========================================================================= Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 18:14:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: POETRY PROJECT EVENTS Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable CALENDAR OF EVENTS WEEK OF DECEMBER 3 - DECEMBER 10 DECEMBER 3, MONDAY OPEN READING Sign-up at 7:30 pm. [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 5, WEDNESDAY RAE ARMANTROUT and MARJORIE WELISH RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of Veil: New and Selected Poems just recently out from the Wesleyan Poetry Series. Veil includes work from seven previous collections. Commenting on Veil, Publishers Weekly notes: "Those who haven'= t discovered the superb poems of Necromance and Made to Seem will find their unsettling vignettes utterly compelling, alert to the vagest shades of postmodern subjecthood." Armantrout's other books include: Precedence, Extremities and True, her 1998 autobiographical work. MARJORIE WELISH's books include The Windows Flew Open from Burning Deck Press, The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems (selected as a finalist for the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize) from Coffee House Press, Begetting Textile from Equipage, and a book of art criticism, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 from Cambridge University Press. Her art criticism has been featured in Bomb and Artforum. [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 7, FRIDAY BACK IN NO TIME: THE BRION GYSIN READER The Friday Late-Night Events Series presents readings from the new antholog= y Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader with IRA COHEN, GENESIS P-ORRIDGE, JOS=C9 F=C9REZ KURI, MARSHALL REESE, ELLEN ZWEIG, TERRY WINTERS, PIERRE JORIS, JASON WEISS, ONDI MCMASTER, and GERARD PAS. The anthology is edited by JASO= N WEISS, a Brooklyn-based writer, who is the author of Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (Iowa, 1991) and The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris, forthcoming from Routledge in 2002. He is the translator of Luisa Futoransky's The Duration of the Voyage: Selected Poems (Junction, 1997) and Marcel Cohen's Mirrors (Green Integer, 1998). [10:30 pm] DECEMBER 10, MONDAY SUZANNE WISE and REBECCA WEE SUZANNE WISE is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive (Alice James Books, 2000). Her writing also appears in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000). "I love Suzanne Wise's poems because they're droll and cavalier, magnificent and terrified all at once. With all the invisible poise of Masculinity-which she doesn't care to possess-she manages to flip responsibility governing her poems so that what's secretly driving them feels like everyone's problem. And that seems like a grand success. As if a vast and almost patriotic distress signal wer= e being sent out." -Eileen Myles REBECCA WEE's poems have been published in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Senora Review, The Mid-American Review, and others. She received her MF= A in poetry in 1992 from George Mason University and worked as an editorial assistant to poet Carolyn Forche on her 1993 Norton anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Her first book, Uncertain Grace, published in May 2001 by Copper Canyon Press, won the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. She teaches creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. [8:00 pm] --=20 Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 23:22:38 -0500 Reply-To: patrick@proximate.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Harpo's Index MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Discussion Statistics, UBPoetics E-mail List November 2001 vs. November 1998 November 1998 number of e-mails: 984 number of threads*: 174 average length of thread, adjusted to remove outliers: 3.6 e-mails discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 67 percent of list posts that were advertisements, announcements, job postings, or responses to such postings: 7.5 (based on random sample of 211 e-mails) November 2001 number of e-mails: 404 number of threads*: 38 average length of thread, adjusted to remove outliers: 2.5 e-mails discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 29 number of advertisements, announcements, job postings, or responses to such postings: 65 (based on a random sample of 149 e-mails) *-threads with more than one e-mail In three years, according to a simple sample, e-mail volume on the UBPoetics list has dropped to less than half of what it was. As a percentage of volume, the length of discussion has not only become shorter in three years by a third, overall, it seems discussion makes up about 3/5 LESS of a part of the list now than it did 3 years ago. Most remarkably, advertising has increased from less than one tenth of the list to a whopping two-thirds. Is this list trending perilously towards becoming nothing but a television that airs only advertising, a tower of Babel, where communication has evaporated, a place where solipsism meets marketing and substance evaporates? Is this what we the avant-garde and progressive poets critics and arbiters of "the new" turned out to be? A bunch of people who listen only to ourselves and who have only something to say when it's time to sell it? Does anyone have any suggestions for the list moderators on how to rescue this list from its downward spiral? Does the drastic change of this list over the last three years have anything to do with post moderation? Or is it just the way things go? I'm not implying that moderation means discussion is thrown out in favor of ads, or even that it is somehow wrong or inappropriate. What I AM saying is that it appears that members are behaving differently on the UBPoetics forum--once upon a time members used to discuss, argue, bicker even. However the pains of communication, there was regular and sometimes even thorough discussion. Now for the most part everyone just ignores one another as they click their way to promote their latest books or readings? Maybe those who like discussion quit and were replaced by promoters? WHAT HAPPENED? A reason for discussion, perhaps, is the evolution of the use of medium itself, its relation to poetry, criticism, analysis, and its cultural significance? Is this worth even me spending an hour counting things, an apparently pedantic exercise destined the annoy the *$@% out of some of you? Best, Patrick Herron patrick@proximate.org ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 02:35:32 +0100 Reply-To: editor@pavementsaw.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: Pavement Saw the sixth--*The Minty Fresh Pirate Issue* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Pavement Saw the sixth *The Minty Fresh Pirate Issue* INWHICH notions of the new caffinated breath mints are posted dated into use by historical archetypes of pirates, INWHICH neighbors threaten the press, BEFOREWHICH a death occurs and therefore is taken with all due seriousness and THEREBY Stevie starts packing a derringer, INWHICH a mime indirectly sends a woeful omen through his appearance, INWHICH a crossword puzzle on pet ownership is imbedded in the poems, WHEREFORE, use of Monkey Business can improve poems, WHENCEFORTH Big Gay Eric sez "when you see the minty fresh pirate, it's got to be good!" Comments: "Between tornadoes and trailer park meth lab explosions it is hard to believe there is anything left standing in Ohio, let alone good literature..." ES (LA, CA) "LOVED your ed. note in the new PS--that energy really permeates the mag! May your pirate vessel storm the seas for a good long while." Eric Lorberer, Editor, Rain Taxi "This is more daring than even the "'Whitey Issue.' " Toledo James "Is that a duck?" LLC Cleveland, OH "We are particularly delighted with your focus on the "unknown" or "unsung" authors." --Poet's House "I am American" LM Paris, France "Perhaps moving to Ohio has been good for you, or so it would seem taking Pavement Saw as evidence" Gil Ott, Philly "rejection is part of life I guess, thankfully I'm not trying to date" ME (MA) "The cover art looks like that 'I remember' guys" TT (nyc) COVER ART by John Q. Pirate Cartoons by Bill Dunlap Feature: Julie Otten whose next full length book will be published in 2002 by Pavement Saw Press. We haven't named it yet. Her work has appeared in Atom Mind, Poetry Motel, Longshot-- her first full length book _The Courtship of Jim Jones_ is now, finally, out from Pudding House. with honorary buccaneers: Micah Ballard John M. Bennett James Bertolino Anne Blonstein Robert Cooperman MTC Cronin Ray Gonzalez Anne Gorrick Rob Griffith Taj Jackson Sandra Kohler Joshua McKinney Sheila E. Murphy Sophia Starnes Alan Sondheim dan raphael Stephen Ratcliffe Maj Ragain Timothy Russell and many other blustery word frigates of funnery. $6 US, 88 pages, including postage and junior firefighter badge $7 US for other locations, payable to Pavement Saw Press Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 11:03:53 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: TONIGHT AT THE POETRY PROJECT In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Anybody here go to the Next Generation Free Sound event last night and feel able to say something more about what directions this work is moving into, what it is challening and how? I'd much appreciate hearing more about this work love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 06:11:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Berkson Subject: dec 11 In-Reply-To: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Bill Berkson FUGUE STATE (Zoland Books) cover by Yvonne Jacquette * Bill Berkson & Frank O'Hara HYMNS OF ST. BRIDGET & OTHER WRITINGS 1960-64 (The Owl Press) cover by Alex Katz BILL BERKSON Reads from these new books & more CITY LIGHTS BOOKSHOP 261 Columbus Avenue San Francisco DECEMBER 11, 7 p.m. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 10:41:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: handmade films In-Reply-To: <5.0.0.25.2.20011130135127.00a685e8@email.psu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >Spike Wilbury -- R.I.P. > ><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > > "I think old zero has lost very much of his self >respect." > --Emily Norcross Dickinson > >Aldon Lynn Nielsen >George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature >Department of English >The Pennsylvania State University >116 Burrowes >University Park, PA 16802-6200 > >(814) 865-0091 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 13:15:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: money made them do it MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - money made them do it is killing everything. - your crushed-glass is destroyed and mutilated. - what damage have you done to your ... soldier stabs me across your crushed-glass! how would your terrorize crushed-glass? is your bioterrorism here... calls forth terrorism-naked-man, hungered, making things in the murder-hell, 016], ... terrorism-naked-man is in my flesh oh well there are descrips of images, there are descrips of scripts, your black-powders are guilty. your boyfriend destroys me around your black-powder around your sex-terror leaflets there's script you can treat as legal tender, there are texts is mine, my oh well there are descrips of images, there are descrips of scripts, is yours there's script you can treat as legal tender, there are texts calls forth anthrax militant, hungered, making things. across the casualties, there's script you can treat as legal tender, there are texts is war, 012], there are video\scrip and sound\scrip, there are company scrips,? ... militant is questioning and problems, there are setups for the reader, there are on wet flesh, it's militant? there's script you can treat as legal tender, there are texts and 2241 and 2250 persons torn and killed :::: there's script you can treat as legal tender, there are texts:there are video\scrip and sound\scrip, there are company scrips,:oh well there are descrips of images, there are descrips of scripts,:interiors, there are exteriors, there are entries, there are contents:setups for the writers, there are scraps of scrips, there are no part of this _ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 17:23:09 -0500 Reply-To: jtley@home.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jennifer Ley Organization: Riding the Meridian Subject: 12/3 Webcast and 2001 NJIT / Newark Review New Media Performance Series Comments: To: webartery@yahoogroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit PLEASE FORWARD (and excuse any cross posting, please !!) 2001 NJIT / Newark Review New Media Performance Series Electronic Poet Jennifer Ley Monday December 3 2:30 p.m. 1400 ITC Building NJIT *** Concurrent Webcast: http://webcaster.njit.edu:8080/ramgen/encoder/newmedia.rm Jennifer Ley is the founder of the online literary magazine Riding the Meridian and a member of the Electronic Literature Organization Literary Advisory Board. Her work in hypermedia has been published, performed and exhibited internationally from South Africa to Brazil and in venues ranging from the Guggenheim Museum, SIGGRAPH 2000 and SUNY Buffalo's E-Poetry Festival to online literary magazines such as BeeHive and Cauldron & Net. Ley's most recent web works are the amniotic meander which offers an auction of the props used to create its visuals to benefit the September 11th Children's Fund and Contortions part of a group web effort hosted by fictive.net Monday December 3 2:30 p.m. GITC 1400 NJIT for more info contact Prof. Chris Funkhouser funkhouser@adm.njit.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 20:15:18 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Wheeler Subject: Last Reading for a Bit -- at Barnard with Canadian poet Sue Wheeler! Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable NY POET SUSAN WHEELER TO READ WITH CANADIAN POET SUE WHEELER AT BARNARD THURSDAY DECEMBER 6 8:00 P.M. New York City =97 Poets Sue Wheeler, from Canada, and Susan Wheeler, a New= =20 Yorker, will read together at Barnard College Thursday, December 6, 2001,=20 at 8:00 p.m. in Sulzberger Parlor of Barnard Hall. The reading is free and= =20 open to the public; for further information, the public may call= 212-854-2116. Sue Wheeler, who grew up in Texas, has lived on a seaside farm on Lasqueti= =20 Island, British Columbia since emigrating to Canada in 1972. Her first=20 book, Solstice on the Anacortes Ferry, won the Kalamalka New Writers Prize,= =20 and her second, Slow-Moving Target, was published by Brick Books last=20 year. From that book=92s =93Islands:=94 A shipload of lice and men enters the bay. The captain, itching to leave a mark, christens the waters for his friend, another captain out somewhere naming things. Susan Wheeler=92s three books include Bag =91o=92 Diamonds, which won the= Poetry=20 Society of America=92s First Book Award, Smokes and Source Codes. She=20 teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA in creative writing program= =20 at Princeton University, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the= =20 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and from the New York Foundation on the=20 Arts. From her =93Beavis=92 Day Off:=94 Please it=92s time said Meg. And each infernal truism struck a package deal for tin. What hast thou, O nut job, with paradise? The sparks O they crested the floor then they floated and she lay down on find braids and she cried. ### ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 12:27:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Quasha Organization: Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd. Subject: Spencer Holst (1926-2001) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Spencer Holst died on Thanksgiving at St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in lower Manhattan. The cause of death was complications of emphysema and apparent stroke. He was 75. His unique writings — his inventions, "Spencer Holst stories" — have influenced and been praised by two generations of writers. His books include On Demons [1970, with Beate Wheeler], The Language of Cats & Other Stories [1971], Spencer Holst Stories [1976, a New York Times "notable book"], Something to Read to Someone & Sixteen Drawings [1980, with Beate Wheeler], Prose for Dancing [1983], The Zebra Storyteller [1993] and Brilliant Silence [2000], the latter four still available from Station Hill/Barrytown, Ltd. [A couple of examples included at the end here.] Audiographics has published tapes of his readings and plans CD collections in the future. Spencer Holst was also an extraordinary and prolific painter in later years and exhibited regularly with the painter Beate Wheeler, his wife. (A painting is currently on exhibit at the Westbeth Gallery in Manhattan.) Spencer Holst's work gained a reputation first from the animated readings he gave during four decades in New York cafés, and since the 1960s he has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. He curiously straddled very different audiences and literary milieus, mostly published by small magazines and independent publishers but also appearing in the popular press (e.g., The Language of Cats was a mass market paperback). His many devoted readers regarded him as under-recognized, yet he received a number of awards, including, for Spencer Holst Stories, the Hilda and Richard Rosenthal Foundation Award in 1977 from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He also received an award from the Foundation for Performing Arts. His work has been translated into other languages, including Swedish, Japanese, Spanish, and French. The charm and imaginative accessibility of his work made one wish that his stories become universally known — it would have to be good for the world. He once said of himself: "In the geography of literature I have always felt my work to be equidistant between two writers, each born in Ohio — Hart Crane and James Thurber, but my wife says don't be silly, your stories are halfway between Hans Christian Andersen and Franz Kafka." Or Borges, greatly admired by Spencer and with whom he had a long correspondence. Yet, according to his sister, Mary-Ella Holst, in the 1950s he identified with the Beats. Spencer Holst's work was not obviously "experimental" yet he was a storyteller who challenged narrative in many ways, sometimes reducing story to a single sentence, as if the drama of unfolding syntax embodied a secret of story itself. "The bubbling Babylonian tablet came clean in the bath of acid." He made an art in which language has consequences, both in ways we prefer to ignore and on levels we have yet to acknowledge or understand. "When she raises one eyebrow, and one nostril rises into half a sneer, and one eye closes to a slit — watch it!." He felt he had invented a new kind of "very, very short story"; others felt the art he cultivated was liminal to performance and magic, in all of its senses. "My Reader, if you should suddenly discover that you have this very vase in your hands, handle it with care and a certain circumspection." One never heard him refer to himself as a poet, but that non-view would be hard to sustain. "I am stuck in this chair in front of my typewriter like a fly on flypaper." Quite different poets/writers have praised his work, including John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Francine Prose, Muriel Rukeyser, John Hollander, Diane Wakoski, Donald Newlove, W.S. Merwin, Allen Ginsberg and Jerome Rothenberg. [Quotes at the end.] A New York Times reviewer called him "the most skilled fairy-tale artificer of our times." In one edition of The Norton Anthology of the Short Story, his stories were the first and the last entries. His work is increasingly taught in schools and universities. [The following account combines information from his family with the only unpaid obituary so far — in The Toledo Blade — which was based on a conversation with Mary-Ella Holst.] Born July 7th, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan, he grew up in Rossford and Toledo, Ohio, where his father, Lawrence Spencer "Doc" Holst, was for many years a reporter and sports columnist (specializing in the Detroit Tigers) for The Toledo Blade and the former Toledo Times. At 16 he dropped out of Scott High School and ran to New York to be a poet. He returned to Toledo but never finished school. He served in the army at the end of World War II, remaining stateside, and worked a short stint in the library of The Toledo Blade. Then, in 1957, he returned to New York, determined to be a writer. He married Beate Wheeler, an artist as impecunious as he, and in 1970 they became charter tenants of Westbeth, the artists’ residence on the lower West Side, where rents are charged according to a resident’s ability to pay. There, where he lived until his death, he played chess (frequently with John Cage during the years he too lived there), wrote his short stories, gave readings, painted and regularly exhibited, often with Beate Wheeler. For money, which always was short, he did readings in bars, churches, cafés and other paying venues across New York, as well as colleges and universities. "He was a wonderful reader and storyteller," his sister Mary-Ella said. "He could mesmerize an audience." And in an interesting bit of cultural speculation, the Washington Post wrote in an article about him in 1975: "In New York City, as in other great and expensive cities of the world, there is a secret network of friends who conspire to live just the way they want, quietly and gently on practically nothing, without the system ever knowing." Perhaps his best-know short-story collection is The Language of Cats (incorporated in The Zebra Storyteller), in which, according to The Saturday Review, "he creates brief but startling visions of men who are maimed, lost, and lonely, unwarmed by the cold comforts of a scientific age." Muriel Ruyekser offered a corrective to this view many would agree with: "At first I thought The Language of Cats was just a book of wry, marvelous fables. But as I went further and began to feel entirely different, I saw that what we have here is a mater of ecstasy." Surviving are his wife, Beate, and sister, Mary-Ella Holst, of Manhattan, and son, Sebastian, daughter-in-law, Dawn, and grandchildren Spencer Robert and Adrianna Beate of Chevy Chase, Maryland. No funeral was held; his ashes were sent to a family grave site in Ohio. But there will be a memorial at Westbeth, probably early January, the date to be announced. [Those wishing to participate actively in the memorial can contact me at gquasha@stationhill.org.] Other comments on Spencer Holst: "These stories are (or should be) classics; they're not merely extraordinary, but absolutely unique. Witty, magical, immensely strange, shimmering with paradox, Spencer Holst's stories oblige us to revise whatever it was we thought we knew about the possibilities of storytelling." Francine Prose "His gift is to a remarkable extent that of a storyteller in the oldest and simplest sense. It's not hard to imagine him telling stories on the street corners of ancient Rome." W.S. Merwin "His sense of humor and of the macabre have earned him a special place as wise jester of the vanguard." The New York Times "These are routines — something like fictions, something like jokes — of a stand-up tragic. Transcriptions of a spoken voice, their cadences linger beyond laughter." John Hollander "Spencer Holst at his best is a goblin telling a story to an audience of spellbound magicians. His stories transform you into a man in an invisible coat seeing all the secrets of the world." Diane Wakoski Subterranean anonymous archaic Lower East Side Kafka prose-poems in a mirror-universe — mysterious impersonality, not self seeking — in simple NY lingo — Empty Buddha centered fables — Lookback on present thru time Distance — Author by now like myself Aging wrinkled in Science-Fiction Wars & Dope Eras, Police State! — but still writing in pubescent youth's persona — Power of imagination goes back Poeesque thru late 1940's to Mailer's underground paranoiac trotskyite Monroe Street — patient genius, triple quadruple twists & contradictions — Daguerreotype Illuminations, Oracle's 'little fantasies' — Silent monster — Storm on Bklyn Bridge — Mind puzzles — Charmant! Charming!" Allen Ginsberg "His stories — written with the verbal and rhythmic preciseness of poetry — are witty, intriguing metaphors for the secrets of the cosmos." Howard Kissel, Women's Wear Daily Spencer Holst stories: Mona Lisa Meets Buddha Up in heaven the curtains fluttered, the curtains fluttered, the curtains fluttered, and the Mona Lisa entered at one end of a small hall, which was hung with many veils. Up in heaven the curtains fluttered, fluttered, fluttered, and the Buddha entered the hall at the other end. They smiled. The Zebra Storyteller Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic. The language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa. Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle, and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet. "Hello there!" says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic. "It is certainly a pleasant day, isn't it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, isn't the world a lovely place to live today?" The zebra is so astonished at hearing a Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why — he's just fit to be tied. So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den. The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet mignon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow neckties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court. He began boasting to friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact that he hunted zebras. The delicate noses of the zebras told them that there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion. One day the storyteller of the zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots of stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly his eyes brightened, and he said, "That's it! I'll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That'll make 'em laugh." Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him and said, "Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn't it!" The zebra storyteller wasn't fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he'd been thinking about that very thing. He took a good a good look at the cat, and he didn't know why, but there was something about his looks he didn't like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him. That is the function of the storyteller. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 02:37:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - i'm burning alive if i write _this_ letter, _this_ word if i say 'i'm burning alive' is that sufficient my lord is that sufficient my lord is that sufficient i'm burning alive if i write _this_ text, _this_ line my lord is that sufficient my lord is that sufficient i perform a burning and perform alive i perform a burning in future immolation i perform a burning of all names and languages i perform a burning of all words and speech my lord is that sufficient my lord is that sufficient _ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 07:22:35 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Scharf, Michael (Cahners-NYC)" Subject: 2H: Clover & Dobbelmann MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain The Segue Foundation presents > Reading at Double Happiness on Saturday, December 8 > > JOSHUA CLOVER AND DUNCAN DOBBELMANN > > Joshua Clover lives in Berkeley, California. He is a member of the C21 > Poetics Working Group, and curator of their reading/talk series. > > Duncan Dobbelmann's chapbook Tronie was recently published by Harry > Tankoos Books. His translations from the Dutch have appeared in > Conjunctions, Harper's, Grand Street, and The Transcendental Friend. > > Segue Reading Series at Double Happiness > 173 Mott Street (just south of Broome) > (212) 941-1282 > > Doors open at 4pm > Two-for-one happy hour(s) > Suggested contribution, $4, goes to the readers > Funding is made possible by the continuing support of the Segue Foundation > and the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. > > Please join us! > > > Work by Joshua Clover: > > "The Map Room" > http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1283 > > "Orchid & Eurydice" > http://www.coh.arizona.edu/poetry/jclover.htm > > > Work by Duncan Dobbelmann > > "Your Lips Testify Against You" > http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/dobbel.htm > > translation of Paul Van Ostaijen > http://www.morningred.com/friend/1998/10/pages/report.html > > translation of Louis Couperus > http://www.britannica.com/magazine/article?content_id=117602&pager.offset= > 120 > > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 19:01:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Brennan Subject: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? part 1 Comments: To: BRITISH-POETS@jiscmail.ac.uk, Psyche-Arts@academyanalyticarts.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Did=20 Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion=20 Slavoj =C5=BDi=C5=BEek Verso, 2001 ISBN 1859847927=20 Alexei Monroe In this book Slavoj =C5=BDi=C5=BEek, the man publishers once d= escribed=20 as "the colossus of Ljubljana," intensifies the more explicit political=20 trajectory of his recent works. This work is part of the WO ES WAR series=20 which =C5=BDi=C5=BEek edits. The raison d'etre of the series is to demonstra= te "that=20 the explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist tradition=20 denotes a dynamic freedom that enables us to question the very=20 presuppositions of the circuit of Capital." Such language is a provocative challenge to the "end of history" school of=20 liberal-capitalist thinking and to dumbed-down intellectual and political=20 populism. The statement raises the spectre of a dense, dry text that could=20 easily deter. Yet even when addressing fundamental political problems, =C5= =BDi=C5=BEek=20 is far from dry and will address his points "by any means necessary" through= =20 reference to popular film, opera or herbal tea. =C5=BDi=C5=BEek loves to taunt liberal sensibilities, and in the introductio= n he=20 recounts the story of an American friend staying in Bucharest after the=20 removal of Ceausescu. The friend complimented the country and the people in=20= a=20 call to his girlfriend. Immediately after the call was finished, the=20 Securitate officer who monitored it rang to thank him for his kind comments.= =C5=BD i=C5=BEek thrives on such paradox and therefore dedicates the book to the se= cret=20 policeman in question. What mass culture can tell us =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's oeuvre is littered with collisions between high theory and= mass=20 culture and he thinks nothing of illustrating a discussion of the work of=20 F.W. Schelling with an analysis of Forrest Gump (in The Indivisible Remainde= r=20 from 1996). =C5=BDi=C5=BEek is not concerned with the aesthetic value (or la= ck of) in=20 such films so much as their significances and symbolisms=E2=80=94the ways in= which=20 such products can reveal fundamental ideological or psychological processes. The underlying lesson of this approach may be that significance (as opposed=20 to aesthetic skill or complexity) is everywhere=E2=80=94it does not start an= d end in=20 the art-house. Each =C5=BDi=C5=BEek text has one extended analysis of a film= (in this=20 case Face Off in a section entitled "John Woo as a critic of Levinas" (182)=20 in which he "pulls out all the stops," pushing at the borders of self-parody= =20 but always remaining persuasive).=20 One of the most striking aspects of this book is its pace. In a stunning=20 section entitled "The Myth of Postmodernity" (29-39), =C5=BDi=C5=BEek cites=20= amongst=20 others, Cindy Sherman, Spanish film, Casablanca, Kleist's "The Marquise of=20 O," Hegel, Joyce's Ulysses, the film Equus, Stravinsky's "The Rite of=20 Spring," Luther, James Bond, Nietzsche and Heidegger. The pace at which thes= e=20 eclectic subjects are deployed and analysed is in a way appropriate to the=20 postmodern techno era of reduced attention spans and informational=20 hyper-loading.=20 The accelerated pace does not imply a dilution of content; the complex works= =20 and references cited hardly suggest dumbing-down. If anything, =C5=BDi=C5= =BEek's ideas=20 can seem more powerful when concentrated almost to the duration of=20 "blipverts." What's striking is how within a single paragraph =C5=BDi=C5=BEe= k cuts to=20 the quick of a concept or a work. The accelerated style works because he has= =20 proved more than capable of extended analysis in the past and it is soon=20 apparent that his mini-analyses don't sacrifice quality for quantity. This techno-age metaphor suggests another image, that of the hyper-fast DJ=20 mixing and cross-fading diverse samples into fast-moving but dense collages.= =20 This also highlights the performative nature of his work. =C5=BDi=C5=BEek is= as much a=20 showman as many DJs and has a repertoire of crowd-pleasing tricks: the swift= =20 cross-fade between discussion of a Hollywood blockbuster and German=20 philosophy, or the rewind of a Lacanian motif (or should that be "sample"?).= =20 Also present in the mix are a fair number of jokes, for instance his=20 discussion of marketing slogans such as "you get 30% free." Here he remarks,= =20 "in such a situation I am always tempted to say: 'OK then, give me only this= =20 free 30 per cent'" (43). "I never knew there was so much in it!" =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's engagement with mass culture does not amount to rehabilita= tion, or a=20 simplistic postmodernist "so bad it's good" celebration. His approach=20 suggests that the most trivial (pop) cultural artefact can be theoretically=20 inspiring and through analysis can produce insights its creators may have=20 been completely unaware of or opposed to (particularly in the political=20 sense). Within =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's Weltanschauung the personal is definitely political= =E2=80=94the=20 psychological mechanisms underpinning interpersonal relations cannot be=20 isolated from those at the root of political or cultural processes, and his=20 discussions of melancholy or desire integrate fully with persuasive analyses= =20 ideologies such as anti-Semitism (=C5=BDi=C5=BEek claims the anti-Semitic na= rrative is=20 a means of accounting for the chaotic nature of reality), nationalism or=20 political and academic correctness. This skill at describing the most=20 esoteric and intangible of psychological and symbolic processes is as=20 indispensable to his analyses of politics as to his work on film. Conformity and resistance in the academy =C5=BDi=C5=BEek mounts an attack on a series of dominant concepts that he ar= gues=20 distort our understanding of totalitarianism and the political field. As in=20 his recent study of Kieslowski (read CER's review) and The Ticklish Subject=20 (1999), there is a broadside against "New Age obscurantists," an "adversary"= =20 mentioned in his work increasingly often (here he audaciously claims their=20 thinking is "an immanent outgrowth of modern science itself," 215). He begins by analysing the language used on the box of an American herbal=20 tea, which describes how the antioxidants it contains are used to tame=20 harmful free radicals. In a masterful stroke he uses this as a metaphor for=20 the way in which the notion of totalitarianism is (ab)used to tame radical=20 thought, acting as a Denkverbot=E2=80=94a mechanism for preventing thought:=20 > "the moment one accepts the notion of 'totalitarianism' one is firmly=20 > located within the liberal-democratic horizon." (3) However, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek is not alone in his critique of totalitarianism. So= me=20 Anglo-American scholars are also questioning it, if not for ideological=20 reasons then because it is too simplistic a model to describe the realities=20 of the former Eastern bloc (see for example Style and Socialism: Modernity=20 and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, eds Reid and Crowley,=20 Oxford: Berg, 2000) Criticising isms Throughout the book, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek draws attention to what he sees as the=20= enfeebled=20 state of debate in an academy structured by a series of prohibitions, the=20 violation of which can have dire consequences=E2=80=94he hints at (though he= does not=20 provide examples of) papers rejected or jobs refused. Having identified such= =20 codes, he goes on to challenge them spectacularly:=20 > "The first thing to do, therefore, is fearlessly to violate these liberal=20 > taboos: So what if one is accused of being 'anti-democratic', 'totalitaria= n' > =E2=80=A6" (3) Besides New Agers and liberals, others on his "hitlist" are advocates of=20 feminism, postmodernism and "pseudo-leftist irrationalism" (7). He claims=20 that transgression is now officially encouraged and that "if one wants to=20 identify the hegemonic intellectual trend, one should simply search for the=20 trend that claims to pose an unprecedented threat to the hegemonic power=20 structure" (141). One of the fascinating aspects of the =C5=BDi=C5=BEek phenomenon is that des= pite (or=20 perhaps because of) all his provocations he has gained a significant=20 following among those that he attacks in his works. If we consider how he=20 gets away with it=E2=80=94infilitrating centres of bourgeois liberalism such= as Radio=20 4's "Start The Week" programme=E2=80=94an interesting possibility arises. As= he has=20 said of Laibach, people and ideas coming from "the Balkans"/ex-Yugoslavia ar= e=20 affected by Western stereotypes of Balkan primitivism. If, as he claims, contemporary academia is bound by unwritten laws, it is=20 possible that his violation of these is only tolerated because of his=20 "Balkan" status. More indulgence may be offered to him as an exotic=20 "outsider" than to an equally iconoclastic Western thinker, particularly if=20 they were to describe themselves as =C5=BDi=C5=BEek has as a "Stalinist" (a=20 semi-ironic reference to his theoretical dogmatism).=20 =20 =20 =20 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 19:02:11 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Brennan Subject: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? part 2 Comments: To: BRITISH-POETS@jiscmail.ac.uk, Psyche-Arts@academyanalyticarts.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Totalitarianism examined In relation to totalitarianism, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek covers topics such as the ro= le of the=20 Holocaust in contemporary culture, the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism,= =20 Havel, the Stalinist show trials and two favoured examples of his: the GDR=20 and the Yugoslav self-management system.=20 Revelling as he does in paradox and irony, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's analysis of Sta= lin's=20 purges is particularly striking. He claims that what the purges actually=20 concealed was "a total incapacity to govern the country through 'normal'=20 authority and executive measures" (119) and that the elevation of the leader= =20 to the status of a genius able to pronounce on any and all subjects had a=20 paralysing effect upon the functioning of country subject to such a cult,=20 also hinting at the corrosive effects of leadership cults in any context.=20= =C5=BDi=C5=BE ek points out the irony of the 1938 "meta-purge" (120) in which Yezhov, head= =20 of the NKVD, was actually charged with killing thousands of innocent=20 Bolsheviks (who =C5=BDi=C5=BEek claims had in a sense betrayed the revolutio= n by=20 becoming the nomenklatura.) =C5=BDi=C5=BEek also discusses the work of Shostakovitch, challenging simpli= stic=20 (liberal) notions of dissidence. He takes particular issue with the=20 oxymoronic concept of covert dissidence, as he says, "the very essence of a=20 dissident act is that it is public" (125). As he has argued elsewhere,=20 maintaining a private inner distance or cynicism towards the system actually= =20 helps the system and it is those who take an ideology literally that pose a=20 greater threat. He sees Shostakovitch's achievement not in his supposed=20 hidden musical dissidence but in the fact that he articulated his own=20 cowardice and inner conflict in relation to the system and claims that the=20 8th String Quartet=E2=80=94written when he finally joined the party=E2=80= =94is the music of=20 a broken man. Subsequently he challenges the liberal understanding of dissidence, drawing=20 out an aspect generally overlooked:=20 > "the very space from which [dissidents] themselves criticized and denounce= d=20 > the day-to-day terror and misery was opened and sustained by the Communist= =20 > breakthrough, by its attempt to escape the logic of Capital... when=20 > dissidents like Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of= =20 > authentic human solidarity, they (unwittingly, for the most part) spoke=20 > from the place opened up by Communism itself=E2=80=94this is why they tend= to be so=20 > disappointed when 'actually existing capitalism' does not meet the high=20 > expectations of their anti-Communist struggle. Perhaps Vaclav Klaus,=20 > Havel's pragmatic double, was right when he dismissed Havel as a=20 > 'socialist'." (130) At this point some will accuse =C5=BDi=C5=BEek of belittling the victims of=20= Stalinist=20 systems, yet he argues that Marxists should not be afraid to acknowledge the= =20 irrationalism of the purges and notes that "the Communist regimes, in their=20 positive content, were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery= "=20 (130). Such failure was, he claims, judged against the systems' own utopian=20 dreams and for this reason Stalinism even at its worst "exudes an=20 emancipatory potential" (131). Perhaps some residual awareness of this plays= =20 a part in the current London trend for clothes decorated with the logos of=20 Cuba or the USSR. However unpalatable to some, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's position co= mpels him=20 to insist on the lost utopian value even of failed revolutionary projects.=20 From the Balkans to The Matrix In the closing section, =C5=BDi=C5=BEek identifies the present forms of "the= spectre=20 of 'totalitarianism': "evil dictators" such as Milo=C5=A1evic, New Right pop= ulism=20 in the West and "the digital Big Brother," noting that "soon, our daily live= s=20 will be registered and controlled to such an extent that the former police=20 state control will look like a childish game: the 'end of privacy'" is in=20 sight (229). =C5=BDi=C5=BEek gives a detailed commentary on ex-Yugoslavia. He identifies=20= two=20 "prejudices" that shaped the views of the Western left: that Yugoslav=20 self-management really worked and that small nations like Slovenia and=20 Croatia naturally regress to a proto-Fascist state if left unsupervised. He goes on to make a key statement, worth quoting in full:=20 > "The ultimate irony of such a nostalgic Leftist longing for the lost=20 > Yugoslavia is that it ends up identifying as the successor of Yugoslavia=20 > the very force that killed it: the Serbia of Milo=C5=A1evic. In the=20 > post-Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s, what could be said to embody the=20 > positive legacy of Titoist Yugoslavia=E2=80=94its much-praised multicultur= alist=20 > tolerance=E2=80=94was ('Muslim') Bosnia: the Serb aggression against Bosni= a was=20 > (also) the aggression of Milo=C5=A1evic, the first true post-Titoist (the=20= first=20 > Yugoslav politician who really acted as if Tito was dead, as a perceptive=20 > Serb social scientist put it more than a decade ago), against those who=20 > clung desperately to the Titoist legacy of ethnic 'brotherhood and unity'.= "=20 > (232) =C5=BDi=C5=BEek notes that the supreme commander of the "Muslim" army was an= ethnic=20 Serb and that all through the 1990s, "Muslim" Bosnia was the last part of=20 ex-Yugoslavia where Tito's portraits were still hung in government offices.=20 He claims that "to reduce the Bosnian conflict to civil war between differen= t=20 'ethnic groups' in Bosnia, is not a neutral gesture, but a gesture that=20 adopts in advance the standpoint of one of the sides in the conflict=20 (Serbia)" (232). He also notes the way in which the death of Tudman and the (predicted)=20 removal of Milo=C5=A1evic cleared the way for their respective states to be=20 accepted as democratic and pro-Western without undergoing any thorough=20 self-examination or removal of the corrupt nationalist elites. Indeed, with=20 the fall and extradition of Milo=C5=A1evic (after this book was written) ele= ments=20 of his regime have been able to deflect much of the blame on to him in a way= =20 which enables the West to hail a victory for democracy and a problem=20 "solved." =C5=BDi=C5=BEek's verdict on the Western interventions (characterised by=20 procrastination followed by over-reaction) is damning, and he claims that as= =20 a result Yugoslavia, Albania, Macedonia and Bosnia are all in effect "under=20 the direct rule of political banditry" (234). Finally, he condemns as "racist" the frequently heard Western truism about=20 age-old hatreds and endemic intolerance (rather than very contemporary power= =20 struggles) being at the root of the wars. =20 He argues that in practice the New Right actually helps legitimise the=20 market-subservient political compromises of parties such as New Labour and=20 that "New Right populism is the 'return of the repressed,' the necessary=20 supplement, of global capitalist multiculturalist tolerance" (244). The=20 threat serves to restore the illusion of genuine choice within the electoral= =20 process displacing what he claims remains "the true focus of the political=20 struggle (which is, of course, the stifling of any Leftist radical=20 alternative)" (241). Effectively this spectre is a useful one for scaring th= e=20 radical left, creating a point onto which oppositional energy can be focusse= d=20 in a way that leaves the actual hegemonic forces a freer hand to govern. =C5=BDi=C5=BEek examines J=C3=B6rg Haider's provocative comparison of his po= litics with=20 those of New Labour and claims that such populism (which appeals most to=20 "working class" sections of the electorate) is "the price the Left is paying= =20 for its renunciation of any radical political project, for accepting market=20 capitalism as 'the only game in town'" (246). He concludes that such=20 "realism" is the "worst ideology." This excoriation of political realism seems to leave him open to criticism i= n=20 the light of his pragmatic (and controversial) support for the Liberal=20 Democratic party in Slovenia. However, he has argued that the LDS played a=20 central role in Slovenia's avoidance of the authoritarian route taken by=20 other ex-Yugoslav republics. He is aware of the apparent contradiction=20 between his international(ist) and domestic discourses but has insisted on=20 the necessity of his LDS alignment (see Geert Lovink's interview with =C5= =BDi=C5=BEek=20 in InterCommunication No. 14, 1995.) Reality TV The final spectre is the digital Big Brother and this section is both=20 tantalisingly brief and, ultimately, surprisingly optimistic. =C5=BDi=C5=BEe= k examines=20 the TV Big Brother phenomeon arguing that it indicates that in the present=20 context people can be more anxious when they believe they are not being=20 observed, and that even members of the general public now need the camera as= =20 a guarantee of their existence. He goes on to use the film The Matrix as=20 symbolic of our lives, which really are regulated by invisible networks but=20 cautions against millenarian fantasies of technological collapse and=20 pre-digital utopias. Some form of "matrix" (either psychological or now=20 digital) is always necessary to protect us against what he calls (borrowing=20 from the film) "the desert of the real" (254). He concludes with "a modest Marxist point," an attempt to find a means of=20 constructive engagement with the digitalisation of society, challenging once= =20 again some of the dominant liberal thinking on the subject:=20 > "the proper answer to this threat is not retreat into islands of privacy,=20 > but an even stronger socialization of cyberspace. One should summon up the= =20 > visionary strength to discern the emancipatory potential of cyberspace in=20 > what we (mis)perceive today as its 'totalitarian' threat." (256) What =C5=BDi=C5=BEek leaves us with is an emphatically constructive challeng= e. To=20 avoid the simplistic rhetorical seductions of automatically branding=20 processes with a radical potential as "totalitarian" and to seek new modes o= f=20 collective engagement with the digital life-world. The fleshing-out of this=20 question is left either for his next book or perhaps to the readers=20 themselves, but the spirit of optimism he manifests here is if nothing else=20= a=20 welcome antidote to political passivity and pessimism.=20 Alexei Monroe,= 2 November 2001 =20 =20 =20 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 00:04:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Broder Subject: Ear Inn Readings--December 2001 Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit The Ear Inn Readings Saturdays at 3:00 326 Spring Street New York City FREE December 8 Steven Cordova, Patrick Donnelly, Walter Holland December 15 Marj Hahne, Dermot Hannon, Jackie Sheeler December 22 Christmas Break--No Reading December 29 New Year's Break--No Reading For more information, contact Michael Broder or Jason Schneiderman at (212) 246-5074. Thanks to everyone for another fine year of poetry and prose at the Ear Inn. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 21:37:56 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Beckett Subject: (no subject) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I I write I write what I write what I I write what I come I write what I come to I write what I come to write ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 11:57:48 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik Dylan Willoughby Dylan Willoughby's work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, featured on Can We Have Our Ball Back and Shampoo, and is forthcoming in Spinning Jenny. He can be reached at dylan_willoughby@yahoo.com. The Precious Cool Beans She is singing the anthem for some kooky people. He strides in as the beautiful one, well-lighted With the chiseled features we want him for. It is not late, yet. She is putting her Heart into it, the song called "Flip." An Occasion piece mired in irrelevance. We acknowledge her passion, though The peanut gallery in our souls winces. The rain outside is green and hits the angled windows Like clumps of seaweed or the terrifying implements Used in car washes. The cleft-chinned, high-cheeked, Comely one withdraws, playing the Goth. He feels as if the spirits are ballroom dancing On his spleen. It is the fashionable time for Melancholy, to bathe in the blues like it's a party For woe. The raspberries on the plate are Recuperative this time. The song "Flip" enters Its final movement and the anxious crowd fidgets. "Your prize is sentience, Olivia, presiding over The precincts of flux." An unexpected end, but Welcome, the audience thinks. A departure from The libretto derived from a press release! Relief Sifts through the people like an unclaimed fragrance; no, Not relief but satisfaction. "Will you come and be my love, Be fruitful, multiply--fructify or bust!--" the beautiful one asks The singer. His question presages such connubial Bliss the crowd showers them with the aperitif, cool beans Including those of the garbanzo variety... It is a story I know well, I tell the retired reporters. I mopped the floors that night. Slopping up those Wretched legumes. How I had loved her! Dylan Willoughby ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 21:56:01 -0500 Reply-To: whitebox@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: tabs@DISINFO.NET Organization: UFO Subject: NADA para FLYING SAUCER Comments: To: chthong@earthlink.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NADA requests the pleasure of your company... Tuesday December 4 at 8pm at Flying Saucer Cafe [494 Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn USA] ============================================== M. Vitale - T. Colby - M. Portnoy OFFERING COMPONENTS WHICH LIFT... A DOZEN OR MORE STATIONS OF THE EXTRAPOLATION PAN ...NO MORE TEXTUAL DISTANCE IN PROGRESSO STRIDE THE RATTLED CHATTER OF CHAPTERS 1 - 15, INCLUDING: OR ETIQUETTE SUMP PIT SUNBOW BIN BIN NEEDING PIN PIN PLANS FOR INGRATITUDE WALK AWAY FROM THE FLYING SAUCER WITH SOMETHING THAT CARES FOR YOUR SUBSEQUENTNESS ...YOUR OWN FLOAT PAST FREE PAMPHLET ! ==================================================== BIO INFO: Known as The Yogurt Boys to some, the above trio has performed at Knitting Factory, St. Marks Poetry Proj., DUMBO Arts Fest.,/// Todd Colby has several books published with Soft Skull Press, as well as writings in numerous magazines/journals; he is Editor of St. Martin's Press's Heights of the Marvelous2000 (including Vitale & Portnoy); Colby is recently bedded with strong stomach flu. /// Marianne Vitale, poet and filmmaker, occasionally enjoys cooking, sewing, strolling around town, shuckin' the what; also Co-Directs White Box NY ///Performing regularly and internationally, Michael Portnoy may be disguised as Liquid Tapedeck musician, Kumikokimoto dancer, Bob Dylan Soy Bomb, Chelsea Art curator, or traveler across US bi- monthly spying on consumers. ==================================================== HOW TO GET TO THE SAUCE: Take the 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or D or Q to the Atlantic Subway stop and walk underground to the Pacific Street exit (at the N or R or M Pacific Street Stop) or take the B or N or R or M - in any case, go out the Pacific Street Exit (right exit), take a right - at the end of the block you will be on Atlantic Ave. Take a left on Atlantic, and about two and a half blocks down, between Third and Nevins, you will find the Flying Saucer. $3 donation. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 08:44:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Whirl2@AOL.COM Subject: SAMUEL DELANY | TUES DEC 4 | WRITERS LIVE! AT PRATT MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable *********Please don't miss the last event of the fall season!!!!!********* Writers Live! at Pratt Institute presents :=20 =20 SAMUEL R. DELANY 6 p.m., Tues. Dec. 4 in Memorial Hall, 200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY=20 Call (718) 636-3570 or check website www.pratt.edu/writerslive for more=20 info...=20 Free of charge! Bring your friends! I hope to see you there! Marcella Harb, Curator Samuel R. Delany is "the most interesting author of science fiction writing=20 in English today," writes The New York Times Book Review. Delany is the=20 author of over 20 novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17, and=20 Dhalgren, which has sold over one million copies, & is the "secret=20 masterpiece=E2=80=A6which has swallowed readers alive for almost 30 years,"=20= according=20 to Jonathan Lethem. To get to Pratt: It's a couple of blocks from the subway (G line)! Transfer to the G from almost any train (A,C,L, F, etc).=20 Get off at the CLINTON/WASHINGTON station on the G line. =20 Use the Washington Ave. exit, then walk on Wash. (toward the Jesus Saves=20 sign) one block to DeKalb Ave, turn right and go one block to Hall St/St.=20 James, the corner of the gated campus. Walk diagonally through campus to=20 Memorial Hall. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 09:33:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maureen McLane Subject: room sought In-Reply-To: <015601c17951$cd4be6e0$bb04fea9@com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Folks -- wondering if any of you in the NYC area, particularly in Manhattan but flexible, might know of a writing and possibly painting space available during the day, for a few days during the week, for the next 6 months to a year. I don't need much space but I need uninterrupted time; if there were a room in an apt., say, free during business hours 2-5 days a week, that might be ideal, or some kind of shared studio space. Thanks so much for any leads! -- Maureen McLane ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 18:08:07 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Tysh Subject: mark(s) release MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Greetings from Detroit, I joined the list around September and it was really something to have all your voices in the midst of this inferno. The new issue of mark(s), an on-line zine I co-edit with Deb King, is up on the screen. It features new work by Dodie Bellamy (with photographs by Sue de Beer), Harry Mathews, Eleni Sikelianos and Sarah Schulman, plus paintings by Sally Schluter Tardella and two videos by Yoshiomi Yamaguchi. Visit the site at http://www.markszine.com best, Chris __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Buy the perfect holiday gifts at Yahoo! Shopping. http://shopping.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 22:02:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? In-Reply-To: <20011127213848.89654.qmail@web11701.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Have you read Merrill's _The Changing Light at Sandover_? I assume so because if the Ouija board thing. Merrill's long poem is about contacts with spirit guides through a Ouija board. I liked the first book, but I got sick of the newaginess of later portions of the work, and didn't finish the rest. That's probably the wrong word to use as Merrill was not at all a new age type, but I'm referring to the theology which was made up out of (it seemed to me) slogans and funny labels for things (for instance God was called God B for God Biology, which struck me as a shallow borrowing from the current interest in biology as the cause of everything, and I also found the term to be too cute.) I did like other aspects of the work, like the realistic parts about Merrill and his partner and their friends (dead and alive) and the characterization of Ephraim, the first spirit who communicated with Merrill. In general I like Merrill a lot. "The Broken Home" is a particular favorite for personal, not poetic reasons (I was subject to a custody battle as a child). But the poem has some great images, like the description of Merrill's father's ex-wives orbiting in sable around him at the funeral. As usual when posting here I am in mortal fear of saying something exceptionally stupid. This list is intimidating with all its poets... Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Jullich Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 4:39 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? E-mail/contact info. for Kristin Prevallet (not her "real" name), please back-channel? Nothing unusual: I just want to thank her for the ride she gave me the other evening (in a car), and to ask her if she'd take a look at a French translation I'm working on, poems in French dictated by ouija board spirit guides. Merci. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 14:25:36 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: << This looks like a superior poetry contest to me. Too bad an institution like SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My boilerplate on this is that if you don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets or award prizes to them without charging them money to submit their work, you should go way. --Bob G. >> I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the prize since University administrations are unlikely to care. But I do share Bob's annoyance. What jumps out most is the list of former winners. Name recognition seems to be an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just noting -- but I wonder if this award is any different from so many others in terms of how winners are selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind submissions, "adjustments" are often made before the winner is announced. I also find unfortunate that some award competitions keep the judges' identities secret. Having this information up front might save a lot of people from wasting a reading fee. Of course, the secret is meant to guard against just this little thing. The Award depends on getting as many entries as possible. I'll be interested to see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, once again, a "Sharon Olds brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good luck to all who must take the plunge. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 17:16:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: no-thing samadhi MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - no-thing samadhi you don't see the universe in a grain of sand; you see a grain of sand in the universe. you may name the grain queen or king, prince or princess, president or premier; you may give it a proper name, akiko, jonathan; you accomplish nothing. you see a rug with its weaving and name a particular loop friend or foe; you understand nothing. names are delusion; they close around particulars; they define particulars. they close around the world and structure it; the assume totality in the wildflower, totality in the grain of sand. they assume the world is all that is the case; there is no case, no world. you don't see any-thing. you see the symbolic; you see function. the world is defined as the sum of its parts. a part is part of the whole. the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. the parts can be summed. the parts can be substituted, rearranged, created, annihilated, transformed. the whole can be substituted, rearranged, created, annihilated, trans- formed. the play of symbols is the play of abstract mathesis, the play of abstract ontology. it is the play of no-thing. it is exact, and exactitude may be at the service of inexactitude. within the chaotic domain, things are determined; within the stochastic domain, envelopes are relatively or roughly determined. there is no universe in a grain of sand. there is no world in a wild- flower. there is no grain of sand, no wild-flower. you see everything in a universe that reflects structure in everything. structure coalesces, coag- ulates - fields, intensifications, energies, fundamental forces. in the grain of sand, structure devolves. on the way down, structure devolves. your body is devolution; your body is coagulation, intensity; your mind, your antibodies, the raising of your arms, ward off boundary dissolution. appearance nearly decomposes; the boundaries are of a making. the boundar- ies are of a dissolution. there is no cessation; there is transformation; there is asymptotic devolvement. the constriction-coagulation, the cont- ract of names, is always already forgotten. there is no-thing to forget. there is no-thing to remember; the universe is neither imaginary nor real. _ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 09:22:46 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM Subject: Rae Armantrout reading at Bridge Street 12/9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bridge Street Books presents Rae Armantrout Sunday December 9th, 7 PM Armantrout is the author of seven books of poetry including the recently puiblished _Veil: New and Selected Poems_ from Wesleyan University Press and _The Pretext_ from Green Integer. _A Wild Salience: The Writing of Rae Armantrout_, features essays by 20 writers including Lyn Hejinian, Robert Creeley, and Bob Perelman. Her author page includes poems, essays, sound files, etc: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/armantrout Bridge Street Books 2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC ph-- 202 965 5200 Bridge Street is five blocks from the Foggy Bottom Metro stop on the blue & orange lines, next to the Four Seasons Hotel, in Georgetown. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 19:50:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Culley Subject: peter culley's new e-mail Comments: To: Kevin Davies , jan coyle , lee ann brown , Miriam Nichols , Ralph Allen , Ange Mlinko , Aaron Vidaver , Biglar678@aol.com, Cara Jean Morrison , Peter Cummings , Dan Farrell , Lis Bianco , Liz Munro , Lisa Robertson , mink@smartt.com, normail@telus.net, nell , Nina Skogster , Antti Pirskanen , paperboy@nevis.scotsman.com, Reid Shier , Rolf Maurer , Roy Arden , "Scharf, Michael (Cahners -NYC)" , Sara Leydon , wcl@sfu.ca MIME-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Dear Pals-- My new e-mail is pjculley@shaw.ca and Daphne's is dksamuel@shaw.ca write soon! peter c ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 20:51:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Bassford Subject: EXOTERICA hosts Phillip Lopate MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This Saturday, December 8th at 8 p.m., PHILLIP LOPATE will read as part of EXOTERICA'S 11th season, at The Society for Ethical Culture, 4450 Fieldston Road, Bronx. Phillip Lopate is widely regarded as one of America's foremost essayists and a central figure in the revival of the personal essay. He is the author of Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, The Rug Merchant, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, Confessions of Summer, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies. "A major national literary figure whose whimsical prose style and analytical approach rivals in quality the work of Didion, Sontag, and Vidal."- Newsweek Join us for the reading and the open mike...poets and essayists welcome! Admission $5 For more info call Rick Pernod at 718-549-5192, or respond here. EXOTERICA...we'll be spreading the word... ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 13:38:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Ram=20Devineni?= Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Pulitzer=20Prize=20winning=20poet=20Louis=20Simpson=20and=20Elaine=20Schwager=20Reading?= In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Louis Simpson & Elaine Schwager DATE: December 8, 2001 TIME: 2:00 pm FREE St. Agnes Branch, 444 Amsterdam Ave., New York City http://www.rattapallax.com Louis Simpson has published seventeen books of original poetry, including= Nombres et poussiere (Paris, France: Atelier La Feugraie, 1996); There Yo= u Are (Story Line, 1995); In the Room We Share(1990); Collected Poems (1988= ); People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-83 (1983); The Best Hour of the Nig= ht (1983); Caviare at the Funeral (1980); Armidale (1979); Searching for the= Ox (1976); Adventures of the Letter I (1971); Selected Poems (1965); At the End of the Open Road, Poems (1963), for which he won the Pulitzer Pri= ze; A Dream of Governors (1959). He is also the author of a memoir, The King My Father's Wreck (Story Line, 1995), and published a volume entitled Sel= ected Prose in 1989. His Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology (Story Line Press) won the Academy's 1998 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award= . Among his many other honors are the Prix de Rome, fellowships from the Gu= ggenheim Foundation, and the Columbia Medal for Excellence. Mr. Simpson lives in Setauket, New York. Elaine Schwager is a poet, practicing psychoanalyst and screenwriter, liv= ing in New York City. She has had poems in Rattapallax, Literal Latte, Writ (Toronto), The World (St. Mark's Poetry Project), Armadillo, Promethean, Gaia and many other literary publications. Her poems have also been in tw= o anthologies: It Is the Poem Singing in Your Eyes (Harper and Row) and Cit= y in All Directions (Macmillan). She has been awarded residencies at The Ma= cDowell Colony, The Woodstock Guild and The Vermont Studio Center. He first colle= ction, I Want Your Chair, was published by Rattapallax Press. Rattapallax Press 532 La Guardia Place Suite 353 New York, NY 10012 USA http://www.rattapallax.com http://www.dialoguepoetry.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 19:43:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: CFP: Graduate Student Conference MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brian Walsh requested we post the following announcement: " " " " CFP: "Performing Community," 12th Annual Conference of " Graduate " Scholarship " " The Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary " Culture " Rutgers University " " We invite graduate students to submit papers for a " one-day, " interdisciplinary " conference, "Performing Community," to be held on " February 15, 2002. " " The conference draws from the Center's 2001-2002 " theme, "The " Performance of " Culture." The conference topic is meant to encourage a " wide array of " submissions, from explorations of specific communities " that perform to " the " ways in which communities perform and/or the ways in " which communities " are " formed through various performance practices. " " Paper topics might include but are not limited to " " *performing local, national, and transnational " community " *performing gendered, racial, ethnic, and sexual " community " *healing communities " *institutional communities " *theater troupes " *dance companies " *choral groups " *film production units " *performance and technology " *street theater " *social/cultural rituals " *theater/performance venues " *spectatorship/audience " *performing resistance " *performing activism " *performance ethnography " *intellectual property/copyright " " Please send 1-to-2-page abstracts for 15-minute papers " (with a cover " sheet " indicating your name, affiliation, mailing address, " and e-mail address) " by " December 15, 2001. We also welcome proposals for " 4-paper panels. E-mail " submissions are preferred. " " Please direct inquiries and e-mail proposals to " CCACC_CONF@email.rutgers.edu " " Proposals may also be sent to the following address: " " Performing Community Conference " Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary " Culture " 8 Bishop Place " New Brunswick, NJ 08903 " Phone: 732-932-8426 " Fax: 732-932-8683 " " " " " __________________________________________________ " Do You Yahoo!? " Buy the perfect holiday gifts at Yahoo! Shopping. " http://shopping.yahoo.com " ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 10:59:01 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The San Francisco State University Poetry Center Prize has had many fine and varied recipients over the years. It is no way a "name brand" contest. Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one is forced to enter the contest either. As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. Maxine Chernoff, Prof of Creative Writing. On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 Austinwja@AOL.COM wrote: > In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: > > << This looks like a superior poetry contest to me. Too bad an institution > > like > > SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My boilerplate on this is that if > > you > > don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets or award prizes to them > > without charging them money to submit their work, you should go way. > > > --Bob > > G. > > >> > > I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the prize since University > administrations are unlikely to care. But I do share Bob's annoyance. What > jumps out most is the list of former winners. Name recognition seems to be > an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just noting -- but I wonder if > this award is any different from so many others in terms of how winners are > selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind submissions, "adjustments" are > often made before the winner is announced. I also find unfortunate that some > award competitions keep the judges' identities secret. Having this > information up front might save a lot of people from wasting a reading fee. > Of course, the secret is meant to guard against just this little thing. The > Award depends on getting as many entries as possible. I'll be interested to > see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, once again, a "Sharon Olds > brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good luck to all who must take the > plunge. Best, Bill > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 11:37:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Del Ray Cross Subject: SHAMPOO NINE MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Fabulous People, SHAMPOO issue NINE is ready for you to drizzle, squirt, or otherwise decant however you see fit. To do so, hop to: http://www.ShampooPoetry.com You'll find sudsy new poems from George Stanley, Hazel Smith, Elizabeth A. Rosenberg, Daniel Nester, Murray Moulding, Rochelle Hope Mehr, David Larsen, Amy Kalvig, Aaron Kiely, Tom Hibbard, Ken Bolton, Brian Dean Bollman, Michael Basinski, and Ed Barrett, and clean but ugly ShampooArt by Erin Kim. And for those of you who will be in the San Francisco Bay Area on March 1, reserve your party hats now, cuz there's gonna be the first official SHAMPOO reading, complete with much pizza and revelry, in celebration of TWO YEARS and TEN ISSUES of SHAMPOO. Mark those calendars and stay tooned for more info. Bubble up, Del Ray Cross, Editor SHAMPOO clean hair / good poetry www.ShampooPoetry.com (If you'd like to be removed from the SHAMPOO e-list, just let me know.) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 16:39:09 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Belz Subject: scraps of the untainted sky In-Reply-To: <006b01c17d14$670540e0$b8433604@joelandrachel> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT "As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An airship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky." -E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 00:13:55 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Millie. I havent read Changing Light at Sandhover but James Merrill is certainly a great poet: quite different eg to John Ashbery although the connections to W H Auden is explored in "Remaking it New" by Lyn Keller... I think that's the book. Merrill writes some beautiful poems and like Auden he was obviously highly intelligent: some I think have found him too difficult or possibly deliberately "obscurantist" but there re many poets that I find "difficult" (in different ways) but the poetry is so great that one's bafflement, or possibly one's initial bafflement, could be aprt of the proces of enjoying...or "eating" the poem. One poem is predicated on the Cupid and Psyche myth which is in Apuleius's "The Golden Ass" (a book I'm currently reading). I think that Merrill revelled in intellectual subtlety, as did Auden (although the latter's later poems are apparently "transparent") but he loved words and language and the subtle beauty of thought: and of course emotion. I have a friend who actually reads "Changing Light..." because he either believes (or wants to because he wants to think he is or can communicate with a close family member through the "oiuji board" or whatever way)... but undoubtedly also because it's a major modern poem. I found it difficult and simply too vast but I intend to get hold of it again when I have time. Look (I know I'm "butting in") but Millie - if I was worried whether all the accos and poets on the list and people I've criticised or been blasted by or all the stupid things I've said or am/are/was/did say saying I'd never do anything: just express your views: if the Moderator wants to cut it, its up to him/her (but ingeneral the problem is simply that not enough people are either humble enough or arrogant enough or self-confident enough or crazy enough or normal enough to express their thoughts): I have done so, very often I think...why the hell did I say that? Sometimes I regret it but I NEVER apologise. What I say I say: get confident and have your say....this connects to what Patrick Herron is saying bout the lack of discussion which I think is people (partly, partly its very time consuming) not entering into real discussions: there was one last year on the Langos etc another centred around langauage (metaphor and mtonomy) and a few others...I enjoyed jawing on about what was poetry, how to define it, and so on....but see Patrick's pennyworth. but dont worrry what other people think: just write. Even send in some poems. (We all talk crap - its the quality of one's crap that counts!!) Look, I'm just a tired old book seller and ex- technitian, but I clash swords with great intellectual and creative giants such as George Bowering, Pierre Joris, Ron Silliman, Arrielle Greenberg, Joe Brennan, Bill Austin, Kevin Killian, Wystan Curnow,harry Nudel, Joe Amato, Marjorie Perloff, and Scott Hamilton. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Millie Niss" To: Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2001 4:02 PM Subject: Re: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? > Have you read Merrill's _The Changing Light at Sandover_? I assume so > because if the Ouija board thing. Merrill's long poem is about contacts > with spirit guides through a Ouija board. I liked the first book, but I got > sick of the newaginess of later portions of the work, and didn't finish the > rest. That's probably the wrong word to use as Merrill was not at all a new > age type, but I'm referring to the theology which was made up out of (it > seemed to me) slogans and funny labels for things (for instance God was > called God B for God Biology, which struck me as a shallow borrowing from > the current interest in biology as the cause of everything, and I also found > the term to be too cute.) I did like other aspects of the work, like the > realistic parts about Merrill and his partner and their friends (dead and > alive) and the characterization of Ephraim, the first spirit who > communicated with Merrill. > > In general I like Merrill a lot. "The Broken Home" is a particular favorite > for personal, not poetic reasons (I was subject to a custody battle as a > child). But the poem has some great images, like the description of > Merrill's father's ex-wives orbiting in sable around him at the funeral. > > As usual when posting here I am in mortal fear of saying something > exceptionally stupid. This list is intimidating with all its poets... > > Millie > > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Jullich > Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 4:39 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? > > > E-mail/contact info. for Kristin Prevallet (not her > "real" name), please back-channel? > > Nothing unusual: I just want to thank her for the ride > she gave me the other evening (in a car), and to ask > her if she'd take a look at a French translation I'm > working on, poems in French dictated by ouija board > spirit guides. > > Merci. > > > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. > http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 23:16:50 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Samuels Subject: Take 2: Senior Poet Job dear poetics persons, below is the slightly revised description of a senior poet job here at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee. the difference is that we can now also consider people with the 'terminal' MFA, not only those with the PHD. this is a big changing program (60+ graduate students), that hired me year before last and hired a fiction writer this past year, in a big changing department with 9 new hires last year. the only catch is that we're in a hurry: DEC 15 2001 deadline. thanks, lisa samuels --- We seek an established poet (PhD or MFA) with at least three book-length publications and extensive experience teaching in a graduate creative writing program. Faculty normally teach four courses a year in literature or creative writing, with significant responsibilities in the advising and tutoring of graduate students. Opportunities exist for work with our literary magazine, The Cream City Review, in community-outreach projects, in other areas of the Deaprtment's broad curriculum (literature, composition, professional writing, linguistics, modern studies) and with the nationally known Center for Twenty-First Century Studies. The Department would be especially interested in candidates with secondary interests in one or more of these fields: creative non-fiction, ethnic literature, or nineteenth- or twentieth-century British literature. Send letter of application and CV to James A. Sappenfield, Chair, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee WI 53201. Deadline: December 15, 2001. --- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 13:37:09 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Small Press Subject: Small Press Traffic & Chax Press, this Friday 12/7 Comments: To: eliztj@hotmail.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at CCAC presents Chax Press Reading & Celebration Friday, December 7 at 7:30 p.m. Please join us for an event celebrating the beautiful and groundbreaking work of Tucson’s Chax Press, publishers of gorgeous, intelligent books, both perfectbound and artist’s. As poet Sheila E. Murphy has written, "Chax Press consistently affords its committed following the opportunity to experience vital, energetic works that expand the boundaries of literature while exemplifying excellence within the chosen forms. Works emerging from the Press... display a fusion of linguistic adventure and integrity, and often brave experiment, that reveals the capacity of writer and reader alike to locate places heretofore undefined. " Chax Press authors Todd Baron, David Bromige, Beverly Dahlen, Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian, Benjamin Hollander, Myung Mi Kim, Walter Lew, Nathaniel Mackey, Kit Robinson, Hugh Steinberg, and Elizabeth Treadwell join Chax Press Director, poet, and book artist Charles Alexander for a celebratory reading as well as a reception; Chax books will be available. 7:30 PM, Timken Lecture Hall, CCAC, $5 (for directions and map please see http://www.sptraffic.org/fac_dir) Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Executive Director Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at CCAC 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, California 94107 415/551-9278 http://www.sptraffic.org ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 18:34:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Sullivan Subject: S W O O N Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed S W O O N Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan 312 pp. * Granary Books * $17.95 ISBN 1887123547 "SWOON is perfect." -Eileen Myles "Fabulous, compulsive reading: proof of the ability of love and need and even writing to trump the crappiness of daily life." -Chris Kraus "A magnificent achievement, these 300 pages were culled from over 5,000 of email and hard-mail correspondence generated within a year between two sharp-minded poets, ranging in genre from mutually consoling letters, lyricalanguage poetry of a very high order of accomplishment, erotic fantasy-vignettes, and physical descriptions of place and everyday life. At every moment, they make for a captivating and illuminating reading experience." -Maria Damon "The pleasures of this book are varied, more varied than any book of poems by a single author in over a decade, but at the center of it is a love that is as pure as it is theatrical ... SWOON manages to revitalize the art of romance and romanticism ..." -Chris Stroffolino Poetry. Correspondence. Beginning in the fall of 1998, the poet Nada Gordon, then living in Tokyo, and poet/cartoonist Gary Sullivan, who'd moved to New York the previous year, began a daily correspondence that culminated in April of 1999 with Gordon's return to the U.S. after 11 years in Japan. SWOON is documentary, love story, poetry, collaborative essay and auto- (or duo-) biography all rolled into one. Written almost inadvertently, it documents the tenacity of love, and shows how it survives - with language as its host - even in inhospitable conditions. Order from any of the following: Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org Granary Books http://www.granarybooks.com/books/swoon/swoon1.html Bridge Street Books E-mail your order to with your address & you will be billed; or via credit card -- call 202 965 5200 -- or e-mail them with your address, order, card #, & expiration date & receipt will be sent with book St. Mark's Books http://www.stmarksbookshop.com _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 00:44:17 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Pursuant to my comments on James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I "butted in" to something Millie was saying about Merrill and his poem = "Cahanging Light At Sandhover" which I also found to long and (for me) = too obscure. But here is one of a series of poems I wrote some time ago, = apropos of nothing. I started writing a fictitious "converation" (maybe = I was thinking a bit of Berryman) between a cockroach and the editor of = the New York Times (which is a bit bizarre because I hardly ever read = that mag these days and have only been to Manhatten briefly: in fact it = was my only visit to anywhere outside NZ apart from Fiji) Anycase I = wrote this one which mentions Merrill's poem. Of course the whole = thing's 'tongue-in -cheek' as they say: COCROACH POEM 27 "Look Roach, you need to take a turn about, stop worrying about the Exclusion Principle or James Merrill's "Changing Light at Sandhover", Or Ashbery's "Three Poems", or Proust, or David Jones Or the Nyquist Diagram as it applies to positive and negative feedback. = Shove it into a corner for a while. Go for a massage, get laid." The Editor's face was quite red, and he was s-sweating. The room seemed to spin in opposing directions, as if in a struggle=20 to unknit the quantum quandry. There was=20 a blurr of motion, Roach felt vertiginous. But he managed to cry out: "What we were we are and what we are we were!" It was magic - everything seized. Roach stared fixedly at Ed, whom he called Word Man. "Sometimes I look up the answers to my poems after I've written them." He quipped = slyly. Editor got up, paced, and swore: "Shit!" he expleted. But Roach wanted = to go on: "There are eternities of ice, and they struggle toward morning who wriggle insinuate, twinely now, and the horse bursting into everything starting again..... the eternal television adverts: how man is a dot." Editor said nothing.=20 =20 Richard Taylor. 1995 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 03:33:17 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bill Etal. I entered a competition for a book publishing and it cost me US$80. I entered because I thought; well this is a good way to get organised with some old material I had. In "my bones" I knew that Lyn Heijinian (whom by the way I admire greatly as a poet) who was the judge wouldnt really like the style of what I sent: although one never knows. But I also entered in the vague hope of winning US$1000.00 Now it was (admittedly remotely) possible even though I am a New Zealander that I COULD have won. I assume very many entered and thus we are looking at probabilities etc. No way for me to know what went on as there has been no info re the comp (they said they would not return manuscripts). I dont even know who won! Or even if my work got there! Or any helpful or critical or otheerwise comments: nothing. Actually it cost me more than US$80 and I cant afford that sort of money very much. But on balance I dont regret it. I dont think I will be entering any more competitions again in any country as in many cases the results ARE rigged OR even if not I feel increasingly that I have to be my own self-approver and judge. None of this is to say that some very deserving people dont win prizes. The story of John Ashbery's "debut" into publishing is interesting: he says of it in an interview with John Tranter that he was lucky that Auden knew someone he knew and so on (it was a toss up between him and O'Hara both great poets)..... But now I do my own work (if I get time) and give the odd reading and "publish" mainly by putting stuff on this List. I have to admit I could be more energetic about publishing or getting into journals but either I'm "disillusioned " or I'm just bored or I'm struggling to make a few bob I dont know....but I have my concerns about competitions. Take sport: I enjoy a good game or boxing match (watching safely on the side I mean!) or cricket or whatever and have to admit that I love winning chess WHEN I win but then the game has to be significant; has to have a degree of struggle: and/but poetry is a creative thing and very unjudgeable I think in general: I think that a creative artist of whatever ilk has to believe vastly in him/herself. Competitions I will avoid. Regards, and all the best for Chrsitmas Bill (and all other List People of whatever ethnicity or nationality or ilk and regardless of all bitter or non bitter or stupid or otherwise words spoken on recent political events whichever way) and so on. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2001 8:25 AM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 > In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: > > << This looks like a superior poetry contest to me. Too bad an institution > > like > > SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My boilerplate on this is that if > > you > > don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets or award prizes to them > > without charging them money to submit their work, you should go way. > > > --B ob > > G. > > >> > > I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the prize since University > administrations are unlikely to care. But I do share Bob's annoyance. What > jumps out most is the list of former winners. Name recognition seems to be > an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just noting -- but I wonder if > this award is any different from so many others in terms of how winners are > selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind submissions, "adjustments" are > often made before the winner is announced. I also find unfortunate that some > award competitions keep the judges' identities secret. Having this > information up front might save a lot of people from wasting a reading fee. > Of course, the secret is meant to guard against just this little thing. The > Award depends on getting as many entries as possible. I'll be interested to > see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, once again, a "Sharon Olds > brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good luck to all who must take the > plunge. Best, Bill > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 21:47:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: 911: phenomenology, premonition MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - 911: phenomenology, premonition Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 1994, p 24 - Like others before, the new 'wars of religion' are unleashed over the human earth (which is not the world) and struggle even today to control the sky _with finger and eye_: digital systems and virtually immediate panoptical visualization, 'air space', telecommunications satellites, information highways, concentration of capitalistic-mediatic power - in three words, _digital culture, jet_ and _TV_ without which there could be no religious manifestation today, for example no voyage or discourse of the Pope, no organized emanation __ of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim cults, whether 'fundamentalist' or not. Sondheim, Disorders of the Real, 1988, 103 - What the Engine Does, of the Anorectic Airliner The Engine swallows the air; it is the point at which the movement of air and its dispersion begins. This is an act of devouring, gorging, the bulimic cycle which collapses as the world is absorbed. It is a transformation into substance as the Engine appropriates the foundations of the signifier for itself. What an appropriation! The Engine inscribes the absorbed world in an exhaust trail. The Engine parallels the photon; it refuses position as the tokenization of existence; it exists as movement and collapse. Thus it flies and desires the air. Thus it appropriates and seduces the air, through an act of violence which retains its position of flight. For that which would escape it, Engine, cruise missile, bomb, what is being said but the "I" of the engine, within a dialectic of seduction? Seduction in which the Origin is proclaimed, and that is the metric established as Origin, the location of the phallus. The cruise missile cocks its head, gives it to the world. It is semen which is disorganized; the world burns into paste through an atmosphere of paste, through an Engine of paste. The world burns, the Engine burns, swells, disgorges; it is the world returned to vomit.The anorectic airliner shudders (therefore shudders); the line of flight is re-established. Such an establishment with markings in the sky! Such a sky that establishes itself as a graph with mobile coordinates, exhaust that indicates while it dissipates, is absorbed in the clutter of the air. The tiny Engine! The presence of Flight! The erection in the sky and the charred earth! It is the appearance of the microtechnological once again, the bacteriophage with its consonant and identical units. It is an empty circle. It is the exhaustion of repetitive expansion. _ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 21:08:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Andrews Subject: ARTEROIDS 1.0: a literary computer game for the Web In-Reply-To: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I've finished version 1.0 of Arteroids, a literary computer game for the Web. It's up at Josh Ulm's http://theremediproject.com (San Francisco) in issue 11 along with some other experimental web.art. There's also a conversation between Josh and I about the literary, games, play, and web.art. Regards, Jim Andrews http://vispo.com http://webartery.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:07:05 +0100 Reply-To: editor@pavementsaw.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: Re: Harpo's Index Comments: To: Patrick Herron MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Patrick-- In answer to your question of "WHAT HAPPENED?" There were two problems that changed the nature of this list. One was a group of folks who said innumerable things and were removed or else decided to ban themselves. This issue was deadened by the participants, here and elsewhere. Before this there was a discussion about Dorn in which people said negative, unsubstantiated claims, when people were well aware of his health problems. In my travels since this occasion, many have told me of how they stopped participating, reading, or dropped the list due to this situation. The diversity of the list viewers changed after this instance, probably participants as well. I never went back to check. Two other factors worth mentioning are: The rise in participation on other lists, which makes sense. The publication of the poetix book, which was taken by some as an exclusionary tactic designed to promote certain individuals. This one I am not sure about as I never had a copy of the book arrive in our box. From a brief perusal, a few years back, certainly many discussions were not brought up; however, a certain amount of this is excusable due to the publication of a finite physical object paired from an enormous base, and while I suppose it would have been nice to appear, I was well aware of the list's nature before joining. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 09:50:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: contact information for Kristin Prevallet, s'il vous plait? In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear neighbor/Millie, Thanks for tossing my message-in-a-bottle back into the waves with your own crying-into-the-wind stuffed into it. Yes, I have read Merrill's ~Changing Light.~ I expect he must've known of my ouija board translation source too because, well, he was reliably literate (and aristocratically thin!), so I suspect that I'm translating an unacknowledged model for ~Sandover.~ (. . . although I'm being cagey about what I'm working on because it's by a very well-known author and I don't want anybody else to "beat me to the punch" on it.) Don't be afraid of appearing dumb here on the Buffalo List, Millie. (. . . although Merrill's association with rhyme-&-meter formalism did station him one foot in the "conservative" camp of poetry that the List's "opposed" to. And we're not supposed to talk abt. him or like him. Banned in Buffalo. Basically, I think Merrill's extreme personal ~weirdness~ redeems him, and that his formalism ultimately comes down to a type of quirkiness, like Gerard Manley Hopkins' (Imagine! Hopkins was trying to be ~helpful!~ and hoped he was making things ~clearer~ by putting all those kooky diacritical marks all over the type) or John Wheelwright's, some sort of rococo attempt at self-control that only further "opaques" the writing by unsuccessfully trying to inhibit and contradict his driving idiosyncracies: any millionaire who would, completely un-self-consciously and unapologetically, write a long poem filled with classical illusions abt. his ~house keeper~ Urania! is odd enough to be let through the metal detectors, I think.) Your syntax betrays your intelligence. Jeffrey ------------------------------------------------------- --- Millie Niss wrote: > Have you read Merrill's _The Changing Light at > Sandover_? I assume so __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Buy the perfect holiday gifts at Yahoo! Shopping. http://shopping.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 14:30:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damian Judge Rollison Subject: slow drag MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII i dragged you dragged and it was a drag your body my body and space empty space opened our mouths to speak and we spoke and when you were done speaking i spoke and when i was done speaking it was you a large weight was lif- ted then replaced every time it starts from nothing again every word rings like learning to speak every inch of distance sings difference a kiss that neglects itself again again and the veil shifts but it isn't lifted and counterweights swing in our throats opened and closed and opened our mouths your mouth and mine elaborately dancing i left you left we left the car running <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 14:22:15 -0500 Reply-To: patrick@proximate.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Re: Harpo's Index Comments: To: editor@pavementsaw.org In-Reply-To: <3C0DF1C8.9861F6ED@megsinet.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Excellent. Thanks for the front-side opportunity for discussion, David. It does seem apparent that "a group" of people either were removed OR left OR withdrew themselves from discussion. But why? Mean things were said and feelings were hurt, but isn't that a part of fully vested discussion? I would guess my question here is a polarizing one. As a born and bred Yankee who's lived in the Southern US for 12 years, I live this tension, between speaking one's mind at the risk of offending someone and withdrawing one's barbed speech at the risk of avoiding full disclosure. I was raised to speak my mind come hell or high water, and that does not go over too well in North Carolina. It seems always to come down to a choice between perceived personal barriers and the exhaltation of ideas. I do believe there's a way short of moderation that can walk the fine line between these two things. So I'm hearing that discussion crushed discussion. Bottom line. This just doesn't make sense. Some people said mean things about Dorn, but there still was discussion, and lots of it, however flawed or rude. Now, the poetix book, that's to me a very compelling point. I do think there's something about establishing one's literary presence, etc., involved here. The fact that this list disintegrated into a place to advertise reveals this sort of power play in its most unabashed form. Pure marketing. Yes there was an attrition to other lists, but again that doesn't explain *why* people would begin to find the grass greener elsewhere. Also, someone backchannelled me to let me know the same sort of thing has happened with brit-po? So where are they going? Maybe it's that people run away from discussions that hurt their feelings or challenge their opinions? I can see that. I run another list and there is such little discussion on it. I've tried to encourage people to post poems to the list, in the hopes that some amount of critical review (I like this, I don't like that, why do you do that, etc.) would happen. The last time I said something negative about someone's poem, which was on another list entirely, that person who I like very much has not spoken to me since. It's very creepy. Even now I'm hesitant because I feel like I'm dealing with eggs. What I'm seeing is that people on every list are reluctant to discuss. I beleive I am witnessing poetics discussion dissolve *everywhere* on the internet though I realize this is only an intuition and I don't have the data to back it up. I am reminded by an article by Dana Gioia in the Atlantic many years back (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm), namely that for some reason or other (take your pick), regardless of affiliation, criticism (re: candor) has all but disappeared from the face of poetry. I honestly cannot remember the last critical poetry book review I read. Every book review I read these days, whether it be about a new formalist or a language poet, seems to end like a high school newspaper sports article. That is, it ends with some kissing little egregious congratulatory note, like some literary high watermark of achievement has been reached. Not EVERY book can be that good (and don't tell me that the ones that aren't so good just never get published, or that "good" and "bad" are paltry and therefore everythig is good or that people only review books they love). Nearly every review I come across is not unlike the reviews I find in Barnes & Noble circulars, where the aim is strictly to sell books. It seems nearly everyone's afraid to say "I don't like this" or "this is not very good." I know people can't possibly love everything they read. Poeple can't all feel that some amount of saying "this part is weak" or "I don't like this because..." or "I would try it this way" is always harmful. (Are egos that fragile?) And so when people who are accustomed to an environment of either constant backslapping or silence suddenly hear negative commentary, which is part of candid (and sometimes belligerent) conversation, things break down. I beleive things SHOULD NOT break down but get stronger. But they do break down. Why? Was Gioia right about a general fear of criticism? I guess I should note that in referring to Gioia's article I don't mean to affiliate myself with Gioia or all of the ideas set forth in his article. I should not have to say that, but I know from experience that things are too Balkanized in the po-world to be taken otherwise. When I get rejections or acceptances for publication, the actual amount of critical insight is always less than a paragraph (with one shining exception), and usually shorter than a sentence. It's driving me crazy, and I cannot escape the feeling that everyone in the Po-world is playing some sort of game. I just want better poetry, as unattainable and ill-defined as that may be. I want developed opinions and I get instead evasions or other indications that people are reluctant to engage in critical evaluation. (As an aside, someone said I should get an MFA and that way I won't feel this need anymore, but that comment says quite a bit! That I have to purchase criticism, that people are burnt out on negativity after MFA programs, etc.) I can't help but feel this reluctance is related to what is going on with this and other e-mail lists. Maybe discussion itself does destroy discussion, or rather, it prompts its other, the suspicion or repression of discussion. And I cannot help but think of Hannah Arendt's idea about supervision, surveillance, and the function of perceived personal space, that surveillance itself makes people less willing to freely participate, that the right to do this or that becomes meaningless in the face of being watched. Patrick -----Original Message----- From: David Baratier [mailto:baratier@megsinet.net] Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 5:07 AM To: UB Poetics discussion group; db; Patrick Herron Subject: re: Harpo's Index Patrick-- In answer to your question of "WHAT HAPPENED?" There were two problems that changed the nature of this list. One was a group of folks who said innumerable things and were removed or else decided to ban themselves. This issue was deadened by the participants, here and elsewhere. Before this there was a discussion about Dorn in which people said negative, unsubstantiated claims, when people were well aware of his health problems. In my travels since this occasion, many have told me of how they stopped participating, reading, or dropped the list due to this situation. The diversity of the list viewers changed after this instance, probably participants as well. I never went back to check. Two other factors worth mentioning are: The rise in participation on other lists, which makes sense. The publication of the poetix book, which was taken by some as an exclusionary tactic designed to promote certain individuals. This one I am not sure about as I never had a copy of the book arrive in our box. >From a brief perusal, a few years back, certainly many discussions were not brought up; however, a certain amount of this is excusable due to the publication of a finite physical object paired from an enormous base, and while I suppose it would have been nice to appear, I was well aware of the list's nature before joining. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 12:01:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] Comments: To: patrick@proximate.org In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Patrick, Thank you for your lovely, Bourdievian numbers. (Your on-List silence had been noticeable. I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. And I was worried that maybe your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym! :) I'm relieved to see you're putting your time to good use.) Something seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't seem to correspond to 65, numerically, and you might've done better to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), I think, especially with randomness, as comparison between samples of unequal size involve chi-factors or r or something . . . but otherwise, I find these numbers neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know," and charming. I felt tempted to do the same myself --- but upping nutritional supplements of Vitamin Shoppe 1500 MG Amino Complex to 10 tabs a day seems to have moderated my counting mania --- and I was more interested in plotting ~who~ responds to ~whose~ posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power and follow-the-leader. I also find the number of advertisements distressing. It's like being on one of those servers with pop-up ads that keep cluttering the screen. One waste of time there, for me, is that poetry-dvertisers do not as a rule mark their subject header with their location,--- so I waste clicks opening ads for interesting poets' readings that are then disappointingly unreachable in far-away States I can't attend (given the impounding of my private jet), not that I ever leave the house anyway. So, (#1) I think it wld. at least be thoughtful of advertisers to mark location in subject header, . . . although I can understand that reputation accumulates through the redundancy of name, and why anyone wld. be motivated just to infiltrate Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at every loophole, "fame"-building. I've wondered if Christopher W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. In print, ads are generally separated to the margins and not interspersed with "articles." --- Pedagogically, insofar as the List is State U. educational outreach, it's like mixing in Save Fifty Cents coupons with class notes. --- Electronically, segregation might be effort, though (develop a co-site/cache), . . . but maybe not all that much effort: even free servers like Yahoo provide instantaneous group resources that poetry-advertisers cld. be given a one-time "warning" to post to, for those interested to consult, and then otherwise summarily blocked/deleted (as exploitative, mercenary, whatever). I've even considered as public "penance" taking it upon myself to maintain an on-line Poetry Calendar such items could be re-directed to and plotted more helpfully, systematically, the way Sharon Matling (name?) single-handedly started the NYC Poetry Calendar as a 2-sided broadsheet that became a company. I do strongly agree that it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow. There's something terribly ~American~ in this anti-social Buy This/Go There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc, for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't seem as thoroughly ~permeated by mercantilism~ as Americans. I'm very easily manipulated by advertisements (which is why I don't watch television or go to the movies, and have trouble with newspapers and magazines), --- psychology finds that some types are objectively more "hypnotizable" by ads/promos! --- and it's distressing to find my relation to poetry being bent into docile consumerism: I spend, easily, between a hundred and two hundred a month on poetry, average, much of it via SPD or checks to on-List book/journal advertisers. That's okay but, once upon a time, my naive attachment to poetry was because an endlessly re-readable enigma masterpiece and nothing but paper and pen/typewriter was a ~refuge~ from consumerism. But it isn't only the alienation that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it, too): it's the lack of ~creativity,~ or imagination, or even--- guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their "Satisfy Me" commands. Utopian, I think it's holding back a potential new ~poetry~ of inventive free market gamesmanship, a "litvertizing," as it were, where poetry would grown into being ironically/ambiguously conjoined with the zeitgeist of advertisement-seduction. What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry, if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy? (How ~could~ Bill Berkson be advertised on-List this week if, in the golden age of genuine inspired "litvertizing," Frank O'Hara hadn't paved a reptutation for him by dint of including his name in O'Hara immortality?) Forgive me if it seems vain of me to use myself as an example, but it took much more than an hour to put together and post my shoddy little http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm , with no self-interest in Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to be among the two or three most remarkable. It was advertising, though, disinterested advertising, labor-intensive advertising. And I was lead to doing that, and to ordering Bok's book and to hearing him on the ~Cabinet~ CD as a result of Brian Kim Stefans posting a micro-review that brought out the nature of ~Eunoia~ in a way I'd previously missed, and as a result of Christopher W. Alexander bringing out points about glossolalia that mentioned ~Cabinet.~ Already here, it shows, I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List ~advertisements,~ whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest ~Fence~ takes uniquely unprecedented and ~admirable~ candor in presenting their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations, Rebecca/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly tiring but envigorating ~Manderley~ road show. The charts should be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan] of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed"). Maybe that's because I see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc., and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative and ascii ads are, on-List. [mar-/mar-]: I don't think we're marginalized; I think we're bad at marketing. But thanks for your own statistical avant-gardisme, --- the future is Neo-Pythagorean! --- which I read as a Herron poetic artefact in and of itself. Bar charts would've been nice (Silliman did Armantrout pie charts in ~A Wild Salience~). Jeffrey P.S. The "BICKERING" and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion also greatly contributes, I suspect, to the drop-off in discussion: you have a thicker hide for and propensity toward it than many. Poets are sensitive plants, and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. (But I'm debilitatingly conflict-avoidant {meek!}.) Professional academics tend to participate less seriously in on-List discussion, too. Perhaps they see it as "work," or their interlocutors as being unqualified; they're more "careful," though. On-List participation sometimes parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys ~grad student~ status together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track appointments. P.P.S. I rented ~Being John Malkovich~ the other night to see the Emily Dickinson puppet, and the puppeteer's employer, Lester Inc., reminded me of your coincidentally named marionette Lester. ======================================================= "One in the sun. Two in the sun. Three in the sun. One not in the sun. . . . Four benches used four benches separately." --- Gertrude Stein, ~Four Saints in Three Acts,~ 1927 ======================================================= --- Patrick Herron wrote: > Discussion Statistics, UBPoetics E-mail List > November 2001 vs. November 1998 > > > November 1998 > number of e-mails: 984 > number of threads*: 174 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 3.6 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 67 > percent of list posts that were advertisements, > announcements, job postings, > or responses to such postings: 7.5 (based on random > sample of 211 e-mails), > > > November 2001 > number of e-mails: 404 > number of threads*: 38 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 2.5 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 29 > number of advertisements, announcements, job > postings, or responses to such > postings: 65 (based on a random sample of 149 > e-mails) > > *-threads with more than one e-mail __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 16:57:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: juliana spahr Subject: teaching question MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am interested in hearing from people who have favorite contemporary poems that they teach that are not readily available. Like I teach Alice Notley's "White Phosphorus" over and over. But the poem isn't really in print. I'm asking because I am working on a website that is dedicated to discussing the teaching of contemporary poetry. I am trying to make what could be seen as a small web anthology and/or list of poems (depends on whether I can get permission to reprint or not) that are ideal for teaching. The website's intended audience is secondary and post-secondary teachers. I would like to draw attention to often overlooked poems. I am also interested in hearing if anyone has any poems that help them to teach in new ways. Like any particular exercise they might use with a certain poem. (Again, to return to "White Phosphorus," I use this poem to demonstrate the multivoiced potential within poetry through an exercise in performance.) Appropriate credit will be given. Or if anyone wanted to write something up, they could have authorship of a particular section. Please back channel me (spahr@hawaii.edu) with any information. I get lost on this list. Thanks for your time. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 17:24:31 -0500 Reply-To: patrick@proximate.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] Comments: To: Jeffrey Jullich In-Reply-To: <20011205200150.3578.qmail@web11701.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >Your on-List silence had been noticeable. I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. I shattered my ankle and had reconstructive surgery. I do appreciate your sympathies. It's been a very difficult month. That doesn't explain my absence, however. >And I was worried that maybe your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym! :) Oh, no no; what you see from me (patrick@proximate.org) is all you will see here on this list from me, or from any other list you may think of, for that matter. From my point of view, heteronymity makes for a poor political device but a good literary device. The overlap between politics and literature is what makes it rich and more complicated than can be expressed in a simple oppostitional diagram of literary vs. politics. >Something seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't seem to correspond to 65, Nothing's muddled with my numbers. Maybe I should explain what they mean. 7.5 is a percentage. 7.5% of posts from November 1998 were promotional. 67% of posts in November 1998 were part of discussion threads. 