating a form of writing that defies boundaries of genre. THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985 documents the emergence, growth, and varied fortunes of the form over decades of American literary history, with a focus on key regional movements. The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives. It will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant-garde theater.

Among the poets featured in THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER are Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Russell Atkins, Gregory Corso, Helen Adam, Michael McClure, James Broughton, Kenneth Koch, Jackson Mac Low, Lorenzo Thomas, Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Ron Padgett, Hannah Weiner, Lew Welch, Sonia Sanchez, Joe Brainard, Bruce Andrews, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bob Holman and Bob Rosenthal, Steve Benson, Ted Greenwald, Carla Harryman, Ntozake Shange, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Robert Grenier, Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Rodefer, Fiona Templeton, Kenward Elmslie, and Leslie Scalapino. Also included are previously unpublished plays by Jack Spicer, V.R. "Bunny" Lang, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, James Keilty, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Johanna Drucker, and Nada Gordon. The editors provide informative and provocative prefatory matter, including extensive notes on each play, as well as several that fall within the purview of the book but, for one reason or another, were omitted, as with Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses or Jessica Hagedorn's Tenement Lover. Rounding out the book are contemporary classics: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and Kathy Acker's The Birth of the Poet.

This is a great book! Here are the poets, the great modern poets who have given us our language, our imagery, our style—plunging us into their theater: John Ashbery’s The Heroes, with its classical echo in Ashbery’s singular idiom, which The Living Theatre produced in 1952; Bunny Lang’s marvelous re-invention of English phrases, which The Poets Theatre at Cambridge so boldly produced; Frank O’Hara, who inspired a whole generation of poet-playwrights; the stylist Schuyler, our blustering hero Corso, the magical Duncan; their names themselves are poetry…and though the fickle theater has sometimes betrayed them, they remain the foundation of our hope that the theatre of poetry lives today—and will flourish tomorrow if our planet is to be saved from oblivion.
—Judith Malina

Kevin Killian and David Brazil's wonderful anthology reminds us of the vital role of theater among postwar U.S. poets and testifies to the enduring connection between poetry and drama from Shakespeare and Milton to Gertrude Stein and Amiri Baraka.  These inventive, daring, funny, strange and exciting works are not mere sidecars to the authors' more important work in poetry but stand as significant contributions to American theater in general, often premiered at major theatrical venues (Judson Church, Living Theater, Berkeley Rep, Cherry Lane Theater, New Langton Arts, Manhattan Artists Theater). Killian and Brazil have provided a superb set of notes documenting each play's provenance as well as performance data that includes casts of characters drawn from fellow poets and friends. This is a major contribution to poetics and performance studies.  
 —Michael Davidson

Each play included here is a gauge of the contributions, some light-hearted, some light-headed, some gestural, some structural, that a great many influential American poets have made in the shadow of experimental theatre’s heydays. The editors are themselves no strangers to the guilty pleasures of this less charted genre and their additional 50 pages of notes show the extraordinary archaeological digs they have created to retrieve lively or relevant compositional or production details. Along with the preface, these notes ensure that the collection will appeal to fans as well as scholars. So don’t be fooled by the sober title. This wonderful volume cannot but delight anyone who likes their plays served in the raw and the cooked of poetry.
—Caroline Bergvall

This absolutely essential anthology unearths many hidden treasures that would have a profound effect on any mature, artistically oriented American Theater, if that could only come into existence. What hidden wealth is displayed here!
—Richard Foreman

Alas! A thoroughgoing collection of Poets Theater works that not only maps the ever-budding / never fully harvested genre that is Poets Theater, but also projects a concrete terrain from which poets and pert near anybody can act on. If PT has been about language capacitance foregrounded from the get-go, then this book is the go-to-go.  
—Rodrigo Toscano 

ISBN: 0-9767364-5-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-9767364-5-5
$25.95

Kenning has been publishing some of the detailed notes on contributions to the book at its website:
Fiona Templeton
Jack Spicer
Steve Benson
Pedro Pietri
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

David Reed ‘Works on Paper’
at Peter Blum (Soho, New York)

at one point Reed writes (and shows)
"The color Wittgenstein said was impossible ..."
The integration of drawing, painting, and writing, under the sign of sketching makes these works marvels of poetry plastique.
Reed remarked to me that it was surprising to him that he had not done any collaborations with poets or writers, given his lifelong engagement with so many; but these works are visual-verbal collaborations.
Of course, these “working drawings,” as Reed calls, them are studies for his paintings; the verbal language integrated with the paintings and drawings are detailed notes for revision as well as commentary (instruction and reflection and recipe). It is just for this reason that this work makes such a strong case for the connection of the verbal and the visual and the way in which the verbal commentary is a prompt or prospectus for the visual marks. The verbal material here is not secondary but an integral part of the poesis.

While seeing the original works on a paper is compelling, David Reed, Rock Paper Scissors (Cologne: Kienbaum Artists’ Books, Snoek, 2009) is a large-format color book that has fine reproductions of this work.

