John Ashbery’s PLANISPHERE (Ecco, 2009)

I’ve just posted a review of Ashbery’s latest book Planisphere over at Big Other.

Here’s a short poem from the book as well as a collage that he exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 2008.

HAPPY AS THE SUN

We know these women from our post cards:
beautiful but inclined to blow away.

And after?

Frozen or correct?

And after:

fadeout. A bowl containing eggs.
Instead of having to stand,
back into the language melody.

After that came a break.

SPD Recommends…

Travis Nichols, IOWA (Letter Machine Edtions, 2010)
Sawako Nakayasu, TEXTURE NOTES (Letter Machine Editions, 2010)
Kevin Varrone, G-POINT ALMANAC: PASSYUNK LOST (Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2010)
Richard Jackson, RESONANCE (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)
Steve Lavoie and Pat Nolan, Eds, LIFE OF CRIME: DOCUMENTS IN THE
GUERRILLA WAR AGAINST LANGUAGE POETRY (Poltroon Press, 2010)
Kaia Sand, REMEMBER TO WAVE (Tinfish Press, 2010)
Michael Eskin, THE DNA OF PREJUDICE: ON THE ONE AND THE MANY
(Upper West Side Philosophers, 2010)
Sandy Florian, PRELUDE TO AIR FROM WATER (Elixir Press, 2010)
Lucy Ives, ANAMNESIS (Slope Editions, 2009)
Boris Pintar, FAMILY PARABLES (Talisman House, 2009)
Bob and Jenna Torres, VEGAN FREAK: BEING VEGAN IN A NON-VEGAN
WORLD, 2nd Edition (PM Press/Tofu Hound Press, 2009)
Jacques Reda, EUROPES (Host Publications, 2009)
Deborah Meadows, DEPLETED BURDEN DOWN (Factory School, 2009)
Fernand Crommelynck, MAD FOR LOVE (Roof Books, 2009)
Anne Whitehouse, BLESSINGS AND CURSES (Poetic Matrix Press, 2009)
Ellen Wehle, THE OCEAN LINER’S WAKE (Shearsman Books, 2009)
Michael Leong, E.S.P. (Silenced Press, 2009)
Mario Bellatin, BEAUTY SALON (City Lights Publishers, 2009)
Chris Hutchinson, OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES (Brick Books, 2009)
Eduardo Lourenco, CHAOS AND SPLENDOR AND OTHER ESSAYS (UMass
Dartmouth, 2002)

The Portable Boog Reader 4

Crack open The Portable Boog Reader 4 edited by Sommer Browning, Joanna Fuhrman, David A. Kirschenbaum, Urayoán Noel, Cathy Eisenhower, and Maureen Thorson. It’s a great read. Some of my favorite poets are included as well as a new poem by Estela Lamat that I recently translated.

*

NYC

Andrea Baker, Macgregor Card, Lydia Cortes, Cynthia Cruz, Pam Dick, Mary Donnelly, Will Edmiston, Laura Elrick, Farrah Field,, Kristen Gallagher, Sarah Gambito, Aracelis Girmay, John Godfrey, Odi Gonzales, Myronn Hardy, Mark Horosky, Brenda Iijima, Ivy Johnson, Boni Joi, Hettie Jones, Pierre Joris, Steven Karl, Vincent Katz, Jennifer L. Knox, Wayne Koestenbaum, Estela Lamat, Mark Lamoureux, Ada Limon, Sheila Maldonado, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Susan Miller, Stephen Motika,Marc Nasdor, Charles North, Jeni Olin, Cecily Parks, Nicole Peyrafitte, Mariana Ruiz, Lytle Shaw, Laura Sims, Mark Statman, Nicole Steinberg, Yerra Sugarman, Anne Waldman, Jared White, Dustin Williamson, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, John Yau

D.C. Metro Area

Sandra Beasley, Leslie Bumsted, Theodora Danylevich, Tina Darragh, Buck Downs, Lynne Dreyer, Wade Fletcher, Joe Hall, Ken Jacobs, Charles Jensen, Doug Lang, Reb Livingston, Magus Magnus, David McAleavey, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Mel Nichols, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Casey Smith, Rod Smith, Ward Tietz, Ryan Walker, Joan Wilcox, Terence Winch

John Madera reviews *e.s.p.* in *Open Letters Monthly*

Much thanks and gratitude to John Madera for his insightful review, “Blast and Scatteration,” which is now online at Open Letters Monthly– I’m particularly delighted by his perceptive comments on some of my favorite poems in the book.  Here’s a small excerpt:

Leong’s collection is a perfect blend of construction and communication where every device, every structure or “machine” is used in service of dialogue, of connection, of intimacy. How often have you read a highly-constructed, heavily-machined poem and literally laughed out loud? Leong’s poems, with their wordplay, puns, and self-deprecating asides; their appropriations, their colloquialisms, their interpolations of idiomatic expressions; they all delight.