65% of posts from November 2001 were promotional, while only 29% of posts in November 2001 were part of threads. Promotional email in November 1998 made up only 7.5% of email volume; last month it was fully 65% of list activity. During the same period, discussion dropped from 67% of the posts to 29%. Hope that helps. I chose random samples (large) for measuring the percent of prmotional e-mails. Finding out what e-mails were promotional required that I read each post. You can imagine that reading (and clicking on) 1300+ e-mails, one at a time, would be way too tedious. Besides, from a statistical point of view, it would likely be a waste of time. Every other value measured used the entirety of data available. >numerically, and you might've done better to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), Uh, I see what you mean. Actually, 149 would have been fine on both (actually 35 would have been more than sufficient for both), but the added accuracy of the sample of the larger was something I wasn't going to throw away or recount. my arm hurt enough already! and it provides no significant deviation problems. The differences in the numbers in discussion and promotions are an order of magnitude! If I carefully mapped out chi-squared stuff it would not have made a difference. I wouldn't submit these results to a scientific journal (as someone might get a little anal retentive and not see the forest from the trees) but they are strong enough to make these general statements. >neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know," and charming. Are you going to say that numbers are simply no good, or part of some antiquated way of thinking? Some say facts are living turned inside out. Sure sure, I've heard it before, but it's a cop-out. "Charming?" Like the way a carriage-house is "charming"? The way a child ties his shoes for the first time? I'd rather not be snide! Let's instead be open and forthcoming! Or am I misconstruing your use of "charming"? How wuould you take it if I called your analysis "charming"? >and I was more interested in plotting ~who~ responds to ~whose~ posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power and follow-the-leader. I fnd this interesting, and it is perhaps an importantly related issue. There are certainly issues of power at stake. (See my coming response to David Baratier.) What say you on this? >I've wondered if Christopher W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. . . . I do strongly agree that it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow. Yeah, this seems to be a good idea to me. This seems to be a moderation function, one that could be self-moderated. I've been on plenty of lists where are are really two lists, one for announcements, and the other for dis cussion. It seems to work. Now, of course, the line between promotion and discussion is certainly not black and white, but most of the time it's pretty blatant. >There's something terribly ~American~ in this anti-social Buy This/Go There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc, for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't seem as thoroughly ~permeated by mercantilism~ as Americans. Haven't enough Americans been singled out (and murdered) for their mercantilism? My problem isn't nationalistic or economic--mine is with the function of the list itself. I see what you mean, that perhaps people of other flags are not so tacky. Perhaps, but I am always way of the prejudices of supposed "taste" from those of the Queen's Domain and from that bastion of history (ahem)--Europe. I see the British as no better authority on taste, despite the contrary indications. "Candle in the Wind?" Ugh. Vomit. Tacky people come from every nation. And every nation has years and years of history. I believe Europeans did a good job of rather systematically erasing the histories of North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East, perhaps so that they would be better-positioned on the "we were first" scale. (I mean this not as a belligerent point but as a humorous one, one that should have my friends on the other side of either pond nodding "yes, yes.") I mean, yes, we Americans are tacky, but so too is everyone else. It cannot be avoided! erasing other cultures for the sake of manufacturing an illusion of one's own cultural primacy does not reduce the level of tackiness. It seems to have an effect to the contrary. Besides, one of my favorite places on earth is Canal Street--it's SO tacky! >But it isn't only the alienation that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it, too): it's the lack of ~creativity,~ or imagination, or even--- guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their "Satisfy Me" commands. Ohm yes yes I do agree. I dislike it, though, not because it's tacky but because it is a gesture of authority. >What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry, if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy? Oh I agree with what you imply here, but I think I've heard theories about proximity from others. From a literary perspective I find obsessive Nominalism exclusionary, alienating, and boring. > http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm with no self-interest in Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to be among the two or three most remarkable. I loved this. yeah it's kinda promotional, but at the same time you were saying, I LOVED THIS. This is a gray area thing. But you're not making any bucks off this, are ya? Are you promoting merchandise or free ideas? I'd say the latter. >Already here, it shows, I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List ~advertisements,~ whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest ~Fence~ takes uniquely unprecedented and ~admirable~ candor in presenting their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations, Rebecca/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly tiring but envigorating ~Manderley~ road show. The charts should be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan] of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed"). Maybe that's because I see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc., and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative and ascii ads are, on-List. More on this? >The "BICKERING" and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion Let me explain: I DO tolerate arguments (discussions with difference of opinion) because they are a mark of emotional investment. Detatchment is so boring, and seems so fake, and it is a gesture signifying nothing but some sort of god-like stature. On a list I created, a member is allowed to say what he or she wants. If a person gets really ad hominem, the post will of course through, but the person's account is temporarily removed from list activity for a few days, just so as that person can go and simmer down. Fighting in the form of name-calling, threats, etc., is intolerable. Debate, especially lively debate where people do seem vested in their positions, is a pretty common feature of human discussion and IS ESSENTIAL TO THE FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS. I don't like people calling other people names, but I don't see why people have to FREAK OUT (either by fighting or by insults or condescentions or other provocations) when a difference of opinion is voiced. that I see as a mark of a closed community, a dying community, a community that can be revitalized through an awareness of the failures that closed-mindedness breeds. Nevertheless, I wasn't born yesterday, so I know the risk of freedom is that someone will be offended. I think the risk is worth it. Let David Duke come to my town to speak. And I should be allowed to tell him and his attendees that these ideas of him are bad, unproductive, ignorant, etc. >Poets are sensitive plants, and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. But what about Hugh MacDiarmid's rule - one has to be thin-skinned to be a writer and thick-skinned to deal with the consequences? Doesn't that carry over here? I agree with you. >On-List participation sometimes parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys ~grad student~ status together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track appointments. Well, that's sad, isn't it? Should poets act like slaves? Isn't that dangerous to poetry? Once upon a time poets could either deal with being poor or keep their day jobs. Now it's about tenure? I'm reluctant to scapegoat academia for this, as people are always more than their professions. Patrick ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 17:29:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rick Snyder Subject: Dactyl Book Fair & Reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed If you're in the New York area, please mark your calendars for The Second Annual SMALL-PRESS BOOK FAIR at THE DACTYL FOUNDATION December 14-21 64 Grand St. (between W. Broadway & Wooster in SoHo) Featuring chapbooks and limited editions from a variety of publishers, including Burning Deck, Pressed Wafer, Spectacular, Instress, Shark, Harry Tankoos, 811 Books, Cello Entry and many others. The Book Fair will kick off with a READING and PARTY at 7 pm on Friday, Dec. 14, featuring Brandon Downing Rob Fitterman Adeena Karasick Free wine. Plenty of hard-to-find works will be on display and available for purchase. The book fair will run for one week only. Gallery hours: 1-6pm. (Closed on Sundays and Mondays). If you have any questions about the fair or reading and party, please backchannel. Thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 18:40:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII it is time to face armageddon prepare for your death there is not enough time but there is no time for the will or contract there is no one to leave to there is no memory nothing is of account and nothing will be accounted for there is no emptiness in massive death the world will return to substance fires continue to burn beneath the world trade center we do not recognize ourselves in ash yah yah our skin already begins to fall our breath is shorter all we have left to do is recognize this fundamental truth we are close to extinction prepare for this make peace resign _ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 20:19:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fargas Laura Subject: Re: Pursuant to my comments on James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" >> -----Original Message----- From: richard.tylr [mailto:richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ] I "butted in" to something Millie was saying about Merrill and his poem "Cahanging Light At Sandhover" which I also found to long and (for me) too obscure. But here is one of a series of poems I wrote some time ago, apropos of nothing. I started writing a fictitious "converation" (maybe I was thinking a bit of Berryman) between a cockroach and the editor of the New York Times (which is a bit bizarre because I hardly ever read that mag these days and have only been to Manhatten briefly: in fact it was my only visit to anywhere outside NZ apart from Fiji) >> Can you have heard somewhere of 'Archy & Mehitabel' ? Series of books by poet and newspaper columnist (for the New York Sun) Don Marquis purporting to be the conversations of Archy, a great poet who was reincarnated as a cockroach. Archy left notes and observations which Marquis would find on his typewriter, which Archy used by jumping from key to key (no uppercase, of course, since he couldn't use the shift key). They're sweet books. LF ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 22:07:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII i'm getting overwhelmed by email and too much to do; there's always several hundred waiting in my inbox; there aren't any viruses anywhere; on the lists i try and reply to every badtrans _x@y email; taking off the _; letting people know their machines are infected :: there's another kind of infection here; it's my fault; in spite of the process i'm working on it :: :: :: ...:i'm guilty of this; honestly in spite of this piece, adjacent or contiguous, in spite of the rearrangement, i'm sorry :: this isn't the way to participate in a list or co-moderate or begin or end collaborations :: inside of me it feels like a war's on :: :: :::i realize i haven't been nice lately; i should apologize for this - i've been jumping all over things - i've also been sick & exhausted but that's tired news, whatever and no excuse - i jump far too fast for that matter, taking offense where none is intended, screwing up, writing too long too many posts in argumentative position that should have been better thought out, psychologically or otherwise :: ::::badtrans d _ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 21:30:46 -0500 Reply-To: Bob Grumman Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Grumman Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > The San Francisco State University Poetry Center Prize has had many fine > and varied > recipients over the years. It is no way a "name brand" contest. > Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one > is forced to enter the contest either. > > As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. Then why don't the people running it (as I support my Runaway Spoon Press)? Why make the losers of the contest support it? --Bob G. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 04:20:29 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: Pursuant to my comments on James Merrill Cockroaches Barney (who?) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Fargas and Listies. Actually I sell books and have (or think I have) a copy of that on my "poetry corner" of my stall ( every Saturday, K'Road, Auckland, New Zealand, 9.30 am to about 3.30 pm: crazy place with tranys, gays of various denominations, "straights", mutterers, taxi drivers who talk Hindu or Arabic or even Italian, young earnest Germans, beautiful Russian< SWedish German,French< Indian , Chinese and every nationality including Kiwi > girls, fat people, thin people, young, old, winos, rich people, poor people,arrogant people, Maoris, humble people, neither nor people, strange autos, eccentric booksellers, a South African lady who was in the Israeli Army, Moslems (though they are less in evidence with their long robes etc while the mad war is on) glue sniffers...poets, artists, clothing sellers, "ordinary woking stiffs", the odd (free to watch) fight or some young woman half dead from "ecstasy", cops racing up and down and ambulances and fire trucks, Bob Orr me mate who's the (well one of the) "Poet Laureat"('s) of Auckland, Witi Ihimaera a major (gay) Maori poet writer in New Zealand who refused to sign his early book for me and who's interested in film ooks and I think he's quite a shy individual, the young bloke obsessed with old Sci Fi paper backs such as Assimov aand A E van Vogt etc, the "joke man who never buys any of my joke books because they're not "his style " and who talks Japanese to every possible japanesey girl he sees and likes boxing and we agree that Mohummad Ali was The Greatest, Turkish kebab places, a big "dairy" where you can get a pie for about a dollar, dogs, cats, babies, pet tarantulas (joke) (actually there used to be dead ones for sale but they've banned even dead ones now!!), an artist to whom I hired a big book on animals so he could draw monkeys, Polynesian kids and Samoan or Tongan or Rarotongan people probably weaving and decorating "tapas", a Kashmiri who said the Indian soldiers were raping Kashmiri women, me mate who is at Uni studying history and war and sociology who got shot twice in the US by some ex-husband crazy military type (and willl tell you all the fascinating details of what was probably the most exciting event in his whole life and hence somehow he believes war is neccessary but his logic evades me but he's a good bloke dont worry),clothing sellers, shoe sellers, bric a brac,sunglasses, leather gear, plants,sex shops, coffee bars, restaraunts, an art gallery.....) AND in amongst all that I have in my 1000 books or so I have often had the book you refer to which reminded me that about the cockroach altho I've never read it to my eternal shame. But thanks. Cheers, Richard. PS. I bet that don Marquis earnt more in a minute writing about HIS cockroach than I would in 100 years with mine....I always think of Barney (BLANK) about the police station in NY and the little jaspanese cop who had pet cockroaches!!!! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fargas Laura" To: Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 2:19 PM Subject: Re: Pursuant to my comments on James Merrill > >> -----Original Message----- > From: richard.tylr [mailto:richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ] > > I "butted in" to something Millie was saying about Merrill and his poem > "Cahanging Light At Sandhover" which I also found to long and (for me) too > obscure. But here is one of a series of poems I wrote some time ago, apropos > of nothing. I started writing a fictitious "converation" (maybe I was > thinking a bit of Berryman) between a cockroach and the editor of the New > York Times (which is a bit bizarre because I hardly ever read that mag these > days and have only been to Manhatten briefly: in fact it was my only visit > to anywhere outside NZ apart from Fiji) >> > > > Can you have heard somewhere of 'Archy & Mehitabel' ? Series of books by > poet and newspaper columnist (for the New York Sun) Don Marquis purporting > to be the conversations of Archy, a great poet who was reincarnated as a > cockroach. Archy left notes and observations which Marquis would find on > his typewriter, which Archy used by jumping from key to key (no uppercase, > of course, since he couldn't use the shift key). They're sweet books. > > LF > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 09:35:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Quasha Organization: Station Hill / Barrytown, Ltd. Subject: Spencer Holst obit in NY Times 12-5-01 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit December 5, 2001 Spencer Holst, 75, Writer and Teller of Fables, Dies By HARVEY SHAPIRO Spencer Holst, a writer of fables and a fixture of the downtown Manhattan avant-garde scene for 30 years, died on Nov. 23 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 75. He had been suffering from emphysema and apparently died of a stroke, said George Quasha, a co- owner of Station Hill/Barrytown, Mr. Holst's publisher. Mr. Holst gained his reputation partly from his own readings of his stories. He was a big-eyed man and read the magical tales with an air of constant wonderment, as if they had been dropped on his doorstep just that morning. They were short and often funny stories in which animals mixed with people. The poet Hugh Seidman, Mr. Holst's neighbor for 30 years in Westbeth, the housing complex for artists in the West Village, said, "Once you heard him perform his classic tales, like `The Frog' or `A Balkan Entertainment,' it was impossible to get his voice out of your head, impossible not to hear it each time you read one of his fables." His venues for readings included Westbeth, the former club Max's Kansas City, Judson Memorial Church and the Village Vanguard. His books of stories included "On Demons" (written with his wife, the painter Beate Wheeler), "The Language of Cats and Other Stories," "Prose for Dancing," "The Zebra Storyteller," "Brilliant Silence," and "Spencer Holst Stories," for which he received the Hilda and Richard Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1977. His stories are hard to classify. The poet John Hollander said: "These are routines — something like fictions, something like jokes — of a stand-up tragic. Transcriptions of a spoken voice, their cadences linger beyond laughter." In one of his characteristic stories, "The Frog," a frog becomes "addicted to morphine during experiments at the federal hospital at Lexington, Ky.," is eventually kissed by a beautiful teenager and, of course, becomes a prince ("a tall Italian-looking guy"). But the girl won't marry her prince because he is a drug addict; the narrator wins her. Some of his short stories are very short indeed. For example, "Mona Lisa Meets Buddha" reads in its entirety: "Up in heaven the curtains fluttered, the curtains fluttered, and the Mona Lisa entered at one end of a small hall, which was hung with many veils. Up in heaven the curtains fluttered, fluttered, fluttered, and the Buddha entered the hall at the other end. They smiled." He once said of himself, "In the geography of literature I have always felt my work to be equidistant between two writers, each born in Ohio — Hart Crane and James Thurber — but my wife says don't be silly, your stories are halfway between Hans Christian Andersen and Franz Kafka." Mr. Holst was born in 1926 in Detroit and grew up in Ohio, where his father was a sports columnist for The Toledo Blade and The Toledo Times. In 1957 he came to New York determined to be a writer. He married Ms. Wheeler, and in 1970 they became charter tenants of Westbeth. He lived there until his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Mary-Ella Holst, of Manhattan; a son, Sebastian, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and two grandchildren. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 23:57:29 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/5/01 9:09:34 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << None of this is to say that some very deserving people dont win prizes. The story of John Ashbery's "debut" into publishing is interesting: he says of it in an interview with John Tranter that he was lucky that Auden knew someone he knew and so on (it was a toss up between him and O'Hara both great poets)..... >> Absolutely right. Deserving people win prizes all the time. The way I heard the Ashbery Yale Younger Poets Series story is that both Ashbery and O'Hara were sacked before their manuscripts reached Auden. Once Auden decided that none of the finalists presented to him merited the award, someone informed him that Ashbery and O'Hara had entered but had been weeded out at a lower level. Auden then asked to see the manuscripts and ultimately chose Ashbery. How much of this is true I have no way of knowing. And I agree that both A & O are great poets. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 00:17:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] In-Reply-To: <20011205200150.3578.qmail@web11701.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I find the advertisements for readings to be very helpful. They list many events not on the NYC Poetry Calendar. This things on the calendar seem to be mostly open readings, many of the "slam" variety in which a poem has to pack a punch and keep the audience entertained/laughing/indignant at some societal injustice. You get absolutely nowhere reading (rather than performing) a Language poem there: Most language poems are interesting for the interactions between the lines or stanzas, where each piece of a poem is seen as a sort of independent entity which bounces off the other pieces of the poem and creates linkages between the ideas. But the individaul pieces of the language poem are not of the sort needed to keep people laughing; often they are everyday things, like in Silliman's alpahbet project or surreal-but-not-funny as in Leslie Scalapino's work or Clark Coolodge's (not sure if he counts as a language poet, though). Likewise, a formalist poem also gets no encouragement at these poetry slams-- formalist poems are too boring for such a setting, and they often depend on a lot of literary allusions and depend on the reader's knowledge of the history of poetry. This is a problem at slams. I recently got up and read a surreal poem about Agamemnon, and I felt it necessary to tell who A. was and how his bitchy wife Clytemnestra bumped him off when he got back from the war, because by then she had found another guy and didn't want her husband putting an end to her affair (you can see the tone I felt forced to adopt...) you can't depend on a slam audience knowing anything, except the work of the regulars at the slam... It is my opinion that slams generate a kind of poetry which is fun to listen to but which seems very shallow if you read the poems. I don't have anything against slam poetry. It's usually more "fun" to listen to the slam poems than to listen to poems at a nonslam venue's open readings. And often even very good poetry is too hard to appreciate when it is unfamiliar and you only hear it. To understand a poem, you have to remember all the previous lines in the poem, to see how the poem builds meaning or to catch refernces between the various sections. Moreover, people actually come to slam events, which makes you feel good about the state of poetry. But I have noticed that trying to please the slam people has been bad for my work. So I have stopped going to these events. Unfortunately, I also don't go often to the readings I see advertised here by poets whose work I admire. But I'd never even know about these readings without the list. Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Jullich Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 3:02 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] Dear Patrick, Thank you for your lovely, Bourdievian numbers. (Your on-List silence had been noticeable. I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. And I was worried that maybe your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym! :) I'm relieved to see you're putting your time to good use.) Something seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't seem to correspond to 65, numerically, and you might've done better to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), I think, especially with randomness, as comparison between samples of unequal size involve chi-factors or r or something . . . but otherwise, I find these numbers neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know," and charming. I felt tempted to do the same myself --- but upping nutritional supplements of Vitamin Shoppe 1500 MG Amino Complex to 10 tabs a day seems to have moderated my counting mania --- and I was more interested in plotting ~who~ responds to ~whose~ posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power and follow-the-leader. I also find the number of advertisements distressing. It's like being on one of those servers with pop-up ads that keep cluttering the screen. One waste of time there, for me, is that poetry-dvertisers do not as a rule mark their subject header with their location,--- so I waste clicks opening ads for interesting poets' readings that are then disappointingly unreachable in far-away States I can't attend (given the impounding of my private jet), not that I ever leave the house anyway. So, (#1) I think it wld. at least be thoughtful of advertisers to mark location in subject header, . . . although I can understand that reputation accumulates through the redundancy of name, and why anyone wld. be motivated just to infiltrate Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at every loophole, "fame"-building. I've wondered if Christopher W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. In print, ads are generally separated to the margins and not interspersed with "articles." --- Pedagogically, insofar as the List is State U. educational outreach, it's like mixing in Save Fifty Cents coupons with class notes. --- Electronically, segregation might be effort, though (develop a co-site/cache), . . . but maybe not all that much effort: even free servers like Yahoo provide instantaneous group resources that poetry-advertisers cld. be given a one-time "warning" to post to, for those interested to consult, and then otherwise summarily blocked/deleted (as exploitative, mercenary, whatever). I've even considered as public "penance" taking it upon myself to maintain an on-line Poetry Calendar such items could be re-directed to and plotted more helpfully, systematically, the way Sharon Matling (name?) single-handedly started the NYC Poetry Calendar as a 2-sided broadsheet that became a company. I do strongly agree that it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow. There's something terribly ~American~ in this anti-social Buy This/Go There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc, for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't seem as thoroughly ~permeated by mercantilism~ as Americans. I'm very easily manipulated by advertisements (which is why I don't watch television or go to the movies, and have trouble with newspapers and magazines), --- psychology finds that some types are objectively more "hypnotizable" by ads/promos! --- and it's distressing to find my relation to poetry being bent into docile consumerism: I spend, easily, between a hundred and two hundred a month on poetry, average, much of it via SPD or checks to on-List book/journal advertisers. That's okay but, once upon a time, my naive attachment to poetry was because an endlessly re-readable enigma masterpiece and nothing but paper and pen/typewriter was a ~refuge~ from consumerism. But it isn't only the alienation that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it, too): it's the lack of ~creativity,~ or imagination, or even--- guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their "Satisfy Me" commands. Utopian, I think it's holding back a potential new ~poetry~ of inventive free market gamesmanship, a "litvertizing," as it were, where poetry would grown into being ironically/ambiguously conjoined with the zeitgeist of advertisement-seduction. What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry, if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy? (How ~could~ Bill Berkson be advertised on-List this week if, in the golden age of genuine inspired "litvertizing," Frank O'Hara hadn't paved a reptutation for him by dint of including his name in O'Hara immortality?) Forgive me if it seems vain of me to use myself as an example, but it took much more than an hour to put together and post my shoddy little http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm , with no self-interest in Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to be among the two or three most remarkable. It was advertising, though, disinterested advertising, labor-intensive advertising. And I was lead to doing that, and to ordering Bok's book and to hearing him on the ~Cabinet~ CD as a result of Brian Kim Stefans posting a micro-review that brought out the nature of ~Eunoia~ in a way I'd previously missed, and as a result of Christopher W. Alexander bringing out points about glossolalia that mentioned ~Cabinet.~ Already here, it shows, I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List ~advertisements,~ whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest ~Fence~ takes uniquely unprecedented and ~admirable~ candor in presenting their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations, Rebecca/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly tiring but envigorating ~Manderley~ road show. The charts should be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan] of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed"). Maybe that's because I see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc., and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative and ascii ads are, on-List. [mar-/mar-]: I don't think we're marginalized; I think we're bad at marketing. But thanks for your own statistical avant-gardisme, --- the future is Neo-Pythagorean! --- which I read as a Herron poetic artefact in and of itself. Bar charts would've been nice (Silliman did Armantrout pie charts in ~A Wild Salience~). Jeffrey P.S. The "BICKERING" and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion also greatly contributes, I suspect, to the drop-off in discussion: you have a thicker hide for and propensity toward it than many. Poets are sensitive plants, and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. (But I'm debilitatingly conflict-avoidant {meek!}.) Professional academics tend to participate less seriously in on-List discussion, too. Perhaps they see it as "work," or their interlocutors as being unqualified; they're more "careful," though. On-List participation sometimes parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys ~grad student~ status together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track appointments. P.P.S. I rented ~Being John Malkovich~ the other night to see the Emily Dickinson puppet, and the puppeteer's employer, Lester Inc., reminded me of your coincidentally named marionette Lester. ======================================================= "One in the sun. Two in the sun. Three in the sun. One not in the sun. . . . Four benches used four benches separately." --- Gertrude Stein, ~Four Saints in Three Acts,~ 1927 ======================================================= --- Patrick Herron wrote: > Discussion Statistics, UBPoetics E-mail List > November 2001 vs. November 1998 > > > November 1998 > number of e-mails: 984 > number of threads*: 174 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 3.6 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 67 > percent of list posts that were advertisements, > announcements, job postings, > or responses to such postings: 7.5 (based on random > sample of 211 e-mails), > > > November 2001 > number of e-mails: 404 > number of threads*: 38 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 2.5 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 29 > number of advertisements, announcements, job > postings, or responses to such > postings: 65 (based on a random sample of 149 > e-mails) > > *-threads with more than one e-mail __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 00:01:16 -0500 Reply-To: patrick@proximate.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Maybe, Jeffrey, I'm just being ridiculous! Maybe I'm best served instead with a little wisdom. Things are as they are. Poetry is not in danger, and neither is the ability or willingness of poets to speak freely with one another. There are always open folks in every outfit, camp, and circle, left, right, ivory, corporate, homeless, landed. I must always continue to seek out such company. I can't just go running around asking everyone else to be like such-and-such. Silly silly emotional little me. Best, P -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Patrick Herron Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 5:25 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] >Your on-List silence had been noticeable. I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. I shattered my ankle and had reconstructive surgery. I do appreciate your sympathies. It's been a very difficult month. That doesn't explain my absence, however. >And I was worried that maybe your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym! :) Oh, no no; what you see from me (patrick@proximate.org) is all you will see here on this list from me, or from any other list you may think of, for that matter. From my point of view, heteronymity makes for a poor political device but a good literary device. The overlap between politics and literature is what makes it rich and more complicated than can be expressed in a simple oppostitional diagram of literary vs. politics. >Something seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't seem to correspond to 65, Nothing's muddled with my numbers. Maybe I should explain what they mean. 7.5 is a percentage. 7.5% of posts from November 1998 were promotional. 67% of posts in November 1998 were part of discussion threads. 65% of posts from November 2001 were promotional, while only 29% of posts in November 2001 were part of threads. Promotional email in November 1998 made up only 7.5% of email volume; last month it was fully 65% of list activity. During the same period, discussion dropped from 67% of the posts to 29%. Hope that helps. I chose random samples (large) for measuring the percent of prmotional e-mails. Finding out what e-mails were promotional required that I read each post. You can imagine that reading (and clicking on) 1300+ e-mails, one at a time, would be way too tedious. Besides, from a statistical point of view, it would likely be a waste of time. Every other value measured used the entirety of data available. >numerically, and you might've done better to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), Uh, I see what you mean. Actually, 149 would have been fine on both (actually 35 would have been more than sufficient for both), but the added accuracy of the sample of the larger was something I wasn't going to throw away or recount. my arm hurt enough already! and it provides no significant deviation problems. The differences in the numbers in discussion and promotions are an order of magnitude! If I carefully mapped out chi-squared stuff it would not have made a difference. I wouldn't submit these results to a scientific journal (as someone might get a little anal retentive and not see the forest from the trees) but they are strong enough to make these general statements. >neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know," and charming. Are you going to say that numbers are simply no good, or part of some antiquated way of thinking? Some say facts are living turned inside out. Sure sure, I've heard it before, but it's a cop-out. "Charming?" Like the way a carriage-house is "charming"? The way a child ties his shoes for the first time? I'd rather not be snide! Let's instead be open and forthcoming! Or am I misconstruing your use of "charming"? How wuould you take it if I called your analysis "charming"? >and I was more interested in plotting ~who~ responds to ~whose~ posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power and follow-the-leader. I fnd this interesting, and it is perhaps an importantly related issue. There are certainly issues of power at stake. (See my coming response to David Baratier.) What say you on this? >I've wondered if Christopher W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. . . . I do strongly agree that it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow. Yeah, this seems to be a good idea to me. This seems to be a moderation function, one that could be self-moderated. I've been on plenty of lists where are are really two lists, one for announcements, and the other for dis cussion. It seems to work. Now, of course, the line between promotion and discussion is certainly not black and white, but most of the time it's pretty blatant. >There's something terribly ~American~ in this anti-social Buy This/Go There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc, for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't seem as thoroughly ~permeated by mercantilism~ as Americans. Haven't enough Americans been singled out (and murdered) for their mercantilism? My problem isn't nationalistic or economic--mine is with the function of the list itself. I see what you mean, that perhaps people of other flags are not so tacky. Perhaps, but I am always way of the prejudices of supposed "taste" from those of the Queen's Domain and from that bastion of history (ahem)--Europe. I see the British as no better authority on taste, despite the contrary indications. "Candle in the Wind?" Ugh. Vomit. Tacky people come from every nation. And every nation has years and years of history. I believe Europeans did a good job of rather systematically erasing the histories of North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East, perhaps so that they would be better-positioned on the "we were first" scale. (I mean this not as a belligerent point but as a humorous one, one that should have my friends on the other side of either pond nodding "yes, yes.") I mean, yes, we Americans are tacky, but so too is everyone else. It cannot be avoided! erasing other cultures for the sake of manufacturing an illusion of one's own cultural primacy does not reduce the level of tackiness. It seems to have an effect to the contrary. Besides, one of my favorite places on earth is Canal Street--it's SO tacky! >But it isn't only the alienation that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it, too): it's the lack of ~creativity,~ or imagination, or even--- guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their "Satisfy Me" commands. Ohm yes yes I do agree. I dislike it, though, not because it's tacky but because it is a gesture of authority. >What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry, if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy? Oh I agree with what you imply here, but I think I've heard theories about proximity from others. From a literary perspective I find obsessive Nominalism exclusionary, alienating, and boring. > http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm with no self-interest in Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to be among the two or three most remarkable. I loved this. yeah it's kinda promotional, but at the same time you were saying, I LOVED THIS. This is a gray area thing. But you're not making any bucks off this, are ya? Are you promoting merchandise or free ideas? I'd say the latter. >Already here, it shows, I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List ~advertisements,~ whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest ~Fence~ takes uniquely unprecedented and ~admirable~ candor in presenting their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations, Rebecca/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly tiring but envigorating ~Manderley~ road show. The charts should be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan] of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed"). Maybe that's because I see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc., and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative and ascii ads are, on-List. More on this? >The "BICKERING" and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion Let me explain: I DO tolerate arguments (discussions with difference of opinion) because they are a mark of emotional investment. Detatchment is so boring, and seems so fake, and it is a gesture signifying nothing but some sort of god-like stature. On a list I created, a member is allowed to say what he or she wants. If a person gets really ad hominem, the post will of course through, but the person's account is temporarily removed from list activity for a few days, just so as that person can go and simmer down. Fighting in the form of name-calling, threats, etc., is intolerable. Debate, especially lively debate where people do seem vested in their positions, is a pretty common feature of human discussion and IS ESSENTIAL TO THE FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS. I don't like people calling other people names, but I don't see why people have to FREAK OUT (either by fighting or by insults or condescentions or other provocations) when a difference of opinion is voiced. that I see as a mark of a closed community, a dying community, a community that can be revitalized through an awareness of the failures that closed-mindedness breeds. Nevertheless, I wasn't born yesterday, so I know the risk of freedom is that someone will be offended. I think the risk is worth it. Let David Duke come to my town to speak. And I should be allowed to tell him and his attendees that these ideas of him are bad, unproductive, ignorant, etc. >Poets are sensitive plants, and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. But what about Hugh MacDiarmid's rule - one has to be thin-skinned to be a writer and thick-skinned to deal with the consequences? Doesn't that carry over here? I agree with you. >On-List participation sometimes parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys ~grad student~ status together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track appointments. Well, that's sad, isn't it? Should poets act like slaves? Isn't that dangerous to poetry? Once upon a time poets could either deal with being poor or keep their day jobs. Now it's about tenure? I'm reluctant to scapegoat academia for this, as people are always more than their professions. Patrick ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 07:25:00 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: vernon fraser MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable can't connect. please email if you've gotten a new email address. tom bell &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&cetera: Poetry at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/publicat.html Gallery - Metaphor/Metonym for Health at = http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm=20 Health articles at http://psychology.healingwell.com/ Reviews at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/reviews.htm ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 03:48:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damian Judge Rollison Subject: el wrongo MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII blahh bliiighaaah that's the aboidi jal;it in sinyoei for twice aoin in among that oiiang blam in bloughram l;afor can you sa it made be wrongo ja;g id a makwiid ,./al;aist ;aplae ;aowp aoi20.a/ols ia;o0 -wa 9'a k;a il;a/a0a9 ail;;,e finda toa ifnaers wherioei ado thae fingere as fall o ona the eaoikeeys where n ye ar waw earhbigng glaoves and;lgan dnot rea lly a apapying at tenaiotntiontaion isa othoi atit po soisbnle to idsui sguiessee a usele ss eixuieruceisse withihst hallwo o w exoipaerimatent ationa an ieo ; e ndoloess col;uamn oaf ao trppipe or ?siodeos oes is t relelaise ease so mtehtihiing laten jtal inta he lant guage laikge evne n as aitbablnal a as i cana maannea geja otto be tuen rn off hte he min di and oa-dlet is t gjoaorun loggor rheicalalyuy cnia n iao rturust hte he medueium aotoo pototroveide meaw witha osmetomehth intg is c oultd n ot t tprovid se m ylalaelselttf ain any eevnt ent the are aren ruels ae s to this game an d perhepasps if a pattenarns amemer gnes ofruor the e rea;daer i can el et its ago and a; gfiani;aylly brin g tint to a'lnend <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 17:15:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: M L Weber Subject: Sugar Mule - new issue online now Comments: cc: SASIALIT@LISTSERV.RICE.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Sugar Mule www.SugarMule.com has a new issue #9 containing the following authors and titles: Prose Shabnam Arora Afsah The Homecoming Susham Bedi Rupture Gregory Graalfs Border Crossings: Jordan 1994 Vanitha Sankaran Persephone Sunny Singh Twins in the Mirror: Mythmaking and the Past in India and Mexico Karl Young Graffiti International Poetry Andrea O'Reilly Herrera cantabrian pilgrimage Karen Lewis Buddha's Garden Geraldine McKenzie Herakles Jonathan Minton Analytical Lyric Sheila E. Murphy Nine Poems Clark Lunberry Nothing in My Head graphics by David Reisman Michael Rothenberg Four Buddhist Poems M. L. Weber Cloud, Mountain - Part II, 2 Reuven BenYuhmin Hamsah For issue 10, the theme is "on the road", deadline Feb. 15, 2002-- Submit ONLY via email or with an email file attachment (if by attachment be SURE to include YOUR NAME and email address within the attached file) in any version of an MS Word, ascii, html or .txt file yours, M. L. Weber,editor _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 02:46:59 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Cockroach Poem 26 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Cockroach Poem 26 =20 As all things sigh toward their nigh, The Cockroach, who was really a naughty=20 grubby little genius, rolled off his back and spoke insistently to Ed: "Editor - Word Man - you know ahat?" "What?" The Editor knew Cock from way back: "Shakespere's a bad poet: full of his own cliches and all that stuff about sans this sans that and=20 kingdoms for horses and food is the music of all thought: it's only clickketety click click click clack clack that matters these latter days in this vertical city of 8 million souls..." =20 The Editor turned laconically to the window and the deep truths of the ever busy and exhaustively yellow street leapt to his gaze. Yes, Roach had a point, after all: `a man is man and a woman is a woman', he mused: and if he was to run for Mayor he'd have to shake hands=20 with fuck knows how many plasmic trolls. The gulf was uncrossable - all that spittle. He turned back to Roach, passing a cigar. They smoked in silence. Ensuing. Roach was the first to unnumb the ice: "We haven'y got a cracker's squeak - you know what I did? - I walked Times Square all night - and no Joe took any notice - fuck me, and me me as big as a goddam skyscraper!!" The Editor nodded, and openned his hands: "You know Roach, our Love surpasses the greatest neon allegory." =20 Richard Taylor. 1995 =20 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 18 Jun 1904 23:32:46 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mary Burger Subject: LESLIE SCALAPINO and SEAN FINNEY, Oakland 12/09 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Catch the final Second Sundays reading of 2001: LESLIE SCALAPINO and SEAN FINNEY at The Stork Club 2330 Telegraph Ave between 23rd and 24th St. Sunday, Dec. 9, 7:00 pm, $2.00 By BART: get off at 19th St, walk one block west to Telegraph, then up about 5 blocks, just past 23rd. The Stork Club has a large and vivid sign. 21 AND OVER ONLY! (Sorry--The Stork cards everyone!) LESLIE SCALAPINO is the author of over 20 books of poetry, fiction, essays, inter-genre writing, and plays. Her most recent books include R-hu (Atelos Press) and Zither (Wesleyan, forthcoming 2001). She teaches at Bard College and the San Francisco Art Institute, and has also taught at Mills College, The Naropa Institute, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland. SEAN FINNEY holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University. His work has appeared in Oblek and Lingo. He lives in Oakland and works as a journalist. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Second Sundays Series continues in 2002!!!! Stay tuned for news of upcoming events. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 16:27:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: Brion Gysin Anthology Reading Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable ST. MARK'S POETRY PROJECT FRIDAY PRESENTS FRIDAY EVENING DECEMBER 7TH @ 10:30 PM - 12:30 AM To celebrate the publication of BACK IN NO TIME: THE BRION GYSIN READER (Wesleyan University Press) A group reading from the anthology, featuring: Ira Cohen Genesis P-Orridge Jos=E9 F=E9rez Kuri Marshall Reese Terry Winters Ellen Zweig Pierre Joris Jason Weiss (editor) Ondi McMaster Gerard Pas + others This will be an informative (as well as performative) celebratory presentation of the work of an artist of fine caliber. There will be a vide= o presentation (of Gysin), as well as a short listening session of some of this creative person's audio recordings. Brion Gysin collaborated with William Burroughs, and by his own right informed a generation (or two) of the possibilities of expression in the viz-art/lit combo as well as understood the quintessence of "being" that signifies the thinker in many societies as "artist." (For more information see this week's Village Voice.) Events at The Poetry Project Friday Night Performative/Reading Series programmed and hosted by Christopher Stackhouse Trains to F at 2nd Ave. walk north, 6 to Astor walk east, N or R to 8th St. walk east --=20 Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 22:17:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit If you had any idea how underfunded San Francisco State University is, there would be no question as to why the Poetry Center has to charge a reading fee. Yes, it is annoying (and perhaps prohibitive) that poets have to pay a reading fee, but it's amazing the work that the Poetry Center has done over the years on a shoestring. And the contest is in no way "brand name." Take a look at the past winners. -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Kathy Lou Schultz http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press http://www.duckpress.net > From: MAXINE CHERNOFF > Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group > Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 10:59:01 -0800 > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 > > The San Francisco State University Poetry Center Prize has had many fine > and varied > recipients over the years. It is no way a "name brand" contest. > Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one > is forced to enter the contest either. > > As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. > > Maxine Chernoff, > Prof of Creative Writing. > > On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 Austinwja@AOL.COM wrote: > >> In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: >> >> << This looks like a superior poetry contest to me. Too bad an institution >> >> like >> >> SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My boilerplate on this is that if >> >> you >> >> don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets or award prizes to them >> >> without charging them money to submit their work, you should go way. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> G. >> >>>> >> >> I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the prize since University >> administrations are unlikely to care. But I do share Bob's annoyance. What >> jumps out most is the list of former winners. Name recognition seems to be >> an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just noting -- but I wonder if >> this award is any different from so many others in terms of how winners are >> selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind submissions, "adjustments" are >> often made before the winner is announced. I also find unfortunate that some >> award competitions keep the judges' identities secret. Having this >> information up front might save a lot of people from wasting a reading fee. >> Of course, the secret is meant to guard against just this little thing. The >> Award depends on getting as many entries as possible. I'll be interested to >> see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, once again, a "Sharon Olds >> brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good luck to all who must take the >> plunge. Best, Bill >> >> WilliamJamesAustin.com >> KojaPress.com >> ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 11:23:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: ^ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - ^ you watch the monitors listing all the flights, they wink out one by one by one, a cellphone rings, someone says hello, oh soldier, what has come between us, oh soldier, what has come between us :: you ride escalator into sky, you see among the beams, a ceiling, airplanes, sky, and world, you see through everything, oh soldier, what has come between us, oh soldier, what has come between us ::: opening shots of airline terminal: you would have loved me softly here, now there are barrier, oh soldier, what has come between us, oh soldier, what has come between us you hear the cellphone ring you see the soldiers and the planes are silent you see the soldiers and the planes are silent _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:04:10 -0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Randolph Healy Subject: Panhandling Alert: poetry lovers who don't want to hear about new books please ignore MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Wild Honey Press is pleased to announce the publication of _Mnemosyne_ by Alison Croggon. 14x18 cm, 16 pages, 250 gsm "Natural" Strata card cover with colour illustration, hand sewn with green twist. The cover illustration is a detail from Jim Andrews' _Garbogawd_ (the original can be see at http://www.vispo.com). Anyone who knows Jim's work will know to expect a stunner. Alison Croggon is an Australian poet, born in 1962. Her books include the collection _The Blue Gate_and the novel _Navigatio_. She has written the libretto for the operas _The Burrow_ and _Gauguin_and is currently working on _The White Army. _ Her plays include _The Famine _ and _Samarkand._ She is a founding editor of _Masthead_ literary magazine. I know there have been complaints on the list re publishers' hype so I'll try to restrain myself. The text could be described as a sequence of meditations on birth. Grounded in experience, memory and intelligence I found it impossible to resist. I was a member of the Irish Home Birth Association for years, and, as it happened, delivered my fourth daughter Beatrice (light work indeed as mother, Louise, and baby do it all) and it spoke volumes to me. Apart from purely poetical considerations, I particularly responded to how _natural_ birth is in this poem. No theatrics, drum beating or eye-in-the-sky pseudo objectivity. It's $5 / STG3.50. (p&p free) You can order online at http://www.wildhoneypress.com/BOOKS/Mnemosyne.html or just visit to enjoy the cover and some extracts, including the following, appended below.: BTW if you're broke and would still like a copy, bc me and we'll organise something. best Randolph II no eye no fingerprint no nose no lips no voice unnamed unthought unknown un til the brain's soft galaxy unlids itself and sucks the tang of sea dividing into time cell by cell by cell ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 11:28:52 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: Job Opening MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Poetics List: Some of you may be interested in this job opening. The search is moving along somewhat slowly, so it is not too late to submit an application. Screening of applications and interviews are likely to take place AFTER MLA. Hank Lazer * The College of Arts and Sciences of The University of Alabama invites nominations and applications for the position of Chair in the Department of English. The Department comprises 34 tenure track faculty members, 16 temporary, full-time instructors, 5 staff positions, and 1 endowed visiting chair holder. It offers graduate degrees through programs in literature (MA and PhD), applied linguistics (PhD), TESOL (MA), rhetoric and composition (PhD), and creative writing (MFA). The Department serves 250 undergraduate majors and 400 minors. The department is the home of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies affiliated with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival; the bi-annual Symposium on Literature, Race, and Ethnicity; The Black Warrior Review; The Bankhead Endowment Visiting Writers Series; and the Coal Royalty Visiting Writers Endowment. Its faculty, active in its scholarship and creative projects and innovative in its teaching, includes two recent Guggenheim Fellows and nominees for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The position of Chair is a 12-month administrative position with a 5-year term to begin August 1, 2002. The preferred rank of the applicant is Professor, tenured, with an appropriate terminal degree. The applicant's work in a field of specialization, while left open, should be ongoing and demonstrate scholarly or artistic distinction. Previous administrative experience is required. Salary for the position will be competitive commensurate with the candidate's qualifications. The Search Committee will begin on December 1, 2001, to review completed applications in order to interview candidates at MLA. Consideration of applications will continue until a Chair is appointed. Applications should include a letter of candidacy, complete c.v., 3 letters of recommendation, and a recent offprint and be sent to: Michael Martone, Chair Chair Search Committee Department of English Box 870244 The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0244 The University of Alabama is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer and has a strong institutional commitment to diversity. Women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 12:05:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: POETRY PROJECT EVENTS Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit CALENDAR OF EVENTS WEEK OF DECEMBER 10 - DECEMBER 17 DECEMBER 10, MONDAY SUZANNE WISE and REBECCA WEE SUZANNE WISE is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive (Alice James Books, 2000). Her writing also appears in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000). "I love Suzanne Wise's poems because they're droll and cavalier, magnificent and terrified all at once. With all the invisible poise of Masculinity-which she doesn't care to possess-she manages to flip responsibility governing her poems so that what's secretly driving them feels like everyone's problem. And that seems like a grand success. As if a vast and almost patriotic distress signal were being sent out." -Eileen Myles REBECCA WEE's poems have been published in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Senora Review, The Mid-American Review, and others. She received her MFA in poetry in 1992 from George Mason University and worked as an editorial assistant to poet Carolyn Forche on her 1993 Norton anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Her first book, Uncertain Grace, published in May 2001 by Copper Canyon Press, won the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. She teaches creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 12, WEDNESDAY A 70TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR JEROME ROTHENBERG This promises to be a major gathering of the avant garde to celebrate one of its most prominent members. Jerome Rothenberg is a performer, translator, teacher, and editor of ground-breaking anthologies. With readings and performances by DAVID ANTIN, BURT TURETSKY, JUDITH MALINA AND HANNON REZNIKOV, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, CHARLIE MARROW AND STEVE CLAY, ELEANOR ANTIN, ED FRIEDMAN, STEN HANSON, ALISON KNOWLES AND CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, JACKSON MAC LOW AND ANNE TARDOS, JEROME ROTHENBERG, PIERRE JORIS AND NICOLE JORIS, A BAND and more! [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 14, FRIDAY City of Fiction With readings by VICTOR D. LAVALLE, JOHN KEENE, MAGGIE ESTEP and ALAN GOLDSHER VICTOR D. LAVALLE's debut book is a collection of stories titled Slapboxing With Jesus. JOHN KEENE is the author of Annotations from New Directions. MAGGIE ESTEP, MTV performance artist, is the author of Diary of an Emotional Idiot, and the darkly funny collection of inter-connected stories, Soft Maniacs, from Simon & Schuster. ALAN GOLDSHER's works include Hard Bob Academy: The Sidemen of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his debut novel Jam. [10:30 pm] DECEMBER 17, MONDAY JOSHUA BECKMAN and LESLIE DAVIS JOSHUA BECKMAN has published two books of poetry Things are Happening (Copper Canyon /APR first book prize) and Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press). LESLIE DAVIS is the author of Lucky Pup, published by Skanky Possum Press. [8:00 pm] -- Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. Trains F, 6, N, R. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 20:04:48 -0800 Reply-To: cstroffo@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Stroffolino Subject: SPIN CYCLE MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I keep forgetting to do this: (the move, the bombing, the semester, etc....) SPIN CYCLE (SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 1989-1999) Chris Stroffolino 268 pp. SPUYTEN DUYVIL--$16.00 ISBN 1-881471-64-0 To Order Call 1-800-886-5304 or http://spuytenduyvil,net Features pieces on: Shakespeare Shapiro (David) Moxley Killian (Sean) Rehm Raworth Moriarty (Laura) Hunt (Erica) Ross (Joe) Ransom (Jane) Lansing Tate (James) Harryman Yau Greenley Godfrey Jackson (Lorri) Hospodar Coolidge Watten Byrd And other essays on poetics & culture, etc.... including the notorious lineage essay (cut from the U-Alabama book 11th hour...) This book is not to be confused with the one on the Clinton Administration or the recent book of fiction (I guess) by Sue Margolis.... "A unique and extremely valuable work of criticism. It is the first work I know to recognize the gulf between established contemporaries, about whom many of us write, and other, usually younger writers, who have much greater claims to be capturing what might count as 'contemporaneity.'...Stroffolino has the hearing to pick up these signals and the eloquence to celebrate the differences they make."---Charles Altieri "With pomp and punk, Stroffolino here unleashes his sensibility, acumen, and passionate appreciation onto the variegated lawn of (mostly) contemporary poetry. His code-mingling, quasi-Boolean rhetoric (whose rhythmic sweep I experience as a WILD RIDE c.f. Mercutio's "soliloquies") generates unexpected propositions that newly illuminate the objects of his maverick attention."--(Nada) Gordon > Bridge Street Books > E-mail your order to with your address & you will be > billed; or via credit card -- call 202 965 5200 -- or e-mail them with your > address, order, card #, & expiration date & receipt will be sent with book > > _________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 16:39:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Ram=20Devineni?= Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Poetry=20on=20the=20Peaks=20Update?= In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello Everyone: We are happy to announce some wonderful developments. We have finished th= e poetry curriculum which lists the poems that will be read on the mountain= s around the world. The poems selected for the Poetry on the Peaks curricul= um focus on humanity and its relationship with nature and with each other. It features a wide range of poets like So Chong Ju, Gary Snyder, William= Blake, Oodgeroo Noonucal, Alfonsina Storni, Leopold S=E9dhar Senghor and = many others. We have mixed the selection so that Wislawa Szymborska's poem wil= l be read on Mt. Bonnell and Mevlana Jeladuddin Rumi's poem will be read on= Mt. Kilimanjaro and so on. Our objectives is to create cross-cultural di= alogue and understanding, so the poems were selected so that they would be read on a mountain not associated with the poet's nationality. A free ebook anthology edited by William Pitt Root will be available in the summer of 2002 listing all of the poems read on the mountains. Also, Michael Willoughby with Magnetcom and Mark L. Hall with Ego-East wi= ll be helping us with publicity. Lastly, we will be setting up special readings around the world to focus on Poetry on the Peaks and increase awareness for each individual reading= . For example, in July 2002 there will be a reading at Hugo House in Seatt= le for the Mt. Rainer climb; a reading at Ebenezer Baptist Church (spiritual= home of Martin Luther King Jr.) in Atlanta and a reading at the New Schoo= l, New York City for World Poetry Day. A press conference is being schedule= d at the National Arts Cub for the end of February, 2002. If you have any questions, please contact me at 212-723-4125 or by email at devineni@dialoguepoetry.org More information on Poetry on the Peaks can be found at http://www.dialog= uepoetry.org/mountain.htm and the curriculum is available as a PDF file at http://www.dialoguepoetr= y.org/mountain_ebook.htm Cheers, Ram Devineni Rattapallax Press 532 La Guardia Place Suite 353 New York, NY 10012 USA http://www.rattapallax.com http://www.dialoguepoetry.org ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 16:56:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: Walmart poetry Comments: To: "WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I have been thinking of your comments on the academic poetry - I am not too sure poetry exists outside of the academy. Most of the people who run the programs around here have some air of authority as they have been trained in it. Even a high school teacher who wrote dreadful muck held her head up high as being in the know. Society doesn't really need poems. I went to the walmart yesterday and every person there wouldn't look at a poem as anything other than something to worship and not enjoy. The Golden book of 100 poem treasuries were on sale in the bargain book bin. This was a crowd of america, the ones who Pound fled to Europe to escape. These people are who we write for, are they not? This is all of us, only they look natural in checkered flannel and grizzly beards. Everyone who I ran across was very nice and in a holiday cheer. The people who are moved by poems seem to drift towards the university as it is by law that they teach literature. Not like basket weaving which is a free elective. The state requires us to be exposed to poems So the ranking within schools programs which the stage for the celebrity of Bernstein, Perloff and Sillyman. Not a bad place to be as they have done exceptional work which can be recognized. But this only fuels the flames as each person knows what a poem is and that gap of common understanding is a big problem. We expect current poets to know something about the art and the theory as to why it works. This deals with your light hearted holing up on the writing list - its free flowing because we each see the poem as something different and find our own ends with it. We all have read "our" poet heroes and come from it acting in a know. Most are in a university program so to find some way to keep the flame of desire burning while doing something that has social value. Unfortunately its not pop music. No one expects Brittany Spears to know why her rhythms works on to the audience it does or the social implications of her body movements. Etc. But since it is alive and in the public eye most accept it or not and can explain why - which is done at walmart. what would happen to poetry if the universities gave it up? I am hopeful that the people would stand up and organize; but they would more likely contribute to a museum to tame it or maybe a even a black coffin. Best, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) ----- Original Message ----- From: "George Biuss" To: Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2001 8:43 PM Subject: Walmart Poetry ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 00:38:51 -0500 Reply-To: bstefans@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: this is just to say: T H E T R U T H I N T E R V I E W is live... Comments: To: bstefans@arras.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ATTENZIONE! EXPERIMENTAL MOOD-ALTERING INTERVIEW REACHES MARKET NEW YORK, Dec. 5 2001. (AP) The "Two Kims" announce their latest invention: a low-orbiting digital way-station for disconsolate malchicks and ruby-toed cowgirls. Begun as a small project for the How2 website (www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2/), a journal of feminist poetics, the interview took on a life of its own as the twin forces of LOVE (amore) and INSURRECTION (pensare) mingled to elaborate an entire alternative metaphysics for viewing the web. Part portal, part interview, part settings of Rosenfield's sequence "Verbali," part curry video-kabob but 100% pure poem, "The Truth Interview" will make you never read "cyberpoetry" (and certainly not "hypertext" poetry) the same way again. It will convince you that wisdom comes in small, well-aerated aromatic packages with peel-off labels. The poet/therapist Kim Rosenfield and the poet/web artist Brian Kim Stefans are now live. And so is "The Truth Interview." --- This project can be seen at several places: www.arras.net/truth_interview/ www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2/current/workbook/index.html www.ubu.com (forthcoming) --- On Kim Rosenfield's Poetry Kim Rosenfield's long-awaited Good Morning Midnight is a rollicking expose of twenty-first century custom, superstition, procedure . . . in what's known as fashion or culture or any such "industry." This monument is an archeologically detailed excavation of logic's museum-quality levity. Rosenfield's swift new evidence of the desperateness of all belief systems except the most glossy, manages to mock sociology and ritual in the same well-placed, tender, haute couture blow. You'll find timeless scientific proverbs, sing-a-long singsongs, practical lists, style pointers, drastically accurate translations, perfect solutions of all necessarily fleeting sorts, 3-D reveries, and more, in living, better than Walt Disney Sensurround. An olfactory must for all time capsules and poetry shoppers alike. --Stacy Doris, Paramour On The Truth Interview This is not a site... The "Truth Interview" is a metasite, but not one more site about websites. It's something in between the voice and the text, the author and the reader, poetry and advertisement. It talks about creation and it is made of creation. The symbiosis between Kim Rosenfeld, the poet and the website "voice", and Brian Stefans, the e-poet, who played here the role of Editor and Interface Designer, is amazing. Some poems seem to have been conceived for "the truth inteview" structure and the interface, seem to be have been designed "on demand". We will never know... But who cares? This is not a site. It's e-reading. So, pipe and play. -- Giselle Beiguelman, "The Book after the Book" (www.desvirtual.com) I can't think of two people I'd rather go through the looking-glass with than Brian Kim Stefans and Kim Rosenfield. Long on content and even longer on style, 'The Truth' is a vast improvement over most interviews because both parties know from the outset that it's not so much about where you're going as how good you look along the way. -- Darren Wershler-Henry, the tapeworm foundry and alienated.net --- KIM ROSENFIELD is the author of three previous collections of poetry: A Self-Guided Walk, Rx and Cool Clean Chemistry, and Some of Us--which was published when she was 15. She lives in New York City with poet Robert Fitterman and their three-year old daughter, Coco. She works as a psychotherapist in private practice and possesses an uncanny sense of smell which may or may not affect future career paths. BRIAN KIM STEFANS is the author of three books of poetry, Free Space Comix, Gulf, and Angry Penguins. Several of his web poems, such as "The Dreamlife of Letters," appear at www.ubu.com. He has also collaborated with poets Christian Bok and Dan Farrell on web poems, and edits the site of new media poetry and poetics, www.arras.net. He possesses no sense of smell whatsoever. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 05:12:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maillist_admin@SFU.CA Subject: pulley-press to be expired Comments: To: pulley-press@sfu.ca The maillist pulley-press has been flagged for deletion, because the owner account is no longer active. The list will be deactivated in 1 week, and deleted the following week. Please contact the postmaster if you wish to take over ownership of the list in order to continue its operation. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 17:28:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Spiral Bridge Subject: The Final Naked Poetry Reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 2001 is wrapping itself up and we, like time keep moving right along... Naked. With this in mind we are hosting the final installment of 'The Naked Readings' Sunday, December 16th from 6pm on at 'The Space,' 18 Broad Street in Bloomfield, NJ. Please reference the E-vite for directions and further details. You don't want to miss this One! http://www.SpiralBridge.org ----------------------------------------------- For reference, your link to this Invite is: http://www.evite.com/r?iid=YPDFYCDBZZIXYZZZKXPO 48484848 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 23:16:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dodie Bellamy Subject: Prose Reading at City Lights December 18 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" To celebrate the publication of Cunt-Ups, Dodie Bellamy will read with her prose workshop at City Lights Books (261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco) on Tuesday, December 18 at 7:00. Other readers are Steve Slattery, Tara Jepsen, Thea Hillman, Alvin Orloff, Traci Vogel, Mark Ewert , Sarah Fran Wisby, and Kevin Killian. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 15:27:01 -0600 Reply-To: Kevin.Gallagher@windriver.binc.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Progressive Subject: A Just Cause, Not a Just War, by Howard Zinn A visitor to our website (see "reply to" above) sent you this e-mail in order to share the following item from The Progressive magazine http://www.progressive.org The Progressive | December 2001 Issue A Just Cause, Not a Just War Howard Zinn I believe two moral judgments can be made about the present "war": The September 11 attack constitutes a crime against humanity and cannot be justified, and the bombing of Afghanistan is also a crime, which cannot be justified. And yet, voices across the political spectrum, including many on the left, have described this as a "just war." One longtime advocate of peace, Richard Falk, wrote in The Nation that this is "the first truly just war since World War II." Robert Kuttner, another consistent supporter of social justice, declared in The American Prospect that only people on the extreme left could believe this is not a just war. I have puzzled over this. How can a war be truly just when it involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape the bombs, when it may not find those who planned the September 11 attacks, and when it will multiply the ranks of people who are angry enough at this country to become terrorists themselves? This war amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and it will produce the exact opposite of what is wanted: It will not end terrorism; it will proliferate terrorism. I believe that the progressive supporters of the war have confused a "just cause" with a "just war." There are unjust causes, such as the attempt of the United States to establish its power in Vietnam, or to dominate Panama or Grenada, or to subvert the government of Nicaragua. And a cause may be just--getting North Korea to withdraw from South Korea, getting Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, or ending terrorism--but it does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the inevitable mayhem that follows, is just. The stories of the effects of our bombing are beginning to come through, in bits and pieces. Just eighteen days into the bombing, The New York Times reported: "American forces have mistakenly hit a residential area in Kabul." Twice, U.S. planes bombed Red Cross warehouses, and a Red Cross spokesman said: "Now we've got 55,000 people without that food or blankets, with nothing at all." An Afghan elementary school-teacher told a Washington Post reporter at the Pakistan border: "When the bombs fell near my house and my babies started crying, I had no choice but to run away." A New York Times report: "The Pentagon acknowledged that a Navy F/A-18 dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on Sunday near what officials called a center for the elderly. . . . The United Nations said the building was a military hospital. . . . Several hours later, a Navy F-14 dropped two 500-pound bombs on a residential area northwest of Kabul." A U.N. official told a New York Times reporter that an American bombing raid on the city of Herat had used cluster bombs, which spread deadly "bomblets" over an area of twenty football fields. This, the Times reporter wrote,"was the latest of a growing number of accounts of American bombs going astray and causing civilian casualties." An A.P. reporter was brought to Karam, a small mountain village hit by American bombs, and saw houses reduced to rubble. "In the hospital in Jalalabad, twenty-five miles to the east, doctors treated what they said were twenty-three victims of bombing at Karam, one a child barely two months old, swathed in bloody bandages," according to the account. "Another child, neighbors said, was in the hospital because the bombing raid had killed her entire family. At least eighteen fresh graves were scattered around the village." The city of Kandahar, attacked for seventeen straight days, was reported to be a ghost town, with more than half of its 500,000 people fleeing the bombs. The city's electrical grid had been knocked out. The city was deprived of water, since the electrical pumps could not operate. A sixty-year-old farmer told the A.P. reporter, "We left in fear of our lives. Every day and every night, we hear the roaring and roaring of planes, we see the smoke, the fire. . . . I curse them both--the Taliban and America." A New York Times report from Pakistan two weeks into the bombing campaign told of wounded civilians coming across the border. "Every half-hour or so throughout the day, someone was brought across on a stretcher. . . . Most were bomb victims, missing limbs or punctured by shrapnel. . . . A young boy, his head and one leg wrapped in bloodied bandages, clung to his father's back as the old man trudged back to Afghanistan." That was only a few weeks into the bombing, and the result had already been to frighten hundreds of thousands of Afghans into abandoning their homes and taking to the dangerous, mine-strewn roads. The "war against terrorism" has become a war against innocent men, women, and children, who are in no way responsible for the terrorist attack on New York. And yet there are those who say this is a "just war." Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a good end. I can see an immediate objection to this equation: They (the terrorists) deliberately kill innocent people; we (the war makers) aim at "military targets," and civilians are killed by accident, as "collateral damage." Is it really an accident when civilians die under our bombs? Even if you grant that the intention is not to kill civilians, if they nevertheless become victims, again and again and again, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in bombing, it may not be deliberate, but it is not an accident, and the bombers cannot be considered innocent. They are committing murder as surely as are the terrorists. The absurdity of claiming innocence in such cases becomes apparent when the death tolls from "collateral damage" reach figures far greater than the lists of the dead from even the most awful act of terrorism. Thus, the "collateral damage" in the Gulf War caused more people to die--hundreds of thousands, if you include the victims of our sanctions policy--than the very deliberate terrorist attack of September 11. The total of those who have died in Israel from Palestinian terrorist bombs is somewhere under 1,000. The number of dead from "collateral damage" in the bombing of Beirut during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was roughly 6,000. We must not match the death lists--it is an ugly exercise--as if one atrocity is worse than another. No killing of innocents, whether deliberate or "accidental," can be justified. My argument is that when children die at the hands of terrorists, or--whether intended or not--as a result of bombs dropped from airplanes, terrorism and war become equally unpardonable. Let's talk about "military targets." The phrase is so loose that President Truman, after the nuclear bomb obliterated the population of Hiroshima, could say: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians." What we are hearing now from our political leaders is, "We are targeting military objectives. We are trying to avoid killing civilians. But that will happen, and we regret it." Shall the American people take moral comfort from the thought that we are bombing only "military targets"? The reality is that the term "military" covers all sorts of targets that include civilian populations. When our bombers deliberately destroy, as they did in the war against Iraq, the electrical infrastructure, thus making water purification and sewage treatment plants inoperable and leading to epidemic waterborne diseases, the deaths of children and other civilians cannot be called accidental. Recall that in the midst of the Gulf War, the U.S. military bombed an air raid shelter, killing 400 to 500 men, women, and children who were huddled to escape bombs. The claim was that it was a military target, housing a communications center, but reporters going through the ruins immediately afterward said there was no sign of anything like that. I suggest that the history of bombing--and no one has bombed more than this nation--is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like "accident," "military targets," and "collateral damage." Indeed, in both World War II and in Vietnam, the historical record shows that there was a deliberate decision to target civilians in order to destroy the morale of the enemy--hence the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, the B-52s over Hanoi, the jet bombers over peaceful villages in the Vietnam countryside. When some argue that we can engage in "limited military action" without "an excessive use of force," they are ignoring the history of bombing. The momentum of war rides roughshod over limits. The moral equation in Afghanistan is clear. Civilian casualties are certain. The outcome is uncertain. No one knows what this bombing will accomplish--whether it will lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden (perhaps), or the end of the Taliban (possibly), or a democratic Afghanistan (very unlikely), or an end to terrorism (almost certainly not). And meanwhile, we are terrorizing the population (not the terrorists, they are not easily terrorized). Hundreds of thousands are packing their belongings and their children onto carts and leaving their homes to make dangerous journeys to places they think might be more safe. Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence called a "war against terrorism." We might examine the idea of pacifism in the light of what is going on right now. I have never used the word "pacifist" to describe myself, because it suggests something absolute, and I am suspicious of absolutes. I want to leave openings for unpredictable possibilities. There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified. In war, however, the proportion of means to ends is very, very different. War, by its nature, is unfocused, indiscriminate, and especially in our time when the technology is so murderous, inevitably involves the deaths of large numbers of people and the suffering of even more. Even in the "small wars" (Iran vs. Iraq, the Nigerian war, the Afghan war), a million people die. Even in a "tiny" war like the one we waged in Panama, a thousand or more die. Scott Simon of NPR wrote a commentary in The Wall Street Journal on October 11 entitled, "Even Pacifists Must Support This War." He tried to use the pacifist acceptance of self-defense, which approves a focused resistance to an immediate attacker, to justify this war, which he claims is "self-defense." But the term "self-defense" does not apply when you drop bombs all over a country and kill lots of people other than your attacker. And it doesn't apply when there is no likelihood that it will achieve its desired end. Pacifism, which I define as a rejection of war, rests on a very powerful logic. In war, the means--indiscriminate killing--are immediate and certain; the ends, however desirable, are distant and uncertain. Pacifism does not mean "appeasement." That word is often hurled at those who condemn the present war on Afghanistan, and it is accompanied by references to Churchill, Chamberlain, Munich. World War II analogies are conveniently summoned forth when there is a need to justify a war, however irrelevant to a particular situation. At the suggestion that we withdraw from Vietnam, or not make war on Iraq, the word "appeasement" was bandied about. The glow of the "good war" has repeatedly been used to obscure the nature of all the bad wars we have fought since 1945. Let's examine that analogy. Czechoslovakia was handed to the voracious Hitler to "appease" him. Germany was an aggressive nation expanding its power, and to help it in its expansion was not wise. But today we do not face an expansionist power that demands to be appeased. We ourselves are the expansionist power--troops in Saudi Arabia, bombings of Iraq, military bases all over the world, naval vessels on every sea--and that, along with Israel's expansion into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has aroused anger. It was wrong to give up Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. It is not wrong to withdraw our military from the Middle East, or for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, because there is no right to be there. That is not appeasement. That is justice. Opposing the bombing of Afghanistan does not constitute "giving in to terrorism" or "appeasement." It asks that other means be found than war to solve the problems that confront us. King and Gandhi both believed in action--nonviolent direct action, which is more powerful and certainly more morally defensible than war. To reject war is not to "turn the other cheek," as pacifism has been caricatured. It is, in the present instance, to act in ways that do not imitate the terrorists. The United States could have treated the September 11 attack as a horrific criminal act that calls for apprehending the culprits, using every device of intelligence and investigation possible. It could have gone to the United Nations to enlist the aid of other countries in the pursuit and apprehension of the terrorists. There was also the avenue of negotiations. (And let's not hear: "What? Negotiate with those monsters?" The United States negotiated with--indeed, brought into power and kept in power--some of the most monstrous governments in the world.) Before Bush ordered in the bombers, the Taliban offered to put bin Laden on trial. This was ignored. After ten days of air attacks, when the Taliban called for a halt to the bombing and said they would be willing to talk about handing bin Laden to a third country for trial, the headline the next day in The New York Times read: "President Rejects Offer by Taliban for Negotiations," and Bush was quoted as saying: "When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations." That is the behavior of someone hellbent on war. There were similar rejections of negotiating possibilities at the start of the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the bombing of Yugoslavia. The result was an immense loss of life and incalculable human suffering. International police work and negotiations were--still are--alternatives to war. But let's not deceive ourselves; even if we succeeded in apprehending bin Laden or, as is unlikely, destroying the entire Al Qaeda network, that would not end the threat of terrorism, which has potential recruits far beyond Al Qaeda. To get at the roots of terrorism is complicated. Dropping bombs is simple. It is an old response to what everyone acknowledges is a very new situation. At the core of unspeakable and unjustifiable acts of terrorism are justified grievances felt by millions of people who would not themselves engage in terrorism but from whose ranks terrorists spring. Those grievances are of two kinds: the existence of profound misery-- hunger, illness--in much of the world, contrasted to the wealth and luxury of the West, especially the United States; and the presence of American military power everywhere in the world, propping up oppressive regimes and repeatedly intervening with force to maintain U.S. hegemony. This suggests actions that not only deal with the long-term problem of terrorism but are in themselves just. Instead of using two planes a day to drop food on Afghanistan and 100 planes to drop bombs (which have been making it difficult for the trucks of the international agencies to bring in food), use 102 planes to bring food. Take the money allocated for our huge military machine and use it to combat starvation and disease around the world. One-third of our military budget would annually provide clean water and sanitation facilities for the billion people in the world who have none. Withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, because their presence near the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina angers not just bin Laden (we need not care about angering him) but huge numbers of Arabs who are not terrorists. Stop the cruel sanctions on Iraq, which are killing more than a thousand children every week without doing anything to weaken Saddam Hussein's tyrannical hold over the country. Insist that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, something that many Israelis also think is right, and which will make Israel more secure than it is now. In short, let us pull back from being a military superpower, and become a humanitarian superpower. Let us be a more modest nation. We will then be more secure. The modest nations of the world don't face the threat of terrorism. Such a fundamental change in foreign policy is hardly to be expected. It would threaten too many interests: the power of political leaders, the ambitions of the military, the corporations that profit from the nation's enormous military commitments. Change will come, as at other times in our history, only when American citizens-- becoming better informed, having second thoughts after the first instinctive support for official policy--demand it. That change in citizen opinion, especially if it coincides with a pragmatic decision by the government that its violence isn't working, could bring about a retreat from the military solution. It might also be a first step in the rethinking of our nation's role in the world. Such a rethinking contains the promise, for Americans, of genuine security, and for people elsewhere, the beginning of hope. -Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 15:23:12 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: Change of E-Mail Address Comments: To: Acousticlv@aol.com, Alpha , Paul Austerlitz , Barrywal23@aol.com, batcitypress@lycos.com, "John M. Bennett" , Arleen Bentley , David Bliss , "Block, Sascha" , Bob , Steve Bogatz , Melanie Bookout , Michael Boudreau , "Sheri G. Boyd" , John Bryan , Maria Campos , james capone , "Carradini, Lawrence" , Lawrence Carradini , Jean Conklin , Conklins , ConnecticutPoet , ConnecticutPoet-owner@YahooGroups.com, current_gothic , Fred D'Aprile , Brian & Debbie , Jack DeCarolis , Michael DeFilippo , Mike DeRosa , Teresa Marie Dickey , Jonathan Duboff , Ecanningc@aol.com, Fred Enisz , Vernon Frazer , Dick Freeman , Ed Friedman , Tom Gatzen , Carrie Gorman , Renwick Griswold , Lowell Handler , HanoverPress , "Holland, Sherry" , Mikhail Horowitz , horowitz@bard.edu, JC , Chantel Jenkins-Yates , Brian Johnson , JSar833932 , Rebecca Kaiser , Elaine Kass , Elaine Kass , "Kass, Elaine" , Gary Kass , Janet Kniffin , Janet Homegrrl Kniffin , Steve Koenig , Jon Konrath , Paul Lappen , Paul Lappen , "Carradini, Lawrence" , Cheryl LeBeau , Chris Mansley , Mark.R.Surawski@travelers.com, John Mcclure , John Mcclure , John McClure , mcintoshandotis-henrywilliams , David McReynolds , michael , Pat Miles , Bob Moore , Bob Moore , Cooper Moore , Pat Moore , Msurawsk@aol.com, Jim Murkette , "Sheila E. Murphy" , David A Nader , David anthony Nader , Dan Nielsen , Nuyopoman@aol.com, David Pardi , Renate_Sandgren , Eileen Rieger , "Rogers, Rosemarie [AMSTA-DSA-PF]" , Rob Rudin , Rob Rudin , "Sampson,Christopher" , Larry Scahill , Joe Shea , smderosa@pop.mail.rcn.net, "Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church" , Steve Starger , Bill Szymanski , William Szymanski , William Szymanski <_wszyman@worldnet.att.net>, William Szymanski , KATHRYN A TAUBERT , trbell@home.com, Michael Tucker , Judit Ungar , Paula Von Deck , Tom VonDeck , wenca , Ilyssa Wesche , Chris Wiernicki , Dia Winograd , Michael Wolff , zzq MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello As many of you may know by now, I have been without e-mail and internet = access for the past week. Excite@home.com, my former internet provider = went bankrupt. AT & T Broadband took over, but the transition wasn't = completed until today. I'm told that messages sent to me in the past week have been returned. = Some of you have been expecting to hear from me and I have been = expecting to hear from you. My new e-mail address is vfrazer@attbi.com. If you mail me now, I should be able to receive your messages and = respond to them. Sorry for the inconvenience. Vernon Frazer Beneath the Underground ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 01:23:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Fouhy Subject: POET CHOCOLATE WATERS DEC 10th Comments: To: "Zork Alan [Poetry] (E-mail)" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Northern Westchester Center for the Arts 272 N. Bedford Road Mt. Kisco, NY 10549 Contact: Cindy Beer-Fouhy 914 241 6922 ext 17 CHOCOLATE WATERS At Creative Arts Café Poetry Series Mt. Kisco, NY: December 10th at 7:30 PM the Creative Arts Café Poetry Series at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts will feature one of New York City’s original performance poets CHOCOLATE WATERS. A Reception, book signing and Open Mike follow the reading. Hailed as the "Poet Laureate of Hell’s Kitchen,” Waters is a pioneer in women's publishing and in the art of performance poetry. She has toured throughout the United States, but makes her home in Manhattan where she teaches poetry workshops, tutors individual clients and is a frequent participant in the New York City poetry circuit. Chocolate Waters has been writing and publishing poetry for over three decades. The author of three collections, she is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry and a fellowship from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work, which has been nominated for several Pushcart prizes, is widely published and currently appears in Bay Windows, Hell’s Kitchen: Slices of Life, Fireweed, And What Rough Beast and The Second Word Thursdays Anthology. Other work can be browsed on the Internet at the Samsara Quarterly, 2River Review, Conspire, Stirring, the Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks and at www.chocolatewaters.com. Waters' latest release, a limited-edition CD entitled "Chocolate Waters Uncensored," spans 25 years of the poet's groundbreaking performance work from the NYC nightclub S.N.A.F.U. and other Manhattan venues. Suggested donation is $5.00 including coffee, tea and cake. The Creative Arts Café Poetry Series is funded in part by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Bydale Foundation. The Creative Arts Café Poetry Series is located in the spacious gallery of the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts at 272 N. Bedford Road in Mt. Kisco, NY. For a full schedule of readings or further information call 914 241 6922or log on to www.nwcaonline.org ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 11:39:48 -0800 Reply-To: max@oingo.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew Maxwell Subject: Charles Alexander reading & book talk @ Dawsons, 4pm Sunday! Comments: To: max@oingo.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Germ & the Poetic Research Bureau presents Charles Alexander at Dawsons Book Shop, Sunday December 9 @ 4pm! ***** The last event of a rather wobbly season! Kathleen Fraser can't make it due to work stress and hubbub, but Charles is here with a reading and retrospective book talk on the history of CHAX Press, which he founded. Spectacular handmade CHAX books will be on display from writers such as Myung Mi Kim, Nathaniels Tarn and Mackey, Robert Duncan, Jackson Mac Low. Take a look at all the writers they've published over the years (http://alexwritdespub.com/chax/chaxlist.htm) and hear Charles read from his latest work. A biblio's delite! ***** Material Poetics: Book Art & Printed Matter A reading & talk by Charles Alexander Charles Alexander's books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, Tucson, 1990) and arc of light / dark matter (Segue Books, New York, 1992), Pushing Water: parts one through six (Standing Stones Press, Morris, MN, 1998), and Pushing Water: part seven (Chax Press, Tucson. 1998), and Four Ninety Eight to Seven (Meow Press, San Diego, 1998). He edited Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, & the Book Arts (Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1996). He is the founder and director of Chax Press in Tucson, Arizona. Alexander will offer a split program that includes a reading of recent poems and a talk about book making and the book as idea and form. Several Chax Press handmade book arts editions will be shown at the conclusion of the talk. ***** Dawson's Book shop is located at 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., between Beverly and Melrose (north of the Village), in the Hollywood/Hancock Park area. Tel: 213-469-2186 Readings are open to all. $3 donation requested for poets/venue. Call Andrew at 310.446.8162 x233 for more info. ***** The Poetic Research series is taking a winter holiday break and will return at the end of January with its new season, to include visits by, among others, Steve McCaffery & Karen Mac Cormick, Chris Stroffolino, Mary Jo Bang, Barbara Henning, and more! ***** Andrew Maxwell, gaslighter The Germ/Poetic Research Bureau 1417 Nolden St Los Angeles, CA 90042 323.255.2433 "a dead romantic is a falsification" --Stevens ______________________________________________________________________________ Send a friend your Buddy Card and stay in contact always with Excite Messenger http://messenger.excite.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 18:06:40 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/7/01 6:09:09 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: << Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one > is forced to enter the contest either. > > As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. Then why don't the people running it (as I support my Runaway Spoon Press)? Why make the losers of the contest support it? >> But of course no one is forced to enter any contest. That is hardly the point. Withholding the names of the judges encourages entries from poets who might have no chance at all from the getgo. I, for example, serve as one judge of a prize administered by my college. I am clearly the only member of an otherwise very conservative panel who even considers formally innovative work. Visual poets like Bob have no chance at all. I have urged the prize administrators to at least publish a disclaimer, or something that might suggest the kind of poetry most on the panel are looking for. But noooo . . . the administrators are well aware that such a statement would limit the number of submissions and entry fees. Every time I see an submission from a language poet, or a visual poet, or Beat poet, or anyone with a distinctive voice that doesn't sound like it came from the creative workshop factory, I cringe because I know the tastes of the other judges. I know such poets, no matter how good they are, are losers going in. Why do I continue to serve? Because at least I'm able to to get a poet who is moderately innovative into the runner-up category, however rare that success is. Somebody has to fight for the unconventional. In no way did I suggest, or am I suggesting, that prize administrators or panels do not have the right to follow their tastes. We all do that. Nor did I single out the San Francisco Prize for criticism. However, if the judge knows the names of the contestants, or is well known to prefer a certain kind of writing, then objective evaluation is likely unlikely. Again, I have no idea if this is the case with the San Francisco Prize which may be a good bet for alternative writers, a bad one for conventional lyric poets. And that may change year by year, depending on the judge. But publicizing the judge up front, as some awards do, would provide the sort of necessary information to potential contestants that would help them exercise their freedom to submit or not. No? Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 18:11:56 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Panhandling Alert: poetry lovers who don't want to hear about new books please ignore MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/7/01 6:20:38 PM, poetry@WILDHONEYPRESS.COM writes: << I know there have been complaints on the list re publishers' hype so I'll try to restrain myself. >> I wasn't aware of this. I don't get it. The audience for poetry is microscopic enough. Now publishers shouldn't talk up their authors? Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 23:14:45 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hi Geoffrey I love this idea of Brittany Spears is it gonna take over from Brittany Ferries? love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 18:18:31 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/7/01 6:20:09 PM, kathylou@WORLDNET.ATT.NET writes: << If you had any idea how underfunded San Francisco State University is, there would be no question as to why the Poetry Center has to charge a reading fee. Yes, it is annoying (and perhaps prohibitive) that poets have to pay a reading fee, but it's amazing the work that the Poetry Center has done over the years on a shoestring. And the contest is in no way "brand name." Take a look at the past winners. >> Believe me, as an academic I know very well how underfunded such things are. And I don't doubt that the Poetry center has done excellent work. I'm rooting for you. So who's the judge? Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 17:24:03 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Small Press Subject: Lauren Gudath and David Larsen at SPT, Friday, Dec 14 Comments: To: amaclennan@earthlink.net, brydiemcpherson@yahoo.com, eddank@boalthall.berkeley.edu, junction@earthlink.net, molly1@Stanford.EDU, ewillis@mills.edu, barry.eisenberg@worldnet.att.net, vicomte_angelpil@hotmail.com, georgewynn10@yahoo.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Please join us for the last Small Press Traffic event of 2001 Friday, December 14, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. Lauren Gudath & David Larsen (rescheduled from September 14) Born in Tampa, Florida in the late middle of the twentieth century, poet Lauren Gudath is currently working on a series of poems exploring infatuations, as well as a novel. Her two most recent chapbooks are The Television Documentary (Second Story, 1999) and This Kind of Interpretation Brings Luck (Lucinda, 2000), for which her coreader David Larsen provided imagery; Read a Poem About California is forthcoming from Melodeon Poetry Systems. Oakland resident David Larsen is a performer, artist, scholar, and poet -- a mover,shaker and maker the Bay Area is lucky to call its own. His poetry has appeared in Cello Entry, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Explosive, and other magazines, as well as the chapbooks To The Fremont Station, Sepia #1-7, and Swath. His artworks have graced many small press books and journals, and new cartoon work appears in Chain #8. All events are $5-10, sliding scale, and begin at 7:30, unless otherwise noted. Our events are free to SPT members, and CCAC faculty, staff, and students. Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented in Timken Lecture Hall California College of Arts and Crafts 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin) Directions and map available at our website, sptraffic.org Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Executive Director Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at CCAC 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, California 94107 415/551-9278 http://www.sptraffic.org ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 17:34:04 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mister Kazim Ali Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I so don't agree that poetry doesn't exist outside of the academy. Most social gatherings I go to (granted I am Arab and Indian) incorporate poetry of some kind. Most parties I go to have some or another free-styling better than most of what's in the Paris Review anyways. I worked at a factory (the Motorola factory in Elma, NY) before (yes) going back to grad school, and I used to read poems to my co-workers all the time and they couldn't get enough of it. Philip Levine (well, obviously) and Mary Oliver were their favorites but recently I've read Fanny Howe and Rosmarie Waldrop (the book with all the traffic signals in it--what's that called?) to some "not-college-educated" friends and they went nuts for it. One "non-literary" friend went so nuts for a Jean Valentine poem (one from the last book) she made me read it into her voice-mail as a greeting. People--even Wal Mart shoppers--like poetry. They've just been tricked. I mean, how and why they've been tricked is a completely separate question which I guess everyone has an opinion on. "Poetry, like bread, is for everyone." !!! ===== "all histories are fabulous. ours stinks with genius." --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 20:40:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: aircrash.mov MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - aircrash.mov k13% green water, shadows of thick palm vegetation, there are bodies moving abou t, cut: soldier and airport security, cut: black, cut: arrival departure monitor s, cut: water, half-submerged body, these are night scenes, almost invisible on the screen, as if upon the body of the guerilla, the survivor, cut: man walking quickly up to checkpoint, he has id, he's speaking to someone, another id, cut: there are women, man, in the water, they're appearances, half-dressed, you can a lmost make them out, the beginning of movement, cut: blackness, cut: escalator, cut: man by palms, cut: women dark in water, almost black, cut: blank arrival a nd departure monitors, everything gone, cut: movement or flurry in dark green out-of-focus water , shadow of thick vegetation, cut: soldier with gun, cut: black, cut: burgeoning water dark flurry, cut: entrance exit by security gate, ringing phone almost mu ted in echoed soundtrack, SECURITY YOUR BAGGAGE, cut: to man with cell phone (rear silhouette of torso), he's answered, inaudible, ksh: green: not found k16% in this space a quality of slight menace, cut: t o black, cut: ksh: in: not found k17% _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 22:33:09 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii --- Kathy Lou Schultz wrote: > If you had any idea how underfunded San Francisco > State University is, there > would be no question as to why the Poetry Center has > to charge a reading > fee. ------------------------------------------------------- I interpreted the response from Maxine Chernoff ("As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize"), Prof. of Creative Writing, SFSU, differently. I understood "does not support" to mean: The University (herewith!) bears no endorsement or responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the contents of the winning book, nor for the actions of the contest promoters (nor their monetary accounts/fees). I.e., the "San Francisco State University Poetry Center Prize" (SFSUPC Prize) is to SFSU as the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter is to St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery: a coincidence of name only, going back to proximity of origin (the kind of relation Ginsberg and Kerouac had to Columbia). The names "SFSUPC" or "SFSUPC Poetry Prize" could move elsewhere, out of state, and are not the property or an expression of the University. SFSU might not ~like~ what the SFSUPC Prize publishes (or what the SFSUPC presents). If the SFSUPC Prize accepted funding from SFSU, the contest's outcome might have to be negotiated with the arbiters of SFSU. Etc. The revenues from contest fees are notoriously unmonitored and unaccounted for; there is not a single poetry contest that makes the ledgers for its fees available to the fee-payers who are underwriting the enterprise (fee-payers shld. be considered benefactors or ~shareholders~ in the outcome of the prize; an annual prize shld. make public "annual reports" as to its income/spending/surplus/debt): fees are routinely used to syphon in money toward other purposes (pay for workers unrelated to a prize). And contests routinely bring in a ~very large~ fixed number of MSs, between 1,000 and 1,600, as of abt. 5 yrs. ago; so fees of $10 or more produce ~significant~ capital: the practice hinges on the naivite and inappropriateness of the majority of MSs submitted. (Contests for "Modern" poetry books will still accept, deposit and depend on the check from the isolated, unworldly, stereotypical shut-in poet whose MSs is rhymed cat poetry.) No contest ~"has to~ charge a reading fee". Reading fees are expedients to slough off the audience-building entrepreneurship of seeking private funding or advertisers and, apparently, to make ~more~ money than needed for the publication itself: the costs that List editors have quoted for publishing books are way below what can be expected from fees. (And no one "has to charge" money for something that doesn't ~"have to"~ exist.) It's time that the poetry world grows up abt. this money thing. (I appreciate the fine community service William James Austin is shouldering by consistently posting against this ever-spreading practice of poetry contest fee pimping.) ======================================================= > Yes, it is annoying (and perhaps prohibitive) > that poets have to pay a > reading fee, but it's amazing the work that the > Poetry Center has done over > the years on a shoestring. And the contest is in no > way "brand name." Take a > look at the past winners. > -- > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Kathy Lou Schultz > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou > > Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press > http://www.duckpress.net > > > From: MAXINE CHERNOFF > > Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group > > > Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 10:59:01 -0800 > > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > > Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, > submissions due 1/31/02 > > > > The San Francisco State University Poetry Center > Prize has had many fine > > and varied > > recipients over the years. It is no way a "name > brand" contest. > > Obviously the names are known by the judge who is > reading books. No one > > is forced to enter the contest either. > > > > As for a reading fee, the university does not > support the prize. > > > > Maxine Chernoff, > > Prof of Creative Writing. > > > > On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 Austinwja@AOL.COM wrote: > > > >> In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, > bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: > >> > >> << This looks like a superior poetry contest to > me. Too bad an institution > >> > >> like > >> > >> SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My > boilerplate on this is that if > >> > >> you > >> > >> don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets > or award prizes to them > >> > >> without charging them money to submit their work, > you should go way. > >> > >> > >> --Bob > >> > >> G. > >> > >>>> > >> > >> I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the > prize since University > >> administrations are unlikely to care. But I do > share Bob's annoyance. What > >> jumps out most is the list of former winners. > Name recognition seems to be > >> an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just > noting -- but I wonder if > >> this award is any different from so many others > in terms of how winners are > >> selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind > submissions, "adjustments" are > >> often made before the winner is announced. I > also find unfortunate that some > >> award competitions keep the judges' identities > secret. Having this > >> information up front might save a lot of people > from wasting a reading fee. > >> Of course, the secret is meant to guard against > just this little thing. The > >> Award depends on getting as many entries as > possible. I'll be interested to > >> see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, > once again, a "Sharon Olds > >> brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good > luck to all who must take the > >> plunge. Best, Bill > >> > >> WilliamJamesAustin.com > >> KojaPress.com > >> __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 20:53:16 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: All Things Come To Those That... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Paradise Police: nEurogenesis--Sound & Other Poetries CD by Jesse Glass & Rod Summers is now up at Ubuweb. Take a listen. In addition, a feature on my work is available at http://www.sendecki.com Best news: I'm gonna be a Dad again at 47! Yeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaa! Or should I say banzai? Jesse About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Aug 1956 21:52:49 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Lewis Subject: POETRY READING ORANGE COUNTY, NEW YORK Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Small news to folks in Orange/Rockland--NW New Jersey area I'll be reading in Warwick.NY on December 14 @7:30pm at the Tuscan Cafe', 46 Main Street, Warwick (845) 987-2050 would knowledge that Warwick is considered the "The Onion Capitol of New York State" provide an incentive for coming by?? JOEL LEWIS ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 00:37:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: war. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - war. my name is george harrison. a limb and a limb. another limb and a limb. a limb and another limb a limb and a limb. my name is paul beetle. a limb and a limb. a limb and another limb. another limb and a limb. a limb and a limb. ringo john. a limb and a limb. a limb and another limb. another limb and a limb. a limb and a limb. _ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 10:27:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Wolff Subject: Fence is participating in this NY event Comments: To: ira@angel.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Please join us for a holiday benefit for Asociacion Tepeyac.* An evening of music and fiction with: Michael Cunningham Mary Gaitskill Pamela Laws Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields) Rick Moody Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) Julia Slavin and Friends Wednesday, December 12th, 8:30 pm Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. $20 Call ticketweb at 866-7619 or visit the box office at Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston. * Moneys raised by the event will help Tepeyac continue to coordinate relief efforts for undocumented immigrants whose lives, loved ones, or jobs were lost as a result of 9/11. For more information about Tepeyac, see http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011203&s=louie, or www.tepeyac.org. Hope to see you all there. With thanks to the Paris Review, Post Road, Tin House, Bomb, Noon, Open City, Fence, Pierogi Press, and the KGB Sunday Fiction Series. ********** Rebecca Wolff Fence et al. 14 Fifth Avenue, #1A New York, NY 10011 http://www.fencemag.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 14:29:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: Reading Fee In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I once was very against the idea of reading fees. I was and still am poor. So to send 10 dollars was to not have smokes for a few days. I would even send in without the cash just to make a point, well more to myself as it was probably thrown away as soon as they saw my red crayon checks or monopoly money. I never heard back. But now, I can see why this is important. If it's a worthwhile journal or zine that you admire and want to be a part of then seven bucks to be involved is a small price. And working from no budgets is a pain. So I don't know. For me this is part or the reason I try not to submit to print journals. Online all the way. Best, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Kathy Lou Schultz Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 10:17 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 If you had any idea how underfunded San Francisco State University is, there would be no question as to why the Poetry Center has to charge a reading fee. Yes, it is annoying (and perhaps prohibitive) that poets have to pay a reading fee, but it's amazing the work that the Poetry Center has done over the years on a shoestring. And the contest is in no way "brand name." Take a look at the past winners. -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Kathy Lou Schultz http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press http://www.duckpress.net > From: MAXINE CHERNOFF > Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group > Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 10:59:01 -0800 > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 > > The San Francisco State University Poetry Center Prize has had many fine > and varied > recipients over the years. It is no way a "name brand" contest. > Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one > is forced to enter the contest either. > > As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. > > Maxine Chernoff, > Prof of Creative Writing. > > On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 Austinwja@AOL.COM wrote: > >> In a message dated 11/30/01 7:02:18 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: >> >> << This looks like a superior poetry contest to me. Too bad an institution >> >> like >> >> SF State has to charge poets to enter it. My boilerplate on this is that if >> >> you >> >> don't appreciate poetry enough to publish poets or award prizes to them >> >> without charging them money to submit their work, you should go way. >> >> >> --Bob >> >> G. >> >>>> >> >> I suppose they need the admission fee to fund the prize since University >> administrations are unlikely to care. But I do share Bob's annoyance. What >> jumps out most is the list of former winners. Name recognition seems to be >> an important factor here. I'm not bitching, just noting -- but I wonder if >> this award is any different from so many others in terms of how winners are >> selected. Even in the case of somewhat blind submissions, "adjustments" are >> often made before the winner is announced. I also find unfortunate that some >> award competitions keep the judges' identities secret. Having this >> information up front might save a lot of people from wasting a reading fee. >> Of course, the secret is meant to guard against just this little thing. The >> Award depends on getting as many entries as possible. I'll be interested to >> see if the winner is someone few recognize or if, once again, a "Sharon Olds >> brand name" takes top honors. Whatever, good luck to all who must take the >> plunge. Best, Bill >> >> WilliamJamesAustin.com >> KojaPress.com >> ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 15:41:07 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Belz Subject: source? -eliot quote In-Reply-To: <001501c17f76$29509560$4b63f30c@attbi.