photo from OEI launch by © Susanne Christensen
Leevi Lehto: Aeons Swish In Eden’s Sway
For Charles Bernstein and Jörgen Gassilewski
Author’s Note. ”Aeons Swish In Eden’s Sway” is based on Charles Bernstein’s ”Johnny Cake Hollow”, together with variations of it by the author (into English), Jörgen Gassilewski (into Swedish), me (into Finnish), Jörgen Gassilewski (from my Finnish into Swedish; all these homophonic) and by me into Swedish from my Finnish (metrical-semantic), that were published in ”Oversettelse 2” issue of nypoesi.net. I use all the lines of these versions in sequence, permutating them stanza per stanza following the pattern of Sestina end words. I performed the poem as part of the launch of Charles’ Swedish book, De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högt spel i tropik-erna. Dikter, essäer, samtal (OEI editör) in Weld, Stockholm, July 1, 2008.
Xo quwollen swacked unt myrry flooped
Ceylon’s ox slaked Mary’s goard
Så kvällen svag ond myrens flod
Jos kuolen, päätyn: nirri pois!
Juice kulen, pesten: ny ripost!
Dör jag, så slutar jag – och kolar vippen!
Bedarrar brådskor, jobb. Omedelbart
Sardone to fligrunt’s swirm, ort
Så tunt tunt tyget, kött. Kort
Cycloned to flagrant dawn, sat
Saa tyyntyyn kiireet, työt. Koht’
sardin till flodgrunds svärm, ort
Jeremie plåga och går vi svårt i
du bjöd den bjässen upp, ack, satt och skita –
körmyn veit, oh, tarpees’ teit – mit’
Jirmy plaight org garvey swait ib
Jimmy’s plight on gravy sprain as
sömsmån vet, åh, tarvets tält – mitt
i kontorslandskap! Sätt
given dörr och klump. Ske
Gibes in fairies lorn. Shed
vad som helst må slösa bort, sen ropa:
Giben durrs urk klurpf. Sheb
ikin’ törsätkööt! Sep’
huuti: ”Buu!” – men’ reisiluus, kun
hojta: “Buu!” – men reslust kan
Boughtie bloor de dazzy dule dun
bågträ blör de dö så du dån
”Bo!” En lårbensbrott fick du när de
Bright blood then, doled dizzy
Frappes along the gogos gay, jug
turpiis Inkoos sait. Kas
på käften dig i Ingå gick. Se när,
ta på änkans sätt. Kastar
från pil gå och glid, ljud
Fruppi’s ghigo’s gly, jud
Silo pain, good Jimmy’s caulk,
kaivoos’ vein – ket’? Ihmistä!
till brunnen din jag drog… O vem? En mänska!
vår vinkel? En mystär!
kullrar fram vid Jimmys kack -
Chyllrophane jed jimmsy’s cack -
Enks’… oudomp’ omp’ kai …?…Sep
Ett Sodoms Molokai …?…Sätt
Exenst aerodole fump glire. Eb
i tjänst är du vårt gli. En
Int’så?… må värka märkligare än?
Ensued irradiant flame. Say
här just nu: “Med djurets vitt? En
hurrar blott, min oro slut när
Hooray bloat, say irksome slit, as
Ursinnig blir han nu: ”Varför, för fan,
Horray bloot, ig orry sluit neb
hurjistuu: ”Miks jurriss’ uit? Ent’
mist och näve vann. Släpp
i pickalurvan svimma? Och varifrån
mist’ ne ott’ ne kuvat?” – Ket’
Nist neb ot neb gwon. Shleb
Nestling slights no gasp. Rail
list med rått med kuvat?” – Katt
dom fotona de tog?” – Vem ska jag åse?
Atsum imba outsey burft allappie
Kattson? - Impa, vatten! – mod?… På läppen!
At sum, imbue outset, burnt
katson? - Impee, vautsi! – muut?… Paa leipiin!
allt som ämbar och din bukt allt lappri
Merp av ords. Een ainsey swish
Thronement merely pines. Then
märkt av ord. En anses vis
Hörppää pois! Aineisiin, niin
Hör upp härpå! En åsna, nån
Ungmön? jisses! andra?… Häng upp på födkrok!
Sörpla bort! Till än så tryckregerad
Ien ansley sploop ughalls dep dulster
på åsnan, kan på halsen Tolstojs
Aeons swish in Eden’s sway
paineisiin, kun puhals’ ne Tolstoin
en anses spå och all ens dunster
flög, jag är och nämner två
ämnen blåste de – jag menar Tolstojs
puut. Vikaantuu nimet, suut
Flooge, ig ahrs unt nimbet twool
Slops hulls in duster’s flow
plats. Vi kan ur minnet, sök
här i – med bud och torkat kött…
begrepp, jag oros kval och blarr.