PROFESSOR MAYER’S TOPOPHONE

A few folks have been asking me about the cover of e.s.p. so here’s the relevant info:  It’s a detail of a rendering of Professor Mayer’s Topophone that appeared in the July 3, 1880 issue of Scientific American.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

The aim of the topophone, which was invented and patented by Professor A. M. Mayer, last winter, is to enable the user to determine quickly and surely the exact direction and position of any source of sound. Our figure shows a portable style of the instrument; for use on ship-board it would probably form one of the fixtures of the pilot-house or the “bridge,” or both. In most cases arising in sailing through fogs, it would be enough for the captain or pilot to be sure of the exact direction of a fog horn, whistling buoy, or steam whistle; and for this a single aural observation suffices.

Briefly described, the topophone consists of two resonators (or any other sound receivers) attached to a connecting bar or shoulder rest. The sound receivers are joined by flexible tubes, which unite for part of their length, and from which ear tubes proceed. One tube, it will be observed, carries a telescopic device by which its length can be varied. When the two resonators face the direction whence a sound comes, so as to receive simultaneously the same sonorous impulse, and are joined by tubes of equal length, the sound waves received from them will necessarily re-enforce each other and the sound will be augmented. If, on the contrary, the resonators being in the same position as regards the source of sound, the resonator tubes differ in length by half the wave length of the sound, the impulse from the one neutralizes that from the other, and the sound is obliterated.

From 1871 until his death in 1897, Alfred Mayer was a Professor of Physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.  His major papers include “The Determination of the Law Connecting the Pitch of a Sound with the Duration of Its Residual Sensation,” “On the Effects of Magnetization in Changing the Dimensions of Iron and Steel Bars,” “Experiments with Floating Magnets,”  and “On Measures of Absolute Radiation.”  What great titles– the last one sounds like it could be a Stevens poem.

…and, by the way, e.s.p. is now available at SPD.

WALLS (ANAMNESES) by Marcel Cohen (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009)

I just posted a review of Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard’s translation of WALLS (ANAMNESES) by Marcel Cohen (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009) at Big Other. It’s a fine little book.

A Post-Halloween Collage : “The Ghost of Meter, or Ezra Pound vs. The Metronome”

Cecilia Vicuña’s “A Tongue Within Tongues” (10/21/09)

Last Wednesday evening, Chilean-born polymath Cecilia Vicuña gave a fascinating ritualistic performance on the Douglass campus of Rutgers University. Slowly entering the Mabel Smith Douglass Room behind the audience, modulating a high-pitched tonal chant, she—along with a few assistants—unfurled long strands of brightly colored wool with which they methodically distributed among the audience. Such a gesture both literally and symbolically bound the audience together indicating an alternative community—not unlike what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas, which he describes as a liminal “seedbed…of cultural creativity.”

“Every seed is a space ship, a nomad planet waiting to sprout.”
—Cecilia Vicuña, from “On Behalf of Seeds” (1971)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not surprising then that Vicuña’s performance thematized issues of birth and creation, virtuality and fecundity in which everything at play—each word, each phrase, each sound—seemed to be on the threshold of actualization, of transforming into something else. The poetry shuttled back in forth between languages in an act of creative translation and exegesis, and the unspun wool that was threaded throughout the audience seemed to signifiy potentiality as such.  In the recently released Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009), Vicuña explains in “An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics” the cultural function of such a performance by linking the use of sound in Latin American Poetry to Mayan ritualistic practice: “Through carefully modulated tones in speech and song, ritual participants enter a resonant state of consciousness where mutual creation and renewal occurs…Awaiting this aural nutrition, the earth listens and responds.”  This seemed to be a primary ambition of “A Tongue Within Tongues”: to provide “aural nutrition” for the earth’s “seedbeds” of creativity. 

Vicuña plaintively began her performance, which was part rogue scientific lecture, part polyglot poetry reading, part song and chant, with the statement: “The poems are crying because they do not want to come out.” What followed was a series of poems that ingeniously linked creation myths to contemporary science, bridging the gap between seemingly distinct epistemological systems. For example, Vicuña recounted a creation story of two intertwining snakes of light that inseminated each other and the world and compared this braided structure to the double helix of DNA.  She also poetically elaborated concepts like virtual particles and quanta—which she called ”bolsitas de luz“—arguing that Western science constitutes one out of many powerful mythological frameworks.

Equally eye-opening was the Q & A session that followed in which Vicuña continued to exert her shifty and clever intelligence.  After a member in the audience asked her about her use of etymologies, she noted that she both made recourse to them as well as creatively invented them, and during another answer, she noted that the word “history” comes from the Greek root ”istos,” which means “weaving”—this isn’t at all surprising given that “weaving,” with its connotations of pre-Columbian textile practices, might be the master term (if there is one at all) that animates Vicuña’s poetics.