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT If someone can identify & backchannel the source of this quote from T.S. Eliot, I would be MUCH in your debt. I'd like to use it in a paper. I need it soon. "Perhaps the conditions of modern life (think how large a part is now played in our sensory life by the internal combustion engine!) have altered our perceptions of rhythm." -Aaron ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 21:07:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: the timing MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - the timing 0000000 064164 071145 020145 060567 020163 060544 065562 071440 0000020 074553 000012 0000023 0000000 064164 071145 020145 060567 020163 060544 065562 071440 0000020 074553 000012 0000023 there was dark sky there wzs dzrk sky 0000000 062571 020163 064164 071145 020145 060567 005163 0000016 yes there was 0000000 020151 060567 065554 062145 061040 020171 067563 062555 0000020 066440 067145 060440 067562 067165 020144 020141 067567 0000040 062157 067145 071040 066541 020160 067151 072040 062550 0000060 067040 063551 072150 064564 062555 073440 071545 062564 0000100 067162 072040 073557 005156 0000110 yes there was 0000000 062571 020163 064164 071145 020145 060567 005163 0000016 i walked by some men some men 0000000 064164 074545 073440 071145 020145 060564 065554 067151 0000020 005147 0000022 they were talking about something, something about horses 0000000 064164 071145 020145 060567 020163 060544 065562 071440 0000020 074553 000012 0000023 0000000 064164 071145 020145 060567 020163 060544 065562 071440 0000020 074553 000012 0000023 there w[s d[rk sky there wzs dzrk sky 0000000 062571 020163 064164 071145 020145 060567 005163 0000016 yes there w[s 0000000 020151 060567 065554 062145 061040 020171 067563 062555 0000020 066440 067145 060440 067562 067165 020144 020141 067567 0000040 062157 067145 071040 066541 020160 067151 072040 062550 0000060 067040 063551 072150 064564 062555 073440 071545 062564 0000100 067162 072040 073557 005156 0000110 yes there w[s 0000000 062571 020163 064164 071145 020145 060567 005163 0000016 i w[lked by some men some men 0000000 064164 074545 073440 071145 020145 060564 065554 067151 0000020 005147 0000022 they were t[lking [bout something, something [bout horses 0000000 020151 060563 062151 000012 0000007 i said 0000000 071141 020145 067571 020165 064553 066154 067151 020147 0000020 064164 066545 000012 0000025 UrO yEA kIllIng thOm ErA you killing thAm 0000000 071164 060440 061542 062544 042440 041504 040502 000012 0000017 they said we are slaughtering everything we are slaughtering everything i couldn't see their faces it was dark and i could touch their violence 0000000 067151 072040 062550 066440 062151 066144 020145 063157 0000020 072040 062550 071040 060557 020144 067141 020144 062567 0000040 071141 067151 020147 072544 066154 061040 067562 067167 0000060 061440 067554 064164 071545 000012 0000071 and wearing dull brown clothes in the middle of the road in the middle of the road _ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 18:12:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gerard Greenway Subject: ToC: ANGELAKI 6.3: General Issue 2001 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities "Fearless and inventive, this journal has reset the agenda for the theoretical humanities." -- Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California, USA Angelaki 6.3, the 2001 general issue, is now out. Contents list below. The deadline for submission of material for consideration for the 2002 general issue is February 28. Special issues published this year: _Subaltern Affect_ (6.1, edited by J. Beasley-Murray and A. Moreiras), _Gift, Theft, Apology_ (6.2, edited by C.V. Boundas). Thank you -- Gerard Greenway, managing editor http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/0969725X.html volume 6 number 3 december 2001 GENERAL ISSUE 2001 issue editor: Pelagia Goulimari CONTENTS Editorial Introduction -- Pelagia Goulimari Never Before, Always Already: Notes on Agamben and the Category of Relation -- Alexander Garcia Duttmann Photography and the Exposure of Community: Sharing Nan Goldin and Jean- Luc Nancy -- Louis Kaplan (photographs by Nan Goldin) Cave Paintings and Wall Writings: Blanchot's Signature -- Lars Iyer To Follow a Snail: Experimental Empiricism and the Ethic of Minor Literature -- Peter Trnka Placing the Void: Badiou on Spinoza -- Sam Gillespie In the Space of the Cursor: An Introduction to John Kinsella's "A New Lyricism" -- Philip Mead A New Lyricism: Some Early Thoughts on Linguistic Disobedience -- John Kinsella Foucault's Evasive Maneuvers: Nietzsche, Interpretation, Critique -- Samuel A. Chambers The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation -- Simon O'Sullivan Judgment is Not an Exit: Toward an Affective Criticism of Violence with _American Psycho_ -- Marco Abel The Comedy of Philosophy: Bataille, Hegel and Derrida -- Lisa Trahair Humanism After Auschwitz: Reflections on Jean Amery's _Freitod_ -- Andrew McCann Human Rights, Humanism and Desire -- Costas Douzinas .... DEBATE* .... Just Hoaxing: A Reply to Margaret Soltan's "Hoax Poetry in America" (Angelaki 5.1: _Poets on the Verge_) -- Bill Freind The Bicameral Mind: Response to Bill Freind's "Just Hoaxing" -- Margaret Soltan * We encourage the submission of responses to work published in the journal. These will be considered for publication in the annual general issue. _Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities_ publishes two special issues and one general/open issue per volume. For full details on _Angelaki_, submission information and contents listings of volumes 2 to 6, please visit the journal's website at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/0969725X.html The journal has been available online as well as in print since volume 5 (2000). An electronic sample is available at the website. Click on the sample copy link in the listing at the top of the home page (registration required). Gerard Greenway managing editor A N G E L A K I journal of the theoretical humanities greenway@angelaki.demon.co.uk http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/0969725X.html 36A Norham Road Oxford OX2 6SQ United Kingdom ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 07:59:13 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Weiss Subject: Reading Comments: To: poetryetc@jiscmail.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed GEORGE ECONOMOU and MARK WEISS Dec. 19 at 6 PM Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village $6.00 admission pays for the first drink George Economou has has published _Ameriki_, _Humours and Fits_, _Century Dead Center_, and a translation of Piers Plowman_, among other poetry and translations. He edited and published _Trobar_, journal and books, with Robert Kelly. Mark Weiss has published _Intimate Widerness_, _A Letter to Maxine_, _A Block Print by Kuniyoshi_, and _Fieldnotes_. _Figures_ is forthcoming. He was editor and publisher of _Brioadway Boogie_ and is currently editor and publisher of Junction Press, for which he is editing, with Harry Polkinhorn, _Al otro lado/ Across the Line: the Poetry of Baja California_, and with Alina Camacho-Gingerich, _The Revolution in Cuban Poetry, 1944 to the Present_. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 11:19:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Scharf, Michael (Cahners-NYC)" Subject: 2H: Elrick & Sutherland MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain The Segue Foundation presents Reading at Double Happiness on Saturday, December 15 LAURA ELRICK AND KESTON SUTHERLAND Laura Elrick moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco in 1999. She currently works at a literacy center in East Harlem where she does public benefits advocacy. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, Tripwire, and Combo. Keston Sutherland now lives in Cambridge, England. He is the editor of Quid, and (with Andrea Brady) of Barque Press. He has published several books of poetry. A collection of recent work will soon be available from the subpress collective, of which Keston is a contributing editor. His essays on poetry, politics and philosophy are scattered among various magazines and splinter various listservs. Segue Reading Series at Double Happiness 173 Mott Street (just south of Broome) (212) 941-1282 Doors open at 4pm Two-for-one happy hour(s) Suggested contribution, $4, goes to the readers Funding is made possible by the continuing support of the Segue Foundation and the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Please join us! Work by Laura Elrick "Sleep" http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_1_1999/lesleep.html Work by Keston Sutherland Poems http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx/lynx610.html http://www.cccp-online.org/archive/cccp08/page_15.html http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/us/suth.html Essay: "The Trade in Bathos" http://www.jacket.zip.com.au:80/jacket15/sutherland-bathos.html Barque Press http://www.barquepress.com Segue calendar at http://www.segue.org/calendar ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 09:46:49 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Corbett Subject: Poetry in Sf In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII will be there this weekend. want to know if there is a good reading and/or other poetry oriented event. b/c please (since if you send it to the list, it will be delayed a day or two and i go Friday). Robert -- Robert Corbett "I will discuss perfidy with scholars as rcor@u.washington.edu as if spurning kisses, I will sip Department of English the marble marrow of empire. I want sugar University of Washington but I shall never wear shame and if you call that sophistry then what is Love" - Lisa Robertson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 08:57:46 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Susan M. Schultz" Subject: Honolulu news MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Please see the on-line _Honolulu Advertiser_ for December 10 (Life = section) for a fine article on Lisa Linn Kana'e's Tinfish chapbook, = _Sista Tongue_. Tinfish 11 will be out soon--albeit late! Linh Dinh's translations of three Vietnamese poets will be out within = the week. Important stuff! Send $7 to Tinfish, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street = #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744. aloha, Susan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 14:54:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: chora-kristeva: old striations of the user's desire: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - chora-kristeva: old striations of the user's desire: -w:# Makes new gender lines in a trace file:$non = int rand(11); Makes new gender lines in a trace file::645:3:#!/usr/local/bin/perl5 ...", "$u";:print "\n\n"; :print `rev .trace`, "\n\n";:}:exit(0);:# - $t)/60;:printf "and it has taken you just %2.3f minutes turning Jennifer $d @a[$gen2] days, I have been @a[$gen3] Julu ...";:print "\n";:$u = (time {:$d = int((gmtime)[6]);:$gen3 = 48 - int(20*rand);:print "For "Wait! $name and $pid are gone forever!", "\n\n" if 1==$g;:FINAL: and $pid - and you knew that all along!", "\n\n" if 2==$g;:sleep(1);:print her frock for $time hours?", "\n" if 2==$g;:sleep(1);:print "$name and $$ $name $diff is darling Jennifer's flesh", "\n\n" if 4==$g;:print "You wore @a[$non] $name $$ is Julu's gift to you ...", "\n\n" if 6==$g;:print "Your $pid is your scar, your wound, your brand.", "\n\n" if 3==$g;:print "... melt into Julu's skin forever...", "\n\n" if 3 < $g;:print "I think $name "yes") {print "Ah, a @a[10+$pre] and @a[15+$pre] fantasy!\n";}:print "You {print "You're dealing with @a[10+$pre] Jennifer.\n";} :if ($answer eq close to Jennifer's $name?\n";:chop($answer=);:if ($answer eq "no") system("rm enfolding");:: exit(0);:}:sleep(1);:print "Are you becoming {: close (STDOUT);:: system("touch .trace; rev enfolding >> .trace");: @noun[$non] is @adj[$newpick] here, it's @noun[$non]?::Construct::} else memory. :@prep[$pre] the @a[$gen], $name is @a[$diff], @a[$gen], $str?:... < $b3;:print $name, julu-of-the-fast-crowd!\n" if 2==$be;:print APPEND "Your @a[$gen1] partying, $name, with us?\n" if 3==$be;:print APPEND "Come home with me, "\n"; :print APPEND "Would $that mind you 1]), "\n"; :# join(":",@adj,$name,$str,$sign,$g,$that,$name,@adj[$pick]), print APPEND: join(":",$name,$str,$that,@adj[$pick + 1], @adj[$newpick + is yours...\n";:$be=int(rand(4));: open(APPEND, ">> enfolding");: "\nMy @adj[$pick] done.\n";:@adj=;:chop(@adj);:$size=@adj;:$pick=int(rand($size)); :srand;:$newpick=int(rand($size));:print \n";:print "one by one, each on a line alone, typing Control-d when "Your body parts, mine, in a dark list, list them... is mine, my sweet $that, I am yours!", "\n" if 2==$g;:sleep(1);:print "Nothing moves, river deep...", "\n" if 5==$g;:print "Your $name :print "$that, $name opens me totally to you!", "\n" if 7==$g;:print $name;:print "\n";:print "$that, $name turns my @nnn[$g] ", "\n" if 3==$g; "\nWhat do you call your @a[$gen2] @nnn[$nnnn]?\n";:$name=;:chop "\n@noun[$non1] @verb[$non] me @prep[$nnnn] your @nnn[$non1]!\n";:print speaks so sweetly, turning me grrrl", "\n" if 4==$g;:sleep(1);:print "Your breasts call me to them...", "\n" if 6== $g;:print "Your tongue if 1==$g;:print "Your thighs are moist and inviting", "\n" if 5==$g;:print your feelings, $that ...\n";}:print "Would $that mind you partying?", "\n" me your panties...\n"; sleep(10); goto FINAL;} :else {print "\nI love @nnn[$non1]? \n";:chop($str=);:if ($str eq "no") {print "\nShow "\nIs Julu wearing your ... , are you wearing your flesh, ah don't answer...\n"; sleep(1);:print "Ah...\n";:sleep(2);:print dressed as you?\n";:print "Are you in your @nnn[$nnnn], are you in your "\nAre you dressed as $that? Is $that do they call you, when they call you...\n";:chop($that=);:print speak... speak...\n";: exit(0);}:sleep(2);:print "\nJennifer, what {print "\nOpen your mouth...\n";}: else {sleep(1); print "\nAh... - int(40*rand);:$time = int(time/3600);:$g = int(8*rand);:if ($sign=fork) = int rand(6);:$gen = int(48*rand);:$gen1 = int(48*rand);:$gen2 = 49 int rand(8);:$non = int rand(11);:$non1 = int rand(7);:$pre "thing", "hole", "stick", "frock", "jumper", "skin");:$nnnn= "your masquerade", "my makeup", :"my masquerade");:@nnn=("flower", "passion", "womb", "being", "your penis", :"your vagina", "your makeup", "confusing",:"staining", "accompanying");:@noun=("breast", "love", "flows", "repairs");:@prep=("beneath or within", "beyond", "throughout", "oozes", "inherits", "splays",:"plays", "mixes", "amuses", "runs", "tight",:"depressed", "manic");:@verb=("thrusts", "turns", "surrounds", "florid", "edgy",:"neurotic", "psychotic", "catatonic", "loose", "taut", "wanton", "contrary",:"nervous", "wandering", "ill", "uneasy", "spry", "thrusting",:"giving", "forgiving", "poor", "rich", "sedate", "small",:"death-like", "lively", "protruding", "penetrating", "sleazy",:"wayward", "nice", "feminine", "lovely", "used", "fashionable", "flax", "pure",:"black", "dirty", "clean", "soiled", "sexy", "wet", time;:$| = 1;:srand time;:@a=("hard", "soft", "velvet", "cotton", "linen", # which represent the old striations of user's desire:$t = _ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 15:20:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: FW: Joris/Peyrafitte in Gloucester 12/19/01 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Please forward! Fishtown Artspace One Center Street Gloucester, MA 01930 978-283-1381 www.artspace.org info@artspace.org Wednesday December 19th 8PM Open Mic Followed by a performance by Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris websites: Pierre Joris Nicole Peyrafitte ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm Email: joris@ albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 19:56:30 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jaime Robles Subject: Reminder Mime-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reading at the Berkeley Art Center Elizabeth Willis Robin Tremblay McGaw. Jono Schneider and Rob Lipton Saturday December 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut Street in Live Oak Park, Berkeley Food and Drink Served Also in the gallery is the exhibition "The Whole World's Watching" featuring photographs of the movements for peace and social change during the '60s and 70s Directions: By car, take the University Avenue exit, turn right on to University Avenue. Continue toward the hills until you reach Shattuck Avenue just before the campus. Turn left. Continue about a half mile north on Shattuck until Rose Street. Turn right. Go two blocks to Walnut Street, turn left. The Art Center is half way up the block on the right hand side in the park. By foot, take Bart to the Berkeley station. Across the street from the station is the bus stop at Center and Shattuck. Take the bus running along Shattuck to Rose. Walk two very short blocks toward the hills on Rose. Turn left on Walnut and walk half a block to the Art Center. It sounds more daunting than it is. The Art Center is a mere three blocks from Black Oak Books in north Berkeley. Join us for some excellent reading and holiday cheer. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 23:17:08 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Camille Martin Subject: Lit City events during New Orleans MLA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii ---------------------------------- * L * I * T * * * C * I * T * Y * ---------------------------------- is pleased to announce THREE POETRY EVENTS coinciding with the MLA Convention in New Orleans All events will take place at St. Mark's of the Vieux Carre' 1130 N. Rampart St. New Orleans, LA 70116 The lists of readers and panelists below are tentative and no doubt incomplete. We'll post an updated announcement closer to the events. 1) Lit City Group Reading #1 Friday, December 28 Reading: 8:30 - 10:30 pm Reception at 7:30 and following the reading Display and sale of books by Small Press Distribution and Lavender Ink Featured readers include: Lee Ann Brown Norma Cole Michael Tod Edgerton Skip Fox Jessica Freeman C. S. Giscombe Joy Lahey Bill Lavender Camille Martin Chris Stroffolino Lorenzo Thomas Mark Wallace Barrett Watten 2) Book Publication Party and Panel Discussion Saturday, 3:30 - 5:00 pm Celebration of the publication ot two new books, TELLING IT SLANT: AVANT GARDE POETICS OF THE 1990S, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (University of Alabama Press) and SPIN CYCLE by Chris Stroffolino (Spuyten Duyvil). Along with the publication party, this event features a panel discussion on questions surrounding avant garde poetics of the 1990s. Likely panelists include: Charles Borkhuis C.S. Giscombe Jefferson Hansen Juliana Spahr Chris Stroffolino Mark Wallace Elizabeth Willis Possible panelists include: Steve Evans Rod Smith and others 3) Lit City Group Reading #2 Saturday, December 29 Reading: 8:30 - 10:30 pm Reception at 7:30 and following the reading Display and sale of books by Small Press Distribution and Lavender Ink Featured readers include: Bill Berkson Charles Bernstein Charles Borkhuis Dave Brinks Michael Davidson Brad Elliott Dennis Formento Tonya Foster Peter Gizzi Jefferson Hansen Hank Lazer Laura Moriarty Elizabeth Willis Contact: Camille Martin 7725 Cohn St. New Orleans, LA 70118 cmarti3@lsu.edu (504) 861-8832 For more information about Lit City and our events, see our website at http://www.litcity.net See you all soon! ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 12:46:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Betsy Andrews Subject: January Sublet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii January 5-February 1 Beautiful BROOKLYN, NY in Prospect Heights, 5 min. walk from Brooklyn Museum, Botanical Gardens, Prospect Park, subways Big big, nicely appointed apartment $1200 plus utilities backchannel Betsy: betsyandrews@yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 01:32:40 -0330 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "K.Angelo Hehir" Subject: the State of terrorism- Mumia Protestors Attacked by Cops MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Forwarded From: Action Center > > International Action Center > 39 W. 14 St. NY, NY 10011 . > (212) 633-6646 . FAX (212) 633-2889 > website -- www.iacenter.org > iacenter@iacenter.org > > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: > Monica Moorehead (201) 320-0676 > Imani Henry (347) 432-4242 > > December 8, 2001 > > > As Over 1,000 Turn Out in Philadelphia for Mumia Abu-Jamal > > PHILADELPHIA COPS AMBUSH RALLY, > BEATING & PEPPER-SPRAYING MUMIA SUPPORTERS > Ten Arrested; One Left Rally In An Ambulance > > The International Action Center (IAC) condemns in the > strongest terms the Philadelphia police's unprovoked and > brutal attack on today's thousand-plus march in support of > death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. > > According to one eyewitness account, on behalf of a > right-wing heckler of the rally, bicycle cops towards the > back of the march rode into the middle of the crowd, > dismounted their bikes and, wielding guns and batons, > started indiscriminately beating, pepper-spraying and > arresting people. Guns were pointed at peoples' heads; > others were thrown against cars. > > The crowd was marching from the corner of 13th and Locust, > where 20 years ago Abu-Jamal was arrested for a crime, the > shooting of police officer Daniel Faulkner, he says he did > not commit. Today at that location protesters viewed the > videotaped confession of Arnold Beverly, who has publicly > admitted to killing Officer Faulkner for the mob. > > As police drew their billy clubs and guns, protesters > surrounded the cops to try to protect those being arrested > and/or attacked and chanted, "Let them go! Let them go!" > and "Shame! Shame!" Police attacked some of these > protesters. > > Several IAC members were among those attacked, with some > being maced and others receiving several blows from police > batons. Further eyewitness reports include a woman being > dragged for at least a block, choking and with her skin > exposed. One person was taken off in an ambulance. In one > incident, an African American reporter photographing the > events from on top a car was grabbed and pulled to the > ground; the attack left a dent in the car. > > After the attacks, the march proceeded to the final indoor > rally at Philadelphia's Ethical Society, where more spoke > out in favor of Mumia's demand for his release based > primarily on Beverly's confession. Protesters saw the > attacks as further efforts on the part of the > Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police to prevent the > truth about Mumia's case from emerging. Those present > also watched fresh video footage of the police attacks. > Currently a number of protesters who traveled to > Philadelphia are staying there to provide legal and > political support to those who have been falsely > incarcerated. > > -30- > > ------------------ > Send replies to iacenter@action-mail.org > > This is the IAC activist announcement > list. Anyone can subscribe by sending > any message to > To unsubscribe ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 14:25:34 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik Notes:Philly, Chicago, NYC Philly! Janet Mason (with Barbara McPherson on drums) Frank Sherlock CAConrad to read from 3 new poetry chapbooks SUNDAY DECEMBER 9th 5:30 to 7pm Giovanni^s Room Bookstore corner of 12th & Pine Streets in BEAUTIFUL Philadelphia! Chicago: jamming at the Word Gourmet Fridays, open mic sign-up begins at 7 p.m. Friday, December 7, Estefani Question, young, dynamic poet, performed in LadyFest Chicago amd with About Face Theater. Friday, December 14, Michael Kadela, from the 2000 Green Mill Slam Team. 728 S Dearborn in Printer's Row NYC: Greenbean Press: A new chapbook of poems by patrick mckinnon called DRESSED ACROSS TIME is now available for $5ppd. ($7 international). patrick mckinnon is co-founder and Director of Poetry Harbor (publisher of The Northcoast Review) as well as Senior Editor of the literary magazine Poetry Motel. A new CD of a reading Nathan Graziano did in Plymouth, NH on May 1st, 2001 is also now available for $5ppd. ($7 international). It's appropriately titled Live at Biederman's. Both of these items are available on the Green Bean Press web site ( http://www.greenbeanpress.com ) or by mailing the appropriate funds to the address below. And just as a reminder, the 2-for-1 sale is still on and will be until the end of the year. Take advantage of it. Order anything in the catalog, get another anything of equal or lesser value FREE. Just remember to mention what it is you want. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 11:00:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fiona Maazel Subject: don't forget! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The holiday benefit for Asociacion Tepeyac* is this Wed at 8:30 at the = Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. Tickets cost $20 and can be bought = online at ticketweb.com, on the phone (866-468-7619), or at the box = office at Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston. Michael Cunningham, Mary Gaitskill, Pamela Laws, Stephin Merritt, Rick = Moody, Thurston Moore, Julia Slavin, more... -------------------------------------------------------------------------= ------- * Moneys raised by the event will help Tepeyac continue to coordinate = relief efforts for undocumented immigrants whose lives, loved ones, or jobs were lost as a result of = 9/11. For more information about Tepeyac, see http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=3D20011203&s=3Dlouie, = or www.tepeyac.org.=20 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 16:20:19 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vgdp@AOL.COM Subject: Sonnets of Passion, Sacred and Profane Comments: To: poetgirl_kathie@yahoo.com, poetgurl@cwnet.com, poetic_muse_30@hotmail.com, poeticlady99@yahoo.com, poetken@yahoo.com, poetlady@hotmail.com, Poetmuse@aol.com, poetpm_k@hotmail.com, poetress@attcanada.net, poetry.guide@about.com, poetry@cleansheets.com, poetry@mattboston.com, poetry@operamail.com, poetry_design@msn.com, poetry4peeps@hotmail.com, poetrydiva@earthlink.com, poetrygirl@hotmail.com, POETRYMAG@aol.com, poetrypoets@hotmail.com, PoetryPorch@juno.com, poetryslam@hotmail.com, poetrywebring@yahoo.com, pogues@logantele.com, PoizNGrace@aol.com, pokey@hotmail.com, pokey@pobox.com, pollyjeanh@hotmail.com, poo_msp@bih.net.ba, pooh817@hotmail.com, pooks@norfolk.infi.net, poorboy73@hotmail.com, pooterz@micron.net, poproj@artomatic.com, porat_el@einhahoresh.org, portal.info@vipmail.com, portia22@hotmail.com, potato_of_terror@redcity.demon.co.uk, Potpourri_Online@yahoo.com, pouchi@videotron.ca, poufter@msn.com, powder77@wcnet.org, ppyo@geocities.com, prairierose@hotmail.com, praseodymium59@geocities.com, precious014@hotmail.com, precosky@cnc.bc.ca, prick09@email.msn.com, primavera@iname.com, prism@ehc.edu, pritchardmusic@yahoo.com, proproj@artomatic.com, Prosewitch@aol.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 14th St Y~ 344 East 14th Street Why Women Poetry Series Veronica Golos, Artistic Coordinator presents ...Something Understood A reading of sonnets of passion, sacred and profane to celebrate the release of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, edited by Phillis Levin with Billy Collins, Poet Laureate Karl Kirchwey, Phillis Levin, Qurash Ali Lansana, Elizabeth Macklin Music by Sarafina Martino with James Smith on lute Thursday, December 20 - 8pm - $12 admission JOIN THE POETS IN A SPECIAL PRE-EVENT RECEPTION~6pm~ Wine and Hors d'oeuvres~$35~includes reception and reserved seating at reading~a benefit for the WhY Women Poetry Series Reservations needed. Deadline, Dec. 17 For Reservations, please call: 212-780-0800x255 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 09:40:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Paul Stephens Subject: Christopher Smart Query MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Listees, A friend of mine is writing a reception history of Christopher Smart's work. I was wondering if anyone might be aware of interest in Smart's poetry on the part of contemporary poets. It occurs to me that Smart is sometimes mentioned as a kind of proto-avant-gardist--for example in Rasula and McCaffrey's "Imagining Language" (now in paperback and a must-own book, incidentally). Smart often gets passing credit for his early free-verse experimentalism, though that credit has traditionally been attributed as much to Smart's madness as to his poetic program. In one sense, it's possible to read Smart's poetry (much like Hopkins' or Herbert's innovations on behalf of devotional poetry) as displaying a kind of anti-nominalism--whereby manipulating poetic form becomes a way of recovering language from its fallen state. This to me seems a much more appealing reading of Smart's poetics than the standard traditional reading of Smart as anomalous madman. I'm aware of Thomas Vogler's excellent article on Smart in Sulfur, and Allen Ingram's work as well. But I'd greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who might know of other references to--or appropriations of--Smart's poetics by contemporary experimentalists. Paul Stephens * * * * * ".while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling of thorns, no I forgot, it's impossible, it's myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation." --Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable" ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 23:15:42 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Isat@AOL.COM Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable If only Merrill had a better editor, he could become, I am convinced, one=20 hell of experimental poet. Here is a radical re-edit of his poem '164 East=20 72nd Street.' It's called now 'My Grandmother' (the original can be found at=20 http://nytimes.org/books/01/03/04/reviews/merrill-164poem.html) My grandmother=20 must be replaced. Frantic adolescense wheeled an old lady=20 into her mink, but what remains? Today=E2=80=99s memo from the Tenant=E2=80=99s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? I have tried many lives =E2=80=94 ten minutes each =E2=80=94 to repair the sonic fallout of a single scare. Do you ever wonder? =E2=80=9Coh, my dear, not here.=E2=80=9D My grandmother=20 moved South to live in style, to drop dead in it. Our life is turning juices blue. Imagine evenings of intensive care, early nocturnal scenes making the brickwork ripple. My grandma made my own sense. Far from high finance, steak house, or quick sex, things in purple fade like dreams. =20 It=E2=80=99s impossible to feel. ___ Igor Satanovsky 2001 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 07:28:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Hyperion Signs a Best-Selling, if Young, Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit from the New York Times: December 10, 2001 Hyperion Signs a Best-Selling, if Young, Poet By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK attie J. T. Stepanek, an 11-year- old with muscular dystrophy who has written two best-selling books of poetry, has sold Hyperion the right to publish editions of his two previously published and three forthcoming volumes of verse. The contract was negotiated last week by Robert Barnett, a lawyer in Washington who has negotiated book contracts for President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others. Hyperion, a division of the Walt Disney Company (news/quote), will pay Mr. Stepanek an undisclosed advance and split some of the proceeds from the sales of his books with VSP Books, which has published two previous volumes of his poems. VSP, a small publisher based in Alexandria, Va., initially published 200 copies of Mr. Stepanek's first collection, "Heartsongs," earlier this year. Cheryl Barnes, publisher of VSP, has said she printed the copies to cheer him up while he was in the hospital, as a favor to his mother, who has an adult form of muscular dystrophy. VSP has now printed a total of more than 500,000 copies of Mr. Stepanek's first collection and a second, called "Journey Through Heartsongs." Mr. Stepanek appeared on the Jerry Lewis telethon in September and on Oprah Winfrey's television show in October. Mr. Stepanek was introduced to Mr. Barnett three weeks ago. Robert S. Miller, president of Hyperion, said of the contract: "It will be a substantial advance because the potential was substantial. And it will be well spent on the enormous cost of Mattie's medical needs." ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm Email: joris@ albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 11:56:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Bouchard Subject: Fwd: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Hello, all. The Bush administration was unable to show any hard link between Iraq and the attacks of Sept. 11, so it has declared that the simple possession of weapons of mass destruction by a "rogue state" is terrorism. Now, the House International Relations Committee is considering a resolution that will declare Iraq's refusal to allow weapons inspectors in an act of "aggression" against the United States (weapons inspectors were removed by the United States shortly before the December 1998 "Desert Fox" bombing campaign, and Iraq has not allowed any back in). This is a clear move to authorize large-scale bombing of Iraq. For those of you living in the United States, the following action alert has information on what to do. For everyone else, please do take note. It's not too early to start thinking about demonstrations. For more information about Iraq, see http://www.casi.org.uk, http://www.endthewar.org, or http://www.fair.org/international/iraq.html In Solidarity, Crisis Update PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY International Affairs Committee Drafting Resolution to Authorize Bombing of Iraq Rep. Ron Paul Circulating Congressional Letter in Opposition Friends - As many of you know, there has been immense pressure building recently within the Bush Administration, and the media, to make Iraq the next target in our unending war against terrorism. Now a number of members of Congress have written a letter urging President Bush to do just that, and this coming Tuesday the House International Relations Committee will be drafting a resolution to authorize attacks on Iraq. (Much greater attacks than what we have been doing already, aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein.) It will, among other things, stipulate that any refusal of Iraq to grant access to UN inspectors to any site in Iraq will be considered an "act of aggression against the United States." Con. Ron Paul of Texas is circulating a letter opposing any attacks on Iraq. While not a pacifist letter, it does clearly state that there will be massive loss of life if we do this, that pretty much the rest of the world opposes us doing this, that even our allies freely acknowledge that there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the September 11 bombing, and that taking military action against them would thus go well beyond the original resolution authorizing use of force in Afghanistan. Please circulate this message to all your group and personal email listservs, and urge your group members, colleagues or friends to call their Representatives immediately (as in Monday and Tuesday) to speak against the bombing of Iraq, and to urge them to sign on to Rep. Paul's letter. While all members of Congress are important, the members of the House International Relations Committee are particularly so, and they are listed below. PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW TO PREVENT THIS WAR FROM SPREADING EVEN FURTHER Members of the House International Relations Committee Henry J. Hyde, Chairman (R-IL) (202) 225-4561 Republicans Benjamin A. Gilman, New York -> (202) 225-3776 James A. Leach, Iowa -> (202) 225-6576 Doug Bereuter, Nebraska -> (202) 225-4806 Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey -> (202) 225-3765 Dan Burton, Indiana -> (202) 225-2276 Elton Gallegly, California -> (202) 225-5811 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida -> (202) 225-3931 Cass Ballenger, North Carolina -> (202) 225-2576 Dana Rohrabacher, California -> (202) 225-2415 Edward R. Royce, California -> (202) 225-4111 Peter T. King, New York -> (202) 225-7896 Steve Chabot, Ohio -> (202) 225-2216 Amo Houghton, New York -> (202) 225-3161 John M. McHugh, New York -> : (202) 225-4611 Richard Burr, North Carolina -> (202) 225-2071 John Cooksey, Louisiana -> (202) 225-8490 Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado -> (202) 225-7882 Ron Paul, Texas -> (202) 225-2831 Nick Smith, Michigan -> (202) 225-6276 Joseph R. Pitts, Pennsylvania -> (202) 225-2411 Darrell E. Issa, California -> (202) 225-3906 Eric Cantor, Virginia -> (202) 225-2815 Jeff Flake, Arizona -> (202) 225-2635 Brian D. Kerns, Indiana -> (202) 225-5805 Jo Ann Davis, Virginia -> 202. 225. 4261 Democrats Tom Lantos (Ranking Member), California -> (202) 225-3531 Howard L. Berman, California -> (202) 225-4695 Gary L. Ackerman, New York -> (202) 225-2601 Eni F. H. Faleomavaega, American Samoa -> (202) 225-8577 Donald M. Payne, New Jersey -> (202) 225-3436 Robert Menendez, New Jersey -> (202) 225-7919 Sherrod Brown, Ohio -> (202) 225-3401 Cynthia A. McKinney, Georgia -> (202) 225-1605 Earl F. Hilliard, Alabama -> (202) 225-2665 Brad Sherman, California -> (202) 225-5911 Robert Wexler, Florida -> (202) 225-3001 Jim Davis, Florida -> (202) 225-3376 Eliot L. Engel, New York -> (202) 225-2464 William D. Delahunt, Massachusetts -> (202) 225-3111 Gregory W. Meeks, New York -> (202) 225-3461 Barbara Lee, California -> (202) 225-2661 Joseph Crowley, New York -> (202) 225-3965 Joseph M. Hoeffel, Pennsylvania -> (202) 225-6111 Earl Blumenauer, Oregon -> (202) 225-4811 Shelley Berkley, Nevada -> (202) 225-5965 Grace Napolitano, California -> (202) 225-5256 Adam B. Schiff, California -> : (202) 225-4176 Diane E. Watson, California -> (202) 225-7084 ><>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Daniel Bouchard Senior Production Coordinator The MIT Press Journals Five Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 bouchard@mit.edu phone: 617.258.0588 fax: 617.258.5028 <>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><>> ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 20:01:34 -0500 Reply-To: patrick@proximate.org Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Herron Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I find ads helpful as well, Millie. my former concern was that ads now predominate this list. once upon a time discussion predominated. i found the difference in three years to be remarkable, and sad, too. considering that really only three or four people responded to this stark insight into this list, i no longer see a point for my concern. i made my attempt to see if i could encourage change. clearly after you me jeffrey and a couple of backchannelers, it appears there is no point for me to pursue this. things are as they are. bye bye listmates. it's been real. see you somewhere else some other day, perhaps some other list? Patrick -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Millie Niss Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 12:18 AM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] I find the advertisements for readings to be very helpful. They list many events not on the NYC Poetry Calendar. This things on the calendar seem to be mostly open readings, many of the "slam" variety in which a poem has to pack a punch and keep the audience entertained/laughing/indignant at some societal injustice. You get absolutely nowhere reading (rather than performing) a Language poem there: Most language poems are interesting for the interactions between the lines or stanzas, where each piece of a poem is seen as a sort of independent entity which bounces off the other pieces of the poem and creates linkages between the ideas. But the individaul pieces of the language poem are not of the sort needed to keep people laughing; often they are everyday things, like in Silliman's alpahbet project or surreal-but-not-funny as in Leslie Scalapino's work or Clark Coolodge's (not sure if he counts as a language poet, though). Likewise, a formalist poem also gets no encouragement at these poetry slams-- formalist poems are too boring for such a setting, and they often depend on a lot of literary allusions and depend on the reader's knowledge of the history of poetry. This is a problem at slams. I recently got up and read a surreal poem about Agamemnon, and I felt it necessary to tell who A. was and how his bitchy wife Clytemnestra bumped him off when he got back from the war, because by then she had found another guy and didn't want her husband putting an end to her affair (you can see the tone I felt forced to adopt...) you can't depend on a slam audience knowing anything, except the work of the regulars at the slam... It is my opinion that slams generate a kind of poetry which is fun to listen to but which seems very shallow if you read the poems. I don't have anything against slam poetry. It's usually more "fun" to listen to the slam poems than to listen to poems at a nonslam venue's open readings. And often even very good poetry is too hard to appreciate when it is unfamiliar and you only hear it. To understand a poem, you have to remember all the previous lines in the poem, to see how the poem builds meaning or to catch refernces between the various sections. Moreover, people actually come to slam events, which makes you feel good about the state of poetry. But I have noticed that trying to please the slam people has been bad for my work. So I have stopped going to these events. Unfortunately, I also don't go often to the readings I see advertised here by poets whose work I admire. But I'd never even know about these readings without the list. Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Jullich Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 3:02 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Harpo's Index [*$@%] Dear Patrick, Thank you for your lovely, Bourdievian numbers. (Your on-List silence had been noticeable. I heard you hurt your shin. Condolences. And I was worried that maybe your silence meant you were cooking up some sort of mischievous heteronym! :) I'm relieved to see you're putting your time to good use.) Something seems muddled with your statistics for advertisements, though: 7.5 doesn't seem to correspond to 65, numerically, and you might've done better to stick it out for an additional count of 62 (= 214 - 149), I think, especially with randomness, as comparison between samples of unequal size involve chi-factors or r or something . . . but otherwise, I find these numbers neo-Pythagorean in their sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know," and charming. I felt tempted to do the same myself --- but upping nutritional supplements of Vitamin Shoppe 1500 MG Amino Complex to 10 tabs a day seems to have moderated my counting mania --- and I was more interested in plotting ~who~ responds to ~whose~ posts and threads, for more of an analysis of power and follow-the-leader. I also find the number of advertisements distressing. It's like being on one of those servers with pop-up ads that keep cluttering the screen. One waste of time there, for me, is that poetry-dvertisers do not as a rule mark their subject header with their location,--- so I waste clicks opening ads for interesting poets' readings that are then disappointingly unreachable in far-away States I can't attend (given the impounding of my private jet), not that I ever leave the house anyway. So, (#1) I think it wld. at least be thoughtful of advertisers to mark location in subject header, . . . although I can understand that reputation accumulates through the redundancy of name, and why anyone wld. be motivated just to infiltrate Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at every loophole, "fame"-building. I've wondered if Christopher W. Alexander or Prof. Bernstein couldn't somehow "cordon off" or segregate ads from poetics discussion. In print, ads are generally separated to the margins and not interspersed with "articles." --- Pedagogically, insofar as the List is State U. educational outreach, it's like mixing in Save Fifty Cents coupons with class notes. --- Electronically, segregation might be effort, though (develop a co-site/cache), . . . but maybe not all that much effort: even free servers like Yahoo provide instantaneous group resources that poetry-advertisers cld. be given a one-time "warning" to post to, for those interested to consult, and then otherwise summarily blocked/deleted (as exploitative, mercenary, whatever). I've even considered as public "penance" taking it upon myself to maintain an on-line Poetry Calendar such items could be re-directed to and plotted more helpfully, systematically, the way Sharon Matling (name?) single-handedly started the NYC Poetry Calendar as a 2-sided broadsheet that became a company. I do strongly agree that it wld. improve readering for ads to be segregated somehow. There's something terribly ~American~ in this anti-social Buy This/Go There panhandling that's done on-List, by poets (communicators!) who have total impunity abt. addressing a community only to try to change peers into audience. Very lively, daily discussion (although abt. work of a different "taste" than the Buff' List's) goes on at PoetryEtc, for example, which is predominately UK and AU/NZ sign-ons, who don't seem as thoroughly ~permeated by mercantilism~ as Americans. I'm very easily manipulated by advertisements (which is why I don't watch television or go to the movies, and have trouble with newspapers and magazines), --- psychology finds that some types are objectively more "hypnotizable" by ads/promos! --- and it's distressing to find my relation to poetry being bent into docile consumerism: I spend, easily, between a hundred and two hundred a month on poetry, average, much of it via SPD or checks to on-List book/journal advertisers. That's okay but, once upon a time, my naive attachment to poetry was because an endlessly re-readable enigma masterpiece and nothing but paper and pen/typewriter was a ~refuge~ from consumerism. But it isn't only the alienation that poets are dousing colleagues with here that bothers me (I find it tacky if the automatic footer at the bottom of a poet's discussion post leads to a book of theirs and a price for where to send for it, too): it's the lack of ~creativity,~ or imagination, or even--- guile! in how matter-of-factly and mass media-like they style their "Satisfy Me" commands. Utopian, I think it's holding back a potential new ~poetry~ of inventive free market gamesmanship, a "litvertizing," as it were, where poetry would grown into being ironically/ambiguously conjoined with the zeitgeist of advertisement-seduction. What were all those names of friends doing in New York School poetry, if not a collective stategy of shared advertising and name-redundancy? (How ~could~ Bill Berkson be advertised on-List this week if, in the golden age of genuine inspired "litvertizing," Frank O'Hara hadn't paved a reptutation for him by dint of including his name in O'Hara immortality?) Forgive me if it seems vain of me to use myself as an example, but it took much more than an hour to put together and post my shoddy little http://www.geocities.com/jeffreyjullich/EUNOIAN.LITTLE.LEXICON.htm , with no self-interest in Bok's reputation other than I genuinely find him to be among the two or three most remarkable. It was advertising, though, disinterested advertising, labor-intensive advertising. And I was lead to doing that, and to ordering Bok's book and to hearing him on the ~Cabinet~ CD as a result of Brian Kim Stefans posting a micro-review that brought out the nature of ~Eunoia~ in a way I'd previously missed, and as a result of Christopher W. Alexander bringing out points about glossolalia that mentioned ~Cabinet.~ Already here, it shows, I'm more concerned about/focussed on the on-List ~advertisements,~ whereas you're more irked by the absence of discussion (the latest ~Fence~ takes uniquely unprecedented and ~admirable~ candor in presenting their distributors' actual print-outs--- with sales figures! Congratulations, Rebecca/Rebecca-informants while Rebecca is on her doubtlessly tiring but envigorating ~Manderley~ road show. The charts should be framed, it's so good. --- Tragic, hopefully not, that their optimism was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" [Greenspan] of the now antediluvian lost "New Economy," and that recession nihilism may well show Fence's charts' upward curve to have been sub-sets of a larger upward slope mania that's been broken by three airplanes and thousands and thousands of deaths, "jinxed"). Maybe that's because I see advertising as an unstoppable semiotic that's really a major vehicle for graphic artists, designers, actors, models, epigrammatists, etc., and quite "avant-garde" in its ingenuities. And I'm mainly disappointed by how anemically we pursue marketing and how uncreative and ascii ads are, on-List. [mar-/mar-]: I don't think we're marginalized; I think we're bad at marketing. But thanks for your own statistical avant-gardisme, --- the future is Neo-Pythagorean! --- which I read as a Herron poetic artefact in and of itself. Bar charts would've been nice (Silliman did Armantrout pie charts in ~A Wild Salience~). Jeffrey P.S. The "BICKERING" and fighting that you condone as the spice of discussion also greatly contributes, I suspect, to the drop-off in discussion: you have a thicker hide for and propensity toward it than many. Poets are sensitive plants, and people of substance aren't going to risk their vulnerability where at any moment their "lessers" are given full clearance to pounce and lash out over imaginary slights. (But I'm debilitatingly conflict-avoidant {meek!}.) Professional academics tend to participate less seriously in on-List discussion, too. Perhaps they see it as "work," or their interlocutors as being unqualified; they're more "careful," though. On-List participation sometimes parallels how long a batch/klatsch enjoys ~grad student~ status together. They clam up once they've gotten tenure-track appointments. P.P.S. I rented ~Being John Malkovich~ the other night to see the Emily Dickinson puppet, and the puppeteer's employer, Lester Inc., reminded me of your coincidentally named marionette Lester. ======================================================= "One in the sun. Two in the sun. Three in the sun. One not in the sun. . . . Four benches used four benches separately." --- Gertrude Stein, ~Four Saints in Three Acts,~ 1927 ======================================================= --- Patrick Herron wrote: > Discussion Statistics, UBPoetics E-mail List > November 2001 vs. November 1998 > > > November 1998 > number of e-mails: 984 > number of threads*: 174 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 3.6 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 67 > percent of list posts that were advertisements, > announcements, job postings, > or responses to such postings: 7.5 (based on random > sample of 211 e-mails), > > > November 2001 > number of e-mails: 404 > number of threads*: 38 > average length of thread, adjusted to remove > outliers: 2.5 e-mails > discussion, as % share of total list e-mail: 29 > number of advertisements, announcements, job > postings, or responses to such > postings: 65 (based on a random sample of 149 > e-mails) > > *-threads with more than one e-mail __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 18:24:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: <47.149e4d28.2942a580@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I know what you mean as one of the losers you reference. I spent a lot of time prep[aring a chapbook for the Pavement Saw prize, and I was not surprised that I didn't win. I didn't expect to win. But I was annoyed at them when I got tha sample chapbook by one of their previous winners; it was all realistic/spill my thoughts and totally un-innovative. I had done a chapbook with surreal poems, languagy things, etc., and seeing who won made me realize that I didn't have a chance from the moment they read the first poem. It would be grate if they put in a statement about what the judes like. they are perfectly free to like what they want to like, but it is annoying to have no chance at all because you didn't know their style. I could actually have put together a chapbook of poems about family issues, poems about relationships, all in standard MFA program free verse, and I would have had a better chance (though I assume I still wouldn't have won as I am a relative beginner in these things...) Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Austinwja@AOL.COM Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 6:07 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In a message dated 12/7/01 6:09:09 PM, bobgrumman@NUT-N-BUT.NET writes: << Obviously the names are known by the judge who is reading books. No one > is forced to enter the contest either. > > As for a reading fee, the university does not support the prize. Then why don't the people running it (as I support my Runaway Spoon Press)? Why make the losers of the contest support it? >> But of course no one is forced to enter any contest. That is hardly the point. Withholding the names of the judges encourages entries from poets who might have no chance at all from the getgo. I, for example, serve as one judge of a prize administered by my college. I am clearly the only member of an otherwise very conservative panel who even considers formally innovative work. Visual poets like Bob have no chance at all. I have urged the prize administrators to at least publish a disclaimer, or something that might suggest the kind of poetry most on the panel are looking for. But noooo . . . the administrators are well aware that such a statement would limit the number of submissions and entry fees. Every time I see an submission from a language poet, or a visual poet, or Beat poet, or anyone with a distinctive voice that doesn't sound like it came from the creative workshop factory, I cringe because I know the tastes of the other judges. I know such poets, no matter how good they are, are losers going in. Why do I continue to serve? Because at least I'm able to to get a poet who is moderately innovative into the runner-up category, however rare that success is. Somebody has to fight for the unconventional. In no way did I suggest, or am I suggesting, that prize administrators or panels do not have the right to follow their tastes. We all do that. Nor did I single out the San Francisco Prize for criticism. However, if the judge knows the names of the contestants, or is well known to prefer a certain kind of writing, then objective evaluation is likely unlikely. Again, I have no idea if this is the case with the San Francisco Prize which may be a good bet for alternative writers, a bad one for conventional lyric poets. And that may change year by year, depending on the judge. But publicizing the judge up front, as some awards do, would provide the sort of necessary information to potential contestants that would help them exercise their freedom to submit or not. No? Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 02:17:35 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: Fwd: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The List Etal. If the US extends its agressive war to Iraq, that's ok, but remember that Iraq Iran etc are fairly (or relatively scarcely populated): a nuclear bomb(s) over there might convert some sand into possibly useful glass: but a (yet to be born!) new generation of physics-minded "terrorists" freedom-fighters or just plain old religious mad-people, might make the next "Big One" say 8 strategically placed nuclear bombs - suggested targets: NY, Los Angeles, San Fransisco,Washington, Chicago,Disneyland, anywhere in Texas, and Colorado for Auld Lange Syne - assembled inside the US. And there's a lot more people in the US, and less sand. (Or failing nukes maybe hundreds and hundreds of the poetically named "daisy-cutters" that Bush etal are so fond of).China will then take over the world after obliterating the Russians and the Japs. New Zealand and Australia will be "burnt" for grovelling up to the Yanks so I wont survive but then I havent got that long to go probably so who cares? Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Bouchard" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 5:56 AM Subject: Fwd: > Hello, all. The Bush administration was unable to show any hard link > between Iraq and the attacks of Sept. 11, so it has declared that the > simple possession of weapons of mass destruction by a "rogue state" is > terrorism. Now, the House International Relations Committee is considering > a resolution that will declare Iraq's refusal to allow weapons inspectors > in an act of "aggression" against the United States (weapons inspectors > were removed by the United States shortly before the December 1998 "Desert > Fox" bombing campaign, and Iraq has not allowed any back in). This is a > clear move to authorize large-scale bombing of Iraq. For those of you > living in the United States, the following action alert has information on > what to do. For everyone else, please do take note. It's not too early to > start thinking about demonstrations. > > For more information about Iraq, see http://www.casi.org.uk, > http://www.endthewar.org, or http://www.fair.org/international/iraq.html > > In Solidarity, > > Crisis Update > PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY > International Affairs Committee Drafting Resolution to Authorize Bombing of > Iraq > Rep. Ron Paul Circulating Congressional Letter in Opposition > > Friends - As many of you know, there has been immense pressure building > recently within the Bush Administration, and the media, to make Iraq the > next target in our unending war against terrorism. Now a number of members > of Congress have written a letter urging President Bush to do just that, > and this coming Tuesday the House International Relations Committee will be > drafting a resolution to authorize attacks on Iraq. (Much greater attacks > than what we have been doing already, aimed at overthrowing Saddam > Hussein.) It will, among other things, stipulate that any refusal of Iraq > to grant access to UN inspectors to any site in Iraq will be considered an > "act of aggression against the United States." > > Con. Ron Paul of Texas is circulating a letter opposing any attacks on > Iraq. While not a pacifist letter, it does clearly state that there will be > massive loss of life if we do this, that pretty much the rest of the world > opposes us doing this, that even our allies freely acknowledge that there > is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the September 11 bombing, > and that taking military action against them would thus go well beyond the > original resolution authorizing use of force in Afghanistan. > > Please circulate this message to all your group and personal email > listservs, and urge your group members, colleagues or friends to call their > Representatives immediately (as in Monday and Tuesday) to speak against the > bombing of Iraq, and to urge them to sign on to Rep. Paul's letter. While > all members of Congress are important, the members of the House > International Relations Committee are particularly so, and they are listed > below. > > PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW TO PREVENT THIS WAR FROM SPREADING EVEN FURTHER > > Members of the House International Relations Committee > > Henry J. Hyde, Chairman (R-IL) (202) 225-4561 > Republicans > > Benjamin A. Gilman, New York -> (202) 225-3776 > James A. Leach, Iowa -> (202) 225-6576 > Doug Bereuter, Nebraska -> (202) 225-4806 > Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey -> (202) 225-3765 > Dan Burton, Indiana -> (202) 225-2276 > Elton Gallegly, California -> (202) 225-5811 > Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida -> (202) 225-3931 > Cass Ballenger, North Carolina -> (202) 225-2576 > Dana Rohrabacher, California -> (202) 225-2415 > Edward R. Royce, California -> (202) 225-4111 > Peter T. King, New York -> (202) 225-7896 > Steve Chabot, Ohio -> (202) 225-2216 > Amo Houghton, New York -> (202) 225-3161 > John M. McHugh, New York -> : (202) 225-4611 > Richard Burr, North Carolina -> (202) 225-2071 > John Cooksey, Louisiana -> (202) 225-8490 > Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado -> (202) 225-7882 > Ron Paul, Texas -> (202) 225-2831 > Nick Smith, Michigan -> (202) 225-6276 > Joseph R. Pitts, Pennsylvania -> (202) 225-2411 > Darrell E. Issa, California -> (202) 225-3906 > Eric Cantor, Virginia -> (202) 225-2815 > Jeff Flake, Arizona -> (202) 225-2635 > Brian D. Kerns, Indiana -> (202) 225-5805 > Jo Ann Davis, Virginia -> 202. 225. 4261 > > > > > > > > > > Democrats > > Tom Lantos (Ranking Member), California -> (202) 225-3531 > Howard L. Berman, California -> (202) 225-4695 > Gary L. Ackerman, New York -> (202) 225-2601 > Eni F. H. Faleomavaega, American Samoa -> (202) 225-8577 > Donald M. Payne, New Jersey -> (202) 225-3436 > Robert Menendez, New Jersey -> (202) 225-7919 > Sherrod Brown, Ohio -> (202) 225-3401 > Cynthia A. McKinney, Georgia -> (202) 225-1605 > Earl F. Hilliard, Alabama -> (202) 225-2665 > Brad Sherman, California -> (202) 225-5911 > Robert Wexler, Florida -> (202) 225-3001 > Jim Davis, Florida -> (202) 225-3376 > Eliot L. Engel, New York -> (202) 225-2464 > William D. Delahunt, Massachusetts -> (202) 225-3111 > Gregory W. Meeks, New York -> (202) 225-3461 > Barbara Lee, California -> (202) 225-2661 > Joseph Crowley, New York -> (202) 225-3965 > Joseph M. Hoeffel, Pennsylvania -> (202) 225-6111 > Earl Blumenauer, Oregon -> (202) 225-4811 > Shelley Berkley, Nevada -> (202) 225-5965 > Grace Napolitano, California -> (202) 225-5256 > Adam B. Schiff, California -> : (202) 225-4176 > Diane E. Watson, California -> (202) 225-7084 > > > > ><>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > Daniel Bouchard > Senior Production Coordinator > The MIT Press Journals > Five Cambridge Center > Cambridge, MA 02142 > > bouchard@mit.edu > phone: 617.258.0588 > fax: 617.258.5028 > <>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><>> > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 17:17:30 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson Subject: Re: Walmart poetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Mister Ali wrote: People--even Wal Mart shoppers--like poetry. They've just been tricked. I mean, how and why they've been tricked is a completely separate question which I guess everyone has an opinion on. And I am very happy to see it. Though I also see all of Geoffrey's points. Everyone wants a poem or a song to catch their feelings or ritual on, to enact interiority into the world, and other things, yes? It's not academic. Academic thought yields a different thrill, and wields some other weapons. The tricks are a big topic. Love and hope - Elizabeth Treadwell http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 17:26:19 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed As Kathy Lou and I both know as graduates of it, SFSU is underfunded. That is what she means, what she said. It's a public school, and not a stuffy UC either. The Poetry Center is a great institution that in my understanding is only partially helped by SFSU. Being housed in an academic setting, to borrow a line from another thread, makes things strange to view. For example, though CCAC (and formerly New College) is kind enough to give Small Press Traffic office and venue space, all of our other expenses (honoraria, publications, publicity, other overhead, etc) are covered by govt and private funders, and our community. In this way we remain autonomous, but it is a bit double edged when members of our dear community assume we are wholly funded by an institution, and thus don't realize how important it is for them to support us if we are to continue. Especially if we are to continue to be autonomous in terms of programming. Elizabeth Treadwell http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 23:02:34 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Karen Lewis Subject: Re: Walmart poetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Kazim, I'm with you. Recently I was invited to a beach party on Lake Erie, and we were all asked to bring poetry to welcome in the winter. This has become an annual event for these folks. I was the only 'poet' there. The rest of the guests crossed all party lines and a few country ones as well. Poems by Shel Silverstein to eecummings were read outside around a roaring fire. We had a blast. I'm not in the academy although I am on this listserve and neither are most of the writers who write that I know. We make poetry a part of our everyday lives, and even though I prefer Target to Walmart, I like to walk through Bloomies every once and while just to see what's going on and how much it all costs. Karen Lewis ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:38:50 +1100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Tranter Subject: = Announcing Jacket 15 = Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Announcing: Jacket # 15 -- December 2001 -- a cultural stocking stuffed with rich and various literary presents: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket15/index.html Featuring a special tribute to New York poet Kenneth Koch -- 23 items from= =20 over twenty writers, including an audio recording of "Popeye and William=20 Blake Fight to the Death" =97 a hilarious public rhyming contest between=20 Koch and Allen Ginsberg at St Mark's Poetry Project, New York City, 9 May=20 1979, ... and tributes to Kenneth Koch from Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Robert=20 Creeley, Barbara Guest, Paul Hoover, Vincent Katz, Jack Kimball and Kent=20 Johnson, John Kinsella, David Lehman, Harry Mathews, Nicole Mauro, Charles= =20 North, Hilton Obenzinger, Ron Padgett, Tom Raworth, Hazel Smith, Tony=20 Towle, David Shapiro, John Tranter and Anne Waldman. and "Words to Comfort" -- A selection of poems and photographs from the benefit= =20 readings to support the World Trade Center Relief Fund on Wednesday October= =20 17, 2001. Many of the poems being read were selected from the enormous=20 public outpouring of poetry after the terrorist attack, posted at New York= =20 City fire stations, Union Square, and numerous other memorial sites around= =20 the city. PLUS more glittering baubles on the tree of art: Reviews: ...by Douglas Barbour, Andrea Brady, Pam Brown, Richard Caddel,=20 Tom Clark, Alan Gilbert, Gabriel Gudding, Kris Hemensley, Kim Hjelmgaard,=20 Mark Neely, Patrick Pritchett, Dale Smith and Chris Tysh. Articles ...by Keston Sutherland, Craig Dworkin and Michel Delville. Feature: Ian Hamilton Finlay =97 the contemporary Spartan philosopher,=20 gardener, poet and artist interviewed by Nagy Rashwan, with articles by=20 Brian Kim Stefans, Drew Milne and Mark Scroggins. Poems by Homero Aridjis, Aaron Belz, Peter Boyle, Chris Edwards, John=20 Hawke, J.Nicole Hoelle, S.K. Kelen, John Kinsella, Helen Lambert, David=20 Lehman, Cassie Lewis, Geraldine McKenzie, Mark Mahemoff, Ange Mlinko, Chris= =20 Tysh, Ethan Paquin, C.D. Wright, and Yang Lian Interviews: Steven Clay of Granary Books interviewed by Olivier Brossard,=20 Alice Notley interviewed by Brian Kim Stefans, Dale Smith interviewed by=20 Kent Johnson, C.D. Wright interviewed by Kent Johnson =97 with Deborah=20 Luster's remarkable photographs of inmates from Louisana prisons and C.D.=20 Wright: excerpt from her poem sequence Deepstep Come Shining And remember: the previous fourteen issues of the magazine are always=20 available too. ... if you'd like to be taken off this mailing list, please just ask. John Tranter, Editor, Jacket magazine ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 01:20:36 +0100 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: the chap contest Comments: To: jeffreyjullich@YAHOO.COM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jeffrey-- The Center for the Book Arts is a rare American instituion, the _only_ US publisher of a letter press collection, which opens its doors yearly to any who wish to submit for the possiblity of having their work appear in the rarest of editions. There are under 20 active letter press publishers in the US, 6 I am in personal contact with. Adastra press is the single place with a *invitational* (not open) consideration of manuscripts from people whose work they are not familiar with. All of the other publishers are purely solicited work. As a relative of mine once said: "a country's worth is measured by their arts, " and, for me, letter-press is too important a poetry form to allow another press' dissolution. Understand my bias and commitment also, I distribute one of Americas finest letter press publishers and will start distributing a second in 2002. "(fee-payers shld. be considered benefactors or ~shareholders~ in the outcome of the prize; an annual prize shld. make public "annual reports" as to its income/spending/surplus/debt)" We give people a book. "fees are routinely used to syphon in money toward other purposes (pay for workers unrelated to a prize)." Not with us "And contests routinely bring in a ~very large~ fixed number of MSs, between 1,000 and 1,600, as of abt. 5 yrs. ago; so fees of $10 or more produce ~significant~ capital: Not even close to the number. "the practice hinges on the naivite and inappropriateness of the majority of MSs submitted. (Contests for "Modern" poetry books will still accept, deposit and depend on the check from the isolated, unworldly, stereotypical shut-in poet whose MSs is rhymed cat poetry.)" These we have hanging on a wall dedicated to poems of this ilk. My favorite this year was a rhyming poem in the shape of a tea pot about tea. Cost for us on the chapbook: $7 entry $500 prize 2000 envelopes x .34= $680 envelopes, labels, new sealing marker etc $76 Photocopy 2000 x 3, 1000 x1=7000, $140 Total cost: $1396 Entries last year: 203 x7= 1421 which meant we did not have a judge for $250. and we gave away 110 copies of the chapbook to people who wanted it. For us, the chapbook prize gives us a chance to publish someone who would not regularly send to us as well a chance to publish individual poems from people we are not ordinarily in contact with. We consider this important. I believe the blame should be placed correctly: there are many factors integral to the system, not the publishing community as a whole. Individual places: yes. One notable example, two years ago P&W wanted the prize money to be raised to $1000 for chapbook contest announcements. I refused, so we do a lot of work for the same number of submissions. We might cut the contest soon, who knows. It's time that the poetry world grows up abt. this money thing. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:12:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query In-Reply-To: <001301c17ff6$4de32a20$a6063b80@oemcomputer> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed I am a reader of Smart and am quite taken by his work, particularly and obviously his poem about Jeffrey his cat. It is strikingly contemporary and feline-accurate. Edward Hirsch has a poem about Smart. Gene At 09:40 AM 12/8/01 -0500, you wrote: >Dear Listees, > >A friend of mine is writing a reception history of Christopher Smart's work. >I was wondering if anyone might be aware of interest in Smart's poetry on >the part of contemporary poets. It occurs to me that Smart is sometimes >mentioned as a kind of proto-avant-gardist--for example in Rasula and >McCaffrey's "Imagining Language" (now in paperback and a must-own book, >incidentally). Smart often gets passing credit for his early free-verse >experimentalism, though that credit has traditionally been attributed as >much to Smart's madness as to his poetic program. In one sense, it's >possible to read Smart's poetry (much like Hopkins' or Herbert's innovations >on behalf of devotional poetry) as displaying a kind of >anti-nominalism--whereby manipulating poetic form becomes a way of >recovering language from its fallen state. This to me seems a much more >appealing reading of Smart's poetics than the standard traditional reading >of Smart as anomalous madman. > >I'm aware of Thomas Vogler's excellent article on Smart in Sulfur, and Allen >Ingram's work as well. But I'd greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who >might know of other references to--or appropriations of--Smart's poetics by >contemporary experimentalists. > >Paul Stephens > > >* * * * * > >".while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling of >thorns, no I forgot, it's impossible, it's myself I hear, howling behind my >dissertation." > >--Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:47:42 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marcella Durand Subject: FW: POeP reading this Saturday (2 pm) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > POeP! Launch Reading > Saturday, Dec. 15, 2-4 PM > Free Admission > at > St. Agnes Library > 444 Amsterdam Ave. (near 81st St.) > > Published by Rattapallax Press and edited by Anselm > Berrigan & Edwin Torres, POeP! is one of the first > eBook literary journals dedicated to innovative > poetry. > > Readers will be: > John Yau > Juliana Spahr > Todd Colby > Sharon Mesmer > Edwin Torres > Anselm Berrigan > Marcella Durand > Mike Tyler > Fred Moten > John Coletti > Mariana Ruiz-Firmat > Kostas Anagnopoulos > Lila Zemborain > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 12:54:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable In a message dated 12/10/01 7:35:08 PM, Isat@AOL.COM writes: << If only Merrill had a better editor, he could become, I am convinced, one= =20 hell of experimental poet. Here is a radical re-edit of his poem '164 East=20 72nd Street.' It's called now 'My Grandmother' (the original can be found at=20 http://nytimes.org/books/01/03/04/reviews/merrill-164poem.html) My grandmother=20 must be replaced. Frantic adolescense wheeled an old lady=20 into her mink, but what remains? Today=E2=80=99s memo from the Tenant=E2=80=99s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? I have tried many lives =E2=80=94 ten minutes each =E2=80=94 to repair the sonic fallout of a single scare. Do you ever wonder? =E2=80=9Coh, my dear, not here.=E2=80=9D My grandmother=20 moved South to live in style, to drop dead in it. Our life is turning juices blue. Imagine evenings of intensive care, early nocturnal scenes making the brickwork ripple. My grandma made my own sense. Far from high finance, steak house, or quick sex, things in purple fade like dreams. =20 It=E2=80=99s impossible to feel. ___ Igor Satanovsky 2001 >> Nice one, Igor! I've never been a fan of Merrill largely due to his=20 gerrymandering poetry prizes. Too rich with too much influence which he=20 didn't hesitate to exercise. Scripts For the Pageant is interesting, though= .=20 Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 19:52:07 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: <20011208013404.77329.qmail@web20704.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" THANK YOU! md At 5:34 PM -0800 12/7/01, Mister Kazim Ali wrote: >I so don't agree that poetry doesn't exist outside of >the academy. Most social gatherings I go to (granted I >am Arab and Indian) incorporate poetry of some kind. >Most parties I go to have some or another free-styling >better than most of what's in the Paris Review >anyways. > >I worked at a factory (the Motorola factory in Elma, >NY) before (yes) going back to grad school, and I used >to read poems to my co-workers all the time and they >couldn't get enough of it. Philip Levine (well, >obviously) and Mary Oliver were their favorites but >recently I've read Fanny Howe and Rosmarie Waldrop >(the book with all the traffic signals in it--what's >that called?) to some "not-college-educated" friends >and they went nuts for it. One "non-literary" friend >went so nuts for a Jean Valentine poem (one from the >last book) she made me read it into her voice-mail as >a greeting. > >People--even Wal Mart shoppers--like poetry. They've >just been tricked. I mean, how and why they've been >tricked is a completely separate question which I >guess everyone has an opinion on. > >"Poetry, like bread, is for everyone." !!! > > >===== >"all histories are fabulous. >ours stinks with genius." > > >--Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Send your FREE holiday greetings online! >http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 12:38:56 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Gallaher Organization: University of Central Arkansas Subject: Book Awards and Their Judges Comments: cc: Austinwja@AOL.COM In-Reply-To: <47.149e4d28.2942a580@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Bill (WilliamJamesAustin.com) writes: The argument you would get from some presses/awards is this: The final judge is kept secret so that people will not call him or her up and, well, you know... The problem is that the REAL insiders know who the judge is, and call up anyway. Albert Goldbarth told me one time that this happened to him. He, as judge, was supposed to be kept a secret, but his phone was ringing constantly with messages from many people who he thought would be above that sort of thing. Now he stays far away from "prizes". (Too bad, I know his phone number . . .wink-wink) Of course, awards aside, the book publication racket is just as bad . . . with "entry fees" as high as $25.00 now. Some contests get as many as 1,200 entries. The National Poetry Series . . . the Walt Whitman Award . . . and these books are getting published on the backs of writers who the presses don't think are good enough to be published. I shouldn't have said that, I guess. And I shouldn't say this either: It cost me $750.00 to get my first book published. And presses don't do much for thanking those who enter. Mostly I just hear complaints from them about how hard it is to publish, and how no one wants to support art these days. So, instead, the "losers" support art these days. And no, I can't think of a better way to do it. The nice ones give you something for your entry though: The Colorado Prize, for instance, gives you a free subscription to The Colorado Review. Another, I can't remember which it is . . .(The Journal/OSU Prize maybe?) . . . sends you the winning book . . . Best, Anonymous! ------------------------- OK, I'm John Gallaher . . . just nearly anonymous! J Gallaher Metaphors Be With You . . . ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:06:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Book Awards and Their Judges MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/11/01 2:36:39 PM, Gallaher@mail.uca.edu writes: << Albert Goldbarth told me one time that this happened to him. He, as judge, was supposed to be kept a secret, but his phone was ringing constantly with messages from many people who he thought would be above that sort of thing. Now he stays far away from "prizes". (Too bad, I know his phone number . . .wink-wink) >> It is also sometimes the case that certain (no doubt worthy artists), who have yet to receive an award, are set up to win by their friends and admirers. Pound and Koch are two such examples. The reasoning goes something like this: "So and so hasn't won a significant award, and deserves one. Let's give him ours." I'm not suggesting this is a commonplace, or typical of prizes less noted and perhaps more competitive than the Bollingen, but it happens. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:39:47 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Fwd: please distribute widely. Subject: 2 sources of free legalaid to Muslim, Central Asian, Sikh, South Asian, and other"suspicious-looking" immigrants Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-From_: amstdy@tc.umn.edu Tue Dec 11 09:16:29 2001 X-Sender: amstdy@amstdy.email.umn.edu Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:16:15 -0600 To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: American Studies Subject: Fwd: please distribute widely. Subject: 2 sources of free legal aid to Muslim, Central Asian, Sikh, South Asian, and other "suspicious-looking" immigrants >X-From_: mart0598@tc.umn.edu Mon Dec 10 21:32:49 2001 >User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.01 (1630) >Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 22:32:11 -0800 >Subject: please distribute widely. >From: "Anne M. Martinez" >To: > > >Subject: 2 sources of free legal aid to Muslim, Central Asian, Sikh, >South Asian, and other "suspicious-looking" immigrants > >1) Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights is developing a plan to respond >to potential requests for representation at FBI interviews of >non-citizens. So far, we have not received any requests for >representation or reports of FBI interviews, but we want to be prepared. > >Last week we learned of the U.S. Attorney's plan to begin interviewing >non-citizens whom the government believes may possess information >related to the terrorist attacks of September 11. The U.S. Attorney has >indicated that these individuals are being asked to answer questions and >if they do not wish to speak with the F.B.I. they will not be obligated >to do so, and he has stated that these individuals should be compared to >possible witnesses at a crime scene, not as suspects. Nonetheless, >F.B.I. agents plan to arrive unannounced at these individuals' homes, >ask to enter the homes, and ask to question the individuals. Minnesota >Advocates for Human Rights feels strongly that all people who are >contacted for these interviews should have the option of being >represented by counsel. We are coordinating volunteers who are >interested in providing pro bono representation at interviews. >Interested attorneys will be placed on an on-call list. If an >individual in need of legal counsel contacts us, we will contact >attorneys on the on-call list to arrange representation. Representation >may be limited to appearance at the interview. > >Jennifer Prestholdt, Esq. >Refugee and Immigrant Program Director >Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights >310 Fourth Ave. So., Suite 1000 >Minneapolis, MN 55415 >Telephone: (612) 341-3302 ext. 111 >Fax: (612) 341-2971 >Email: jprestholdt@mnadvocates.org >www.mnadvocates.org > > >2) ARABS AND MUSLIMS-KNOW YOUR RIGHTS > >FREE LEGAL SUPPORT >FOR >FBI QUESTIONING! > >Have you been contacted by the FBI for questioning? A group of local >lawyers and human rights activists have volunteered to help you >understand your rights, advise you on your options and provide you with >legal counsel during this time. > >F.B.I. agents plan to arrive unannounced at individuals' homes, ask to >enter, and begin questioning local Arabs and Muslims about their >activities, relationships, and affiliations. All people who are >contacted for these interviews should have the option of being >represented by legal counsel. > >We are helping to coordinate volunteers available for pro-bono >representation at interviews, or to answer questions about your rights >during these interviews. > >If you or anyone you know needs the assistance of legal counsel during >this time, please call one of the numbers below, and we will refer you >on to lawyers who can help you. > >To be referred to FREE legal counsel regarding FBI questioning call: > >612-825-5962 >or >612-706-6125 > >adc_mn@hotmail.com > >The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC) is a civil rights >organization committed to defending the rights of people of Arab descent >and promoting their rich cultural heritage. ADC, which is >non-sectarian, non-partisan is the largest Arab-American grassroots >organization in the United States. It was founded in 1980 by former >Senator James Abourezk and has chapters nationwide. -- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:33:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: the chap contest In-Reply-To: <3C15513F.8DBABF72@megsinet.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii David: Thank you. I don't know what this all refers to, . . . but thank you. Letterpress is the loveliest, definitely: I know that much. If there were more like what you've tallied here, and like the distributors' charts that Rebecca Wolff illustrated the latest Fence with, your elegant Neo-Pythagoreanism of dollar sign leadership-by-ledgers would open up a whole new anti-obscurantist XXIInd century poetics. It seems very 2002 of you: nice. Very convincing. Sure sold me! Since you include your mailing address at the bottom, I'd be happy to send off a check to help compensate for > Entries last year: 203 x7= 1421 minus > Total cost: $1396 first thing in the morning (if I can just get this Netscape Programs > Accessories > Calculator to pop up and stop MR-ing!). Heck, for a poem about tea shaped like a tea pot, the sky's the limit! that's what I say. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 14:44:12 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Spring and Summer internships available with POG Comments: To: Tenney Nathanson MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Please pass this announcement along to anyone you think might be interested; or, if you're a UA student, please consider applying yourself. * Through the UA English Department, two internships to work with the arts organization POG are available for Spring 2002; one internship is available for Summer 2002. Interns receive academic credit. POG internships POG (Poetry Group) is a collective of writers, artists, publishers, professors, students, and others engaged in promoting the avant-garde art scene in Tucson. At present POG’s principal activity is Poetry in Action, a public art event series committed to crossing boundaries. Poetry in Action events, at such sites as Dinnerware Gallery, Orts Dance Theatre, and Las Artes Studios, typically pair a poet with a visual or musical artist, a local writer or artist with a visiting one, and a well-known figure with a younger, emergent one. POG interns will work on several facets of POG’s programming (mostly for Poetry in Action), possibly including: · contacting visiting poets and other visiting artists and arranging the details of their visits · working with POG members to put together a comfortable visit for our visiting artists (who are typically in Tucson for 2-3 days) · spending some time with visiting artists while they are in Tucson (as part of our “hosting” activities) · helping with site set up and event logistics · helping to organize the annual benefit fund-raising dinner · working on the bi-annual POG anthology · helping to locate possible sources of additional funding for POG (grants, corporate sponsors) · helping to put together publicity materials During FALL and SPRING semesters POG will likely have two student interns. One SUMMER internship will also be available. It’s not necessary for all interns to work on all the above activities. So if you’re interested in some of them but not all, it’s still worth applying. It would be very helpful for at least one intern to possess the following computer-related skills and requisite technology: · ability to receive and send email “attachments” (attached document files) from home computer (this can’t currently be done from a “u.arizona.edu” account) · ability to work with files in Microsoft Office 2000 format (especially Word, Excel, and Access) · regular internet access · ability to do basic layout for fliers and brochures. Interns are not paid but receive academic credit through the UA English Department. For further information or to apply now for SPRING 2002 or SUMMER 2002 contact: Tenney Nathanson Department of English 296-6416 or email: mailto:tenney@dakotacom.net mailto:nathanso@u.arizona.edu http://www.u.arizona.edu/~nathanso/tn/ POG: http://www.gopog.org mailto:pog@gopog.org ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 17:21:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I need 19 copies of Lyn Hejinian's *My Life* for a course I'm teaching this spring at the University of Pennsylvania on "Re-envisioning Personal Narratives." The Penn Book Center (an independent book seller here) can't get it, so I called SPD in Berkeley myself and they have *no* copies. Any suggestions on where to go next? Many thanks, Kathy Lou Schultz -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Kathy Lou Schultz http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press http://www.duckpress.net ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 17:39:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Paul Stephens Subject: Re: Hyperion Signs a Best-Selling, if Young, Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ravi, You were clearly promoting the wrong kind of books, as you can see from the forward below. Sorry to hear about your job. If you're really desperate for a place, I may be away at the end of December and in early January. As you know, my place is a little too small for a couch, but you'd be welcome to it while I'm out in Cali. The Billy Collins piece is guaranteed to entertain you. He was on the Newshour last night and I almost did an Elvis to my TV. Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pierre Joris" To: Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 7:28 AM Subject: Hyperion Signs a Best-Selling, if Young, Poet > from the New York Times: > > December 10, 2001 > > > Hyperion Signs a Best-Selling, if Young, Poet > > By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK > > attie J. T. Stepanek, an 11-year- old with muscular dystrophy who has > written two best-selling books of poetry, has sold Hyperion the right to > publish editions of his two previously published and three forthcoming > volumes of verse. > > The contract was negotiated last week by Robert Barnett, a lawyer in > Washington who has negotiated book contracts for President Bill Clinton and > Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others. > > Hyperion, a division of the Walt Disney Company (news/quote), will pay Mr. > Stepanek an undisclosed advance and split some of the proceeds from the > sales of his books with VSP Books, which has published two previous volumes > of his poems. > > VSP, a small publisher based in Alexandria, Va., initially published 200 > copies of Mr. Stepanek's first collection, "Heartsongs," earlier this year. > Cheryl Barnes, publisher of VSP, has said she printed the copies to cheer > him up while he was in the hospital, as a favor to his mother, who has an > adult form of muscular dystrophy. > > VSP has now printed a total of more than 500,000 copies of Mr. Stepanek's > first collection and a second, called "Journey Through Heartsongs." Mr. > Stepanek appeared on the Jerry Lewis telethon in September and on Oprah > Winfrey's television show in October. > > Mr. Stepanek was introduced to Mr. Barnett three weeks ago. > > Robert S. Miller, president of Hyperion, said of the contract: "It will be a > substantial advance because the potential was substantial. And it will be > well spent on the enormous cost of Mattie's medical needs." > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: > 6 Madison Place > Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 > Tel: (518) 426-0433 > Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm > Email: joris@ albany.edu > Url: > ____________________________________________________________________________ > _ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:16:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "WrightZ, Laura" Subject: Laura Wright, Kai Sibley, Darrin Daniel, and Randy Roark read in Boulder MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain 18th and Pearl, Boulder Monday, December 17th. Open reading from 8:00 to 9:00, followed by featured readers. Kai and Randy will be doing a slide/text presentation on William Blake in honor of Naropa University's Blake Festival (January 19). Free and open to the public, although there will be a donation jar for people wanting to donate to the Naropa Archives Project. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:37:21 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Igor. Actually I like what you've done here. Merrill was a great poet of a certain style: almost mannerist - an extraordinary brilliance - but not fundamentally innovative: but then how do we evaluate these things. In a way: your version or re-appropriation becomes a new poem. A little Williams perhaps? But I like it: the ending is good: "its impossible to feel" ....... I know ther sense and the meaning of that. Now I'll look at the original. Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 5:15 PM Subject: Re: James Merrill If only Merrill had a better editor, he could become, I am convinced, one hell of experimental poet. Here is a radical re-edit of his poem '164 East 72nd Street.' It's called now 'My Grandmother' (the original can be found at http://nytimes.org/books/01/03/04/reviews/merrill-164poem.html) My grandmother must be replaced. Frantic adolescense wheeled an old lady into her mink, but what remains? Today’s memo from the Tenant’s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? I have tried many lives — ten minutes each — to repair the sonic fallout of a single scare. Do you ever wonder? “oh, my dear, not here.” My grandmother moved South to live in style, to drop dead in it. Our life is turning juices blue. Imagine evenings of intensive care, early nocturnal scenes making the brickwork ripple. My grandma made my own sense. Far from high finance, steak house, or quick sex, things in purple fade like dreams. It’s impossible to feel. ___ Igor Satanovsky 2001 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:49:22 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Igor. Yes: in this case your version is better (well I feel it is)..but its (the original I mean) still a typical Merrill poem: with some brilliant images...but not as subtle as some of his others. But possibly editing would or should involve cutting it entirely ... although its an interesting "episode"..... rather than re-writing (something I've been known - a bit arrogantly, something I dont think Id bother with now, or even criticism - to do when critiquing poets in NZ). But of the two poems yours is the more intense as (in this case) the cutting back and the disjunctions etc make it quite excellent. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 5:15 PM Subject: Re: James Merrill If only Merrill had a better editor, he could become, I am convinced, one hell of experimental poet. Here is a radical re-edit of his poem '164 East 72nd Street.' It's called now 'My Grandmother' (the original can be found at http://nytimes.org/books/01/03/04/reviews/merrill-164poem.html) My grandmother must be replaced. Frantic adolescense wheeled an old lady into her mink, but what remains? Today’s memo from the Tenant’s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? I have tried many lives — ten minutes each — to repair the sonic fallout of a single scare. Do you ever wonder? “oh, my dear, not here.” My grandmother moved South to live in style, to drop dead in it. Our life is turning juices blue. Imagine evenings of intensive care, early nocturnal scenes making the brickwork ripple. My grandma made my own sense. Far from high finance, steak house, or quick sex, things in purple fade like dreams. It’s impossible to feel. ___ Igor Satanovsky 2001 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:27:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik Notes! Brooklyn! KPF II: The Saga Continues Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, The Second Installment Tuesday, December 18, 2001 8pm Poets sing karaoke, read poetry. An idea whose time has come. Produced by The Brooklyn Lyceum Kind of co-produced by La Petite Zine Co-hosted by Daniel Nester and Lucky Dave Brooklyn Lyceum 227 4th Avenue at President Street Brooklyn R train to Union Street www.gowanus.com 718.857.4816 Featuring Maggie Balistreri, Regie Cabico, Gene Cawley, Marj Hahne, Joelle Hann, Bob Holman, Tracey Knapp, Richard Eoin Nash, Daniel Sonenberg, Matthew Zapruder, plus: Richard Dawson Limited open reading (k+p) before and after. Admission free. BYOB, refreshments sold. ******************************************************************** Loisaida! A GATHERING OF THE TRIBES Upcoming December Events Calendar At the Gallery, Second Floor, 285 East Third Street between Avenues C and D, NYC 10009 (212) 674-3778 Gallery open Tuesdays through Sundays 12-6 PM and by appointment Sunday December 16th, 2001: 7pm for the first set and 9 pm for the second set The House Of Tribes Theatre and A Gathering of The Tribes, Inc. second annual benefit concert featuring Mr. Wynton Marsalis & his Quartet and special guests to the stage. Tickets are $130, are tax deductible and include an exclusive evening with Mr. Marsalis and guests plus a meal. UPCLOSE AND PERSONAL will be featured at the House of Tribes Theatre @ 272 East 7th Street between Avenues C and D, RSVP 212-477-0735 or 212-674-7176, you can also email us @ HOUSEOFTRIBES@AOL.COM. POETRY WORKSHOPS Sundays December 4-11-18-25 at 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM 9(212) 674-3778(FAX: (212) 388-9813* PO Box 20693 Tompkins Square Station-NYC 10009 Visit our web site at www.tribes.org=E-mail: info@tribes.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:57:35 -0800 Reply-To: kendall@wordcircuits.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Kendall Subject: New Flash Poetry at Word Circuits MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit * * NEW AT WORD CIRCUITS * * ---------------------------- Xylo By Peter Howard This Flash poem explores the dimension of time through both words and movement. http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/xylo Childhood in Richmond By Komninos Zervos Childhood memories become a collage of images and spoken words in this Flash piece. http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/childhood/index.html Come visit the Word Circuits Gallery (http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery), where you'll find these two new Flash poems by noted practitioners of the art. Also in the Gallery are hypertext works by Stephanie Strickland, Deena Larsen, Bill Bly, and Jackie Craven. [Apologies for cross-posting] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Kendall E-Mail: kendall@wordcircuits.com Home Page: http://www.wordcircuits.com/kendall ----------------------------------------------------------------- Word Circuits (Hypertext/Cybertext Poetry and Fiction): http://www.wordcircuits.com Electronic Literature Directory http://directory.eliterature.org On-Line Class in Hypertext Poetry and Fiction (The New School): http://www.wordcircuits.com/kendall/htclass.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:58:14 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: laurie macrae Subject: Jerome Rothenberg's Birthday! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Did I miss it, or have all you New Yorkers failed to announce the celebration of Jerome Rothenberg's birthday to be held tommorrow, Dec. 12, at St. Mark's Poetry Center?! Happy Birthday, Jerry! Thank you and Diane for all your generous hospitality and kindness to newcomers to San Diego's poetry scene. Laurie Macrae __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 13:23:32 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Belz Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit > Everyone wants a poem or a song to catch their feelings or ritual on, to > enact interiority into the world, and other things, yes? It's not academic. A Wal-Mart shopper myself, I feel a bit dazed by this phrase: "enact interiority into the world." Maybe you can explain it...in terminology I might understand if I were, say, wandering between cosmetics and electronics. I have a feeling that its this sort of articulation that cuts poetry off from Wal-Mart shoppers -- "a song to catch [my] ritual on"? is this American language fissuring or completely falling apart? Best, Aaron Belz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 19:18:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Basil King Gallery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Basil King Gallery Restored The Basil King Gallery has been redesigned (by Jerrold Shiroma) and is = once again accessible on the Avec site: www.poetrypress.com/avec. You can = enter the gallery by scrolling to the bottom of Basil King's bio. Please note that j.pegs are only approximations of the original art. BTW, Basil King has a new book out, _Warp Spasam_, from Spuyten Duyvil Press (www.spuytenduyvil.net). Cydney Chadwick ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 14:43:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Spiral Bridge Subject: One Final Reminder Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" One last reminder, this Sunday is the Final Installment of "The Naked Readings" at The Space, 18 Broad Street in Bloomfield, NJ. These events have traditionally been sandwiched between two great slices of live music and this coming evening shall live up to the high quality history of musicianship we have been so honored to present. Opening: Nikki Borodi Closing: 5,000 Fingers The Show starts at 6pm and goes till just about midnight. We are all very excited to hear the voices of the Poets and look forward to seeing you there. Please click the below web site link for exact directions to The Space from Yahoo Maps and more information about Spiral Bridge and our upcoming events. http://www.geocities.com/spiralbridgepoets/The_Naked_Readings.html This Friday @ The Space we are also pleased to announce the opening of the Art Exhibition of: Matt Di Leo Antonio Noguiero Jenn Schwartz Jesus Moreno With music by: The American Water Color Movement And we thank you for your support. ----------------------------------------------- For reference, your link to this Invite is: http://www.evite.com/r?iid=YPDFYCDBZZIXYZZZKXPO 48484848 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:20:37 -0500 Reply-To: whitebox@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: whitebox@EARTHLINK.NET Organization: whitebox Subject: BLAME at WHITE BOX MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit On December 15th 2001, from noon to 6pm, in the true spirit of democracy, Larry Litt will be at White Box to document your personal opinions, serious to absurd, on the state of homeland politics, security/insecurity, economics, paranoia, malcontention, arrogance, and hubris. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHITE BOX presents... LARRY LITTíS BLAME PROJECT In Spring 2002 Larry Litt will present a video installation at White Box featuring opinions from a wide variety of global and native New Yorkers. The topic: Who or What Is To Blame For The Current State Of Social And Political Affairs In The Homeland. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I like many others believe we have been deliberately and deviously excluded from the current Homeland political conversation. Itís time to be included. What are you thinking? We the people want to know. Participants names will not be used. There is now the distinct possibility of The Blame Project video airing on Public Television. Refreshments will be served. Reply to be scheduled for a brief recording session. See you there. Best, Larry Litt The Litt Wit@aol.com (or contact WHITE BOX...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHITE BOX 525 WEST 26TH STREET (BETWEEN 10TH AND 11TH AVENUES) NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 212.714.2347 TEL. WWW.WHITEBOXNY.ORG ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 17:47:33 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit you might try amazon and half.com these kinds of items are eeking their way to walmart. can you post or bc info about the course. sounds interesting. tom bell ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kathy Lou Schultz" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 4:21 PM Subject: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* > I need 19 copies of Lyn Hejinian's *My Life* for a course I'm teaching this > spring at the University of Pennsylvania on "Re-envisioning Personal > Narratives." The Penn Book Center (an independent book seller here) can't > get it, so I called SPD in Berkeley myself and they have *no* copies. Any > suggestions on where to go next? > Many thanks, > Kathy Lou Schultz > -- > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Kathy Lou Schultz > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou > > Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press > http://www.duckpress.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:18:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Standard Schaefer Subject: Re: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Kathylou: Call Messerli at S&M (323) 857-1115 I think I saw plenty of copies there a few months back. SS ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kathy Lou Schultz" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 2:21 PM Subject: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* > I need 19 copies of Lyn Hejinian's *My Life* for a course I'm teaching this > spring at the University of Pennsylvania on "Re-envisioning Personal > Narratives." The Penn Book Center (an independent book seller here) can't > get it, so I called SPD in Berkeley myself and they have *no* copies. Any > suggestions on where to go next? > Many thanks, > Kathy Lou Schultz > -- > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Kathy Lou Schultz > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou > > Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press > http://www.duckpress.net > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:32:07 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cheryl doppler burket Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Another thing about SFSU is the CW dept sponsors a book contest for graduate students - alternating poetry and fiction each year. The winner gets a perfect bound full length book. It's run through 14 Hills The SFSU Review and is partially supported by both that magazine and by SFSU student fees through the university. All through volunteer labor. I say this because SFSU does quite a bit to support writing & I don't like to see it singled out. It's true that if you don't like the terms of a contest, don't enter it. It's like saying we all should agree on how these things are run, which is ridiculous. cheryl burket sfsu 2000 grad, former poetry ed 14 hills --- Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson wrote: > As Kathy Lou and I both know as graduates of it, > SFSU is underfunded. That > is what she means, what she said. It's a public > school, and not a stuffy UC > either. > The Poetry Center is a great institution that in my > understanding is only > partially helped by SFSU. > Being housed in an academic setting, to borrow a > line from another thread, > makes things strange to view. For example, though > CCAC (and formerly New > College) is kind enough to give Small Press Traffic > office and venue space, > all of our other expenses (honoraria, publications, > publicity, other > overhead, etc) are covered by govt and private > funders, and our community. > In this way we remain autonomous, but it is a bit > double edged when members > of our dear community assume we are wholly funded by > an institution, and > thus don't realize how important it is for them to > support us if we are to > continue. > Especially if we are to continue to be autonomous in > terms of programming. > Elizabeth Treadwell > > > http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 14:09:43 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Support the Arts in Tucson: become a POG Subscriber, Sponsor, or Patron Comments: To: Tenney Nathanson MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit December 12, 2001 Dear Friends of POG: This is POG’s sixth season of public arts programming. Over the years we have brought to Tucson (or co-sponsored) such important writers as Bob Perelman, David Bromige, Leslie Scalapino, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Jerry Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Lydia Davis, Michael Davidson, Erica Hunt, Juan Felipe Herrera, Norman Fischer, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Rae Armantrout, David Shapiro, Bernadette Mayer, Juliana Spahr, Bill Luoma, Gil Ott, Maggie Jaffe, Lyn Hejinian, Diane Glancy, Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Cole Swensen, Myung Mi Kim, Joe Amato, Hank Lazer, and Jackson Mac Low. And we have presented—typically on the same program with such visiting writers—Arizona writers, musicians, dancers, and visual and dramatic artists such as Jim Waid, Cynthia Miller, Victor Masayesva, Dan Featherston, A.C. Huerta, Alex Garza, Ned Schaper, Nancy Solomon, Barbara Penn, Maurice Grossman, Danny Lopez, the Ge Oidag Village (Big Fields) Traditional Dancers, Anne Bunker, Barbara Cully, Gwen Ray, Samuel Ace, Eno Washington, Sharon Wahl, Ted Pope, Jay Vosk, Jesse Seldess, and Dan Buckley. Both the range of writers and artists we present and our commitment to cross-over arts programming make POG a unique and vital presence on the Tucson arts scene. Our Fall 2001 program continued this tradition, featuring visiting poets Peter Gizzi and Mary Rising Higgins and local writers and artists Jon Anderson, Michael Cherney, Sheila Pitt, and Ann Tracy-Lopez. Our spring 2002 program is especially exciting. Along with local visual artist Chris Morrey we will present visiting writers Robin Blaser, Ron Silliman, Lisa Jarnot, Benjamin Hollander, and David Matlin. We also plan to bring poet Timothy Liu to Tucson, co-sponsoring his appearance at the Tucson Poetry Festival. For the Fall 2001- Spring 2002 season POG’s programming expenses are roughly $8,000. Approximately $2,000 of this is covered by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tucson/Pima Arts Counil. The remaining $6,000 needs to be raised through event admissions, our annual fundraising dinner, sale of POG-related books and broadsides, and (to a significant extent) individual and corporate contributions. We ask that you consider one of the following ways of supporting POG this year: · purchasing a Season Subscription: $30. Free admission to all POG events. · becoming a POG Sponsor: $50. For a contribution of $50 or more, you can become a POG Sponsor. In exchange you receive a Season Subscription and any one of the following: a copy of the POG ONE or POG TWO anthology (while these last), a beautiful POG t-shirt, or an alternate gift still to be determined · becoming a POG Patron: $100. For a contribution of $100 or more you can become a POG Patron. In exchange you receive a Season Subscription and TWO of the following: POG ONE, POG TWO, a POG t-shirt, or an alternate gift still to be determined POG is an IRS recognized 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. All contributions are fully tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. If you’d like to purchase a Season Subscription or become a POG Sponsor or POG Patron, you can do so via email by clicking here: mailto:pog@gopog.org Please tell us whether you wish to be a Subscriber, Sponsor, or Patron. If you are becoming a Sponsor or Patron, please also let us know whether you’d like your name listed along with other POG donors in our publicity (we hope you’ll let us use your name). Then mail your check, made out to POG, to: POG, 7931 East Presidio Road, Tucson, AZ 85750. We’ll add you to our list of Subscribers, Sponsors, and Patrons; just mention your name at the door and you’ll be admitted free of charge to all POG events. If you are becoming a Sponsor or Patron, you can claim your free gift(s) at any POG event. If you prefer, you can instead print out the form which will come to you momentarily in a separate email message; send it, along with your check, to the address listed above. Thank you for your interest in POG programming. Sincerely, Tenney Nathanson President, POG Board of Directors mailto:tenney@dakotacom.net mailto:nathanso@u.arizona.edu http://www.u.arizona.edu/~nathanso/tn/ POG: http://www.gopog.org mailto:pog@gopog.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 14:13:19 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: POG printable form Comments: To: Tenney Nathanson MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit POG Subscription Form Fall 2001 Spring 2002 To become a POG Season Subscriber, Sponsor, or Patron, please print out and complete this form and mail it, along with your check made out to POG, to: POG, 7931 East Presidio Road, Tucson, AZ 85750. Name: E-Mail address (optional): Street address (optional): Phone (optional): Please select one of the following categories by circling it: Season Subscription: $30. Free admission to all POG events. POG Sponsor: $50. For a contribution of $50 or more, you can become a POG Sponsor. In exchange you receive a Season Subscription and any one of the following: a copy of the POG ONE or POG TWO anthology (while these last), a beautiful POG t-shirt, or an alternate gift still to be determined POG Patron: $100. For a contribution of $100 or more you can become a POG Patron. In exchange you receive a Season Subscription and TWO of the following: POG ONE, POG TWO, a POG t-shirt, or an alternate gift still to be determined (POG is an IRS recognized 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. All contributions are fully tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.) If you are becoming a Sponsor or Patron: may we list you along with other POG donors in our publicity? YES / NO mailto:tenney@dakotacom.net mailto:nathanso@u.arizona.edu http://www.u.arizona.edu/~nathanso/tn/ POG: http://www.gopog.org mailto:pog@gopog.org ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:33:49 +0100 Reply-To: jd@sil.at Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeff Derksen Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20011211101041.0258a380@pop.buf.adelphia.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Christopher Dewdney\'s \"Grid Erectile\" borrows formally from Smart\'s _Jubilante Agnos_.... > > > At 09:40 AM 12/8/01 -0500, you wrote: > >Dear Listees, > > > >A friend of mine is writing a reception history of Christopher Smart\'s > work. > >I was wondering if anyone might be aware of interest in Smart\'s poetry on > >the part of contemporary poets. It occurs to me that Smart is sometimes > >mentioned as a kind of proto-avant-gardist--for example in Rasula and > >McCaffrey\'s \"Imagining Language\" (now in paperback and a must-own book, > >incidentally). Smart often gets passing credit for his early free-verse > >experimentalism, though that credit has traditionally been attributed as > >much to Smart\'s madness as to his poetic program. In one sense, it\'s > >possible to read Smart\'s poetry (much like Hopkins\' or Herbert\'s > innovations > >on behalf of devotional poetry) as displaying a kind of > >anti-nominalism--whereby manipulating poetic form becomes a way of > >recovering language from its fallen state. This to me seems a much more > >appealing reading of Smart\'s poetics than the standard traditional reading > >of Smart as anomalous madman. > > > >I\'m aware of Thomas Vogler\'s excellent article on Smart in Sulfur, and > Allen > >Ingram\'s work as well. But I\'d greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who > >might know of other references to--or appropriations of--Smart\'s poetics > by > >contemporary experimentalists. > > > >Paul Stephens > > > > > >* * * * * > > > >\".while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling > of > >thorns, no I forgot, it\'s impossible, it\'s myself I hear, howling behind > my > >dissertation.\" > > > >--Samuel Beckett, \"The Unnamable\" > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 19:37:29 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jacques Debrot Subject: Virus MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi, I just received an e-mail attachment today with the heading: Re: Why I was a bad poet (was: greatness; editors, editing, etc.). The sender came up as Noriko Shimoda, but apparently a virus has gotten into her address book and everyone in her computer has received it--possibly it's spread to POETICS. This is the 3rd time a virus connected to the "bad poet" thread has circulated, so if I were you I definitely wouldn't open attachments having anything to do w/ that aborted conversation. Best, Jacques ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 03:37:01 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit But Bill. I might critique "capitalism" etc but it doesnt meean that Merrill with his privliges, money, and many things we dislike (like say Pound or Wallace Stevens in a different way) about him wasnt a great poet of his kind; i think that's what is criticised mostly ....sometimes his over mannerist and near-orgulously ornate complexity of hidden meanings tropes and references: some of his works are corruscating.....in a more "distanced" way he was self-aware - obviously of his gayness so to speak and the Proustian clossetting of his life, the near suffocation of the soul that being "priviliged" (is it privilege?) can engender: accusing Merrill of being too rich is like accusing Mandelstam of being too poor or Trakl too fond of his sister and too sensitive about the first world war Williams too arrogantly a male and so on: although I know you're point is the misuse of privilige. That may be true but he wouldnt be the first: we are all ( if only a little bit) editor-grovellors....or at least we show a bit more deference to those that might publish us: how much more easy to be on good terms with someone who likes, or says he/she likes ones own work! (Altho to Millie I'd a say when do you write to order: in other words what happenned to "INTEGRITY" that is sourgrapes??! but I have thought of sending in poems "appropriate" to a certain publication and thus besmirching my soul (my justification being mammon)...... This all ties in with your (Millie's, my) comments on book comps and prizes etc Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 6:54 AM Subject: Re: James Merrill In a message dated 12/10/01 7:35:08 PM, Isat@AOL.COM writes: << If only Merrill had a better editor, he could become, I am convinced, one hell of experimental poet. Here is a radical re-edit of his poem '164 East 72nd Street.' It's called now 'My Grandmother' (the original can be found at http://nytimes.org/books/01/03/04/reviews/merrill-164poem.html) My grandmother must be replaced. Frantic adolescense wheeled an old lady into her mink, but what remains? Today’s memo from the Tenant’s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? I have tried many lives — ten minutes each — to repair the sonic fallout of a single scare. Do you ever wonder? “oh, my dear, not here.” My grandmother moved South to live in style, to drop dead in it. Our life is turning juices blue. Imagine evenings of intensive care, early nocturnal scenes making the brickwork ripple. My grandma made my own sense. Far from high finance, steak house, or quick sex, things in purple fade like dreams. It’s impossible to feel. ___ Igor Satanovsky 2001 >> Nice one, Igor! I've never been a fan of Merrill largely due to his gerrymandering poetry prizes. Too rich with too much influence which he didn't hesitate to exercise. Scripts For the Pageant is interesting, though. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 14:46:25 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: WIlbur Jenkins Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/12/2001 11:12:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > I could > actually have put together a chapbook of poems about family issues, poems > about relationships, all in standard MFA program free verse, and I would > have had a better chance (though I assume I still wouldn't have won as I am > Wow! You can do that? Write poetry like that? Made-to-order. Wow. Maybe I'll start a fast-food-poetry contest, dig. If you backchannel me, I'd like to personally award you a prize. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 03:50:31 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I solved that problem (altho admittedly only one copy) by photocopying "My Life" at the Auckland University Library - "illegal" I know - but I did purchase "Cell". There may back issues. Lyn Hejinian herself must be contactable. Good luck with you courses. Hope all is well, Richard. PS On ADDALL there is 1 "paper back" (allcopies were wernt they) for about NZ$11.00 and the rest (3) are about NZ$150.00 (being inscribed or whatever) so that at least shows that book dealers are aware of her significance if not otherwise selling them cheaply. ADDALL includes Abebooks.com, Bilblion, Justbooks and many others. So one for about US$4.60 plus postage and the rest ~ US$60.00 plus postage & packaging. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kathy Lou Schultz" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 11:21 AM Subject: Sun & Moon: Hejinian's *My Life* > I need 19 copies of Lyn Hejinian's *My Life* for a course I'm teaching this > spring at the University of Pennsylvania on "Re-envisioning Personal > Narratives." The Penn Book Center (an independent book seller here) can't > get it, so I called SPD in Berkeley myself and they have *no* copies. Any > suggestions on where to go next? > Many thanks, > Kathy Lou Schultz > -- > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Kathy Lou Schultz > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou > > Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press > http://www.duckpress.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:43:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: White Chickens MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit William Carlos Williams - The Academy of American Poets by Ron Padgett Thu, 6 Sep 2001 The birds are on fire Previously recently highlighted articles. Beside the white chickens. William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. With rain water beside the white chickens. Document. the white chickens: White chickens. Morello Visits Mumia Sargent, Daniels Audio. Removed from the Internet last Thursday. Internet last Thursday: Company Skynet. Iraradio. 