Airs numbed till gab, obeyers
träd. Skavankar nämnen får, och munnar
Begroob, ig ooburs quwate ag blurg.
heruu – mik’ puutyös’ tärkätkööt…
enbart en liten skvätt ska ge, och dina
Chewed, blur the blur ingests.
snickerier fina stärka må!
Sketch of Roberts by Wyndham Lewis, 1948
Lynette Roberts
Collected Poems
ed. Patrick McGuinness
Manchester: Carcanet, 2005.
Embrowns himmel hokushai. Manure seeps
In long rags, pavilions hut, camouflages
Arsenical veins with a sprouting
Febrifuge and serial of death; heaves a
Heavier heart of sedimentary hate.
Washing like flies to pin of elbow, soldiers
Under ciliated moon shake off floatings
Of soap; strike code on oxidised zinc; polish
Bayonets clean as the cut of the moon to
Sharpen inactivity. Spark electric cells
Of air into a prism of light as they
Shoulder the blades on parade. A shark wind teethes,
Strips fields; striating black fullstops under hedge;
Bellying-white trees as they stand caustic
And chagrin. Like paleozoic sentinels, stretched high
Above skeleton hills. Dripping rust low on
Blue lined eddies of wind, cold down
To the shafts of their root: to kerb of tide
Where cracked mud quails into Kuan glaze;
To greening dunes where rivulets shine as …
from Gods with Stainless Ears (opening of pt III p. 56)
McGuinness provides a fine introduction to this relatively unknown second-wave modernist (1909-1995) of Welsh descent, who grew up in Argentina & moved to Britain as a teenager, and who stopped writing poetry (partly due to hospitalizations for schizophrenia) in the mid-1950s. The collection consists of Roberts 1944 Faber & Faber collection (selected by T.S. Eliot), her 1951 Faber & Faber long war poem, Gods with Stainless Ears: An Heroic Poem, which McGuinness suggests is a kind of poetry screenplay, plus a miscellany of uncollected works. In a useful and detailed response to the book in the Boston Review, John Wilkinson links Roberts to second-wavers Mina Loy and Hart Crane. Comparison with David Jones is inevitable. Thick syntax, an often arcane lexicon, a complex prosody, and an aggressively off-center (not to say “minor”) perspectivism created a poetry of “sociolinguistic intensities,” in Wilkinson’s useful phrase.
OEI launch for
De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage
[The Attack of the Difficult Poems: A Tropics of High Stakes]
Weld, Stockholm, 2008
below: Susan Bee; Jörgen Gassilewski. & Bernstein; Leevi Lehto; Bernstein
photos by Cecilia Grönberg / OEI
Susan Bee, "Framing the Rosenbergs"
(1983, 28 x 32"), oil on linen
“You know, I seldom use the word sister anymore;
I’ve just wiped it out of my mind.”
– David
Greenglass (brother of Ethel Rosenberg).
The
New York Times reported
today
on the recent death of Ruth Greenglass.
"now
is the time for your tears ..."
Lawrence Joseph
on
Close
Listening
ArtRadio WPS1.Org
July 7, 2008
Program 1: Selected poems: (23:16): MP3
1. In the Age of Postcapitalism
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. By the Way
4. About This
5. When One is Feeling One's Way
6. On That Side
7. The Game Changed
8. What Is There to Understand
9. That Too
Program 2: Conversation with Charles Bernstein (27:24): MP3
photo: ©2008
Bernstein/PennSound
link | 07-08-08
Subscribe
by email via feedburner or rsspect
...don't you know that models are what we are inside of ...
that's no model, that's my life
.One way to read this collection, on the poetics of architecture, from the point of view of poetry, is to see how much it offers for an approach to poems as models (rather than expression or representation).
Models,
306090 Books Volume 11
Emily Abruzzo, Eric Ellingsen and Jonathan D. Solomon, editors
ISBN 978-1-56898-734-7
Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press
248 pages
Myung & the heaviness of the snow
Go
to web log home page for streaming video. 
The great snowstorm of 2006 had done serious damage to Buffalo. Myung moved to the city about a year before I moved to Penn. So our plan to work together got scuttled.
