Peter Middleton

Download MP4 to see see video.

Peter Middleton
Peter was on his way back from Creeley Buffalo conference, which I had missed because of the devastating snow storm in Buffalo that weekend. The first time I met with Peter in New York was in the early 1990s. I remember going to the Riverside Park playground and while Emma played in the sandbox we chatted on about his entirely informative book The Inward Gaze: Masculinity & Subjectivity in Modern Culture.
October 16, 2006
(mp4, 38 seconds, 7.5 mb)

link    |  05-09-08

Nerys Williams
Reading Error: The Lyric and Contemporary Poetry
Poetry Series:  Modern Poetry  Vol. 1
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007
265 pp. ISBN 978-3-03911-025-4  pb.

from the publisher’s information:
This book considers the development of the lyric form in recent American poetry of the past three decades. By concentrating on the writing of three poets associated with language writing, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Lyn Hejinian, the discussion considers the attempts of contemporary poetry to problematise the identification of the lyric as a static model of subjectivity. Central considerations motivating the discussion are: How do contemporary lyric poets negotiate the propositions posed by postmodern thought? What reading of lyricism can one formulate once the self is displaced from centre stage and an 'experience' of language takes its place? The book proposes that an aesthetic of error enables us to approach the reconfiguration of the lyric in recent innovative poetry. Drawing from elements of modernist poetic practice, psychoanalytic theory, language philosophy and critical theory this book pursues methods for understanding the demands placed upon the reader of contemporary poetry.

Contents:

• Language Writing and the Lyric
• Error, Malapropisms, 'Ideolects' and 'Knowing' a Language in Charles Bernstein's Dark City and Rough Trades
• Whose Language: Charles Bernstein Reading Cavell, Reading Wittgenstein
• Michael Palmer's Lyric and 'Nobody's Voice'
• Ungrammaticalities and Intertextuality in Michael Palmer's Sun and Letters to Zanzotto
• Erring in Lyn Hejinian's Poetry of the 1980s - 'There is no one correct path': Lyn Hejinian's Prepoetics
• Lyric from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E into the 21st Century.
  

link    |  05-08-08

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

AUGUST 19 - 24, 2008
VIVO Media Arts Centre
1965 Main Street
Vancouver, BC (Coast Salish Territory)
CANADA

invited participants include

for details
thematics statements
and registration information
please visit
http://www.kswnet.org/

to learn more about VIVO, visit
http://www.videoinstudios.com/

link    |  5-03-07

Robert Cignoni
16 August 2007
Xul/Argentina
video by Eresto Livon-Grosman

link    |  04-27-08

Tracing the Lines
A Symposium on contemporary poetics and cultural politics
in honour of Roy Miki
May 28 to 31, 2008
Vancouver, BC

------

EYEWEAR
Todd Swift has posted and  introduced
"One More for the Road"
one of the poesm of "World on Fire"
in Girly Man
on the occasion of the paperback edition

_____

photo © 2008 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Cecilia Vicuña

Writers Without Borders Reading
Kelly Writers House, UPenn
April 15, 2008

Complete Reading (50:23): MP3

Introduction by Al Filreis (2:54): MP3
Introduction by Charles Bernstein (6:58): MP3
Poems and songs by Cecilia Vicuña (40:08): M

Vicuña on PennSound
PennSound Daily

link    |  4-26-08

 

Elizabeth Willis on Close Listening
from Art Radio WPS1
recorded March 17, 2008

Reading: MP3
Willis reads a retrospective selection of her poetry.. 

In conversation with Charles Bernstein: MP3
Willis talks about the influence of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites and J.M.W. Turner, as well as discussing  the relation of artifice and sincerity.

Elizabeth Willis's most recent collection of poems, Meteoric Flowers, was published by Wesleyan in 2006. Her other books include Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003) and The Human Abstract  (Penguin,1995). An edited volume on Lorine Niedecker is presently in production. Willis teaches literature and creative writing at Wesleyan.

photo: ©2007 Bernstein/PennSound
link    |  04-19-08

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) Clayton Eshleman reading Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Part One Clayton Eshleman reading Notebook Part Two courtesy PennSound AP news report International Herald-Tribune Times of London

 

link    |  04-17-08

George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation
SUNY Buffalo: Wednesday April 23 – Friday April 25, 2008