Jeffrey Robinson, Jerome Rothenberg and I discuss
Robert Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return"
on the new PoemTalk, with host Al Filreis.
(I'm the one with grey hair.)
MP3 

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Bob Holman's extensive guide to
2009's Poetry Books

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At Gabriel Orasco at MoMA (New York)
"Dial Tone" (1992):
a very wide Chinese scroll with
columns of partial phone numbers collaged from the New York white page telephone book.
Of course, I'm partial to telephone book art,
but this struck me a marvelous work of visual-verbal-conceptual-concrete-language-centered (VVCCLC) art.
(Unfortunately MoMA does not offer a decent image.)

Robert Grenier

PENN SCANS
from Whalecloth

NOTE

These 71 drawing poem images were selected/thrown together primarily out of two 2008 notebooks to bring to show (look at, read & discuss in public) at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, the evening of October 27, 2009.

A record of that night's proceedings exists, as of this writing, here.
(Video via PennSound)

Many too many to 'get through' on one occasion, as usual, & just thrown together—but isn't it funny, 'after the fact' they look like they've been married all their life.

Might as well prop them up together here with the prior/online version of Sentences (originally hand-drafted in notebooks, but 'composed' on typewriter, c. 1971-1978) with which—despite seeming (time/distance) otherwise weird result of determining to (quit the typewriter!) draw letters/write in colors/use the whole space of the page—they (curiously) have much in common.

A fairly begun exercise in 'compare & contrast' could certainly proceed to fill up a number of blue book pages at 8 a.m. almost anywhere (presuming any able body wanted to undertake the work)—I don't care what their 'motivation' is any more, I just think it's well time I got some substantial notice (!) & had, demonstrably, some real readers !

Somebody who had something to say !

The last six poems were written in sequence on Long Island in February 2003 (& are included in discussion in Buffalo published by Jonathan Skinner's Field Books in 2009 as Farming The Words)—the rest (heretofore unpublished, along with thousands of others) are rough-scanned from two 2008 notebooks & are 'from & of' (how so?) Bolinas (arguably a straightforward 'record of life' hereabouts).

Two (nos. 37 & 38) are 'mere quotation'—a (remembrance) 're-writing' of a repeated question from "A LONG DRESS" in Stein'sTender Buttons—& thus (though acknowledged here) hardly to be differentiated from plagiarism (?). What is the 'point' of doing that? (And why suddenly resort to use of a punctuation mark, when such have been consistently eschewed elsewhere?)

"Coming in from the Cold"
Celebrating 20 Years of the MLA Off-Site Reading

&

MLA Off-Site & On-Site Reading 2009

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PARTS
from l'amour fou by Tom Beckett

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Stephen Ratcliffe's poem a day
lookin' out the window

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Kit Robinson. The Dolch Stanzas.
(1976)
Available in three versions from Whalecloth:
page-through, scroll-through, and PDF format.

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Danny Snelson at PennSound

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George Oppen:
2 Newly Discovered Poems from Guggenheim Museum Reading, 1964
PennSound
with thanks as always to Richard Swigg

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Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger
Threads talk series on books arts
Loney, Alexander, Cutts, Spector

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Barrett Watten
"Plasma"
(1979)

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THE 100 MOST FREQUENT WORDS
IN THE SOPHIST
from RealPoetik (2009)
a recent poem

Prepared for the Inauguration of Daniel Dromm as the representative of the 25th Council District in New York City, this video was produced by Joel Kuszai and Brendan Fay, and edited by Joel Kuszai and makes generous use of "Danny Boy," the 2003 documentary on Daniel Dromm by Brendan Fay.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010 1pm
IS ART CRITICISM 50 YEARS BEHIND POETRY? OR AREN'T YOU THE KIND THAT TELLS?
 (Introduced by Jacqueline Turner)

Charles Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, With Strings, 2000-2001

poetry is [vol. I] from George Quasha on Vimeo.

poetry is (Speaking Portraits) [Vol. I--v. 1.4]--

61 POETS IN VOL. I:

Ammiel Alcalay, Hector Alves, David Antin, Arman, Coleman Barks, Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Harvey Bialy, Blue, Lee Ann Brown, Tisa Bryant, Elizabeth Clark, Michael Coffey, Alan Davies, Michel Deguy, Timotha Doane, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Fisher, Joanna Fuhrman, Eric Gansworth, Steve Goodman, Carla Harryman, Kevin Hart, David Henderson, Mitch Highfill, Bob Holman, Anselm Hollo, Mikhail Horowitz, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Romana Huk, Franz Kamin, Robert Kelly, Richard Kostelanetz, Louise Landes Levi, Judith Malina, Chris Mann, Michael Meade, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Cheryl Pallant, Nick Piombino, Kristen Prevallet, India Radfar, Carter Ratcliff, Hanon Reznikov, Jerome Rothenberg, Sapphire, Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, Charles Stein, David Levi Strauss, Kate Suddes, Chris Tysh, Cecilia Vicuña, Tenzin Wangyal, Barrett Watten, Henry Weinfield, Elizabeth Willis, Krzysztof Ziarek

more Quasha "art is" video at Vimeo