December 12, 2006
(mp4, 39 seconds, 6.3 mb)
J. M. W. Turner
Norham Castle, Sunrise, ca. 1845
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY)
through September 21
awesome
The new issue of the Dutch magazine Parmentier (17:2,
June 2008), is devoted to a dossier called T=A=A=L, featuring
Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Michael
Palmer, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, and myself
along with Ton van’t Hof, Samuel Vriezen. While the print
magazine is all Dutch, the web
site provides the original English poems.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Leevi Lehto & I at WALTIC
Stockholm, June 30
At the launch for the OEI
book, July 1
reading with Susan Bee collaborations
at Weld (Stockholm)
photos ©2008 Susanne
Christensen
One of the main EPC projects of recent years
has been the development of our "portals."
The Scandanavian portal, edited by Lehto, has now evolved into
the
Nordic Poetry Center
still in development.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Link Repaired:
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
POETRY - A Retrospective
An interview with Charles Bernstein (2006-2007)
Aryanil Mukherjee
What, Me Conceptual?
a
talk & reading
May 31, 2008
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others
Poetry Center, University of Arizona
|
A brief primer on bachelor machines
(with special reference to "Recantorium") "Bachelor machine" comes from Duchamp's "Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (the lower part of the "Large Glass," e.g., "Chocolate Grinder"). Michel Carrouges extended the term to incorporate the disciplinary apparatus of Kafka's The Penal Colony (in turn adapted by Deleuze and Guattari) & also Roussel's Impressions of Africa. As a term for poetic constructions, "bachelor machine" suggests nonproductive, nonprocreative, onanistic processes; vicious (or self-enclosing/collapsing) circles, an apparatus that is unable to get outside itself. There is a connection, in my use, to délire (delirium, with special reference to Jean-Jacques LeCercle) — that which goes astray, deviates from the rational, errs, raves. |
2. "A Theory's Evolution" (The Theory
of Flawed Design) (1:18): MP3, text (from
Philadelphia Inquirer)
3. anagrammatica from Shadowtime (anagrams of "Walter
Benjamin") (0:43)): MP3
4. introduction to "Dea%r Fr~ien%d" (1:21): MP3
5. "Dea%r Fr~ien%d" (3:33): MP3, text (from Conjunctions)
6. Some remarks on poetry and framing (2:24): MP3
7. On Blind Witness (1:47): MP3
8. "Four score ..." and "Nonny" (from "Today's
Not Opposite Day" in With Strings): (1:39): MP3
9. "Gertrude & Ludwig's Bogus Adventure" (from My
Way) — in honor of Marjorie Perloff (1:46): MP3
10. On "Most Frequent Words" suite (0:42): MP3
11. "Kiss Me Tommy" (3:37): MP3
12. "No Hiding Place" (2:18): MP3
13. "All the Whiskey in Heaven" (1:21): MP3
Charles Bernstein
De
svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage
[The Attack of the Difficult Poems: A Tropics of
High Stakes]
ed. & tr. Anders Lundberg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, Jesper Olsson
(Stockholm: OEI, 2008)
app. 300pp.
order from OEI
order @ oei.nu
or
www.adlibris.se
www.bokus.com
Launch for the book
with Bernstein, Susan Bee, & Leevi Lehto
& Lundberg, Magnusson, & Jörgen Gassilewski.
July 1 6:30pm-9pm
Weld
Norrtullsgatan 7 (t-bana Odenplan), Stockholm
photo:
Cecilia Grönberg for OEI
from Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, ed.
anthology of poetry in translation of English poetry to Icelandic.
131.839 slög með bilum
English tr. of Norðdahl's introduction here.
published 2007 by ntamo
order"Thank You for Saying Thank You"
[from Girly Man]
This is a completely accssible poem
Þakka þér fyrir að þakka mér
Þetta er fullkomlega
aðgengilegt ljóð.
Það er ekkert
í þessu ljóði
sem á nokkurn
hátt er erfitt
að skilja.
Öll orðin
eru einföld &
hitta í mark.
Hér eru engin ný
hugtök, engar
kenningar, engar
hugmyndir til að rugla
í þér. Það eru engir
intellektúal-stælar í
þessu ljóði. Þetta er
hreint tilfinningaljóð.
Það tjáir að fullu
leyti tilfinningar
höfundarins: mínar tilfinningar,
manneskjunnar sem talar
við þig núna.
Þetta snýst allt um
samskipti.
Frá einu hjarta til annars.
Þetta ljóð metur
& virðir þig mikils sem
lesanda. Það
fagnar sigri
ímyndunarafls
mannsins
17
innan um gryfjur &
hörmungar. Í
þessu ljóði
eru 90 línur,
269 orð, og
fleiri atkvæði en
ég hef tíma til þess að
telja. Hver lína, hvert
orð, & hvert atkvæði
var valið til að
tjá einvörðungu
hina ætluðu meiningu
& ekkert umfram hana.