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New at the PEPC Library
Roberr Creeley
Introduction to the Selected Poems of George Oppen

ne finds so many insistences upon the presumption that, as Auden said, "Poetry makes nothing happen." Somehow poems therefore are supposed to be without value, just an indulgent pastime, an avoidance of the workaday world in which we otherwise have to live. Yet, on the other hand, one knows that poetry has often been felt to be tacitly subversive—an arousal of feelings contrary to the status quo, a calling together of mutual sympathies and recognitions altogether against the grain. It's no surprise that Federico Garcia Lorca's poems, for example, were crucial to Spain's Republican soldiers in that country's Civil War (1936–39), or that Plato, centuries earlier, hoping to secure an inclusive if dogmatic system of government, wanted all poets removed from the body politic at the outset. Then their curious ability to stir things up could be comfortably avoided.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

Most intriguing to me is that George Oppen became the primary poet he turns out to be truly against the odds. There are no signs or facts of circumstance arguing his possible transformation from the securely provided child of a well-to-do family into the spare, self-determined, isolate and unremitting person he turns into. No doubt his seemingly never-ending travels argue his ability to move as feelings and need proposed, but always he managed to find commonplace means wherewith to support himself and his wife, Mary. It is Mary who best makes clear the motive, which prompts them:

We were constantly searching—searching in our travels, in our pursuit of friends and in our conversation concerning all that we saw and felt about the world. We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held  for us if we relented in our escape from them ... We wanted to see a great deal of the world, and the education of which we talked for ourselves was to leave our class and learn our life by throwing ourselves into it.

                                                                    (Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life: an Autobiography)

Much of Oppen's own life did not fit a simple pattern and this was not at all a fact of his own choosing. The early loss of his mother by suicide, the step-mother with whom he finds little rapport or sympathy, his teenage accident while still in military academy, involving the death of a passenger and his own expulsion for drinking, the earlier shift of the family from New Rochelle, New York (where he was born in 1908) to the other end of the country, San Francisco, even the probably therapeutic trip with his father to Europe in the year he is forced to leave school (1925) must be signs or markers for a childhood and adolescence scarred by tragedy and familial displacement. The travels, then, that he and Mary undertake are like those of the fairy-tale, wherein the two children, holding hands tightly, set off through the woods to discover the bluebird of happiness and the home they know themselves to have been driven from and to which they must at last return. So it is, as Mary writes, "the people we met, as various and as accidentally met as thumbing a ride could make them, became the clue to our finding roots; we gained confidence that this country was ours in a sense which we hadn't known under our parents' roofs. The sense was not only patriotic but a personal one, for as people generally accepted us, we felt as comfortable and at home in our country. I have never felt so at home in any other land."

William Carlos Williams, a poet whom George Oppen much respected, makes the point that "the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity." It was the Oppen's Objectivist Press, which published Williams' Collected Poems, 1921-1931 in 1934. The name of the press is also significant in that the Objectivists, consisting of the poets George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky and Williams himself, were the decisive conjunction, which gave Oppen his company and ground. However different they were later to find their lives—particularly so in the instance of Oppen and Zukofsky—all worked from the premise that poetry is a function of perception, "of the act of perception," as Oppen emphasizes in his one defining essay, "The Mind's Own Place." Oppen's complex 'thinking with his poems' is a consistent and major factor in all his surviving work. I think much becomes clear, in fact, if one recognizes that George Oppen is trying all his life to think the worId, not only to find or to enter it, or to gain a place in it—but to realize it, to figure it, to have it literally in mind. Poetics itself is the art of figuration, of configuring, so to speak, of making a picture, an imago mundi, which can serve as the (or a) whole world. Just so, Zukofsky said one might spend a lifetime considering the difference between "the" and "a," the particular and the general.

In hindsight it may seem odd that such a brilliant and also privileged person as Oppen should have given his political commitment to the Communism of that period. But one forgets how preoccupied with viable political systems the whole time was—and necessarily so. The Depression, as well as the incessant wars of the 20th century, both civil and international, increased dramatically the implacable distance between the haves and the have-nots. The grinding and heartbreaking poverty of a great number of the world's people made an insistent impression upon those given the chance—really, the leisure—to think of it at all. Of course, all yearned for "one's place in the sun" but very few indeed were ever permitted to secure it. So, given their own provision, those as Oppen were particularly aware of their privilege, if they had not simply accepted the fact of their good fortune and taken their lives as thus granted.

In other words, one begins to recognize this active, restless intelligence, often brooding in its preoccupation, endlessly returning to its determined premises, tracking and retracking an implacable ground of apparent consequences. Why is this so? What so defines it? Is it the case in all instances? What are the givens? What inheres in the fact "of being numerous"? What is the "this" "in which" what is? If I tease these terms here, my wish is to make clear that we are reading not only a unique collection of poems—and what are poems?—but also a rhetoric of thinking, a "grammar [in Kenneth Burke's phrase] of motives," an immensely human attempt to have the world in mind and, in that heroic act, to insure that all is included, all provided and thought of—not at all as details, a kind of Noah's Ark of particulars, but rather as the imagination of a total "place," which provides for all that can be put there, each particular and local 'thing.’