“In the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya, one of the names of God is ‘Force Entwined’.”
—Cecilia Vicuña, from “The Weaving of Words” (1990-96)

Not until I got home did I realize that “history,” in fact, comes from the word “istoria,” which means “inquiry,” and it was then did I appreciate this wonderfully transformed sense of “history” which includes a willful and wily conflation of both weaving and inquiry.

This “folk etymology” reminded me of Aldon Nielsen’s striking move in the introduction of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (2004):

Interdiction has much to recommend it as a critical term. While the word intends a prohibition, it seems to seek an opening, an in-between space in which folk etymology might read a felt history of differing dictions brought into frictive contact. To interdict racism would appear to require a polyglot tongue-lashing, an interruption and eruption, a critical insertion of oneself into a dangerous space between people speaking in tongues.

This, too, bears much resemblance to the liminal, “in-between” space of Vicuña’s polyglot performances in which she attempts to “interdict,” with a “mestizo” tongue within tongues, the erasure of indigenous contributions to Latin American literary history.

Poetry in Motion: A Spontaneous Spoken Word Poem on the 8th Ave Local

I was on my way to Rutgers University this morning, taking the 8th Ave local from West 4th St to Penn Station, and I witnessed an improbable event that seems only possible within the dense urban heterotopia that is New York City. An elderly woman sitting across from me, who was in the midst of cleaning out her wallet of old business cards and scraps of paper, broke out into a chant-like speech which I can only describe as a performative soliloquy or a spoken word poem (complete with the socially aware consciousness of that genre). She began with a refrain (and here I can only approximate her forceful cadence):

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a lot of trouble making out the middle of her poem, but it recounted, in the first person, an experience of being traumatized in Nazi Germany for being Jewish. And the poem concluded with the same refrain:

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a strong suspicion that the woman was addressing no one in particular (a man beside me was nonchalantly reading a book), that this was, to allude to John Stuart Mill’s famous distinction between eloquence and poetry, an example of “feeling, confessing itself to itself in [a] moment…of solitude.” But, at the same time, I felt utterly convinced that her poetic chant was meant only for me (and this is, in my opinion, one of the potent ways that poetry can interpellate an audience). The woman seemed to have been uncannily aware that I was thinking of institutionalized, state-sanctioned violence; earlier that morning, I was perusing the new “war” issue of PMLA, and while I was having my coffee, I was reading the Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit’s account of the utterly oppressive violence of the Pinochet era.

Before I rose to get off at 34th St, and as if she had anticipated this too, the woman lifted her head (was she looking at me? I don’t remember…) and added a kind of postscript to her poem—”Also MTA police brutality, also MTA police brutality”—which nicely gave her performance a site-specific resonance.

While I do, in certain respects, appreciate the MTA’s Poetry in Motion project (which seems now to be losing steam compared to the newer Train of Thought program which excerpts prose), these decontextualized snippets of verse have never struck me, or unsettled me, in the same way that this woman’s impromptu poem had.

This event also seemed to attest to the particular power of performance, and I am today very much looking forward to seeing Cecilia Vicuña’s performance.

*

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Cecilia Vicuña, 2009-10 Estelle Lebowitz Artist-in-Residence
Public Lecture and Poetry Performance
“A Tongue Within Tongues”
Reception for the Artist: 6pm;
Performance: 6:30pm – 7:30 pm
Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library
New Brunswick, NJ

“In her poetry performances Cecilia Vicuña creates a space for silence and transformation. Words, sounds and the audience are woven into new sensory perceptions. Playing with many languages as she reads and chants she transforms her texts as she goes, incorporating the present moment.”

Big Other!

I’ve just joined a new online venture, a kind of collective blog, called Big Other which is the brainchild of John Madera.

“BIG OTHER is an online forum of iconoclasts and upstarts focusing its lens on books, music, comics, film, video and animation, paintings, sculpture, performance art, and miscellaneous nodes and sonic booms. We will explore how we are made and unmade by images, language, and sound; examine computer-mediated worlds; and dance along with various tumults, genre- and other border-crossings, trespassings, transgressions, and whatever, nevermind.”

Other contributors include Leni Zumas, John Dermot Woods, Sean Lovelace, Jac Jemc, Christopher Higgs, Greg Gerke, Molly Gaudry, Luca Dipierro, Kim Chinquee, and Ryan W. Bradley— I’ll be looking forward to reading what they have to say. Already there are some eye-opening posts.

I just posted my first entry called “American Poetry & The Contemporary Cartoon: From Robert Pinsky to Patrick the Starfish” which contextualizes my previous post “SpongeBob SquarePants and the Value of Bad Poetry” within a larger context of cartoons (like The Simpsons and The Family Guy) that also talk about poetry. Check it out!