Þetta ljóð tjáir ekkert
óskýrt eða torráðið.
Hér er ekkert
hulið. Hundrað
lesendur myndu allir
lesa ljóðið
nákvæmlega eins &
fá út úr því
sömu skilaboðin. Þetta
ljóð, eins og öll
góð ljóð, segir
sögu án krókaleiða
svo lesandinn þarf aldrei
að giska í eyðurnar. Þó á
stundum tjái það
biturð, reiði,
gremju, útlendingahræðslu
& vott af kynþáttahatri, er
ráðandi andrúmsloft þess
jákvætt. Það finnur
gleði jafnvel í
þessum fyrirlitlegu
augnablikum
lífsins sem
18
það deilir með
þér. Þetta ljóð
er fulltrúi vonarinnar
um ljóðlist
sem snýr ekki
baki sínu við
áhorfendum, sem
telur sig ekki
betri en lesandann,
sem hefur helgað sig
ljóðlistinni sem
vinsælli afþreyingu, eins og
flugdrekaflugi og fluguveiðum.
Þetta ljóð
tilheyrir engum
skóla, hlýðir engum
kreddum. Það fylgir
engri tísku. Það
segir bara það sem
það segir. Það er
ekta.
Susan Bee, "Unbridled Dawn"
You are invited to:
an Opening Reception at
A.I.R. Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, #301
on Thursday, June 26, 6pm to 8pm
Shows on view from June 24 through July 19
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6 pm
A group show
with paintings by Susan Bee, Francie Shaw
and other gallery members
Wish You Were Here
a postcard exhibition
with Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Toni Simon, and many others
and a solo exhibition by Hanna Sandin
Gallery I:
SCENE CHANGE
is a group show of the gallery artists.
The artists are: Nancy Azara, Susan Bee, Liz Surbeck Biddle,
Daria Dorosh,
Regina Granne, Louise Kramer, Carolyn Martin, Louise McCagg,
JoAnne McFarland, Sylvia Netzer, Ann Pachner, Sheila Ross, Ann
Schaumburger,
Ursula Schneider, Francie Shaw, Barbara Siegel, Elisabeth Munro
Smith,
Joan Snitzer, Alice Steinhardt, Nancy Storrow, Haejin Yoon.
Gallery II:
WISH YOU WERE HERE
is an annual postcard benefit exhibition including original
works by over 400 artists.
The 4” x 6” artworks are created by hundreds of contemporary
artists. Each postcard will be priced at $40.
The show will feature work by three prominent artists: a
series of small drawings by Tom Otterness, a print by Carolee Schneemann,
and a painting by Joan Snyder. These works will be available
through silent auction. The bidding will begin on June
26th and end on July 19th at 6 pm. To place a bid visit the gallery
or contact Kat Griefen, Director, at 212-255-6651, kgriefen@airgallery.org
————
Peter
O'Leary on the "Objectivist" issue of Poetry
(Poetry Foundation)
————
Frank
Kuenstler singles
with Bruce Andrews' essay
at PennSound
————
—————
A collection of abstracts and some papers from the Orono 70s conference
including these full texts:
Scratching the '70s: The Uncollected Clark Coolidge, Tom Orange
Bernadette
Mayer and the Capitalization of Everyday Life, Jasper Bernes
Clarity, or Late Modernism (A Photological Midrash), Patrick
Pritchett
Meaning,
Method, Motive, Bruce Andrews Hannah
Weiner and Basic English, Rodney Koeneke
Becoming Literature, Patrick F. Durgin (on Mac Low)
The Feminist Anthology, Ellen Smith (extended abstract)
—————
—————
"Three American Poets"
with Kenneth Goldsmith and Anne Tardos
produced by Lars Hermansson
Swedish Radio
June 2008
(46:32): MP3
---
singles from the May 6 recording sessions
"Virtual Reality" (from Dark City)
MP3
"The Boy Soprano" (from With Strings)
MP3
"Memories" (from With Strings)
MP3
__________
Brown University/RISD Conference
Oct. 17-18, 2008
on interruption
in its digital manifestations
Recantorium
a bachelor
machine after Duchamp after Kafka
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others,
Poetry Center, University of Arizona
Tucson, May 29, 2008
collaboration with Tracie Morris
(11:24):
MP3
Tucson, May 31, 2008
text
(from The Brooklyn Rail)
Tracie Morris on PennSound
Vol.
1
pb.