Small wonder that George Oppen was not engaged with the usual poetry of his time. We too have forgotten how many of the writers of the nineteen thirties and forties shared his political thinking. Who now remembers the poems of Norman Macleod, for example, who was in 1930 the most published poet in America, invited to Moscow by the Russian government in respect of his accomplishments and convictions? In 1935, coincident with joining the Communist Party, Oppen stopped writing, noting later in a daybook, "Surely there are situations in which it's absurd to write poetry! One could approach his own death with poetry—I should think one would. But a slaughter, a slaughter for which he bears perhaps some responsibility? Or, he does what he does. I don't know what one "should" do . . . " So he as well was to find himself in Mexico some twenty years later with the Hollywood Ten script writers, whose "leftist" commitment had forced them to seek political asylum in order to escape Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities' attacks and accusations.

Certainly poets before Oppen have given up writing for such a length of time. There was Paul Valéry who stopped writing poetry for a like twenty years and then picked up again with his masterpiece, "Le Cimetière Marin." Many speak of writer's block, of finding themselves with nothing to say and no means to say it. Or others, as Oppen, feel that writing itself is impossible in a world so committed to self­destruction and despair. Yet poetry would seem to be an art like swimming or riding a bicycle. Once learned, one does not forget even if one wants to.

Still the confounding ethical question of how one can speak as one in a time when all are so threatened hardly disappears because one is a poet. For Oppen the singular act of poetry could not outweigh the need to work in concert with those he felt oppressed—in a common employment, in a clearly committed political determination. His being wounded in the Second World War, serving as a common soldier, is a unique validation for him and one he much values thereafter. It was not until 1958 that Oppen began to write again and to undertake the work of finding publication.

If I think now of Oppen's incessantly restless travels, his shifting sense of company, I must realize I finally know him only in his poems despite he left both journals and letters, which are a very useful information in themselves of both the time and the person. But in the end the poems are the significant record, even when unwritten, thinking now of the more than twenty years of their hiatus. They say what he felt could be said, which, for him then, was a necessary and painful silence.

Perhaps this is what poetry can "make happen," an inscription of the apparent world which registers its relation to our transient human lives—something that will matter, something that can count. One reads in Oppen's poems a record of thought compacted with feeling, a register of what might be finally that "this in which" our lives might have their determining value. He recognizes and insists that we are "numerous," a complex "many"—yet, as Robinson Crusoe's presence would emphasize, he knows himself finally as one:

               'Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one's distance
                             from Them, the people, does not also increase'
               I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

               Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man's way of
                            thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
                            to me
               Have made poetry

               To dream of that beach
               For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

               The absolute singular

               The unearthly bonds
               Of the singular

               Which is the bright light of shipwreck

                                          ***

No selection as this can be managed simply as one person's decision, however much I stand responsible for the poems here included. When I read them now, I hear George Oppen's voice underlying—quite deep, poised, reflective in its movement, without aggressive emphasis. It is as if one listens to his thinking, the slowly secured phrases, the syntax taking each step.

Then my fellow poet Robert Duncan's love for him and his work persuades me—as George Oppen would make his own love for Duncan clear in his letters. The one poet complemented the other—the unembarrassed fullness of Duncan's rhetoric fits unexpectedly the modes of Oppen's spare thought. Both wanted the whole world as their ground and each worked always to enter it. I learned from them a measure for "democracy" in all its many, shifting guises.

Most particularly here my resource has been the defining editor of George Oppen's poetry, Michael Davidson, whose crucial New Collected Poems (2002) gave me the text from which I made my selections. I also felt that a brief, compacted, chronology for Oppen's life would serve a real purpose and asked another old friend and fellow poet's help with providing it. Thanks to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the reader can review for him or herself the "incessantly restless travels [and] shifting sense of company" I refer to. She has also given us an exceptionally useful edition of Oppen's correspondence, The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990), which, together with Mary Oppen's Meaning a Life (1978), makes an active context for the poems and the world in which they were written. Stephen Cope (University of California, San Diego) has kindly provided the two texts, which follow the poems themselves. His edition of Oppen's various prose forthcoming from the University of California Press will be a welcome addition to the canon.