11. that would detail support for a truly humanitarian intervention, Would detail support for a truly humanitarian intervention. NGO Sardar Sarovar Project Pro Democracy Campaign plus more. 11. postmark 11; A NEW BOOKSTORE. BOOKSTORE; DEPENDS UPON A NEW BOOKSTORE; POSTCARD FROM PARIS postmark 11, Was one of the bravest heroes in the history of Afghanistan. history of Afghanistan, peaceful Afghanistan, His entire lifetime fighting to free his nation. fact, Who oppose the Taliban. for Reparations Monbiot: 10 Reasons for Reparations Monbiot. With rain water beside the white chickens. Wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens: much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens, So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. A red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Last June. devotion to a religious cause by just a few true believers can cause chaos among the infidel; Few true believers can cause chaos among the infidel. leaders like bin Laden appear to be trying to do is to show that devotion to a religious cause by just a few true believers can cause chaos among the infidel; cause chaos among the infidel, What the terrorist leaders like bin Laden appear to be trying to do is to show that devotion to a religious cause by just a few true believers can cause chaos among the infidel. // --> The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens, beside the white chickens; So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Who Benefits from Free Trade Fisk. The white chickens. Allen Interviews Peters Peters answers questions about liberatory paths r. Peters Peters answers questions about liberatory paths r; Fisk. Phillip; Insecurity Douglas Valentine places the USA Patriot act in context Starhawk: Krugman. Warnock. Albert Audio. fbi/legal updates Shiva: Manning Marable Shiva, Pro Democracy Campaign plus more. like the Gulf War before it, for his campaign against the terrorists: the key figures involved, President Bush will never acknowledge that conventional geopolitics plays a role in US policy. Osama bin Laden: We are unlikely to hear any of this from the key figures involved. Their doom on this day. Have similar thoughts about the ordinary people who have been trapped in the parts of the Pentagon which were also struck by a jet. And Power Massive Corporate DataBase NGO Albert. DU Coverage Pages Grubacic; and Power Massive Corporate DataBase NGO Albert, Joann Wypijewski. Massive Corporate DataBase NGO Albert. Of the world's great faiths produces suicide bombers. Safire I suspect (or hope; Instinct is replaced with a pseudo- religious fantasy of a killer's self-martyrdom leading to eternity in paradise surrounded by adoring virgins. Pakistan, is the challenge to Muslim clerics everywhere, Suicide and the recnt tradegdy. Of the world's great faiths produces suicide bombers. Glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. // --> The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens; --> The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Exploring Poetry. ------------------ paderum v5.3 Bill Luoma ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:49:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Broder Subject: Ear Inn Readings--December 2001 Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit The Ear Inn Readings Saturdays at 3:00 326 Spring Street New York City FREE December 15 Marj Hahne, Dermot Hannon, Jackie Sheeler December 22 Christmas Break--No Reading December 29 New Year's Break--No Reading Join us on January 5 for readings by Madelena Montiel, Harry Waitzman, and another surprise guest. Happy Holidays! For more information, contact Michael Broder or Jason Schneiderman at (212) 246-5074. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:11:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Harry Nudel Subject: m&r...maligant black olive sheet cake...Jerry Rothenberg at 70... the only black person at the reading was blind... politically correct olives..no more salami from 2nd Ave Cheese...now on 3rd Ave... two large sheet cakes...large pieces...where one would have been more than 'nuff... the mo fame poet turns to the babe...bye no intro....not that i blame him...fame is as does is as does is as does..happy birthday...DRn... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:45:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Take of the Continuity Girl MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Take of the Continuity Girl The continuity girl wears a big baggy sweater and carries a clipboard and Polaroid camera. She walks among the naked actors and actress and takes notes, whose hand is where, which face is turned towards - and which away from - the camera. This is amazing. whose finger has a torn nail - whose breasts already damp - the degree of nipple erection (easy here) - all of this is carefully noted by the continuity girl. There is sweat running from a shoulder. The terrorist has his knife to a neck from the left - no, from the right - side; "R" appears almost by command on the continuity chart. Is this the numbered scene, the only scene - the continuity girl knows, takes everything into account. She writes "Alan is gagged tightly, he is having trouble breathing. If he suffocates, this will be the only take." She writes "n/g" as the gag is loosened. Azure has been shaved, head to toe; Azure is constantly shuddering. The continuity girl writes "Azure moves - lock structure in edit - there is no room for error - there is nothing but error." The continuity girl notes the bruises and bites on four, on five, breasts. She notes, "Day 3." She notes, "This is the second day." It is the goal of the continuity girl to make sure the world is whole, to make sure it remains contained, coherent, logical beneath the chaos the rest of us take for granted. _ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 21:03:54 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Leonard Brink Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Since the Poetry Center Award is for books that have already been published it's probably the publisher who pays, not the author. And the publisher is willing to pay because the award brings some recognition for the book that the publisher wants. I don't see how anyone is being scammed here. If the judge happens to be familiar with the author of the winning entry, well...what credible judge would not be familiar with several writers/books deserving of the award? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 02:19:52 +0100 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: chap MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Millie-- The previous winners have been all over the place. "seeing who won made me realize that I didn't have a chance from the moment they read the first poem." I don't subscribe to one form of poetry. If you know Pavement Saw's titles they are not of one poetic affiliation. For example, this year we published a 92 page poem written 7 languages by Ivan Arguelles & John M. Bennett on one end & a poet who won the Larry Levis Poetry prize, Jeffrey Levine, on the other end. Did you have a chance? Sure you did. "It would be grate if they put in a statement about what the judes like." All the young judes are obscure as not to be judahs. Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 03:42:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: The Continuity Girl MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - The Continuity Girl The continuity girl asserts the fundamental forces of the world. She writes 5; then 5/under erasure; she writes 4; she exhausts the series. She adds the cosmological constant, planck's constant; she erases them; she includes them; she erases them. The slate is a mess. The slate is unreadable. The slate mimics the world. The slate becomes the world. She continues to write. She is wearing a baggy sweater and carrying a Polaroid camera. She carries a great number of accessories: tripod, telephoto, wide-angle, scanning-transmission electron microscope, interferometer, neutron telescope. There are a continuous number of scenes; she numbers them according to the continuum. It is not so difficult to describe the actors; they are also continuous, and the transformation of props and objects occurs according to aristotelian logic and fluid morphology. Only certain quantum leaps give her trouble, but these radical discontinuities also permit discontinuities within or across scenes, and need not be annotated. For the rest, everything appears relatively differentiable. The slate is a mess. The slate is a continuous mess. _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:20:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rebecca Wolff Subject: once more in NYC Comments: To: ira@angel.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Please come to a poetry reading Tuesday, December 18th, at 6:30 pm New School, 66 W. 12th Street in Room 501 Rebecca Wolff author of Manderley (http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f01/wolff.html) and Cate Marvin author of World's Tallest Disaster (http://www.sarabandebooks.org/Authors/Cate%20Marvin/998400128208) introduced by Robert Pinsky, who chose these books for the National Poetry Series and the Sarabande Books contest, respectively. ********** Rebecca Wolff Fence et al. 14 Fifth Avenue, #1A New York, NY 10011 http://www.fencemag.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:42:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Schlesinger Subject: A Charles Reznikoff Author Page at the EPC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I am pleased to announce that a new Charles Reznikoff Author Page is = now up at the EPC @ http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/reznikoff/. The page = features a complete bibliography, selections from his poetry, links to = current Reznikoff scholarship, audio links, and essays by Paul Auster = and Dan Featherston. I would appreciate any suggestions or comments. =20 Best Wishes to All, Kyle Schlesinger=20 ks46@acsu.buffalo.edu =20 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:42:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: claity@DREW.EDU Subject: MSA4 Conference: CFP Comments: To: h-afro-am@h-net.msu.edu, hdsoc-l@uconnvm.uconn.edu, tse@po.missouri.edu, victoria@listserv.indiana.edu, modbrits@listserv.kent.edu, h-amstdy@h-net.msu.edu, modernism@lists.village.virginia.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit CALL FOR SEMINAR AND PANEL PROPOSALS MSA 4 THE MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 31 October - 3 November, 2002 University of Wisconsin, Madison The MSA Founded in 1999, the Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Through its annual conferences and its journal, Modernism/Modernity, the organization seeks to develop an international and interdisciplinary forum for exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly expanding field. For more information, please see our web site at http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa. The fourth annual Modernist Studies Association Conference will be held at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on the shores of Lake Monona in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the conference will feature plenaries, panels, seminars, poetry readings, and film screenings related to the study of modernism and modernity. Calls for seminar and panel proposals follow. Please note that the deadline for seminar proposals is 15 February 2002, the deadline for panel proposals 1 May 2002. Please note also that MSA rules do not allow participants to lead a seminar and present a paper for a panel at the same conference. Participants may present a panel paper and participate in a seminar, or chair a panel and lead a seminar. All who attend the MSA Conference must be members of the organization with dues paid for 2002. CALL FOR SEMINAR LEADERS Deadline: 15 February 2002 SEMINARS Participation of conferees in seminars is one of the most significant features of the MSA conference. Seminars are small-group discussion sessions for which participants write brief "position papers" that are read and circulated prior to the conference. Seminars generate lively and valuable exchange during the conference and in some cases have created a network of scholars who have continued to work together. Further, the seminar model allows most conferees to seek financial support from their institutions as they educate themselves and their colleagues on subjects of mutual interest. SEMINAR TOPICS There are no limits on topics. Past experience has shown that the more clearly defined the topic and the more guidance provided by the leader, the more useful the discussion has been to people's individual projects. Seminar topics at the 2001 MSA conference included "Literary Modernism and Visual Culture," "Modernism and Masculinity," and "New Approaches to Little Magazines." For a full listing, see the MSA Web site. PROPOSING A SEMINAR Seminar proposals must include the following information. Please assist us by sending this information in exactly the order given here. Use as a subject line: MSA 4 SEMINAR PROPOSAL / [LAST NAME OF SEMINAR LEADER]. * The seminar leader's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, mailing address, phone, fax, and e-mail address * A brief description (up to 100 words) of the proposed topic * A current curriculum vitae for the seminar leader Send seminar proposals by 15 Febrary 2002 to: Elizabeth Evans, efevans@facstaff.wisc.edu. Email submission is strongly preferred. For more information, visit our website: http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa. Questions not addressed on the website may be directed to David Chinitz, msa-seminars@luc.edu, or Douglas Mao, dmao@fas.harvard.edu. Seminars will be selected in late March. Please note that participants may not present a paper and lead a seminar at the same conference. Participants may present a panel paper and participate in a seminar, or chair a panel and lead a seminar. LEADING A SEMINAR The MSA will advertise seminars and register participants. To promote discussion, the size of seminars is limited to a maximum of 15. Leaders may, at their option, invite one or two individuals to join the seminar in some special role. Some leaders will wish to share the work of reading and responding to papers with the invited participants; others will simply want to assure a high standard of discussion by involving scholars whose work they know to be important for their topic. Please note that invited participants will not be specially listed as such in the conference program. E-mail addresses for all seminar registrants will be provided to seminar leaders in May. At that time, leaders should * Initiate communications by e-mail, introducing themselves and providing addresses to all participants. * Set guidelines for the seminar. These might include questions to be addressed, reading to be done, and a specified length for the position papers (normally 5-7 pages). * Set firm deadlines, no later than mid-September for the actual exchange of papers. * Exchange and read papers during the 6-8 weeks before the conference. * Plan the seminar format. The MSA will provide guidance, but leaders are, within reasonable limits, free to use the time (two hours) as they see fit. CALL FOR PANEL PROPOSALS Deadline: 1 May 2002 Proposals for panels must include the following information. Please assist us by sending this information in exactly the order given here. Use as a subject line: MSA 4 PANEL PROPOSAL / [LAST NAME OF PANEL ORGANIZER]. * Session title * Session Organizer's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, mailing address, phone, fax, and e-mail address * Chair's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, and contact information (If you cannot identify a moderator, we will locate one for you.) *Panelists' names, paper titles, institutional affiliations, disciplines or departments, and contact information * A 250-word abstract of the panel as a whole. MSA policy on panels: 1. No participant may present more than one paper at one conference, and no participant may both present a paper and lead one of the conference's seminars. 2. We do not accept proposals for individual papers. 3. We encourage interdisciplinary panels, and discourage panels on single authors. 4. We encourage panels with three participants. Panels of four and roundtables of five or six will be considered. 5. Panels composed entirely of graduate students or of participants from a single institution are not likely to be accepted. 6. All MSA panels must have a chair who is not giving a paper. Please attempt to locate a moderator, but if you do not have one, we will locate one for you. Send panel proposals by 1 May 2002 to: Elizabeth Evans, efevans@facstaff.wisc.edu. Email submission is strongly preferred. We will accept those sent by other means when access to e-mail is unavailable. For more information, visit our website: http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa. Questions not addressed on the website may be directed to Jesse Matz, matzj @kenyon.edu or Douglas Mao, dmao@fas.harvard.edu. Panels will be selected in early June. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:02:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "David A. Kirschenbaum" Organization: Boog Literature Subject: Boog Year's Eve Party NYC-music, film, poetry MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Please forward Monday December 31, 2001, 11pm C-Note, 157 Avenue C (and 10th St.) NYC-based small press Booglit invites you to bring in the New Year with broken country, punk rock, indie film, and poetry. music from Ruth Gordon (Sean Cole and Aaron Kiely) & White Collar Crime (Soft Skull Press's Sander Hicks, Nick Colt, Dale W. Miller, and Dan O'Brien ) softskull.com/wcc films from Joel Schlemowitz homepage.newschool.edu/~schlemoj/imptopia/joel_schlemowitz.html poetry from Pom2 co-editor Ethan Fugate and special guests With Boog 2002 calendar by Brendan “Lungfull” Lorber. All proceeds from the calendar go to the New York Arts Recovery Fund (www.nyfa.org/9-11.htm). Info: 212-206-8899 • booglit@theeastvillageeye.com Hosted by Boog editor David A. Kirschenbaum. $8. apologies to those receiving this announcement multiple times ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:20:00 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ian Randall Wilson Subject: "New" Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on Oprah, fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early because of his illness). Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: 9-11-2001 It was a dark day in America. There was no amazing grace. Freedom did not ring. Tragedy attacked sky-high. Fiery terror reigned. Structures collapsed. Red with blood, white with ash, And out-of-the-sky blue. As children trust elders, Citizens find faith in leaders. But they were all blinded, Shocked by the blasts. Undefiable outrage. Undeniable outpouring Of support, even prayer, Or at least, moments of silence. Church and State Could not be separated. A horrific blasting of events With too few happy endings. Can the children sleep Safely in their beds tonight? Can the citizens ever rest Assured of national security again? God, please, bless America... And the rest of our earthly home. Mattie Stepanek Sept. 11, 2001 Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan Franzen here. . .) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:47:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: aversive therapies Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed This comes to me from a friend in Georgia: >Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:53:13 -0500 >X-PH: V4.1@f05n11 >From: Richard Flynn >Subject: Re: Ok LAst one, I promise >To: Aldon Nielsen >X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 > >I bought a teacher's guide to the novel in verse for children, Out of the >Dust, to see if it would give me more ammunition for my diatribe against >the way poetry is taught in schools, and it is providing me with many gems: > >An exercise in writing "free verse" defined as "a type of modern poetry >which is not written in any special form and does not require rhyme or >rhythm (!) Free verse changes how a story is told and adds more >information on how people are feeling." > >But my favorite comes from the bio of the author, Karen >Hesse: "Hesse began her writing efforts with poetry. With two small >children to nurture, she found it hard to focus on poetry and turned to >literature." > >:-) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "I think old zero has lost very much of his self respect." --Emily Norcross Dickinson Aldon Lynn Nielsen George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature Department of English The Pennsylvania State University 116 Burrowes University Park, PA 16802-6200 (814) 865-0091 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:00:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aldon Nielsen Subject: Fwd: INTERVIEW: lorenzo thomas on black poetry and modernism Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable >From: Kalamu ya Salaam >Subject: INTERVIEW: lorenzo thomas on black poetry and modernism > > > > >>INTERVIEW: lorenzo thomas on black poetry and modernism >=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D > >[http://www.writenet.org/poetschat/poetschat_l_thomas.html] >***go to the website for downloads of lorenzo thomas reading poetry and for >hyperlinks to other sites and followup info on particular items mentioned= in >this interview*** > >P o e t s C h a t > >POETS ON POETRY: Daniel Kane interviews poets about their poems, their >poetics, and their ideas on how to teach poetry to students in grades K-12. >This month, Lorenzo Thomas talks about the connections between >African-American derived prosody and modernism, and suggests ways in which >teachers can make historical links between texts not usually considered as >related. This interview is an excerpt from a longer, more comprehensive= piece >to be published in the book Poetry and Pedagogy, edited by Juliana Spahr= and >Joan Retallack > >Poet On Poetry Menu >Interview with Poet >Download Reading Of "Five Leaf Clover" By Lorenzo Thomas >NEW OPTION: MP3 Format: Download Reading Of "Five Leaf Clover" By Lorenzo >Thomas > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ >Lorenzo Thomas is a widely published poet and critic whose works have >appeared in many journals including African American Review, Living Blues, >Partisan Review, and Ploughshares. His poetry books include Chances Are Few >and The Bathers, and Sound Science; he also edited the Teachers & Writers >Collaborative book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African >American Literature. He's an Associate Professor of English at the= University >of Houston-Downtown. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ >Daniel Kane interviews the poet Lorenzo Thomas > >DK: An "avant-garde" anthology like Rothenberg and Joris's Poems For the >Millennium is interesting in that it includes blues lyrics by Ma Rainey in >the same company as excerpts from Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons." Is= this >kind of historical thinking and connective work useful for you as a= teacher? >LT: I certainly understand and appreciate why Rothenberg and Joris's Poems >for the Millennium has to include both Ma Rainey and Gertrude Stein. >Certainly, listening to Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith might help one to >appreciate Stein's " Melanctha." Or maybe not. > >DK: Say you want to teach Stein's "Tender Buttons" on its own to a group of >students for whom poetry - all poetry - is a mystery. How might you discuss >something like "a white hunter is nearly crazy" without driving them and >yourself crazy? >LT: Uh huh. Tender Buttons is a crazy book and the white hunter text calls= to >mind the somewhat offensive saying about mad dogs & Englishmen-but then it >was Gertrude Stein's little friend Ernest Hemingway who actually grew up to >be a great white hunter. What's great about Tender Buttons (1914) is its >incomprehensibility, its innovative abstraction. The early fans of the book >included Kay Boyle and Bob Brown. I think that Brown, in particular, was a >true believer in the idea behind Tender Buttons. He is now completely >forgotten, but in 1932 Brown wrote an article titled "Optical Balloon= Juice" >in a little magazine called Contempo where he declared, "I'm not really >interested in writing either prose or poetry. All I want is words. Words= with >the punch of hieroglyphics, words with the sweep and color of painters' >lines, twenty-mule-team vigorous vulgar words with a hee-haw kick to them." > >Now, how in the heck did he predict TV shows of the 1950s and 60s way back >then? > >Anyway, silliness aside, Brown pointed out that he was interested in the >overlooked metaphors of everyday speech: "Alley apples for bricks. Human= hobo >slang. Alligator bait for fried liver. Inelegant but elevating." Thankfully >he didn't include the phrase we used for chipped beef breakfasts when I was >in the Navy-that one was hardly elevating. But his other examples are >interesting: "Thieves jargon, criminal cant. Dangler for exhibitionist. >Lord's Supper for Prison food. Bone-orchard for graveyard. Splinter-belly= for >carpenter." >You can also imagine how delighted he probably was with the coinages of the >tabloid newspapers. It may be worth mentioning that, in the late 1920s,= Brown >seems to have pioneered the kind of cartoon/poems that I first came across= in >Kenneth Patchen's work. > >Someone may say that Bob Brown's idea actually leads away from Stein; that >hers is an individual, indeed solitary, project while the creative >development of slang is collective communication. To me, that's OK.= Exploring >the distinction is itself a profitable inquiry. > > >DK: Might Brown and Stein help emphasize the possibilities for language as >plastic material - stuff you can play with apart from "making sense"? >LT: Attentiveness to language itself, to words, is the first skill demanded >of both poets and careful readers. Much too often by the time students= reach >high school or college they have been taught to read for the purpose of >extracting "content"-or specific bits of information. Standardized tests= and >college entrance exams focus on that approach. That kind of reading is like >panning for gold. It is certainly not the best way to read either poetry or >fiction; and, more importantly, that is not the correct model for listening >to music or to the pronouncements of our politicians. > >There are three levels of attentiveness. First, there is attention to the >subject matter of a text or an utterance. Second, attention to the shape of >the argument or discourse. Finally, there is attention to the entire >performance. Ideally, a book is the record of a mind at work. The third= level >of attentiveness is focused on examining that aspect of a text. > >But to go back and answer your question, I suppose I could teach Tender >Buttons as if it were a kind of sketch-book. Then it would provide certain >models for students to analyze or emulate. For example: > >* Creative Writing exercise: Pick an object in your kitchen. DO NOT NAME >IT. Write about it using only metaphor. In other words, describe it in a= way >that no one has ever before thought of. If the rest of the class can't= guess >what the heck you're talking about, then . . . . > >I suppose the instructor can decide whether that deserves an "A" or an "F." > >* Grammar lesson: Better yet, we might think about the list of equations >offered by Bob Brown: > >"Bone-orchard for graveyard," for example. That one rhymes, doesn't it? >What's the logic involved in the substitution of words, images, or ideas in >these slang metaphors? > >Or, again, what about that line concerning mad dogs and Englishmen? Is it= the >name of a rock album? A signifyin(g) comment by the "natives" about their >colonial bosses? A bar-room joke told by the layabout colonial bosses in= the >subjunctive, i.e., putting words into the mouths of the Other for their own >amused self-aggrandizement through ostensibly uncharacteristically honest >self-deprecation? Do we need to call in Erving Goffman? "If," as Louis >Armstrong once said, "you have to ask," does that mean your loan= application >will be turned down? Do you get a piece of candy beside your pillow-or a= lump >of coal? > > >DK: Lorenzo, I'm getting a little confused! >LT: Hey, what am I talking about? You see the baleful influence of Gertrude >Stein? >I guess what I am suggesting is that I do not approach teaching Tender >Buttons by promising to assist students in "deciphering" it or= "translating" >it into ordinary English. It is not a text that makes paraphrase an easy >task. It may be much more useful to leave students puzzled while= collectively >attempting to see if we can discern Stein's method. > > >DK: By asking your students to move away from experiencing the poem via >paraphrase - to cease panning for gold, as it were - and towards reading= the >poem as an experience of process, what might the student then "get" from= such >an experience? >LT: In Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (1996), Brenda Wineapple says >that Tender Buttons shows Gertrude Stein moving "away from the world of >predictable objects predictably named" (371). As such, Stein's experiments >can be useful in getting readers to think about how and why certain aspects >of language work. Do short stories and television commercials follow the >model of our thoughts or do they train us in ways of thinking? If most of= our >speech and writing follows a handful of phrase and sentence patterns, does >breaking out of those predictable patterns yield pleasure or annoyance? > >Recently I had a seminar that read and discussed Jeffery Renard Allen's= novel >Rails Under My Back (2000). The group's initial response was confusion. We >then looked at Allen's poems in Harbors & Spirits (1999) and noted how he >used folkloric themes, allusions, the figures of the Afro-Haitian orishas >(mythological gods and goddesses). Allen's poem "Backstreets," written in >1990, gave us a key to the very poetic prose that he employs in the novel. >Then we were able to consider how the formal structure of the novel differs >from the structures of his poems. At some point, I think, someone will >carefully compare the structure-as well as the thematic content--of Rails >Under My Back to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Jean Toomer's= Cane >(1923). But the first real problem -with Rails or any other= self-consciously >innovative, nonlinear, or avant-garde text-is to find a place to enter;= what >I'd like to call "a familiar door into the unknown." Getting out of the= maze >afterward may be beside the point. > > >DK: You're someone who is clearly invested in the avant-garde and has= worked >to delineate a specifically African-American derived notion of prosody >through your work in the Black Arts movement and your various prose works. >Have you ever faced any conflict teaching modernist texts including those= of >Pound and Stein (who were not really overt about the influence blues, >minstrelsy and patois played on their own poetics) alongside more >specifically political/racially conscious work? How do you make connections >between, say, the work of Amiri Baraka and Charles Olson? >LT: The entire issue of language dialects fascinates me. There is a= tendency >to think that education and media have begun to threaten the existence of >regional dialects in the United States. But even if that is true, there is >still the fascinating world of fashionable dialects-manners of speech that >are adopted because the speakers think that it makes them "cool" or >impressive or what have you. I have found it interesting to monitor how >Hip-hop has run through the regional African American dialects of Hollis,= New >York to Compton, California to New Orleans to Atlanta. The fans seem to >imitate whichever rhythm is a hit for about six months and then switch to= the >next one. I began to look at that when the question of whether or not there >is a standard African American vernacular was raised. And I suppose that= one >could say that there is indeed such a thing; but that it depends upon= fluency >in all of these regional variations. Still, of course, there is no >impermeable barrier between the vernacular of African Americans and that of >other Americans. > >An essay in the current issue of Antioch Review points out that when Jack >Kerouac and his colleagues set out to capture the rhythms of Black speech= and >hipness in their writing, they didn't bother to spend any time reading the >work of Black writers. Similarly, Ezra Pound seemed to have been familiar >with a number of American dialects but he used what he knew, particularly= in >his letters, to achieve a sort of minstrelsy. Then, of course, there is= John >Berryman who used his own version of minstrel dialect in some of his later >poems. I guess you could say that anything a poet hears can go into the= poem. >That's legitimate. But it is up to the reader or auditor to determine the p >urpose of such detours into other voices.. > >There is also the question of the value that can be attached to a= particular >manner of speech. Discussing the Haitian surrealist poet Clement >Magloire-Saint-Aud=E9 (1912-1971), critic Michael Richardson can assert= that >this poetry represents "the contamination of the French language by the >introduction of a Creole sensibility" (28). Of course, Richardson's= statement >would have pleased rather than offended Magloire-Saint-Aud=E9, a man who >reportedly preferred the company of laborers over the literati. > >Magloire-Saint-Aud=E9 proudly claimed that his poems represented "defiance= and >distrust" of what he called "illusory philosophies" and "unctuous and >sonorous morals" (236). I suppose that because there is an academy in Paris >in charge of the French language, it is possible to contaminate it. > >Since Emerson's nationalistic essay "The Poet" (1844), however, a word like >"contamination" could not possibly be applied to the language (or dialect >choice) of any anglophone American poet-black, white, or brown-except by >someone like Prince Charles in his role as defender of a particular sort of >British English. But when it comes to American poetry, even critics who= might >share that point of view tend to give it a positive spin. In The Dialect of >Modernism (1994), Michael North presents an excitingly daring and= interesting >argument about how T. S. Eliot and Pound used what they thought of as Negro >dialect "against the standard language to make way for an entirely new >literature." In terms of Pound's Pisan Cantos, North argues that Pound >utilizes the Chinese ideogram and Uncle Remus dialect "to demolish the >authority of the European languages and even of the Roman alphabet" (99). > >Come to think of it, "demolish" may be even stronger than "contaminate."= But >there's another view conerning so-called African American dialect. African >American poets in the 1960s and 70s were well educated, well read, and also >quite a bit alienated. We knew-as Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the >Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)-that the classics of >American literature were not written for black people to read (16-17). We >also loved the lingo of the black community, the everyday language we had >grown up with-from heavily ironic polemics of the street-corner orator, or >the fervent prayers of the Church mothers, to the risqu=E9 wit of the >barbershop raconteur. We knew that this language could be both beautiful= and >eloquent. As a result of these perceptions, the Black Arts poets made it >their business to (a) write directly for black readers; and (b) employ >African American vernacular as a literary language. > >I do want to make it clear that this aspect of the Black Arts Movement was= an >affirmation, not a reaction. It was not an attempt to demolish the English >language. One thing I will say about the connections of Modernist ideas to >current poetic practice is that, while grounded in Pound's ideogrammatic >method, Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" theory deeply influenced Amiri >Baraka. It was Baraka's Totem Press that published Olson's essay as a= little >book in 1959. And, through Baraka, the Projective Verse idea was avidly >adopted by the writers of the Black Arts Movement who saw how it was= possible >to "score" their oral approach on the page. Baraka's statement "How You >Sound?" in Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 is a key text to >understanding how that development was set into motion. When Olson says= that >the printed line on the page should represent the poet's breath, then= reading >a properly "scored" poem should allow the person reciting to reproduce the >poet's oral performance. There is nothing mystical about this really; the >same rule applies to the sonnet. > >=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D >Advance your career and become an instructional leader in >the K-12 setting. With an existing Bachelor=92s degree, >National University can help you obtain a Master=92s in >Teaching. >http://click.topica.com/caaaeGLbUrD3obVUh9Bf/NationalUniversity >=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D > >############################################# >this is e-drum, a listserv providing information of interests to black=20 >writers and diverse supporters worldwide. e-drum is moderated by kalamu ya= =20 >salaam (kalamu@aol.com). >---------------------------------- >to subscribe to e-drum send a blank email to: >e-drum-subscribe@topica.com >--------------------------------------------- >to get off the e-drum listserv send a blank email to: >e-drum-unsubscribe@topica.com >---------------------------------------------- >to read past messages or search the archives, go to: >http://www.topica.com/lists/e-drum > >=3D=3D^=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D >This email was sent to: aln10@psu.edu > >EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?bUrD3o.bVUh9B >Or send an email to: e-drum-unsubscribe@topica.com > >T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! >http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register >=3D=3D^=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "I think old zero has lost very much of his self respect." --Emily Norcross Dickinson Aldon Lynn Nielsen George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature Department of English The Pennsylvania State University 116 Burrowes University Park, PA 16802-6200 (814) 865-0091 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 10:53:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: michael amberwind Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Dec 2001 to 12 Dec 2001 (#2001-191) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > I know what you mean as one of the losers you > reference. I spent a lot of > time prep[aring a chapbook for the Pavement Saw > prize, and I was not > surprised that I didn't win. I didn't expect > to win. But I was annoyed at > them when I got tha sample chapbook by one of > their previous winners; it was > all realistic/spill my thoughts and totally > un-innovative. I had done a > chapbook with surreal poems, languagy things, > etc., and seeing who won made > me realize that I didn't have a chance from the > moment they read the first > poem. > It would be grate if they put in a statement > about what the judes like. > they are perfectly free to like what they want > to like, but it is annoying > to have no chance at all because you didn't > know their style. I could > actually have put together a chapbook of poems > about family issues, poems > about relationships, all in standard MFA > program free verse, and I would > have had a better chance (though I assume I > still wouldn't have won as I am > a relative beginner in these things...) > Millie Let's say you wrote some "surrealist" and "innovative" verse - you enter it into a contest and - lo! and behold! - you WIN! Ed McMahon shows up at your house with a big fat prize - publishing houses are calling you - all the bonuses of the world Well guess what... YOU ARE MAINSTREAM!!! Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too - they want to write verse *outside* the mainstream of contemporary poetics and at the same time - recieve all the recognition they feel it is due It seems to me if you are really interested in knowing what the judges prejudices are - you would look at what won in the past - what the judges have written and edited - the sort of work the sponsoring magazine accepts - it would give you a good rule of thumb i am utterly opposed to contests - if poetry cannot exist without my entrance fees - then POETRY DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE READ! fuck the contests - forget them - can you imagine Whitman entering a contest? i doubt it - put your time and energy into better things - the standard MFA Verse is death - the last gasp of an intelligent brain dying - more constricting than any of the regular verse forms the modernists ever attempted to overcome - the wailings of a grotesque grandiosity of ego - sure some of it is "good" - so what? fuggedaboutit! if poetry is going to have a future - it is not going to be from MFA Students - "precious" poetry who get up in front of groups of people reading what is essentially uninteresting even as prose in that "special voice" that poets use (we all know that voice) because they think somehow changing their tone of voice will make a bad poem good - though these poems are rarely bad, merely dusty the moment they are written so say no to contests - donate money to a magazine if you want to - or better still - send a check to a poet you happen to like - forget the institutions - they trap a poet like dragonfly in honey - keeping relics of byegone eras alive for ever and ever ===== ...I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. [from "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 15:09:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: claity@DREW.EDU Subject: 2nd MSA4 CFP w/corrected website! Comments: To: h-afro-am@h-net.msu.edu, hdsoc-l@uconnvm.uconn.edu, tse@po.missouri.edu, victoria@listserv.indiana.edu, modbrits@listserv.kent.edu, h-amstdy@h-net.msu.edu, modernism@lists.village.virginia.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit CALL FOR SEMINAR AND PANEL PROPOSALS MSA 4 THE MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 31 October - 3 November, 2002 University of Wisconsin, Madison The MSA Founded in 1999, the Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Through its annual conferences and its journal, Modernism/Modernity, the organization seeks to develop an international and interdisciplinary forum for exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly expanding field. For more information, please see our web site at The fourth annual Modernist Studies Association Conference will be held at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on the shores of Lake Monona in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the conference will feature plenaries, panels, seminars, poetry readings, and film screenings related to the study of modernism and modernity. Calls for seminar and panel proposals follow. Please note that the deadline for seminar proposals is 15 February 2002, the deadline for panel proposals 1 May 2002. Please note also that MSA rules do not allow participants to lead a seminar and present a paper for a panel at the same conference. Participants may present a panel paper and participate in a seminar, or chair a panel and lead a seminar. All who attend the MSA Conference must be members of the organization with dues paid for 2002. CALL FOR SEMINAR LEADERS Deadline: 15 February 2002 SEMINARS Participation of conferees in seminars is one of the most significant features of the MSA conference. Seminars are small-group discussion sessions for which participants write brief "position papers" that are read and circulated prior to the conference. Seminars generate lively and valuable exchange during the conference and in some cases have created a network of scholars who have continued to work together. Further, the seminar model allows most conferees to seek financial support from their institutions as they educate themselves and their colleagues on subjects of mutual interest. SEMINAR TOPICS There are no limits on topics. Past experience has shown that the more clearly defined the topic and the more guidance provided by the leader, the more useful the discussion has been to people's individual projects. Seminar topics at the 2001 MSA conference included "Literary Modernism and Visual Culture," "Modernism and Masculinity," and "New Approaches to Little Magazines." For a full listing, see the MSA Web site. PROPOSING A SEMINAR Seminar proposals must include the following information. Please assist us by sending this information in exactly the order given here. Use as a subject line: MSA 4 SEMINAR PROPOSAL / [LAST NAME OF SEMINAR LEADER]. * The seminar leader's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, mailing address, phone, fax, and e-mail address * A brief description (up to 100 words) of the proposed topic * A current curriculum vitae for the seminar leader Send seminar proposals by 15 Febrary 2002 to: Elizabeth Evans, efevans@facstaff.wisc.edu. Email submission is strongly preferred. For more information, visit our website: http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa. Questions not addressed on the website may be directed to David Chinitz, msa-seminars@luc.edu, or Douglas Mao, dmao@fas.harvard.edu. Seminars will be selected in late March. Please note that participants may not present a paper and lead a seminar at the same conference. Participants may present a panel paper and participate in a seminar, or chair a panel and lead a seminar. LEADING A SEMINAR The MSA will advertise seminars and register participants. To promote discussion, the size of seminars is limited to a maximum of 15. Leaders may, at their option, invite one or two individuals to join the seminar in some special role. Some leaders will wish to share the work of reading and responding to papers with the invited participants; others will simply want to assure a high standard of discussion by involving scholars whose work they know to be important for their topic. Please note that invited participants will not be specially listed as such in the conference program. E-mail addresses for all seminar registrants will be provided to seminar leaders in May. At that time, leaders should * Initiate communications by e-mail, introducing themselves and providing addresses to all participants. * Set guidelines for the seminar. These might include questions to be addressed, reading to be done, and a specified length for the position papers (normally 5-7 pages). * Set firm deadlines, no later than mid-September for the actual exchange of papers. * Exchange and read papers during the 6-8 weeks before the conference. * Plan the seminar format. The MSA will provide guidance, but leaders are, within reasonable limits, free to use the time (two hours) as they see fit. CALL FOR PANEL PROPOSALS Deadline: 1 May 2002 Proposals for panels must include the following information. Please assist us by sending this information in exactly the order given here. Use as a subject line: MSA 4 PANEL PROPOSAL / [LAST NAME OF PANEL ORGANIZER]. * Session title * Session Organizer's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, mailing address, phone, fax, and e-mail address * Chair's name, institutional affiliation, discipline or department, and contact information (If you cannot identify a moderator, we will locate one for you.) *Panelists' names, paper titles, institutional affiliations, disciplines or departments, and contact information * A 250-word abstract of the panel as a whole. MSA policy on panels: 1. No participant may present more than one paper at one conference, and no participant may both present a paper and lead one of the conference's seminars. 2. We do not accept proposals for individual papers. 3. We encourage interdisciplinary panels, and discourage panels on single authors. 4. We encourage panels with three participants. Panels of four and roundtables of five or six will be considered. 5. Panels composed entirely of graduate students or of participants from a single institution are not likely to be accepted. 6. All MSA panels must have a chair who is not giving a paper. Please attempt to locate a moderator, but if you do not have one, we will locate one for you. Send panel proposals by 1 May 2002 to: Elizabeth Evans, efevans@facstaff.wisc.edu. Email submission is strongly preferred. We will accept those sent by other means when access to e-mail is unavailable. For more information, visit our website: http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa. Questions not addressed on the website may be directed to Jesse Matz, matzj @kenyon.edu or Douglas Mao, dmao@fas.harvard.edu. Panels will be selected in early June. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 20:50:20 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Samuels Subject: Global Englishes Job dear list persons, below is another job opening at UWM. a happening place. please apply on the early end of soon, if this fits your life and profile. cheers, lisa samuels --- Globalization and English Studies. Assistant Professor, tenure-track, specializing in the study of literatures and discursive practices in English outside of Great Britain and North America, including Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand. The ideal candidate will have a strong interdisciplinary knowledge of globalization theory as it applies to the history of English as a diasporic language; secondary interest in cultural theory, linguistics, literacy, or visual arts highly desirable. Opportunities to develop courses and program initiatives related to English and globalization at the undergraduate and graduate level and to work with various UWM research and instructional innovation centers. Applications, with letter, CV, and brief writing sample, should be addressed to Professor James A. Sappenfield, Chair, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Box 413, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201. Deadline: January 15, 2002. Start date: August 19, 2002. The University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee is an AA/EOE. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 14:58:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: Tomorrow Night at the Poetry Project Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit DECEMBER 14, FRIDAY CITY OF FICTION Readings by VICTOR D. LAVALLE, JOHN KEENE, MAGGIE ESTEP and ALAN GOLDSHER VICTOR D. LAVALLE's debut book is a collection of stories titled Slapboxing With Jesus. JOHN KEENE is the author of Annotations from New Directions. MAGGIE ESTEP is the author of Diary of an Emotional Idiot, and the darkly funny collection of inter-connected stories, Soft Maniacs, from Simon & Schuster. ALAN GOLDSHER's works include Hard Bob Academy: The Sidemen of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his debut novel Jam. [10:30 pm] -- Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. Trains F, 6, N, R. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 15:27:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson Subject: Re: Walmart Poetry Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! Elizabeth Treadwell http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:16:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20011211101041.0258a380@pop.buf.adelphia.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I know the poem about his cat, but spelled Joeffry. I was reading it today. I also remember he died in debtors prison in 1771. Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of gene Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 10:13 AM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query I am a reader of Smart and am quite taken by his work, particularly and obviously his poem about Jeffrey his cat. It is strikingly contemporary and feline-accurate. Edward Hirsch has a poem about Smart. Gene At 09:40 AM 12/8/01 -0500, you wrote: >Dear Listees, > >A friend of mine is writing a reception history of Christopher Smart's work. >I was wondering if anyone might be aware of interest in Smart's poetry on >the part of contemporary poets. It occurs to me that Smart is sometimes >mentioned as a kind of proto-avant-gardist--for example in Rasula and >McCaffrey's "Imagining Language" (now in paperback and a must-own book, >incidentally). Smart often gets passing credit for his early free-verse >experimentalism, though that credit has traditionally been attributed as >much to Smart's madness as to his poetic program. In one sense, it's >possible to read Smart's poetry (much like Hopkins' or Herbert's innovations >on behalf of devotional poetry) as displaying a kind of >anti-nominalism--whereby manipulating poetic form becomes a way of >recovering language from its fallen state. This to me seems a much more >appealing reading of Smart's poetics than the standard traditional reading >of Smart as anomalous madman. > >I'm aware of Thomas Vogler's excellent article on Smart in Sulfur, and Allen >Ingram's work as well. But I'd greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who >might know of other references to--or appropriations of--Smart's poetics by >contemporary experimentalists. > >Paul Stephens > > >* * * * * > >".while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling of >thorns, no I forgot, it's impossible, it's myself I hear, howling behind my >dissertation." > >--Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable" ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:36:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Exactly. Most will agree that poetry is fine media that we all enjoy it. Poetry is like my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I like it, but its not for everyone - its for me. Poetry is not for everyone and its not like bread. Well for Neruda bread is something grand. But most of america has a loaf of spongy wonder bread in their box. And when its gone they get more. Bread is everywhere. I am not calling a for poetry that will make your mouth white and brite or sell it to give a full head hair to make people like you. No the poetry we make is appreciated - but how do we get these poems our from under our shadow of the publishing industry? To gain an audience who would be excited by poems if placed in a kinder context. I too have had great readings of poetry with the non poem person. Its been fun. This is why I feel comfortable in asking why not promote it while compromising nothing. Best, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 8:18 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: Walmart poetry Mister Ali wrote: People--even Wal Mart shoppers--like poetry. They've just been tricked. I mean, how and why they've been tricked is a completely separate question which I guess everyone has an opinion on. And I am very happy to see it. Though I also see all of Geoffrey's points. Everyone wants a poem or a song to catch their feelings or ritual on, to enact interiority into the world, and other things, yes? It's not academic. Academic thought yields a different thrill, and wields some other weapons. The tricks are a big topic. Love and hope - Elizabeth Treadwell http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:36:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: FW: [kagyu] Statement About World Peace by the Nobel Laureates (warning: political) (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=X-UNKNOWN Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 15:18:35 -1000 From: Jacques L. Yerby To: Cybermind List Subject: FW: [kagyu] Statement About World Peace by the Nobel Laureates (warning: political) -----Original Message----- From: Merritt, Lu [mailto:lu.merritt@santafe.cc.fl.us] Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 5:03 AM Subject: [kagyu] Statement About World Peace by the Nobel Laureates (warning: political) The statement below (signed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, among others) speaks for itself. Because I think that the statement deserves wider distribution that it seems to be receiving, I am forwarding it. In dharma, Lu NEWS ABOUT THE NOBEL LAUREATES' STATEMENT BEGINS HERE OSLO, Norway-December 7, 2001 (OTVNewswire)--At the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium here yesterday celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize, 100 Nobel laureates have issued a brief but dire warning of the "profound dangers" facing the world. Their statement predicts that our security depends on immediate environmental and social reform. The following is the text of their statement: THE STATEMENT The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If then we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor. The only hope for the future lies in co-operative international action, legitimized by democracy. It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek to shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world. These twin goals will constitute vital components of stability as we move toward the wider degree of social justice that alone gives hope of peace. Some of the needed legal instruments are already at hand, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As concerned citizens, we urge all governments to commit to these goals that constitute steps on the way to replacement of war by law. To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all. THE SIGNATORIES Zhohres I. Alferov Physics, 2000 Sidney Altman Chemistry, 1989 Philip W. Anderson Physics, 1977 Oscar Arias Sanchez Peace, 1987 J. Georg Bednorz Physics, 1987 Bishop Carlos F.X. Belo Peace, 1996 Baruj Benacerraf Physiology/Medicine, 1980 Hans A. Bethe Physics, 1967 James W. Black Physiology/Medicine, 1988 Guenter Blobel Physiology/Medicine, 1999 Nicolaas Bloembergen Physics, 1981 Norman E. Boriaug Peace, 1970 Paul D. Boyer Chemistry, 1997 Bertram N. Brockhouse Physic, 1994 Herbert C. Brown Chemistry, 1979 Georges Charpak Physics, 1992 Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Physics, 1997 John W. Cornforth Chemistry, 1975 Francis H. Crick Physiology/Medicine, 1962 James W. Cronin Physics, 1980 Paul J. Crutzen Chemistry, 1995 Robert F. Curl Chemistry, 1996 His Holiness The Dalai Lama Peace, 1989 Johann Deisenhofer Chemistry, 1988 Peter C. Doherty Physiology/Medicine, 1996 Manfred Eigen Chemistry, 1967 Richard R. Ernst Chemistry, 1991 Leo Esaki Physics, 1973 Edmond H. Fischer Physiology/Medicine, 1992 Val L. Fitch Physics, 1980 Dario Fo Literature, 1997 Robert F. Furchgott Physiology/Medicine, 1998 Walter Gilbert Chemistry, 1980 Sheldon L. Glashow Physics, 1979 Mikhail S. Gorbachev Peace, 1990 Nadine Gordimer Literature, 1991 Paul Greengard Physiology/Medicine, 2000 Roger Guillemin Physiology/Medicine, 1977 Herbert A. Hauptman Chemistry, 1985 Dudley R. Herschbach Chemistry, 1986 Antony Hewish Physics, 1974 Roald Hoffman Chemistry, 1981 Gerardus 't Hooft Physics, 1999 David H. Hubel Physiology/Medicine, 1981 Robert Huber Chemistry, 1988 Francois Jacob Physiology/Medicine, 1975 Brian D. Josephson Physics, 1973 Jerome Karle Chemistry, 1985 Wolfgang Ketterle Physics, 2001 H. Gobind Khorana Physiology/Medicine, 1968 Lawrence R. Klein Economics, 1980 Klaus von Klitzing Physics, 1985> Aaron Klug Chemistry, 1982 Walter Kohn Chemistry, 1998> Herbert Kroemer Physics, 2000 Harold Kroto Chemistry, 1996 Willis E. Lamb Physics, 1955 Leon M. Lederman Physics, 1988 Yuan T. Lee Chemistry, 1986 Jean-Marie Lehn Chemistry, 1987 Rita Levi-Montalcini Physiology/Medicine, 1986 William N. Lipscomb Chemistry, 1976 Alan G. MacDiarmid Chemistry, 2000 Daniel L. McFadden Economics, 2000 C=E9sar Milstein Physiology/Medicine, 1984 Franco Modigliani Economics, 1985 Rudolf L. Moessbauer Physics, 1961 Mario J. Molina Chemistry, 1995 Ben R. Mottelson Physics, 1975 Ferid Murad Physiology/Medicine, 1998 Erwin Neher Physiology/Medicine, 1991 Marshall W. Nirenberg Physiology/Medicine, 1968 Joseph E. Murray Physiology/Medicine, 1990 Paul M. Nurse Physiology/Medicine, 2001 Max F. Perutz Chemistry, 1962 William D. Phillips Physics, 1997 John C. Polanyi Chemistry, 1986 Ilya Prigogine Chemistry, 1977 Burton Richter Physics, 1976 Heinrich Rohrer Physics, 1987 Joseph Rotblat Peace, 1995 Carlo Rubbia Physics, 1984 Bert Sakmann Physiology/Medicine, 1991 Frederick Sanger Chemistry, 1958; 1980 Jos=E9 Saramago Literature, 1998 J. Robert Schrieffer Physics, 1972 Melvin Schwartz Physics, 1988 K. Barry Sharpless Chemistry, 2001 Richard E. Smalley Chemistry, 1996 Jack Steinberger Physics, 1988 Joseph E. Stiglitz Economics, 2001 Horst L. Stormer Physics, 1998 Henry Taube Chemistry, 1983 Joseph H. Taylor Jr. Physics, 1993 Susumu Tonegawa Physiology/Medicine, 1997 Charles H. Townes Physics, 1964 Daniel T. Tsui Physics, 1998 Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu Peace, 1984 John Vane Physiology/Medicine, 1982 John E. Walker Chemistry, 1997 Eric F. Wieschaus Physiology/Medicine, 1982 Jody Williams Peace, 1997 Robert W. Wilson Physics, 1978 Ahmed H. Zewail Chemistry, 1999 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Need new boots for winter? Looking for a perfect gift for your shoe loving friends? Zappos.com is the perfect fit for all your shoe needs! http://us.click.yahoo.com/ltdUpD/QrSDAA/ySSFAA/GkEylB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> The Kagyu Mailing List List Homepage: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kagyu Subscribe/Unsubscribe by sending empty messages to these addresses: kagyu-subscribe@yahoogroups.com kagyu-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:55:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: project hope - call for works (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 15:06:59 +0100 From: Reiner Strasser To: hope@nonfinito.de Subject: project hope - call for works Dear art friends - here a call for new media, net art, cyberpoetry works Love Reiner ::::::::::::::::: project hope - call for works ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: collecting[reflecting]spreading hope . cumulating (positive) energy . esprit . light . balance . "chi" . hope . . . hope@nonfinito.de In these dark times, we are finding people in pain, people suicidal, people sick with worry, people with the threatening dark sky; in these dark times, we seem to sense the beginning of the end, or at least the end of the beginning. This is a call for work, for hope; this is a call for hope, for the hopeless, for all of us; this is a call for hope in spite of the world, perhaps through another world, beneath your feet or beyond. We are setting up a page for hope, http://nonfinito.de/hope/ and a call for works (1), for illuminations... Please contact hope@nonfinito.de to place your entry. Thank you so much. Reiner Strasser Annie Abrahams, Alan Sondheim - (on the side) (1) step one: new media, net art, cyberpoetry works //sorry for cross.postings ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 20:28:41 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew Maxwell Subject: FW: Poets to perform reading in baboon cage MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Poets to hold reading in zoo's baboon enclosure Seven poets are to hold a reading of their work inside the baboon enclosure of a zoo in Chile. They are holding the recital as a form of protest. They want to imply that apes are more receptive to poetry than their countrymen. They will be lowered into the enclosure in a small cage, specially designed to protect them from possible attack. "We will descend into the enclosure on Saturday morning at around 11 am," one of the poets told newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias. "For around an hour we will take it in turns to read our poems, creating a sort of dialogue with the apes." They are hopeful the baboons at Santiago's Metropolitan Zoo will sit quietly and listen to the poetry - thereby showing they are more interested than the average Chilean. The spokesman says they will be asking the public not to throw peanuts at the caged poets. "We are reading our poetry to the monkeys because poets need an audience and it is hard to find people who want to listen to us," the poet's spokesman said. The poets include Raul Zurita, who during previous performances has burned his face with molten iron and ammonia and publicly masturbated. Vet Maricarmen Barba said she was surprised the zoo authorities were allowing the reading to go ahead. "These monkeys like biting and are aggressively territorial," she said. "I wouldn't get in there with them because they are extremely unpredictable. They could easily kill someone." Story filed: 14:13 Thursday 13th December 2001 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 17:00:10 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Richard Long Subject: New Issue of 2RV Comments: To: new-poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu MIME-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The season has changed at 2River. Thus a winter issue of The 2River View, this one with new poems by Thomas Bates, Roger Jones, Leigh Kirkland, Robert Hill Long, Frances Ruhlen McConnel, Michael Meyerhofer, Ann Politte, Logan Ryan Smith, T. L. Stokes, Kelly White, and Ian Randall Wilson, and text/image collaborations by Clark Lunberry and David Reisman. You can read it by going to http://www.2River.org where you'll see the link to the winter issue. Since 1996, 2River has been a site of poetry, art, and theory, quarterly publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series. Have a good end of the year holiday. Richard Long ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 00:36:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Fouhy Subject: Poetry Monday-DYLAN THOMAS' A CHILD'S XMAS IN WALES Comments: To: "Zork Alan [Poetry] (E-mail)" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit This is an evening for everyone! A joy to hear! FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Northern Westchester Center for the Arts 272 North Bedford Road Mt. Kisco, New York 10549 914 241 6922 Creative Arts Cafe Poetry Series: Holiday Special Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales Read by Poet, Ron Price Mt.Kisco, NY¾ The Creative Arts Cafe Poetry Series at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts will present our fifth annual holiday reading - giving voice to the poetry of one of our most memorable poets. On Dec. 17st at 7:30 PM, Poet Ron Price will present a reading of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales - a wonderful recollection of the sights, smells and sounds of a long-ago Christmas. An Open Mike for poets in the audience follows. All ages are invited to attend. The theme for the open mike is “Poetry and Songs Celebrating Winter.” Donations of an unwrapped children’s book for a children’s charity may be substituted for one $5.00 admission fee. Refreshments are included. Ron Price is the author of Surviving Brothers is currently a distinguished Poet and Teaching Artist in residence at the Julliard School for the Performing Arts. He is a founding Member of the Free Peoples Poetry Workshop in Memphis and in Philadelphia. Mr. Price was a Teaching Fellow for Writing Across the Curriculum and has taught through Poets in the Schools, Poets in the Parks, and Poets in Prisons. He has translated poems from the German of Rilke, the Greek of Seferis, and the French of Char and Eluard, and a play from the Norwegian of Jon Lockert. He is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, New Letters, and Southern Exposure. Ron Price’s new tape and CD recording of his poetry, “A Crucible for the Left Hand” ( Woobbi & Exoterica Press) will be on sale after the reading. Mr. Price is also the author of a book of poems, “A Small Song Called Ash From the Fire” (Something More Publication, 1998). After the reading, the audience is invited to share poems about the season either original or written by a favorite poet. *Also “Cheer-A-Child Book Drive” - Donations of new children’s books will be collected at the door. Books will be presented to a local children’s charity. Coffee, tea and desserts are available before and after the reading. There is a $5.00 suggested donation which may be substituted with the donation of a children’s book. The Creative Arts Café is supported by grants from the New York state Council on the Arts and the Bydale Foundation. The Creative Arts Cafe is located in the gallery of Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, 272 North Bedford Road, Mt. Kisco, on Rte 117, near Staples.For further information, call Cindy Beer-Fouhy at NWCA, 241 6922. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 09:08:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <8d.10ccf863.294a3d40@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed 'xept he's only eleven. certainly can grow. there was no amazing grace...not a bad line. no rimbaud but, give the kid a break. Gene At 12:20 PM 12/13/01 -0500, you wrote: >I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on Oprah, >fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early because >of his illness). > >Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: > >9-11-2001 >It was a dark day in America. >There was no amazing grace. >Freedom did not ring. >Tragedy attacked sky-high. >Fiery terror reigned. >Structures collapsed. >Red with blood, white with ash, >And out-of-the-sky blue. >As children trust elders, >Citizens find faith in leaders. >But they were all blinded, >Shocked by the blasts. >Undefiable outrage. >Undeniable outpouring >Of support, even prayer, >Or at least, moments of silence. >Church and State >Could not be separated. >A horrific blasting of events >With too few happy endings. >Can the children sleep >Safely in their beds tonight? >Can the citizens ever rest >Assured of national security again? >God, please, bless America... >And the rest of our earthly home. > >Mattie Stepanek >Sept. 11, 2001 > >Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of Jimmy >Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan >Franzen here. . .) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 09:20:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: Walmart poetry In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed each walmart greeter should read a poem to her/his customer as they come through the door and get their carts. maybe a broadside poem on the cart as well or in place of the greeting reading. by the way, sorry, sorry that i misspelled jeff the cat's name. Gene t 10:36 PM 12/13/01 -0500, you wrote: > Exactly. Most will agree that poetry is fine media that we all > enjoy it. >Poetry is like my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I like it, but its >not for everyone - its for me. Poetry is not for everyone and its not like >bread. Well for Neruda bread is something grand. But most of america has a >loaf of spongy wonder bread in their box. And when its gone they get more. >Bread is everywhere. >I am not calling a for poetry that will make your mouth white and brite or >sell it to give a full head hair to make people like you. No the poetry we >make is appreciated - but how do we get these poems our from under our >shadow of the publishing industry? To gain an audience who would be excited >by poems if placed in a kinder context. I too have had great readings of >poetry with the non poem person. Its been fun. This is why I feel >comfortable in asking why not promote it while compromising nothing. > > Best, Geoffrey > >Geoffrey Gatza >editor BlazeVOX2k1 >http://vorplesword.com/ > __o > _`\<,_ > (*)/ (*) > >-----Original Message----- >From: UB Poetics discussion group >[mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Elizabeth Treadwell >Jackson >Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 8:18 PM >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: Walmart poetry > >Mister Ali wrote: > >People--even Wal Mart shoppers--like poetry. They've >just been tricked. I mean, how and why they've been >tricked is a completely separate question which I >guess everyone has an opinion on. > >And I am very happy to see it. Though I also see all of Geoffrey's points. > >Everyone wants a poem or a song to catch their feelings or ritual on, to >enact interiority into the world, and other things, yes? It's not academic. >Academic thought yields a different thrill, and wields some other weapons. > >The tricks are a big topic. > >Love and hope - > > >Elizabeth Treadwell > > >http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html > > >_________________________________________________________________ >Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 06:25:14 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mister Kazim Ali Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <8d.10ccf863.294a3d40@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Damn you guys are cynical. Give the kid a break. Besides that poem's way better than anything I ever read by Jimmy Stewary or Jimmy Carter or Jewel. (Sorry I never read Allie Sheedy). Kazim. --- Ian Randall Wilson wrote: > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how > he'll be going on Oprah, > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that > may be ended early because > of his illness). > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from > the VSP site: > > 9-11-2001 > It was a dark day in America. > There was no amazing grace. > Freedom did not ring. > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > Fiery terror reigned. > Structures collapsed. > Red with blood, white with ash, > And out-of-the-sky blue. > As children trust elders, > Citizens find faith in leaders. > But they were all blinded, > Shocked by the blasts. > Undefiable outrage. > Undeniable outpouring > Of support, even prayer, > Or at least, moments of silence. > Church and State > Could not be separated. > A horrific blasting of events > With too few happy endings. > Can the children sleep > Safely in their beds tonight? > Can the citizens ever rest > Assured of national security again? > God, please, bless America... > And the rest of our earthly home. > > Mattie Stepanek > Sept. 11, 2001 > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine > poetic tradition of Jimmy > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I > am being too Jonathan > Franzen here. . .) ===== "all histories are fabulous. ours stinks with genius." --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 18:21:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: JR@70 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Wednesday night, a celebration in honor of Jerome Rothenberg's 70th=20 birthday was held at the Poetry Project of St. Mark's Church in New York,=20 organized by Ed Friedman, Pierre Joris, Steve Clay, Charley Morrow and=20 myself. Among those who performed were David Antin, Judith Malina & Hannon= =20 Reznikov, Sten Hanson, Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, Jackson Mac Low= =20 and Anne Tardos, Nicole Peyrafitte, and Robert Kelly. In addition a clip=20 was shown from Eleanor Antin's film, "The Man Without a World," with=20 Rothenberg as dancing exorcist. The night ended with a reading/performance= =20 by Jerome Rothenberg. I had the pleasure of introducing Jerry. Charles Bernstein ************************************************************** Today we come together to celebrate the life and work of one of the=20 grandest, most animating sprits in the recent history of American poetry.=20 Born on December 11, 1931, to a Yiddish-speaking family, educated at the=20 City College of New York, professor at SUNY-Binghampton and UCSD, Jerome=20 Rothenberg=92s work spans poetry and poetics, translation and editing,=20 performance and activism, to each of which he continues to bring an=20 unbridled exuberance and an innovator=92s insistence of transforming the=20 given state of affairs. How then, in a few words, can we touch on the full range of Rothenberg=92s= =20 poetic project? In 1979 Rothenberg wrote: "My passion is to maintain and shore up what=20 comes to us as a larger human memory, and to preserve as far as possible --= =20 and not in a museum sense--the real, continuous and localized cultures, the= =20 diversity that still exists in the world: to thwart by all means possible=20 the other process toward homogenization of cultures into a single=20 monoculture." In the late 60s and early 70s, with his ground-breaking anthologies=20 Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin, as well as America: A=20 Prophesy (coedited with Georuge Quasha), Rothenberg insisted on the=20 immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of=20 the "tribal" poetries of Native Americans (on both American continents),=20 Africans, peoples of Oceania. This was a concerted assault on the primacy= =20 of Western high culture and an active attempt to find in other,=20 non-Western/non-Oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our=20 own. Moreover, the "recovery" of Native American culture by a Jewish=20 Bronx-born first generation poet-as-anthologist (in Rothenberg's words --=20 "a jew among / the indians") whose aesthetic roots were in the European=20 avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our domestic genocide. This gesture=20 cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way= =20 of recovering from the Second War by refusing to cover over the genocide=20 that has allowed a false unity to the idea of American=20 Literature. Rothenberg's anthologies present a polycultural America of=20 many voices in a way that explicitly rejects Eurosupremacism from within a= =20 European perspective -- that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of= =20 Europe as such in favor of idealized "America". Here's Rothenberg in Shaking the Pumkin, anticipating what is now a central= =20 tenant for our multicultural poetics: "For a period of twenty-five years,=20 say, or as long as it takes a new generation to discover where it lives,=20 take the Greek epics out of the undergraduate curricula. & replace them=20 with the great American epics. Study the Popul Vuh where you now study=20 Homer, and study Homer where you now study the Popul Vuh -- as exotic=20 anthropology, etc." I want especially to note how much this proposition has actually come to=20 pass, much to chagrin of many keepers of that older permiflame that refuses= =20 to go out because it was never lit. As Rothenberg writes in one of his poems "but the ACADEMY OF DADA knows not the least green vales of England nor knows cathedral bells ding dong it is the first academy without a book ... Dada knows not but knows each is his own Dada each wears a Dada hat that shines like Dada Symphonies & Dada ice-creams ... (he cries) "to free the forces of poeis from "the gods of power" ... " A key to Rothenberg=92s poetics is his ethically charged imagination of=20 collage as both a social and aesthetic principal. This is at the heart of=20 his great anthologies, including the most recent collaboration with Pierre= =20 Joris, Poems for the Millennium. The syncretic is for Rothenberg is the=20 alternative to the dogmas of religion and the banalities of=20 literature-as-lobotomy. Rothenberg=92s work, resolutely situated in the zone= =20 not of hieratic but of the secular, offers no easy comfort to a the new=20 spiritualism that constantly reinvents itself in and as American=20 poetry. For Rothenberg, ritual without innovation and disruption, just as= =20 spirituality in the service of fixed religious doctrine, is a barrier to=20 the sacred. As he writes in a 1983 talk, =93I am in fact anti-=91religion=92= as a=20 fixed & inflexible set of beliefs. =85 At the same time I find the= strongest=20 response to =85 a tyrannical form of religion may come from the arena of=20 religion itself from the language of religion in a kind of glorious clash= =20 of symbols. I am in that sense a religious collagist more specifically, as= =20 a poet, an anti-religious collagist. As a state-of-mind, it may amount to=20 much the same thing.=94 Extending this principal of collage to the social space of poetry, he=20 writes the value of poetry is =93not the making of single, isolated=20 masterpieces but of a larger work in common.=94 And, indeed, this larger= work=20 is common can be seen as the link between Rothenberg=92s poetry, poetics,=20 anthologies, and translations. =93What has come to us, then, at ground-zero,=94 Rothenberg writes in the= 1983=20 talk, is =93the ecological and economic crises now upon us =85 The= threatened=20 wilderness is in our minds as well in our homes and in our language. We=20 are all endangered species, & the exploration of the depth of our=20 endangerment some of us have called the work of the =91new wilderness.=92=94 Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard= =20 in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go=20 unregistered. And they do this more in the minute particulars of=20 registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest. Consider Rothenberg's 1968 working of a Tibetan source: "a man without lips who is speaking who sees without eyes a man without ears who listens who runs without legs" -- and we might add, in these dark times, a line from another Rothenberg=20 poem of the same period: "But that which weeps is the mind." Our minds still weep but tonight also celebrate. In thanks for his lifelong vigilance to the human crisis that is, that can= =20 never be, only a crisis of the human, in thanks for his lifelong commitment= =20 to the syncretic imaginary of human cultures, we welcome this beloved son=20 on New York City, this child of the Bronx, to St. Mark=92s church and say,= =20 separately and together, together but separately Happy--------------------Birthday-------------------Jerry ---------------------------Happy Birthday! --------------------- ---------- Charles Bernstein http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:05:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: <65.1f5359cf.29490e11@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I can't believe that two people accused me of writing-to-order (as if tat were necessarily bad--I've done some freelancing and the deal is that you write what they want...). But anyway, I said I could have "put together" a submission of poems that were more in the judges' style. I didn't say anything about _writinfg_ more poems in their style. It was just a matter of _selecting_ poems from among the poems ai have already written that would be more to their style. I sued to write more autobiographica and less strange poems, and they clearly would have been better if I am to judge from teh winning chapbook they sent. The only thing is that the contest is judged by a different person each year, so the chapbook they sent might not represent what they chose this year. I don't understand the self-righteousness of the responses to my post. Doesn't everyone _always_ choose to submit poems to a publication in which the poem would fit in stylistically? Don't you look at journals before submitting? My problem with the contest was that you could not really look to see what they want. And as I said above, I wouldn'ty have written specifucally for that contest. But I don't see anything shameful about writing a poem that fits an editor's taste! Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of WIlbur Jenkins Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 2:46 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In a message dated 12/12/2001 11:12:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > I could > actually have put together a chapbook of poems about family issues, poems > about relationships, all in standard MFA program free verse, and I would > have had a better chance (though I assume I still wouldn't have won as I am > Wow! You can do that? Write poetry like that? Made-to-order. Wow. Maybe I'll start a fast-food-poetry contest, dig. If you backchannel me, I'd like to personally award you a prize. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 09:47:26 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cheryl doppler burket Subject: sublet in SF 12/26-1/6 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii 2 room crowded with books & papers in- law, san francisco, available 12/26-1/6 or therein outer sunset across st from ocean pls backchannel jasperwriter@yahoo.com cheryl burket __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:23:04 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/14/01 9:16:44 AM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << But Bill. I might critique "capitalism" etc but it doesnt meean that Merrill with his privliges, money, and many things we dislike (like say Pound or Wallace Stevens in a different way) about him wasnt a great poet of his kind; >> Richard, I suppose I allowed for that, however indirectly, with Scripts for the Pageant. Merrill rattles among late Modernists even as he writes into the seventies, which is fine, except that I prefer the first stringers. It's a matter of taste, of course. Merrill reads to me as a poet who is most concerned with mastering and manipulating devices -- a craftsman in the main. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. But for me, at least, the work lacks a sense of adventure, of exposure, even in its most experimental bee bops which just never seemed all that fresh to me. Mannered, yes. And yes, I am more concerned with the abuse of power than I am with inherited privilege, though I'm not delighted with the latter. Ass kissing is another matter altogether. If a certain amount of hyporcrisy is to be forgiven in matters re: publishing, then we must be consistent when it comes to the self-serving behavior of governments on the world stage where much more is at stake. No? Ah, the nature of the human. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:41:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: I.II. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I.II. I. + 2. 1. 2 is of base three. 2 is outside base 1. [ this film skims on image and sound. ] according to which base? but 2 is an abbreviation. but of which this 1? how so. if to the base 1 then + 2 already is nonsense. of the calculation or accumulation. of the integer 1? the natural number 1? of the operation or procedure. she uses her polaroid to photograph: 1 + 2. the continuity girl notes + 2 to what? the continuity girl notes 1. the continuity girl wears a baggy sweater. the continuity girl writes "+ of the accumulation." the continuity girl writes "1 + 2 = the grave." the continuity girl writes "photograph number 3." the continuity girl writes down "> base 3." the continuity girl writes down "in addition nothing needs to happen." the continuity girl writes down "in addition." the continuity girl writes down "trinity." the director says "there is no equal." the director says "there is no equality." the director says "there is no sign of equals." the image is blank. then of the plus? asks the continuity girl. this is already of the depth or debris, of the grave. to 1. II. + 2. 1. 2 is of base three. 2 is outside base 1. [ this film skims on image and sound. ] abdomen according to which base? anus arch arch arm arm ball ball ball ball breast breast but 2 is an abbreviation. but of which this 1? cheek cheek chin ear ear elbow elbow eye eye eyebrow eyebrow eyelid eyelid finger finger finger finger finger finger finger finger finger finger foot foot hair hand hand head how so. if to the base 1 then + 2 already is nonsense. knee knee knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle knuckle leg leg lip lip mouth nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nail nape neck nipple nipple nose nostril nostril of the calculation or accumulation. of the integer 1? the natural number 1? of the operation or procedure. palm palm penis she uses her polaroid to photograph: 1 + 2. shoulder shoulder stomach the continuity girl notes + 2 to what? the continuity girl notes 1. the continuity girl wears a baggy sweater. the continuity girl writes "+ of the accumulation." the continuity girl writes "1 + 2 = the grave." the continuity girl writes "photograph number 3." the continuity girl writes down "> base 3." the continuity girl writes down "in addition nothing needs to happen." the continuity girl writes down "in addition." the continuity girl writes down "trinity." the director says "there is no equal." the director says "there is no equality." the director says "there is no sign of equals." the image is blank. then of the plus? asks the continuity girl. this is already of the depth or debris, of the grave. thumb thumb to 1. toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe tongue underarm underarm vagina waist wrist wrist _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 11:01:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: FW: Poets to perform reading in baboon cage In-Reply-To: <1D419C6A55E3D4119D310002A50900C86329FA@OINGOEX0> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii This is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Beuys' two masterpieces, "Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare," where he sat in a store showwindow, his feece covered in gold leaf, a dead rabbit in his arms, talking to it,--- and the other where he had himself sealed for days in an art gallery with a live wolf, stacks of the New York Times, and his tarpaulins of his trademark felt that he wrapped himself in, with a sort of shepherd's crook, as I remember it. --- Andrew Maxwell wrote: > Poets to hold reading in zoo's baboon enclosure __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 08:20:03 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: The Disparities and My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Green Integer (in collaboration with O Books) is proud to announce the = publication of The Disparities by Rodrigo Toscano. The book is available = to individuals on this list for a 20% discount. The book retails for = $9.95, which means that with $1.50 postage, you should mail a check to = Green Integer (6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90036) = for $9.46. In The Disparities, Rodrigo Toscano's first full-length collection of = poetry, the author explores "how things wouldn't happen." The = Disparities brings together official and unofficial histories that vie = with one another to expose new meanings created between "the gaps." = Time, in this highly original work of poetry, is "unwound," revealing = new significance for the things of the world, "not apples and oranges / = but fruits / off the same carved-up tree."=20 Rodrigo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. _________________ Let me also take this opportunity to announce to the poetic community = that we are reprinting My Life by Lyn Hejinian in the Green Integer series. This = will be the fifth reprinting of the book, a book which we care very much about, and which = have been instrumental in keeping in print and available.=20 Although we have a few copies of the Sun & Moon edition available, = the book (for all practical purposes) is out of stock. But the new edition, reset and corrected, is = now at the printers, and should be available by the first week of = February 2002.=20 I feel a bit frustrated by the statements made regarding My Life on = the Poetics list. Any time a=20 reader makes a copy of a book for which we have not given permission he = or she is showing a great disregard for both author and publisher, since = neither will see any money that would help the writer to survive and = help the publisher to keep the book (and others) in print. Perhaps, as = Standard Shaefer has suggested, it might have been more sensible to have = contacted the publisher (Sun & Moon or Green Integer) than simply = getting on the list and presenting incorrect information.=20 I am quite available, and will be happy to answer any questions you = have about any book we publish. You can contact me, Douglas Messerli, at = djmess@greeninteger.com My best, Douglas Messerli ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:37:23 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brenda Coultas Subject: catsitter needed in exchange for rent MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit IHi Everyone, Laird and Eleni asked me to passt this on: > Eleni Sikelianos and Laird Hunt are looking for a catsitter (to live with > calico sisters from Brooklyn). Two bedroom mini-loft on the lower east > side from 19 December to 14 January. We don't want any rent (well, we do, > but we're desperate) -- just money for utilities, so this is a great deal. > If you are only interested for part of the time call or email us anyway, it > might work. Must be a cat lover not a cat tolerator! We leave soon so > have to get this taken care of ASAP. > Phone -- 212-614-9546 > Sikelianos@aol.com > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:47:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: m&r...maligant black olive sheet cake...Jerry Rothenberg at 70... MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/14/01 9:20:17 AM, nudel-soho@MINDSPRING.COM writes: << the only black person at the reading was blind... politically correct olives..no more salami from 2nd Ave Cheese...now on 3rd Ave... two large sheet cakes...large pieces...where one would have been more than 'nuff... the mo fame poet turns to the babe...bye no intro....not that i blame him...fame is as does is as does is as does..happy birthday...DRn... >> The exorcism silent starring Jerry was a hoot. Mac Low was musical. Big Kelly gave little Jerry a bear hug. We all held our breaths. Little Jerry resuscitated. He swung a whizzer over his head. From David Antin: "An artist is someone who does his/her best." Best, Bill (Happy Birthday, Jerry!! You d'anthology man! And if I'm not mistaken, you've made a little history.) WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:16:50 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <8d.10ccf863.294a3d40@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I'm also uncomfortable with this making-fun-of, especially where it involves a person with disability (where're Thomas Bell and Millie Niss when you need 'em?). Think of Larry Eigner! There are any number of "great" poets, Plath (?), Pound, the afore-discussed Hannah Weiner, etc., etc., whose work has to be reconciled to/through their disability. How is it Nobel Prize material when Samuel Beckett writes from the ~perspective~ of a legless, armless trunk in a basket, but despicable when it's from an actual gimp. If I were this child's poetry tutor (if he's 11, then he's a prodigy and you're misjudging the work by adult standards: it is very atypical writing for an 11-yr. old), I think I'd highlight the lines > Fiery terror reigned. > Structures collapsed. > Red with blood, white with ash, > And out-of-the-sky blue. as moving toward a more "adult"/literary direction, sort of Nostradamean in their apocalypticality. He has a tendency toward unmonitored abstractions, definitely. In those lines, he starts to cross over "better," I'd say, into finding a palpable, visceral, imagistic grounding where the abstraction can be experienced more sensorily. I'm reminded of my archived post about the poet who wrote "Invictus," a cripple on crutches, valedictorily invoked by hyper-American patriot bomber Timothy McVeigh, at his hour of vulnerability. There's a curious symmetry there, nation-to-man: now it's we who are in bomber patriotic mode, and look how the national focus has found a parallel cripple poet to laureate. In ways, I find the poetry of Jewel or ~The Basketball Diaries~ a much more disturbing phenomenon because, in Jewels' case, these writers are ~Aryan~ in their physical perfection. Kohut, about Nazi Germany, theorized a metapsychology of national narcissisms, where the danger is in the self-image of beautiful, handsome, invulnerable, gym body, to the exclusion of the weak and damaged. And I don't find it a particularly help strategy for poets to oppose ourselves to ~any~ advancement of poetry and pit ourselves against every example that reaches mass audience. Why do we? Are we ~envious~ and bitter that they and not we are getting attention? A more effective strategy, I think, would be to ~link~ ourselves to every such fluke of poetry publicity. If SPD and all the EPC publishers were to "shower" this guy with avant-garde books, along with all the other cratefuls of gifts he's gonna be receiving from all over the coutnryh, and "our" community editors were to write through his agents to ~solicit~ poems to include in "our" journals, . . . Recall, too, Lyn Hejinian's and Leslie Scalapino's PIN (Poets In Need), a fund for poets in times of emergency, illness, life crisis, or Brendan Lorberer's similar ~Lungfull~ efforts for (forgive my poor memory for names) the young poet injured in a car crash in September. I apologize that I'm always bringing up my May finger injury on lists; it's much better, healed, miraculously; but--- On my first visit to the hand surgeon after the emergency room, I was in his office waiting for him. And looking about, snooping, the way one does in MDs' offices. And there was one of those calendars of painting done by disabled people, "mouth paintings," as the genre is called, by quadraplegics. In the past, I'd always found that stuff fiendishly risible. "Sappy." No different from Taiwanese painting factory work, except maudlinly authored. America's weakness for such work is, of course, its own curious phenomenon. (...which could be critiqued in various directions: Americans, in a "sick" nation, correctly recognize the work of the most severely disabled as the best expression of our national vulnerability/pathology;...) Anyhow, that afternoon, with my first phlange almost gone, feeling awful and full of dread, leafing through the "mouth painting" calendar, it looked different to me. Not so laughable. In fact, some of the paintings had their own verve. A lot of them fell short of "better" work by standing just to the left or right of a particular imitated tradition,--- but American painting has always tended toward that (Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc., aside), the way we produced all those "second-rate" Cubists in the '20s-'30s. The art's "failure" was more a result of provincialism, not so much abt. a lack of "inspiration." Like klezmers. When all you've got to blow on is a kazoo (provincial limitations), it's gonna sound pretty tinny. But, if you can screen out the accidentals and hear through to the "core,"... I told a friend of mine abt. this embarassing "change of heart." He said, "So, as a result of your injury, you're developing Compassion." ....................................................... Some mouth painting/disabled artist links (it is, apparently, a "major" art form in India): http://www.yorku.ca/admin/sa/roncope/picture.htm http://www.paralinks.net/wiredwheelsart.html http://www.boloji.com/ww/0401/teom.htm http://www.geocities.com/~wolf-eyes/faq-f.html http://www.puffler.com/artist.html http://www.ericmohn.com/ http://www.abilitymagazine.com/osmond_penalver.html http://www.alexabrysonart.com/Gallery/gallery.html http://www.tfaoi.com/articles/anne/ae11.htm http://www.melaningraphics.com/bios2.html http://www.pasipka.gr/art.htm http://www.indiabuildnet.com/mfpa/elangovan.html http://www.hotkey.net.au/~pg/cv.html AND A ~REVERSE~ PARAPLEGIA QUOTABLE: http://www.bartleby.com/63/45/2845.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:37:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: POETRY PROJECT EVENTS Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable CALENDAR OF EVENTS WEEKS OF DECEMBER 17 - JANUARY 1 DECEMBER 17, MONDAY JOSHUA BECKMAN and LESLIE DAVIS JOSHUA BECKMAN has published two books of poetry Things are Happening (Copper Canyon /APR first book prize) and Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press). LESLIE DAVIS is the author of Lucky Pup, published by Skanky Possum Press. [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 19, WEDNESDAY OPEN GATE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HAITIAN CREOLE POETRY With readings by PAUL LARAQUE, DENIZ=C9 LAUTURE, BOB LAPIERRE, PIERRE-RICHARD NARCISSE, JACK HIRSCHMAN, JOSAPHAT LARGE. Open Gate, edited by Paul Laroque and Jack Hirschman, is the first bilingua= l collection of modern Haitian Creole poetry available to English readers. PAUL LARAQUE, winner of the Casas de las Americas Poetry Prize in French, was Secretary General of the Association of Haitian Writers Abroad from 1979-1986.=20 DENIZ=C9 LAUTURE is a poet and short story author, he writes in Creole, English and French. BOB LAPIERRE is a poet and actor who has also written for the theatre, and has published poetry books and plays in both English and Creole. PIERRE-RICHARD NARCISSE is a poet who is working towards the renewal of Haitian Creole poetry. His poetry books D=E9y ak lespoua (1979) and Depale (1980) have been well received by the critics. [8:00 pm] DECEMBER 21, 24, 26, 28, 31 NO READINGS * HAPPY HOLIDAYS! JANUARY 1, 2002, TUESDAY THE POETRY PROJECT'S 28TH ANNUAL NEW YEAR'S DAY MARATHON READING Spend the first day of the new year with the best of downtown poetry, performance, dance, music, and multimedia with OVER 100 PERFORMERS AND READERS INCLUDING PHILIP GLASS, PATTI SMITH, EDWIN TORRES, JIM CARROLL, RICHARD HELL, TAYLOR MEAD, YOSHIKO CHUMA, LENNY KAYE & many others!. 2 pm-past midnight, $15, $12 for Poetry Project members, students & seniors --=20 Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. Trains F, 6, N, R. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:44:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: Re: "New" Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I didn't get to see the original post because of server problems. The kid writes better than I did when I was eleven, and better than a lot of what many bookstores stock as poetry. I spent a good part of my life staring down the Reaper, so I view his situation a bit differently than people who've never faced a life-threatening illness. If he's going to die, let him have his spot with Oprah, even though we'd like to have it ourselves. Recognize the heart and conscience expressed in the poem. With a full, healthy life to devote to his craft, he might have become a good poet. Vernon Frazer ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mister Kazim Ali" To: Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 6:25 AM Subject: Re: "New" Poet > Damn you guys are cynical. Give the kid a break. > > Besides that poem's way better than anything I ever > read by Jimmy Stewary or Jimmy Carter or Jewel. (Sorry > I never read Allie Sheedy). > > Kazim. > > --- Ian Randall Wilson wrote: > > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how > > he'll be going on Oprah, > > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that > > may be ended early because > > of his illness). > > > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from > > the VSP site: > > > > 9-11-2001 > > It was a dark day in America. > > There was no amazing grace. > > Freedom did not ring. > > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > > Fiery terror reigned. > > Structures collapsed. > > Red with blood, white with ash, > > And out-of-the-sky blue. > > As children trust elders, > > Citizens find faith in leaders. > > But they were all blinded, > > Shocked by the blasts. > > Undefiable outrage. > > Undeniable outpouring > > Of support, even prayer, > > Or at least, moments of silence. > > Church and State > > Could not be separated. > > A horrific blasting of events > > With too few happy endings. > > Can the children sleep > > Safely in their beds tonight? > > Can the citizens ever rest > > Assured of national security again? > > God, please, bless America... > > And the rest of our earthly home. > > > > Mattie Stepanek > > Sept. 11, 2001 > > > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine > > poetic tradition of Jimmy > > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I > > am being too Jonathan > > Franzen here. . .) > > > ===== > "all histories are fabulous. > ours stinks with genius." > > > --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of > your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com > or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 12:26:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Dec 2001 to 12 Dec 2001 (#2001-191) In-Reply-To: <20011213185323.13282.qmail@web10806.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Oh, come on, folks. What I posted was in response to someone else who posted about contests and now I'm getting flamed and made fun of. Is your attitude that one shouldn't bother to try and get published because if the work is good enough, it will be acclaimed by the angels and disseminated all over the land (perhaps by air-drops like the smushed food they were dropping in Afghanistan)? Perhaps if you are relly great you can wait until people beg you to publish your work, but the rest of us have to submit to journals and contests and so on if we want our work to see the light of day. I think the attitude you have is elitist and just plaini unkind. I said stright off that I didn't expect to win. My only regret was submitting to a contest and paying the entry fee) that probably wasn't in line with what I submitted. The editor at the press involved replied saying they publish all sorts of stuff, so maybe I was simply wrong to say that I submitted the wrong poems. Obviously I didn't subbmit the right poems. The only question is whether I could have submitted different poems more successfully. But it's not a question I care about because it's OVER. Surely we all make mistakes like this and waste stamps but it is hardly a major disappointment because one can never _expect_ to win or to get published; it's a relatively hard market these days with fewer and fewer journals. And I guess there is also a reluctance (which I shoud overcome) to submit to journals which are very small or photocopied etc. If I were suitably humble I'd submit more to these places and presumably be more likely to get published. But I am still young and unhumbled. I am sure I will eventually get humbled, which will be good for my character... Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of michael amberwind Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 1:53 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Dec 2001 to 12 Dec 2001 (#2001-191) > I know what you mean as one of the losers you > reference. I spent a lot of > time prep[aring a chapbook for the Pavement Saw > prize, and I was not > surprised that I didn't win. I didn't expect > to win. But I was annoyed at > them when I got tha sample chapbook by one of > their previous winners; it was > all realistic/spill my thoughts and totally > un-innovative. I had done a > chapbook with surreal poems, languagy things, > etc., and seeing who won made > me realize that I didn't have a chance from the > moment they read the first > poem. > It would be grate if they put in a statement > about what the judes like. > they are perfectly free to like what they want > to like, but it is annoying > to have no chance at all because you didn't > know their style. I could > actually have put together a chapbook of poems > about family issues, poems > about relationships, all in standard MFA > program free verse, and I would > have had a better chance (though I assume I > still wouldn't have won as I am > a relative beginner in these things...) > Millie Let's say you wrote some "surrealist" and "innovative" verse - you enter it into a contest and - lo! and behold! - you WIN! Ed McMahon shows up at your house with a big fat prize - publishing houses are calling you - all the bonuses of the world Well guess what... YOU ARE MAINSTREAM!!! Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too - they want to write verse *outside* the mainstream of contemporary poetics and at the same time - recieve all the recognition they feel it is due It seems to me if you are really interested in knowing what the judges prejudices are - you would look at what won in the past - what the judges have written and edited - the sort of work the sponsoring magazine accepts - it would give you a good rule of thumb i am utterly opposed to contests - if poetry cannot exist without my entrance fees - then POETRY DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE READ! fuck the contests - forget them - can you imagine Whitman entering a contest? i doubt it - put your time and energy into better things - the standard MFA Verse is death - the last gasp of an intelligent brain dying - more constricting than any of the regular verse forms the modernists ever attempted to overcome - the wailings of a grotesque grandiosity of ego - sure some of it is "good" - so what? fuggedaboutit! if poetry is going to have a future - it is not going to be from MFA Students - "precious" poetry who get up in front of groups of people reading what is essentially uninteresting even as prose in that "special voice" that poets use (we all know that voice) because they think somehow changing their tone of voice will make a bad poem good - though these poems are rarely bad, merely dusty the moment they are written so say no to contests - donate money to a magazine if you want to - or better still - send a check to a poet you happen to like - forget the institutions - they trap a poet like dragonfly in honey - keeping relics of byegone eras alive for ever and ever ===== ...I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. [from "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 14:33:15 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/14/01 9:17:45 AM, CaptainPoetryJr@AOL.COM writes: << In a message dated 12/12/2001 11:12:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > I could > actually have put together a chapbook of poems about family issues, poems > about relationships, all in standard MFA program free verse, and I would > have had a better chance (though I assume I still wouldn't have won as I am > Wow! You can do that? Write poetry like that? Made-to-order. Wow. Maybe I'll start a fast-food-poetry contest, dig. If you backchannel me, I'd like to personally award you a prize. >> Ha Ha! Funny but unfair. If I may come to the defense of men2, artists of all sorts have been creating to order for as long as artists have been creating. Michelangelo and Blake spring immediately to mind. Not to mention all of those talented songwriters who compose for movies. "A ballad? With simple boy-girl lyrics instead of my usual inscrutable poems? And it must relate to the love between an artificial intelligence and an ashtray? You got it!" Artists can do this. However "inspired" they are some of the time, they are also craftsman. At least the best ones are. Of course men2 can do this. You probably can also. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 17:39:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damian Judge Rollison Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII The long poem that "My cat Jeoffry" comes from is called JUBILATE AGNO (in praise of the lamb) and is a proceduralist proto-langpoem if there ever was one -- a long series of complementary verses contained in a journal, where the verso lines all begin with "Let" and the recto with "For". "For I will consider my cat Jeoffry / For he is a servant of the living God" etc. belongs to a section which has only "For" verses, and is not an independent unit except by editorial fiat; the rest of the poem is much more complex and elusive, i.e. the "Let" verse may or may not logically connect to the corresponding "For". He has a wonderful passage (Rimbaudesque) on the meaning of letters of the alphabet. JUBILATE AGNO was not discovered until the 1930s or 40s -- long before this Smart was classed with the mystico-insane a la Blake and (later) John Clare, partly because he did occasionally go nuts (would sometimes interrupt polite conversation to ask "Why are you not praying?!") and partly due to the elaborate numerical games in ostensibly more traditional verse poems such as "A Song to David" which no one of Dr. Johnson's generation could make sense of. Had they known JUBILATE AGNO I'd guess they might have thrown away the key -- but it was received with fascination, not dismissal, when finally discovered. Which is NOT to say that sufficient studies of him exist -- in fact a good thorough treatment of his experimentalism (and not just in free verse) is overdue. Best wishes, Damian Rollison On Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:16:59 -0500 Geoffrey Gatza wrote: > I know the poem about his cat, but spelled Joeffry. I was reading it today. > I also remember he died in debtors prison in 1771. > > Geoffrey Gatza > editor BlazeVOX2k1 > http://vorplesword.com/ > __o > _`\<,_ > (*)/ (*) > > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of gene > Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 10:13 AM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: Christopher Smart Query > > I am a reader of Smart and am quite taken by his work, particularly and > obviously his poem about Jeffrey his cat. It is strikingly contemporary > and feline-accurate. Edward Hirsch has a poem about Smart. > > Gene > > > At 09:40 AM 12/8/01 -0500, you wrote: > >Dear Listees, > > > >A friend of mine is writing a reception history of Christopher Smart's > work. > >I was wondering if anyone might be aware of interest in Smart's poetry on > >the part of contemporary poets. It occurs to me that Smart is sometimes > >mentioned as a kind of proto-avant-gardist--for example in Rasula and > >McCaffrey's "Imagining Language" (now in paperback and a must-own book, > >incidentally). Smart often gets passing credit for his early free-verse > >experimentalism, though that credit has traditionally been attributed as > >much to Smart's madness as to his poetic program. In one sense, it's > >possible to read Smart's poetry (much like Hopkins' or Herbert's > innovations > >on behalf of devotional poetry) as displaying a kind of > >anti-nominalism--whereby manipulating poetic form becomes a way of > >recovering language from its fallen state. This to me seems a much more > >appealing reading of Smart's poetics than the standard traditional reading > >of Smart as anomalous madman. > > > >I'm aware of Thomas Vogler's excellent article on Smart in Sulfur, and > Allen > >Ingram's work as well. But I'd greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who > >might know of other references to--or appropriations of--Smart's poetics by > >contemporary experimentalists. > > > >Paul Stephens > > > > > >* * * * * > > > >".while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling of > >thorns, no I forgot, it's impossible, it's myself I hear, howling behind my > >dissertation." > > > >--Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:04:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "WrightZ, Laura" Subject: Re: chap MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Just to pipe in in defense of Pavement Saw's contests: as a past "loser", I really appreciate getting the winning book. It's like a poetry grab bag -- send in your fee (it seems a reasonable fee) & you will get poetry one way or another. As I recall, the name of the judge was given in advance also, at least for one of them. It's hard not to be the one lauded and published, but when anyone is reading manuscripts and publishing poetry they find exciting, we are all winning. Best, Laura -- Laura Wright Serials Cataloging Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder (303) 492-3923 "My wife thinks I'm in Oslo, Oslo France that is" --John Ashbery (Worsening Situation) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 00:18:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss =?iso-8859-1?Q?Peque=F1o?= Glazier Subject: _Digital Poetics_ now available Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed A news announcement that this week _Digital Poetics_ came out from the Univ. of Alabama Press. After years in its making and production, it is truly great to finally see the book in print! I am grateful to the press for the admirable job it did on this project. I'm quite pleased with how the book came out! I think many readers on this list will like the book: there is a lot of discussion about writers, poets, and digital artists that are close to our interests. One of its goals is marking out a vision of the strands that link innovative print poetry and digital visual textual experimentation. This ground, familiar to many of us, is covered and re-cast in an effort to bring a particularly poetry-based illumination to the new digital landscape. In addition, the book documents some of the events where we have witnessed the growth of this new field of poetry. So I'm sure many will find it interesting! If you haven't seen info about the book, there is a link to DP info at the EPC (http://epc.buffalo.edu/). Order information is available at Alabama's DP page (http://www.uapress.ua.edu/authors/Glazie01.html). Here's hoping you will have the time to check it out! ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 20:34:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Some MLA Poetry Events Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable This year the MLA meets in New Orleans, at the end of this month. A number= =20 of special local poetry events are planned and I assume notice of them will= =20 be posted. The Poetry Division's annual "Conversations with Poets" session has had to= =20 be changed because Charles Tomlinson is unable to make it to New Orleans.=20 Here is the info on the new event: Conversations with Poets: Special Event Poetry in a Time of Crisis: A Roundtable Thursday, December 27 7:00-8:15pm, Rhythms Ballroom III, Sheraton Charles Bernstein (SUNY-Buffalo), presiding Michael Davidson (UCSD) Biljana D. Obradovic (Xavier University of Louisiana) Steve McCaffery (York University) A. L. Nielsen (Penn State) Juliana Spahr (University of Hawaii-Manoa) Roland Greene (Stamford University) Lorenzo Thomas (University of Houston-Downtown). Note: this session is free and open to the public. immediately following this event is another Poetry Division session: Poetry and Pedagogy II (session 84) Thursday, December 28 8:45-10pm, Cornet, Sheraton Presiding: Lorenzo Thomas, Univ. of Houston-Downtown 1. "The Other Other Voice: The Tendentiousness of Poetry in=20 Higher Education," John Gery, Univ. of New Orleans 2. "Teaching Poetry to Soldiers in a Post-Heroic Age," Elizabeth D. Samet,= =20 United States Militarey Academy 3. "Poetry and the Matrix," Jeffery Gray, Seton Hall Univ. 4. "From Pound to Olson: The Avant-Gardist as Pedagogue," Alan Golding,=20 Univ. of Louisville I will be on a panel the following day: Digital Poetics: The E-Poetry Genre (session 178) Friday, 28 December 2001 10:15 to 11:30 a.m., Pontchartrain Ballroom C, Sheraton Presiding: Maria Damon, University of Minnesota Twin Cities 1. "A Prospectus for E-Poetry," Loss Peque=F1o Glazier, SUNY-Buffalo 2. "Script Language =3D `Poetry': The Poetic Potential of JavaScript and=20 DHTML," George Hartley, Ohio University, Athens 3. "Electronic Pies in the Poetry Sky," Charles Bernstein, SUNY-Buffalo The final Poetry Division session is #363 Poetic Movements and Their Consequence for Individual Poets Friday, 28 December 7:15-8:30pm Borgne, Sheraton Presiding: Roland Greene, Stanford Univ. 1. "The Personal Anthologizing of Verse in Seventeenth Century England:=20 Folger MS V.a.345 and the Academic Formation of Poetic Taste," Arthur=20 Marotti, Wayne State Univ. 2. "Aligning HD," Adelaide Morris, Univ. of Iowa 3. "Between and after Black Mountain and Language Poetry: The Ritual=20 (Ideological) Function of the (American) Lyric Self," Joseph Lease, Central= =20 Michigan Univ.=20 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 20:10:11 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: WIlbur Jenkins Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable In a message dated 12/14/2001 3:27:08 PM Pacific Standard Time,=20 men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > But I don't see anything shameful about >=20 I think writing a poem simply to suit an editor's taste is most definitely a= =20 sort of fast-food-poetry, made-to-order, etc. etc. etc. With the exception of something like Jack Spicer's BOOK OF MAGAZINE=20 VERSE...which is anything but cheap and greasy. =A0=20 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 18:22:46 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew Felsinger Subject: Re: Virus In-Reply-To: <7c.1fa7a8e8.29495249@aol.com> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I also received an email that I had to delete from Noriko Shimoda. It was headed w/ something referencing Yasusada. So the header is varied. I then attempted to reply and the mail was undeliverable, to a Yahoo account. I would be careful with anything related to Noriko Shimoda. At least not for the time being. Best, Andrew > From: Jacques Debrot > Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group > Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 19:37:29 EST > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Virus > > Hi, > > I just received an e-mail attachment today with the heading: Re: Why I was a > bad poet (was: greatness; editors, editing, etc.). The sender came up as >, but apparently a virus has gotten into her address book and > everyone in her computer has received it--possibly it's spread to POETICS. > This is the 3rd time a virus connected to the "bad poet" thread has > circulated, so if I were you I definitely wouldn't open attachments having > anything to do w/ that aborted conversation. > > Best, > Jacques > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 20:16:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: WIlbur Jenkins Subject: Re: "New" Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I agree he's gifted -- advanced for his age ("for his age," whatever that means) -- but the POEM IS TERRIBLE, and any literate intelligent kid can (along with many many adults), with effort, slap together a heap of a cliches...and that's what this poem is. In a message dated 12/14/2001 3:38:06 PM Pacific Standard Time, vfrazer@ATTBI.COM writes: > > > > > > 9-11-2001 > > > It was a dark day in America. > > > There was no amazing grace. > > > Freedom did not ring. > > > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > > > Fiery terror reigned. > > > Structures collapsed. > > > Red with blood, white with ash, > > > And out-of-the-sky blue. > > > As children trust elders, > > > Citizens find faith in leaders. > > > But they were all blinded, > > > Shocked by the blasts. > > > Undefiable outrage. > > > Undeniable outpouring > > > Of support, even prayer, > > > Or at least, moments of silence. > > > Church and State > > > Could not be separated. > > > A horrific blasting of events > > > With too few happy endings. > > > Can the children sleep > > > Safely in their beds tonight? > > > Can the citizens ever rest > > > Assured of national security again? > > > God, please, bless America... > > > And the rest of our earthly home. > > > > > > Mattie Stepanek > > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:46:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Bromige Subject: Re: Walmart Poetry In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! > > > > >Elizabeth Treadwell > > >http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html > > >_________________________________________________________________ >Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as though it were a French name. I suppose in part this is because Target is on a borderline between middle and lower class. So that persons of the middle class deal with the unease this causes them, by guying their own slumming with a gesture of inverse snobbery. This playfulness with language, at the service of a social dilemma, has something of the poetic to it, though I admit it's pretty thin. Dahveed Brahmeej. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 22:36:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Famous Poet Dangles Multiple Modifiers In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20011214181917.02c71620@pop.bway.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII >>>Born on December 11, 1931, to a Yiddish-speaking family, educated at the City College of New York, professor at SUNY-Binghampton and UCSD, Jerome Rothenberg^s work<<< Dear Charles, I am prepared to believe that Rothenberg's work was born. I am even prepared to believe that, through his influences, his work was educated. But how is it that his work holds, or held, two professorships without him? I mean, I can't even get one of my poems to wash my damn car. Signed, Wondering in Washington ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 23:43:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: The Disparities and My Life In-Reply-To: <008d01c184bc$21aa1fc0$64fc97d1@doug.sunmoon.com> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I understand Douglas Messerli's frustration, but I would like to say that I was seeking, and Poetics folk were sending me, information on where to *buy* _My Life_, not simply to copy it (and thereby deprive the poet and the publisher from deserved monies.) But teachers get frustrated too; I've heard from several people who wanted to teach *My Life* but couldn't because it was unavailable. At these moments even the most judicious poet/critic/teacher thinks momentarily of xeroxing sections of the book. However, the interest in teaching the text and finding copies of it shows great respect for both Lyn Hejinian and Sun & Moon's work. (And I just got the phone number and planned to call Sun & Moon directly on Monday as Standard suggested.) But here's a thanks to Douglas for all his work. I know publishing is a damned hard, expensive proposition, and Sun & Moon is an invaluable resource. And thanks to everyone who contacted me to direct me where to look after I struck out at the bookstores here and SPD. Thanks very much, Kathy Lou Schultz -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Kathy Lou Schultz http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou Lipstick Eleven/Duck Press http://www.duckpress.net > From: Douglas Messerli > Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group > Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 08:20:03 -0800 > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: The Disparities and My Life > > Green Integer (in collaboration with O Books) is proud to announce the > publication of The Disparities by Rodrigo Toscano. The book is available to > individuals on this list for a 20% discount. The book retails for $9.95, which > means that with $1.50 postage, you should mail a check to Green Integer (6026 > Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90036) for $9.46. > > In The Disparities, Rodrigo Toscano's first full-length collection of poetry, > the author explores "how things wouldn't happen." The Disparities brings > together official and unofficial histories that vie with one another to expose > new meanings created between "the gaps." Time, in this highly original work of > poetry, is "unwound," revealing new significance for the things of the world, > "not apples and oranges / but fruits / off the same carved-up tree." > Rodrigo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. > > > _________________ > > Let me also take this opportunity to announce to the poetic community that we > are reprinting My Life by Lyn Hejinian in the Green Integer series. This will > be the fifth > reprinting of the book, a book which we care very much about, and which have > been instrumental > in keeping in print and available. > Although we have a few copies of the Sun & Moon edition available, the book > (for all practical > purposes) is out of stock. But the new edition, reset and corrected, is now at > the printers, and should be available by the first week of February 2002. > I feel a bit frustrated by the statements made regarding My Life on the > Poetics list. Any time a > reader makes a copy of a book for which we have not given permission he or she > is showing a great disregard for both author and publisher, since neither will > see any money that would help the writer to survive and help the publisher to > keep the book (and others) in print. Perhaps, as Standard Shaefer has > suggested, it might have been more sensible to have contacted the publisher > (Sun & Moon or Green Integer) than simply getting on the list and presenting > incorrect information. > I am quite available, and will be happy to answer any questions you have about > any book we > publish. You can contact me, Douglas Messerli, at djmess@greeninteger.com > > My best, > Douglas Messerli ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 11:00:22 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant poet. Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 8:23 AM Subject: Re: James Merrill > In a message dated 12/14/01 9:16:44 AM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > << But Bill. I might critique "capitalism" etc but it doesnt meean that > Merrill > > with his privliges, money, and many things we dislike (like say Pound or > > Wallace Stevens in a different way) about him wasnt a great poet of his > > kind; >> > > Richard, I suppose I allowed for that, however indirectly, with Scripts for > the Pageant. > Merrill rattles among late Modernists even as he writes into the seventies, > which is fine, except that I prefer the first stringers. It's a matter of > taste, of course. Merrill reads to me as a poet who is most concerned with > mastering and manipulating devices -- a craftsman in the main. Nothing > wrong with that, I guess. But for me, at least, the work lacks a sense of > adventure, of exposure, even in its most experimental bee bops which just > never seemed all that fresh to me. Mannered, yes. And yes, I am more > concerned with the abuse of power than I am with inherited privilege, though > I'm not delighted with the latter. Ass kissing is another matter altogether. > If a certain amount of hyporcrisy is to be forgiven in matters re: > publishing, then we must be consistent when it comes to the self-serving > behavior of governments on the world stage where much more is at stake. No? > Ah, the nature of the human. Best, Bill > > > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 08:50:29 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Gallaher Organization: University of Central Arkansas Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <001501c184e0$253733c0$4b63f30c@attbi.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Vernon Frazer writes: "The kid writes better than I did when I was eleven, and better than a lot of what many bookstores stock as poetry. I spent a good part of my life staring down the Reaper, so I view his situation a bit differently than people who've never faced a life-threatening illness. If he's going to die, let him have his spot with Oprah, even though we'd like to have it ourselves. Recognize the heart and conscience expressed in the poem. With a full, healthy life to devote to his craft, he might have become a good poet." I Reply: I'd rather not have a spot with Oprah. She would undoubtedly ask a question that I'd find insufferable and her loyal audience would boo me. Alas. As for the 11 year old? Many die horrible deaths before their time, and any comfort we can give speaks well of us. But, what makes me nervous (for the sake of art), is when people act like that 9/11 poem that was posted to this list is, somehow, good poetry. (I suppose someone will make this poem into a broadside and sell it at Wal-Mart, complete with author bio underneath? And many will buy it as the sole poem in their collection?) btw: I've seen more interesting poems from children in the hand full of times I've worked with them. I've also seen worse, as well. (Most things from children bear some stamp of an adult "helper" . . . usually there's a teacher or guardian in the wings . . . [though I don't know if this is the case here]) John Gallaher J Gallaher Metaphors Be With You . . . ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 11:49:51 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sheila Massoni Subject: Re: FW: Poets to perform reading in baboon cage Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit very good idea here have students who would fit nicely with the wolf ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 12:29:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: biograph continuity girl MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - biograph continuity girl who is the continuity girl. she writes and underlines these words; she checks spelling and stylistic consistency. in the world, she writes, she makes certain that day is day, night is night; that if day for night, then not night for day; if night for day, then not day for night. she wears careful glasses, is twenty-three years old, and a graduate of ucla's motion picture / television department. she has been an extra in several post-blair-witch-project student films, shot in will rogers state park. she is originally from portland, maine. she studied with leslie thornton in brown university's modern culture and media department for her undergraduate work. it was only later that she decided to remain on the periphery of cinema, closely observing everything around her. the film was secondary, she writes, to the continuous reiteration of the real. she thinks she is a machine. she thinks she is the perfect eye. she thinks she is the inconceivable eye. i am the continuity girl, she writes, who am i. who is the continuity girl. she writes and underlines these words; she is killing everything. everything is destroyed and mutilated. what damage have you done; she... a soldier rapes me. i rape a soldier. i am terror. i am terror of the real. i make certain that day is day, night is night; that if day for night, then what is mine, who is the continuity girl. she writes and underlines these words: SHE IS YOURS. SHE IS YOUR BIOTERRORISM HERE. i dream of the naked dead-man, she writes. i am hungry. i make things. she is in the armor. she writes, i owe everything to leslie thornton and john malkovich. she writes, i will be naked all the time. she takes off her baggy sweater. she writes, i am of the real. n/g. i am the real. i am film. armies film me. i will write their names. the glass is on the right- hand side. it is cloudy out and 9 o'clock in the early night. she writes, people are dying. she writes, people are staring at me. i am happy. she makes certain that day is day, night is night; that if day for night, then:checks spelling and stylistic consistency. in the world, she writes, she:who is the continuity girl. she writes and underlines these words; she:thinks she is a machine. she thinks she is the perfect eye. she thinks she :careful glasses, is twenty-three years old, and a graduate of ucla. _ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 16:08:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Berkson Subject: Berkson Reading MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Bill Berkson Fugue State (poems 1989-2001) cover by Yvonne Jacquette Zoland Books, 2001 + Hymns of St. Bridget and Other Writings (1960-1964) by Bill Berkson & Frank O'Hara cover by Alex Katz The Owl Press, 2001 Bill Berkson will read from these & more Octavia Bookstore 513 Octavia=A0Street (corner of Laurel, uptown) New Orleans December 28, 7 p.m. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 20:49:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <20011214201650.70984.qmail@web11703.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jeffrey Jullich wrote: On my first visit to the hand surgeon after the emergency room, I was in his office waiting for him. And looking about, snooping, the way one does in MDs' offices. And there was one of those calendars of painting done by disabled people, "mouth paintings," as the genre is called, by quadraplegics. In the past, I'd always found that stuff fiendishly risible. "Sappy." No different from Taiwanese painting factory work, except maudlinly authored. America's weakness for such work is, of course, its own curious phenomenon. (...which could be critiqued in various directions: Americans, in a "sick" nation, correctly recognize the work of the most severely disabled as the best expression of our national vulnerability/pathology;...) Anyhow, that afternoon, with my first phlange almost gone, feeling awful and full of dread, leafing through the "mouth painting" calendar, it looked different to me. Not so laughable. In fact, some of the paintings had their own verve. A lot of them fell short of "better" work by standing just to the left or right of a particular imitated tradition,--- but American painting has always tended toward that (Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc., aside), the way we produced all those "second-rate" Cubists in the '20s-'30s. The art's "failure" was more a result of provincialism, not so much abt. a lack of "inspiration." Like klezmers. When all you've got to blow on is a kazoo (provincial limitations), it's gonna sound pretty tinny. But, if you can screen out the accidentals and hear through to the "core,"... ---- Response: I used to have a similar condescending feeling about art or writing by people with mental illness. I think the only way a despised group can get accepted is to produce work which is actually good. When you are thought of as being somewhat dull or "limited," producing sappy poetry isn't going to help your group's image. This shouldn't be the case but it's sadly true that showing yourself to be just as mediocre as other people does not help your group. (Although of course that in itself is proof that you are "normal," as a group, and would presumably have some talented people but mostly average people in your group.) It doesn't help that writing activities proposed to menatlly ill people by occupational therapists (who know nothing about writing) emphasize "expressing your feelings" over actually creating someting of value. (Also, mentally ill people are sick and tired of talking about their feelings...when I am in a bad way, what I want is something other than my feelings to think about, like reading Finnegan's Wake for example, for which I was accused of not trying to get better when I was in the hospital since I preferred Joyce to a game of ring toss with a bunch of crazy adults in their pajamas, some of whom had toilet paper in their hair...) After taking a number of writing workshops and starting grad school, I decided to teach writing to mentally ill people by including readings of "real" poets, including poets who are "difficult" such as the Modernists or the Language group and several other schools in between. My first lesson was (very traditionally, probably because I went to college at a school which taught required Classics courses) on the Epic, and on how modern poets use epic material, either as subject matter or as a style to be aware of when writing long poems involving national myths or heros, etc. I also gave them some modern poems to read that used more subtle allusions to the classical epics. The result was that the students wrote better (compared to a class I had taught to similar students in which I was more touchy feely and used fewer readings and more standard workshop exercises). They would write poems and say "I'm trying to write a Beat poem here," or whatever and it seemed as if the ideas had sunk in. I don't think imitation is the same thing as having one's own style but it does force you to write rigorously. (I mean, writing in "your own" style isn't great if yur own style is maudlin and full of cliches.) I criticized their work "as poetry" and pointed out problems although I always said "I like the poem" but I'd say things like "the poem isn't finished/polished yet" if it had problems. There was one student who was so bad that it hurt to try to be positive about it (she eventually dropped out but occasionally sends me mail. She was in a really difficult personal situation, so I didn't want to be harsh, but she must have gotten the idea that I liked other people's work better...) Some others dropped out. But the rest (half a dozen) wrote poetry seriously. Of course several of them had previous experience writing or had read a lot, so it wasn't liek starting from scratch. The interesting thing, from the perspective of designing activities for people with mental illness, was that a rigorous class was just as good at prvoding psychological support, if not better, than the "therapeutic" approach where you praise everything and don't teach any published poets at all. Someone wrote me that the class kept him out of the hospital. Various people gave each other support with personal problems on the class listserv. My conclusion was that people are happier with (and do better at) activities which do not treat them as if they were stupid and not just crazy and that people with mental illness do not need to deal exclusively with their feelings and get excessive positive feedback. They are in fact happier to be treated as if they were not disabled. I guess the experience taught me, as in your post, to like mouth paintings but only the good ones. I later worked in a mental health agency and they had a poetry activity and published a collection and had an annual poetry reading. Some of the poems were quite good. However, I was (surprisingly because I am often elitist) very impressed that many of these people (like Johnson's dog which walks on its hind legs) wrote poetry at all. These people were mostly formerly homeless, had never worked, and often had many health problems in addition to mental illness. I guess I underestimated people a little bit sometimes (my job was giving out medication in the morning before they went to the day prgram and people were pretty groggy in the morning) but I was pretty amazed at the words they knew and the use of metaphors, etc. This was a case where I was willing to accept less than wonderful work as a real achievement. And it was clear that one couldn't teach this group Language poetry. But ascsomeone who has been ill myself I know that I often can't write at all, and that I can struggle to find words as so forth. So I, too, now have an appreciation for all "mouth painters," not just the amazingly talented ones... P.S. I don't actually like the Confessionals that much except for Robert Lowell who was arguably only a Confessional in maybe two collections in his whole career ("Life Studies" and "For the Union Dead") and was a generation older than Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, whom he taught at Boston University. I think Lowell's best work is in the early period, with the most successful poem (and most anthologized so I am hardly making an original judgement) being "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," which is certainly not a confessional poem. It seems no one reads Lowell any more though. I bought a book by Robert Lowell at a bookstand on the street, and the guy who sold it to me said just that: "I'll give you a good deal because no one reads Lowell any more"... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 15:03:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jason Nelson Subject: daisy cutter Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Recently finished two related hypermedia projects...just wanting to know people's thoughts or suggestions on these odd creations (oh and use MS explorer 5 or higher and turn up the sound) "Daisy Cutting" www.heliozoa.com/daisy.html and "Superstitious Appliances" www.heliozoa.com/superstition.html love forever, Jason Nelson _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 21:48:02 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Belz Subject: on pinsky on dugan In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20011214181917.02c71620@pop.bway.net> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Rob't Pinsky reviews Alan Dugan in NYTBR: > At the age of 78, Dugan remains a high-wire adept. > A circus pro above mere flash, he has seen over his > long career many tons of lion and elephant droppings > go down the drains. In a period when cautious young > poets may attend graduate school to learn how to be > avant-garde, doing their homework in self-reflexive > doubt about language, Dugan presents a challenging > alternative: a lyrical skepticism, rooted in experience, > that scorns the postmodern safety net. > It is refreshing that we finally have, in the annals of poetry, "a lyrical skepticism, rooted in experience." It's about time. I guess what's so great about it is that it's rooted in *experience*, not in some flight of fancy. And also that it's skeptical--for who, having endured experience, would emerge optimistic? So Dugan at least has that integrity. Yet also, it's lyrical; we expect lyricism, and I'd say we deserve it. And finally, it's scornful--scornful of what? Of what history has brought it: deeper skepticism, more radical doubt. In summary, the great thing about Alan Dugan at 78 is that, having weathered "experience," he's somewhat skeptical. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/books/review/16PINSKYT.html ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 08:11:55 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Millie. I've been in this dilemma eg I have had some poems published in a NZ magazine "Poetry New Zealand" but the editor chose poems that were I thought good enough but maybe not what I would want to see. But I wouldnt have written them if I didnt feel somewhat positively dispposed toward them! Other things come in such as practicality. What I did in (1996 I think) was to use the Poet's Market in an attempt to get into some of the more 'radical' mags and so on. It turned out to be easier to get into one of the smaller and newer presses, which was then a mag called PICA: the editor (a youngish woman I gather) was very keen on what I had sent (some strangish prose poems) which she published. And I thank both editors. Of course I couldnt be continually at war with the editors: the only way "in" would thus be either to be in some recent equivalent of the Langpo or earlier the Black Mountain or the New York School (I dont know what 'schooll" here in NZ) or to publish one's own work.In the former case it often becomes who you know as we all know. I think one has to enter the fray and 'test' one's work against so-called "Official Verse" (and I would say that Bernstein, Hejinian and others have done that somewhat): and it would be foolish to turn one's back eg on an offer by The New Yorker to take a series of poems: or even to become a columnist. The pay would be good and one could work a bit "clandestinely" with ones more edgy and radical work. It not a sell-out: that's going too far. Poets of whatever stamp should go for publication wherever and whenever they can: but of course as you imply this doesnt mean a complete back down from a radical or "experimental" approach. Some times the editors of the so-called "mainline" mags are more open than so-called marginalised "radicals" as here in New Zealnd the editor of Poetry New Zealand (alistair Paterson) is very very supportive of young and old poets and takes the trouble to give opiniions and thoughts on EVERY poet. Not so confident that some of our local "Langpo'ists" are quite so open: I think many of them some are very talented and reside in Universities but they are I think that others may be rather frightenned of being "upstaged"..... but this is a generalisation. The other prolem is that all the so-called marginalised people start talking and almost writing like each other (they start to revel in their "outsider" status...(and one who does, Alan Loney has been published all over New Zeakland by some of the best presses..he's far from "marginalised", rather he seems to ghave a 'chip" on his shoulder) (which is not to say that he is not a considerable and very ingenious poet: which [the perceived sameness or congruence] didnt quite become a big problem with the langpos but clearly the Creative writing courses have that tendency (they need'nt, those attending are individuals) : eg there's one here run here (N.Z.) by Bill Manhire (at Victoria University in Wellington) who is a marvellous poet but the poets and writers who have succeeded from that course are accused, a bit cruelly, of being clones of Manhire (which accusatin in its turn sounds like shoulder chippings and sour grapes).....and somewhat the Auckland University perhaps tends to form cliques: but I benefited greatly from the courses on poetry there not only on Modernist or "Post Modernist" writing etc but overall........the answer is to be aware of the negative and positive asspects: whatever way one goes its all experience. It takes courage and sometimes passion to ignore the rules (after you've earnt a fistful of them) and then write whatever gets into YOUR (meaning ONE"S) head. A few thoughts.........I can see what you're saying: competitions are ok for some and there are more ways than one to kill and skin the poetical cat! Cheers, Richard. PS: dont worry about being "flamed' no one ever died by email! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Millie Niss" To: Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 6:05 AM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 > I can't believe that two people accused me of writing-to-order (as if tat > were necessarily bad--I've done some freelancing and the deal is that you > write what they want...). But anyway, I said I could have "put together" a > submission of poems that were more in the judges' style. I didn't say > anything about _writinfg_ more poems in their style. It was just a matter > of _selecting_ poems from among the poems ai have already written that would > be more to their style. I sued to write more autobiographica and less > strange poems, and they clearly would have been better if I am to judge from > teh winning chapbook they sent. The only thing is that the contest is judged > by a different person each year, so the chapbook they sent might not > represent what they chose this year. > > I don't understand the self-righteousness of the responses to my post. > Doesn't everyone _always_ choose to submit poems to a publication in which > the poem would fit in stylistically? Don't you look at journals before > submitting? My problem with the contest was that you could not really look > to see what they want. And as I said above, I wouldn'ty have written > specifucally for that contest. But I don't see anything shameful about > writing a poem that fits an editor's taste! > > Millie > > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of WIlbur Jenkins > Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 2:46 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 > > > In a message dated 12/12/2001 11:12:38 AM Pacific Standard Time, > men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > > > > I could > > actually have put together a chapbook of poems about family issues, poems > > about relationships, all in standard MFA program free verse, and I would > > have had a better chance (though I assume I still wouldn't have won as I > am > > > > > Wow! You can do that? Write poetry like that? Made-to-order. Wow. > > Maybe I'll start a fast-food-poetry contest, dig. > > > If you backchannel me, I'd like to personally award you a prize. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 10:41:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Levitsky Subject: BELLADONNA* BOOK SALE MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit HALF PRICE SPECIAL UNTIL JANUARY 31!!! Please scroll down to subscription and ordering for sale information. BELLADONNA* Book Catalog 1. Mary Burger, Eating Belief (temporarily out-of-print) 2. Camille Roy, Dream Girls (temporarily out-of-print) 3. Cecilia Vicuña, Bloodskirt (temporarily out-of-print) 4. Fanny Howe, parts from Indivisible 5. Eleni Sikelianos, from The Book of Jon 6. Laura Mullen, Translation Series (a few copies left) 7. Beth Murray, 12 Horrors (temporarily out-of-print) 8. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Audience (temporarily out-of-print) 9. Laura Wright, Everything Automatic 10. Lisa Jarnot, Nine Songs 11. Kathleen Fraser, Soft Pages 12. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 43: Gap 13. Nicole Brossard, Le Cou de Lee Miller/The Neck of Lee Miller 14. Lee Ann Brown, The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time/Reverse Mermaid 15. Adeena Karasick, The Arugula Fugues VII-VIII 16. Aja Couchois Duncan, Commingled : Sight 17. Lila Zemborain, PAMPA 18. Cheryl Pallant, Spontaneities 19. Lynne Tillman, chapters from Weird Fucks and “Dead Talk” 20. Abigail Child, Artificial Memory vol 1 & vol 2 ($5.00 set) Also Available: broadsides: Kristin Prevallet, "Still Life of Pigeons" Publications are printed in limited editions, a small portion of which are numbered and signed by the authors. Out of print volumes will be reprinted eventually. Ordering: Pamphlets: $3.00; $4.00 for institutions (add $2.00 for double volume) Signed: $5.00; $6.00 institutions Broadsides: $1.50 each, Signed: $2.50 Add $.50 for each item for postage. Subscriptions: Series of 5 pamphlets, includes free postage, postcards, & broadsides and one free pamphlet of choice: $15; $20 institutions; signed copies--$25; $30 institutions. NOW THOUGH JANUARY 31, 2002 (for orders with checks received by that date) SPECIAL HALF PRICE SALE!!!!! Belladonna 11-20, 11 volumes plus one surprise goodie, ONLY $15 including postage (U.S. orders only, add $3.00 for international orders) please allow 3 weeks for delivery Please send check or money order payable to: Rachel Levitsky Belladonna* Books 458 Lincoln Place, #4B Brooklyn, NY 11238 Email: levitsk@attglobal.net for more information http://www.durationpress.com/belladonna ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 23:23:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <20011214201650.70984.qmail@web11703.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed anyone wants to pick on this kid better pick on someone their own literary size at age 11. Gene At 12:16 PM 12/14/01 -0800, you wrote: >I'm also uncomfortable with this making-fun-of, >especially where it involves a person with disability >(where're Thomas Bell and Millie Niss when you need >'em?). Think of Larry Eigner! > >There are any number of "great" poets, Plath (?), >Pound, the afore-discussed Hannah Weiner, etc., etc., >whose work has to be reconciled to/through their >disability. > >How is it Nobel Prize material when Samuel Beckett >writes from the ~perspective~ of a legless, armless >trunk in a basket, but despicable when it's from an >actual gimp. > >If I were this child's poetry tutor (if he's 11, then >he's a prodigy and you're misjudging the work by adult >standards: it is very atypical writing for an 11-yr. >old), I think I'd highlight the lines > > > Fiery terror reigned. > > Structures collapsed. > > Red with blood, white with ash, > > And out-of-the-sky blue. > >as moving toward a more "adult"/literary direction, >sort of Nostradamean in their apocalypticality. He >has a tendency toward unmonitored abstractions, >definitely. In those lines, he starts to cross over >"better," I'd say, into finding a palpable, visceral, >imagistic grounding where the abstraction can be >experienced more sensorily. > >I'm reminded of my archived post about the poet who >wrote "Invictus," a cripple on crutches, valedictorily >invoked by hyper-American patriot bomber Timothy >McVeigh, at his hour of vulnerability. There's a >curious symmetry there, nation-to-man: now it's we who >are in bomber patriotic mode, and look how the >national focus has found a parallel cripple poet to >laureate. > >In ways, I find the poetry of Jewel or ~The Basketball >Diaries~ a much more disturbing phenomenon because, in >Jewels' case, these writers are ~Aryan~ in their >physical perfection. Kohut, about Nazi Germany, >theorized a metapsychology of national narcissisms, >where the danger is in the self-image of beautiful, >handsome, invulnerable, gym body, to the exclusion of >the weak and damaged. > >And I don't find it a particularly help strategy for >poets to oppose ourselves to ~any~ advancement of >poetry and pit ourselves against every example that >reaches mass audience. Why do we? Are we ~envious~ >and bitter that they and not we are getting attention? > A more effective strategy, I think, would be to >~link~ ourselves to every such fluke of poetry >publicity. If SPD and all the EPC publishers were to >"shower" this guy with avant-garde books, along with >all the other cratefuls of gifts he's gonna be >receiving from all over the coutnryh, and "our" >community editors were to write through his agents to >~solicit~ poems to include in "our" journals, . . . > >Recall, too, Lyn Hejinian's and Leslie Scalapino's PIN >(Poets In Need), a fund for poets in times of >emergency, illness, life crisis, or Brendan Lorberer's >similar ~Lungfull~ efforts for (forgive my poor memory >for names) the young poet injured in a car crash in >September. > > >I apologize that I'm always bringing up my May finger >injury on lists; it's much better, healed, >miraculously; but--- > >On my first visit to the hand surgeon after the >emergency room, I was in his office waiting for him. >And looking about, snooping, the way one does in MDs' >offices. And there was one of those calendars of >painting done by disabled people, "mouth paintings," >as the genre is called, by quadraplegics. > >In the past, I'd always found that stuff fiendishly >risible. "Sappy." No different from Taiwanese >painting factory work, except maudlinly authored. >America's weakness for such work is, of course, its >own curious phenomenon. (...which could be critiqued >in various directions: Americans, in a "sick" nation, >correctly recognize the work of the most severely >disabled as the best expression of our national >vulnerability/pathology;...) > >Anyhow, that afternoon, with my first phlange almost >gone, feeling awful and full of dread, leafing through >the "mouth painting" calendar, it looked different to >me. Not so laughable. In fact, some of the paintings >had their own verve. A lot of them fell short of >"better" work by standing just to the left or right of >a particular imitated tradition,--- but American >painting has always tended toward that (Abstract >Expressionism, Pop, etc., aside), the way we produced >all those "second-rate" Cubists in the '20s-'30s. The >art's "failure" was more a result of provincialism, >not so much abt. a lack of "inspiration." Like >klezmers. When all you've got to blow on is a kazoo >(provincial limitations), it's gonna sound pretty >tinny. But, if you can screen out the accidentals and >hear through to the "core,"... > >I told a friend of mine abt. this embarassing "change >of heart." He said, "So, as a result of your injury, >you're developing Compassion." > >....................................................... > >Some mouth painting/disabled artist links (it is, >apparently, a "major" art form in India): > >http://www.yorku.ca/admin/sa/roncope/picture.htm > >http://www.paralinks.net/wiredwheelsart.html > >http://www.boloji.com/ww/0401/teom.htm > >http://www.geocities.com/~wolf-eyes/faq-f.html > >http://www.puffler.com/artist.html > >http://www.ericmohn.com/ > >http://www.abilitymagazine.com/osmond_penalver.html > >http://www.alexabrysonart.com/Gallery/gallery.html > >http://www.tfaoi.com/articles/anne/ae11.htm > >http://www.melaningraphics.com/bios2.html > >http://www.pasipka.gr/art.htm > >http://www.indiabuildnet.com/mfpa/elangovan.html > >http://www.hotkey.net.au/~pg/cv.html > >AND > >A ~REVERSE~ PARAPLEGIA QUOTABLE: > >http://www.bartleby.com/63/45/2845.html > > > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of >your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com >or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 12:13:11 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Isat@AOL.COM Subject: Re: JR@70 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Happy B-day, Jerry!=20 The world would be a bleaker place without yr anthologies.=20 Here is a humble tribute to tribal poetries,=20 a little chant for tribal poets to do around the campfire. best, Igor Satanovsky SHAMBA BOO _________________ Shamba Boo Shamba Boo Shamba Boo Shamba Boo Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Shamba Boo t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Shamba Boo t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag f=C3=BAckita f=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Tuck tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Tuck Tuck tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Tuck Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck Tuck tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck tRRRRRRRRR Ta f=C3=BAckita f=C3=BAckita Tuck tRRRRRRRRR Ta t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Tuck tRRRRRRRRR tuck tuck Tuck tRRRRRRRRR tuck tuck Tuck tRRRRRRRRR t=C3=BAckita Tuck tRRRRRRRRR t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Shamba Boo t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Shamba Boo t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Boo=E2=80=99n=E2=80=99Tag t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita tuck-tuck-Tuck t=C3=BAckita t=C3=BAckita Shamba Boo Shamba Boo Shamba Boo SHSHAMBA-A! ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 00:29:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: BeeHive 4:3 Now Online (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII (apologies for cross-posting) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 13:06:52 -0800 From: BeeHive To: beehive@percepticon.com Cc: beehive@percepticon.com Subject: BeeHive 4:3 Now Online BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal Volume 4 : Issue 3 |...| December 2001 ________________________________________________ ISSN: 1528-8102 http://beehive.temporalimage.com ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ IN THIS ISSUE... ________________ ALT-X(CERPTS) Selections from the Alt-X ebooks by Mark Amerika, Adrienne Eisen, Raymond Federman & George Chambers, Matt Samet, Alan Sondheim, Nile Southern, Ronald Sukenick, Eugene Thacker ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_a.html --------<< COCKTAIL NATION by Eric Lammerman ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_b.html --------<< THE DREAM LIFE by Thomas Swiss ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_c.html --------<< DIGITAL CODE AND LITERARY TEXT by Florian Cramer ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html --------<< SUBLIMINAL by Kenji Siratori ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_e.html --------<< SHAMANS OF THE CYBER-STEPPES by Gordon Rumson ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_f.html --------<< THE WATCHER / THE MERMAID CABINET by Ellen Zweig ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_g.html --------<< INVENTION by Komninos Zervos ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_h.html --------<< SOCIAL UNITS | SHADOW TEXT by Kevin Magee ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_j.html --------<< 2 AM CONFESSION by Alison Daniel ... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_k.html ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ BeeHive ArcHive: http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/index.html ALL THE CONTENT FROM PAST ISSUES OF BEEHIVE Highlights include: ON STELARC : ALAN SONDHEIM http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/41arc.html TOWARD ELECTRACY : GREGORY ULMER / TALAN MEMMOTT [intro by Mark Amerika] http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html NY/SF POETRY COLLECTION : 30 Poets from San Francisco and New York http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/23arc.html SQUARING OF THE WORD : SIEGFRIED HOLZBAUER http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/25arc.html HELL'S FATHER : ROWAN WOLF http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/41arc.html ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ BeeHive Creative Director: Talan Memmott / beehive@percepticon.com BeeHive Associate Editor: Alan Sondheim / beehive@percepticon.com BeeHive Poetry Editor: Ted Warnell / beehivepoetry@percepticon.com ________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 22:51:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award [NISS: "writing-to-order" YEAH!]] In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii --- Millie Niss wrote: > I can't believe that two people accused me of writing-to-order (as if tat were necessarily bad--I've done some freelancing and the deal is that you write what they want...).......... But I don't see anything shameful about writing a poem that fits an editor's taste! Millie ------------------------------------------------------- I may have carried writing-to-order (prete-a-lire) to the extreme. I would calculate in the journal's typeface, character-width per line,... wld. read everything I cld. get my hands on of the editors/jurors... (I am not necessarily recommending the below as a Guide To Being Published, by any means.) In the first year or two of my "Return to Poetry" (after a 10-yr. hiatus or "abstinence"), in the rush of its renewed newness, and the sense of infinite possibilities,--- being published in journals was a driving (subsequently failed, starved-into-quiescence) desire of mine and I approached it indiscriminately. Although I scrutinized any journal I would submit to, --- and I also submitted to ill-advisedly many competitions --- I had some sort of blind spot where, basically, pretty much anything I read seemed roughly within my range: I already had in my volumes and volumes of poetry 3-ring binders, I fancied, something that fit, or that I could come up with something to match and would put my nose to it. That perspective was probably related to innate (infantile) feelings of omnipotence, that I could do anything or write in any style. For a Boston Review competition jurored by Jane Miller (?), I read all her books, and "imitated" her to the point of ~taking poems of hers~ and *word-for-word* re-tracing her grammars, subtituting for each word a synonym or, in another mood, its antonym, a sort of anti-poem (anti- like anti-matter), identical in every pattern except that, black-for-white, night-for-day, it reversed the original thematically. Lucie Brock-Broido was juror to a Mississippi journal contest, a place I would normally never want to publish and whose writing I didn't like--- but I liked B-B's ~Master Letters~ and somehow felt compelled to try to establish a link to her by winning this competition (although she lives write here in the neighborhood: going to Mississippi in order to meet your next-to-neighbor). The "rush" of poetry ("inspiration") by then was approaching flood-date levels and, given the competition's 10-pp. limit, I wrote a 10-pp. long poem. To make sure it would fit, I measured out character widths of the journal's pages, etc., and re-formatting, re-lineating the 10-pp. within a millimeter. (Oh! A millimeter! Unconscious name pun there, Millie!) When I turned in my process notes to Chain that accompanied the visual art comic book they were nice enough to print, my future fiancee Juliana reacted, "That's the first time anybody has written to spec!" She'd given me a suggested page limit and I tailored the volume to those margins. With the criticism/reviews I've had published, sometimes soliciting editors are almost ~annoyed~ at this tendency of mine. "The 'joke' will be lost on most people," I was told once: they'd stipulated, say, a 400-word limit and, you know JJ, bingo! 399. Whatever. Etc., etc. Despite never winning anything or being published in the target journals, it yielded strange synchronicities. With my Jane Miller failures, a few of them became "movie poems", explicitly drawing imagery from movies I was then also enthusiastic abt. watching (simultaneously haven't broken an even longer "abstinence" of avoiding all cinema and television for a mortification of, like, twenty years; bought a VCR, renting, renting): "Twelve Monkeys" was the title of one, after the film. The winner Miller chose was the Boston Review issue with the Tom Hanks poems, where every poem of his was titled after a Tom Hanks movie. Somehow, it felt, although I'd been bypassed in a win-or-nothing competition, I'd accurately intuited (predicted) Miller's vulnerabilities: movies. And so on, and so on. When that phase broke and I eased into less-targeted writing, stopped sending out and just peacefully wrote for my hour-and-a-half minimum each night,--- I had settled into a fruitful perversion homogenized out of all those previous goals: I ~counted up~ the number of lines per page in journals and, either reasoning that editors prefer one-poem-per-page or myself disliking the usually arbitrary break page-turning insets, I came up with an average of 28 lines per page. For the next year-and-a-half to two years: 28 lines (including spaces), every night. Millie, I think that these willingness or capacity to adapt has to do with some (few) poems writing from an Other-centered place (vs. a "self"-centered). Psychologically, there's something very significant abt. that sort of accommodation to the Other. (And can be interpreted in different ways: negatively, it could seem sycophantish, slavish, chameleon...) In a different form, that impulse guided Frank O'Hara's Personism, that "a poem takes place between two people, not between two pages." Even when journals and competitions can be putted aside, that same personal orientation may re-manifest: writing ~"about"~ others, writing ~to~ others,... You're writing. There's something healthy underlying that impetus. It's social. You're bound to be "accused" of writing-to-order, given the Little Jack Horner School of Poetry that's prevalent ("...sat in a corner / Eating his ... pie. / He stuck in his thumb / And pulled out a plum / And said: What a good boy am I!"). thumb red dripping plum socket in crust pie tin all the walls converge here in my corner sitting on the carpet shall I lick it clean? would you like to see my red opposeable thumb cuticle knuckle __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 03:31:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Parr Subject: Cripples write poetry, no longer drunks. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello friends-- Glad to hear I'm not the only disgruntled poet to be a bit fascinated by the Stepanek phenomenon-- not unlike Jewel's poetry being published a few years ago, I'm interested more and more by the name of "poetry" itself, i.e., that part of writing which travels under the literary signifier of the "poetic." Immediately, yeah, it's awful, but I think it's important to remember that this is what "poetry" is for people who don't read a lot-- and I don't want this to sound elitist as hell, but indeed-- I think it's important for writers/scholars/etc. to pay attention to how these codes play out-- poetry is available at a local bookstore and will make you feel better, like watching Forrest Gump Good poetry is written by people with unfortunate physical setbacks like Muscular Dystrophy. Poetry is also incredibly occasional along these lines-- a "good" poem should be about "important" things like buildings falling down and America being emotional in order to combat mystery terrorists. Good poetry should be less of an aesthetic experience than a blank catharsis. Not being coherent, I realize, but I don't think this ill sort of "popularity" should be overlooked-- which is not to say that poets should write to be accepted by the American public, but it's worth thinking about what kind of ideologies surrounding the poetic and the idea of "poetry" abound. Not pretty, and really pretty disturbing-- the lyric ratcheted into an incredibly false and and pathetic condition of subservience to "feel-good" monoculture. And on top of that, as bad as this Jewel-Stepanek stuff is, I'd argue that it's not a hell of a lot worse than what shows up in the New Yorker-- or a number of other "poetry" journals. PS, happy new year to all. James Ian Randall Wilson wrote: > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on Oprah, > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early because > of his illness). > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: > > 9-11-2001 > It was a dark day in America. > There was no amazing grace. > Freedom did not ring. > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > Fiery terror reigned. > Structures collapsed. > Red with blood, white with ash, > And out-of-the-sky blue. > As children trust elders, > Citizens find faith in leaders. > But they were all blinded, > Shocked by the blasts. > Undefiable outrage. > Undeniable outpouring > Of support, even prayer, > Or at least, moments of silence. > Church and State > Could not be separated. > A horrific blasting of events > With too few happy endings. > Can the children sleep > Safely in their beds tonight? > Can the citizens ever rest > Assured of national security again? > God, please, bless America... > And the rest of our earthly home. > > Mattie Stepanek > Sept. 11, 2001 > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of Jimmy > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan > Franzen here. . .) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 01:39:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: VIRGIL (posted recklessly) In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20011216160056.02ec1980@pop.bway.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii night befell what unused coffin design'd the torch so fatal destiny compell'd the vehicle, dire, kissed with fatal zeal, universal time prefix'd with hyphens ours the wonder his the bloody falchion. Exiled into an unseen, the force relentlessly exerted against giants counter-balances the tipping scales, weighed down by sighs. Ha! the furnace laughs a wreath of smoke, of cosmos. Red then blue venom blots linen looms, warp and woof all discolored. Our minds possess by deed and contract on parchment some countenance of antique tongue, a wren caught in the rain under an awning, in search of target as tiger gods ordain and prowl unmanly sit-at-home to dine on offals ugh Lamp along th'unequal sides of streets balance in vain fortune's return. Chewn to grasshopper-leap into cuspidor, mouthful thief slithered the tongue in my opening, an unguent that spoils nostrils so werewolf flowers. Later the same doomsday, Medea's lullaby, a hillbilly lullaby to put babes to bed with hollow rocks for pillows: to listen to waterfall of Mixolydian blood rush in their ears, up their asses like a lake. Sire, by rubbing out her son, conqu'ring bedchamber etched in air and wine and tender son, mortal boys (dill pickle) lost a sunken town along the road, the deserted road that leads, lots cast by hands mistaken for huntsman's head(s), to world with his heart unsuccored, daring, beastly. On all fours, there in birds' path shone limbs, a blimp overhead whose old clouds, childish clouds --- cloud, cloud, cloud, --- was the majestic song aegis married (wed but bedwetter), turning bride to warm stone, rocks of the fields to loaves. Half himself, . . . Sails flying, yin and yang, pirates in their lust for the innocent coin are unlike sailors (rapine) in little telltale ways: their boots, the brimmer, for one; the reward of brave sleep defenselessly enshrined under a canopy of swords drawn clanging from their worst hilts. Leaf portends a presage pleas'd to wound Anubis by the Nile, ev'ry sea, conceal'd under feast's napkins ---- only one ocean left behind: a meal for parents; and for the child, prophecy, cyphers . . . And drowned in drama. Flecked in beaten gold, the lifeless surrounds black body with an encirclement. The elements were against forces joined unwillingly to march up-hill. Wind deity, O with your three pudgey-cheeked wind deity brothers whom tropics please by swatting blueflies with sorrow-streaming imperial Neptune devotees, weapon by itself flattened goddess-born Despondency: the umbilical has veins, too. Flask uncorked, my summer slumber presaged autumn's westernmost sunset, not the sunset over the ruins but the one next to it, smaller, vaporous, sev'n in a row, dancing bears. Progeny, pyre has smoke screens for spectres. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 09:30:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mister Kazim Ali Subject: Unauthorized Photocopying! In-Reply-To: <152.5bba979.294badfb@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I see the point of Mr. Messerli about unauthorized copying of texts. Since we have some level of insitutional power (looking for 19 copies of a text, for example), our continued use of "My Life" (just as an example) will help the small publisher keep the work in print. Still, there is something a little sexy about scaring up a copy of a rare or hard to find work--I remember in 1991 when "House of Incest" by Anais Nin was *impossible* to find and (I believe) out of stock, if not out of print. Luckily for me, soon after the movie "Henry and June" was released Ohio U press re-released all of her works. As for me, the book I would "most like to copy illegally" (such a back-handed honor indeed) is "Cunning" by Laura Moriarty. The thing is, one could never do it, because the physical book (paper, type, ink) is unbelievably beautiful and part of the novel (I swear on of the five best novels I've ever read)-- --still, if I'm ever in the position to order books for courses, I hope to use books regularly in order to contribute to their long, long life. the book I most want back in print (I understand that I am about to get my wish) is "Europe of Trusts" by S Howe. Kazim. ===== "all histories are fabulous. ours stinks with genius." --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 11:50:38 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mister Kazim Ali Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: <3b.1f06c7e7.294bfcf3@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > I think writing a poem simply to suit an editor's > taste is most definitely a > sort of fast-food-poetry, made-to-order, etc. etc. > etc. > It's really interesting to think about. I mean: how many great poems *were* indeed written to specific situations, or even "commissioned" by occasions and leaders. And how these poems resist their intended uses. I'm still nuts about (in spite of the brilliant article in "Code of Signals" that Michael Palmer edited--who wrote that article?) the way the Aenied devolves and then collapses under its own empire-bearing weight. It's the same sort of trick when an author is writing for an audience she *knows*--the example from classical literature is Murasaki Shikibu, summoned to court of the empress (according to the new translator--what's his name? I'm so bad at this--why I never became an academic)--*because* she was writing the Genji. So each night she's writing the episode, *knowing* the scrolls are going to be passed around and read--and she knew exactly *who* was reading as well because she was living with most of them in the palace-- and then maybe the author fights for his integrity back: Thomas Hardy forces to use the bogus happy ending for the magizine serial of Return of the Native yanks it from the book version...though most editions now include it at the end "after" the "actual" book is completed. or Virgil who wanted the Aeneid burned. he could see its flaws. the emperor mis-read the book and published it and praised it. and of course Emily Dickinson's "valentine's day letter" (1850, I think?) was written for her brother's friend who wanted something for the college humor magazine (well maybe it wasn't a humor magazine, but some kind of magazine--I'm a travesty of scholarship, i know)... ===== "all histories are fabulous. ours stinks with genius." --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 17:56:43 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Theresa Hak Kyung Sha MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable great section on her work in the new _Fence! Great issue as a whole, = too. It wasn't clear if she is still alive and working? tom bell &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&cetera: Poetry at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/publicat.html Gallery - Metaphor/Metonym for Health at = http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm=20 Health articles at http://psychology.healingwell.com/ Reviews at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/reviews.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 12:09:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cadaly Subject: Re: Walmart Poetry MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT this started with Jacques du Penne > I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as > though it were a French name. Catherine Daly rhymes with Dali en francais cadaly@pacbell.net ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 12:09:32 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik Web Site 2001 The RealPoetik website, also our archives, is up for the year 2001. Same place. http://www.scn.org/realpoetik ought to get you there. Errors and omissions (and such have been known to occur) should be brought to my attention immediately for correction (I always wanted to say that..."for correction"). Sal Salasin RealPoetik ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 03:50:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: double-coded everglade MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - double-coded everglade i undressed nature with my camera lens and eyes hidden clotting apple snails green anoles anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water continuity saw grass cut through perception r you_know sex_girls sex_boys w y apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered hidden distant herons green anoles molten turkey vultures circled overheard brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water continuity saw grass cut through perception o r you_know sex_girls adolescent alligators gathered w hidden green anoles brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception anhinga spearing beneath the surface you_know hidden green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o r you_know hidden clotting green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o anhinga spearing beneath the surface r you_know sex_girls sex_boys w r k saw grass cut through perception o sex_boys w y distant herons green anoles o you_know the white ibis, the white ibis y apple snails green anoles anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception hidden green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o r you_know hidden clotting green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o anhinga spearing beneath the surface r you_know sex_girls sex_boys w r green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water r you_know the white ibis, the white ibis distant herons green anoles o you_know the white ibis, the white ibis y hidden apple snails green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast continuity saw grass cut through perception o r you_know sex_girls w hidden distant herons green anoles molten turkey vultures circled overheard brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water continuity saw grass cut through perception o r you_know sex_girls adolescent alligators gathered w green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water r you_know the white ibis, the white ibis w clotting brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o sex_girls sex_boys y y apple snails green anoles anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception clotting turkey vultures circled overheard brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o sex_girls hidden green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o r you_know clotting brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o sex_girls sex_boys y r hidden green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o r you_know hidden clotting apple snails green anoles molten turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast k iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o q r sex_girls sex_boys w y hidden clotting green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o anhinga spearing beneath the surface r you_know sex_girls sex_boys w k saw grass cut through perception o sex_boys w y apple snails green anoles anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception hidden green anoles brown anoles moving fast iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception anhinga spearing beneath the surface you_know hidden clotting green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard anhinga streamed towards me brown anoles moving fast saw grass cut through perception o anhinga spearing beneath the surface r you_know sex_girls sex_boys w hidden green anoles turkey vultures circled overheard iguana fled quickly into the water saw grass cut through perception o r you_know k saw grass cut through perception o sex_boys w y y apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered apple snails brown anoles moving fast o adolescent alligators gathered _ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 17:25:49 -0500 Reply-To: whitebox@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: whitebox@EARTHLINK.NET Organization: whitebox Subject: Dada Lama Ping Pong at WHITE BOX MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit WHITE BOX presents... THURSDAY DECEMBER 20th - 8PM ____________________________________________________________________ TEXTUAL OPERATIONS organized by AS BESSA CARL SKELTON Dada Lama Ping Pong: Duet /Séance with bp Nichol Introduced, and occasionally interrupted, by Warren Niesluchowski bp Nichol was one of Canadaís most inventive poets. Originally part of the Four Horsemen group, Nichol also experimented with concrete poetry, children literature and collaborated with visual artists. Carl Skelton met bp Nichol in 1982, at Coach House Press and the two were to collaborate in a project at Open Studio, in Toronto. Skelton calls "Dada Lama Ping Pong", "a virtual collaboration between a visual poet and an artist who talks too much. "Dada Lama Ping Pong" is based on a sound poem/homage to Hugo Ball, that Nichol recorded in1967. It will combine various aspects of bp Nicholís extensions of poetry into the visual and aural fields, and Skelton's promiscuous practice of splicing and mangling architectural, narrative, and tactile Image Implantation Protocols. Assistance of the Canadian Consulate General and Cabinet magazine is gratefully acknowledged. ____________________________________________________________________ immediately following will be... BOOK PREVIEW/ TREE DANCE GATHERING Carolee Schneemann's Imaging Her Erotics 2001 - MIT Press ...plus Festive Spirits, 6 Strings of Red Poinsettia Lights, Sound, Space and an Aromatic Pine ____________________________________________________________________ WHITE BOX 525 WEST 26TH STREET (between 10th & 11th avenues) NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 ph 212.714.2347 WWW.WHITEBOXNY.ORG WHITE BOX is a 501[c]3 not for profit arts organization (to be deleted from WHITE BOX's e-mail address book, please reply with "delete me") ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 05:59:33 -0500 Reply-To: Bob Grumman Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Grumman Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Nothing against SFSU but my bottom line remains: If the people running a poetry press don't care enough about poetry and POETS to run their press with their own money, if need be, so as not to have to charge poets to submit manuscripts or enter contests, they should take up another hobby. I would add that poets who don't care enough about poetry publishers at least occasionally to buy books from them and subscribe to their magazines, and even send gifts of money to them when able, should take up another hobby. --Hard-Nos ed Bob G. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 06:24:53 -0500 Reply-To: Bob Grumman Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Grumman Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I've been meaning for quite a while to comment on Igor's re-edit and properly establish the Satanovsky/Austin/Grumman Buffalo clique, but just didn't get around to it till now. Not much to say, actually. I think the Merrill poem an okay one in the now-standard Iowa Epifikal Free Verse mode, but I like Igor's chop better--though I wouldn't call it all that experimental. My editorial annotations follow: My grandmother must be replaced. Frantic adolescense *change last two lines to "rust be meplaced rantic adolesc Fense" wheeled an old lady into her mink, *consider various sizes and varieties of fonts for the above two lines but what remains? Today’s memo from the Tenant’s Committee? The ongoing deterioration? *replace "oration" with multi-colored blob and mess around with the rest of the passage with smudges and lining out perform vector analysis on the rest, reprint the whole thing on a crumpled piece of paper, then get Santa and Rudolph to make the result really experimental! --Bob G. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 21:18:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jesse glass Subject: Ed Cox--Collected Poems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Not sure anybody mentioned this, but Ed Cox's Collected poems are available for $13.95 from Paycock Press/ 3819 No. 13th Street/ Arlington, Va. 22201. Intro. by Robert Coles, 152 page perfect bound paperback with a haunting picture of Ed on the cover c. 1970 or so. ISBN: 0-931181-10-0. Contact Rick Peabody hedgehog2@erols.com for more information. Ed was part of Some of Us Press Collective, along with Beth Joselow and Michael Lally--a group I visited one long bus ride ago. Jesse About Jesse Glass. How to order his books. http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 08:35:59 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik Halvard Johnson Halvard Johnson lives and works in NYC and can be reached at halvard@earthlink.net. You can also check out his web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~halvardjohnson. ATM in Lobby “Lobby Girl sits on the fat man’s knee-e, fat man happy as he can be-e.” He picked up the heavy lamp from the table and began to explore the hips tight with her leg, his genuine and less guilty wealth. Shampooing her lips, swimming and casting round his eye to delve with some companions what men began to loosen. Her vagina clamped down upon his cock, and he sends Eurylochus to explore, to feel it pulsate to her body, shimmer into a herald of new dreaming. We think we cannot, so then we must investigate this as she became lost in the throes of her orgasm. This struck dead their hearts, The end of this counsel being to persuade his soldiers he had actually done it with a woman. Those parts which he knew would prove a most, to them, unpleasing motion, to take his cock with her hands and close her mouth about the head, and therefore I advise thee to explore. I now am bound, in purpose, to seek by this device of travel to slowly tighten on it, sucking it until she had about half of it in her mouth, to earn by her deep explorings, to satiate him, sucking on it like a popsicle, eyes glued to mine, savoring my every reaction. And thoughts of sacred Sparta, up and down the coastline of my straining cock, of our land, its cultivation of the soil and of the mind, exploring the interior regions of her mouth, preparing by scientific means problems that will unite us instead of belaboring those problems which invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean until finally all of my cock was buried in her mouth. As we plumb the vastnesses of space, let us go to the new worlds together. She ground her face against my stomach ere I could explore its wildernesses. All forms and substances twisting her head back and forth, then returning to fucking my cock with her mouth. At Oxford, I found the liberty and seclusion best fitted for my active and exploring mind. No safer place than college for a youth whose mind wasn’t going to take anything too roundly. Nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for the great daring and venture of sailors on new voyages of discovery. I could feel my balls swelling, getting ready to expel my fluids. Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me. Halvard Johnson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 14:49:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Administration Subject: Re: Virus MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Regarding worms, trojans, and viruses in general: The Poetics List may be discounted safely as a possible source of virus transmission as we have configured the listserv not to distribute email attachments and embedded files, which are the almost exclusive means of email-related virus transmission. Indeed, it is for this reason that we have made the decision not to distribute even so much as HTML-formatted messages. While it is nevertheless highly recommended that subscribers run anti-virus software on their machines, this is urged as a general precaution and is not strictly related to your subscription to this listserv. The most current information on computer viruses may be found in the "security response" section of Symantec's web site: . Christopher W. Alexander poetics list moderator ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 01:17:10 +0100 Reply-To: baratier@megsinet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Baratier Organization: Pavement Saw Press Subject: great poets MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Perhaps if you are relly great you can wait until people beg you to publish your work" Millie-- What is funny is we have done this. For the feature for issue #3 I walked out of a poets house with a manuscript and published 20 pages for the feature. For issue #7, we are badgering the hell out of a young bostonian (not age 11 Be well David Baratier, Editor Pavement Saw Press PO Box 6291 Columbus OH 43206 USA http://pavementsaw.org ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 16:52:05 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Larsen Subject: Skips 'n' Scrips In-Reply-To: <001301c17ff6$4de32a20$a6063b80@oemcomputer> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Now available: S K I P S ' N ' S C R I P S by David Larsen (feat. "Portrait of Gerard Malanga") For trade or $4, from the artist at: 829 Park Way Oakland CA 94606 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 21:50:04 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Aaron Belz Subject: britney a calvinist? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20011214181917.02c71620@pop.bway.net> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT B R I T N E Y S P E A R S anagrams to P R E S B Y T E R I A N S You heard it here first! maybe. -Aaron ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 09:34:55 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marcella Durand Subject: for New Orleans poets & voters MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" A friend in New Orleans asked me to forward this: Hello, Sean has entered the upcoming City Council At-Large race. If you have a moment, please check out his web site at: www.seangerowin.com. Sean's decision is driven by a desire to be an effective city legislator without a large campaign war chest. We have been working on ways to run a grass roots campaign based on a web site loaded with research and campaign literature. If you have any suggestions please email me or Sean at: sean@seangerowin.com. Most importantly, if you like the site, please email the site URL to others. This is the only way for our campaign to get our message out. Best, Karoline ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 15:17:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Isn't it condescending as hell to cut a poet slack because of hir handicap? Plath needs no slack cut for her; Sexton got too much; and little Mattie Stepanek does, indeed, seem to write perfectly dreadful poems. His whole phenomenon seems to me death-voyeurism-kitsch, on the same plane as _Love Story_ only without Al Gore. Now, if he were forging the poems of a nonexistent English monk, I'd be impressed. Gwyn ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 12:27:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Elena Caballero-Robb Subject: Re: by way of intro ii In-Reply-To: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Dear Damian Judge, In case it has not already been suggested, Nate Mackey would be of interest as well. Check out his essay "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol." in _The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy_. Ed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof Books, 1998. 87-118. See also his _Bedouin Hornbook_ (Sun and Moon, I think). I understand Nate also performs his poetry (or recently did) accompanied by a live jazz ensemble. Good luck with your work, and apologies for not responding sooner. I'm catching up with the last month or so of the list only now. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Maria Elena Caballero-Robb Literature Department University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California 95064 mecr@cats.ucsc.edu %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Damian Judge Rollison Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 11:08 AM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: by way of intro ii Dear List, In a different vein, I wonder if I could prevail on your collective and individual awarenesses for help with my dissertation project, which is now at an inaugural stage. I'm writing about the nexus of poem/text/notation/music/performance in Modernist poetry, specifically collaborations between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson and between Louis and Celia Zukofsky, with some discussion of musical notation in Gerard Manley Hopkins' manuscripts, and of jazz and blues in Harlem Renaissance poetics. I'm also interested in Cage and Mac Low, but I don't know as much as I'd like to about contemporary poetic engagements with musical structure and performance. I'd love to hear, bc or otherwise, answers to some questions about contemporary practice (however one might choose to delimit 'contemporary'): 1) What poets have integrated musical notation into poetic texts? 2) What strike you as the most significant examples of opera or oratorio libretti, or other 'words for music', by contemporary poets? 3) What poets are especially interested in incorporating jazz, blues, modern orchestral, American folk, or other musics into their work? In a U.S. context especially, are there contemporary poets whose work is deeply engaged with music as a model? (I'm thinking of Zukofsky, Bunting, Langston Hughes as precursors here.) I ask these questions not to shirk the work myself, but because there are, to my knowledge, few obvious ways to research it. Thanks! Damian <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 18:24:46 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: Cripples write poetry, no longer drunks. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit the question for me is whether he's going to appear on Oprah because of the poetry or because of her interest in cripples? tom bell ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Parr" To: Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 2:31 AM Subject: Cripples write poetry, no longer drunks. > Hello friends-- Glad to hear I'm not the only disgruntled poet to be a bit > fascinated by the Stepanek phenomenon-- not unlike Jewel's poetry being > published a few years ago, I'm interested more and more by the name of "poetry" > itself, i.e., that part of writing which travels under the literary signifier of > the "poetic." Immediately, yeah, it's awful, but I think it's important to > remember that this is what "poetry" is for people who don't read a lot-- and I > don't want this to sound elitist as hell, but indeed-- I think it's important > for writers/scholars/etc. to pay attention to how these codes play out-- poetry > is available at a local bookstore and will make you feel better, like watching > Forrest Gump Good poetry is written by people with unfortunate physical > setbacks like Muscular Dystrophy. Poetry is also incredibly occasional along > these lines-- a "good" poem should be about "important" things like buildings > falling down and America being emotional in order to combat mystery terrorists. > Good poetry should be less of an aesthetic experience than a blank catharsis. > > Not being coherent, I realize, but I don't think this ill sort of "popularity" > should be overlooked-- which is not to say that poets should write to be > accepted by the American public, but it's worth thinking about what kind of > ideologies surrounding the poetic and the idea of "poetry" abound. Not pretty, > and really pretty disturbing-- the lyric ratcheted into an incredibly false and > and pathetic condition of subservience to "feel-good" monoculture. > > And on top of that, as bad as this Jewel-Stepanek stuff is, I'd argue that it's > not a hell of a lot worse than what shows up in the New Yorker-- or a number of > other "poetry" journals. > > PS, happy new year to all. > > James > > Ian Randall Wilson wrote: > > > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on Oprah, > > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early because > > of his illness). > > > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: > > > > 9-11-2001 > > It was a dark day in America. > > There was no amazing grace. > > Freedom did not ring. > > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > > Fiery terror reigned. > > Structures collapsed. > > Red with blood, white with ash, > > And out-of-the-sky blue. > > As children trust elders, > > Citizens find faith in leaders. > > But they were all blinded, > > Shocked by the blasts. > > Undefiable outrage. > > Undeniable outpouring > > Of support, even prayer, > > Or at least, moments of silence. > > Church and State > > Could not be separated. > > A horrific blasting of events > > With too few happy endings. > > Can the children sleep > > Safely in their beds tonight? > > Can the citizens ever rest > > Assured of national security again? > > God, please, bless America... > > And the rest of our earthly home. > > > > Mattie Stepanek > > Sept. 11, 2001 > > > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of Jimmy > > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan > > Franzen here. . .) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 13:36:35 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Kizershot Subject: Re: Theresa Hak Kyung Sha Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit She was murdered in 1982. There are some great essays on her work-- in The Dream of The Audience (Constance Lewallen), everybody's autonomy (Juliana spahr), translation and subjectivity (Naoki Sakai), the melancholy of race (Anne Anlin Cheng) and Trinh T Minh Ha has written on her too. There is a book of essays on her work called Writing Self, Writing Nation. I think her archives are at Berkeley. It's well worth pursuing her work! best-- julie kizershot ---------- >From: Thomas Bell >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Theresa Hak Kyung Sha >Date: Mon, Dec 17, 2001, 4:56 PM > > great section on her work in the new _Fence! Great issue as a whole, too. > It wasn't clear if she is still alive and working? > > tom bell > > &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&cetera: > Poetry at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/publicat.html > Gallery - Metaphor/Metonym for Health at > http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm > Health articles at http://psychology.healingwell.com/ > Reviews at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/reviews.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 22:14:40 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Re "My Life". The information I gave was correct in regard to the = availability of "My Life" through second hand book dealers i.e via = ADDALL which has other companies such as Abebooks.com associated with = it. As to who publishers what and where they are that's for publishers = and other clever types etc I dont buy new stock mainly because I have = got that kind of money...I'm not quite on a par with Borders yet... But as to copying: when I was at the Auckland University the major = activity of students seemed to be photocopying. I was watching one = personage one day copying all the books (then available at the A.U.) of = John Ashbery and somehow the "counter" on the machine was ADDING the = cost to his card!!!=20 Mr Messerli doesnt have to wory: photocopying books is awesomely = tedious and there is always a sufficient market out there of "rich = people" who buy books at Borders. I could have a copy of "My Life" and = I'd be struggling to get US$3.00 for it because in the second hand book = game most buyers have buggerall (or they pretend to be thus indigent). = Even if I stole 10,000 copies of each book I ever got I would lose money = through costs accruuing: probably the cost of shredding unwanted poetry = especially. But the capitalist system - actuallly just about any market system - = would crash tommorrow if theft was outlawed !!!! I've got a book published called "Red". I wish people would steal it ! = At least then I know someone wanted it: or thought they did! Best for = Xmas and may the US's efforts in obliterating Afghanistan be = rewarded...hopefully not in kind though. PS. This Messerli character sounds a bit retentive...not one of these = "goody goody" types I hope?=20 Richard=20 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:04:15 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: Virus In-Reply-To: <576714.3217589397@ny-chicagost2a-134.buf.adelphia.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Example 1: Of the pear the fish drives calmly the grass. ..................................................... Example 2: >From the chestnut the pale steaming darkness and the long mushroom. ..................................................... I-Worm.Haiku, by Mister Sandman Did you know The smallest box may hold The biggest treasure? ..................................................... CONTENTS bridge light sea fish butterfly foghorn day moon evening spring sunset boat petal blossom stone mist passage darkness dolphin ant shadow star frost cicada wind garden orchard chestnut forest leaf sun winter autumn summer morning tree branch smoke grape rainbow blackness shade edge snowflake raindrop starling stem charcoal silence flurry trunk gnat pear strawberry breeze grass silence worm solstice rain cauliflower dawn fire splinter cedar skyline mushroom foam roar child reflected calm distant small shiftin g long overlooking delicate tiny colorful silent noisy faint bruised plucked ripening swollen dark new old brittle steaming decaying single wet bare bright cold heavy purplish fleeting smooth pale imprisoned lightning frozen cupped dewy shriveled fiery hunkered stirring chattering misshapen taut matted visible wild surprising sudden trembling twisting perfect flashing frosted solemn rising lost loved this that these those of to with from in on sl owly calmly soon suddenly eagerly afterward slightly toward no w the a and or share shared s stop stopped s recall recalled s drive drove s chase chased s contain contained s return returned s rise rose s ripple rippled s move moved s fall fell s hang hung s miss missed es catch caught es start started s tousle tousled s pass passed es pluck plucked s blind blinded s crush crushed es awake awoke s rattle rattled s pierce pierced s The Haiku worm usually arrives as a HAIKU.EXE file attached to an e-mail message. The message looks like it was forwarded from the original recepient with the subject 'Fw: Compose your own haikus'. The message body advertises the attached file as a Haiku (oriental poetry style) generator which it actually is. But along with Haiku generation routine the file contains worm code. The message the worm spreads itself with looks like that: :)) ----- Original Message ----- >"Old pond... > a frog leaps in > water's sound." >- Matsuo Basho. > >DO YOU WANT TO COMPOSE YOUR OWN HAIKUS? > >Haiku is a small poetry with oriental metric that appeared in the XVI century and is being very popular, mainly in Japan and the USA. > >It's done to trascend the limitation imposed by the usual language and the linear/scientific thinking that treat the nature and the human being as a machine. > >It usually has 3 lines and 17 syllables distributed in 5, 7 and 5. It must register or indicate a moment, sensation, impression or drama of a specific fact of nature. It's almost like a photo of some specific moment of nature. > >More than inspiration, what you need in order to compose a real haiku is meditation, effort and perception. > >DO YOU WANT TO COMPOSE YOUR OWN HAIKUS? > >Now you can! it is very easy to get started in this old poetry art. Attached to this e-mail you will find a copy of a simple haiku generator. It will help you in order to understand the basics of the metric, rhyme and subjects which should be used when composing a real haiku... just check it out! it's freeware and you can use and spread it as long as you want! When the worm is run it first installs itself as HAIKUG.EXE into root Windows directory and modifies WIN.INI to be run during all further Windows sessions. After that the worm displays a messagebox with a randomly generated Haiku: Example 1 [ABOVE;HEAD] Example 2 [ABOVE;HEAD] F-Secure Virus Descriptions NAME: Haiku ALIAS: I-Worm.Haiku, W95.Haiku.16384.worm After system restart the worm gets control, checks if Internet connection is available and starts to look for e-mail addresses by scanning DOC, EML, HTM, HTML, RTF and TXT files. After the suitable e-mail address is found, the worm decrypts its internal message text, connects to a remote SMTP server that allows sending anonymous e-mail and sends its body MIME-encoded with the decrypted message to a found e-mail address. Then the worm displays its copyright messagebox: >From time to time the worm connects to a free web hosting provider Xoom and gets a WAV file from one of user accounts. The worm writes the downloaded file as C:\HAIKU.WAV, plays it and deletes it afterwards. The WAV file has a copyright string of Sandman: 0 00 00 ( E 66 6D (c) Mister Sandm 0 74 20 an, 2-2000 fmt E 0 00 > [HAPPY FACE] [HAPPY FACE]v C. 0 04 01 [HAPPY FACE] etc. The generator of Haiku poetry uses the internal table of words and endings and creates poetry strictly according to Haiku style rules. Here are the table's contents: [CONTENTS IN HEAD] [Analysis: Alexey Podrezov, F-Secure] pi __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 19:45:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: CDROM Offering: Alan Sondheim : Collected and Newly-Released Work: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - CDROM Offering: Alan Sondheim : Collected and Newly-Released Work: Help Azure and Alan leave Florida and purchase fantastic cdrom work in the process! We're returning to New York or heading to parts unknown! I want to distri- bute our work, raise some money, make more work! I've been busy - several series of new videos, images, texts, soundworks - All of the following include video/text/sound (except Asteroids - only video - and Turn/Cray - only sound); Archive 4.1 has the entire Internet Text to date - over 4500 pages! There are 7 cdroms for sale; price includes shipping costs. Any ONE cd-rom for $ 15; TWO for $ 25; THREE for $ 31. FOUR for $37, $5 each for any over FOUR. Special $53 for all eight! What's Available: Archive 4.1: This includes all the texts from 1994- present, a number of older articles, several books, a great number of images, some short video, etc. Archive is continuously updated. There is also sound-work and some programming. I think of this as the "basic" cd-rom; if you have an earlier copy, you might want to update. Et: This is the most recent cd-rom, with almost all of the video/sound/ imagework that has been described on the lists - plus more. r- if not x- rated. Much of this deals with the relation between sexuality and terror, as well as fascinated/fetishization - with Azure Carter. Some of the most intense pieces we've done. Voyage: Finished before Et, a number of video and image works, as well as sound/music pieces - with Azure Carter. Languor and exhibitionism on the way out of New York. Turn/Cray: Continuous/stringent machine soundwork, 56 minute .wav file. Miami: Finished before moving to Florida, a number of sound, image, and video pieces. Despair, existentialism, sex, power-land. With Azure Carter. Parables: Dance, Foofwa d'Imobilite, texts and sound by Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, a series of short videos (plus text) taken from The Parables of Nikuko. Between conceptual dance and body work / mesmeric movement. Baal: Foofwa d'Imobilite, Azure Carter, Alan Sondheim, several videos of sexuality, the problematic of ballet, and signs. r- or x- rated. Asteroids: A number of short silent videoworks - camera moving through 3d "asteroids" - no sound. Special: All 8: $53. Please note there is some overlap (not much) among the disks. =================== Please send cash, money order, or check to: Alan Sondheim 4600 SW 67 Avenue, Apartment 252 Miami, Florida, 33155 ======================================== ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:02:57 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: britney a calvinist? In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" brilliant At 9:50 PM -0600 12/15/01, Aaron Belz wrote: >B R I T N E Y S P E A R S > >anagrams to > >P R E S B Y T E R I A N S > > > >You heard it here first! maybe. > >-Aaron ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:01:25 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Theresa Hak Kyung Sha In-Reply-To: <014701c18756$7b415160$6401a8c0@ruthfd1tn.home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" she died in 1982 i believe, or '81. At 5:56 PM -0600 12/17/01, Thomas Bell wrote: >great section on her work in the new _Fence! Great issue as a whole, too. >It wasn't clear if she is still alive and working? > >tom bell > >&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&cetera: >Poetry at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/publicat.html >Gallery - Metaphor/Metonym for Health at >http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm >Health articles at http://psychology.healingwell.com/ >Reviews at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/reviews.htm ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 20:44:25 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Meyer Subject: Gertrude Stein Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable First, I want to thank Ulla Dydo for her posting last month on Stein texual= scholarship. Bless you, Ulla, for leading the way and carrying the torch f= or the last couple of decades. Next year we will have your book and what a = difference that will make. There is of course a very simple reason for the = regrettable absence of a textually sound edition of Stein's writing and tha= t is the regrettable absence of serious Stein scholarship. Yes there have b= een books and essays, but all you have to do is compare Susan Howe's amazin= g work on E. Dickinson and Lyn Hejinian's fabulous essays on Stein (see THE= LANGUAGE OF INQUIRY). Howe's work is all about scholarship; Hejinian gives= stunning, self-contained readings. Perhaps the relative inability of the a= cademy to barnacle Stein's texts has contributed to their incredible liveli= ness, their presentness, the sense that they have somehow managed the jump = from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century without sign of = aging. By the same token, however, it's high time to take Stein's intellect= ual stature seriously. And that, like it or not, requires scholarship. In a= couple of years we're going to have to deal with the fact that she was act= ually writing a century ago (in 2103, Q.E.D, in 2105-06, THREE LIVES, etc.)= and I have a sense that we're going to be wanting a textually sound editio= n pretty badly. I know I will. I'm saying all this completely self-interest= edly, to be sure, since my book IRRESISTABLE DICTATION: GERTRUDE STEIN AND = THE CORRELATIONS OF WRITING AND SCIENCE appeared in your local bookstore a = couple of months ago. If anyone's interested (and to promote interest) here= 's the jacket copy and the blurbs. I take responsibility for the former but= not the latter. The book's 475 pp., which partly accounts for why Stanford= UP is listing it for $55. It's possible, though, that you may be able to g= et a 30% discount for the next month or two=E2=80=94call 800-872-7423 and m= ention the following discount code: ZS1LT2. Thanks. =09"Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century=E2=80=99s preeminent= experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research in both the le= ading psychological laboratory and the leading medical school in the United= States. This book unearths the turn-of-the-century scientific and philosop= hical worlds in which the young Stein was immersed, demonstrating how her e= xtensive scientific training continued to exert a profound influence on the= development of her extraordinary literary practices. =09As an undergraduate, Stein worked with the philosopher William James and= the psychologist Hugo M=C3=BCnsterberg at the Harvard Psychological Labora= tory, investigating secondary personalities and automatic writing. Later, a= t Johns Hopkins Medical School, she was involved in cutting-edge neuroanato= mical research in the laboratory of Franklin Mall, the leading anatomist an= d embryologist of the day, and Lewellys Barker, author of the first English= -language textbook to describe the nervous system from the standpoint of th= e newly established neuron doctrine. Just as scientists reconceived relatio= ns among neruons as a function of contact or contiguity, rather than of org= anic connection, Stein radically reconceptualized language to place equal w= eight on the conjunctive and disjunctive relations among words. =09In the course of a broad reevaluation of Stein=E2=80=99s career, the aut= hor situates this major postromantic thinker in the lineage of poet-scienti= sts such as Wordsworth, Goethe, and Shelley, as well as in an important lin= e of speculative thinkers that extends from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William = James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also links Stein= to a wide range of contemporary figures whose work builds on this intellec= tual heritage, including the bioaesthetician Susanne Langer, the technoscie= nce theorist Donna Haraway, and the neuroscientists Francisco Varela, Geral= d Edelman, and J. Allan Hobson. The two lineages, poetic and speculative, s= hare the perspective that William James designated =E2=80=98radical empiric= ism.=E2=80=99 =09A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, IRRESISTIBLE DICTATION aims bo= th to explicate Stein=E2=80=99s radically experimental compositions and to = bring the radical empiricist philosophical tradition into focus through the= lens of her writing." =E2=80=9CIRRESISTIBLE DICTATION is dazzling, original, and wonderful. A maj= or work about Gertrude Stein and her radical creativity, it also brings tog= ether literature and science in compelling ways. Steven Meyer writes with l= ucidity, freshness, and authority, and I am very glad he has written this = book.=E2=80=9D =09=09=09=09=E2=80=94Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean of the Graduate School of = Arts and =09=09=09=09Science, New York University, and editor of GERTRUDE STEIN:=20 =09=09=09=09WRITINGS, 1903-1932 and WRITINGS, 1932-1946 =E2=80=9CWhat has been missing from the vast body of Gertrude Stein studies= is an approach so holistic that it sheds light not only on the literary tr= adition of which she was a part, but the early neurological and philosophic= background that contributed so much to her thought. Along comes Steven Mey= er, who has somehow mastered the science and the philosophy so thoroughly t= hat he presents us with exciting, dramatically new, and beautifully lucid c= oncepts that are sure to fascinate scholars for decades to come.=E2=80=9D =09=09=09=09=E2=80=94Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., Clinical Professor, Yale Medi= cal =09=09=09=09School, and author of HOW WE DIE, HOW WE LIVE, and THE=20 =09=09=09=09MYSTERIES WITHIN =E2=80=9CIRRESISTIBLE DICTATION is a fascinating new view of science, liter= ature, and the art of writing. I suspect that Steven Meyer has outdone his = protagonist, Gertrude Stein, in the subtlety of his philosophical and liter= ary analyses and in his penetrating insights into the limits of the contemp= orary neurosciences. A marvelous tour de force.=E2=80=9D =09=09=09=09=E2=80=94Israel Rosenfield, author of THE INVENTION OF MEMORY: = A NEW=20 =09=09=09=09VIEW OF THE BRAIN, and THE STRANGE, FAMILIAR, AND FORGOTTEN:=20 =09=09=09=09AN ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS =E2=80=9CThis groundbreaking book enters areas of Gertrude Stein research t= hat once were considered marginal, but now must be considered central. Stev= en Meyer brings Stein back to science, reclaims her for good sense, and wid= ens our understanding of her no longer peculiar originality.=E2=80=9D =09=09=09=09=E2=80=94William H. Gass, author of THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORD, =09=09=09=09HABITATIONS OF THE WORD, and THE TUNNEL ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:55:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: HO HO HO, MERRY COMBO!!! (9) Comments: cc: imitationpoetics@topica.com, whcircle@dept.english.upenn.edu, hub@dept.english.upenn.edu, grads@dept.english.upenn.edu In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20011216160056.02ec1980@pop.bway.net> from "Charles Bernstein" at Dec 16, 2001 08:34:41 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit COMBO 9 HAS ARRIVED IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS!!! NATHAN AUSTIN JACQUES DEBROT RAY DI PALMA PATRICK DURGIN LAURA ELRICK E. TRACY GRINNEL JEN HOFER VINCENT KATZ BEN LERNER MICHAEL MAGEE JENN McCREARY PHIL METRES CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY JASON NELSON RONALD PLAMER and... and interview with CARLA HARRYMAN by MICHAEL MAGEE & JACQUES DEBROT Wither the avant-garde? Wither do you think??? With her. And her friends in the COMBO..... $10.00 / 4-issue subscription $3.00 / single copies $50.00 / LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION $4.00 / back issues (includes available back issues) cash or checks payable to Michael Magee, 31 Perrin Ave., Pawtucket, RI 02861 www.combopoetry.com COMBO 9. 60pp side-stapled w/ glossy cardstock cover w/ original artwork ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 21:12:29 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Susan M. Schultz" Subject: Do not erase this message: important book announcement!! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I'm writing to announce the publication of Linh Dinh's new Tinfish book, = Three Vietnamese Poets, which he translated. His introduction to the = book is available at the Skanky Possum Pouch: = http://www.skankypossum.com/pouch.htm#dinh. Three Vietnamese Poets = features work by Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Phan Nhien Hao, and Van Cam Hai, = their work located in places as far-flung as Hue and Silicon Valley. = Book design is by Stuart Henley of the University of Hawai`i Art = Department.=20 Linh Dinh's previous chapbooks of poems are A small triumph over = lassitude (Leroy, 2001) and Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998). = He is author of the short story collection, Fake House (Seven Stories = Press, 1998) and editor of the anthology Night, Again: Contemporary = Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press). He translated the poems and = wrote the introduction while living in Vietnam; he moved recently to = Annandale, Virginia.=20 Tinfish Press publishes innovative poetry from the Pacific. The journal, = Tinfish, comes out twice a year and is available by subscription from = Susan M. Schultz, Editor, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744. = Tinfish 11, due out within the month, features work by Linh Dinh = himself. Other recent chapbooks include Sista Tongue, by Lisa Linn = Kanae, and Physics, by Lisa Asagi and Gaye Chan. More information is = available from the editor at sschultz@hawaii.edu.=20 Please forward this message to anyone who might be interested! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 03:41:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: James Merrill In-Reply-To: <009601c184ea$bae3f5c0$832137d2@01397384> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Maybe Merrill wasn't as innovative as Lowell (but I doubt that; Lowell's only "innovative" poems are his bad late ones), but Merrill had the knack of getting poems exactly right. Sometimes it was a minor poem that he was attempting, but minor or major, it always worked. I think The Book of Ephraim is quite innovative. Merrill is one of the few poets who should be allowed to rhyme. He has permission :-) The person who accused Merrill of being manipulative should reread the Sandover poems. In the Book of Ephraim, Merrill tries to mess with fate by influencing who gets reborn where, and totally screws up. So I think Merrill was quite self-aware. Millie P.S. Has anybody read Snodgrass's "The Fuehrer Bunker"? I rather like it, but there is something quite sick, alomst offensive about it, as it makes Himmler express himself in abecedarian telegrams, plays with sestina, villanelle, all sorts of forms but but with this vile, awful subject matter. Of course the poem is against Hitler, but Snodgrass makes the Nazis human (well they of course _were_ human, which is a dilemma we often don't want to face) and we wonder whether it is accceptable to play games of language with such subject matter... -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of richard.tylr Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 5:00 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: James Merrill Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant poet. Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 8:23 AM Subject: Re: James Merrill > In a message dated 12/14/01 9:16:44 AM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > << But Bill. I might critique "capitalism" etc but it doesnt meean that > Merrill > > with his privliges, money, and many things we dislike (like say Pound or > > Wallace Stevens in a different way) about him wasnt a great poet of his > > kind; >> > > Richard, I suppose I allowed for that, however indirectly, with Scripts for > the Pageant. > Merrill rattles among late Modernists even as he writes into the seventies, > which is fine, except that I prefer the first stringers. It's a matter of > taste, of course. Merrill reads to me as a poet who is most concerned with > mastering and manipulating devices -- a craftsman in the main. Nothing > wrong with that, I guess. But for me, at least, the work lacks a sense of > adventure, of exposure, even in its most experimental bee bops which just > never seemed all that fresh to me. Mannered, yes. And yes, I am more > concerned with the abuse of power than I am with inherited privilege, though > I'm not delighted with the latter. Ass kissing is another matter altogether. > If a certain amount of hyporcrisy is to be forgiven in matters re: > publishing, then we must be consistent when it comes to the self-serving > behavior of governments on the world stage where much more is at stake. No? > Ah, the nature of the human. Best, Bill > > > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 22:50:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damian Judge Rollison Subject: Re: "New" Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII From someone with too much time on his hands, here is a Oulipian treatment of Stepanek's poem, in the spirit of the Merrill experiment and, more remotely, "On the Pumice of Morons." This one has the serpent eating its own tail, the end of the poem feeding backwards into the beginning, one word at a time, until the whole thing disappears in the middle. It's mapped to the word count of the original, though I screwed that up somewhere (one word off at the end). Some nice surprises emerge here ("no bless amazing please, grace"). The poem is, after all, just a little chunk off of the crap iceberg that is contemporary mass culture, so it doesn't really bother me in itself, and I certainly don't mean to be satirizing the poem or making fun of the kid. Just messing about with the words. All best, Damian Rollison THE OF BLASTS home. It earthly was our dark of day rest in America. the There And was America... no bless amazing please, grace. God, Freedom again? did security not national ring of Tragedy Assured attacked rest sky-high ever Fiery citizens terror the reigned. Can Structures tonight? collapsed. beds Red their with in blood, Safely white sleep with children ash, the And Can out-of-the-sky endings. blue. happy As few children too trust With elders, events Citizens of find blasting faith horrific in A leaders. separated. But be they not were Could all State blinded, and Shocked Church by silence the of blasts, moments Undefiable least, outrage. at Undeniable or outpouring prayer, Of even support, <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 23:41:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: Cripples write poetry, no longer drunks. In-Reply-To: <3C1DAD7E.565B01B9@virginia.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed good point. Gene At 03:31 AM 12/17/01 -0500, you wrote: >Hello friends-- Glad to hear I'm not the only disgruntled poet to be a bit >fascinated by the Stepanek phenomenon-- not unlike Jewel's poetry being >published a few years ago, I'm interested more and more by the name of >"poetry" >itself, i.e., that part of writing which travels under the literary >signifier of >the "poetic." Immediately, yeah, it's awful, but I think it's important to >remember that this is what "poetry" is for people who don't read a lot-- and I >don't want this to sound elitist as hell, but indeed-- I think it's important >for writers/scholars/etc. to pay attention to how these codes play out-- >poetry >is available at a local bookstore and will make you feel better, like watching >Forrest Gump Good poetry is written by people with unfortunate physical >setbacks like Muscular Dystrophy. Poetry is also incredibly occasional along >these lines-- a "good" poem should be about "important" things like buildings >falling down and America being emotional in order to combat mystery >terrorists. >Good poetry should be less of an aesthetic experience than a blank catharsis. > >Not being coherent, I realize, but I don't think this ill sort of "popularity" >should be overlooked-- which is not to say that poets should write to be >accepted by the American public, but it's worth thinking about what kind of >ideologies surrounding the poetic and the idea of "poetry" abound. Not >pretty, >and really pretty disturbing-- the lyric ratcheted into an incredibly >false and >and pathetic condition of subservience to "feel-good" monoculture. > >And on top of that, as bad as this Jewel-Stepanek stuff is, I'd argue that >it's >not a hell of a lot worse than what shows up in the New Yorker-- or a >number of >other "poetry" journals. > >PS, happy new year to all. > >James > >Ian Randall Wilson wrote: > > > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on > Oprah, > > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early > because > > of his illness). > > > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: > > > > 9-11-2001 > > It was a dark day in America. > > There was no amazing grace. > > Freedom did not ring. > > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > > Fiery terror reigned. > > Structures collapsed. > > Red with blood, white with ash, > > And out-of-the-sky blue. > > As children trust elders, > > Citizens find faith in leaders. > > But they were all blinded, > > Shocked by the blasts. > > Undefiable outrage. > > Undeniable outpouring > > Of support, even prayer, > > Or at least, moments of silence. > > Church and State > > Could not be separated. > > A horrific blasting of events > > With too few happy endings. > > Can the children sleep > > Safely in their beds tonight? > > Can the citizens ever rest > > Assured of national security again? > > God, please, bless America... > > And the rest of our earthly home. > > > > Mattie Stepanek > > Sept. 11, 2001 > > > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of > Jimmy > > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan > > Franzen here. . .) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 11:56:55 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "New" Poet Sir Peter Blake & Guilt etc MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To the List Folks and other Felons. I think this is a good poem for an 11 year old. There are better and worse - although everyone's concept of that will vary. It seems to be a sincere response to the attack on the United States, and whatever one thinks of that and whoever and whyever it was done - it would be an amazing person of that age to be writing like eg Larry Eigner or whoever else. Maybe we should look at the positive aspects in art and literature: ask if the writer is really gaining in his/her own development and experientially is getting pleasure, excitement, fulfilment, from their writing. I dont mean that ironically (altho of course there's a place for irony). Can we even make judgements: what is "great" literature? Should we even bother writing great poems? What about just putting it onto paper: throw away the idea of revisions, the struggle for perfection and so on? Its good or better (or is it?) that people (young people especially -but no, anyone) are encouraged....ok they will soon enough get blitzed by zealous or righteous critics. One of the problems is the very sincerity (or perceived sincerity) and the realively uncritical way that people "ooh" and "aah"..... if we think of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" which in many senses is a brilliant poem we also know that (even at the time it was known) it was based on simplistic nationalism and the infamous charge was based on the misinterpretation of an order given. But if it had been the fact that that charge was an event that DID save England we could understand the British being rightly proud of Tennyson (the author of very good poems such as "Ulysees" and others)...or a cripple if a cripple had written it or whoever... this however is the "danger" of this kind of writing that we forget that the person writing is using a "weapon", language, which we know is very loaded, never innocent, never unmediated. There are big questions here (and always) about "language practice" ... it may not be appropriate just now to present such arguments to this writer or onto Oprah Winfrey - maybe it should be though or or maybe it is..... Rather than a negative good/bad repsonse we maybe should present these aspects to the writer or each other or whoever as points of discussion... Ok I'm well aware that I am the one who put the boot into Rod McKuen ...but he's a big lad! And I am sure he would completely ignore me anyway: point is we are not attacking the person's integrity when we critique a poem (if we feel it IS neccessary) but asking questions about language forms and practice, politics into poetry and philosophy and so on. One issue of "Fence" I got hold of here had some marvellous poems by children. One good side: we need to encourage people away from hate and repressed and negative anger and toward a positive outlook - note that I said encourage not BOMB...... This all might sound a bit Waldorfy or Marty (I dont know the place) but over here (Auckland there's a K'Mart) but probably Waldmart is a change from Macy's (I actually visited there in 1993 and I was very impresssed by the revolving doors.....) Probably we dont need to put the boot into this boy but be wary of sentiment and so on. Over here there's a lot of crap about Peter Blake ( the round the world yachtsman) (who was shot on the Amazon) but I never met the man and cant somehow get much interest in that fact....I could understand someone in NY being deeply affected by S11 but not a New Zealander by the death of someone they'd mostly never met ... and its dubious that he was more important than I am....in fact he never was: but there's a mass hysteria of the sort that accompanied the death of Princess Diana. Rather pathetic. I was sadder about the death of Alan Curnow the poet...but great as he was I didnt feel the need to go into deep mourning...I can understand the immediate families of these people feeling very strongly of course... What I'm leading into I suppose is the point that in cases like this people will hit one with the guilt thing: "how could you criticise a cripppled poet?" "a dying poet, just a boy?"..well you can and may do just as you (one) can choose to not respond or whatever. But your response, our response, shouldnt be based on a feeling of guilt or false sentiment, or envy or whatever...probably its harmless this phenomena of the "new" poet.....but if one just HAS to put the boot in....well, as Dietrich said after a long "lecture" to Wojahoitz on "Barnery Miller" about the moral problems of violence and cops with guns and life and death, about a recent "stake out", and to Wojahoitz's question: "Well, what did you do?", then responded: "Well, it was him or me, so I blew the bastard away!" Some thoughts from abroad. But not from Browning or Tennyson. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Randall Wilson" To: Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 6:20 AM Subject: "New" Poet > I, too, saw the announcement about Stepanek and how he'll be going on Oprah, > fulfilling one of his life dreams (of a life that may be ended early because > of his illness). > > Well here's the level of his material as taken from the VSP site: > > 9-11-2001 > It was a dark day in America. > There was no amazing grace. > Freedom did not ring. > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > Fiery terror reigned. > Structures collapsed. > Red with blood, white with ash, > And out-of-the-sky blue. > As children trust elders, > Citizens find faith in leaders. > But they were all blinded, > Shocked by the blasts. > Undefiable outrage. > Undeniable outpouring > Of support, even prayer, > Or at least, moments of silence. > Church and State > Could not be separated. > A horrific blasting of events > With too few happy endings. > Can the children sleep > Safely in their beds tonight? > Can the citizens ever rest > Assured of national security again? > God, please, bless America... > And the rest of our earthly home. > > Mattie Stepanek > Sept. 11, 2001 > > Fiery terror does reign as Stepanek joins the fine poetic tradition of Jimmy > Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Ali Sheedy and Jewel. (Or I am being too Jonathan > Franzen here. . .) > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:07:59 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: Poetry Monday-DYLAN THOMAS' A CHILD'S XMAS IN WALES MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit That is marvellous, that thing by Thomas: we used to play it on Christmas...that's an idea: I'll be sat here in me house alone in Auckland and I can get emotional hearing that again. That's what I'll do on Christmas day: I'll listen to that recording of Dylan reading (cant take more than one day of him though) but it is wonderful. Makes me wish it snowed here in Auckland at Xmas but its just now muggy and the Pohutukawa trees are blazing with their red jewels ...Alan Curnow has a great poem about the Pohutukawa tree...and they are wonderful trees...in fact I believe he was a friend of Dylan Thomas: some influence, or residue thereof, is in his work...although I know he had a very wide knowledge of poetry...Browning, and also such as Wallace Stevens were other favourites I believe. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "George Fouhy" To: Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 6:36 PM Subject: Poetry Monday-DYLAN THOMAS' A CHILD'S XMAS IN WALES > This is an evening for everyone! A joy to hear! > > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: > Northern Westchester Center for the Arts > 272 North Bedford Road > Mt. Kisco, New York 10549 > 914 241 6922 > > Creative Arts Cafe Poetry Series: Holiday Special > Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales > Read by Poet, Ron Price > > Mt.Kisco, NY¾ The Creative Arts Cafe Poetry Series at Northern > Westchester Center for the Arts will present our fifth annual holiday > reading - giving voice to the poetry of one of our most memorable poets. > On Dec. 17st at 7:30 PM, Poet Ron Price will present a reading of Dylan > Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales - a wonderful recollection of the > sights, smells and sounds of a long-ago Christmas. An Open Mike for > poets in the audience follows. All ages are invited to attend. The > theme for the open mike is "Poetry and Songs Celebrating Winter." > Donations of an unwrapped children's book for a children's charity may > be substituted for one $5.00 admission fee. Refreshments are included. > > Ron Price is the author of Surviving Brothers is currently a > distinguished Poet and Teaching Artist in residence at the Julliard > School for the Performing Arts. He is a founding Member of the Free > Peoples Poetry Workshop in Memphis and in Philadelphia. Mr. Price was a > Teaching Fellow for Writing Across the Curriculum and has taught through > Poets in the Schools, Poets in the Parks, and Poets in Prisons. He has > translated poems from the German of Rilke, the Greek of Seferis, and the > French of Char and Eluard, and a play from the Norwegian of Jon Lockert. > He is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on > the Arts and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals > including The American Poetry Review, New Letters, and Southern > Exposure. Ron Price's new tape and CD recording of his poetry, "A > Crucible for the Left Hand" ( Woobbi & Exoterica Press) will be on sale > after the reading. Mr. Price is also the author of a book of poems, "A > Small Song Called Ash From the Fire" (Something More Publication, 1998). > > After the reading, the audience is invited to share poems about the > season either original or written by a favorite poet. *Also > "Cheer-A-Child Book Drive" - Donations of new children's books will be > collected at the door. Books will be presented to a local children's > charity. > > Coffee, tea and desserts are available before and after the reading. > There is a $5.00 suggested donation which may be substituted with the > donation of a children's book. > > The Creative Arts Café is supported by grants from the New York state > Council on the Arts and the Bydale Foundation. > > The Creative Arts Cafe is located in the gallery of Northern Westchester > Center for the Arts, 272 North Bedford Road, Mt. Kisco, on Rte 117, near > Staples.For further information, call Cindy Beer-Fouhy at NWCA, 241 > 6922. > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:33:53 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ian Randall Wilson Subject: Alan Dugan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit During a recent move my postmodern safety net was damaged in transit and is no longer usable. I've tried to contact the original manufacturer but they seem to have gone out of business. Can anyone tell me where I might buy another? IRW ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:33:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ian Randall Wilson Subject: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In the world of sitcoms, writers sometimes say of a line "it makes noises like a joke." Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes noises like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and she likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, dammit, it makes my life more difficult. Now I have to explain to the cousins at every family reunion why I don't write like this kid -- because, of course, he's a poet, he has to be a poet, Oprah had him on her show. If I were a poet, Oprah would have me on. IRW ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:47:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Halvard Johnson Subject: Re: My Life In-Reply-To: <006401c186db$43522020$152037d2@01397384> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > But the capitalist system - actuallly just about any market system > - would crash tommorrow if theft was outlawed !!! Hmmm, and I somehow thought that had been done. Just another of my many delusions, I guess. Hal No pets or dogs. --sign at the entrance to the gardens of St. Luke in the Fields, NYC Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard@earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:26:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Stefans, Brian" Subject: :: A R R A S . N E T now revived :: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain ARRAS is now alive again. please see: www.arras.net More florid announcement to come. -- bks ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:24:32 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: J Gallaher Organization: University of Central Arkansas Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20010516232230.01e18160@pop.buf.adelphia.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Gene writes: anyone wants to pick on this kid better pick on someone their own literary size at age 11. __________________ I reply: So we have to research a person's life before we can talk about the work now? Where should we start? Where will it end? Can I only write about males (as I am male) who I write better than? Goodness. Who's to say? And maybe some of those picking on this kid WERE much better at age 11 . . . who knows . . . John Gallaher ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:38:27 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Weishaus Subject: Norman Dubie MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit For those of you who are interested in Norman Dubie's work, my review of "The Mercy Seat" is now up at Rain Taxi's website: www.raintaxi.com -Joel Joel Weishaus Center for Excellence in Writing Portland State University Portland, Oregon. http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:20:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: on pinsky on dugan Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Regardless of the review's vapid pleasantries, Dugan's always been an interesting case -- his use of the line at first glance borders on prose, one of the softest linebreaks in the past 50 years or so (softer even than Jimmy Schuyler). His poems have always struck me as having their limits, or at least there is that side of a generation now in its it 80s that was influenced visibly by Williams but not interested in either the Objectivists nor the New Americans (Harvey Shapiro & David Ignatow would be two others and one could jerry-rig Archie Ammons or even Bill Bronk into the same category I suppose). There's a crabbed rigor in Dugan's best work that lacks the discipline or formal imagination of a Niedecker, for example, but is clearly working hard to some good effect. Ron "It is refreshing that we finally have, in the annals of poetry, "a lyrical skepticism, rooted in experience." It's about time. I guess what's so great about it is that it's rooted in *experience*, not in some flight of fancy.And also that it's skeptical--for who, having endured experience, would emerge optimistic? So Dugan at least has that integrity. Yet also, it's lyrical; we expect lyricism, and I'd say we deserve it. And finally, it's scornful--scornful of what? Of what history has brought it: deeper skepticism, more radical doubt. In summary, the great thing about Alan Dugan at 78 is that, having weathered "experience," he's somewhat skeptical." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/books/review/16PINSKYT.html Ron Silliman ron.silliman@gte.net rsillima@hotmail.com DO NOT RESPOND to Tottels@Hotmail.com It is for listservs only. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 21:50:31 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/17/01 4:00:22 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant poet. Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. Cheers, Richard. >> Richard, if Merrill so delights you (and so many others), then I'm glad he was, and is. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:40:47 PST Reply-To: bowering@sfu.ca Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: bowering@SFU.CA Subject: Re: Walmart Poetry Content-Type: text/plain Mime-Version: 1.0 On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:46:40 -0700 POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU wrote: > >Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! > > I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as > though it were a French name. I suppose in part this is because > Target is on a borderline between middle and lower class. So that > persons of the middle class deal with the unease this causes them, by > guying their own slumming with a gesture of inverse snobbery. This > playfulness with language, at the service of a social dilemma, has > something of the poetic to it, though I admit it's pretty thin. > > Dahveed Brahmeej. Oh, I would as soon forjay all about it. . ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 02:52:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Florid MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Florid Florid0: Water, ripples: i can't remember anything any more. one person's disaster is another person's pleasure. everyone has had us, azure writes, writes alan. there is too much water in the world, it flattens everything. Florida: Azure, pool-side, jeans, red blouse pulled up, mad (crazed) look in her eyes, seated: i'll drown myself and then i'll drown you Floridb: Same as above, looking at camera: then i'll drown everybody else Floridc: Pool interior, distorted, from within: you're out here i can feel you Floridd: Pool edge, ripples in blue-green water, like skin: then i'll drown everyone else Floride: Azure at pool edge, same as above, leaning back into the water, camera head-on: late at night i lie here and i think of you, john, and i think of you, susan, and i think of you, david, i think of you fucking me, and i fall backwards and i drown myself and i will take you, i will take you with me Floridf: Same as above, camera from side, Azure's face ecstatic, ripples in blue-green water, like skin: i am thinking of you, may, and i am thinking of you, george, and i am thinking, your mouths are on me, your dead eyes are looking at me, you are fucking me hard, you are dying there Floridg: Alan, leaning back into water, t-shirt and black jeans, exposed, shot from side, water black: i'm thinking about everything, i'm writing you into this, the way the world is, is awful, i'm out of control, i'm aroused and writing this, this is from my state to your own Floridh: Azure, exposed, shot from beneath by pool-side, black background: cynthia, i want your tongue against me alan, please don't be upset, jack, alan write me down, peter, azure inscribes me, i am everything you want, i am everything you could possibly want Floridi: Azure, still naked from waist down, astride pool-side left-hand beach chair, blue shirt (right-hand chair empty, partially visible): i am mad. i am completely out of my mind. Floridj: Alan naked, lying back, right-hand beach chair (left-hand beach chair empty, partially visible), camera head-on: i'm writing this, azure in the drowning pool, she takes her lovers with her, she says, they're not as good as you are, they couldn't be, they're down there, she's pointing, i'm aroused, this is the beginning of the game, this is the ending: how the world works and everyone dies Floridk: Two empty beach chairs, adjustable actually, the right-hand one partially supine, the left-hand one partially erect, no text. Analysis: Azure and I live alone together. We have no friends. I think: We are horrors. Again and again our story turns on us. Our story repeats like a bad record. Our story decays. We go for a drive. We drive long and hard and nowhere. There is nowhere to go. We return home. Sometimes I go and teach. I face students. We leave. We get in the car and drive long and hard and nowhere. We go and return and look at each other. We stare at each other. We wrestle each other to the ground. We take our clothes off. We put them on. We strangle ourselves. We turn ourselves inside out. We are walking advertisements for art and poetry. I swim in the black pool, the blue-green pool like skin. I swim two lengths beneath the surface. I have heard you can pass out and keep swimming. You can be swimming and drowning underwater. The surface looks: You are alive, you are perfect person. The depth looks up: You are still swimming and you are drowning. How can you drown in so much beauty. We go to the pool and photograph. We return for image and text, for art and poetry, for gimp and photoshop, for perl and protocol, for process and program. Online we teeter on the brink of culture. It is at the edge of the pool. The edge is an outline of water. The apartment complex is Everglades reclaimed. At night I dream alligators. I am ungainly; I can move fast, strike. No one is here. I am thick-scaled, reptilian. My brain slips to edges. My brain swims. My brain swims beneath. Analysis: Too much work on exposure. Too much exhibitionism, too much exhibition. As if the body could be fixed, pierced, held in position. As if the world were pure exchange. What other information we might provide. Too many circuits of sexual tension, terror, power, language withdrawn in the other face of the body, the other body of the face. Work a caricature of itself. Stale work. Work which should have remained stillborn. Dead work. Repetitive work. Work of the reflex arc, work of the twitch. Analysis: Tearing apart, artist and model. The apartment is silent. Azure reads upstairs; I type this on a laptop borrowed from the university. The university has closed down new media. New media is tainted, condemned. Images leak out: Our exposure is that of the naughty politics of the world. I keep quiet about my work at the school. I show no one. I am close to slaughter. I continue to swim submerged. At the edge, I will push and push off. I will make the other side. _ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 03:20:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In-Reply-To: <3b.1f06c7e7.294bfcf3@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit This is ridiculous. First of all, I have said three times that I didn't write a poem just to please a poarticular editor. I only said that I should have selected poems that were more in line with the chapbook they selected (a previous year). It was just a matter of selecting appropriate stuff from what I had already written. But we all write to please others and we are all limited by the style of the times and the style of the people in our school of writing, and it is normal to submit things to editors who share one's tastes. It would just be perverse to deliberately send things out (especially a chapbook, which is a lot of work to prepare), to someone whose taste seems to run against the style of your chapbook. And since I have years of work to choose from, I could easily have made a chapbook subbmission that had a very different feel. As could anyone here. I don't think any of the successful people here got that way by just waiting to be published wuithout submitting anything, and I'm pretty certain they selected both the work to submit and the editors they submitted to with great care. It's just sloppy not to do that. I don't see how that sloppiness represents integrity. I even have a historical argument making the claim that we always have and always will have art that is made to please others and fit the styles of the time... Art was until the twentieth century defined by the idea that it was supposed to be pleasurable to experience (well really until the last twenty years of the nineteenth, when the Romantic period started, but I have to be vague because there were different dates for poetry than for music or painting or whatever). People commissioned art to be something they would want to look at or listen to, and the artist's pride was linked the the work of art actually being pleasing (although of course one assumes some patrons had lousy tastes and one imagines people other that the Medicis trying to commission tasteless sculptures of brass unicorns frolicking under a waterfall with real water coming down :-) But the point was that the art was intended to be pleasing to someone of "good taste" (a suspect term of course). After that, poeple started experimenting with all sorts of dissonances and putting deliberately ugly things in their art or very ordinary things which seemed unartistic, and one could say that was the beginning of "Art for Art's Sake." -- but I think that's not quite right. Artists were experimenting with ways to use ugliness in ways that created beauty. Viewed up close, Monet's lilies were ugly (I actually don't like them much anyway), Beethoven's late work was loud and had chords that didn't sound pleasing, and people like Browning experimented (and people think of him as Victorian and unoriginal because they dismiss the whole period, but he did change the way we decide what's poetic I think) with lines of iambic pentameter which seemed not to scan, full of mundane lists of unpoetic things that read aloud sounded totally uneuphonious. However, IMHO, these experiments were an effort to find new beauty, and they were written to please the more radical fringe of the public. Times had changed, and monarchs were no longer on the cutting edge of the art world. When we think of Queen Victoria, we don't think of poets like Browning or (more obviously original but less influential I think) Hopkins, we think of the kind of ghastly stuff you see in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, like teapots in the shape of heads of cabbages. Real artists were not in the business of pleasing poeple who wanted silverware with real porcelain handles that looked like corncobs, they were in the business of pleasing people in the art world. Their correspondence shows that they were not creating art just for themselves but were instead forming schools of art, in which they dedicated works to each other, edited each other's work, and obviously wanted to please a public, which was "their" public, not the general public. This becomes even more apparent later on, when, for example, Eliot showed Pound his draft of The Wasteland, which suppposedly was full of tacky rhyming couplets, which Pound mercilessly cut, leaving only two or something. The Moderninsts wrote for each other, published each other, etc. etc., so rather than pursuing some mythic muse who cared not for the tatses of man, they were succumbing to (in the case of the Moderninsts, rather excellent) peer pressure. As we move yet forward, we find poets runnning small presses, publishing poems they like from amongst their friends or unknown poets whose work fits within their aesthetic. On POETICS this is pretty evident, when anyone can start and e-zine for free and because of places like the list, they can even attract some very good poets to it. But no one would deliberately submit poems to someone that they thought the editor would dislike! Editors like to be more open-minded that that, in the sense that good editors do not accept only work which is in their own style or a style they would like to achieve themselves, but there are obvious limits. Suppose that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening" had not been written (so there would be no plagiarism involved) and that I had submitted it to a literary magazine whose contents was experimental, avant-garde, langpo-like, whatever...the kind of magazine people here write for. I am absolutely sure that the Frost poem would be rejected. It might even become an object of ridicule. Someone might say, sneering, "It even _rhymes_!" And someone else would complain that the sleep=death symbolism is painfully obvious, a total cliche. And that the horse reminding the narrator that he has responsibilities is cheating because the author just needed some way to get his narrator out of the damned woods and had nothing but the horse to use, barring having Robin Hood jump out from behind a tree, or Peter Pan telling the narrator that there are no adults in never-never-land... So even if I were "inspired" to write "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (which actually isn't a bad poem. I even have a sentimental attachment to it as it was the first poem I saw the point of without having a teacher explain it...and I wrote a four-page long close reading of it during my earth science class in tiny little letters. I think the poem was actually quite good, and it still is good, but only in its context, not in the context of something I could write and submit to a magazine), I wouldn't do so. And none of the people who excoriated me for wanting to send an editor poems that would actually fit the style of what he publishes would submit that poem to any up-to-date journal either. Even if that was what your muse whispered to you insistently. You would instead write fashionable poetry in one of the currently available styles. Of course the range of current styles is very broad. You could be a New Formalist and not an avant-garde person. But you still couldn't submit the Frost poem anywhere. It always seems to us that any poetry we can imagine is allowed and that being a true writer involves following our inspiration, but our inspiration is limited by the boundaries of current practice. Of course you could write a poem which is totally new in every way, one that no one has ever even come close to writing. You might have a hard time publishing it, but a truly new poem is possible given our period's rules (it wasn't always so). If you wrote a new poem and it got rejected, we'd all understand that you were following your art and not bowing to convention. However "new" things are very much a part of the current scene (although maybe not as much as they were in the early post-modern period). The point is that everyone carries around an editor in their head who knows the boundaries of current taste. And that editor is composed of the tastes of all the people who you admire in the poetry world. You are writing for them, whether you know it or not. And when you submit a poem for publication, you don't do it unless your internal editor accepts it. In fact, you can't even write the poem unless the internal editor accepts it. So why is trying to please a single real-life editor somewhow immoral? It's a lot easier that satisfying every poet whose taste you admire, which is what you attempt when you actually write the poem. Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of WIlbur Jenkins Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 8:10 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 In a message dated 12/14/2001 3:27:08 PM Pacific Standard Time, men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: > But I don't see anything shameful about > I think writing a poem simply to suit an editor's taste is most definitely a sort of fast-food-poetry, made-to-order, etc. etc. etc. With the exception of something like Jack Spicer's BOOK OF MAGAZINE VERSE...which is anything but cheap and greasy. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:33:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Univ. of Alabama Press poetics series @ MLA Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed As many of you may know, Hank Lazer and I coedit a series for the University of Alabama Press, Modern and Contemporary Poetics. For a full list of the books in our series -- including several new ones that are soon to be announced on the list -- go to our website: http://www.uapress.ua.edu/authors/poetics3.html At this year's MLA convention in New Orleans, Hank and I will be at the University of Alabama booth on Friday, Dec. 28, from 3:30 to 4:30, to meet those interested in the series and to answer questions about possible submissions. The University of Alabama Press will be at booth #314 in the book exhibit at the Marriott. Charles Bernstein ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:40:33 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marcella Durand Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to operate outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. To show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because their poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be creatively irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." That this child has joy in the process of writing poetry is a nice thing, overall, even if the end result may not be all that one would desire. Sorry if I sound like I'm moralizing, but I hate to see little kids getting picked on by bigger kids. > ---------- > From: Ian Randall Wilson > Reply To: UB Poetics discussion group > Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 12:33 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: "new" poet > > In the world of sitcoms, writers sometimes say of a line "it makes noises > like a joke." Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes > noises > like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and > she > likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, > dammit, > it makes my life more difficult. Now I have to explain to the cousins at > every family reunion why I don't write like this kid -- because, of > course, > he's a poet, he has to be a poet, Oprah had him on her show. If I were a > poet, Oprah would have me on. > > IRW > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 14:06:36 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/18/01 1:22:39 PM, men2@COLUMBIA.EDU writes: >This is ridiculous. First of all, I have said three times that I didn't > >write a poem just to please a poarticular editor. I only said that I should > >have selected poems that were more in line with the chapbook they selected > >(a previous year). It was just a matter of selecting appropriate stuff >from > >what I had already written. But we all write to please others and we are > >all limited by the style of the times and the style of the people in our > >school of writing, and it is normal to submit things to editors who share > >one's tastes. Millie, I think somebody should come out clearly in your defense. What's the big deal about submitting poems which might fit an editor's or panel's taste. I understand very well if someone refuses to send work to award competions; there maybe legitimate reasons for that. But I don't understand the idea of sending work but refusing to consider the panel/editor's taste. Then, why is one sending it? Murat ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:42:33 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson Subject: oh PLEASE Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:46:40 -0700 POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU wrote: > >Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! > >I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as >though it were a French name. I suppose in part this is because >Target is on a borderline between middle and lower class. So that >persons of the middle class deal with the unease this causes them, by >guying their own slumming with a gesture of inverse snobbery. This >playfulness with language, at the service of a social dilemma, has >something of the poetic to it, though I admit it's pretty thin. > >Dahveed Brahmeej. Oh PLEASE, first I get blasted for not being fancy enough in my language about the value/use, whatever, of poetry, then I get blasted for being too fancy, now I get my imaginary checkbook/lineage assessed because I shop at Target. Kids, is there nothing better to discuss? Millie, have at em. Elizabeth Elizabeth Treadwell http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 17:46:13 -0330 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "K.Angelo Hehir" Subject: Re: Dada Lama Ping Pong at WHITE BOX Comments: To: whitebox@earthlink.net In-Reply-To: <3C1D1F6C.CF257583@earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Two things. Nichol was making concrete and sound long poetry before he joined/founded/formed the Four Horsemen. I would love a review of this show. cheers, kevin -- ---- andor replace sigourney weaver with jacques derrida and then make a film about him chasing hegelians through the airducts of a spaceship in order to immolate these vermin with a flamethrower andor darren wershler-henry from _the tapeworm foundry_ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 16:31:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wanda Phipps Subject: experimental image and sound MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Experience IMAGEinations experimental image and sound by: Joel Schlemowitz/Rebecca Moore REVERIE Dave Gearey/David First FINAL SCREENS Andrea Odezynska/Sandra Sprecher WHO SHOULD I PRAY TO Sandra Sprecher/Sandra Sprecher ELEMENTALS 8:00PM Saturday, December 22, 2001 3:00PM Sunday, December 23, 2001 THE MEDICINE SHOW THEATER 549 West 52 Street, NYC 212-262-4216 $10.00 Admission This event was made possible in part by Meet the Composers and Crystaline Music. -- Wanda Phipps Hey, don't forget to check out my website MIND HONEY http://users.rcn.com/wanda.interport (and if you have already try it again) poetry, music and more! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:37:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Okay. (Poor Patrick Herron. Jumped ship just when the knitting circle really starts purling.) The discussion seems to be thematicizing into like this: 1. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE TERRIBLE AND THE DREADFUL / CLASSISM 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY 3. THE IDEAL OPRAH ------------------------------------------------------- 1. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE TERRIBLE AND THE DREADFUL / CLASSISM I do not know what people mean by "good", "bad," and the increasingly escalating "terrible" and "dreadful" here. (I never understand what it means to slippage over those terms from ethics to aesthetics.) Certainly, there's a usefulness in being able to speak among the like-minded in a short-hand like that--- but I don't know how to imagine what ~criteria~ those assessments are being framed against. (The only poem of his that I have read is the one that was quoted on-List.) Even in putting forward the criteria by which I found his poem promisingly improveable and him ~educable~ ("unmonitored abstractions"), I was moving onto thin ice: no to Laura Riding Jackson's philosophical abstractions, too? His poem is ~not~ personist or autobiographical of the type Buffalo satellites might be expected to object to. He's quite transcended "subjectivity" and The Subject per se (although not with the greatest eloquence),--- so it isn't objectionable on those grounds. It's remarkable --- and may come as quite a head-spinner to Oprah's America --- that it does not rhyme or have detectable buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM meter. I had to be educated out of that naivite, personally. The tailoring of one complete sentence then PERIOD per-line is noteworthy: no enjambment. Despite my previous criticism of the "unmonitored abstractions", his use of them is in fact so blissfully indulgent in its excess ("Freedom", "Tragedy", "terror", "Structure", "faith", "outrage", "support" . . . ) that it creeps over into an almost Blakean Songs of Innocence and Experience active abstractness: "mutual fear brings peace, Misery's increase / Are mercy, pity, and peace". I ~also~ had to be educated out of thinking that "good"/ "bad", "taste", was some sort of absolute, univeralized standard recognizeable to everyone and true everywhere. It's not. Currently, hierarchies from exemplary to lesser are really only understandable by dint of --- here we go again --- ~whom they serve~ and what groups they advance: power. Is the poem "dreadful" and "terrible" because it's not displaying enough awareness of poetry at large (and post-modernist opaque poetry, specifically)? 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF AGE OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? OR CLASS? ETC.?) Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, again, I have to re-translate it: If the sick wish to advance the social assimilation of their fellow disabled, they should conform to socially accepted norms. Am I misrepresenting the thought? It's better for the disadvantaged or special caste to ~impersonate~ the privileged majorities, in order better to promote inclusion of their group? 3. THE IDEAL OPRAH The list of titles that Oprah's Book Club promotes does not match or even overlap with The New York Review of Book's table of contents. She is not known to be a purveyor of fine arts/high culture reading. She does do some type of ~good,~ though. She's found a way of re-directing her celebrity away from gossip-raking over to the cause of high school level literacy. Relatives very close to me buy the books Oprah mentions. And they weren't particularly reading before that. Intelligent but uneducated high school drop-outs now quite contently going through stacks of "bad" novels, experiencing at least ~some~ level of why ever we read. And the comparative ~pandering~ of Oprah's selections is not a dead-end to further expansion: it seems to be an inroad. My relative will still return to the series of novels about the detective whose cats help solve crimes,--- but when my Hawthorne-Melville opera piqued curiosity, there wasn't the old obstacle anymore and she picked up ~The Scarlet Letter~ and on her own went on to ~The Blithedale Romance.~ William Burroughs' ~Naked Lunch,~ which she had the librarians reserve for her, was a little more impassable,--- but she tends to understand that she is not the infinite audience and is bound by her own indoctrinations. But--- Oprah is not isolated. Elaine Paschen, the upper crust former head of Poetry Society of America, who shoved copies of her poetry books into Bill Clinton's hands at the White House, or the likes of Paschen have certainly crossed paths with Oprah at cocktail parties. Billy Collins, etc. Do you think Oprah has never been asked, "Why don't you ever feature poetry books?" So, my Ideal Oprah: Recognizing that that's been an oversight and deficit in her recommendations, but understanding the prejudices of her viewers and working through her own limitations,--- Stepanek is a ~beginning~ in Oprah's Grand Scheme of introducing poetry to TV watchers. First, get 'em on a sob story type they can't resist. Later, on the precedent and foundation of that preliminary introduction, you/she can move a level, go from Stepanek to some poet a little more multi-dimensional (although Oprah, from my scant knowledge of her, seems chauvinistically impervious to "high fallutin'" required reading). It's a ~beginning.~ She and we are coming from ~below zero~ as far as television promotion of poetry. I ~did~ read Book of the Month club Rod McKuen ~Listen to the Warm,~ age 13, before I knew how to look elsewhere to find more English Department accredited poetry. There is absolutely no way a responsible talk show super-star --- or educator --- would jump start TV watchers directly to--- Tina Darragh or somebody like that. It would totally back-fire. Is it that we believe poetries other than "ours" ~should not exist?!~ Is everything supposed to homogenize into healthy college-educated Caucasian salaried ~Manderley~? (which I have not read yet. New School reading is on my calendar for tomorrow tonight. Luv ya, Rebecca! [Air kisses.] Welcome home) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 17:38:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It's definitely improved by this transformation... Am I anticipating the many variations on stepanek? I'd do one but once I read the poem I felt no compunctions about using my delete button. I don't think it's fair to make fun of the kid though. There are many adults whose best effort at poetry would be very similar, and many more who probably think the kid's poem is good. And there is an argument that in times of public sorrow, we need cliches more than literature. Literature raises questions and doubts, is open to many interpretations, and can't be easily pinned down. Cliches, on the other hand, are good for expressing a feeling shared by many--they are cliches precisely because they are feelings or thoughts shared by many. A real writer's response myight take off from 911 anbd go totally elsewhere. It might, like Beughel's famous painting of Icarus drowning, feature the WTC falling in one tiny sentence deep inside the work. It might make us actually think about what terrorism is saying and what might cause someone to engage in it. All of these literary possibilities are most unpatriotic and might damage the nation's readiness to go to war and defeat the enemy (whoever the enemy is). You can't have THAT, can you, at a time of war...it would be positively seditious. (I hope my sarcasm is broad enough because if not I will get flamed for this, too...) Queneau's Exercise de Style was perhaps all teh more memorable and brilliant _because_ the text he worked on was (quite deliberately) banal and uninspiring (except to Queneau, who apparently was inspired by either writing or seeing the text). Plus I can't get in a crowded bus in whihc someone rudely pushes me without thinking of the Queneau book. A great thing about that book is that it is hirarious even to people who are uninformed about surrealist games or math/oulipo stuff etc. I first encountered it as a child (my father had studied French literature and so would show me French books, and I devoured it withiout understanding what the point was at all. Some of the funnier versions though migh nit be transklatable, like the "feminine" version or the "official" version (which is official-sounding in a waly only the French can be; after all until recently you still had to sign business letters with a formula several lines long using words that are not used except in that formula) or even the "aloprs" version which simply puts "alors" in front of every sentence, which is funnier in French than putting "So" in front of the sentences because the alors thing is a way some people talk. Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Damian Judge Rollison Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 10:51 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: "New" Poet From someone with too much time on his hands, here is a Oulipian treatment of Stepanek's poem, in the spirit of the Merrill experiment and, more remotely, "On the Pumice of Morons." This one has the serpent eating its own tail, the end of the poem feeding backwards into the beginning, one word at a time, until the whole thing disappears in the middle. It's mapped to the word count of the original, though I screwed that up somewhere (one word off at the end). Some nice surprises emerge here ("no bless amazing please, grace"). The poem is, after all, just a little chunk off of the crap iceberg that is contemporary mass culture, so it doesn't really bother me in itself, and I certainly don't mean to be satirizing the poem or making fun of the kid. Just messing about with the words. All best, Damian Rollison THE OF BLASTS home. It earthly was our dark of day rest in America. the There And was America... no bless amazing please, grace. God, Freedom again? did security not national ring of Tragedy Assured attacked rest sky-high ever Fiery citizens terror the reigned. Can Structures tonight? collapsed. beds Red their with in blood, Safely white sleep with children ash, the And Can out-of-the-sky endings. blue. happy As few children too trust With elders, events Citizens of find blasting faith horrific in A leaders. separated. But be they not were Could all State blinded, and Shocked Church by silence the of blasts, moments Undefiable least, outrage. at Undeniable or outpouring prayer, Of even support, <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 18:38:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: James Merrill In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I would not compare Merrill to ashbery or Kelly. It's the wrong comparison and you're bound to be disapppointed. How about comparing Merrill with Auden or Stevens or Hollander and to a lesser extent, say, Berryman or Lowell? Ashbery's is a poetics of images that attempt to affect the reader while deliberately not making literal sense. Compared to Ashbery, Merrill is not an innovator and could be seen as someone who just takes a little bit of ivory and polishes and polishes it (not my image). But Merrill was often experimental as far as subject matter and organization of poems was concerned. I guess the difference is that most _sentences_ of a Merrill poem are ones which someone could conceivably write or say. Merrill could never write a sentence like "The cold sunrise attacks one side of the giant capital letters, bestirs a little landmass as it sinks, grateful, but asleep" (taken randomdly from Ashbery. The poem is Fantasia on "the Nut Brown Maid") But Ashbery never (to my mind) reaches the peaks of lyricism because to a certain extent, the stringest effects happen when there is an image that is string both as a collection of words and as a semantic relation involving real objects. It is hard to feel strongly about nonsense (I don't use the word pejoratively). One can laugh at it, and be impressed by it, and enjoy it, but one can't really be moved by it. There are some very simple stanzas of Merrill's that I find absolutely haunting. For example: A cold so keen My speech unfurls tonight As from the chattering teeth Of a sewing machine. What's amazing about that to me is not particularly the metaphor of the sewing machine (which I like), but the fact that every word is right. Without "keen", "unfurls", and "chattering" the lines wouldn't work at all, viz: A chill so deep That tonight I talk Through the trembling teeth Of a sewing machine On the other hand, you can mess with the Ashbery without damaging it too much: "The monsoon sweeps between the big serifs of her words, rushing through valleys, causing despair." Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Austinwja@AOL.COM Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 9:51 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: James Merrill In a message dated 12/17/01 4:00:22 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant poet. Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. Cheers, Richard. >> Richard, if Merrill so delights you (and so many others), then I'm glad he was, and is. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 01:23:53 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "new" poet And My Television Debut:Today Auck Today Tommorrow Hollywood! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ian. I mentioned once something about poetry to my mother and she said rapidly and a bit sharply for her: "I hate poetry" (she preferred novels). If I were you I'd either pretend I wasnt a poet or invent some elaborate lie proving that in fact you were only joking and actually the boy on Oprah was the sort of thing you wanted to to do or a glorious ode to mr Wolf or Rumsfeld etal and how wonderful they all are these fire fighters and politicians..or something about a drowned spastic kitten that Oprah might like...but dont tell any sexy women or family you're a poet: in fact, keep away from family reunions: I see one young man went so far in this respect that he joined the Al Qaeda...but you can stay where you are...you dont need to knock over any public buildings...just start acting..well my technique is to ignore most communications from my sisters and everyone who sends Christmas cards and having a brother (who I actually rather like!) well out of the way and a brother-inlaw who hates my guts and a sister who is a religious nut (Christian of some type) and is (I hope) scared to visit me ..and generally being unlikeable and grumpy (except of course to my children)...helps enormously in avoiding parties and "celebrations" so I am always able to do what I want when I want: and the fact that I write incomprehensible poems which very few people are ever going to be interested in is probably put down to "madness" as poets are still either ignored or considered to be subversive or psychotic or whatever: and for Christ sakes dont go on Oprah Winfrey!! You'll NEVER hear the end of it...I had a bit part in a local soap "Shortland Street" as a grumpy nuerotic landlord (a role I play without acting) and I said one line, was on for about 2 minutes and hundreds of people I'd forgotten I knew and who had just seen me around spotted it!! And I dont even watch the show: it must be terrible to be recognised like those bizzarre pop stars or people on TV: Oprah maybe should follow up her programs with an investigation into how many people she has "pushed over the edge" and how many she's assisted with their defficiencies or bizzarities (I dont mean to becoming more bizzare or twisted...or do I?: but no, keep it quiet about being a poet...I read the bio of old T S Eliot and he was getting off a bus in London and (I think this was before television) an Indian student (probably a sincere and fervent writer to be) recognised him: according to the biog he spent 20 minutes agreeing how interesting this was and what a coincidence and how unfortumate but indeed he WASNT the poet T S Eliot: maybe not embarrassed at being a poet but certainly upset at the vulgarity of being "recognised' ....I can tell you from my brief foray into Television that I have no desire for Hollywood, I found it an interesting experience but the pay is low (unless you're a major "star" as they call them) but if 60 seconds produces that result God help those on Oprah or any other media like that. But remember: avoid you're family and dont let on you're a poet. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Randall Wilson" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 6:33 AM Subject: "new" poet > In the world of sitcoms, writers sometimes say of a line "it makes noises > like a joke." Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes noises > like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and she > likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, dammit, > it makes my life more difficult. Now I have to explain to the cousins at > every family reunion why I don't write like this kid -- because, of course, > he's a poet, he has to be a poet, Oprah had him on her show. If I were a > poet, Oprah would have me on. > > IRW ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 01:48:47 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "New" Poet and a poem for Oprah MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit BEDS no amazing of pleasing rest ghost ghosts god and ash given blasts and fiery beyond black america assured it the outrage outpouring there tonight national the security sky reigned to terror high blood of structured structures collapsed tragedy in undefiably not udeniably god of endings out-of-the-sky-grace to terror ring national tonight's the night to safety bless america citizens white children sleep freedom shocked silen(t)ce church but not were be they separated but blinded of prayer and leaders Richard Taylor (Book copier part time poet sometimes watcher of "Judge Judy" and would be terrorist and general layabout chess player and general idler with a US$60,000 disability I can assure you Oprah) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Damian Judge Rollison" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 4:50 PM Subject: Re: "New" Poet > From someone with too much time on his hands, here is a > Oulipian treatment of Stepanek's poem, in the spirit of the > Merrill experiment and, more remotely, "On the Pumice of > Morons." This one has the serpent eating its own tail, the > end of the poem feeding backwards into the beginning, one > word at a time, until the whole thing disappears in the > middle. It's mapped to the word count of the original, > though I screwed that up somewhere (one word off at the > end). Some nice surprises emerge here ("no bless amazing > please, grace"). > > The poem is, after all, just a little chunk off of the crap > iceberg that is contemporary mass culture, so it doesn't > really bother me in itself, and I certainly don't mean to > be satirizing the poem or making fun of the kid. Just > messing about with the words. > > All best, > Damian Rollison > > > > > THE OF BLASTS > > home. It earthly was our dark of > day rest in America. the > There And was America... > no bless amazing > please, grace. God, > Freedom again? > did security not national ring of > Tragedy Assured attacked > rest sky-high ever Fiery > citizens terror the reigned. Can > Structures tonight? collapsed. beds Red > their with in blood, > Safely white > sleep with > children ash, the And > Can out-of-the-sky endings. blue. happy As > few children too > trust With elders, events > Citizens of find blasting faith > horrific in A leaders. separated. > But be they not > were Could all State blinded, > and Shocked Church by silence > the of blasts, moments Undefiable > least, outrage. at Undeniable > or outpouring prayer, Of even support, > > > > > > > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > damian judge rollison > department of english/ > institute for advanced > technology in the > humanities > university of virginia > djr4r@virginia.edu > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 20:12:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: hassen Subject: Re: "New" Poet - cryptographic geurrilla MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >>Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes noises like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and she likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, dammit, it makes my life more difficult<< >>Isn't it condescending as hell to cut a poet slack because of hir handicap? << >>And maybe some of those picking on this kid WERE much better at age 11 . . . who knows . . . << e t c e t e r a at the risk of bruising my own apples - *who freaking cares!* i can't help but wonder what (st)age are folks who have issues with an eleven yr old kid getting a little attention for a few words he wrote... or is it the *professing* to have issue w/it so that one may announce one's position re 'bad poetry'? i've better things to bitch about - i'm finding it tiresome that most (a few exceptions, of course) posts here (list) are primarily concerned w/polishing the ol' projected image (announcements, judgments, pronouncements) & self-promo moreso than interest in conversation & exploration (which i used to think was of interest to most 'poets.' naive) & by so doing seem to inhibit the latter & cause general crappy feeling. judging from patrick's last posts & the following (non) reception to it, in addition to what's absent, c&e here are about dead. it's making me grumpy, damnit. i'm (finally, after four years) feeling most disillusioned, maybe it's the season... that's all, i'll shut up now. i realize i'm talking to walls at any rate. blah! sniff, h ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 22:36:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: James Merrill In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed exactly right...? Gene At 03:41 AM 12/18/01 -0500, you wrote: >Maybe Merrill wasn't as innovative as Lowell (but I doubt that; Lowell's >only "innovative" poems are his bad late ones), but Merrill had the knack of >getting poems exactly right. Sometimes it was a minor poem that he was >attempting, but minor or major, it always worked. > >I think The Book of Ephraim is quite innovative. Merrill is one of the few >poets who should be allowed to rhyme. He has permission :-) The person who >accused Merrill of being manipulative should reread the Sandover poems. In >the Book of Ephraim, Merrill tries to mess with fate by influencing who gets >reborn where, and totally screws up. So I think Merrill was quite >self-aware. > >Millie > >P.S. Has anybody read Snodgrass's "The Fuehrer Bunker"? I rather like it, >but there is something quite sick, alomst offensive about it, as it makes >Himmler express himself in abecedarian telegrams, plays with sestina, >villanelle, all sorts of forms but but with this vile, awful subject matter. >Of course the poem is against Hitler, but Snodgrass makes the Nazis human >(well they of course _were_ human, which is a dilemma we often don't want to >face) and we wonder whether it is accceptable to play games of language with >such subject matter... > >-----Original Message----- >From: UB Poetics discussion group >[mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of richard.tylr >Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 5:00 PM >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: James Merrill > > >Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the >"great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if >even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and >contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr >acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be >that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel >that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But >then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US >had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a >stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the >potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even >might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the >US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep >meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice >Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he >didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis >Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant >poet. > Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. >Cheers, Richard. >----- Original Message ----- >From: >To: >Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 8:23 AM >Subject: Re: James Merrill > > > > In a message dated 12/14/01 9:16:44 AM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > > > << But Bill. I might critique "capitalism" etc but it doesnt meean that > > Merrill > > > > with his privliges, money, and many things we dislike (like say Pound or > > > > Wallace Stevens in a different way) about him wasnt a great poet of his > > > > kind; >> > > > > Richard, I suppose I allowed for that, however indirectly, with Scripts >for > > the Pageant. > > Merrill rattles among late Modernists even as he writes into the >seventies, > > which is fine, except that I prefer the first stringers. It's a matter of > > taste, of course. Merrill reads to me as a poet who is most concerned >with > > mastering and manipulating devices -- a craftsman in the main. Nothing > > wrong with that, I guess. But for me, at least, the work lacks a sense of > > adventure, of exposure, even in its most experimental bee bops which just > > never seemed all that fresh to me. Mannered, yes. And yes, I am more > > concerned with the abuse of power than I am with inherited privilege, >though > > I'm not delighted with the latter. Ass kissing is another matter >altogether. > > If a certain amount of hyporcrisy is to be forgiven in matters re: > > publishing, then we must be consistent when it comes to the self-serving > > behavior of governments on the world stage where much more is at stake. >No? > > Ah, the nature of the human. Best, Bill > > > > > > > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > > KojaPress.com > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 22:39:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: on pinsky on dugan In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed ? Gene At 01:20 PM 12/18/01 -0500, you wrote: >Regardless of the review's vapid pleasantries, Dugan's always been an >interesting case -- his use of the line at first glance borders on prose, >one of the softest linebreaks in the past 50 years or so (softer even than >Jimmy Schuyler). His poems have always struck me as having their limits, or >at least there is that side of a generation now in its it 80s that was >influenced visibly by Williams but not interested in either the Objectivists >nor the New Americans (Harvey Shapiro & David Ignatow would be two others >and one could jerry-rig Archie Ammons or even Bill Bronk into the same >category I suppose). There's a crabbed rigor in Dugan's best work that lacks >the discipline or formal imagination of a Niedecker, for example, but is >clearly working hard to some good effect. > >Ron > >"It is refreshing that we finally have, in the annals of poetry, "a lyrical >skepticism, rooted in experience." It's about time. I guess what's so great >about it is that it's rooted in *experience*, not in some flight of >fancy.And also that it's skeptical--for who, having endured experience, >would emerge optimistic? So Dugan at least has that integrity. Yet also, >it's lyrical; we expect lyricism, and I'd say we deserve it. And finally, >it's scornful--scornful of what? Of what history has brought it: deeper >skepticism, more radical doubt. In summary, the great thing about Alan >Dugan at 78 is that, having weathered "experience," he's somewhat >skeptical." > > >http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/books/review/16PINSKYT.html > > > > >Ron Silliman >ron.silliman@gte.net >rsillima@hotmail.com > >DO NOT RESPOND to >Tottels@Hotmail.com >It is for listservs only. > > >_________________________________________________________________ >Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 12:29:03 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill Alan Sondheim and some New Zeland Poets Considered MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bill. Not "so delights me" but certainly I find him an interesting poet: what would come of us if we all wrote like, well, in a certain style: our "radical" and disjunctive writings would become the yawn norm...no, I got interested in him via a book by Lyn Keller who writes excellently on I think it was Stevens and Ashbery, Williams and Creeley, and Auden and Merrill which led me into his poetry but I havent read as much as I'd like to have of any of these authors. When I have time I'm going to have a look at Sondheim's work more closely ( I got his CD Rom) : after all here is a contemporary living poet who is available and fresh online so to speak...but as you know one man's meat...what I have found is that a good critique-ing critic (as against a criticism) will either elucidate a work or by his or her enthusiasm and or lead you into poets you (one) had neglected: Christopher Smart I hadnt heard of until my friend Scott Hamilton enthused over it..and (father forgive me for I have sinned) I photocopied that strange and fascinating poem, who else do I like..Brryman, Roethke, many of the New York poets, Spicer, many of the Langpos and their derivatives or associates, many New Zealand poets eg Michelle Leggott, Vincent O'Sullivan (sometimes he is reminiscent of Merrill altho not so ornately complex perhaps), the Curnows (Wystan and Allan) esspecially I like Wystan's small book "Castor Bay" and "Cancer Diary" as well as his description of a "happenning" down at the gas works which I discovered in an old mag produced by Alan Loney ( who is worth a look at) and other things: but there are many others: Bill Manhire is quite brilliant and sometimes Richard von Sturmer and so on.Jack Ross has produceed a strange and fascinating prose poem "thing" called "nights With Giodorno Bruno" which I reviewed for Brief and I might (I will) send a shortened version of that tothe List Some of the poets in "Brief" ed John Geraets are interesting and Scott Hamilton's SALT had myself, Scott, Hamish Dewe, Michael Arnold and others: there are many many talented poets in NZ but just as in the States the "Official Verse" stuff is given he nod. I generalise but I dont think editors anywhere often recognise real passion and inventiveness; real innovation. A handful of editors SEE but the history of literature favours poets sucha as Emily Dickinson and Hopkins and many others when they are dead...in art Van Gogh...in music J S Bach and real inventors such as Cage, Varese, Xenakis, Stockhausen might be recognised but one suspects that those "in power" or in publishing keep anything of great value or real voltage at a distance: success and recognition for a writer in his her own life time is probably a sign that they are actually quite ordinary poets artists musicians etc...but maybe that is not always so....most publishers (for good reasons) have to watch the $signs etc But certainly we owe it to our fellow poets (living and dead ) to value and carefully evaluate and consider and discuss their work. In the end of course there will be such debates or likes and dislikes of one poet or another...so its not a question of Merrill delighting me per se...anyway, all the best for Xmas to you Bill and everyone. Richard ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 3:50 PM Subject: Re: James Merrill > In a message dated 12/17/01 4:00:22 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > << Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the > > "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if > > even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and > > contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr > > acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be > > that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel > > that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But > > then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US > > had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a > > stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the > > potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even > > might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the > > US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep > > meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice > > Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he > > didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis > > Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant > > poet. > > Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. > > Cheers, Richard. > > >> > > Richard, if Merrill so delights you (and so many others), then I'm glad he > was, and is. Best, Bill > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 10:43:12 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Isat@AOL.COM Subject: "New" Poet Recut Take2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Damian, I think the kid should be certainly given a credit for writing all the right buzzwords down, but, of course, he is not a poet, so he could not put them together in the "right order". Here is another take on his poem, this one being a prosody treatment: ___ God please America bless our out-of-the-blue sky shocked horrific assured of national blasts bless our blinded state separated elders and the rest of our national church bless our children leaders security beds support silence citizens amazing trust their faith in the happy endings bless our collapsed grace our dark moments of fiery freedom terror red white with blood ash undeniable bless our sky-high earthly prayer outrage: tonight you rest again Igor Satanovsky kojapress.com ______ > From someone with too much time on his hands, here is a > Oulipian treatment of Stepanek's poem, in the spirit of the > Merrill experiment and, more remotely, "On the Pumice of > Morons." This one has the serpent eating its own tail, the > end of the poem feeding backwards into the beginning, one > word at a time, until the whole thing disappears in the > middle. It's mapped to the word count of the original, > though I screwed that up somewhere (one word off at the > end). Some nice surprises emerge here ("no bless amazing > please, grace"). > > The poem is, after all, just a little chunk off of the crap > iceberg that is contemporary mass culture, so it doesn't > really bother me in itself, and I certainly don't mean to > be satirizing the poem or making fun of the kid. Just > messing about with the words. > > All best, > Damian Rollison > > > > > THE OF BLASTS > > home. It earthly was our dark of > day rest in America. the > There And was America... > no bless amazing > please, grace. God, > Freedom again? > did security not national ring of > Tragedy Assured attacked > rest sky-high ever Fiery > citizens terror the reigned. Can > Structures tonight? collapsed. beds Red > their with in blood, > Safely white > sleep with > children ash, the And > Can out-of-the-sky endings. blue. happy As > few children too > trust With elders, events > Citizens of find blasting faith > horrific in A leaders. separated. > But be they not > were Could all State blinded, > and Shocked Church by silence > the of blasts, moments Undefiable > least, outrage. at Undeniable > or outpouring prayer, Of even support, _____ > 9-11-2001 > It was a dark day in America. > There was no amazing grace. > Freedom did not ring. > Tragedy attacked sky-high. > Fiery terror reigned. > Structures collapsed. > Red with blood, white with ash, > And out-of-the-sky blue. > As children trust elders, > Citizens find faith in leaders. > But they were all blinded, > Shocked by the blasts. > Undefiable outrage. > Undeniable outpouring > Of support, even prayer, > Or at least, moments of silence. > Church and State > Could not be separated. > A horrific blasting of events > With too few happy endings. > Can the children sleep > Safely in their beds tonight? > Can the citizens ever rest > Assured of national security again? > God, please, bless America... > And the rest of our earthly home. > > Mattie Stepanek > Sept. 11, 2001 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 10:45:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Nada Gordon Subject: Basil & Martha King/Brooklyn/Jan. 8 Comments: To: Gpwitd@aol.com, KurlyGurly@aol.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Nada requests the pleasure of your company at the Flying Saucer Cafe 494 Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn on the evening of Tuesday January 8 at 8 pm ******************Martha King & Basil King******************************* Poet/prose writer Martha King attended Black Mountain College briefly as a teenager in the late 1950s, and married the painter Basil King in San Francisco. She began writing regularly in the early 1970s, after the birth of their two daughters, Mallory and Hetty. She edited Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, which she sent gratis to interested readers, from 1983 to 1993. Her most recent book is a collection of prose, Little Tales of Family and War, from Spuyten Duyvil. Separate Parts is forthcoming from Avec. Other books include Women and Children First, Weather, Islamic Miniature, Monday Through Friday, and Seventeen Walking Sticks. She will read from her new book Selected, Collected, Published and Unpublished. Painter/poet Basil King attended Black Mountain College and completed his apprenticeship as a painter in San Francisco and New York. Although he did not begin to write until 1986, his involvement with poetry has always been part of his life, first doing art to accompany poems in books and magazines, later as a book artist and now as a poet/painter. Some of his larger paintings can be seen on the Web at the Spuyten Duyvil and Avec sites. His most recent book, Warp Spasm, has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other books include Split Peas, Miniatures, Devotions, Identity, and The Poet. At the Flying Saucer, he will present the opening sections of his ongoing work, "Mirage" -- combining slides of art and text which is sequentially poetry, prose, recollection, and invention. Some "Mirage" text (without images) is currently on the Web at Light&Dust@Grist (http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm) a highly recommended site. HOW TO GET THERE: Take the 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or D or Q to the Atlantic Subway stop and walk underground to the Pacific Street exit (at the N or R or M Pacific Street Stop) or take the B or N or R or M - in any case, go out the Pacific Street Exit (right exit), take a right - at the end of the block you will be on Atlantic Ave. Take a left on Atlantic, and about two and a half blocks down, between Third and Nevins, you will find the Flying Saucer Cafe. $3 donation. -- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:10:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: mdw Subject: TELLING IT SLANT available at 20% percent discount MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Hey friends: TELLING IT SLANT: AVANT GARDE POETICS OF THE 1990s, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks, is now out from the University of Alabama Press. This collection of 26 essays by various writers focuses on many of the essential issues regarding avant garde poetry in the last decade. I hope you'll consider buying a copy; information on how to get your 20% discount can be found at the website below. And please pass this information along to anybody else who might be interested. Contributors to the collection include: Daniel Barbiero Caroline Bergvall Charles Borkhuis Sherry Brennan Jeff Derksen Steve Evans Ben Friedlander Chris Funkhouser C. S. Giscombe Jeff Hansen Andrew Levy Tan Lin Bill Luoma Steven Marks Harryette Mullen Siann Ngai Jena Osman Kristin Prevallet Lisa Robertson Leonard Schwartz Rod Smith Juliana Spahr Brian Kim Stefans Gary Sullivan Mark Wallace Elizabeth Willis Further information, including purchase and discount information, about the book can be found at: http://www.uapress.ua.edu/authors/wallac01.html Or begin with the UA Press web site, and you'll find a link/feature for the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series: http://www.uapress.ua.edu/ If you have any questions, don't hesitate to let me know. Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 08:37:18 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Betsy Andrews Subject: watch your language MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Could we stop using the word "cripples?" It's really offensive. And, as for the whole phenomenon of this young poet, really, why are we harping on it at all? If you're so concerned about "mediocrity" getting attention, the best revenge is to make great art. 'Nuff said. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 14:26:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: claity@DREW.EDU Subject: New MSA Web Address Comments: To: h-afro-am@h-net.msu.edu, hdsoc-l@uconnvm.uconn.edu, tse@po.missouri.edu, victoria@listserv.indiana.edu, modbrits@listserv.kent.edu, h-amstdy@h-net.msu.edu, modernism@lists.village.virginia.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The Modernist Studies Association now has a new web address: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/ Although the old address will continue to work, we urge you to set your bookmarks to the new (and much simpler) address. At the site you will find information about the upcoming MSA 4 meeting at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, including dates, a call for panel proposals, and a call for seminar leaders. There is also general information about the organization, its new board of directors, and current election being held to chair the Membership Committee. MSA Webmaster Sean Latham Assistant Professor of English Editor, James Joyce Quarterly University of Tulsa ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 17:03:06 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Laura Mullen Subject: Cha MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Theresa Cha not Sha: note also the wonderful text Writing Self Writing Nation, criticism on Dictee. Which book--Dictee--everyone should read.... ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 19:47:19 -0500 Reply-To: bstefans@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: A R R A S is alive (sorry if you've received this already... Comments: To: bstefans@arras.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit just a brief announcement to say that: ARRAS new media poetry and poetics has been redesigned, refitted, restocked, and is being watched over by Lord Roy Batty. http://www.arras.net/index.htm what you will find there: .pdfs -- three full length acrobat books: Notes to Poetry, literary criticism by Steve Evans Object 9, an anthology of experimental poetry edited by Robert Fitterman Arras 4, the first of a new series of issues of Arras magazine edited by bks sites with legs -- featured this month is www.alienated.net, a postnuke site of "Poetechnology" run by Darren Wershler-Henry that rocks -- join up, friend! gallery -- featured this month, "New Digital Emblems" (www.williampoundstone.net), a quasi-didactic site that outlines how the web and the ancient form of the heroic emblem -- which employed a motto, iconic image and commentary -- intersect all the urls -- the complete list of URLs posted to the ubu list over the past year or so candy -- just that bks resources -- yes, it's a homepage, too, so you get my work as well other fun stuff -- more to be added over time, including Arras 5 and a new volume of poli-sci prose by Bruce Andrews. in case you forgot: http://www.arras.net/index.htm ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:04:57 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: walterblue Subject: Re: Alan Dugan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am sure you can get one at the Salvation Army for the good it will do you. MR ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Randall Wilson" To: Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 9:33 AM Subject: Alan Dugan > During a recent move my postmodern safety net was damaged in transit and is > no longer usable. I've tried to contact the original manufacturer but they > seem to have gone out of business. Can anyone tell me where I might buy > another? > > IRW ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:12:45 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: komninos zervos Subject: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" i need help. i'm studying modes of recognition of poetry. on the web, how do we recognize words used in language as poetry, how do we know we are having a poem? i mean before we start to interpret it or process it for meaning/feeling. in print we see a visual pattern or arrangement, we see line lengths, we see indentations from the left margin and we visually recognize it as poetry, we see also phonological elements, rhyme, rhythms translated from oral culture, we then interpret what we read as poetry, or by the special rules of reading a text as belonging to a poetic discourse. in live performance there are visual recognition stimuli; a spotlit area; a microphone; chairs arranged in a room pointing towards the performance area; a person holding an opened book or papers. There are definitely phonological signs we identify also; the poet's projected voice (not normal speaking voice); sound patterns (rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance) being sounded, which we have learnt to recognize as poetry. in web environments how do i tell if i've come across a poem? is it merely the same signs we use to recognize poetry in print and in live performance, or are there unique recognition stimuli for web/cyber/new/digital/hypermedia poetry? do we need visual evidence of text or aural presence of text to be poetry in this medium? i would appreciate some thoughts on this cheers komninos -- komninos zervos bsc(hons) ma(creative writing) http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/K_Zervos Convenor CyberStudies major School of Arts Griffith University Gold Coast Campus PMB 50 Gold Coast Mail Centre Queensland 9726 Australia tel: +61 7 55528872 fax: +61 7 55528141 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:10:28 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/18/01 1:43:19 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << But the capitalist system - actuallly just about any market system - would crash tommorrow if theft was outlawed !!!! >> I don't know that it would crash, but the unemployment rate would certainly rise. Blackmarket money, especially drug money, is spent on food, appliances, shoes, etc., and so creates jobs. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:37:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ken Rumble Subject: Re: "new" poet In-Reply-To: <9b.1fe2ef54.2950d802@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ha-ha-ha!: "If I were a poet, Oprah would have me on." Well said. Ken At 12:33 PM 12/18/2001 -0500, you wrote: >In the world of sitcoms, writers sometimes say of a line "it makes noises >like a joke." Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes noises >like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and she >likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, dammit, >it makes my life more difficult. Now I have to explain to the cousins at >every family reunion why I don't write like this kid -- because, of course, >he's a poet, he has to be a poet, Oprah had him on her show. If I were a >poet, Oprah would have me on. > >IRW > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:18:24 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/18/01 12:43:19 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > I've got a book published called "Red". I wish people would steal it ! > At least then I know someone wanted it: or thought they did! I would happily steal your book, Richard. Murat ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 18:50:12 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Bromige Subject: Re: HO HO HO, MERRY COMBO!!! (9) In-Reply-To: <200112180455.XAA08917@dept.english.upenn.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >COMBO 9 > >HAS ARRIVED IN TIME > >FOR THE HOLIDAYS!!! > > > NATHAN AUSTIN JACQUES DEBROT > >RAY DI PALMA PATRICK DURGIN LAURA ELRICK E. TRACY GRINNEL > > JEN HOFER VINCENT KATZ BEN LERNER > >MICHAEL MAGEE JENN McCREARY PHIL METRES > > CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY JASON NELSON > >RONALD PLAMER and... > > and interview with CARLA HARRYMAN > by MICHAEL MAGEE & JACQUES DEBROT > > >Wither the avant-garde? Wither do you think??? WHITHER. > With her. And her >friends > >in the COMBO..... > >$10.00 / 4-issue subscription $3.00 / single copies >$50.00 / LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION $4.00 / back issues >(includes available back issues) > >cash or checks payable to >Michael Magee, 31 Perrin Ave., Pawtucket, RI 02861 > >www.combopoetry.com > >COMBO 9. 60pp side-stapled w/ glossy cardstock cover w/ original artwork ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 17:55:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elizabeth Bassford Subject: Exoterica//RYSEC Rep Theater Presents MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear friends of Exoterica: Catch our very own Exoterica director Rick Pernod in "WHO AM I THIS TIME", adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House", this Friday and Saturday, Dec. 21st and 22nd, at 8 p.m. at The Society for Ethical Culture, 4450 Fieldston Road in the Bronx. For tkt. reservations call 718-548-4445. The playlet "It" wil open the evening. Cost for this double feature is $7 for adults and $3 for children. Wishing you all the best for the new year, from those of us at Exoterica, The House of Pernod, and our host organization, RYSEC. Peace. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:08:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: john coletti Subject: Ephraim Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Though I know this work (I think) was the one conjured through ouija (right?) I'd be curious to know about any of the religious content therein (if any?) Wasn't ephraim the son of joseph--as in the coat of many colors. Having grown up a mormon (and now most certainly not one) I remember being blessed once and told I was from the tribe of Ephraim. I believe ephraim was given the birthright after the elder brother whose name I forget spoiled his chance. I remember being told that most amerikans are given, during their "patriarchal blessing," that tribe as their lineage (as opposed to the 12 original and subsequent lines).....just curious and scooping up some odd facts there. -john coletti _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 01:53:11 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: James Merrill MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit One can compare any poet to any other: but I was just listing some poets at random ..... Bill ausrin is and most on the list are well aware of the big difference between the poets: but there are points of intersection...which can be seen by looking a "Remaking it New" by Lynn Keller which is the book that gave me some insights into Merrill. I agree with your comments but I dont lie awake thinking about Merrill...I went through an Ashbery jag though for a while..but I've read so much that it all starts to seem the same: Alan Sondheim is the most interesting poet for me at the moment and a few New Zealand poets... I think you're wrong about Ashbery though: he's a different poet but in my book at his best and in many of his poems and his books (not all of course) one of the greatest poets: there are some extraordinary beautiful and lyrical moments that put him with the best poets ever. But he seems lately to be running on automatic...but he's written masses of books. Kelly is also very different (altho eqaully prolific) and I enjoyed his poems which are somewhat into the "deep image" thing. Everyone sees something different in different poets. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Millie Niss" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 12:38 PM Subject: Re: James Merrill > I would not compare Merrill to ashbery or Kelly. It's the wrong comparison > and you're bound to be disapppointed. How about comparing Merrill with > Auden or Stevens or Hollander and to a lesser extent, say, Berryman or > Lowell? Ashbery's is a poetics of images that attempt to affect the reader > while deliberately not making literal sense. Compared to Ashbery, Merrill > is not an innovator and could be seen as someone who just takes a little bit > of ivory and polishes and polishes it (not my image). But Merrill was often > experimental as far as subject matter and organization of poems was > concerned. I guess the difference is that most _sentences_ of a Merrill > poem are ones which someone could conceivably write or say. Merrill could > never write a sentence like "The cold sunrise attacks one side of the giant > capital letters, bestirs a little landmass as it sinks, grateful, but > asleep" (taken randomdly from Ashbery. The poem is Fantasia on "the Nut > Brown Maid") > > But Ashbery never (to my mind) reaches the peaks of lyricism because to a > certain extent, the stringest effects happen when there is an image that is > string both as a collection of words and as a semantic relation involving > real objects. It is hard to feel strongly about nonsense (I don't use the > word pejoratively). One can laugh at it, and be impressed by it, and enjoy > it, but one can't really be moved by it. > > There are some very simple stanzas of Merrill's that I find absolutely > haunting. For example: > > A cold so keen > My speech unfurls tonight > As from the chattering teeth > Of a sewing machine. > > What's amazing about that to me is not particularly the metaphor of the > sewing machine (which I like), but the fact that every word is right. > Without "keen", "unfurls", and "chattering" the lines wouldn't work at all, > viz: > > A chill so deep > That tonight I talk > Through the trembling teeth > Of a sewing machine > > On the other hand, you can mess with the Ashbery without damaging it too > much: "The monsoon sweeps between the big serifs of her words, rushing > through valleys, causing despair." > > Millie > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Austinwja@AOL.COM > Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 9:51 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: James Merrill > > > In a message dated 12/17/01 4:00:22 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > << Bill. Hypocrisy like justice: I mean the abolition of the first and the > > "great" promotion of the latter, probably so far off, if not impossible: if > > even desirable... As to the world stage I see a lot of complexities and > > contradictions and these are in us all: lately S11 whoever or howevr > > acheived or "executed" raises many many questions. One "good" thing might be > > that such as Merrill might feel less smug....but I digress.... I still feel > > that Merrill was a genius: but indeed he lived in a different world. But > > then dont we all? All in our own worlds. (Which is why I wish that the US > > had left the Taleban alone: they were unique in their own way: there was a > > stable government: now you have potentially a greater chaos, and the > > potential for even more extreme groups forming is even more possible -even > > might be desirable to challenge the arrogant military-political might of the > > US).....But to return to Merrill: there was some great "music and deep > > meaning" in his poetry: as much as in Ashbery, or Robert Kelly, or Alice > > Notley, or hundreds of other marvelous poets of his own time but clearly he > > didnt move innnovatively even as much as Berryman or Ashbery (say of Tennis > > Court Oath) or even Lowell.....but he is still a major and a significant > > poet. > > Forgiving politicians is a hard one! They are the ones we love to hate. > > Cheers, Richard. > > >> > > Richard, if Merrill so delights you (and so many others), then I'm glad he > was, and is. Best, Bill > > WilliamJamesAustin.com > KojaPress.com > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:50:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fargas Laura Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" >>I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to operate outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. >> Eh? The corporate-bureaucratic system is what has printed ziggity-jillion copies of his book, is sending him around the country and exhibiting him on television, and generally relying upon the deep-heartedness of the people who are paying for his book. It is selling his courage and his effort to not merely endure but prevail. Corporations are subtler swine than you are crediting them with being -- someone in the corporate system wanted to print that book to make the kid happy, yes, but they were also gambling that your compassion would open your wallet. >>To show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because their poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be creatively irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." >> What kind of compassion are you recommending? To say his poems will last with Frost or Ashbery? Why bullshit this smart, brave kid? This is a little boy who has to have his lungs vacuumed every hour or two -- he deserves better. Whoever it was that said the rest of us should stand what we could write at age eleven against what he writes is fairer, and more to the point. Isn't enough to say, 'pretty good for eleven, not grown-up poetry?' Obviously he's only being published because he's gravely ill -- it's like the old crack comparing a woman doing something-or-other to a dog getting up on his hind legs and giving a speech-- the astonishment being not that the thing was done well, but that it was done at all. Having read a newspaper interview with him, I suspect the boy understands that perfectly well, too. One wishes him the luck of living to be older and writing better poems. Then he can sell 28 copies a year of his brilliant book of poems just like the rest of us. And the Jimmy Stewart or Jewel or gravely ill child of that era can go on to be the year's best selling poet. Laura Fargas ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:16:46 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: is life a pain Comments: To: lit-med@endeavor.med.nyu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I just read this in an announcement from the American Pain Society: "[Current consensous views the continual formation and perception of = successive internal narrative drafts as the foundation of human = consciouness.....current scholarly and/or popular perception of = narrative about pain and suffering"] some facinating food for thought if true? tom bell &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&cetera: Poetry at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/publicat.html Gallery - Metaphor/Metonym for Health at = http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/metaphor/metapho.htm=20 Health articles at http://psychology.healingwell.com/ Reviews at http://members.tripod.com/~trbell/lifedesigns/reviews.htm ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 02:11:28 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Murat. Thank you. At last: but would you immediately shred it or read it or translate it to bin Laden to send that gentleman insane if he's NOT a computer generated graphic? Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Murat Nemet-Nejat" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 7:18 AM Subject: Re: My Life > In a message dated 12/18/01 12:43:19 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > > I've got a book published called "Red". I wish people would steal it ! > > At least then I know someone wanted it: or thought they did! > > > I would happily steal your book, Richard. > > Murat > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:39:08 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: ** Poetry Center Book Award, submissions due 1/31/02 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/19/01 7:58:28 PM, MuratNN@AOL.COM writes: << Millie, I think somebody should come out clearly in your defense. What's the big deal about submitting poems which might fit an editor's or panel's taste. I understand very well if someone refuses to send work to award competions; there maybe legitimate reasons for that. But I don't understand the idea of sending work but refusing to consider the panel/editor's taste. Then, why is one sending it? Murat >> Murat, I did come to her defense. Twice! Happy Holidays, all!! Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 19:23:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Spiral Bridge Subject: Spiral Bridge Rodeo Reading Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Spiral Bridge has invited you to "Spiral Bridge Rodeo Reading". Click below to visit Evite for more information about the event and also to RSVP. http://www.evite.com/r?iid=YFQTMLZMEEKLKRWLBMWX This invitation was sent to you by Spiral Bridge using Evite. To remove yourself from this guest list please contact us at support@evite.com This Evite Invite is covered by Evite's privacy policy*. To view this privacy policy, click here: http://www.evite.com/privacy ********************************* ********************************* HAVING TROUBLE? Perhaps your email program doesn't recognize the Web address as an active link. To view your invitation, copy the entire URL and paste it into your browser. If you would like further assistance, please send email to support@evite.com * Updated 03/15/01. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:44:18 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: James Merrill Alan Sondheim and some New Zeland Poets Considered MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/19/01 8:15:09 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << all the best for Xmas to you Bill and everyone. Richard >> HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:49:07 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/19/01 8:19:38 PM, MuratNN@AOL.COM writes: << > I've got a book published called "Red". I wish people would steal it ! > At least then I know someone wanted it: or thought they did! I would happily steal your book, Richard. Murat >> Ah Abbe, I knew you well. Well, not really, but I own a first edition. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:23:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <20011218213747.97978.qmail@web11705.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit You said I said: 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF AGE OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? OR CLASS? ETC.?) Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, again, I have to re-translate it: If the sick wish to advance the social assimilation of their fellow disabled, they should conform to socially accepted norms. Am I misrepresenting the thought? It's better for the disadvantaged or special caste to ~impersonate~ the privileged majorities, in order better to promote inclusion of their group? ------- You didn't misstate what I said but you lost the context, which was that "sadly" this is true. I also said that logically, if we wanted to prove that we aren't morons by writing poetry, we should only have to write the poetry average people who are not morons write, which generally isn't very good (to use a loaded term, of course). I think it is silly to make poetry-writing the center of a claim that disabled people are as worthy of respect or love or care as other people. All people are worthy of respect, etc., by virtue of being human, and there are certainly som ediability groups whoo can never write as good poetry as non-disabled folks (say people who are multiply handicapped and can neither move nor speak and are mentally retarded (one hopes these people have extremely sever mental deficiencies because if they are even conscious of existing it must be hellish)). A lot of times minority groups claim to have a culture of their own and want not to be judged by the standards of the majority. Perhaps a group very invested in this idea wouldn'ty want to compete in the field of poetry because it isn't their domain. Or they would have a poetry so different from ouirs that we couldn't understand it. Recently, disability groups have made use of the "we're different, not better or worse" idea. The Deaf (who demand the right to be capitalized) have done this the most, presumably because they share a language that non-Deaf people rarely if ever achieve fluency in. Deaf poetry does exist and it is incomprehensibe to non-Deaf people, although there are also productions which try to mix Deaf and hearing words, music, and dance. I think crazy people have a culture, too, but I don't know that we have our own poetics. (If we did it might be like the weirder poems of James Tate. Some of his works depict paranoia and most depict tangential thinkinig and derailment, which are thought disorders according to the psychiatrists. But unfortunately for us, James Tate invented his poetics and not one of us, unless he is a closet case.) Crazy people are more likely to use standard poetry with subject matter related to our situation, although there is also a trend to use pseudo-psychotic tangential thinking methods, which I think is a more exciting direction than just imitating standard discourse. I think there are real possibilities for prose poems that are crazy and don't just talk about ctaziness, but I don't know of published examples. The reason I taught different schools of poetry when I taught mentaly ill people is that I wanted them to see that there are possiblities available other than simply stating your thoughts or feelings and adding in line breaks. Many people (not just mentally ill people) think that this is all there is to poetry. (I'd make a snide comment about what poets they probably read, only I'm afraid the person might be on this list!) The reaction I got to teaching postmodern poems was a kind of relief and , "wow, you mean we're allowed to do this!" People who are interested in words and poetry often have experimented and played with language, but they may have received ideas that you have to have lines all the same length and you have to make sense and the thought has to end at the end of the line (personally, I think enjambment was one of the great inventions in poetry. When was it invented?). Anyway, by teaching poetry to mentally ill people and putting together my ezine (which I am on the brink of releasing the new issue of) which is half by mentally ill people, I didn't intend to prove that mentally ill people are more creative than other people because they can write poetry, but rather that mentally ill _poets_ can be as good as other poets. My zine will have one poem that makes me wince with its badness and for personal reasons (no, I am not dating the author, but he was one of the first to submit, and I thanked him profusely, before I read the poem...and I didn't make clear that I could reject stuff...I rejected the very worst poem he wrote but kept one I don't like) I didn't see how to reject it. Other than that, I think it has decent work. The first issue (mostly stories) was better I think. This time I have some works that stand up but others that are blah (and the one poem which is bleccch). Millie ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:45:30 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: The Disparities and My Life Comments: cc: djmess@GREENINTEGER.COM In-Reply-To: <3C211AEC.6CF914F1@earthlink.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 08:20:03 -0800 From: Douglas Messerli Subject: The Disparities and My Life > I feel a bit frustrated by the statements made regarding My Life on the Poetics list. Any time a reader makes a copy of a book for which we have not given permission he or she is showing a great disregard for both author and publisher ------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 23:43:20 -0500 From: Kathy Lou Schultz Subject: Re: The Disparities and My Life > teachers get frustrated too; I've heard from several people who wanted to teach *My Life* but couldn't because it was unavailable. At these moments even the most judicious poet/critic/teacher thinks momentarily of xeroxing sections of the book. However, the interest in teaching the text and finding copies of it shows great respect ======================================================= Any academic who is in a dilemma about rushing a text onto syllabus in time for a new semester, versus the delays in shipment or out-of-print, can purchase rights to xerox through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., at http://www.copyright.com/ . Funds are re-directed back along proper channels to the copyright-holders. It's normally procedural at a university on the scale of University of Pennsylvania for the Operations Department merely to sign off on payment for any such invoices, as a decimal point within allotted photocopying budgets. Your department or the institution can in fact also purchase annual ~blanket~ permission to photocopy all copyrighted material (to avoid frustrated teachers). ~"sections"~ of any book, for academic institutions, are exempt from standard copyright restrictions. There's a designated percentage (section) that can be copied for teaching purposes. Again, your Operations Department or Provost's designees on intellectual property, for example, http://www.library.upenn.edu/resources/subject/social/communication/intellectual.html should be equipped to provide you with that information. (As, coincidentally, there has been some question about the recent reprinting, without authors' permission [or editors' full knowledge], of Rutgers' on-line 1998 HOW2 [ http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_2_1999/current/forum/index.html ] in the print LIPSTICK 11 no. 2, this may be timely. [Incidentally, the issue looks great! and certainly everybody's pleased, I'm sure, despite the minor "surprise"! :) ]) It's a curious parry, "great disregard" / "great respect": "I was so interested in having people see that movie that I judiciously thought momentarily about videotaping a bootleg copy of it and got others to advise me that they'd done as much,--- and that shows great respect" (??). :) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 21:50:24 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "New" Poet - cryptographic geurrilla In-Reply-To: <006101c1882a$4ae04420$86322518@adubn1.nj.home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed just the most amazing jam session dumping on this kid who, at least for me, writes better poetry than when I was 11. presumably, many in this circle wrote better than he at 11. and think about all the garbage an 11 yr. old has to penetrate today...more tightly locked down goalposts and Bob Simon news bs and consciousness crap. i suppose that his physical condition like my youthful asthma freed him somewhat of that junk. rather than stand around and point, welcome a young poet among others who think themselves poets. he's a friend. poetry, in ancient days, was the most public art. Gene At 08:12 PM 12/18/01 -0500, you wrote: > >>Well 11 or not and sick or not his writing only makes noises >like a poem. When you bring him onto Oprah -- because isn't it sad and she >likes sad -- and you call him a poet and call his stuff poetry, well, >dammit, it makes my life more difficult<< > > >>Isn't it condescending as hell to cut a poet slack because of hir >handicap? << > > >>And maybe some of those picking on this kid WERE much better at >age 11 . . . who knows . . . ><< > >e t c e t e r a > >at the risk of bruising my own apples - > > *who freaking cares!* > >i can't help but wonder what (st)age are folks who have issues with an >eleven yr old kid getting a little attention for a few words he wrote... or >is it the *professing* to have issue w/it so that one may announce one's >position re 'bad poetry'? i've better things to bitch about - i'm finding it >tiresome that most (a few exceptions, of course) posts here (list) are >primarily concerned w/polishing the ol' projected image (announcements, >judgments, pronouncements) & self-promo moreso than interest in conversation >& exploration (which i used to think was of interest to most 'poets.' naive) >& by so doing seem to inhibit the latter & cause general crappy feeling. >judging from patrick's last posts & the following (non) reception to it, in >addition to what's absent, c&e here are about dead. it's making me >grumpy, damnit. i'm (finally, after four years) feeling most disillusioned, >maybe it's the season... > >that's all, i'll shut up now. i realize i'm talking to walls at any rate. >blah! > >sniff, >h ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 22:07:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: watch your language In-Reply-To: <20011219163718.33919.qmail@web9606.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed right on. Gene At 08:37 AM 12/19/01 -0800, you wrote: >Could we stop using the word "cripples?" It's really >offensive. And, as for the whole phenomenon of this >young poet, really, why are we harping on it at all? >If you're so concerned about "mediocrity" getting >attention, the best revenge is to make great art. >'Nuff said. > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of >your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com >or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 02:09:44 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: watch your language MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cripples cripples cripples cripples weirdos queers homos spastics dribblers losers hunchbacks commies WASPS wops ggooks niggers sheilas cripples cripples freaks dwarfs whores hookers losers pigs cops niggers bungas arse bandits history historectomy sex fuck arsehole pig fuckers mother fuckers kill americans kill wogs wogs wogs wogs horis Frogs Poms yanks Aussies darkies abbos hindus curry muchers towell heads wogs spastic plastics plasmic trolls scumbags losers CAPITALISTIC PIG DOGS russian revisionists cripples weakos puffs "the weaker vessel" shit kickers boffin heads "hot as a nigger with a $10 dollar note" death to cooons death to IMPERIALISM death death death decay maggots cripples losers cripples pigs and boursgeiosie liberal humanist weakos. Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Betsy Andrews" To: Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 5:37 AM Subject: watch your language > Could we stop using the word "cripples?" It's really > offensive. And, as for the whole phenomenon of this > young poet, really, why are we harping on it at all? > If you're so concerned about "mediocrity" getting > attention, the best revenge is to make great art. > 'Nuff said. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of > your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com > or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:16:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "K.Silem Mohammad" Subject: Merrill / Ashbery Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Millie Niss writes: >Ashbery's is a poetics of images that attempt to affect the reader >while deliberately not making literal sense. Compared to Ashbery, Merrill >is not an innovator and could be seen as someone who just takes a little >bit >of ivory and polishes and polishes it (not my image). But Merrill was >often >experimental as far as subject matter and organization of poems was >concerned. I guess the difference is that most _sentences_ of a Merrill >poem are ones which someone could conceivably write or say. Merrill could >never write a sentence like "The cold sunrise attacks one side of the giant >capital letters, bestirs a little landmass as it sinks, grateful, but >asleep" (taken randomly from Ashbery. The poem is Fantasia on "the Nut >Brown Maid") > >But Ashbery never (to my mind) reaches the peaks of lyricism because to a >certain extent, the [strongest?] effects happen when there is an image that >is >[strong?] both as a collection of words and as a semantic relation >involving >real objects. It is hard to feel strongly about nonsense (I don't use the >word pejoratively). One can laugh at it, and be impressed by it, and enjoy >it, but one can't really be moved by it. Millie, I think you've entered one of those "there're two kinds of people in the world" areas: in this case, those who are moved by nonsense and those who aren't. (It's tempting to be flip and point out that millions of people are moved by nonsense every night on prime time TV, but I'll be serious for a minute [harumph, ahem] and stipulate that we're talking about linguistic utterances that are not reducible to a meaning that reflects actual or potential conditions of reality. I know there are problems with what "reality" means, but let's go with this for now, OK?) The lines you quote from "Fantasia on 'The Nut Brown Maid'" are useful, because they illustrate Ashbery's power to do precisely what you're saying can't be done: move with "nonsense." I'm taking it you're considering these lines nonsense because we don't know: A) what the "giant capital letters" are or what they're doing there (maybe it's the Hollywood sign or something, but still, why?); B) why he would describe the sunrise as "attack[ing" these letters; C) how such an attack could possibly "[bestir] a little landmass"; D) how a landmass could be "grateful" and "asleep" at the same time (or for that matter how a landmass could be either of those things, period. Granted. But if a reader is really attentive to the images and concepts here, as everywhere else in the poem, it becomes impossible, in my opinion, not to have an affective response to them. You may not know what's going on or why, but you are made to _picture_ it nevertheless. And in picturing it, certain elements come together to form ... not a narrative, exactly, but the _feeling_ of a narrative. Or more precisely, you have feelings similar to those you have while experiencing an _actual_ narrative, because you encounter motions and expressive details that are familiar to you from the sort of referential narratives that are in part the model for Ashbery's work. These effects often have more to do with rhythm and cadence than with what is being "said": as Ashbery says elsewhere in the same poem, "What I am writing to say is, the timing, not / The contents, is what matters." Just sit back and imagine the sunrise doing its thing with the big letters and the landmass etc.: don't you feel a little something? Isn't that what poetry is for--giving you feelings you can't explain? >There are some very simple stanzas of Merrill's that I find absolutely >haunting. For example: > >A cold so keen >My speech unfurls tonight >As from the chattering teeth >Of a sewing machine. > >What's amazing about that to me is not particularly the metaphor of the >sewing machine (which I like), but the fact that every word is right. >Without "keen", "unfurls", and "chattering" the lines wouldn't work at all, >viz: > >A chill so deep >That tonight I talk >Through the trembling teeth >Of a sewing machine > >On the other hand, you can mess with the Ashbery without damaging it too >much: "The monsoon sweeps between the big serifs of her words, rushing >through valleys, causing despair." Millie, I think you've cheated a little here, because you're not merely paraphrasing, but changing the meaning entirely, both with the Merrill and the Ashbery. In Merrill's case, by removing "unfurls" you've removed the central image: that of the speaker's steamy speech / breath resembling white thread coming out of a machine. A more accurate rewording might be something like: A chill so deep That my speech ravels out As through the trembling teeth Of a sewing machine. Your point, however, which is well taken, is that changing the words, even while preserving the referential meaning, disrupts the emotional power of the sound of the language. Well, yes. But doesn't that show that at least part of what moves in poetry has nothing to do with sense? In the case of the Ashbery, you've inserted a monsoon in place of the sunrise, assigned a gender to something or other, added some valleys and despair, etc. The new passage bears little relation to the original except that it too involves some big letters. It thus becomes hard to claim that anything has been illustrated about the power (or lack thereof) of the original utterance. So then, how about this: "The frigid morning light assails one side of the huge block letters, sets in motion a small landmass as it submerges, thankful, but slumbering." One thing I notice in performing this exercise is how economical Ashbery's language is: with the exception of the slightly archaic "bestirs," every word in the quoted passage is humbly prosaic taken by itself. It is very difficult to find suitable substitutes for words as specific as "cold," "sunrise," "attacks," "capital letters," and so forth. Some of my replacement words are deeply unsatisfying (e.g., the pretentious "slumbering" for "sleeping"), and in the case of something like "landmass," I haven't even tried. More importantly, to my ears this paraphrase destroys the poetry of the original; yours was not so destructive, Millie, because it was in effect an entirely new poem. My hunch is that Merrill is actually the _easier_ of the two writers to paraphrase and still preserve some of his particular music, because he deals in far less specialized expressions. That is, he describes things whose relation to our lives is pre-recognized and somewhat "guaranteed," rather than things whose relevance must be decoded at great length, with no promise of closure. For this reason, "precision" is at least as much, if not more, at stake in Ashbery as it is in Merrill. (IThis is of course a matter of subjective response to a great degree, but I feel that Ashbery, among living poets, gets about as close to "the peaks of lyricism" as anyone. Even if we accept your very New-Critical-sounding formulation that "the strongest effects happen when there is an image that is strong both as a collection of words and as a semantic relation involving real objects," Ashbery seems to fit the bill. All the things he mentions are real objects, and they are certainly in some kind of semantic relation. That this relation is not one we would ordinarily encounter in the course of our daily experience hardly seems to disqualify the poetry as "moving," especially if we consider poetry to be a use of language that, among other things, explores unknown territory in the hopes of awakening our senses to strange feelings. That's all, I'll stop now. Since you either are moved or not by a piece of writing, I'm obviously not saying that you're "wrong" not to be moved by Ashbery, or to be moved by Merrill, for that matter--just that I don't think it's possible to make a blanket pronouncement about nonsense's emotional power. Kasey ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ K. Silem Mohammad Visiting Asst. Prof. of British & Anglophone Lit University of California Santa Cruz _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:44:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: alphabet of death-paste foreclosure MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - alphabet of death-paste foreclosure @go jump-cut problematic reflex arc with runaway feedback mechanism growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion no end to circuitry op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature dull repetition in continuation no end to circuitry trajectories of reification recursive coding no end to circuitry trajectories of reification algebraic ring or modulus phenomenology recursive function not primitive recursive no end to circuitry trajectories of reification growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion no end to circuitry trajectories of reification fn(2,2)=4 as matrix origin no end to circuitry op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature trajectories of reification stereotypical circuitry growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion no end to circuitry trajectories of reification tending towards escape route kehre which tends nowhere no end to circuitry tending towards escape route growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion recursive coding algebraic ring or modulus phenomenology highway cloveleaf with no offramps recursive coding no end to circuitry reflex arc with runaway feedback mechanism algebraic ring or modulus phenomenology tending towards escape route ground plane reflex arc with runaway feedback mechanism replacement of traditional goto continuous if then else formalism triplet substance-paste anomic implicate ordering continuous if then else formalism triplet tending towards escape route growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion runaway positive feedback resonant environment turbulent stases of strange attractors trajectories of reification @go jump-cut problematic replacement of traditional goto growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion @go jump-cut problematic replacement of traditional goto ground plane anomie, ennui, exhaustion algebraic ring or modulus phenomenology tending towards escape route recursive coding op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature trajectories of reification no end to circuitry op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature turbulent stases of strange attractors tending towards escape route op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature @go jump-cut problematic growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion no end to circuitry ground plane @go jump-cut problematic runaway positive feedback resonant environment topology body narrative towards n-1 embedded surface trajectories of reification growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion ouroboros artificial life evolutionary paradigm trajectories of reification kehre which tends nowhere growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion runaway positive feedback resonant environment circulatory transport system @go jump-cut problematic replacement of traditional goto continuous if then else formalism triplet reflex arc with runaway feedback mechanism kehre which tends nowhere growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion runaway positive feedback resonant environment ground plane replacement of traditional goto defuge or decathected disinvestment, exhaustion trajectories of reification growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion dull repetition in continuation no end to circuitry _ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 23:24:06 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: WIlbur Jenkins Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/19/2001 3:57:46 PM Pacific Standard Time, MDurand@PRIMEDIASI.COM writes: > because their > Did you read the poem? talk about trite and overused words, YIKES! ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 00:55:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: My Life In-Reply-To: <12a.9491e4f.2950e094@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit And there is nothing more brutal than a black market capitalism. To steal means the goods are in the stores produced. Production cannot happen in anarchy. Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Austinwja@AOL.COM Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 1:10 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: My Life In a message dated 12/18/01 1:43:19 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: << But the capitalist system - actuallly just about any market system - would crash tommorrow if theft was outlawed !!!! >> I don't know that it would crash, but the unemployment rate would certainly rise. Blackmarket money, especially drug money, is spent on food, appliances, shoes, etc., and so creates jobs. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 01:16:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Damian Judge Rollison Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: <20011218213747.97978.qmail@web11705.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Where does mass-culture poetry come from? Is it a half-digested imitation of "official verse culture" workshop poetry? Does it come out of what people read in grade school? School probably has a bigger influence than OVC, since I doubt Mattie Stepanek, or Jewel, or Henry Rollins or whatever, read much in the way of Ploughshares and Grand Street and Paris Review -- but what I think it really comes out of is the "other tradition" of amateur versifying that lots of people plugged into as adolescents and some continued into adulthood, with no real ambition to be more than amateurs. It's like a kind of folk art, and the standards for success are different than in OVC or the classics. The practice is represented now by tons of websites (www.poetry.com is the motherlode). This kind of poetry goes on (scads of it really) under the radar of academics and published poets, having nothing really to do with that culture -- it's the poetry of somebody who did well in a creative writing class once, or, to be less cynical, somebody who gets private satisfaction from modest practice of the craft (and more power to them as long as I don't have to read it). The web is a good place to suss it out, lots of "journals" that exist solely for the benefit of the writers who get published in them, not far off from the personal website -- "here's some pictures of my dog, and here's some poems I wrote about snorkling". But it's interesting -- what does *that* subculture want from art? One thing it definitely wants is not to have to know a whole lot about poetry (technique, tradition, what's cool) in order to write it and get a little aesthetic buzz, be part of a little (very unofficial) verse culture, feel like an Artist (because we're all Artists, deep down, aren't we? I mean, Deepak Chopra says so). And so that's why Mattie Stepanek is on Oprah -- because everybody knows about that kind of thing anyway, knows somebody who writes "a little poetry", wouldn't know Paris Review (not to mention EPC) if it hit them in the ass and doesn't care either, and this is just the kind of poetry they like: easy to understand, sentimental, chicken soup for the soul. Something almost anybody could do -- but by some standards a skill anybody with gumption can learn is the best kind (embroidery, auto body repair, poetry). I think what bothers me about Oprah's love affair with the written word is that it commodifies the practice of amateurs. They were always there and they didn't need Oprah until she convinced them they did. -- Damian <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 11:47:42 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Kominos. I dont think the question is limited to on line poetry or work I think that eg the work of Alan Sondheim and alsso some of the online visual poems so to speak (altho that's not what Alan's work is per se) but I mentioned him because of his great (certainly extensive and enthusaistic) project on and about the net and other concerns: I think that these things underline and point again to the question of poetry: what is it and how is it defined? In some ways the "old" forms were "natural", practical: or at least provided limitations..the tennis with the nets up..nothing wrong with that but what about another concept that cuts out any imposed artificial rules ( I dont mean that neglects the possibility or usefulness of rules and so on) but which is constantlly developing, constantly growing and has no final perceived form (a kind of mirror of life - I mean the living world as it is (ad or seems))? : I dont mean thus to return to realism or whatever, but into a concept which allows the interaction of many forms and which is (at first sight so to speak at least, formless): it, this kind of poem, finds itself, is its own making -has no beginning or end, no rules: may or may not be authorless...some thoughts. The practical problem of the Intenet is the very fact that one cannot (well I find it hard especially as I have an old slow printer) to sit down and think more deeply over eg Alan Sondheim or some of the other writers on this list etc although the screen isnt too bad to scroll. In many of the things I write or attempt I have a feeling that the form or layout is irrelevant (its "the message" I want to covey which often isnt a messsage "about" anything but is a message all the same!): although that isnt the case with all things ... butI make very quick and insticntive or intuitive decisions as to word use and layout: but setting up some poems I have felt it neccessary that the layout be absolutely exact (although my exactness or feeling of rightness of layout is often "instinctive" .. I like the fashion of the caesura in the middle line. The net like a book of course is limited by phyisical restraints: imagine a book that was 100 feet square!! Or a computer with a screen as a large as China! Nothing wrong with that or those sizes but a bit hard to take to bed: obviously another limitation on the net is the screen, the computer software, and the stamina of the reader or "observor".... Just some thoughts on the subject - nothing greatly original - but some discussion might ensue from this and your remarks. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "komninos zervos" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 2:12 PM Subject: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? > i need help. > > i'm studying modes of recognition of poetry. > > on the web, how do we recognize words used in language as poetry, how > do we know we are having a poem? i mean before we start to interpret > it or process it for meaning/feeling. > > in print we see a visual pattern or arrangement, we see line lengths, > we see indentations from the left margin and we visually recognize it > as poetry, we see also phonological elements, rhyme, rhythms > translated from oral culture, we then interpret what we read as > poetry, or by the special rules of reading a text as belonging to a > poetic discourse. > > in live performance there are visual recognition stimuli; a spotlit > area; a microphone; chairs arranged in a room pointing towards the > performance area; a person holding an opened book or papers. There > are definitely phonological signs we identify also; the poet's > projected voice (not normal speaking voice); sound patterns (rhyme, > rhythm, alliteration, assonance) being sounded, which we have learnt > to recognize as poetry. > > in web environments how do i tell if i've come across a poem? is it > merely the same signs we use to recognize poetry in print and in live > performance, or are there unique recognition stimuli for > web/cyber/new/digital/hypermedia poetry? > do we need visual evidence of text or aural presence of text to be > poetry in this medium? > > > i would appreciate some thoughts on this > > cheers > komninos > -- > komninos zervos bsc(hons) ma(creative writing) > http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/K_Zervos > Convenor > CyberStudies major > School of Arts > Griffith University > Gold Coast Campus > PMB 50 Gold Coast Mail Centre > Queensland 9726 Australia > tel: +61 7 55528872 > fax: +61 7 55528141 > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 08:57:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Magee Subject: Re: HO HO HO, MERRY COMBO!!! (9) In-Reply-To: from "David Bromige" at Dec 18, 2001 06:50:12 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit According to David Bromige: > > >Wither the avant-garde? Wither do you think??? > > > WHITHER. > Ah, yes, David, but me pun, me pun. ;) -m. > > With her. And her > >friends > > > >in the COMBO..... > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:38:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Bromige Subject: Re: oh PLEASE In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:46:40 -0700 POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU wrote: >> >Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! > > >> >>I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as >>though it were a French name. I suppose in part this is because >>Target is on a borderline between middle and lower class. So that >>persons of the middle class deal with the unease this causes them, by >>guying their own slumming with a gesture of inverse snobbery. This >>playfulness with language, at the service of a social dilemma, has >>something of the poetic to it, though I admit it's pretty thin. >> >>Dahveed Brahmeej. > >Oh PLEASE, first I get blasted for not being fancy enough in my language >about the value/use, whatever, of poetry, then I get blasted for being too >fancy, now I get my imaginary checkbook/lineage assessed because I shop at >Target. Kids, is there nothing better to discuss? Millie, have at em. > >Elizabeth > > > > > > >Elizabeth Treadwell > > >http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html > > >_________________________________________________________________ >Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:42:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Dillon Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thank you Marcella! I concur... now can't we all move on to other subjects...we all begin somewhere as artists, he has just had the opportunity or wings to be published young. how many pages of poetry have we all thrown away from that time in our lives? Isn't it good that a child is being recognized...whether he is handicapped or not, he is a boy, whose journey has just begun--not a self-proclaiming arrogant poet who has read hundreds of books of his predecessors? sgd ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 11:28:31 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: Digital Poetics - discount offer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Announcing the latest volume in the series Modern and Contemporary Poetics, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer Digital Poetics The Making of E-Poetries Loss Peque=F1o Glazier In this revolutionary and highly original work, poet-scholar Loss Glazier investigates the ways in which computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of poetry. = Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier's work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium. Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avant-garde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web "pages" and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate "space of poesis." Digital Poetics will attract a readership of scholars and students interested in contemporary creative writing and the potential of electronic media for imaginative expression. "[Glazier] does a superb job of demonstrating the relevance of 20th century innovative poetries as a means to understanding the implications and possibilities of current digital writing developments." -Jerome McGann, author of = The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style Loss Peque=F1o Glazier is Director of the Electronic Poetry Center and Adjunct Associate Professor of English at State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. 320 pages, 6 x 9 ISBN 0-8173-1075-4 $24.95 paper ISBN 0-8173-1074-6 $54.95 cloth SPECIAL OFFER TO POETICS LISTSERV 20% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU MENTION THAT YOU ARE ON THE POETICS LISTSERV = OFFER EXPIRES 31 January 2002 To order contact Elizabeth Motherwell E-mail emother@uapress.ua.edu = Phone (205) 348-7108 Fax (205) 348-9201 or mail to: The University of Alabama Press Marketing Department Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Attn: Elizabeth Motherwell www.uapress.ua.edu Glazier/Digital Poetics = paper discounted price $19.96 ISBN 0-8173-1075-4 cloth discounted price $43.96 ISBN 0-8173-1074-6 Subtotal ________________ Illinois residents add 8.75% sales tax ________________ USA orders: add $4.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Canada residents add 7% sales tax _________________ International orders: add $5.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Enclosed as payment in full _________________ (Make checks payable to The University of Alabama Press) Bill my: _________Visa _________MasterCard Account number _______________________________ = Daytime phone________________________________ Expiration date ________________________________ = Full name____________________________________ Signature ____________________________________ = Shipping Address______________________________ City _________________________________________ State_______________________ Zip ______________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:06:33 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Bromige Subject: Re: oh PLEASE In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:46:40 -0700 POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU wrote: >> >Aaron, I can't explain -- I shop at Target! > > >> >>I am reminded of many persons who refer to this store as "Tarjay," as >>though it were a French name. I suppose in part this is because >>Target is on a borderline between middle and lower class. So that >>persons of the middle class deal with the unease this causes them, by >>guying their own slumming with a gesture of inverse snobbery. This >>playfulness with language, at the service of a social dilemma, has >>something of the poetic to it, though I admit it's pretty thin. >> >>Dahveed Brahmeej. > >Oh PLEASE, first I get blasted for not being fancy enough in my language >about the value/use, whatever, of poetry, then I get blasted for being too >fancy, now I get my imaginary checkbook/lineage assessed because I shop at >Target. Kids, is there nothing better to discuss? Millie, have at em. > >Elizabeth > > >Elizabeth, I took no exception to yr xonfession that you shop at >Target. I've shopped there myself. I had long wondered that so many >persons pronounced it "Tarjay," and so I hitched a ride on yt post, >to find out if others had likewise been puzzled, and to see if they >had any answers. I did not criticize yr post at all. (and excuse >the italics...I dont know where they came from.) I I reamlize my post could seem trivial, but figure there are other poets on yhis list who share my interest in new alang and whence it derives. I am only a language mechanic, but figure that, as such, I may from time to time be allowed to post to this list. As anyone knows who has watched its ways, the list often moves very obliquely from one topic to the next. I assure you, I meant no rudeness towards you, and am sorry that my post has made you rude towards me. I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbled this rime around. Yr -e-friend, David > > > >Elizabeth Treadwell > > >http://www.poetrypress.com/avec/populace.html > > >_________________________________________________________________ >Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 12:32:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ian Randall Wilson Subject: Watch Your Language MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I had no idea that Ari Fleischer was on this list. I had thought that an issue of avant-garde poetics was the commodification of poetry so any move into the popular culture -- Oprah, MTV's "Spoken Word" programs, and Russell Simmons Def Jam Poets -- might be worth discussion. I thought the re-visions of the kid that resulted were great: "child ash" and "the national security sky" are two phrases from those re-visions that stay with me. But you're right B. Andrews, let's all just keep writing and telling one another about that writing through the press releases and advertisements that we're writing and then we'll all know that we're writing and we'll be writing. IRW ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:31:36 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: On Target, Off Target MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Elizabeth Treadwell said she shops at Target. This year I did the bulk = of my holiday shopping there, as well. I'm imagining this two-poet = Target scenario expanding like a Nike ad, with numerous poets saying = they shop there or voiceovers announcing "Even the avant-garde finds = what it needs at Target." Now, if only they'd carry some serious = literature or sponsor a poetry series... (dream on) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:01:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: anthropology.com (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:57:40 -0500 Subject: Anthropophagy.com From: "anthropophagy.com, an online journal of text an image" Anthropophagy.com is offering new work by: Alfred Corn Chip Gladson Sharon Harper D. T. Harris Lyn Hillis Jordan Hoffman Dean Kostos Nicholas Lawrus Julia Pearson Morgan Roberts Elizabeth Routen Alex Weinstein Stephen Welch They are more than just flesh. Take a bite. http://www.anthropophagy.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:49:57 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: We Who Love to Be Astonished MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Announcing the latest volume in the series Modern and Contemporary Poetics, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer We Who Love to Be Astonished Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue This is the first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works and includes some of the most respected writers and critics in the contemporary avant-garde. We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today. The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance. The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late 20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion. "This is an important collection, especially in its emphasis on multicultural experimental writing, and on differences between modes of experimental writing." -Susan Schultz, author of Aleatory Allegories and The Tribe of John Contributors: Charles Altieri Charles Borkhuis Nicole Cooley Kathleen Crown Rachel Blau DuPlessis Elisabeth A. Frost Alan Golding Eileen Gregory Carla Harryman Laura Hinton Cynthia Hogue AnaLouise Keating Lynn Keller Linda A. Kinnahan Susan McCabe Jonathan Monroe Aldon Lynn Nielsen Ron Silliman Heather Thomas Laura Hinton is Associate Professor of English at the City College of New York and author of The Perverse Route of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from "Clarissa" to "Rescue 911." Cynthia Hogue is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and author of Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity. 376 pages, 6 x 9 ISBN 0-8173-1095-9 $24.95 paper ISBN 0-8173-1094-0 $54.95 cloth SPECIAL OFFER TO POETICS LISTSERV 20% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU MENTION THAT YOU ARE ON THE POETICS LISTSERV OFFER EXPIRES 31 January 2002 To order contact Elizabeth Motherwell E-mail emother@uapress.ua.edu Phone (205) 348-7108 Fax (205) 348-9201 or mail to: The University of Alabama Press Marketing Department Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Attn: Elizabeth Motherwell www.uapress.ua.edu Hinton and Hogue/We Who Love to Be Astonished paper discounted price $19.96 ISBN 0-8173-1095-9 cloth discounted price $43.96 ISBN 0-8173-1094-0 Subtotal ________________ Illinois residents add 8.75% sales tax ________________ USA orders: add $4.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Canada residents add 7% sales tax _________________ International orders: add $5.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Enclosed as payment in full _________________ (Make checks payable to The University of Alabama Press) Bill my: _________Visa _________MasterCard Account number _______________________________ Daytime phone________________________________ Expiration date ________________________________ Full name____________________________________ Signature ____________________________________ Shipping Address______________________________ City _________________________________________ State_______________________ Zip ______________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:52:34 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Subject: Telling It Slant MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Apologies to the List for a somewhat duplicated posting (of Mark Wallace's earlier announcement).... Announcing the latest volume in the series Modern and Contemporary Poetics, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer Telling it Slant Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s Edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks Some of the finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries. This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics. Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity. This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone working in contemporary American literature and poetry. "This is the book that many people have been eagerly awaiting, since the articulation of the poetics of the constellation of innovative poets has never been gathered with such force and persuasiveness in any magazine or other collection. This book is truly news." -Charles Bernstein, series editor Contributors: Daniel Barbiero Caroline Bergvall Charles Borkhuis Sherry Brennan Jeff Derksen Steve Evans Benjamin Friedlander Christopher Funkhouser C. S. Giscombe Jefferson Hansen Andrew Levy Tan Lin Bill Luoma Steven Marks Harryette Mullen Sianne Ngai Jena Osman Kristin Prevallet Lisa Robertson Leonard Schwartz Rod Smith Juliana Spahr Brian Kim Stefans Gary Sullivan Mark Wallace Elizabeth Willis Mark Wallace is Lecturer in the Department of English at George Washington University. Steven Marks is an independent scholar. 511 pages, 6 x 9 ISBN 0-8173-1097-5 $29.95 paper ISBN 0-8173-1096-7 $59.95 unjacketed cloth SPECIAL OFFER TO POETICS LISTSERV 20% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU MENTION THAT YOU ARE ON THE POETICS LISTSERV OFFER EXPIRES 31 January 2002 To order contact Elizabeth Motherwell E-mail emother@uapress.ua.edu Phone (205) 348-7108 Fax (205) 348-9201 or mail to: The University of Alabama Press Marketing Department Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Attn: Elizabeth Motherwell www.uapress.ua.edu Wallace and Marks/Telling it Slant paper discounted price $23.96 ISBN 0-8173-1097-5 cloth discounted price $47.96 ISBN 0-8173-1096-7 Subtotal ________________ Illinois residents add 8.75% sales tax ________________ USA orders: add $4.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Canada residents add 7% sales tax _________________ International orders: add $5.00 postage for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book _________________ Enclosed as payment in full _________________ (Make checks payable to The University of Alabama Press) Bill my: _________Visa _________MasterCard Account number _______________________________ Daytime phone________________________________ Expiration date ________________________________ Full name____________________________________ Signature ____________________________________ Shipping Address______________________________ City _________________________________________ State_______________________ Zip ______________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:18:12 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Harris Subject: Northwestern University Press Avant-Garde and Modernism Series Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Please stop by Northwestern University Press's MLA exhibit (Booth 216 at the Marriott) to see the titles in our Avant-Garde and Modernism series, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Rainer Rumold. Titles published this year include Charles Bernstein's CONTENT'S DREAM: ESSAYS 1975-1984; Steve McCaffery's PRIOR TO MEANING: THE PROTOSEMANTIC AND POETICS; Rosmarie Waldrop's HANKY OF PIPPIN'S DAUGHTER and A FORM/OF TAKING/IT ALL; and Krzysztof Ziarek's THE HISTORICITY OF EXPERIENCE: MODERNITY, THE AVANT-GARDE, AND THE EVENT. Forthcoming books include Christian Bok's 'PATAPHYSICS and Rainer Rumold's THE JANUS FACE OF THE GERMAN AVANT-GARDE: FROM EXPRESSIONISM TOWARD POSTMODERNISM; current authors include Bruce Andrews, Christopher Beach, Hanjo Beressem, Daniel Katz, Hank Lazer, Paul Naylor, Marjorie Perloff, Beret Strong, and Keith Tuma. _________________________ Susan Harris Director Northwestern University Press 625 Colfax Evanston, IL 60208-4210 sharris@northwestern.edu phone 847 491 8116 fax 847 491 8150 http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 12:04:06 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Camille Martin Subject: updated Lit City events during MLA MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Here's updated information about Lit City events during MLA. See y'all soon! ---------------------------------- * L * I * T * * * C * I * T * Y * ---------------------------------- presents * * * * * * * * Between X & 1 * * * * * * * * a poetry festival coinciding with the 2001 Modern Language Association Convention All events to take place at St. Mark's of the Vieux Carre' 1130 N. Rampart St. (between Gov. Nicholls & Ursuline) New Orleans, LA 1) Poetry Reading #1 Friday, December 28 Reading: 8:30 - 10:30 pm Reception at 7:30 and following the reading Display and sale of books by Small Press Distribution and Lavender Ink Admission: $3 READERS: Michael Tod Edgerton C. S. Giscombe Lee Ann Brown Skip Fox Stephen Ellis Bill Lavender Norma Cole Chris Stroffolino Mark Spitzer Jessica Freeman Lorenzo Thomas Mark Wallace Joy Lahey Barrett Watten 2) Book Publication Party and Panel Discussion Saturday, 3:30 - 5:00 pm Celebration of the publication of two new books, TELLING IT SLANT: AVANT GARDE POETICS OF THE 1990S, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (University of Alabama Press) and SPIN CYCLE by Chris Stroffolino (Spuyten Duyvil). Along with the publication party, this event features a panel discussion on questions surrounding avant garde poetics of the 1990s. Free. PANELISTS: Charles Borkhuis C. S. Giscombe Jefferson Hansen Juliana Spahr Chris Stroffolino Mark Wallace Elizabeth Willis 3) Poetry Reading #2 Saturday, December 29 Reading: 8:30 - 10:30 pm Reception at 7:30 and following the reading Display and sale of books by Small Press Distribution and Lavender Ink Admission: $3 READERS: Brad Elliott Bill Berkson Charles Bernstein Stephanie Williams Charles Borkhuis Michael Davidson Camille Martin Jefferson Hansen Elizabeth Willis Tonya Foster Dennis Formento Hank Lazer Peter Gizzi Laura Moriarty Laura Mullen Contact information: 861-8832 / cmarti3@lsu.edu For information about Lit City, see our website: ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:29:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: Cat Power MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ZNet Store by Usama Tue, 18 Sep 2001 Good Bye Bert Working. and us, And science and us. Is a real and present danger. Analyzing the Flag Ghghg. like a good storm or an earthquake and some lava. Albert. And we will come back too. We are not bad people. We are happy monsters. ghghg, Wil je een benaan. Sam Mchombo. Malawi Sam Mchombo. Mchombo. In Malawi Sam Mchombo. Mchombo, Malawi Sam Mchombo: Malawi Sam Mchombo, in Malawi Sam Mchombo, and Development in Malawi Sam Mchombo: in Malawi Sam Mchombo, the United States, cannot be controlled by the United States, That the Taliban has been a threat to the stability in the region - the Gulf. good to knock things down and destroy them. We are he fills the laundry basket with things to keep him occupied while waiting for the laundry to finish and Bert points out that he's forgotten the laundry, Points out that he's forgotten the laundry. Does the laundry (S) he fills the laundry basket with things to keep him occupied while waiting for the laundry to finish and Bert points out that he's forgotten the laundry. The laundry basket with things to keep him occupied while waiting for the laundry to finish and Bert points out that he's forgotten the laundry. The laundry (S) he fills the laundry basket with things to keep him occupied while waiting for the laundry to finish and Bert points out that he's forgotten the laundry. Theme. a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative; been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the first to express the commonsense of anguish; heroic police: the first to express the commonsense of anguish, Extraordinary compassion. City's heroic police. for U: Five, Three. Art Color Recognition Math Bert and Ernie Buddy Cakes Celebrate Bert's birthday with Bert and Ernie cake faces. Orange-half for a nose. Sesame Workshop - Bert and Ernie Buddy Cakes facility as often as you wish: as you wish, As often as you wish. As you wish. keeper to use these costumes and we therefore called the police, and we therefore called the police, Hall agency had no official permission from the licence keeper to use these costumes and we therefore called the police. Appel bert. Ghghg. Sustainer Program. Activity Type; a licorice smile; One package of black licorice Half an orange Four dried apricots One red gumdrop 1. Of my alarm clock ringing. Which reminds me of games. Welcome Message - last updated 27 September 2001 6. Four dried apricots One red gumdrop 1, Birthdays Muppets Friendship Learning Area. Muppets Friendship Learning Area. They were. storm or an earthquake and some lava: And kill the fence. back by itself, back by itself: Destroy them. monsters, This facility. I am a subscriber, A subscriber. I am a subscriber. At the Congress. Regime in 1979 and organized numerous processions and meetings in schools. ------------------ jackson jesse rip ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 19:03:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ontological News Subject: Re: Maria del Bosco Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Richard Foreman and the Ontological Theatre are pleased to announce the opening:=20 Richard Foreman=B9s Maria del Bosco (Sex and Racing Cars: A Sound Opera), his 50th production, begins performances at the Ontological Theatre (131 East 10th St.) on Thursday, December 27th " The real is what destroys you. Make contact with the real and it destroys you.=B9 Richard Foreman=B9s 50th production, Maria del Bosco (Sex and Racing Cars: A Sound Opera), begins performances at the Ontological Theatre at St. Marks Church (131 East 10th Street) on Thursday, December 27th. In Maria del Bosco, three ravishingly beautiful ballerinas fantasize a racing car that carries them into dreams of love and catastrophe. The three drop-dead beauties are attacked by the strange erotic props and accessories, which ar= e manipulated by a group of coolly aggressive young men. In this daring and unprecedented "Sound Opera," Foreman uses only forty aphoristic sentences. Each sentence is tripled in layers of processed sound=8Bwith exotic music slowly added to the sonic mix. The stars if Maria del Bosco (Sex and Racing Cars: A Sound Opera) are Juliana Francis (who also appeared in Paradise Hotel and Bad Boy Nietzsche)= , Funda Duyal and Okwui Okpokwasili. Maria del Bosco (Sex & Racing Cars: A Sound Opera) written and directed by Richard Foreman At the Ontological Theatre at St. Mark=B9s Church (131 E. 10th St. at 2nd Ave.) Performances Begin: Thurs. December 27th Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8PM Admission: $15 Reservations: 212-533-4650 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 19:04:24 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew Maxwell Subject: FOLLOW-UP: Poets pleased with response from baboons MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Poets pleased with response from baboons Story filed: 17:41 Tuesday 18th December 2001 http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_476651.html?menu=3D A group of seven Chilean poets who held a poetry reading in a baboon=20 enclosure have praised the animals' patience. It had been feared they could attack the poets who wanted to=20 demonstrate baboons are more receptive to poetry than their=20 countrymen. Poet Leonel Lienlaf says were surprised by the warm welcome they had=20 got from the monkeys at Santiago's Metropolitan Zoo. Colleague Ra=FAl Zurita told Las Ultimas Noticias newspaper he was=20 pleased they had not attacked the cage the poets were in. "In fact, they were impressively alert, as well as showing the kind=20 of curiosity we associate with young children," he said. Mr Lienlaf added: "I was very surprised by the warmth of their=20 welcome to us. They were very quiet during our reading, although we=20 sometimes saw their playful side." The paper reports the baboons seemed particularly interested when=20 Guillermo Garc=EDa addressed them directly. "Yesterday, my dear=20 baboons, I had a profound dream. I dreamt that one day humanity would=20 again live in harmony with you," the poet told his audience. The poetry of Lienlaf and Jorge del R=EDo also provoked a response.=20 During both readings the baboons climbed to the top of their tower=20 and began shrieking. The seven poets ended with an epic poem. Mr Zurita said: "There was=20 certainly a profound silence during that piece. At least that's how I=20 remember it." ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 22:10:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: [webartery] Fw: BeeHive Microtitles New Releases (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:51:36 -0800 From: Talan Memmott Reply-To: webartery@yahoogroups.com To: webartery@yahoogroups.com, _arc.hive_@lm.va.com.au, "WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" Subject: [webartery] Fw: BeeHive Microtitles New Releases BEEHIVE MICROTITLES http://microtitles.com ________________________________________________ !! THREE NEW RELEASES !! ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Journal and BeeHive Microtitles are pleased to announce the release of three new Series 1 Microtitles. THE ODIOUS ART OF LEWIS LACOOK by Lewis LaCook GREEEN by William Gillespie THE MERMAID CABINET by Ellen Zweig ** Series 1 Microtitles are short experimental fiction and essay titles in Adobe PDF format. Lightweight, portable, disposable -- not quite books, these ebook[lets] are specially formatted for the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Palm OS. *** http://microtitles.com ________________ Issue 4:3 of the BeeHive Journal is now online http://beehive.temporalimage.com/ including ... ALT-X(CERPTS) - Selections from the Alt-X ebooks ... COCKTAIL NATION by Eric Lammerman ... DIGITAL CODE AND LITERARY TEXT by Florian Cramer ... SUBLIMINAL by Kenji Siratori ... INVENTION by Komninos Zervos ... .... And much, much more .... http://beehive.temporalimage.com/ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ BeeHive Creative Director: Talan Memmott / beehive@percepticon.com BeeHive Associate Editor: Alan Sondheim / beehive@percepticon.com BeeHive Poetry Editor: Ted Warnell / beehivepoetry@percepticon.com ________________________________________________ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 23:07:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: dress MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - dress You have received this email because you signed up to receive valuable email offers from Florida International University or one of our marketing partners. You have received this email by either requesting more information on one of our sites or someone may have used your email address. If you received this email in error, please accept our apologies. Your contract is terminated. There is a contract on your life. So help me god I can't tell you more. I know this sounds like a "rant." If this is a "rant" so be it. You're too good for us, Alan Sondheim, you're a piece of dirt. I am sending you a warning: don't investigate any further. You don't want to know and you don't want to know. Parts of this text are true. woman, young woman, girl, there are three men. one of them is speaking to another. the girl is silent. the girl just sits there. she is so fragile. o fragile woman, young girl, girl. one of the men screams. the girl just sits there. the man is very wise. the man is second-most wise. he says to the other man, the most wise. she just sits there. oh what do i do. who says the most wise, the woman, young woman, girl. oh oh, the third will do, he is not so wise, call the third. they jump about many places. the third comes, he is not so wise. with his fingers the woman, young girl, girl, stands up. with his fingers, the woman, young woman, girl, sits down. with his fingers, the woman, young girl, girl, is naked. the girl just sits there. not-so-wise leaves. second-most wise stays. woman, young woman, girl. josei. josei come in and put some clothes on. I am married to a lawyer. Don't ask why you've been terminated. I know how to answer. I know when to keep quiet. You will die if you ask questions. You always ask too many questions. You are never content. Alan Sondheim, you are never content. Alan Sondheim, you are about to cross the "plane." The "plane" is very broad and wide. With his fingers, Alan Sondheim, is naked. josei.josei come in and put some clothes on. _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 23:29:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: =?Windows-1252?Q?L=E9opold_S=E9dar_Senghor?= In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Senghor, poet & statesman, co-founder of the Negritude movement & first President of independent Senegal dies at 95. Below, the intro to the Negritude section of POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM vol.I by Jerry Rothenberg & myself, but first the obit from today's _The Independent_. -- Pierre THE INDEPENDENT 21 December 2001 Léopold Sédar Senghor, politician, poet and writer: born Joal, Senegal 9 October 1906; Deputy, French National Assembly 1945-58; minister in the French government 1955-56, 1958; President of Senegal 1960-81; twice married (one son, and two sons deceased); died Verson, France 20 December 2001. Poet and president, intellectual and man of action, academic and political leader, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal lived a life that was rich in contrasts. But they were not paradoxes; they were achievements. The man of many parts was also the man of two worlds and the triumph of Senghor was that he attained greatness in all that he did. He embodied the African process of decolonisation. This he defined as "the abolition of all prejudice, of all superiority complex in the mind of the coloniser and the abolition of all inferiority complex in the mind of the colonised". He was the first president of an independent Senegal and he ruled for 21 years before taking the unusual step in a political leader of voluntarily resigning, in 1981. He had been re-elected four times. He was born in Joal, a fishing village on the Senegalese coast in 1906 (or possibly earlier) and spent his childhood in Djilor, some 20km inland. His father, a prosperous trader in a poor area, belonged to the Serer ethnic group; his mother was Fulani. The father, Basile Senghor, had, like other Serer, converted to Christianity, but he had been polygamous and Léopold was said to have some two dozen brothers and sisters, and probably more. Léopold was his Christian name, Sédar his Serer name. The area was changing. The ground-nut trade had developed, particularly with the construction of railways. Among the inhabitants there was the interplay of paganism, Islam and Catholicism, as there was the coming together of Fulani, Mandingo, Serer and other groupings. Senghor was sent to the missionary school but his Fulani uncle had a great influence on him, and he never forgot the folklore that he learnt from him, with its beliefs in the enchanted domain, the soul of the village, the moment of the spirits and what he later called, in one of his poems, "the hour of primary fears". He always remained profoundly African, and, when as a highly educated and experienced man of 40 he achieved fame, it was as one of the apostles of "negritude". He was often presented as the founder of this movement, although Senghor said that this was the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire (as he put it, "we must render unto Césaire the things that are Césaire's"). At all events, he was one of the most effective spokesmen in presenting the message of "negritude" which was that black civilisation, especially African, had its values, its achievements and its aspirations. Here, above all, Senghor was conscious of what he called "mon ethnie, ma nation". But he was also a Frenchman. Educated at the Lycée Louis le Grand and at the Sorbonne, he taught in French lycées. When he entered the classroom at Tours for the first time he said to his pupils, "I am black. Let's spend the next few minutes in silence so that you can look at me and see how black I am. Then we can get on with our work." In the Second World War he served with the French army and in 1940 he was taken prisoner. A German wished to shoot him simply because he was black, but was restrained by a French soldier. In his prisoner-of-war camp near to Poitiers, Senghor listened to de Gaulle's broadcasts from London and helped a number of Breton soldiers to escape, for which he was punished until a French military doctor conveniently found that he was suffering from a tropical disease. In 1944 he was appointed to a Chair in the University of Paris. He was elected deputy from 1945 to 1958, he served as a minister in the government of Edgar Faure, from 1955 to 1956, and in General de Gaulle's first ministry of 1958. He was a schoolfriend of Georges Pompidou, and was greatly admired by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1984 he was elected to the French Academy. After his retirement he went to live with his second wife Colette Hubert, the granddaughter of a French marquis, in the village of Verson, just outside Caen. As Senghor himself put it, he had added "normanditude" to negritude. At his burial, he said that he would like Gregorian chants to accompany him. On his 90th birthday, as the masses celebrated in Senegal and the powerful celebrated in Paris, the people of Verson had decorated their streets and shops, the schoolgirls sang songs in celebration and the mayor had made a speech. What could have been more French? Senghor built his strength in Senegal with his Bloc Démocratique Sénégelais, which attracted the rural vote. His two principles for independence were that there should not be a complete break with France, and that the independence of the African states should not lead to the Balkanisation of the African continent. The first wish seemed to be met by de Gaulle's idea that the Fifth Republic should extend to a Franco-African community. The second was met partially by de Gaulle's reluctant acceptance of a union between Senegal and the former French Sudan (it was said that de Gaulle was fascinated by the rare perfection of Senghor's spoken French). But the Franco-African community disappeared as each state demanded full independence and the Mali Federation, as the union of Senegal and the ex-Sudan was called, split up after only two years. Senghor gave priority in his government to rural reform, to the establishment of a multi-party system and to promoting a moderate socialism that could be mid-way between capitalism and communism. His principles were always democratic although it was by decree that he ordered that French should be taught. He was not successful in preventing the formation of a new élite in Senegal, which he had observed as being the normal consequence of independence, and although his country was one of the least tribal of African states, there were perpetual conflicts with the southern region of Casamance and with the Muslim groupings which were growing in importance at the time of his resignation. There are areas where his government could be criticised, but in general his success was worthy of his wisdom and determination. Douglas Johnson Prologue to Negritude [From POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM] As for artistic creation, we have no lessons to receive from anyone. (Léopold Sedar Senghor) Put up with me. I will not put up with you. (AimÉ CÉsaire) Although the term nÉgritude first appeared in AimÉ CÉsaire's 1939 poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, the movement as such — & the constellation of its political & poetic concerns — had begun to take shape around 1931, when CÉsaire met LÉopold SÉdar Senghor in the LyÉe Louis-le-Grand in Paris & was introduced to modern European literature, to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, & to the radical reevaluations of African sources by cultural thinkers such as the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. In 1932, Caribbean students with communist & surrealist affiliations brought out the single issue of a small, radical magazine, LÉgitime DÉfense (the title borrowed from AndrÉ Breton), violently denouncing both Martinican society & Caribbean literature's servile imitation of colonial models. Two years later, CÉsaire, Senghor and LÉon Damas founded L'Etudiant noir, with the declared intention of bringing together African and West Indian students, while laying out the groundwork for the concept of negritude. Out of a sense of “panic-stricken despair” (Senghor's words), came the desire “to divest ourselves of our borrowed attire — that of assimilation — to assert our being, that is to say our negritude.” In terms of an actual practice, this meant the replacement of earlier French models by a poetics of the present (Surrealism on the one hand, African-American figures such as Langston Hughes [below, p. 000] and Claude Mac Kay on the other), & by an insistence on African art & oral poetry as more accurate models for poets & artists newly aware of their origins & trying to escape what Damas called “tracing paper” poetry. Negritude, understood thus was, in Clayton Eshleman's words, “a parthenogenesis in which the poet must conceive and give birth to himself while exorcising his introjected and collective white image of the black.” Its derivation — from ngre, roughly the equivalent of English “nigger” — indicates a further defiance of the politesse of racism & race. While the term negritude has been used to encompass much pre-CÉsairien and even some non-francophone work, its hard core & essential moves are best located in the work of the poets active in it from the start. Of these, CÉsaire is doubtless the strongest and most virulent presence — a likely result of his double exile, not only as a member of a colonized society, but of a people displaced by slavery from the lands of their ancestors. This difference helps to explain the explosive violence pervading his work on the level (at least) of his language in which (thus Eshleman & Annette Smith as CÉsaire's principal translators) "he wants to marronner, to run away from accepted French poetry, as the maroons ran away from their masters," to create in its place "a poetry that arises from an earth that is not only composed of a geological fundament but of the rotted corpses of fallen runaway slaves." If Senghor, colonized but firmly rooted in the country of his birth (of which he would become the first President after Senegal's independence), was able to use a more classical French language & rhetoric to present materials drawing on his African sources, CÉsaire had to (re)invent both his language & culture so as to create his identity as man & poet. By doing so, he inscribed himself indelibly in the dark lineage of "insurrectional" poets & writers, the transgressors & voyants who include Sade, LautrÉamont, Rimbaud, and Bataille, because, as he himself says, "our heritage is one of fevers, of earthquakes; and poetry... must never cease to lay claim to it: with its raven-like voice, its voice of Cassandra, of Orpheus, of violent death." For all the importance given to interchanges with the Paris-based Surrealists (Breton, who prefaced CÉsaire's Notes, recognized him early on as one of the master poets of the century), Senghor's distinction between a "natural African surrealism" and a more artificially created European version is still worth considering. CÉsaire's images, e.g., are never gratuitously surreal, but always weave a meaningful web of cosmo- & mytho-logical transformatory activity — a mix of mineral, plant & animal life, along with the mythemes of both Africa & Europe — in which the metamorphic violence is a direct reflection of the political condition of his double exile. The achievement is immense, as Clayton Eshleman has said of it & him: "To discover a human heart in the center of the natural world verifies the most profound desire behind CÉsaire's poetry: to once again place mankind at the heart of the universe." And again: "The prophetic voice here commands attention with an authority unmatched by any other living French poet." ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm Email: joris@ albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 01:26:14 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Murat Nemet-Nejat Subject: Re: My Life MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/20/01 11:11:48 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: >Murat. Thank you. At last: but would you immediately shred it or read it >or > >translate it to bin Laden to send that gentleman insane if he's NOT a > >computer generated graphic? Cheers, Richard. Richard, I would definitely read it and then send it to Bin Laden with a little note: to a fellow artist ... Cheers. Murat ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 00:44:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: the joys of being a naive reader In-Reply-To: <001001c1888c$1e6acfc0$332137d2@01397384> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I don't have anything against Ashbery. Really. I like Ashbery... I took (not the small exclusive class but the big lecture) Modern Poetry in college with Kenneth Koch, so naturally we read Ashbery. Actually, that was the worst part of the course. Koch said illuminating things about everyone from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens, but once he started with the New York School, all he could say is (drawling) "Frank wrote this....on the beach.....at Fire Island.....it was a really nice....weekend" etc. So I didn't learn anything I couldn't figure out on my own about NY School writing, and i coudn't figure out much because I had only just barely started reading poetry the summer before I took that course. I have a very old book of Ashbery's Selected Poems (1985) and Flow Chart and Girls on the Run. I have others but they are in boxes in my uncle's storage area since I am living with my father now and don't have room for all my books and didn't even get to choose which ones myself. (sob story) I've read much of the selected poems volume, and I keep trying to read Flow Chart, but I never get terribly far, although I like it just fine. I just don't know how to approach it _as a long poem_. I expect a long poem to be something other than a bunch of poetry which could be cast as shorter poems in a collection. I think I keep getting trapped because I am subconsciously looking for a narrative and there isn't one. I don't think there has to be one, but the poem starts out as if it is a Dante-esque epic about going to the underworld: Still in the published city but not yet overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask the diagram: is it the foretase of pain it might easily be? I really like thise lines but I am being taken for a ride by them... Actually, as I flip through the book, I can see that it's clearer and easier than I remember, probably because my earliest poetry reading was all Formalist stuff and I didn't understand poems that didn't make sense in a literal way, but now I've gone over to the other side, as it were, and I've been reading Language poetry, which often has much less that a naive reader can easily grab on to. Actually, all the apparent difficulty of contemporary poetry goes away if you start looking at it with the question "Hey, how did he do that and what effect did it have?" (assuming the poet is a he) rather than "what did that mean?" Not everything in a poem "means" something, but everything in a good poem produces some effect on the reader that the poet wants to produce. Or you can privelege the individual reader and talk about how the poem _is_ the effect it has on each reader, and all the readers are different etc. etc. (PS I only play at being totally naive. You can tell by the fact that I used "privelege" as a verb. Normal people don't do this.) It did take me a long time to learn that poetry doesn't have to make sense, though, embarrassingly so. I had always known that about particular poems I knew before I went to college. I had read some Eliot poems and liked them but I was still messed up by the seventh grade English teacher who would pass out Robert Frost or Theodeore Roethke poems (on dittos. remember dittos?) and make us find all the "symbols" and what they meant, as if the poem were a cryptic crossword which you had to be able to decipher and once you did decipher it, you'd get some empty, banal philosophical statement. (It can be argued, of course, that Robert Frost poems really are empty and banal...) The creepy thing about the seventh grade approach is that it warped you more if you were a good student. I mean I dutifully destroyed poems just as I was told to do and "learned" the teacher's lesson well. If I had been throwing paper airplanes in the back of the class, I might have been an eleven year old poet with cystic fibrosis way ahead of my years....ops...wrong thread.... Are there any programs which educate high school English teachers about poetry so they don't ruin it for their students? I have heard of "Poets in the Schools" but usually they teach the students. But the students usually have no preconceived notions whereas it's teachers who have it all ass-backwards. When I was a math person (I got as far as math grad school), I attended a conference which had a track for teachers and we were supposed to be teaching them what real math is like and how it's exciting unlike what we had in high school, but we found the teachers to be pretty unteachable. Not because they weren't bright enough (the conference funded the teachers to attend and it was in a really nice setting at Amherst College where you could go hike in the woods) so the program for teachers was quite competetive to get accepted into), but because they really had this ingrained view of what and how things should be taught and they kept saying that they, and not mathematicians, were the experts on teaching math (!). I imagine the same thing might happen if poets tried to teach teachers about poetry from a poet's point of view, making use of current schools of poetry and keeping Robert Frost in the drawer where he belongs... Millie ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 06:15:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: filter of exhaustion near death MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - filter of exhaustion near death /[0]+/ { print "0" } /[z]+/ { print "defuge or decathected disinvestment, exhaustion" } /[y]+/ { print "runaway positive feedback resonant environment" } /[x]+/ { print "circulatory transport system" } /[w]+/ { print "ouroboros artificial life evolutionary paradigm" } /[v]+/ { print "topology body narrative towards n-1 embedded surface" } /[u]+/ { print "ground plane" } /[t]+/ { print "op amp negative feedback towards coherent signature" } /[s]+/ { print "turbulent stases of strange attractors" } /[r]+/ { print "trajectories of reification" } /[q]+/ { print "anomie, ennui, exhaustion" } /[p]+/ { print "@go jump-cut problematic" } /[o]+/ { print "replacement of traditional goto" } /[n]+/ { print "continuous if then else formalism triplet" } /[m]+/ { print "substance-paste anomic implicate ordering" } /[l]+/ { print "reflex arc with runaway feedback mechanism" } /[k]+/ { print "algebraic ring or modulus phenomenology" } /[j]+/ { print "highway cloveleaf with no offramps" } /[i]+/ { print "tending towards escape route" } /[h]+/ { print "kehre which tends nowhere" } /[g]+/ { print "stereotypical circuitry" } /[f]+/ { print "fn(2,2)=4 as matrix origin" } /[e]+/ { print "growing at a rate x > than any primitive recursion" } /[d]+/ { print "recursive function not primitive recursive" } /[c]+/ { print "recursive coding" } /[b]+/ { print "dull repetition in continuation" } /[a]+/ { print "no end to circuitry" } /^$/ { print "closure" } _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 09:16:45 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marcella Durand Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Of course, it's obvious (and not really so subtle) that the corporate-bureaucratic system has fixed on this kid as a quick way to make a buck. I would think playing on the compassion of the general public as a rather risky gamble, myself, but hey. However, just because they're playing upon "our compassion" doesn't mean that compassion in itself is a bad thing. I'm glad the corporations are mixed up with this kid--maybe it means they might actually have to put their money where their mouths are and build disabled-access to their buildings, or sponsor some scientific research into his disease or something like that. I certainly don't mean we should all send him letters praising him as the next Gertrude Stein, just because he's young and ill, but I wouldn't pass on to any 11-year-old--healthy or not--the kind of "criticism" this kid's been receiving on this list. I would rather see a critique of the corporate system selling off his efforts, than raging at the person-process-poetry him/itself. M > ---------- > From: Fargas Laura > Reply To: UB Poetics discussion group > Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 7:50 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: "new" poet > > >>I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to > operate > outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. >> > > Eh? The corporate-bureaucratic system is what has printed > ziggity-jillion copies of his book, is sending him around the country and > exhibiting him on television, and generally relying upon the > deep-heartedness of the people who are paying for his book. It is selling > his courage and his effort to not merely endure but prevail. Corporations > are subtler swine than you are crediting them with being -- someone in the > corporate system wanted to print that book to make the kid happy, yes, but > they were also gambling that your compassion would open your wallet. > > >>To show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because > their > poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be > creatively > irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." >> > > What kind of compassion are you recommending? To say his poems will > last > with Frost or Ashbery? Why bullshit this smart, brave kid? This is a > little boy who has to have his lungs vacuumed every hour or two -- he > deserves better. Whoever it was that said the rest of us should stand > what > we could write at age eleven against what he writes is fairer, and more to > the point. Isn't enough to say, 'pretty good for eleven, not grown-up > poetry?' > > Obviously he's only being published because he's gravely ill -- it's > like > the old crack comparing a woman doing something-or-other to a dog getting > up > on his hind legs and giving a speech-- the astonishment being not that the > thing was done well, but that it was done at all. Having read a newspaper > interview with him, I suspect the boy understands that perfectly well, > too. > One wishes him the luck of living to be older and writing better poems. > > Then he can sell 28 copies a year of his brilliant book of poems just > like the rest of us. And the Jimmy Stewart or Jewel or gravely ill child > of > that era can go on to be the year's best selling poet. > > > Laura Fargas > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:41:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Slow Trains Literary Journal (fwrd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: "Slow Trains Literary Journal" To: Subject: Slow Trains Winter Issue -- newsletter Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 10:21:59 -0700 December 21, 2001 The Slow Trains Literary Journal Newsletter http://www.slowtrains.com ~~~~~~ Slow Trains is proud to bring you our new Winter Issue, full of light on this solstice, and with our most peaceful wishes for your holiday season. Our Winter Issue travels from Ecuador to Iowa, with great writing on childhood, baseball, faith, the pursuit and loss of love, and a bit of an explanation on what the crocodiles were doing during the "Hangover Sestina." Our fabulous poets include: P.J. Nights, John Eivaz, Rebecca Lu Kiernan, Lytton Bell, Michael K. Gause, Lawrence Schimel, Itir Toksoz, Pasquale Capocasa, Kathryn Rantala, Tony Gruenewald, and a favorite poet who always brings grace and light to our issues, Robert Gibbons. With fiction from Patricia Ann McNair, Anne Tourney, Aaron Paulson, Brendan Connell; essays from Brian Peters, Tony Leather, Marcy Sheiner, Dave Gregg, Anthony Puccinelli, David Taylor, Judy Bunce; and music and memories from Jeff Beresford-Howe, William Dean, and Samamtha Capps Emerson, our Winter Issue awaits to warm and entice you. http://www.slowtrains.com ~~~~ Slow Trains is published on a quarterly schedule, but offers an ongoing journal: "Rave On: Postcards from Slow Trains." http://www.slowtrains.com/rave_on/rave_on.html Come visit and stay awhile, as we rave on words on (non)printed page! Susannah Indigo Editor ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:42:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Second Sundays @ The Stork retires... (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:16:38 -0800 From: Mary Burger Subject: Second Sundays @ The Stork retires... Due to the bar's decision to close on Sundays, Second Sundays at the Stork Club poetry series will not continue in 2002. It has been a great year; thank you to all for your support! Mary Burger and Beth Murray ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:55:06 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? In-Reply-To: <3C212ABA.FC3AF648@lamar.colostate.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii --- In webartery@y..., komninos zervos wrote: > i need help. Komninos, If you know how to recognize printed poetry ("a visual pattern or arrangement, … line lengths, … indentations from the left margin"), you're doing a better than a lot of critics and the editors who get it into print! :) George Butterick, in his introduction to Charles Olson's ~Maximus Poems,~ (Butterich did the posthumous redaction) says that it was very difficult to decide whether many pieces of paper were fragments of poetry or were prose ~notes~ that Olson had made to himself. And hence not included in the volume. Or F.A.O. Matthiessen, the critic perhaps single-handedly most responsible for getting Melville and the American Transcendentalists into the canon. He has an essay where he's discussing Walt Whitman and, in making a point, he presents what we take to be unmistakably Whitman's lines, the long lineation, and even the diction and tone. Matthiessen's curious "trick", next, was to ~"reveal"~ that what was just read was prose by Thoreau, re-lineated by Matthiessen The problem with the print cues you're talking about is that there's a whole bibliography of 20th/21st cent. poetry that is made up entirely of pre-existing prose imported over into lineation: the John Adams Cantos of Pound's, ~beautiful~ poems by Ronald Johnson (who also did "concrete" poetry), etc., etc. (The Cantos' Adams material can be excruciatingly prosaic, and that may even have been Pound's point: to set up a polyphony between the "sublime" lines of his own composition and the raw American Founding Fathers language.) ~Has~ prose "become" poetry by being transferred over into a poetry frame and re-lineated? Is it no longer prose, although letter-for-letter identical, once those spacings have been added? And you're leaving out prose poems. The in-person cues ("a spotlit area; a microphone; chairs arranged in a room pointing towards the performance area; a person holding an opened book or papers") are basically the same cues used for stand-up comedians (and the difference there becomes even vaguer in "Slam" poetry settings, where getting a laugh [audible audience reaction] is a sign that the poem is working How do those in-person "stimuli" differ from the set-up for a lecture? As far as the phonological ("the poet's projected voice (not normal speaking voice)"), in New York City, at least, part of John Ashbery's widespread influence is the famously flat, unaffected, and quotidian voice he reads in. There are still semi-incantorial poets who appear here, certainly, but ~most,~ I'd say, have borrowed Ashbery's style of dry, undramatic reading, normal speaking voice. No phonological change of tone. I'm not saying that the cues aren't factors. What I'm responding to is any assumption, in preceding on to the "challenge" of web poetry, that real world poetry is already a done deal, clearly recognizable and solved. On web especially, but in general, remember: those cues pretty much ~always~ follow after an a priori "announcement" or declaration of some sort that what you're about to read/hear is poetry (a Dewey decimal number, a Poetry section in a book store, the flyer for the event, an introduction by the series curator that says "PN's poetry has appeared in . . ."): meta-. On web, the categorization ("key word") may be even stronger. If none of those cues are definitive, sufficient, or conclusive to poem-ify text (as I think you'll discover on re-examination), then they may operate only by ~overdetermination.~ (It takes two points to demarcate a line; three points along the same line are overdetermination.) I hope this helps. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 01:21:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wanda Phipps Subject: work in Milk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hey, work just out in the new issue of Milk--check it out milk volume three is now online/new poetry from: http://www.milkmag.org Dana Ward Michael Rothenberg Charles Henri Ford Cid Corman Anselm Berrigan Vincent Katz Wanda Phipps Ron Padgett Linh Dinh Clayton Eshleman and many others . . . _____________________________________ Also, featuring poetry by Attila Jozsef (trans. by Gabor Gyukics & Michael Castro) _____________________________________ 20 Questions With Bill Berkson _____________________________________ Prose by Gerard Malanga _____________________________________ Interview: Paola Igliori interviews Allen Ginsberg on the life and times of Harry Smith plus more to come... Larry Sawyer, editor milk magazine sawyerl@gemair.com -- Wanda Phipps Hey, don't forget to check out my website MIND HONEY http://users.rcn.com/wanda.interport (and if you have already try it again) poetry, music and more! ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 16:53:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: derek beaulieu / housepress Subject: housepress subscriptions now available: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT housepress subscriptions now available: subscribers recieve 1 copy of every publication by housepress for a year (pamphlets, chapbooks, postcards, leaflets - everything) on average between 30 and 50 publications; as well as a selection of publications from other small presses and magazines. subscriptions are: $100.00 (Canadian funds, US funds if outside of canada) and include all postage and handling. (individuals only, no institutions please) for more information or to subscribe, contact derek beaulieu at: housepress@shaw.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 21:16:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Of the Latter Days and what you might hear MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Of the Latter Days and what you might hear And of unto your inner worlds, where you must die. It makes no difference, whether you make peace. And of course one always hopes that embracing the worst, overcomes. And of course that is a myth. We have not escaped the fire, to speak. Do not make peace. For whom shall you make peace. Do not seek your hearts. For whom shall you seek your hearts. ... This is temporary. You may not receive this. You may receive this only on a temporary basis. With the proliferation of small-scale nuclear devices, the Internet is in imminent danger of collapse. There may be days, weeks, months, a few years, left. This is the end-game of culture. Your knowledge is useless. Don't fret our media. But it is a privilege to read this. It is a privilege to witness the curtain coming down on the future. It is a privilege to recognize that little will remain on the other side - that later, much later, something else might inscribe similar words to these. Later, much later, something else might read them, but not these, but others. There are too many bombs; there is the untoward simplicity of the bomb. It is human to hate, human to take out one's enemy at the risk of one's life. Sacrifice is the core and kernel of being human; hate is the shell that derives destruction. These lines are written between one destruction and another, between one and another finality. They are produced on the road to another's paradise and the dissembling of our own. ... The world frantically holds peace concerts. The world frantically produces beautiful music reaching throughout heavens and earths. The world produces books, fashion, songs, operas, magazines, articles, psalms, poems, epics, sculptures, paintings, puppet-shows, cinema, theater, whole literatures, all in the name of peace. The world produces screams, terrors, whimpers, moans, cries and whispers, all begging for peace, caterwauling for peace, yelling for peace. Human beings scurry in all directions. Plants burn. Rivers burn. Animals are blinded. Lesions develop. There are rumors of bombs. There is no electric. Servers and routers are silenced. I will stand up and sit down. I will be the prophet of the last and latter days. I will type on dying keyboards, dead laptops. My words are the words of truth. My words die from crippled fingers. My words die in ten throats. My words die in one. My words are lesions. ... Countdown. This is written from the future to the past. This has already been written. This will already have been written. This will already have not been read. Not by us. Not by something else. Listen: We are all dead. Listen: It is too late now. The poison is here. Listen: It is time to make our peace. Listen: It is time to listen to ourselves. This is the end of the sentence to which we are sentenced. No one will make peace. No one will listen to another. It is the nature of being human. It is human to hate. It is human to act on that hate. We will dance until we are burned alive. We will dance with our lesions. We will dance and destroy. We will go to heaven. We will take you with us. It takes only one. Technology: It takes less than one. One minus one is zero. It will take nothing. It will take nothing at all. Hello Pakistan will you not listen to us. Give us your weapons. Hello USA please listen to us. Give us your weapons. Hello India, Israel, China, France, Germany, Belgium, England, Russia, Sumer, Latvia, Babylonia, Chad, Japan, Italy, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Canada, give us your weapons. We will take your weapons and we will beat them into weapons. We will take your weapons and we will make a column of ash and smoke, fire and debris, radiation and cloud, from pole to pole, an axis of fury, an axis of death and destruction. We will cleanse the earth. We will boil the oceans. We will flood the lands. We will freeze the oceans. We will burn flesh. We will fuck our enemies. We will arrive in paradise. We will arrive in heaven. We have removed our enemies. We have removed your enemies. We do this out of our own goodwill, out of the hearts of men. We do this out of kindness and charity. We have removed their hearts. ... But we write between one destruction and another. At the risk of boring you: We write between one destruction and another. We write into the air air we breathe. We write through the slaughter, onslaught of lesions always already among us. We write through our sickness. We write for the decades of routers and servers. We write for the years of wireless, months of optical, weeks and days of pdas, minutes of broadband, seconds of remaining life. We write for audience of one, for audience of one-half, for audience already tending towards zero. We write for the terror among us and the success of that terror, and its end. We write for an improbable length. It takes nothing. It takes nothing at all. We write for our lesions, our implacable hatreds. It takes nothing. It takes nothing at all. We write in order to kill. We write against one another. There is no other writing. We write the enunciation of slaughter. We write its emancipation. We write in order to be silenced. We write in order to be successful. We are successful. We write for an irrational number. It is a matter of time; it is a matter of nothing else. And we write for the silence to follow. We are at the end of days. We are of the end. We are the meat of the end, the flesh of the end. We are of the flesh and its lesions. We are not improbable. We are not improbable at all. We are most probable. Of this I am sure: We are most probable. It takes nothing. It takes nothing at all. ... - from a midrash _ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 11:55:45 -0500 Reply-To: ron.silliman@gte.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?L=E9opold_S=E9dar_Senghor?= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable December 21, 2001 L=E9opold Senghor Dies at 95; Senegal's Poet of N=E9gritude By ALBIN KREBS New York Times L=E9opold S=E9dar Senghor, a poet, professor, philosopher and statesman = who became the first president of Senegal when it gained independence from France, died yesterday at his home in Normandy. Mr. Senghor, one of the central figures in the political upheaval that led to freedom for France's African colonies, was 95. His life was a blend of African and European experiences. In World War II, he fought in an all-African French Army unit and spent two years in a Nazi camp after being captured. In 1984, he became the first black member of the French Academy. In between, he served as an always eloquent, often critical spokesman for the cause and culture of Africa. "I wear European clothing," he once said, "and the Americans dance to jazz which derives from our African rhythms: civilization in the 20th century is universal. No people can get along without others." The current president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, announced the death to a summit meeting of West African nations in Dakar, Senegal. President Alpha Oumar Konar=E9 of Mali, speaking for the 15 leaders there, hailed Mr. Senghor as a "great politician and great African." President Jacques Chirac of France yesterday mourned Mr. Senghor as a historic figure for Africa. "Poetry has lost one of its masters, Senegal a statesman, Africa a visionary and France a friend," he said in a statement. Mr. Senghor's career was studded with paradoxes. He was a Roman Catholic who led a predominantly Muslim nation, a sophisticated scholar who drew his primary support from peasants and a poet who wielded political power with great skill. Among African leaders, Mr. Senghor was the chief theoretician of n=E9gritude, or "blackness," his definition for the common culture and spiritual heritage of the black peoples of Africa. In one of his earliest poems, "Totem," he wrote:=20 I must hide in the intimate depths of my veins The Ancestor storm-dark skinned, shot with lightning and thunder And my guardian animal, I must hide him Lest I smash through the boom of scandal. He is my faithful blood and demands fidelity Protecting my naked pride against=20 Myself and all the insolence of lucky races. Mr. Senghor was also an eloquent diplomat, who on the one hand deftly criticized the colonial policies of Portugal and South Africa, while on the other scolding some developing nations for what he considered their hypocrisy. At the United Nations in 1961, for instance, he noted the double standards applied by some nations newly rid of colonialism.=20 "We have denounced the imperialism of the great powers only to secrete a miniature imperialism toward our neighbors," he said then. "We have demanded disarmament from the great powers only to transform our countries into arsenals. We proclaim our neutralism, but we do not always base it upon a policy of neutrality."=20 Mr. Senghor was born Oct. 9, 1906, in the small Senegalese coastal town of Joal. His father was a prosperous peanut planter and trader who had 20 children. His mother, a Roman Catholic, had him educated at a nearby Catholic mission and seminary and nurtured Mr. Senghor's first ambition =97 to become, as he recalled many years later, "a teaching priest to = work toward the intellectual emancipation of my race." When he turned 20, however, Mr. Senghor abandoned his calling to the priesthood and transferred to secondary school in Dakar. In 1928 he won a partial scholarship that permitted him to study at the Lyc=E8e Louis-le-Grand at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Georges Pompidou, who was later to become prime minister and then president of France. During his Sorbonne years, Mr. Senghor said, he also discovered "the unmistakable imprint of African art on modern painting, sculpture, music and literature," which confirmed his belief in Africa's contribution to "the civilization of the universal."=20 In his studies in philosophy, Mr. Senghor originated, with Aim=E9 = C=E9saire of Martinique and L=E9on G. Damas of French Guiana, the concept of n=E9gritude, in part as a proud protest against French rule and the = policy of assimilation. N=E9gritude retained a respect for French, European and Western poetry and political thought, but Mr. Senghor as a young scholar emphasized the importance of his African heritage and urged his compatriots to "assimilate, not be assimilated." His love poems over the years reflected themes of n=E9gritude, dealing = as they did with what he saw as the "soullessness" of Western civilization =97 "No mother's breast. Legs in nylon." =97 and he maintained that only African culture has preserved a mystic means of reviving "the world that has died of machines and cannons." Further, Mr. Senghor believed, the African culture gained strength from its closeness to nature and its people's ancestors, while Western culture was out of step with the world's ancient and natural rhythms.=20 In his poetry, Mr. Senghor could sound like Walt Whitman or Robinson Jeffers. His poems carried a tone of optimism, often of exuberant celebration, according to critics like Clive Wake and John Reed, who translated his collected poems.=20 At the Sorbonne, Mr. Senghor was recognized as one of the most brilliant students, and upon his graduation in 1935 achieved the distinction of becoming the first African agr=E9g=E9, the highest-ranked teacher in the French school system. He taught French to French children in Tours. In 1939, while teaching at another school near Paris, he was drafted into the French Army, serving in an all-African unit until 1940, when he was captured by the Germans. During the two years he spent in Nazi prison camps, he wrote some of his best poems, collected in 1945 in a volume titled "Chantes d'Ombre."=20 Mr. Senghor returned to teaching and writing after the war, and in 1945 became deputy for Senegal to the French Constituent Assembly. A year later, he was elected one of Senegal's two deputies to the National Assembly. Sitting in the legislature for the Socialist Party, he soon decided that only an African party could adequately represent African needs. Having founded the Senegalese Democratic Bloc in 1948, he ran as that party's candidate in 1951 and defeated the Socialist candidate for the National Assembly.=20 By the mid-1950's, the French Parliament had embarked on a policy aimed at giving a large measure of self-government to the African colonies. Mr. Senghor opposed the policy, believing that it would result in a proliferation of small, weak nations.=20 Instead, Mr. Senghor favored a federal unity between French Equatorial Africa and the French colonies of West Africa. Later, he successfully appealed to President Charles de Gaulle of France for independence, and Senegal became a republic in 1960. Mr. Senghor was elected its first president.=20 Late in 1962, he repulsed an attempted coup led by a longtime = prot=E9g=E9, Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, ordering his old friend imprisoned for life. From then on, he tolerated no challenge to his generally moderate, pro-Western policies. Mr. Senghor won re-election to the presidency in 1963, 1968 and 1973, and remained president until his retirement in 1980. The first African president voluntarily to resign power, he handed the office to his chosen successor, Abdou Diouf. As president, Mr. Senghor faced problems common among the emerging nations of Africa. His country was poor, its resources mostly limited to fishing, peanut farming and the mining of phosphates. He devoted himself to modernizing agriculture, with limited success, and tried to combat the corruption and inefficiency that had become endemic under French rule. In foreign policy he was a neutralist, while at home he advocated a special form of "African socialism," which he said should be devoid of both atheism and excessive materialism. In contrast to African leaders who fell under the sway of the Soviets in the cold war, he emphasized his disapproval of a "dictatorship of the proletariat."=20 In 1946, Mr. Senghor married Ginette =C9bou=E9, the daughter of a = Guyanese who was a prominent colonial official in Africa. They had two children before divorcing nine years later. He later married Colette Hubert, a Frenchwoman from Normandy, where he spent much of his time after retirement. The couple had one son, Philippe, who died in an accident in the 1980's.=20 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 11:45:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Floodeditions@AOL.COM Subject: Chicago Tribune Review of Pam Rehm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In the Chicago Tribune this Sunday (today), there is an excellent review of Pam Rehm's GONE TO EARTH (published by Flood Editions this year). Here is the address: http://chicagotribune.com/features/books/chi-0112230181dec23.story And here is the review: "Exploring the darker sides of love and salvation" -------------------- By Maureen McLane. Maureen McLane is a fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows and the author of "Romanticism and the Human Sciences." December 23, 2001 Gone to Earth By Pam Rehm Flood Editions, 50 pages, $10 paper Pam Rehm's poetry, rigorous and delicate, is profoundly serious. "Gone to Earth," her first book in six years, deals with the stakes of love and salvation, and their terrible shadows: infidelity, guilt, dispossession, despair. Published by the new, non-profit, Chicago-based press Flood Editions, the book begins with the luminous, tentative experience of love and progressively tracks its darkening. The worshipped beloved has inspired the condition in which one wants "To be all curiosity": Naturally desiring a day with you That strays into night The lovely longing and the natural desire etched here do not persist unmarred; the word "strays" suggests as much, pointing us to the errant nature of erotic conjunction. We find ourselves, as Keats put it, in the Vale of Soul-Making: Psyche has made her appearance, has "gone to earth," so to speak, and her development will not be easy. The biblical and Miltonic notes amplify from the beginning of the book the resonances of this encounter. Evoking the language of Paul's promise to the Corinthians that they would see anew with Christ, this lover sees her beloved "First `darkly'/but then `face to face.' " Like Milton's Adam and Eve, these lovers are "Shepherded/Out of the thicket/Hand in hand." If we recall "Paradise Lost," we remember they were thus shepherded after paradise was lost, when "hand in hand" they took "their solitary way." Like Rehm's previous work, including the National Poetry Series award-winning "To Give It Up," this book is austere and excruciating, yet it is also profoundly calm. "Gone to Earth" may be the most stringently developed of Rehm's volumes. Her poems carve out a stillness within the existential domain of fear and trembling, as the titles of some poems suggest: "The Concept of Dread," "'We Realize a Guilt . . .'," "Humiliation of the Valley." Now, this may not sound like your idea of fun, and it's not. But salvation, at least in an existential key, is not fun, and Eros, as Rehm rhymes and reminds us, carries his arrows precisely and specifically to wound us. "Until you're wounded in a single spot/Permanently/no impression is made." This is not the Horatian or Arnoldian poetry of "sweetness and light." It is rather a poetry in the American transcendental line, its brilliant, exacting foremother Emily Dickinson. The probing intensities of Rehm's lines owe something to Dickinson, as do, occasionally, her rhythms and diction. What could be more Dickinsonian than the opening of "The Humiliation of the Valley": The compass of the moment reveals an angle of suspense Doubtful hope or bliss to come are the only presentiments pressed heavy in the air of circumspect Rehm rarely aims for the stunning, trap-door closures of Dickinson's best poems, and while she puns and plays and paradoxes ("doubtful hope") she does not sustain elaborate conceits. Her poetry lacks the metaphysical brilliance of Dickinson's (Whose doesn't?), but shows an astonishing capacity for sustained, difficult attention. She is no formalist; she is a poet of the isolated or paired line, the intermittent stanza and the predicament. She is not usually a rhymer, although her poems are sonically rich; her lines tend to pause with the phrase and to be grouped by units of thought. Rehm's spare statements, microrevisions and repetitions, conceptual puns and morphemic mutations sometimes put one in mind of the earlier work of poet Susan Howe, who has long pursued her impressive, sui generis task of fusing the focus of lyric with a revisionary critique of American history. Rehm's work comes from a more-intimately excavated place. These poems emerge out of a relation: the "you" addressed is the beloved, who seems to be a spouse but is sometimes, perhaps, a god. Several poems undertake a lacerating self-address. Rehm's precision and her controlled, almost classical investigation of intimate intensities are sometimes reminiscent of poet Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.), from whom she drew an epigraph for the volume "Pollux." It is important to note that the extremity registered here is not melodramatic, is indeed hostile to theatricality and to the sentimental; we are in the presence not of a performance (the weakness of much postconfessional poetry, with its designs on us) but of a dialogue of self and soul. We are not held captive to a poet's ego; we are implicitly invited to follow the movements of mind and heart, a wholly different thing. We are overhearing, so to speak, disciplined acts of contemplation, the soul struggling to make itself. These poems frequently suggest Rehm's profound immersion in sacred language and liturgical rite, although this semantic domain is often evoked in ambiguous ways. In "The Concept of Dread," Rehm writes, "Dearly beyond/we are scattered here today/amongst commodities." Such parody of liturgical formula ("Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . ." ) could be insufferable in large doses; Rehm has the tact to use such techniques sparingly and effectively. This is not so much a religious poetry as a postreligious poetry that wishes to retain and honor the practices of introspection and soul-scrutiny so central to one vein of radical protestantism. This work commits itself as well to an inhabitation of uncomfortable psychological and ethical spaces: what does it mean to love someone before knowing them or oneself, to feel desire move you in lawless ways, to find oneself geared toward self-abandon even when one intellectually, ethically, wishes to repudiate those impulses? To uninitiated readers this may seem to be hermetic or unusually dry poetry. It is not chatty, narrative, or easily socially located. It is often abstract and sometimes gnomic. It is a poetry voiced from and to inner spaces. But this is not an unworldly or escapist book. Its first tart lines set the tone and the challenge: "A roof is no guarantee/that you'll sleep." And for all its delineation of a searching, reflective, often-agonized consciousness, this is also a book that announces and earns such statements as, "Privacy is not a remedy." It is striking to contrast this with the title of one of Mark Strand's poems in "Blizzard of One" (1998): "Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life." The aestheticization of private life is something Rehm never courts; whether Strand does requires a whole other essay. In Rehm's work, the world is there, and one has entered it, however obliquely it is registered; and, more important, the world has entered oneself. "I'm not the world," Rehm writes, "but its vanity/has a hold on me." Rehm is deeply interested in the impact of possessions on the inner life; one of the recurring words here is "possession," in all its varieties: erotic, material, spiritual. "I feel deaf/inside of possessions," she writes in "Serving Two Masters." Marx described commodities as very queer metaphysical things, goods whose value lay not in their use but in their exchangeability. We might say that Rehm's interest in commodities is similarly metaphysical: Economic life will run down blind alleys a specter A specter is haunting this book, and if it is not the specter of communism it is certainly the specter of community, integrity and intimacy in a world flush with things, distractions and incursions: We've become separated by `efficiencies' Nobody can do anything with Given the scrupulousness everywhere evident here, Rehm's bald statements and occasionally unlovely locutions must be seen as intentional, although "intent" is one of the words and concepts under pressure here (for example, in the poem "Of Single Intent"--"Free to rest without ambivalence/Intention is difficult to express"--and later in "Where Oh Where Has My Little God Gone?"--"I cannot follow any form/of intending/other than a reservation/to cast my gaze yonder.") Rehm's register is narrow and deep; this book is more a profound, resonating tunnel than a variegated display of instrumental virtuosity. It strikes a few deep notes hard and attentively sits with the over- and undertones. Some may find this work limited, monotonous, difficult, privatized; there is little rhythmic variety, less tonal variety and little relief. You may find yourself crying, "Enough already!" But grace comes to those who seek it and sometimes to those who don't. Approached in the right spirit, the book will deeply reward those with the desire and patience to sit with difficult things expressed through minimalist means. "Love answers need," and so, too, some poetry. Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 16:30:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: mdw Subject: poetics panel and book publication party in New Orleans 12/29 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Hey friends: I hope you can attend the following special event in New Orleans at the time of MLA: Saturday, December 29 3:30-5 p.m. St. Mark's Community Center 1130 N. Rampart St. New Orleans, LA We hope you can join us at this special book publication party and panel discussion sponsored by LIT CITY. We are gathering to celebrate the publication of two new books, TELLING IT SLANT: AVANT GARDE POETICS OF THE 1990S, ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (University of Alabama Press) and SPIN CYCLE by Chris Stroffolino (Spuyten Duyvil). Along with the publication party, this event is going to feature a panel discussion on questions surrounding avant garde poetics of the 1990s. Likely panelists include: Charles Borkhuis C.S. Giscombe Jefferson Hansen Juliana Spahr Chris Stroffolino Mark Wallace Elizabeth Willis Each panelist will be speaking for 5-7 minutes on issues they feel are of importance to understanding avant garde poetics of the 1990s, and then we'll open up a general discussion on the topic for both the panelists and the audience. We'll just talk for as long as makes sense to us, then turn it into a party whenever we feel like we're done. If you have any questions, let me know. I really do hope to see you there. Sincerely, Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 15:49:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher Martin Subject: Puppy Flowers MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hey all. Check out the latest in laser poetry and/or cyber fiber. It's Puppy Flowers, the new webjournal with the really smart name. In addition to wonderful contributors (really fantastic!), there's also art to warm the heart, and a limited time only jingle that will lull even the most disheartened into grinning passivity. You ask "Where did this supra-hybrid of the ecstasies spring from and why am I not abreast of its buzz?" Well, it looks like a great beaming triangle of yellow light that stretches from San Francisco to New York to St. Paul and back to San Francisco again, and its sticker campaign has only made it to the bathrooms and public transportation of the Bay Area thus far. Don't lose anymore valuable time: www.puppyflowers.com PF1 is Noel Black Eleni Sikelianos Greg Hewett Kevin Opstedal Beth Lisick Cedar Sigo Chris Fischbach Courtney Martin Rosebud Lane brandon Karl Krause Edmund Berrigan Marina Eckler Chris Martin Jeni Olin Rebecca Lowery Happy Merry! Chris Martin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 10:54:42 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: first 'open letter' *Open Letter* -- now online MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable A N N O U N C I N G : The first of two 'open letter' issues of Open Letter magazine - open letters to/from poets - now online at http://www.arts.uwo.ca/openlet/11.3/ (special thanks to Aaron Levy @ http://slought.net) This first issue is also available in print for $7 (Canadian), or US$ 9 = (international) - made out to: Open Letter, c/o Frank Davey, 499 Dufferin Ave, London, Ontario, N6B = 2A1, Canada The second issue of letters to/from poets is forthcoming this Winter = 2002 (Open Letter, Eleventh Series, No. 4). CALL FOR RESPONSES We are accepting new open letters, as well as new responses to the = existing letters, for prompt online publication. Louis Cabri & Nicole Markotic, eds. lcabri@dept.english.upenn.edu; markotic@ucalgary.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:57:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Dec. 27 Zinc Bar/NYC from Mitch Highfill (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: "Mitch Highfill" Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 19:08:29 -0500 For those folks who happen to be in NYC during the holidays, and wish to take a break from the family festivities for an evening, Joe Elliott and Mitch Highfill will be reading at Zinc Bar on Thursday night, Dec. 27 at 6:30 pm. Zinc Bar is at 90 West Houston, between LaGuardia & Thompson. If you're free, come out!! Happy Holidays, Mitch & Joe ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 19:38:58 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: "new" poet In-Reply-To: <71EAF6EBA863D2119C4F0008C74CA78E03261621@PSI-MS1> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:40 PM -0600 12/18/01, Marcella Durand wrote: >I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to operate >outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. To >show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because their >poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be creatively >irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." ... i like concept of creative irrationality, when it involves compassion, this very much. thanks! ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 10:43:46 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: owner-realpoetik@SCN.ORG Subject: RealPoetik ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 15:25:20 -0800 From: Doug McClellan More from the Dumbo series, sort of a Dunciade of our times. He does several of these a week and while RealPoetik has actually posted a number of them, readers charmed by Mr. McClellan, soon to be performing live in a re-education camp near you, should write to him and get subscribed directly. Thoughts from Our Leader on ABM Treaties and Son of Star Wars. "A treaty's just some old paper and ink 'N if you wanna know what I think I think They tell me that I'm a reasonable fella They tell me we really need this umbrella The tests are just great when the weather's fine." (If your old enough, think Maginot Line) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 03:00:39 -0500 Reply-To: bstefans@earthlink.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian Stefans Subject: batties MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit http://www.arras.net/batties.htm ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 21:55:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Yunte Huang Subject: New Book: Transpacific Displacement Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Yunte Huang, now out from the University of California Press "Yunte Huang has produced a fascinating study of the transformation of poetics texts, in this case Chinese ones, at the hands of American scholars, editors, translators, and especially poets. Huang understands that there is no such thing as a 'translation' that is 'true' to the original; there are only better and worse-case scenarios....Whether the work in question is nineteenth-century ethnography, Pound's 'Cathay', the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston, or the 'pidgin' of John Yau, this brave and highly original study is sure to raise controversy." --Marjorie Perloff "'Transpacific Displacement' is a lucid and insightful study of the intertextual travel embedded in texts of modern American literature. Huang opens an entirely new discourse on bilingualism and biculturalism that hitherto has not been thought of in the fields of American modernism or Asian American literature." --Leo Ou-fan Lee Yunte Huang takes an original "ethnographic" approach to well-known American texts as he traces the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia. Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, "Transpacific Displacement" opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang goes on to address early ethnographies of Asia, racist representations of Asians in contemporary pop culture, the countermockery of literary Orientalism by Asian American writers, and textually homogenizing tendencies in Maxine Hong Kingston's work. He ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry. Articulating a vision for the future, "Transpacific Displacement" calls for an American literary tradition rooted in transnationalism and translingual practice. For more information: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9384.html 0-520-23223-2 paper $24.95 0-520-22886-3 cloth $60.00 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 22:23:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: Merrill / Ashbery In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I think the Ashbery poem _is_ moving. My problem is that I don't understand how he achieves this. I think this is why Ashbery is sometimes thought of as a "difficult" poet, when he is in fact a relatively easy poet to read and enjoy since he uses simple enough language and doesn't allude to an excessive amount of outside sources without which the poems can't be understood. But therein lie the difficulties. With some poets, it seems as if you have analyzed them (but maybe this is an illusion) when you have provided glosses for obscure language, including, perhaps, references to literary sources who used those words first or most famously, when you have filled out all the references to mythology, when you have noticed that there are five or six words which all are part of the same "symbol" (like words about sailing or words about trees or words about wood or whatever, and then you complete the symbol by stating the poem is comparing the governance of the soul to sailing a gallion in the main). None of this is possible with Ashbery (nor is it possible with many current poets). You can't generalize about symbols because each object tends to appear only once. You can't find a narrative thread because any one verse has a narrative feel to it (the verse, or sentence, may tell quite clearly "what happened") but the next verse or sentence seems to be about different people in a different place. You can't break it into several strands where each strand tells a continuous story (like the beginning of The Wasteland, where one strand is the women in the bar, to whom the barman is saying, "Hurry up please, it's time" (of course this line was designed to resonate all over the poem, but literally speaking, it belongs in the bar)) You can't interpret the narrative(s) as symbolic trips or dream-trips all undertaken by the same person, because they are so clear and plain and just don't seem dreamlike. There is no obscure language to gloss. The literary allusions are rare and not too obscure or else they even announce themselves so you don't have to look them up. In other words, it seems like the Ashbery poem resists the kind of close reading that one is taught to do in some places. (I attended high school partly in France, and the Explication de Texte is still a big thing there, as it was in the French Department in college among the older professors. However the younger French professors were more into X-Theory, where X could be Feminist or Queer or Postcolonial, etc., and the X-Theory rests upon Structuralism and Semiotics and Deconstruction which I have never properly understood) I unfortunately understand better how to do the close reading thing than whatever one has to do to understand contemporary poetry, despite reading a lot of contemporary poetry and having a sense of which poets I like (I am trying to figure out why), and even writing poetry which I hope is contemporary in the sense of not seeming like an imitation of something I've read and have Closely Read, (in order to figure out exactly where to put in the obligatory reference to the death of Agamemnon :-) I did write one poem that mentions the death of Agamemnon, but it is a cut-up, and thus not very susceptible to being Closely Anythinged.) I hope that an honest admission of ignorance as I made above won't get me flamed. This list scares me a bit. It seems as if it is dangerous to be stupid here. I was legitimately worried about the last post, in which I argued tat the Merril was more prescise than Ashbery and used an Ashbery fragment by switching the words around and seeing what happened and was grateful for the non-flamey nature of the reply. I realized about the minute after I posted that my argument was pure sophistry (almost literally). I was just desperate to start the conversation going on some actual test of Merrill and Ashbery, rather than remain in the abstract, and I wanted to show that they aren't comparable poets. They may well be comparable in _value_ (whatever that means), but what they did to language was so different. When I read Merrill, I find myself noticing the _words_, thinking, usually about ordinary enough words (Merrill isn't precious) "that's just right". I imagine him putting together woprds like the pieces of the wooden puzzles he put together as a child, as described in one of his early poems. When I read Ashbery, I find the words to be transparent. I think I am reading something that is gripping, contemporary, and totally realistic-- from a different universe. I don't notice how the words sound, except that nothing stands out, and if I think about it, I realize that in order to create that effect, the poet does have to put the words together very carefully. But the striking thing seems to be the image, and in some cases the emotion it produces, all without anything in the real world corresponding to Ashbery's phrases. For instance the beginning of Flow Chart is gripping. When it starts, we are "Still in the published city..." (How can a city be published? Why were we there in the first place? And why are we leaving? These questions do not occur as I read...) A few lines later, he refers to "an emptiness/so sudden it leaves the girders/whanging in the absence of wind,/the sky milk-blue and astringent...." Now I have no idea what Ashbery is referring to by this and there are few clues in the text, but like all good literature, it can be used as a mirror upon which to project one's own life so as to see it more clearly, and I know I have seen that astringent sky... I think Ashbery has had more influence than Merrill, given the direction thet contemporary poetry has taken, and this is probably a good thing, as Ashbery is a somewhat more democratic poet. You don't have to study him to enjoy him. I think he is more the heir of Whitman than of Wallace Stevens, for example. Ashbery's style is perhaps more of an innovation, especially at the time he started writing, but I don't think his poems differ that much from one-another in basic style. Merrill seems to have tried everything. Sometimes he failed utterly and sometimes he came up with miniature masterpieces. I am eager to get the new Collected Merril so I can see _all_ the poems. I don't know if the ones left out of the Selected are failures or simply poems which didn't fit the tone of the individual volumes he published. Millie P.S. I just bought and have read some of Charles Bernstein's With Strings, but I know he is here, so I probably won't dare to make remarks about it, naive or not, except that obviously, I liked the poems in it that I read in the store because I bought the book and not the book by Brenda Hillman (a poet I have not read) which also looked good or the book by Cole Swenson (ditto, different style, though), or the new James Tate (I am a little disappointed by the ordinary realism of the poems in it that I've glanced over; I hope I'm wrong. Didn't it win the Pulitzer? Shroud of the Gnomes and Worshipful Company of Fletchers were so pleasantly weird that I hope he hasn't switched to being a realist...) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 22:29:10 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: phenomenology of speech and prophecy / enlightenment MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - phenomenology of speech and prophecy it doesn't matter what you say.:it happens anyway.:problem with being a prophet: no one listens. :: your death is a proof they won't allow you to see.:the best they do is spit at you. the worse they do is ignore.:you're not writing for them. you're writing for collateral.::you speak to the murderers of your speech. she speaks a language of no consequence whatsoever. to an audience of no consequence whatsoever.:the prophet more than anyone else knows it doesn't matter.:you speak to your murderers. your speak to the murderers of your speech.:: it is always already in another tongue.:it is always after the fact and therefore both eternal and ephemeral, langue and parole.:it is the nature of pure speech or the purity of natural speech.:: ----------------------------------- Enlightenment this is completely abstract. :this is entirely based on theoretical structure.:this is the phenomenological horizon of the occidental subject and accidental tourist.:x''':x'' demon in absentia. this horizon is non-existent.:this refuses meaning.:x x' x'' x''' x''''::y''' prostitute in absentia. this inherency possesses its own contradictions unrelieved in meta-analytics.:this tends towards the magazine of structural anomalies.:y y' y'' y''' y''''::black powder prostitute in absentia. ------_ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 03:52:32 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "new" poet Keep off Opprah MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Unless a writer has read a lot of their precursors and contemporaries and readds widely they wont be any good unless its a fluke. Of course there's nothing wrong with a kid writing poetry: it becomes a problem when its obliquely used by Opprah (who I believe has become a millionnaire by "do gooding" and woould probably subscribe to an "ooh, isnt it awful, those lovely towers crashing down: and its so good now that we the US have destroyed the eivil dooers and and and ... [huge gushes of tears and outrage and more oohhing and ahhhhing as another daisy cutter bomb lands somewhere on a whole lot of wogs thank God and God bless Ameriky and then Wolf Man comes on and says "See!" Didnt I warn ya?Dont mess with Ameriky...Turn on the spigots boys..." and so on] ..and he (not Wolf Man) goes on Television and its like the Aristotelian theory of catharthis: we all feel so much better no: we can live with a spastic or some dying kid its so emotional and he writes "pomes" Ooh!! All by himself ... Look if we really subscribed to the concept that each individual is valuable we would encourage individuals everywhere to be quietly happy about who and what they are: the boy's parents in my opinion would be wise to keep him off television - especially Opprah - (even if he had no physical or other disabilities) its bad news needing other people to approve or not of what one write, paints...anything one does.generally poets that we mostly concur are "significant" are, or would mostly be, capapble of writing regardless. yes we should encourage children: but people have to learnt to take knock backs...I see this going on TV with a disability as an example (mostly) of the "poor old me" syndrome which is really a long winge by the person or persons to get attention (that not always bad on itself) but very often by people who lack real self-love (as ditinguished from vanity or arrogance...quite different from someone who goes to a SLAM poetry night to have a few minutes of fame: the problem is when you start needing that: if you can operate without props etc thats great... I suspect that the parents of this boy should be careful: ask themselves whether he's not just being put up for scikly sentimental reasons as a kind of freak (we all like to watch freaks or things like "The Munsters" or horror or "The Hunch Baack of Notre Dame" would have far less appeal) ... but the media, Opprah etc are in it for cash: big cash, they dont care if you commit suicide the week after the show. Thinking about it I'd arther eat a plate of vomit than be on Opprah (money or not) or even shake her hand. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Susan Dillon" To: Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 3:42 PM Subject: Re: "new" poet > Thank you Marcella! I concur... > > now can't we all move on to other subjects...we all begin somewhere as > artists, he has just had the opportunity or wings to be published young. how > many pages of poetry have we all thrown away from that time in our lives? > Isn't it good that a child is being recognized...whether he is handicapped or > not, he is a boy, whose journey has just begun--not a self-proclaiming > arrogant poet who has read hundreds of books of his predecessors? > > sgd ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 22:33:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Millie Niss Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I think part of the problem is that at all levels, it is considered to be some kind of crime to impose values from above. I was in an MFA prgram (Emerson College) which was not that bad. I did nonfiction and poetry for two semesters and one semester of fiction. I was hosrrible at fiction, and got comments from the teacher to that effect. She would only give A's if it were publishable. In nonfiction, I did well, but got a lot of criticism,, and _some_ people did badly. However in POETRY, there's this idea that you can't judge someone's inspiration (or some such nonsense) and EVERYONR did well, regardless of whether they wrote brilliantly or were the worst poet imaginable. (One person was the worst poet imaginable. I cannot quote but I can tell you that she distributed her poems on various shades of pink and lavender paper, in a nonstandard font...) The problem was not that the teacher was incompetent; he is the poetry editor of the Atlantic and had a bew volume out at the time he taught the class. The problem was that he was hired to find the good n everything and to never, ever say anything was bad. This is called having a supportive atmosphere in grad school :-( If MFA programs are like this, god knows how acceoting of bad poetry expensive non-degree courses are, or courses at the Y or at the public libraries are... I had taken some classes at Brown's Continuing Ed dep't prior to enrolling at Emerson, and if anything, they were more challenging. I actually chose Emerson because they were the only place that would let me start in January. But the program is really pretty good in the sense that it is big and they offer a lot of different classes. The fiction class I was terrible at was a really good, challenging class. It was on the short short story. Unfortunately I have zero talent for that and was also medicated in a way which somewhat precluded creativity... I was too afraid of bombing out of grad school again if I ended up at a super competetive place, and was also attempting to switch from having been a math PhD student to an MFA in Creative Writing, with a big gap in the middle, so it wasn't clear where I'd get accepted. Because I didn't want to reveal my personal situation in my writ8ing sample, I sent them a review I did on A. R. Ammons's book "Glare" which ended up not getting published because I liked the book and the editor of the online journal I was writing for didn't. Millie -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Damian Judge Rollison Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 1:17 AM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: "New" Poet Where does mass-culture poetry come from? Is it a half-digested imitation of "official verse culture" workshop poetry? Does it come out of what people read in grade school? School probably has a bigger influence than OVC, since I doubt Mattie Stepanek, or Jewel, or Henry Rollins or whatever, read much in the way of Ploughshares and Grand Street and Paris Review -- but what I think it really comes out of is the "other tradition" of amateur versifying that lots of people plugged into as adolescents and some continued into adulthood, with no real ambition to be more than amateurs. It's like a kind of folk art, and the standards for success are different than in OVC or the classics. The practice is represented now by tons of websites (www.poetry.com is the motherlode). This kind of poetry goes on (scads of it really) under the radar of academics and published poets, having nothing really to do with that culture -- it's the poetry of somebody who did well in a creative writing class once, or, to be less cynical, somebody who gets private satisfaction from modest practice of the craft (and more power to them as long as I don't have to read it). The web is a good place to suss it out, lots of "journals" that exist solely for the benefit of the writers who get published in them, not far off from the personal website -- "here's some pictures of my dog, and here's some poems I wrote about snorkling". But it's interesting -- what does *that* subculture want from art? One thing it definitely wants is not to have to know a whole lot about poetry (technique, tradition, what's cool) in order to write it and get a little aesthetic buzz, be part of a little (very unofficial) verse culture, feel like an Artist (because we're all Artists, deep down, aren't we? I mean, Deepak Chopra says so). And so that's why Mattie Stepanek is on Oprah -- because everybody knows about that kind of thing anyway, knows somebody who writes "a little poetry", wouldn't know Paris Review (not to mention EPC) if it hit them in the ass and doesn't care either, and this is just the kind of poetry they like: easy to understand, sentimental, chicken soup for the soul. Something almost anybody could do -- but by some standards a skill anybody with gumption can learn is the best kind (embroidery, auto body repair, poetry). I think what bothers me about Oprah's love affair with the written word is that it commodifies the practice of amateurs. They were always there and they didn't need Oprah until she convinced them they did. -- Damian <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< damian judge rollison department of english/ institute for advanced technology in the humanities university of virginia djr4r@virginia.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 13:57:38 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? poem in diguise MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jeffrey Etal.. In a way by a poem being (apparently) "not a poem" with Asbery's flat voice and the cues or clues being more and more enigmatic might paradoxically heighten its "uncertainty-as-to-what-kind-of-writing-this-is" and with it becoming always less certain what is poetry or when poetry is poetry or art or music or prose or dull Jacksonian politics (as you say a good ploy for contrast etc) but that uncertainty and the greater "obfuscating" of the clues could lead to a poetry hich even before it gets to be read is already so irritating complex paradoxical two-faced three-faced multi-Janused multi-methodamediacal multi-everything could be aything wait a minute that was a line - or was it? - gome - and the uncertainty the chabging the evr changing the shapes the colours sounds many many voices the big soup of begins and ends and the dark smiles the sudden attack the flame the bright the the flicker the night the lack or the skite: or just plain old words and there's another gap: why? does it do anything for you (he, she, we) what's this? who's ... who's calling to who: is it messages in bottles like Celan: or the "deep statements" it may depend on disguise: then out it comes a single phrase hidden in a 100,000 page novel: or text or cyber thing Thing: a single thing to remember: and how much do we remember....I like Grominger's idea of a field of play abit of mischief: a bit of malice: malicious delicious malice...spelling eras an all it all going into the ont the onto the onto the great (concrete) cyber sexual semantic psychosocial slosher: innovation and instant replay battling it out with abzolute determintaion: robert frost battles Pat Rehm or Bruce Andrews...in reality what's reality is your reality my reality and who's talkin to who whom. to what room did you take the broom...why are we here? alice in malice land: REPETITION IS TRUTH you must believe me. wht's next what's for dinner (tea) the COMEDIAN with a letter E what good can we not do die (this is fun) its got to be fun an d a bi t ov perspiration................................................................ ........... Dikinsinian + Shift = Dickenisian The Y axis. Infinite dimensions: Romance at K-Mart lately I;ve been bothered by fleas and confess to using BLACK FLAG to (really?) deplete the OZONE layer in (an ) (I've just inserted this "an") [but I had to tap the INSERT button to de-INSERT mode it which I'd done ACCIDENTALLY callooh callay which INSERT had nothing to do with me inserting] [interesting word that, insert: sounds like advert, or dirt, or sex] attempt to get comfotable: i wonder how bin Laden eats: I;ve been thinking about the way important people eat or people who seem very serious eat: we are just big electronic insects netting on the internet: boom. Its an interesting discussion. You;re welcome to join in. I ve invited everyone in the universe Crotons as well and all and the Plutons.....and all the nice people.....and HEAPS of horrible people and some quite ordinary people Regards, Richard.. (OK THAT wasnt very well disguised, but maybe it was a poem (s) ) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Jullich" To: Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2001 9:55 AM Subject: how do i know i'm having a poem in cyberspace? > --- In webartery@y..., komninos zervos > wrote: > > i need help. > > Komninos, > > If you know how to recognize printed poetry ("a visual > pattern or arrangement, . line lengths, . indentations > from the left margin"), you're doing a better than a > lot of critics and the editors who get it into print! > :) > > George Butterick, in his introduction to Charles > Olson's ~Maximus Poems,~ (Butterich did the posthumous > redaction) says that it was very difficult to decide > whether many pieces of paper were fragments of poetry > or were prose ~notes~ that Olson had made to himself. > And hence not included in the volume. > > Or F.A.O. Matthiessen, the critic perhaps > single-handedly most responsible for getting Melville > and the American Transcendentalists into the canon. He > has an essay where he's discussing Walt Whitman and, > in making a point, he presents what we take to be > unmistakably Whitman's lines, the long lineation, and > even the diction and tone. Matthiessen's curious > "trick", next, was to ~"reveal"~ that what was just > read was prose by Thoreau, re-lineated by Matthiessen > > The problem with the print cues you're talking about > is that there's a whole bibliography of 20th/21st > cent. poetry that is made up entirely of pre-existing > prose imported over into lineation: the John Adams > Cantos of Pound's, ~beautiful~ poems by Ronald Johnson > (who also did "concrete" poetry), etc., etc. (The > Cantos' Adams material can be excruciatingly prosaic, > and that may even have been Pound's point: to set up > a polyphony between the "sublime" lines of his own > composition > and the raw American Founding Fathers language.) > > ~Has~ prose "become" poetry by being transferred over > into a poetry frame and re-lineated? Is it no longer > prose, although letter-for-letter identical, once > those spacings have been added? > > > And you're leaving out prose poems. > > > > The in-person cues ("a spotlit area; a microphone; > chairs arranged in a room pointing towards the > performance area; a person holding an opened book or > papers") are basically the same cues used for stand-up > > comedians (and the difference there becomes even > vaguer in "Slam" poetry settings, where getting a > laugh [audible audience reaction] is a sign that the > poem is working > > How do those in-person "stimuli" differ from the > set-up for a lecture? > > > > As far as the phonological ("the poet's projected > voice (not normal speaking voice)"), in New York City, > at least, part of John Ashbery's widespread influence > is the famously flat, unaffected, and quotidian voice > he reads in. There are still semi-incantorial poets > who appear here, certainly, but ~most,~ I'd say, have > borrowed Ashbery's style of dry, undramatic reading, > normal speaking voice. No phonological change of tone. > > > > I'm not saying that the cues aren't factors. What I'm > responding to is any assumption, in preceding on to > the "challenge" of web poetry, that real world poetry > is already a done deal, clearly recognizable and > solved. > > On web especially, but in general, remember: those > cues pretty much ~always~ follow after an a priori > "announcement" or declaration of some sort that what > you're about to read/hear is poetry (a Dewey decimal > number, a Poetry section in a book store, the flyer > for the event, an introduction by the series curator > that says "PN's poetry has appeared in . . ."): > meta-. On web, the categorization ("key word") may be > even stronger. > > > If none of those cues are definitive, sufficient, or > conclusive to poem-ify text (as I think you'll > discover on re-examination), then they may operate > only by ~overdetermination.~ (It takes two points to > demarcate a line; three points along the same line are > overdetermination.) > > > I hope this helps. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send your FREE holiday greetings online! > http://greetings.yahoo.com > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 17:25:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: periodic notice, etc. - alan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII (last one of these sent out in September) Internet Philosophy and Psychology - -05/01/02 My recent work has been dealing with sexuality, terror, death, windows onto worlds, the confluence of subtropical nature with subsumption neural architectures. In Miami, my job has been terminated, the new media line cancelled, the track itself eliminated. I contain my frustration, writing under the sign of the repressed. Below is the usual intro: This is a somewhat periodic notice describing my Internet Text, available on the Net, and sent in the form of texts to various lists. The URL is: http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/ which is partially mirrored at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html. (The first site includes some graphics, dhtml, The Case of the Real, etc.) The changing nature of the email lists, Cybermind and Wryting, to which the texts are sent individually, hides the full body of the work; readers may not be aware of the continuity among them. The writing may appear fragmented, created piecemeal, splintered from a non-existent whole. On my end, the whole is evident, the texts extended into the lists, partial or transitional objects. So this (periodic) notice is an attempt to recuperate the work as total- ity, restrain its diaphanous existence. Below is an updated introduction. ----- The "Internet Text" currently constitutes around 100 files, or 5000 print- ed pages. It began in 1994, and has continued as an extended meditation on cyberspace, expanding into 'wild theory' and literatures. Almost all of the text is in the form of short- or long-waves. The former are the individual sections, written in a variety of styles, at times referencing other writers/theorists. The sections are interrelated; on occasion emanations are used, avatars of philosophical or psychological import. These also create and problematize narrative substructures within the work as a whole. Such are Susan Graham, Julu, Alan, Jennifer, Azure, and Nikuko in particular. The long-waves are fuzzy thematics bearing on such issues as death, sex, virtual embodiment, the "granularity of the real," physical reality, com- puter languages, and protocols. The waves weave throughout the text; the resulting splits and convergences owe something to phenomenology, program- ming, deconstruction, linguistics, philosophy and prehistory, as well as the domains of online worlds in relation to everyday realities. Overall, I'm concerned with virtual-real subjectivity and its manifesta- tions. I continue working on a cdrom of the last eight years of my work (Archive); I also additional video materials, created with Azure Carter and Foofwa d'Imobilite, on two cdroms, Baal and Parables. I've worked on a series of codeworks and political pieces, as well as Asteroids, a group of videos based on 3d modeling of spatial objects and fly-byes. Finally, I've recently completed two cdrom collections of materials, Miami and Voyage. I have used MUDS, MOOS, talkers, perl, d/html, qbasic, linux, emacs, vi, CuSeeMe, etc., my work tending towards embodied writing, texts which act and engage beyond traditional reading practices. Some of these emerge out of performative language - soft-tech such as computer programs which _do_ things; some emerge out of interferences with these programs, or conversa- tions using internet applications that are activated one way or another. And some of the work stems from collaboration, particularly video, sound, and flash pieces. There is no binarism in the texts, no series of definitive statements. Virtuality is considered beyond the text- and web-scapes prevalent now. The various issues of embodiment that will arrive with full-real VR are already in embryonic existence, permitting the theorizing of present and future sites, "spaces," nodes, and modalities of body/speech/community. It may be difficult to enter the texts for the first time. The Case of the Real is a sustained work and possible introduction. It is also helpful to read the first file, Net1.txt, and/or to look at the latest files (lq, lr) as well. Skip around. The Index works only for the earlier files; you can look up topics and then do a search on the file listed. The texts may be distributed in any medium; please credit me. I would ap- preciate in return any comments you may have. For information on the availability of cdroms containing the text and other materials (graphics, video, sound, articles, books), see the appen- ded notice below. You can find my collaborative projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm and my conference activities at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk - both as a result of my virtual writer-in-residence with the Trace online writing community. See also: Being on Line, Net Subjectivity (anthology), Lusitania, 1997 New Observations Magazine #120 (anthology), Cultures of Cyberspace, 1998 The Case of the Real, Pote and Poets Press, 1998 Jennifer, Nominative Press Collective, 1997 Alan Sondheim - Miami cellphone (voicemail) 305-610-5620 Miami phone (no voicemail) 305-668-5303 email sondheim@panix.com Home address: 4600 SW 67th Avenue, Apartment 252, Miami, FL, 33155 (This address is good through 4/15/2002.