Then the river necessarily widens for me, from friends of years, such as Burt Hatlen, Peter Quartermain and Ted Enslin, to those younger as Charles Bernstein, Stephen Fredman and John Taggart. All have had much to do with Oppen and they were much in my own mind as I attempted to resolve this book. My work was always fact of any day's instance—conversation with a friend such as Ben Friedlander, or Carla Billitteri's prompt help with getting the Selected Letters from the University of Maine at Orono's library. I talked to each a good deal about Oppen, about my own questions and confusions, all of which is composted here in one way or another. Finally I thank my editor in this undertaking, Jeffrey Yang of New Directions, whose useful enthusiasm and clarity made for me all the difference. Thus being instance "of being numerous" has its enduring pleasure.

Robert Creeley
Buffalo, New York
December 28, 2002

PEPC Library Edition
with the permission of the Penelope Creeley
©2008 Estate of Robert Creeley

link    |  04-16-08

provisional programme
for Sussex conference on Long Poems / Major Forms

-----

Writing the New at New College: A Celebration of Innovative Writing
Sarasota, Florida
May 1-3, 2008
Hamilton Classroom Teaching Auditorium (HCL 8) and Cook Hall
FREE
Thursday, May 1 @ 7pm HCL 8: Charles Bernstein, Talking Poetics, With reception to follow in Cook Hall
Friday, May 2 @ 7pm HCL 8: Reading by Catherine Daly Friday
Saturday, May 3 @ 3:30 in Cook Hall: Student Poetry Reading 
Saturday, May 3 @ 7pm HCL 8: Charles Bernstein: "The Attack of the Difficult Poems: Poetry Reading and Performance"

link    |  4-15-08

PennSound is pleased to announce selections from
Henry Hills
Emma's Dilemma
(1997-2004)

including "King Richard" (portrait of Richard Foreman)
& "Nervous Ken" (portrait of Ken Jacobs)
plus the sections serialized on this web log, & including

"Maybe (or, In Pursuit of Parker Posey)" with Emma Bee Bernstein

(. mov, 14 mb, 2:26)
PennSound Special Edition: full screen version (.mov., 531mb)

PennSound Emma's Dilemma page

PennSound Hills page with new streaming versions of his films

thanks to Danny Snelson for the design of these PennSound pages.


photo of Hills: 2006, Bernstein/PennSound

link    |  4-13-08

 

Henry Hills
from Emma's Dilemma
(1997-2004)

Julie Patton

(. mov, 4:10)

link    |  4-11-08

 

Henry Hills
from Emma's Dilemma
(1997-2004)

"Printed Matter" with Kenny Goldsmith

(. mov, 18mb, 3:13)
PennSound Special Edition: full screen version (.mov, 699mb)

link    |  4-10-08

Hannah Weiner
under discussion

• Joeyelle McSweeney in Boston Review
  
• Patrick Durgin replies

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

Henry Hills
from Emma's Dilemma
(1997-2004)

"An Lee Ann-thology of Concrete Poetry" with Lee Ann Brown

download .mov (4:00)

link    |  04-07-08

Girly Man
New in paper
Reviews
$15
Support independent boosktores.
Order from Rod Smith at Bridge Street Books.
There are two ways to order: 1. E-mail your order to <rod /at/ bridgestreetbooks.com> with your address & they will bill you with the books. or 2. via credit card-- call 202 965 5200 or e-mail w/ yr add, order, card #, &  expiration date & they will send a receipt with the books.

link    |  40-06-08

John Tranter

Close Listening
readings and conversations at WPS1.Org
New York
April 3, 2008
courtesy PennSound

Reading from Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (24:32): MP3

In conversation with Charles Bernstein (29:15): MP3

photos © 2008 Charles Bernstein/PennSound
link    |  04-05-08

The University of Sussex's School of Humanities
in conjunction with the Centre for Modernist Studies
announces the following conference
scheduled for Friday the 16^th and Saturday the 17^th of May 2008:
[I will post more detailed info as available. This is the preliminary announcement and subject to change.]

Long Poems ::: Major Forms

Plenary Speakers

Charles Bernstein (U Penn)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Temple)

Simon Jarvis (Cambridge)

Ron Bush (Oxford)

Tony Lopez (Plymouth)

Peter Middleton (Southampton)

The 'long poem' has been traditionally conceived of as the principal means by which poets confront political and aesthetic problems through sustained investigations. Beyond this general outline, or indeed perhaps because of it, there is little consensus as to either what the long poem is, or what it might be uniquely capable of. In 'The Poetic Principle,' Edgar Allen Poe went so far as to assert that "a long poem does not exist" since "the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity." Years later, and seeking to resolve the technical and affective dilemmas that Poe identified, Charles Olson prescribed a 'projective verse' that he purported might carry "much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans." He thought Pound's Cantos exemplified the beginnings of such poetry, displaying a methodology capable of solving "problems of larger content and of larger forms." This conference seeks to address the contemporary relevance of the long poem: how has it evolved, what standing does it currently hold, and who are now its readers? As both a poetic and a critical concept, the 'long poem' presents poets with the difficulty of articulating what Pound called "a compound of freedom and order" that "hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other." We hope this conference will provide a forum for the consideration of ways in which comprehensive, often formally complex and expansive poems may respond, or fail to respond, to certain "obligations toward the difficult whole," and to explore what these obligations might now entail for both poets and their readers. We therefore welcome proposals for presentations addressing aesthetic, formal, generic, compositional and literary-historical questions the 'long poem' brings into particular focus.

For further details please contact thelongpoemconference@sussex.ac.uk.

link    |  04-04-08-pm

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

-------

PEN PETITION

We Are Ready: Petition to the Chinese Government

On August 8, 2007, China launched a publicity campaign proclaiming “We Are Ready” to host the Olympic Games in August 2008. We, the undersigned members of PEN American Center, are writing to ask you to show the world that China is in fact ready—not just to stage the Olympics, but to acknowledge, protect, and celebrate the full rights of its citizens.

PEN believes there are currently 38 writers and journalists imprisoned in China for exercising their right to speak and write freely, as guaranteed under Chinese and international law. We are concerned that, despite official pledges to respect essential rights in this Olympic year, Chinese authorities continue to harass and detain writers in violation of their right to freedom of expression.

In order to fulfill the promises China made in securing the Olympic Games, and to ensure that the rights of our colleagues are fully protected in your country, we therefore urge you to:

• facilitate the immediate and unconditional release of all writers and journalists currently imprisoned and end the practice of detaining, harassing, and censoring writers and journalists in China
• abide by China’s pledge that “there will be no restrictions on media reporting and movement of journalists up to and including the Olympic Games”; and
• end internet censorship and reform laws that are used to imprison writers and journalists and suppress the free exchange of information and ideas on the internet.


>> ACT NOW: sign the petition

link    |  04-04-08

link    |  04-03-08

The Conceptual Poetry Interviews
responses by
Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Howe, Marjorie Perloff, and Cole Swensen
as well as my response posted here last week
in/about/around the Universty of Arizona symposium

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

ROUNDTABLE RESPONDENTS
Charles Alexander, CHAX Press, Tucson; Laynie Browne, UA Poetry Center; Graca Capinha, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Barbara Cole, SUNY, Buffalo; Wystan Curnow, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Michael Farrell, University of Melbourne, Australia; Jesper Olsson, OEI Magazine, Sweden; Vanessa Place, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles; Brian Reed, University of Washington, Seattle; Linda Reinfeld, Rochester Institute of Technology; Marie Smart, University of Southern California; Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma

THURSDAY, MAY 29
4 p.m. – READING with COLE SWENSEN, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, CHRISTIAN BÖK
7 p.m. – KEYNOTE ADDRESS with MARJORIE PERLOFF
FRIDAY, MAY 30
9 a.m. - Poetry Rules!: The Concept of Poetry with Charles Bernstein
10:15 a.m. - Black Conceptual Poetics: Examples for Crafting with Tracie Morris
1 p.m. - Panel Discussion with featured poets moderated by TENNEY NATHANSON
3 p.m. - Forms of Social Engagement with Caroline Bergvall
4:15 p.m. - ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
5:30 p.m. - Uncreative Writing Workshop with Kenneth Goldsmith
8 p.m. - READING with CRAIG DWORKIN, PETER GIZZI, SUSAN HOWE
SATURDAY, MAY 31
9 a.m. - The Visible World: Writing the Visual Arts with Cole Swensen
10:15 a.m. - Poetics of Assemblage with Peter Gizzi
1 p.m. - Two Dots over a Vowel with Christian Bök
2:15 p.m. - ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
4 p.m. - Class Session with Susan Howe
5:15 p.m. - The Politics of Conceptual Writing with Craig Dworkin
8 p.m. - READING with KENNETH GOLDSMITH, CAROLINE BERGVALL, TRACIE MORRIS
---------

Brooklyn Museum, March 30, 2008
"Beyond the Waves; Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations"

Kat Griefen | Susan Bee | Mira Schor | Emma Bee Bernstein | Carolee Schneemann  | Brynna Tucker

link    |  04-01-08

 

link    |  03-28-08

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