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CDROM Offering: Alan Sondheim : Collected and Newly-Released Work: All of the following include video/text/sound (except Asteroids - only video - and Turn/Cray - only sound); Archive 4.1 or later has the entire Internet Text to date - over 4500 pages! There are 7 cdroms for sale; price includes shipping costs. Any ONE cd-rom for $ 15; TWO for $ 25; THREE for $ 31. FOUR for $37, $5 each for any over FOUR. Special $53 for all eight! What's Available: Archive 4.1: This includes all the texts from 1994- present, a number of older articles, several books, a great number of images, some short video, etc. Archive is continuously updated. There is also sound-work and some programming. I think of this as the "basic" cd-rom; if you have an earlier copy, you might want to update. Et: This is the most recent cd-rom, with almost all of the video/sound/ imagework that has been described on the lists - plus more. r- if not x- rated. Much of this deals with the relation between sexuality and terror, as well as fascinated/fetishization - with Azure Carter. Some of the most intense pieces we've done. Voyage: Finished before Et, a number of video and image works, as well as sound/music pieces - with Azure Carter. Languor and exhibitionism on the way out of New York. Turn/Cray: Continuous/stringent machine soundwork, 56 minute .wav file. Miami: Finished before moving to Florida, a number of sound, image, and video pieces. Despair, existentialism, sex, power-land. With Azure Carter. Parables: Dance, Foofwa d'Imobilite, texts and sound by Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, a series of short videos (plus text) taken from The Parables of Nikuko. Between conceptual dance and body work / mesmeric movement. Baal: Foofwa d'Imobilite, Azure Carter, Alan Sondheim, several videos of sexuality, the problematic of ballet, and signs. r- or x- rated. Asteroids: A number of short silent videoworks - camera moving through 3d "asteroids" - no sound. Special: All 8: $53. Please note there is some overlap (not much) among the disks. =================== Please send cash, money order, or check to: Alan Sondheim 4600 SW 67 Avenue, Apartment 252 Miami, Florida, 33155 ======================================== ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 20:48:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: Watch Your Language In-Reply-To: <69.1f595681.29537a93@aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I agree, personally, that any intersection between poetry & popular culture bears watching, and not necessarily with a glare. Further, I agree that in the spirit of "On the Pumice of Morons," the revisions of Little Nell, typo, I mean Mattie's poem have been more interesting TO ME than the original poem. Which is terrible. Oh, wait, that word is "trite," isn't it? Okay: I'll see my own "terrible" and raise myself "barfy." Personally, being both physically disabled (thankfully, at the moment not so badly that you'd notice unless you deliberately watched my gait) and five kinds of certifiable nutbar, I don't want people to look at my poem and go, "Awww, poor wittle cripple." Don't lay on me the burden of being some saintly fucking Tiny Tim. If my poem sucks, tell me it sucks. Della Reese does not live in my house. Signed, Crippled, Crazy Godless Heathen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 21:43:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Birth and Tomb MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Birth and Tomb Searched the web for "Alan Sondheim". Results 1 - 10 of about 4,160. Search took 0.10 seconds. See www.google.com. I take my measurement. I exclude "Alan Myouka Sondheim". I exclude "Alan Jennifer Sondheim". I exclude "Alan Jenn Sondheim". I take my temperature. I take the temperature of my obsession. I, I, I. For several days I have ranged above 4,000: 4,140 - 4,200. I enter the portal trembling. I enter the gateway. I enter the hated name. I enter it all within quotations: Let there be no doubt. "Alan Sondheim". This grabs site and citation. This grabs text and image. This is an archaeology of the real, the true, the fabricated. This is an archaeology of taint, of plagiarism, of the problematic. It spreads like a skein or membrane, like a stain. It spreads like a spider, an uncomfortable residue. I take my temperature. It holds at 4,160. I indulge my addiction. I indulge my obsessive-compulsive behavior. Trembling, I enter the portal: Searched the web for "Alan Sondheim". Results 1 - 10 of about 4,170. Search took 0.10 seconds. A gain of 10. Trembling, I leave it... _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 03:54:12 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "New" Poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Criticism is tricky: educators are right to encourage people and provide a situation as much as possible where people feel good about themselves: but if one is doing poetry eg it is probably good to give honest but detailed comments where those comments are expected. As a person approaches adulthood (altho one is still sensitive about one's own work) a criticism can be helpful; its the way its put. I remember my father teaching me water colour technique when I was about 9 or 10, now he was convinced that I had what he called "a marvellous colour sense" whereas when I painted I simly put a colour here another ther more or less as I remembered things were - but that wasnt too bad but it embarrassed me how he went around saying how good an artist I was (would be), but he taught me how to put blues in the distance, green in the fore-ground etc, have a centre, balance, how to give a feeling of light (I suppose he was teaching me his own way of painting as he painted after Turner and others like that ) but the criticism came in the form of suggestions: I remember working as a tewchnitian and when I made an error that was matter-of-factly pointed out by my boss (without the sarcasm or abuse that a lot of foreman reserve for those under them) but I received sufficient support for acheivements: thats a good process ... its very hard to deal with this question as the problem for a sensitive teacher is "what is good poetry?" and you might think you know, but do you (or does one?) it's problematic: the creative writing schools etc maybe are doing the best thing by not criticising in the "this is better than that etc sense" and rather getting the students "into action" showing them this idea: "let's try this" judgements and negativity are probably superfluous: an example is your own appreciation of Ammons - who is a poet i like altho I havent read him for a time - and of course its your or (one's, the individual's) opinion: but once a poem is published its a fact of life that there simpply ARE critics out there: the work of building a person needs to have been done both by that person and parents and so on before they are criticised....its problematic: but remember that by the time somebody gets so much praise there on Opprah or whatever its very different: but I think that we do feel very strongly about things such as our own poetry... I have to admit that when it comes to that I am still very nervous when I read in public: this means that I am scared of criticism or disapproval which is probably a hang over from my school days when people were "dumb" or "morons" and people got prizes and "failed" certificates or athletics eg School Cert which has now been done away with was a big bogey for many children, and hence the approval, instead of coming from within the individual, comes from outside: which is bad news because if one is dependent on external approval one collapses (or may collapse) when that approbation is removed.....I just got beaten in a close chess game and it feels bad: I hate losing! but the answer to that is: how long am I to remain upset over that when noboddy else cares and remaining depressed about a "failure" actually limits one's abilities to continue in some other endeavour?..its a paradox: to get strong inside oneself one has to expereince so-called "failure" and even court it and ride over and through it: as rejection, criticism etc are all constant but in developing that strength in ourselves or others we need to also give as many positive messages as possible. Maybe the teachers on a creative writing programme should encourage experimentation and effort while providing examples of a range of other writers: some criticism of technique toward a particular end if approriate:but get away from the judgement of the end product.....if people are motivated to invent or create then they will find their own way eventually; in a sense all poetry IS good as long as the creator of the poem or work feels good in the process of creation. That's what matters: to feel good about what one is doing while doing it: even better to be 'passionate' and driven and maybe 'obssessed'..and so on... I think however that the Opprah's of this world play on the weaknesses of people who have because of whatever events in their lives and their own make-up are unhappy inside themselves: as some one said "she likes sad" ... but if she gives positive messages that's good: the trouble is that the world TV film etc is so artificial and full of phonies that my advice to the parents would be to keep their boy well away from any media exposure. Regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Millie Niss" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 4:33 PM Subject: Re: "New" Poet > I think part of the problem is that at all levels, it is considered to be > some kind of crime to impose values from above. I was in an MFA prgram > (Emerson College) which was not that bad. I did nonfiction and poetry for > two semesters and one semester of fiction. I was hosrrible at fiction, and > got comments from the teacher to that effect. She would only give A's if it > were publishable. In nonfiction, I did well, but got a lot of criticism,, > and _some_ people did badly. > > However in POETRY, there's this idea that you can't judge someone's > inspiration (or some such nonsense) and EVERYONR did well, regardless of > whether they wrote brilliantly or were the worst poet imaginable. (One > person was the worst poet imaginable. I cannot quote but I can tell you > that she distributed her poems on various shades of pink and lavender paper, > in a nonstandard font...) The problem was not that the teacher was > incompetent; he is the poetry editor of the Atlantic and had a bew volume > out at the time he taught the class. The problem was that he was hired to > find the good n everything and to never, ever say anything was bad. This is > called having a supportive atmosphere in grad school :-( > > If MFA programs are like this, god knows how acceoting of bad poetry > expensive non-degree courses are, or courses at the Y or at the public > libraries are... I had taken some classes at Brown's Continuing Ed dep't > prior to enrolling at Emerson, and if anything, they were more challenging. > > I actually chose Emerson because they were the only place that would let me > start in January. But the program is really pretty good in the sense that > it is big and they offer a lot of different classes. The fiction class I > was terrible at was a really good, challenging class. It was on the short > short story. Unfortunately I have zero talent for that and was also > medicated in a way which somewhat precluded creativity... I was too afraid > of bombing out of grad school again if I ended up at a super competetive > place, and was also attempting to switch from having been a math PhD student > to an MFA in Creative Writing, with a big gap in the middle, so it wasn't > clear where I'd get accepted. Because I didn't want to reveal my personal > situation in my writ8ing sample, I sent them a review I did on A. R. > Ammons's book "Glare" which ended up not getting published because I liked > the book and the editor of the online journal I was writing for didn't. > > Millie > > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Damian Judge > Rollison > Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 1:17 AM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: Re: "New" Poet > > > Where does mass-culture poetry come from? Is it a > half-digested imitation of "official verse culture" > workshop poetry? Does it come out of what people read in > grade school? School probably has a bigger influence than > OVC, since I doubt Mattie Stepanek, or Jewel, or Henry > Rollins or whatever, read much in the way of Ploughshares > and Grand Street and Paris Review -- but what I think it > really comes out of is the "other tradition" of amateur > versifying that lots of people plugged into as adolescents > and some continued into adulthood, with no real ambition to > be more than amateurs. It's like a kind of folk art, and > the standards for success are different than in OVC or the > classics. The practice is represented now by tons of > websites (www.poetry.com is the motherlode). > > This kind of poetry goes on (scads of it really) under the > radar of academics and published poets, having nothing > really to do with that culture -- it's the poetry of > somebody who did well in a creative writing class once, > or, to be less cynical, somebody who gets private > satisfaction from modest practice of the craft (and more > power to them as long as I don't have to read it). The web > is a good place to suss it out, lots of "journals" > that exist solely for the benefit of the writers who get > published in them, not far off from the personal website -- > "here's some pictures of my dog, and here's some poems I > wrote about snorkling". But it's interesting -- what does > *that* subculture want from art? One thing it definitely > wants is not to have to know a whole lot about poetry > (technique, tradition, what's cool) in order to write it > and get a little aesthetic buzz, be part of a little (very > unofficial) verse culture, feel like an Artist (because > we're all Artists, deep down, aren't we? I mean, Deepak > Chopra says so). And so that's why Mattie Stepanek is on > Oprah -- because everybody knows about that kind of thing > anyway, knows somebody who writes "a little poetry", > wouldn't know Paris Review (not to mention EPC) if it hit > them in the ass and doesn't care either, and this is just > the kind of poetry they like: easy to understand, > sentimental, chicken soup for the soul. Something almost > anybody could do -- but by some standards a skill anybody > with gumption can learn is the best kind (embroidery, auto > body repair, poetry). > > I think what bothers me about Oprah's love affair with the > written word is that it commodifies the practice of > amateurs. They were always there and they didn't need Oprah > until she convinced them they did. > > -- Damian > > > > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > damian judge rollison > department of english/ > institute for advanced > technology in the > humanities > university of virginia > djr4r@virginia.edu > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 20:10:08 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: "New" Poet / "values" [Niss] In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Millie, About your response viz. "quality" (points excerpted below)/"can't judge ... brilliantly/worst poet imaginable"--- and to conflate that with your other thread abt. Ashbery/Merrill--- John Ashbery had the reputation for being the most ~generous~ poet anyone would ever meet. (Harry Mathews brought out that obvious characteristic of John Ashbery's, in an interview I did with Mathews in 1988.) You couldn't show John Ashbery a poem he wouldn't like, wouldn't find some good in. And if he ~a priori~ found anything likeable/attractive about the person, the poem was a shoe-in. Any student of his, anyone who encountered him must've discovered this, I think: there would be a single line he'd pull out, a single ~word~ ... ("It made me think how many times I read the word 'the' and yet never tire of seeing it"!) John Ashbery has even said, in interviews, that given a student who writes in a style he personally doesn't follow or espouse, such as Confessionalism, he supported the stud. in trying to write "better" Confessionalist poems. There are people, Millie, about whom it's proverbially cooed, "He never said an unkind word about anyone." It's not a bad thing to be approving, encouraging, and nurturing, ---especially where the students are novices. Consider: the closer to an "ideal" any writer approaches embodying (the case with John Ashbery, who is living paragon to whole generations of imitators and admirers), the further that writer ~falls short of~ a Still-Unattainable that's envisioned. (Another John Ashbery interview where he said Wallace Stevens used to scare him, because he realizes he'd never be able to write like that, at that calibre.) If you're a James Joyce scholar, ~what's the point~ in even discussing or commenting upon anyone else's writing, since, on some level, you know that the entire XXth century (~pace~ Pynchon, et al.) never did/will never reach that level of "command," architecture, diction. Everybody's a shrimp, when there are giants in the earth. Whatever mental list you can count off on your fingers --- don't give yourself too long or cheat --- of English language poets you can name from the ~pre-1900s~ millenium is probably about as many poets who are worth reading that the language produces, and ~at that frequency.~ But we know so many more contemporary poets than we remember past ones. The odds of any poem or poet being "supremely" worth your investment, on some sort of cosmic scale, are quite slim. (And we know only Modernists. What were the libraries full of early XXth cent. poetry that are never re-printed...? Should these people ~have never been born?~) So, the rest is just ~your temperament~ speaking, how ~you~ form judgments, whether you form judgments ~at all.~ As far as your Emerson teacher from Atlantic, pedagogically there is no evidence that "Spare the rod and spoil the child" works better in creative writing classes or MFAs programs. My education has ~closed me off~ to more poetry than it has opened me up to. Indoctrinated taste ~seals off~ our capacity to take in. How will red-pencilling a MS and writing "cliche'", "redundant", "trite", and all the other ~cliche'~ comments that creative writing teachers are indoctrinated to make, faster advance students toward some next stage, than encouraging them to believe there's some kernel of possibility that continued ~work~ (which takes place ~on their own,~ to the degree a writer can tolerate solitude) and guided reading will advance them toward? (In ~A Wild Salience,~ a student of Rae Armantrout's collated the marginal remarks that Armantrout made on poems of hers in a writing class that Armantrout taught.) I think it's long since overdue to place "good," "bad," "worst," "terrible," etc., permanently ~under erasure,~ banned, as terms--- not to enter into the sort of Flower Children relativism you're talking about but ~in order to see~ whether you/we can continue to make the same judgments with more illuminating terms. "good"/"bad" are ~universalized,~ the way you're using them, when, in fact, in separate cases different criteria are being exercised in the judgment. ("This poem isn't very good" = "This poem is using a limited, 4th grade reading level vocabulary of one- and two-syllable words, few more than five letters long"? = "This poem is using a florid, Ph.D. level vocabulary that forces me to check the dictionary every other word, if I am to follow any meaning, and *I don't like* being reminded of what I don't know"? = "This poem is embarassing frank about private matters and I'm uncomfortable having such hair-raising intimacies revealed to me"? = "This poem is Mister Spock Vulcan in its emotionless, impersonal neutrality and I believe it needs to be humanized on some level to have some appeal to any earthling" = "This poem is..."?) The "bad" poet you describe who wrote in Gigi and Kristen fonts on lavender and pink paper ~had a graphic impulse~ more like a painter or visual artist, and they might be more helpfully taught by being directed toward poetry, like --- whatever --- Apollinaire's calligrammes, Robert Grenier's caligraphic ink writing, Spencer Selby's collages, *WILLIAM BLAKE!*, etc., where that secondary impulse could be cultivated into fuller parity with the text. Someone --- I forget whom (Blake?) --- said: "There are no great poets in heaven." ---which I had to have explained to me by the commentator who quoted it: hierarchies of taste or importance are not ultimately leveling, a "superior" poem does not cancel out the appreciability of a "minor" poem --- and poems appreciated at different times for different reasons, in one case a sorrowful Celan miniature because your woundedness is seeking out its spokesperson, on another night Milton or Pound because you're more in touch with your multi-leveled complexity and a sense of history/mythology and need to be addressed from equally many planes, the next night a "saccharine" Elizabeth Barrett Browning love sonnet because ~you~ are lost in sentimentality and puppy love and at that hour can only understand the simplistic,... The pleasures of poetry are not homogeneous. I think there really needs to be more openness toward the determinants of transitory ~power~ that are influencing one's sense of "good"/"bad". Study of women's poetry written in America before the XXth century will be reduced to --- whom? --- a teacupful of two or three poets, at best, unless the reader can transcend prejudices and unreceptiveness around rhyme, meter, and sentimentality. Annie Finch, whose project in other respects I sometimes diverge from, was quite pioneering and recuperative in linking the resurgence of "formalism" to pre-Modernist women's poetry,--- so that by again reacquiring the lost ~capacity~ to read buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM "June"/"moon" poetry "breathes life into" half the population of past poetry. Your pink and lavender paper poet is much closer and ready for web publication, where graphics matter more, than a pure 12 pt. Times Roman font poet. P.S. James Merrill's influence is as strong or even more widespread than John Ashbery's: you're not considering the counter-reformation of New Formalism, to which Merrill represents a formalist torchbearer. ------------------------------------------------------- --- Millie Niss wrote: > I think part of the problem is that at all levels, it is considered to be some kind of crime to impose values from above. > However in POETRY, there's this idea that you can't judge someone's inspiration (or some such nonsense) and EVERYONR did well, regardless of whether they wrote brilliantly or were the worst poet imaginable. > The problem was not that the teacher was incompetent; he is the poetry editor of the Atlantic and had a bew volume out at the time he taught the class. The problem was that he was hired to find the good n everything and to never, ever say anything was bad. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 18:38:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: charles alexander Subject: address Comments: To: perelman , peterganick , phil , POG , poproj , ppplist , RaeA100900 , raydipalma , rdupless , ringer1 , robertahoward , ron_silliman , RT5LE9 , rtavenner , s-braman , sclay , scope , sesshu , sikelianos , skroupa , SloanMM , sloanmm_1 , smsfaz , SSSCHAEFER , Steve_Hahn , stevemccaffery , stevenkehoe , subpoetics-l , susandick MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Dear Friends: =20 Please keep using the address chax@theriver.com for me for at least awhil= e. I'm trying to find a way or ways not to have to switch entirely over t= o the chaxpress@msn.com, if at all possible. =20 thanks, =20 charles alexander chax pressGet more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://exp= lorer.msn.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 00:04:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: "The Gaga Films," by Jennifer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - "The Gaga Films," by Jennifer I went to the cinema on the tram down the hill. I often went this way for other reasons but wasn't sure where I was. I was in company of a couple of experimental filmmakers. They told me about the place. It was in a clap- board house remodeled as an underground film venue. It was $15 to get in. I only had $8 Canadian. I left and came back; I found $14 US. I hoped I could make up the difference. They were talking about "The Gaga" - the two films about "The Gaga" - and had I seen them? The films were the most politically astute of the century. "The Gaga" was also "La Gaga" and I hadn't seen them. I was missing so much. "The Gaga" wasn't playing that night. Interpretation "The Gaga" is the violent absurdity that drives late-capitalism. "The Gaga" has always existed, but was quiescent in traditional capitalism - it could never appear under hierarchy, but only interstitially in the Network. As the Network grew, through late-capitalism and postmodernity into terror, The Gaga appeared - first as a peripheral symptom, then increasingly as an engine driving the whole. The Gaga is a projection, perhaps derived from Cruickshank's 19th-century Locomotive - "They've gone loco" - images of the confluence of steam and imperial capital. The Gaga, like the Japanese Kappa, is a figure at once vulnerable and dangerous. It is vulnerable because it resides in the Network, a post-Situationist entity susceptible to major and minor illness or decay - through the strategic application of hacking and other disruptive techniques. The Gaga is utterly inhuman, nonhuman, inhumane; all of The Gaga films are in black-and-white, as if to indicate, from the mode of representation itself, the structural and nodal nature of The Gaga. The Gaga is most often described in these films by means of chalkboard lectures, diagrams in pencil, voice-overs, and talks. Computers and digital effects are rarely used; they are the centrifugal residue of The Gaga, incapable of anything more. It seems paradoxical that The Gaga both underlies the skein and is within it; the skein is its flesh and blood, and a computer repre- sentation would be nothing more than a desiccated and useless sample of its tissue. For it is clear that The Gaga is continually in process, that it participates in the quantum states known as superimpositions, that it is always extended beyond itself, non-boolean, gestural, genderless. A feminist professor appears in one of the films, delineating The Gaga, demonstrating its difference and distinction from a feminist fluidity that absorbs and gives, breaks down the transitive. She, like all other actors in these works, is defined as such - "a feminist professor" - in subtitles that also list "a working-class hero" - "a factory worker" - "a consumer" - even though an attempt is made, beyond analysis, to develop a romance - "a lover" - "another lover" - against the constant and broken, jump-cut description that constitutes the style of the films. The Gaga alone, like the Virgin of the Virgin Mary, like the sealed womb, is never described, always clothed in the Network. It is clear that The Gaga is part of the distribution of the films, that the audience, as in violent pornography, is implicated, just as The Gaga is implacable. The implacability is portrayed in terms of gray zones; the black-and-white occupies, for the most part, an uneasy middle ground, most of the time. There are never any "true" whites, "true" brightness, in the films; instead, starting from an upper middle gray, the films descend into murky darkness, as if they were reproduced several times over, from an earlier, and now lost, model. The result of all of this is a clear indication that we, ourselves, have lost the power of brilliance, of brightness, of that clear light permitting analysis; instead, our theoretical explanations begin in that gray area where language proliferates, cut off from the clarity of projection and representation. These explanations likewise descend into darkness, where they are part and parcel of the substance of the world, where they are within and without, suffused with The Gaga, from which, like the real weight of the curtain of iron, there is no escape. It is no wonder that both films are titled "The Gaga" as well; the resulting confusion in talk and analysis (some speak of "Gaga A," "Gaga B," "First and Second Gaga," etc.) only serves to reconfirm their internal direction. If there is any brilliance in the world, it is clear, it is to be found in the films themselves; nowhere else in culture is analysis so devastating, accurate, and beyond recall. The films are undated; the names of the participants involved are never given; even their origin remains, not a mystery, but simply unknown. Go see "The Gaga"; everything else falls, into place. _ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 23:37:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "new" poet In-Reply-To: <71EAF6EBA863D2119C4F0008C74CA78E03261644@PSI-MS1> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed well-said. Gene At 09:16 AM 12/21/01 -0600, you wrote: >Of course, it's obvious (and not really so subtle) that the >corporate-bureaucratic system has fixed on this kid as a quick way to make a >buck. I would think playing on the compassion of the general public as a >rather risky gamble, myself, but hey. However, just because they're playing >upon "our compassion" doesn't mean that compassion in itself is a bad thing. >I'm glad the corporations are mixed up with this kid--maybe it means they >might actually have to put their money where their mouths are and build >disabled-access to their buildings, or sponsor some scientific research into >his disease or something like that. > >I certainly don't mean we should all send him letters praising him as the >next Gertrude Stein, just because he's young and ill, but I wouldn't pass on >to any 11-year-old--healthy or not--the kind of "criticism" this kid's been >receiving on this list. I would rather see a critique of the corporate >system selling off his efforts, than raging at the person-process-poetry >him/itself. > >M > > > ---------- > > From: Fargas Laura > > Reply To: UB Poetics discussion group > > Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 7:50 PM > > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > > Subject: Re: "new" poet > > > > >>I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to > > operate > > outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. >> > > > > Eh? The corporate-bureaucratic system is what has printed > > ziggity-jillion copies of his book, is sending him around the country and > > exhibiting him on television, and generally relying upon the > > deep-heartedness of the people who are paying for his book. It is selling > > his courage and his effort to not merely endure but prevail. Corporations > > are subtler swine than you are crediting them with being -- someone in the > > corporate system wanted to print that book to make the kid happy, yes, but > > they were also gambling that your compassion would open your wallet. > > > > >>To show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because > > their > > poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be > > creatively > > irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." >> > > > > What kind of compassion are you recommending? To say his poems will > > last > > with Frost or Ashbery? Why bullshit this smart, brave kid? This is a > > little boy who has to have his lungs vacuumed every hour or two -- he > > deserves better. Whoever it was that said the rest of us should stand > > what > > we could write at age eleven against what he writes is fairer, and more to > > the point. Isn't enough to say, 'pretty good for eleven, not grown-up > > poetry?' > > > > Obviously he's only being published because he's gravely ill -- it's > > like > > the old crack comparing a woman doing something-or-other to a dog getting > > up > > on his hind legs and giving a speech-- the astonishment being not that the > > thing was done well, but that it was done at all. Having read a newspaper > > interview with him, I suspect the boy understands that perfectly well, > > too. > > One wishes him the luck of living to be older and writing better poems. > > > > Then he can sell 28 copies a year of his brilliant book of poems just > > like the rest of us. And the Jimmy Stewart or Jewel or gravely ill child > > of > > that era can go on to be the year's best selling poet. > > > > > > Laura Fargas > > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 22:42:59 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "K.Silem Mohammad" Subject: Re: Merrill / Ashbery Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Millie Niss writes: >[...]Ashbery is sometimes thought of >as a "difficult" poet, when he is in fact a relatively easy poet to read >and >enjoy since he uses simple enough language and doesn't allude to an >excessive amount of outside sources without which the poems can't be >understood. But therein lie the difficulties. With some poets, it seems as >if you have analyzed them (but maybe this is an illusion) when you have >provided glosses for obscure language, including, perhaps, references to >literary sources who used those words first or most famously, when you have >filled out all the references to mythology, when you have noticed that >there >are five or six words which all are part of the same "symbol" (like words >about sailing or words about trees or words about wood or whatever, and >then >you complete the symbol by stating the poem is comparing the governance of >the soul to sailing a galleon in the main). > >None of this is possible with Ashbery (nor is it possible with many current >poets). You can't generalize about symbols because each object tends to >appear only once. You can't find a narrative thread because any one verse >has a narrative feel to it [...] but the next verse or sentence seems to be >about different people in a different place. You can't break it into >several >strands where each strand tells a continuous story [...] You >can't interpret the narrative(s) as symbolic trips or dream-trips all >undertaken by the same person, because they are so clear and plain and just >don't seem dreamlike. There is no obscure language to gloss. The literary >allusions are rare and not too obscure or else they even announce >themselves >so you don't have to look them up. > >In other words, it seems like the Ashbery poem resists the kind of close >reading that one is taught to do in some places.... This helps to account for what makes Ashbery so popular among both "Us" and "Them" (we all know which particular Us we belong to, right?). As you say, his poetry resists the "find-the-major-symbols" school of analysis by refusing to supply coherent narratives, points of view, thematic focus, etc. But it does so in part by seeming to _invite_ that kind of analysis: because syntax, grammar, and that kind of thing is so often "normal," even "eloquent," in non-_Tennis Court Oath_ Ashbery, the uninitiated reader will at first invariably _attempt_ to read the poems for a conventional referential meaning. I know I did, anyway. For example, many of his poems have lots of water imagery, or sky imagery, or writing-poems imagery, etc. And in fact Ashbery continues to supply these kinds of temptations in ever-more complex forms to those determinedly traditional readers who have already learned his basic tricks but still want to lobby for his status as a "real" poet. Just look at at least half the Ashbery criticism out there, and you will see attempts at exactly what you were saying can't be done: readings that try to connect symbols, find cloaked narratives, establish a unified speaking subject, and so on. The first objection that springs to mind is that such readings are perverse, but they're really not--the poems are _asking_ to be treated that way. You could accuse the poems themselves for being critically perverse in setting up so many ingenious, perceptive critics. The most obvious example would be Harold Bloom, with his Romantic subjective-poet Ashbery, but you could say the same about John Shoptaw, Leslie Wolf, Fred Moramarco, Charles Altieri, even at times a devout avant-gardener like Marjorie Perloff. All these very intelligent critics in their various ways have set about to demonstrate Ashbery's suitability for inclusion within a system of canonization and commentary that uses very old-fashioned New-Critical modes of inquiry. Furthermore, as I've been suggesting, they frequently meet with a great deal of success, at least as far as they take their approaches, which is usually just far enough to stop before they have to take account of Ashbery's "trick": i.e., that the poems are only pretending to be those kinds of poems. (Actually, some of those critics probably acknowledge this, now that I think of it, so please nobody call me on the carpet.) But the paradox is that in order to pretend convincingly to be that kind of poem, it must ... well, _be_ that kind of poem. So for example, "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is on one level a poem of meditation about art, identity, etc., and as such is capable of sending the Harold Blooms and Helen Vendlers out there into paroxysms of ecstasy. On another level, however, it's a pastiche, a blank parody that short-circuits its stabs at profundity as soon as it makes them, in the _act_ of making them. This is even more the case in poems like "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" or just about anything he's written since 1990: these poems are like little facades set up in a ghost town, with little signs on them saying "(close-) read me." And when you try, you end up realizing that you've only been close-reading the sign saying to close-read, not the structure behind the sign. In this respect, Ashbery's poems are different from the other contemporary poetry you mention. You're right about those poems: regular close reading doesn't work with them. They're made with that futility in mind. Their little hanging signs say something like "Don't even bother trying, pal." Ashbery's, however, are like reversible jackets you can wear to either Iowa City or Buffalo. Kasey ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ K. Silem Mohammad Visiting Asst. Prof. of British & Anglophone Lit University of California Santa Cruz _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 13:22:22 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "New" Poet / "values" [Niss] Richard's Butt In MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To but in here again: I agree in principal with the gist of your comments Jeffrey: Ashbery (at least everything I;ve heard about him and the way he (and what he says)) in interviews makes me think him (if witty urbane and very sensitive) also a positive person: not one to make hurtful or harsh judgements: I dont know if it was editied but his "Reported Sightings" on art says nothing bad about anyone: and he has some very interesting and eclectic interests: John Clare's (prose especially);Charles Ives, Elliot Carter, Marvell, Raymond Roussell, the way he was reading Milton and then went to a movie about daffy duck with Frank O'Hara and dreamt Daffy was the devil: hence the very vital "Daffy Duck in Hollywood", the amazing ability to pick out Parmigianino's extraordinary painting, the surreal the lyrical and the quotidian modulated in his work, the sometimes quite amazing twists, the sense of ongoing ness, nowness, and so on....but Ashbery has been enormously written about: Merrill is a little more "normative" (if I can make a classification-generalisation)... And the concept of directing or encouraging people along lines they like is excellent: we all start with "trite" or common-a-garden poems - although some children -many- seem very creative: there are some extraordinary poems: in fact I remember when i was "getting back into poetry" about 1988 that my daughter brought home a painting with faces on titled "The Girl on the Faces" either a creative error or her way of seeing things any way I turned that into the beginning of a poem: "The girl on the faces is a thousand child." There I deliberately end-stopped the "child" and this was long before I;d heard of language poetry or much of any modern poetry.... However I'm a bit puzzled to your talk about shrimps and giants. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Jullich" To: Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 5:10 PM Subject: Re: "New" Poet / "values" [Niss] > Millie, > > About your response viz. "quality" (points excerpted > below)/"can't judge ... brilliantly/worst poet > imaginable"--- > > and to conflate that with your other thread abt. > Ashbery/Merrill--- > > > > John Ashbery had the reputation for being the most > ~generous~ poet anyone would ever meet. > > > (Harry Mathews brought out that obvious characteristic > of John Ashbery's, in an interview I did with Mathews > in 1988.) > > > You couldn't show John Ashbery a poem he wouldn't > like, wouldn't find some good in. > > And if he ~a priori~ found anything > likeable/attractive about the person, the poem was a > shoe-in. > > Any student of his, anyone who encountered him must've > discovered this, I think: there would be a single line > he'd pull out, a single ~word~ ... > > ("It made me think how many times I read the word > 'the' and yet never tire of seeing it"!) > > John Ashbery has even said, in interviews, that given > a student who writes in a style he personally doesn't > follow or espouse, such as Confessionalism, he > supported the stud. in trying to write "better" > Confessionalist poems. > > > There are people, Millie, about whom it's proverbially > cooed, "He never said an unkind word about anyone." > It's not a bad thing to be approving, encouraging, and > nurturing, ---especially where the students are > novices. > > Consider: the closer to an "ideal" any writer > approaches embodying (the case with John Ashbery, who > is living paragon to whole generations of imitators > and admirers), the further that writer ~falls short > of~ a Still-Unattainable that's envisioned. > > (Another John Ashbery interview where he said Wallace > Stevens used to scare him, because he realizes he'd > never be able to write like that, at that calibre.) > > > If you're a James Joyce scholar, ~what's the point~ in > even discussing or commenting upon anyone else's > writing, since, on some level, you know that the > entire XXth century (~pace~ Pynchon, et al.) never > did/will never reach that level of "command," > architecture, diction. > > Everybody's a shrimp, when there are giants in the > earth. > > Whatever mental list you can count off on your fingers > --- don't give yourself too long or cheat --- of > English language poets you can name from the > ~pre-1900s~ millenium is probably about as many poets > who are worth reading that the language produces, and > ~at that frequency.~ > > But we know so many more contemporary poets than we > remember past ones. > > The odds of any poem or poet being "supremely" worth > your investment, on some sort of cosmic scale, are > quite slim. > > (And we know only Modernists. What were the libraries > full of early XXth cent. poetry that are never > re-printed...? Should these people ~have never been > born?~) > > > So, the rest is just ~your temperament~ speaking, how > ~you~ form judgments, whether you form judgments ~at > all.~ > > As far as your Emerson teacher from Atlantic, > pedagogically there is no evidence that "Spare the rod > and spoil the child" works better in creative writing > classes or MFAs programs. > > My education has ~closed me off~ to more poetry than > it has opened me up to. Indoctrinated taste ~seals > off~ our capacity to take in. > > How will red-pencilling a MS and writing "cliche'", > "redundant", "trite", and all the other ~cliche'~ > comments that creative writing teachers are > indoctrinated to make, > > faster advance students toward some next stage, > > than encouraging them to believe there's some kernel > of possibility that continued ~work~ (which takes > place ~on their own,~ to the degree a writer can > tolerate solitude) and guided reading will advance > them toward? > > (In ~A Wild Salience,~ a student of Rae Armantrout's > collated the marginal remarks that Armantrout made on > poems of hers in a writing class that Armantrout > taught.) > > > I think it's long since overdue to place "good," > "bad," "worst," "terrible," etc., permanently ~under > erasure,~ banned, as terms--- not to enter into the > sort of Flower Children relativism you're talking > about but > > ~in order to see~ whether you/we can continue to make > the same judgments with more illuminating terms. > > > "good"/"bad" are ~universalized,~ the way you're using > them, when, in fact, in separate cases different > criteria are being exercised in the judgment. > > ("This poem isn't very good" = "This poem is using a > limited, 4th grade reading level vocabulary of one- > and two-syllable words, few more than five letters > long"? = "This poem is using a florid, Ph.D. level > vocabulary that forces me to check the dictionary > every other word, if I am to follow any meaning, and > *I don't like* being reminded of what I don't know"? = > "This poem is embarassing frank about private matters > and I'm uncomfortable having such hair-raising > intimacies revealed to me"? = "This poem is Mister > Spock Vulcan in its emotionless, impersonal neutrality > and I believe it needs to be humanized on some level > to have some appeal to any earthling" = "This poem > is..."?) > > The "bad" poet you describe who wrote in Gigi and > Kristen fonts on lavender and pink paper ~had a > graphic impulse~ more like a painter or visual artist, > > > and they might be more helpfully taught by being > directed toward poetry, like --- whatever --- > Apollinaire's calligrammes, Robert Grenier's > caligraphic ink writing, Spencer Selby's collages, > *WILLIAM BLAKE!*, etc., where that secondary impulse > could be cultivated into fuller parity with the text. > > Someone --- I forget whom (Blake?) --- said: > > "There are no great poets in heaven." > > ---which I had to have explained to me by the > commentator who quoted it: hierarchies of taste or > importance are not ultimately leveling, a "superior" > poem does not cancel out the appreciability of a > "minor" poem --- and poems appreciated at different > times for different reasons, in one case a sorrowful > Celan miniature because your woundedness is seeking > out its spokesperson, on another night Milton or Pound > because you're more in touch with your multi-leveled > complexity and a sense of history/mythology and need > to be addressed from equally many planes, the next > night a "saccharine" Elizabeth Barrett Browning love > sonnet because ~you~ are lost in sentimentality and > puppy love and at that hour can only understand the > simplistic,... > > The pleasures of poetry are not homogeneous. > > > I think there really needs to be more openness toward > the determinants of transitory ~power~ that are > influencing one's sense of "good"/"bad". > > Study of women's poetry written in America before the > XXth century will be reduced to --- whom? --- a > teacupful of two or three poets, at best, unless the > reader can transcend prejudices and unreceptiveness > around rhyme, meter, and sentimentality. > > Annie Finch, whose project in other respects I > sometimes diverge from, was quite pioneering and > recuperative in linking the resurgence of "formalism" > to pre-Modernist women's poetry,--- so that by again > reacquiring the lost ~capacity~ to read buh-BUM > buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM "June"/"moon" poetry "breathes > life into" half the population of past poetry. > > Your pink and lavender paper poet is much closer and > ready for web publication, where graphics matter more, > than a pure 12 pt. Times Roman font poet. > > > > > P.S. James Merrill's influence is as strong or even > more widespread than John Ashbery's: you're not > considering the counter-reformation of New Formalism, > to which Merrill represents a formalist torchbearer. > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > > --- Millie Niss wrote: > > I think part of the problem is that at all levels, > it is considered to be some kind of crime to impose > values from above. > > > However in POETRY, there's this idea that you can't > judge someone's inspiration (or some such nonsense) > and EVERYONR did well, regardless of whether they > wrote brilliantly or were the worst poet imaginable. > > > The problem was not that the teacher was > incompetent; he is the poetry editor of the Atlantic > and had a bew volume out at the time he taught the > class. The problem was that he was hired to find the > good n everything and to never, ever say anything was > bad. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send your FREE holiday greetings online! > http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 13:40:46 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: My Life Message to Bin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bin Laden seems to me like a prophet... a kind of modern Jesus Christ and he seems to talk poetically and enigmatically...a kind of gentle and langorous version of Che Guevara whose book (about him) i carried aroound and never read: I liked the idea of revolutionaries and revolutions especially as a 20, 21 year old...never got as far as going to Vietnam like the young man who joined the Al Qaeda...like Christ he (bin baby I mean) will probably inspire a cult which could even turn into a religion: not sure if I could become a Muslim but I would if Bush and Mr Wolf started a big campaign against Muslims and banned that religion...mind you I'm a loner I dont like joining things...just like the idea of big buildings crashing down and explosions but then I suppose its a left over from watching all those war movies ( from Amerika) in the 50s eg "The Battle of the River Plate" (wow one ship coped in the magazine and the whole ship blew up!) and "To Hell and Back" (with Eddie Murphy) and ones in which the Koreans (Koreans?) were always the evil slant-eyed ones we loved to see blasted heroically (heroically?) from the skies (they always flew Migs), and then those cowboy movies when we always all cheered as children when the cavalry arrived to save them from the frightening Red Indians, and there was always Pop Eye with his spinach and The Three Stooges... But do you think that old bin baby would be interested in me poetry? Anyway as I say i like the idea of bin Laden: maybe that's all he is, an idea...but I hope not: could you pass on my regards? Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Murat Nemet-Nejat" To: Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 7:26 PM Subject: Re: My Life > In a message dated 12/20/01 11:11:48 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > >Murat. Thank you. At last: but would you immediately shred it or read it > >or > > > >translate it to bin Laden to send that gentleman insane if he's NOT a > > > >computer generated graphic? Cheers, Richard. > > Richard, > > I would definitely read it and then send it to Bin Laden with a little note: > to a fellow artist ... > > Cheers. > > Murat ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 09:40:05 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mister Kazim Ali Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I want to say something about this, even though it may be simple reiteration. bear with me. I'll get it right. > but what I > think it > really comes out of is the "other tradition" of > amateur > versifying that lots of people plugged into as > adolescents Indeed. once I used to go to poetry workshops at the Clearfield Public Library, etc., finally I even taught one through a Community Education program...the Just Buffalo Literary Center does three open mic readings a month at which all kinds of poets and of all different skill levels and experiences read. and it doesn't really matter that many of them haven't read a lot of the excellent poetry being *written* in Buffalo. on the other hand, very few of those poets left the campus to go to the open mics. so there are several different Buffaloes, with not too much mixing...at least not while i was there. (having just left). (sad. i love Buffalo. under snow though it is.) > *that* subculture want from art? One thing it > definitely > wants is not to have to know a whole lot about > poetry > (technique, tradition, what's cool) in order to this is very true. i remember experiences fairly brutal resistence from my workshop students when i attempted to "teach" well anything really including traditional versification. > write it > and get a little aesthetic buzz, be part of a little > (very > unofficial) verse culture, feel like an Artist > (because > we're all Artists, deep down, aren't we? I mean, > Deepak > Chopra says so). well I am not sure if you are being sarcastic here or not. i think i am with Deepak Chopra. recently I've been driven to hysterical emotion (I am being quite serious) by Yoko Ono's music--not the cheesy protest songs or the Lennon-corrupted attempts at "pop" music, no I mean the full on Ono-weird moaning and wailing (specifically, if you are interested, the albums "Fly" and "Plastic Ono Band")--to me it is about an individual exploring all strange, unsettling, boring, cheesy, dissonant and fabulous qualities of her own individual voice. in fact, since this has been happening i have been having a very hard time listening to forms of music with regular time signatures and scales. odd. i'm not one hundred percent clear what all this has to do with the poetry discussion. oops. well, i knew this was going to get away from me. but i guess one thing Yoko actualizes is that everyone has a generative source they should be reaching for and developing. sort of regardless of the results. i admire the point you make re Oprah and commodity of verse. i think if Mattie's work--(indeed)--results in more people writing verse, doggerel, bad poetry, whatever you want to call it, that is okay with me. i think that is a positive move for a world in which people (past Sesame Street anyhow) are solidly alienated from the sources of their own creativity. we may discover a way to be less selfish. ===== "all histories are fabulous. ours stinks with genius." --Cleopatra Mathis, from _Guardian_, Sheep's Meadow Press __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 14:04:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: On Target, Off Target In-Reply-To: <000801c1899d$b75a3e20$4b63f30c@attbi.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Vernon, This is the point that I was hoping would come around. (wait that sounds snotty doesn't it) I shop'd the Walmart this year and it was great. The people there are great, looking up to see low brow as entertainment, yes, but these are the people, the mob. Now Ginsberg's triumph was to open the modern poem to them. As if I am not one ... But Yes there is a poem, Virginia. Now how could one get a poetry sponsorship or open reading in the market place? Would we be shunned like in Footloose and have an angry John Lithgow say it is anti Christian? Would we be forced to drink hemlock for teaching in the agora ??? I fine case for agoraphobia. I know I am sounding like John Dryden here, but how can we open the poem to everyone, and remove it from the day old bread section?? Best, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Vernon Frazer Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 4:32 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: On Target, Off Target Elizabeth Treadwell said she shops at Target. This year I did the bulk of my holiday shopping there, as well. I'm imagining this two-poet Target scenario expanding like a Nike ad, with numerous poets saying they shop there or voiceovers announcing "Even the avant-garde finds what it needs at Target." Now, if only they'd carry some serious literature or sponsor a poetry series... (dream on) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 11:43:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: michael amberwind Subject: Re: "New Poet" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Beethoven went deaf, Dante was blind, and according to rumour, so was Homer. There were no social programs for these people. They do not continue to be studied over the centuries because of their "special interest" status, but because of what they *said*. I think it is condescending to grant some sort of special dispensation based on disabilities, especially in literature, which is arguably one of the most level playing fields there is. It is not a question of of conforming to socially accepted norms. If a deaf poet puts on a performance for the deaf, they have conformed to a set of normalised expectations, namely those within the deaf community. We seem to have the idea that everyone can and should be able to do everything. There *are* things the handicapped cannot do. That's what *makes* them handicapped! Were I too lose my arms, legs, hearing and eyesight in the next five minutes, I would still expect that anything I write be judged against an "objective" standard. If I had to talk into a tape recorder, then so be it. Of course we are dealing with not art and aesthetics anymore, but political correctness. There is truth in what Harold Bloom calls "the literature of resentment". I prefer to think of it as an utter lack of commonsense. A poem may or may not be interesting in the context in which it was written, but that should not be the final criteria. >>Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:23:26 -0500 >>From: Millie Niss >>Subject: Re: "New" Poet >>You said I said: 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF AGE OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? OR CLASS? ETC.?) Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, again, I have to re-translate it: If the sick wish to advance the social assimilation of their fellow disabled, they should conform to socially accepted norms. Am I misrepresenting the thought? It's better for the disadvantaged or special caste to ~impersonate~ the privileged majorities, in order better to promote inclusion of their group? ------- You didn't misstate what I said but you lost the context, which was that "sadly" this is true. I also said that logically, if we wanted to prove that we aren't morons by writing poetry, we should only have to write the poetry average people who are not morons write, which generally isn't very good (to use a loaded term, of course). I think it is silly to make poetry-writing the center of a claim that disabled people are as worthy of respect or love or care as other people. All people are worthy of respect, etc., by virtue of being human, and there are certainly som ediability groups whoo can never write as good poetry as non-disabled folks (say people who are multiply handicapped and can neither move nor speak and are mentally retarded (one hopes these people have extremely sever mental deficiencies because if they are even conscious of existing it must be hellish)). A lot of times minority groups claim to have a culture of their own and want not to be judged by the standards of the majority. Perhaps a group very invested in this idea wouldn'ty want to compete in the field of poetry because it isn't their domain. Or they would have a poetry so different from ouirs that we couldn't understand it. Recently, disability groups have made use of the "we're different, not better or worse" idea. The Deaf (who demand the right to be capitalized) have done this the most, presumably because they share a language that non-Deaf people rarely if ever achieve fluency in. Deaf poetry does exist and it is incomprehensibe to non-Deaf people, although there are also productions which try to mix Deaf and hearing words, music, and dance. ===== ...I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. [from "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 15:59:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: travis ortiz Subject: Atelos is pleased to announce the publication of Garderner of Stars by Carla Harryman. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Gardener of Stars by Carla Harryman Atelos (www.atelos.org) is pleased to announce the publication on December 31, 2001 of Garderner of Stars by Carla Harryman. About the book: Carla Harryman describes Garderner of Stars as “an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex — all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question (“the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world’s current”) must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process of coming into being and falling into ruin. But this utopia must be understood too as the very language, the prose, that invents it. No contemporary writer has done more than Carla Harryman to tend and generate the possibilities of prose writing in English. Haunted by the future, Gardener of Stars is an extraordinarily moving, brilliantly visionary work. About the author: Carla Harryman was born in California and lived there until 1996. She now lives in Detroit, where she teaches Women’s Studies, Literature, and Creative Writing at Wayne State University. She was one of the founders and the principal playwright of the Bay Area’s Poets Theater, and a number of her theater works have been produced for the stage, with performances throughout the U.S. as well as in England. In addition to Gardener of Stars, other books by Harryman include two volumes of selected writings, There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn (City Lights 1995) and Animal Instincts: poetry, prose, and plays (This, 1989); a hybrid novel, The Words after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean Paul Sartre (O Books, 1999); and a book-length dramatic work, Memory Play (O Books, 1994). About the project: Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip’s Road. It is devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate poetry from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact. All the works published as part of the Atelos project are commissioned specifically for it, and each is involved in some way with crossing traditional genre boundaries, including, for example, those that would separate theory from practice, poetry from prose, essay from drama, the visual image from the verbal, the literary from the non-literary, and so forth. The Atelos project when complete will consist of 50 volumes; Gardener of Stars is volume 10. The project directors and editors are Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz; the director for production and design is Travis Ortiz; cover production and design is by Ree Katrak. Ordering information: Gardener of Stars may be ordered from Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1403; phone 510-524-1668 or toll-free 800-869-7553; e-mail: orders@spd.org. Title: Gardener of Stars Author: Carla Harryman Price: $12.95 Pages: 192 Publication Date: December 31, 2001 ISBN: 1-891190-10-5 Contact: Lyn Hejinian: 510-548-1817 Travis Ortiz: 415-863-1999 fax: 510-704-8350 Atelos PO Box 5814 Berkeley, CA 94705-0814 *** *** *** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 19:51:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: day after day (aegis of wisdom) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - day after day we go day after day now. the rest of the world is terror. this is no terror, not even the culling, the shattering of the thin shells of the crust. this is a moment to think about intelligence, the intelligence of the world, breaking out of the loop. this is the breaking out. . :this is the way the aging brain works. neurons skein, tangle, interlace, inter- weave. some die off. there are submerged strata absorbed by the other. the other is transformed into others. wisdom is the networks among the others. wisdom is the limestone, the submergence. wisdom is the marl gathered beneath the peat. there are large saw palmettos at chikeka. the brain is gathered among the confluence of life. the brain is self-reflecting, resonant, subsumption architecture. wisdom is the making-manifest of the network. wisdom is the culling of extraneity.:at chikeka, two men were fishing. we went through the hardwood hammock. a little girl took some mosquito-fish for her aquarium. watched the sawgrass. watched several killdeer. a turkey vulture landed in front of the car, flew around to the back. strangler figs everywhere. before that, oasis, back to the ibis rookery. there were heron mixed in. walked through the mudflats to the left of the runway. before that, back at shark valley. there were too many cars. back at chikeka a possum eating alligator eggs. on the way out the limestone showed. there were snake and crabholes everywhere. a huge flock of ibis, enormous, in big cypress. :anhinga:glossy ibis shrike tricolored heron green heron glossy ibis white ibis cormorant anhinga _ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 07:38:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: subrosa@SPEAKEASY.NET Subject: concrete: NW invite to send work Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain MIME-Version: 1.0 northwest concrete/visual poetry exhibit (oregon,washington,idaho,montana,vancouver) to coincide with seattle poetry festival 2002 send original/copies of 2-D, 3-D in related realm. "outsiders" need a NW theme or link if you wish it returned please include sufficient postage. any questions subrosa@speakeasy.net deadline 3/21/02 mail, disk, email nico vassilakis 3046 61st Ave SW seattle, wa 98116 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 12:15:58 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: Merrill / Ashbery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I agree in general with this analysis or actually I think Ashbery is very highly intelligent, creative and extremely well read and a llateral thinker. I think he just sits down, brain on fire, and writes: that's it! He's simply a genius like Mozart: he just writes it down. Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "K.Silem Mohammad" To: Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 7:42 PM Subject: Re: Merrill / Ashbery > Millie Niss writes: > > >[...]Ashbery is sometimes thought of > >as a "difficult" poet, when he is in fact a relatively easy poet to read > >and > >enjoy since he uses simple enough language and doesn't allude to an > >excessive amount of outside sources without which the poems can't be > >understood. But therein lie the difficulties. With some poets, it seems as > >if you have analyzed them (but maybe this is an illusion) when you have > >provided glosses for obscure language, including, perhaps, references to > >literary sources who used those words first or most famously, when you have > >filled out all the references to mythology, when you have noticed that > >there > >are five or six words which all are part of the same "symbol" (like words > >about sailing or words about trees or words about wood or whatever, and > >then > >you complete the symbol by stating the poem is comparing the governance of > >the soul to sailing a galleon in the main). > > > >None of this is possible with Ashbery (nor is it possible with many current > >poets). You can't generalize about symbols because each object tends to > >appear only once. You can't find a narrative thread because any one verse > >has a narrative feel to it [...] but the next verse or sentence seems to be > >about different people in a different place. You can't break it into > >several > >strands where each strand tells a continuous story [...] You > >can't interpret the narrative(s) as symbolic trips or dream-trips all > >undertaken by the same person, because they are so clear and plain and just > >don't seem dreamlike. There is no obscure language to gloss. The literary > >allusions are rare and not too obscure or else they even announce > >themselves > >so you don't have to look them up. > > > >In other words, it seems like the Ashbery poem resists the kind of close > >reading that one is taught to do in some places.... > > This helps to account for what makes Ashbery so popular among both "Us" and > "Them" (we all know which particular Us we belong to, right?). > > As you say, his poetry resists the "find-the-major-symbols" school of > analysis by refusing to supply coherent narratives, points of view, thematic > focus, etc. But it does so in part by seeming to _invite_ that kind of > analysis: because syntax, grammar, and that kind of thing is so often > "normal," even "eloquent," in non-_Tennis Court Oath_ Ashbery, the > uninitiated reader will at first invariably _attempt_ to read the poems for > a conventional referential meaning. I know I did, anyway. For example, > many of his poems have lots of water imagery, or sky imagery, or > writing-poems imagery, etc. And in fact Ashbery continues to supply these > kinds of temptations in ever-more complex forms to those determinedly > traditional readers who have already learned his basic tricks but still want > to lobby for his status as a "real" poet. > > Just look at at least half the Ashbery criticism out there, and you will see > attempts at exactly what you were saying can't be done: readings that try to > connect symbols, find cloaked narratives, establish a unified speaking > subject, and so on. The first objection that springs to mind is that such > readings are perverse, but they're really not--the poems are _asking_ to be > treated that way. You could accuse the poems themselves for being > critically perverse in setting up so many ingenious, perceptive critics. > The most obvious example would be Harold Bloom, with his Romantic > subjective-poet Ashbery, but you could say the same about John Shoptaw, > Leslie Wolf, Fred Moramarco, Charles Altieri, even at times a devout > avant-gardener like Marjorie Perloff. All these very intelligent critics in > their various ways have set about to demonstrate Ashbery's suitability for > inclusion within a system of canonization and commentary that uses very > old-fashioned New-Critical modes of inquiry. > > Furthermore, as I've been suggesting, they frequently meet with a great deal > of success, at least as far as they take their approaches, which is usually > just far enough to stop before they have to take account of Ashbery's > "trick": i.e., that the poems are only pretending to be those kinds of > poems. (Actually, some of those critics probably acknowledge this, now that > I think of it, so please nobody call me on the carpet.) > > But the paradox is that in order to pretend convincingly to be that kind of > poem, it must ... well, _be_ that kind of poem. So for example, "Self > Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is on one level a poem of meditation about art, > identity, etc., and as such is capable of sending the Harold Blooms and > Helen Vendlers out there into paroxysms of ecstasy. On another level, > however, it's a pastiche, a blank parody that short-circuits its stabs at > profundity as soon as it makes them, in the _act_ of making them. This is > even more the case in poems like "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" or just about > anything he's written since 1990: these poems are like little facades set up > in a ghost town, with little signs on them saying "(close-) read me." And > when you try, you end up realizing that you've only been close-reading the > sign saying to close-read, not the structure behind the sign. > > In this respect, Ashbery's poems are different from the other contemporary > poetry you mention. You're right about those poems: regular close reading > doesn't work with them. They're made with that futility in mind. Their > little hanging signs say something like "Don't even bother trying, pal." > Ashbery's, however, are like reversible jackets you can wear to either Iowa > City or Buffalo. > > Kasey > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > K. Silem Mohammad > Visiting Asst. Prof. of British & Anglophone Lit > University of California Santa Cruz > > > > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: > http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 07:30:21 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: Re: "new" poet MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I agree. Vernon ----- Original Message ----- From: "gene" To: Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 7:37 PM Subject: Re: "new" poet > well-said. > > Gene > > At 09:16 AM 12/21/01 -0600, you wrote: > >Of course, it's obvious (and not really so subtle) that the > >corporate-bureaucratic system has fixed on this kid as a quick way to make a > >buck. I would think playing on the compassion of the general public as a > >rather risky gamble, myself, but hey. However, just because they're playing > >upon "our compassion" doesn't mean that compassion in itself is a bad thing. > >I'm glad the corporations are mixed up with this kid--maybe it means they > >might actually have to put their money where their mouths are and build > >disabled-access to their buildings, or sponsor some scientific research into > >his disease or something like that. > > > >I certainly don't mean we should all send him letters praising him as the > >next Gertrude Stein, just because he's young and ill, but I wouldn't pass on > >to any 11-year-old--healthy or not--the kind of "criticism" this kid's been > >receiving on this list. I would rather see a critique of the corporate > >system selling off his efforts, than raging at the person-process-poetry > >him/itself. > > > >M > > > > > ---------- > > > From: Fargas Laura > > > Reply To: UB Poetics discussion group > > > Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 7:50 PM > > > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > > > Subject: Re: "new" poet > > > > > > >>I think to be compassionate towards this kid and his poetry is to > > > operate > > > outside the corporate-bureaucratic system of systematic heartlessness. >> > > > > > > Eh? The corporate-bureaucratic system is what has printed > > > ziggity-jillion copies of his book, is sending him around the country and > > > exhibiting him on television, and generally relying upon the > > > deep-heartedness of the people who are paying for his book. It is selling > > > his courage and his effort to not merely endure but prevail. Corporations > > > are subtler swine than you are crediting them with being -- someone in the > > > corporate system wanted to print that book to make the kid happy, yes, but > > > they were also gambling that your compassion would open your wallet. > > > > > > >>To show compassion towards those who "don't deserve it" (i.e., because > > > their > > > poem-product is "terrible"--a trite and overused word), is to be > > > creatively > > > irrational, which of course makes "life more difficult." >> > > > > > > What kind of compassion are you recommending? To say his poems will > > > last > > > with Frost or Ashbery? Why bullshit this smart, brave kid? This is a > > > little boy who has to have his lungs vacuumed every hour or two -- he > > > deserves better. Whoever it was that said the rest of us should stand > > > what > > > we could write at age eleven against what he writes is fairer, and more to > > > the point. Isn't enough to say, 'pretty good for eleven, not grown-up > > > poetry?' > > > > > > Obviously he's only being published because he's gravely ill -- it's > > > like > > > the old crack comparing a woman doing something-or-other to a dog getting > > > up > > > on his hind legs and giving a speech-- the astonishment being not that the > > > thing was done well, but that it was done at all. Having read a newspaper > > > interview with him, I suspect the boy understands that perfectly well, > > > too. > > > One wishes him the luck of living to be older and writing better poems. > > > > > > Then he can sell 28 copies a year of his brilliant book of poems just > > > like the rest of us. And the Jimmy Stewart or Jewel or gravely ill child > > > of > > > that era can go on to be the year's best selling poet. > > > > > > > > > Laura Fargas > > > > > > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 09:08:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "New" Poet In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Per his definition, Emily Dickinson was one of Damien's amateur poets. Gene At 10:33 PM 12/25/01 -0500, you wrote: >I think part of the problem is that at all levels, it is considered to be >some kind of crime to impose values from above. I was in an MFA prgram >(Emerson College) which was not that bad. I did nonfiction and poetry for >two semesters and one semester of fiction. I was hosrrible at fiction, and >got comments from the teacher to that effect. She would only give A's if it >were publishable. In nonfiction, I did well, but got a lot of criticism,, >and _some_ people did badly. > >However in POETRY, there's this idea that you can't judge someone's >inspiration (or some such nonsense) and EVERYONR did well, regardless of >whether they wrote brilliantly or were the worst poet imaginable. (One >person was the worst poet imaginable. I cannot quote but I can tell you >that she distributed her poems on various shades of pink and lavender paper, >in a nonstandard font...) The problem was not that the teacher was >incompetent; he is the poetry editor of the Atlantic and had a bew volume >out at the time he taught the class. The problem was that he was hired to >find the good n everything and to never, ever say anything was bad. This is >called having a supportive atmosphere in grad school :-( > >If MFA programs are like this, god knows how acceoting of bad poetry >expensive non-degree courses are, or courses at the Y or at the public >libraries are... I had taken some classes at Brown's Continuing Ed dep't >prior to enrolling at Emerson, and if anything, they were more challenging. > >I actually chose Emerson because they were the only place that would let me >start in January. But the program is really pretty good in the sense that >it is big and they offer a lot of different classes. The fiction class I >was terrible at was a really good, challenging class. It was on the short >short story. Unfortunately I have zero talent for that and was also >medicated in a way which somewhat precluded creativity... I was too afraid >of bombing out of grad school again if I ended up at a super competetive >place, and was also attempting to switch from having been a math PhD student >to an MFA in Creative Writing, with a big gap in the middle, so it wasn't >clear where I'd get accepted. Because I didn't want to reveal my personal >situation in my writ8ing sample, I sent them a review I did on A. R. >Ammons's book "Glare" which ended up not getting published because I liked >the book and the editor of the online journal I was writing for didn't. > >Millie > >-----Original Message----- >From: UB Poetics discussion group >[mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Damian Judge >Rollison >Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 1:17 AM >To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU >Subject: Re: "New" Poet > > >Where does mass-culture poetry come from? Is it a >half-digested imitation of "official verse culture" >workshop poetry? Does it come out of what people read in >grade school? School probably has a bigger influence than >OVC, since I doubt Mattie Stepanek, or Jewel, or Henry >Rollins or whatever, read much in the way of Ploughshares >and Grand Street and Paris Review -- but what I think it >really comes out of is the "other tradition" of amateur >versifying that lots of people plugged into as adolescents >and some continued into adulthood, with no real ambition to >be more than amateurs. It's like a kind of folk art, and >the standards for success are different than in OVC or the >classics. The practice is represented now by tons of >websites (www.poetry.com is the motherlode). > >This kind of poetry goes on (scads of it really) under the >radar of academics and published poets, having nothing >really to do with that culture -- it's the poetry of >somebody who did well in a creative writing class once, >or, to be less cynical, somebody who gets private >satisfaction from modest practice of the craft (and more >power to them as long as I don't have to read it). The web >is a good place to suss it out, lots of "journals" >that exist solely for the benefit of the writers who get >published in them, not far off from the personal website -- >"here's some pictures of my dog, and here's some poems I >wrote about snorkling". But it's interesting -- what does >*that* subculture want from art? One thing it definitely >wants is not to have to know a whole lot about poetry >(technique, tradition, what's cool) in order to write it >and get a little aesthetic buzz, be part of a little (very >unofficial) verse culture, feel like an Artist (because >we're all Artists, deep down, aren't we? I mean, Deepak >Chopra says so). And so that's why Mattie Stepanek is on >Oprah -- because everybody knows about that kind of thing >anyway, knows somebody who writes "a little poetry", >wouldn't know Paris Review (not to mention EPC) if it hit >them in the ass and doesn't care either, and this is just >the kind of poetry they like: easy to understand, >sentimental, chicken soup for the soul. Something almost >anybody could do -- but by some standards a skill anybody >with gumption can learn is the best kind (embroidery, auto >body repair, poetry). > >I think what bothers me about Oprah's love affair with the >written word is that it commodifies the practice of >amateurs. They were always there and they didn't need Oprah >until she convinced them they did. > >-- Damian > > > ><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >damian judge rollison >department of english/ >institute for advanced > technology in the > humanities >university of virginia > djr4r@virginia.edu > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 09:35:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: My Life Message to Bin In-Reply-To: <004201c18e6f$1fdd5ec0$d35637d2@01397384> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Liking the idea of revolution is the romantic comfort of an armchair revolutionary. Bush et al will not, cannot, outlaw Islam. But, what if the Bill of Rights becomes, at least in part, a subversive document? Do the armchair folks act? By then, it will be too late to act. Gene At 01:40 PM 12/27/01 +1300, you wrote: >Bin Laden seems to me like a prophet... a kind of modern Jesus Christ and >he seems to talk poetically and enigmatically...a kind of gentle and >langorous version of Che Guevara whose book (about him) i carried aroound >and never read: I liked the idea of revolutionaries and revolutions >especially as a 20, 21 year old...never got as far as going to Vietnam like >the young man who joined the Al Qaeda...like Christ he (bin baby I mean) >will probably inspire a cult which could even turn into a religion: not >sure if I could become a Muslim but I would if Bush and Mr Wolf started a >big campaign against Muslims and banned that religion...mind you I'm a loner >I dont like joining things...just like the idea of big buildings crashing >down and explosions but then I suppose its a left over from watching all >those war movies ( from Amerika) in the 50s eg "The Battle of the River >Plate" (wow one ship coped in the magazine and the whole ship blew up!) and >"To Hell and Back" (with Eddie Murphy) and ones in which the Koreans >(Koreans?) were always the evil slant-eyed ones we loved to see blasted >heroically (heroically?) from the skies (they always flew Migs), and then >those cowboy movies when we always all cheered as children when the cavalry >arrived to save them from the frightening Red Indians, and there was always >Pop Eye with his spinach and The Three Stooges... > >But do you think that old bin baby would be interested in me poetry? Anyway >as I say i like the idea of bin Laden: maybe that's all he is, an idea...but >I hope not: could you pass on my regards? Cheers, Richard. >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Murat Nemet-Nejat" >To: >Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 7:26 PM >Subject: Re: My Life > > > > In a message dated 12/20/01 11:11:48 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > > > >Murat. Thank you. At last: but would you immediately shred it or read it > > >or > > > > > >translate it to bin Laden to send that gentleman insane if he's NOT a > > > > > >computer generated graphic? Cheers, Richard. > > > > Richard, > > > > I would definitely read it and then send it to Bin Laden with a little >note: > > to a fellow artist ... > > > > Cheers. > > > > Murat ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 09:47:36 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: gene Subject: Re: "The Gaga Films," by Jennifer In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed I don't know if this review, itself, is a fiction. As I understand it, the focus is alienation. Tel me ore. Gene At 12:04 AM 12/27/01 -0500, you wrote: >- > > >"The Gaga Films," by Jennifer > > >I went to the cinema on the tram down the hill. I often went this way for >other reasons but wasn't sure where I was. I was in company of a couple of >experimental filmmakers. They told me about the place. It was in a clap- >board house remodeled as an underground film venue. It was $15 to get in. >I only had $8 Canadian. I left and came back; I found $14 US. I hoped I >could make up the difference. They were talking about "The Gaga" - the two >films about "The Gaga" - and had I seen them? The films were the most >politically astute of the century. "The Gaga" was also "La Gaga" and I >hadn't seen them. I was missing so much. "The Gaga" wasn't playing that >night. > >Interpretation > >"The Gaga" is the violent absurdity that drives late-capitalism. "The >Gaga" has always existed, but was quiescent in traditional capitalism - >it could never appear under hierarchy, but only interstitially in the >Network. As the Network grew, through late-capitalism and postmodernity >into terror, The Gaga appeared - first as a peripheral symptom, then >increasingly as an engine driving the whole. The Gaga is a projection, >perhaps derived from Cruickshank's 19th-century Locomotive - "They've gone >loco" - images of the confluence of steam and imperial capital. The Gaga, >like the Japanese Kappa, is a figure at once vulnerable and dangerous. It >is vulnerable because it resides in the Network, a post-Situationist >entity susceptible to major and minor illness or decay - through the >strategic application of hacking and other disruptive techniques. The Gaga >is utterly inhuman, nonhuman, inhumane; all of The Gaga films are in >black-and-white, as if to indicate, from the mode of representation >itself, the structural and nodal nature of The Gaga. The Gaga is most >often described in these films by means of chalkboard lectures, diagrams >in pencil, voice-overs, and talks. Computers and digital effects are >rarely used; they are the centrifugal residue of The Gaga, incapable of >anything more. It seems paradoxical that The Gaga both underlies the skein >and is within it; the skein is its flesh and blood, and a computer repre- >sentation would be nothing more than a desiccated and useless sample of >its tissue. For it is clear that The Gaga is continually in process, that >it participates in the quantum states known as superimpositions, that it >is always extended beyond itself, non-boolean, gestural, genderless. A >feminist professor appears in one of the films, delineating The Gaga, >demonstrating its difference and distinction from a feminist fluidity that >absorbs and gives, breaks down the transitive. She, like all other actors >in these works, is defined as such - "a feminist professor" - in subtitles >that also list "a working-class hero" - "a factory worker" - "a consumer" >- even though an attempt is made, beyond analysis, to develop a romance - >"a lover" - "another lover" - against the constant and broken, jump-cut >description that constitutes the style of the films. The Gaga alone, like >the Virgin of the Virgin Mary, like the sealed womb, is never described, >always clothed in the Network. It is clear that The Gaga is part of the >distribution of the films, that the audience, as in violent pornography, >is implicated, just as The Gaga is implacable. The implacability is >portrayed in terms of gray zones; the black-and-white occupies, for the >most part, an uneasy middle ground, most of the time. There are never any >"true" whites, "true" brightness, in the films; instead, starting from an >upper middle gray, the films descend into murky darkness, as if they were >reproduced several times over, from an earlier, and now lost, model. The >result of all of this is a clear indication that we, ourselves, have lost >the power of brilliance, of brightness, of that clear light permitting >analysis; instead, our theoretical explanations begin in that gray area >where language proliferates, cut off from the clarity of projection and >representation. These explanations likewise descend into darkness, where >they are part and parcel of the substance of the world, where they are >within and without, suffused with The Gaga, from which, like the real >weight of the curtain of iron, there is no escape. It is no wonder that >both films are titled "The Gaga" as well; the resulting confusion in talk >and analysis (some speak of "Gaga A," "Gaga B," "First and Second Gaga," >etc.) only serves to reconfirm their internal direction. If there is any >brilliance in the world, it is clear, it is to be found in the films >themselves; nowhere else in culture is analysis so devastating, accurate, >and beyond recall. The films are undated; the names of the participants >involved are never given; even their origin remains, not a mystery, but >simply unknown. Go see "The Gaga"; everything else falls, into place. > > >_ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 08:12:30 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: On Target, Off Target ["We live here, too"] In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii --- Geoffrey Gatza wrote: > Now how could one get a poetry sponsorship or open reading in the market place? ------------------------------------------------------- K-Mart opened a Manhattan outlet at St. Mark's Place, the main drag of the ever-punk, black leather, green-haired/skinhead East Village, within blocks of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. The neighborhood was, legendarily, terminally cool. Soho was fed by East Village painters. I don't recall if they ever actually held poetry readings there, but in trying to befriend the "Take A Walk On The Wild Side" neighborhood, that K-Mart did open an in-house art gallery. There was an article on it in the New York Times. (I'm sorry I can't locate it through Lexis-Nexis, well over ten years ago. I think I cut out the photo and used to keep it over my desk.) The premier artist's work looked highly believable. The photo of him slumped at a K-Mart Cafeteria table, young like tungsten over a paper coffee cup, a second-hand suit with sleeves too short, cuffs rolled up, vertical hair, was classic St. Mark's. The "how," Geoffrey, to get an open reading in the market place, or in Wal-Mart, is: to go in and propose it. Walk in the door. Ask for the manager. You could write in advance, if you felt you needed more influence, gumption or time. Phone 1-800-Wal-Mart-Central-HQ (not a real phone number). The store branch may not realize that Buffalo is such a poetry mecca. If you pitched it right, it's highly feasible. He'd surely see dollar signs and a way of "reaching out" to the University population. Of uniting town and gown. Wal-Mart has a Community Involvement Wal-Mart Foundation: http://www.walmartfoundation.org/wmstore/goodworks/scripts/index.jsp , Environment, Community, Children, Education. There are certain off-beat holidays they associate themselves with, too. * Community: They've given matching grants to the Ballet Folklorico Infantil in Los Banos, CA. (If ballet, how not poetry?) They supported Grandparents' Day with $750,000 in grants last year. * Children: Missing children and Code Adam. Project Insight provides eyeglasses to children at no cost. * Education: Ground Job Shadow Day. (And there's no easier way to "make a name for yourself" in the East Coast poetry world than to run a reading series!) ======================================================= "We live here, too. So we strongly believe in our responsibility to contribute to the well-being of our community. Together with our customers, we know where Wal-Mart can help the most, and we can take great pride in getting involved and seeing the results of our efforts in person." --- Wal-Mart __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 11:26:23 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Muffy Bolding Subject: art in a time of terror MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Ruth Padel: Art in a time of terror 27 December 2001Special report The shadow of terror: Three months on http://www= .independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=3D111722 "Art should not console," said Iris Murdoch austerely. But sometimes it's th= e=20 only thing that can. One thing 11 September broke was a pattern in the ways=20 we see ourselves in the world. And when such perceptions are challenged is=20 when we most need pattern-making in the form of art. We need existing great=20 art, and to urgently find new meaning in structures already familiar to us;=20 we also need the structure of art made after the trauma to confront it, to=20 explain it for us. Some arts can confront it directly. "We are not healers or protectors, merel= y=20 artists," said Tom Hanks at the "Tribute to Heroes" telethon concert. But=20 Bruce Springsteen sang a new song, "My City of Ruins", for "our fallen=20 brothers and sisters", ending it with "Rise up, rise up". It sounds corny,=20 but it worked. "I wanted to hug the guy," says Rick de Yampert, a journalist= .=20 For art does heal. The art of presenting audiences with knowledge that is=20 terrible to accept, of making us able to survive horror by structuring it in= =20 a particular way, is the art of tragedy. And Aristotle's metaphor for=20 tragedy's method was catharsis. Patsy Rodenburg, voice trainer at the National Theatre, has just taught a=20 Shakespeare-speaking course in New York. "There's a yearning there now for=20 profound work. You can go to the great plays and not feel so lonely. I did=20 Richard III and Julius Caesar; plays full of envy, grief, murder on an=20 unbelievable scale, about what they were facing themselves. They got the=20 power of it: Richard the murderer, 'hell's black intelligencer'. It's=20 comforting that it's happened before, that Shakespeare structured the words=20 for us." After 11 September, the United States also embraced WH Auden's poem on the=20 declaration of war, "September 1, 1939". It was read on national radio.=20 "Auden muses on Manhattan skyscrapers as symbols of modern power, and the=20 isolation of America's consumer culture," says poet Dana Gioia, who recited=20 it at a reading on 12 September. "'The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends= =20 the September night...' =E2=80=93 they gasped as I read." "There's a profound thirst for poetry now," says Alice Quinn, The New Yorker 's poetry editor. "Anthologies of poems that speak to the time are coming=20 out; the Poetry Society of America organised a reading at Cooper Union, wher= e=20 Lincoln gave his most stirring speeches; 1,200 people came." Chip McGrath, the books editor of The New York Times, sees a different=20 cultural shift. "Books on warfare, Islam, Afghanistan, are jumping off the=20 shelves. Otherwise, it's cookery. Hardly any fiction, to my surprise." In=20 Britain, the bestseller lists have been reconquered by Harry Potter and the=20 celebrity chefs. In the US, however, another kind of book has recently been=20 appearing on the best-seller lists: books with titles like New York Septembe= r=20 11 (Magnum Photographers), September 11: A Testimony (Reuters), September=20 11th 2001: New York Attacked (New York Magazine) =E2=80=93 dozens upon dozen= s of=20 coffee-table books, of which the book-buying public cannot get enough.=20 "Images are crucial to our understanding," said Thomas Hoepker,=20 vice-president of Magnum in New York. "People want to have something they ca= n=20 keep. TV images are powerful, but fleeting." "Mmm," said a friend of mine. "Isn't there a thin line between consoling and= =20 cashing in?" Obviously, there will be some cashing in. No doubt the books an= d=20 films have already started =E2=80=93 Woody Allen said the events would be "f= air game"=20 for directors. Some will be exploitative; others will be necessary art =E2= =80=93 in=20 the sense that Gerard Manley Hopkins found it necessary in 1875 to write a=20 poem on the death of five nuns in a blazing ship. "The Wreck of the=20 Deutschland" became his masterpiece, but that's not the point: he had to=20 write it. The Art Museum in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's memorial-museum for the=20 Holocaust, contains sketches of gas chimneys, barbed wire and scalped hair,=20 made in death camps by people for whom art was a necessity: "driven to it by= =20 what they saw," say the museum's curators. Bruno Bettelheim, a death-camp survivor, said you shouldn't try to understan= d=20 horror, just stop it happening again. The critic Theodor Adorno said there=20 could be no poetry after Auschwitz. But there had to be. To go on, we have t= o=20 find a pattern in our responses to trauma. Audiences need the questioning=20 clarity of art; artists need to create new structures from pain. "Cashing in= "=20 will depend on the artist's integrity. On 11 September, 11 members of the=20 photographic agency Magnum were in Manhattan: all took photographs. What=20 would 11 top photographers have done in New York but take photos? And now th= e=20 book has come out. "If something upsets me," the photographer Helmut Newton=20 told me once, "I get my camera out. I believe that if a photographer has a=20 camera between him and horror, he can face anything." "In a peculiar way, for artists, this is the best as well as the worst of=20 times," the theatre director Deborah Warner said recently. "We have a=20 terrible thing to draw on. There'll be new energy. My feeling after 11=20 September was to return to the theatre. It's a very safe place." That's the=20 response to Tom Hanks. Art does protect and heal. Sometimes it's the only=20 place where you feel safe. On 11 September, however, art was made unsafe, too. Art, under attack along=20 with everything else, was abused; even stolen. When video-artist John Maybur= y=20 saw the second tower hit, he recognised an aspect of his art: "What I was=20 seeing was artfully done. The first plane got our attention, so we'd look at= =20 the second." The planes were a video-installation, with the world as audienc= e. The music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the 73-year-old experimental composer,=20 has long incorporated elements of theatre and spectacle. He has followed=20 Duchampian aesthetics, searching for metaphorically violent ways of thrustin= g=20 image and sound together. His 1994 "Helicopter Quartet", based on a dream he= =20 had of "towers of television screens", thousands of outdoor spectators and=20 musicians in flying helicopters, was creepily prescient of 11 September as a= =20 live spectacle. Inevitably, he responded to the attack in those terms, as=20 "the greatest work of art there's ever been. That people rehearse like crazy= =20 for 10 years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die! Compared to= =20 this, we are nothing as composers." Faced with fury and outrage, Stockhausen later said he was referring to the=20 "Luciferian aspect of art", but his comments also show that late Modernist=20 ideas of art, privileging spectacle and "happening", are stale; that they=20 must change. Different arts will change differently as they move beyond 11 September. The= y=20 will change because that day was destruction, the antithesis of creativity.=20 And making something new, good, bearable out of destruction is what=20 creativity is for. The fall of Troy, of the "towers of Ilium", is tragedy's first metaphor of=20 human fragility =E2=80=93 and changes in design are obvious. "More emphasis=20= on=20 safety," says Frank Gehry, architect of Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. "More=20 technical discussion of how to get people out of tall buildings fast," says=20 Cecil Balmond, the designer-engineer of iconic buildings throughout the worl= d. Others may take longer. Art offers safety because it takes risks. Nicola=20 Lane, a London artist whose work is currently touring in the Arts Council=20 exhibition Adorn, Equip, says she felt guilty about taking a magnifying glas= s=20 to photos of people jumping from the towers, "but I had to know the shape of= =20 their bodies in the air". That's her job. Art has to risk knowing appalling=20 things, to draw constructive conclusions from them. But risks can backfire. The earliest Greek tragedy we know of was written=20 when Persia was the global super-power. In 499BC, Athens helped the Eastern=20 Greeks rebel against Persia: in revenge, Persia burnt the Eastern Greek city= =20 of Miletus, massacring men and enslaving women. In 493 BC, the Athenian=20 dramatist Phrynichus wrote a play, The Sack of Miletus, and was fined 1,000=20 drachmas for "reminding the Athenians of their own misfortunes". After 11 September, the riskiest art may be fiction. Novelists can't ignore=20 11 September. If they describe it poorly, they kill their novel; do it well,= =20 and they unbalance it and risk accusations of cashing in on the tragedy.=20 "Such a huge thing bulldozes through any narrative," says Deborah Moggach,=20 author of Tulip Fever. "You'd have to acknowledge it. Awareness of it affect= s=20 everything, but if you mention it explicitly readers may feel it's dragged i= n=20 for effect." Many novelists have been unable to work recently. "Shock, grief= ,=20 aftershock: one's reactions were extreme and changed every day," says=20 Moggach. "It was difficult to concentrate." "Novelists respond in oblique ways, mediated by imagination," says Michele=20 Roberts, author of The Looking Glass. "That takes time." She was in the=20 middle of a city novel about suffering, death, and compassion, set in August= =20 2001. "Now there'll be more death, and more compassion, " she says. "September 11 is affecting novelists who draw inspiration from the world=20 outside, rather than the world within," says Amanda Craig, author of In a=20 Dark Wood. "It brought home to us how our cultures are bound up with each=20 other, and made the American psyche more permeable by the rest of the world.= =20 My American characters have become more complex, anguished, conscious of=20 being hostages of fortune." The novel is the art of the story, and stories outlast everything. What are=20 Troy and Persia now? A handful of ruins =E2=80=93 and stories. The story of=20= 11=20 September will be told when photographs are dust, as long as there are peopl= e=20 to tell it. But though we live in a story-shaped world, we don't know what=20 shape it will take next. Osama bin Laden knew America's story =E2=80=93 our=20= modern=20 Athens, our talismanic culture =E2=80=93 inside-out. It's in that narrative=20= of=20 invincibility that the biggest break has been made. No one knows how=20 permanent this deliberate break will be. For Americans to take control of their story again, they have to understand=20 it from other people's point of view. There are always two sides to the stor= y=20 in a divorce, just as there was in the Crusades =E2=80=93 that episode of=20 international piracy remembered in the West in Turkish operetta characters,=20 in pubs called The Saracen's Head and in Bush's unfortunate rhetoric. Bin=20 Laden must have smiled when he heard Bush utter that word which, for million= s=20 of people living in conditions other than ours, is so capable of arousing=20 memories of outrage. With 19 plastic Stanley knives( box cutters), bin Laden= =20 became Saladin, energising the story of the Crusades as seen through=20 non-Western eyes. Looking at one's own story from a different side is a prime characteristic o= f=20 Western art, distinguishing Homer from, say, contemporary Assyria. Homer=20 shows the pity of war from both the Greek and Trojan points of view. The=20 earliest surviving tragedy, by Aeschylus, showed Athens's final victory over= =20 Persia as a tragedy for Persia. John Buchan, a master of narrative, knew the stories in other nations' heads= .=20 "We have laughed at the jihad," says Walter Bullivant in Greenmantle,=20 published in 1916. "But there is a jihad preparing. The question is, how?"=20= =E2=80=93=20 words the CIA might have attended to in 1996. The day after the bombing of Hiroshima, a New York Times editorial declared,= =20 "Civilization and humanity can now survive only if there is a revolution in=20 mankind's political thinking."=20 What happened to that revolution? Is technology the only way we've advanced=20 since 499BC? What about culture? Different ethnic groups live all over US=20 cities, but no one programmes sympathetic knowledge of other peoples' storie= s=20 into our education. In Yad Vashem, Jewish schoolchildren are shown the=20 Holocaust story: why aren't Palestinian children, too? And where's the museu= m=20 of Palestinian suffering, where Jewish kids can be taken to learn the storie= s=20 of people they'll grow up beside? Why is the history of Islam =E2=80=93 and=20= the=20 treasures it gave the West when we were still medieval thugs and warlords=20= =E2=80=93=20 not on the national curriculum for all children in countries with Muslim=20 populations? The art that helps us understand our own tragedies has to be big enough, lik= e=20 that of Homer, to sympathise with the suffering of people who cause them. We= =20 won't get rid of terrorism =E2=80=93 or the support for it now preparing in=20= the=20 hearts and memories of thousands of mutilated, bereaved, dispossessed people= =20 =E2=80=93 without understanding our story and theirs, from their point of vi= ew. For =E2=80=93 as Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings =E2=80=93 "Stories do= not end, we are=20 all still part of the same story." Troy and Greece, Athens and Persia,=20 Saladin and the Lionheart, New York and Tora Bora; we are part of the same=20 pattern still. Can't we ever break it for good?=20 =C2=A9 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd=20 =C2=A0 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 11:31:17 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: Re: On Target, Off Target MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Geoffrey, I wish I had the answers. Most corporations have corporate giving offices that fund programs and use their contributions as tax write-offs. It's a nice thought (more a dream) that if government funds poets in the schools corporations could fund "poets in the stores." Finding someone who combines a substantial literary background with corporate clout would prove a real challenge, I suspect. When Borders first started, it stocked works of local authors, and let them hold readings and book parties. As its profit margin dropped (some of its staff told me), its support of local writers dropped as well. It also stopped carrying the work of many writers and musicians I like. I believe many members of the "masses" could appreciate more interesting literature and music than the media currently feeds them. Whether a corporation would take the risk of supporting poets is one of the unanswered questions. Whether the audiences themselves would take the risk is another. Ginsberg did open the poem to many people. Poetry slams opened the door a little further, before becoming its own genre. When I give readings I try to educate the audience a little. (At St. Mark's Poetry Project, this isn't an issue, but it would be at Walmart or Target.) By telling the audience what I'm trying to do, I try to reorient their expectations. In some cases it's helped, in other cases it hasn't. Some people who didn't now a thing about langpo found they enjoyed it, others found it made them "uncomfortable." Nevertheless, the contingent that wants 19th century rhyming verse will remain. I don't condemn them; after a day of writing what I write and reading anything from Bruce Andrews to Marjorie Perloff and many stops in between, I like to close out the night with a mindless TV show. My hope is that some of the masses will take the time to challenge their current tastes, and possibly expand them. But I've been hoping that hope for decades. Best, Vernon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Geoffrey Gatza" To: Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 11:04 AM Subject: Re: On Target, Off Target > Vernon, > > This is the point that I was hoping would come around. (wait that sounds > snotty doesn't it) I shop'd the Walmart this year and it was great. The > people there are great, looking up to see low brow as entertainment, yes, > but these are the people, the mob. Now Ginsberg's triumph was to open the > modern poem to them. As if I am not one ... But Yes there is a poem, > Virginia. Now how could one get a poetry sponsorship or open reading in the > market place? Would we be shunned like in Footloose and have an angry John > Lithgow say it is anti Christian? Would we be forced to drink hemlock for > teaching in the agora ??? I fine case for agoraphobia. I know I am sounding > like John Dryden here, but how can we open the poem to everyone, and remove > it from the day old bread section?? > > > Best, Geoffrey > > > Geoffrey Gatza > editor BlazeVOX2k1 > http://vorplesword.com/ > __o > _`\<,_ > (*)/ (*) > > -----Original Message----- > From: UB Poetics discussion group > [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of Vernon Frazer > Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 4:32 PM > To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > Subject: On Target, Off Target > > Elizabeth Treadwell said she shops at Target. This year I did the bulk of my > holiday shopping there, as well. I'm imagining this two-poet Target scenario > expanding like a Nike ad, with numerous poets saying they shop there or > voiceovers announcing "Even the avant-garde finds what it needs at Target." > Now, if only they'd carry some serious literature or sponsor a poetry > series... (dream on) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 11:41:45 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Floodeditions@AOL.COM Subject: NEW FLOOD EDITIONS TITLES FOR 2002 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ANNOUNCING TWO NEW TITLES FROM FLOOD EDITIONS: Tom Pickard, HOLE IN THE WALL: New & Selected Poems =20 ISBN 0-9710059-3-1 $15 =20 sewn paperback,160 pp. with collages by Tom Raworth Tom Pickard=E2=80=99s poems are by turns erotic and political, pastoral and=20= urban,=20 and make use of everyday speech with formal inventiveness and sophistication= .=20 Since HIGH ON THE WALLS (1967), he has written six books of poetry, and this= =20 career-spanning volume is his first in America. =20 Song sings itself in these poems. Their heart is clarity, spoken. Why=20 shouldn=E2=80=99t the music lead and the heart follow=E2=80=94and mind be th= e wonder of=20 their witness? This is a great poetry made of such common life, each word a=20 step along the way. =20 =E2=80=94Robert Creeley Philip Jenks, ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN ISBN 0-9710059-2-3 $10 sewn paperback, 64 pp. ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN is Philip Jenks=E2=80=99 first full-length collectio= n. His=20 poems are both intimate and strange, encompassing personal history and the=20 politics of Appalachia, epileptic seizures and Baptist glossolalia, memory=20 cells and Kentucky coal mines. His cave describes the limits of what=E2=80= =99s known,=20 and =E2=80=9CHis speech is from crevices / running diagonal through the /=20 underneath...=E2=80=9D At various turns hieratic and profane, their blur the blur=E2=80=94in equal=20= parts=E2=80=94of=20 the confessed and the prophetic, these poems direct us to the language that=20 starts just past =E2=80=9Cthat point / where nothing is not.=E2=80=9D Cassan= dra lives there;=20 and Stein=E2=80=94and so does Philip Jenks. =20 =E2=80=94Carl Phillips ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 11:48:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Floodeditions@AOL.COM Subject: Special Offer from FLOOD EDITIONS MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Order both new titles from Flood Editions for just $22 with free shipping. Tom Pickard, HOLE IN THE WALL: New & Selected Poems ISBN 0-9710059-3-1 $15 Philip Jenks, ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN ISBN 0-9710059-2-3 $10 Order now, and we will send you the books when they are available in February. Make checks payable to FLOOD EDITIONS P.O. Box 3865 Chicago IL 60654-0865 ------ Also forthcoming in 2002: Fanny Howe, ECONOMICS Paul Hoover, WINTER (MIRROR) Robert Duncan, LETTERS [1958] ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 11:55:24 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Austinwja@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Merrill / Ashbery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 12/28/01 7:02:34 AM, immerito@HOTMAIL.COM writes: << As you say, his poetry resists the "find-the-major-symbols" school of analysis by refusing to supply coherent narratives, points of view, thematic focus, etc. But it does so in part by seeming to _invite_ that kind of analysis: because syntax, grammar, and that kind of thing is so often "normal," even "eloquent," in non-_Tennis Court Oath_ Ashbery, the uninitiated reader will at first invariably _attempt_ to read the poems for a conventional referential meaning. I know I did, anyway. For example, many of his poems have lots of water imagery, or sky imagery, or writing-poems imagery, etc. And in fact Ashbery continues to supply these kinds of temptations in ever-more complex forms to those determinedly traditional readers who have already learned his basic tricks but still want to lobby for his status as a "real" poet. Just look at at least half the Ashbery criticism out there, and you will see attempts at exactly what you were saying can't be done: readings that try to connect symbols, find cloaked narratives, establish a unified speaking subject, and so on. The first objection that springs to mind is that such readings are perverse, but they're really not--the poems are _asking_ to be treated that way. You could accuse the poems themselves for being critically perverse in setting up so many ingenious, perceptive critics. The most obvious example would be Harold Bloom, with his Romantic subjective-poet Ashbery, but you could say the same about John Shoptaw, Leslie Wolf, Fred Moramarco, Charles Altieri, even at times a devout avant-gardener like Marjorie Perloff. All these very intelligent critics in their various ways have set about to demonstrate Ashbery's suitability for inclusion within a system of canonization and commentary that uses very old-fashioned New-Critical modes of inquiry. Furthermore, as I've been suggesting, they frequently meet with a great deal of success, at least as far as they take their approaches, which is usually just far enough to stop before they have to take account of Ashbery's "trick": i.e., that the poems are only pretending to be those kinds of poems. (Actually, some of those critics probably acknowledge this, now that I think of it, so please nobody call me on the carpet.) But the paradox is that in order to pretend convincingly to be that kind of poem, it must ... well, _be_ that kind of poem. So for example, "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is on one level a poem of meditation about art, identity, etc., and as such is capable of sending the Harold Blooms and Helen Vendlers out there into paroxysms of ecstasy. On another level, however, it's a pastiche, a blank parody that short-circuits its stabs at profundity as soon as it makes them, in the _act_ of making them. This is even more the case in poems like "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" or just about anything he's written since 1990: these poems are like little facades set up in a ghost town, with little signs on them saying "(close-) read me." And when you try, you end up realizing that you've only been close-reading the sign saying to close-read, not the structure behind the sign. In this respect, Ashbery's poems are different from the other contemporary poetry you mention. You're right about those poems: regular close reading doesn't work with them. They're made with that futility in mind. Their little hanging signs say something like "Don't even bother trying, pal." Ashbery's, however, are like reversible jackets you can wear to either Iowa City or Buffalo. Kasey >> If I may be forgiven for jumping in, Kasey's finger is on the pulse. Ashbery is, in all of his productions, a "language" poet, a manipulator of rhetorical forms. What he foregrounds (if I may use that well worn term) is not meaning per se, but its structural interpinnings, its source material so to speak. Meaning is always a formal product, and Ashbery's poems are loaded with it. What is deliberately lacking, typically, is a sense of unity (a "trick" of relationality), the stratagem of the parts concealing their seams. Best, Bill WilliamJamesAustin.com KojaPress.com Amazon.com/BarnesandNoble.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 09:27:19 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: UbuEditor Subject: U B U W E B :: OBJECT 10 : CYBER POETICS Comments: To: ubuweb MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii ___U B U W E B___ http://www.ubu.com --------------------------------------- OBJECT 10 CYBER POETICS Winter 2002 Guest Editor: Kenneth Goldsmith http://www.ubu.com/feature/papers/feature_object.html I. Introduction Kenneth Goldsmith II. State of the (E)Art: or, What's Wrong with Internet Poetry? R. Rickey and Derek Beaulieu III. The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics Christian Bök IV. The Sweetest Poison, or the Discovery of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry on the Web Neil Hennessy V. From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation Kenneth Goldsmith VI. Analog Echoes: A Poetics of Digital Audio Editing Martin Spinelli VII. How We Became Automatic Poetry Generators: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Blurst of Times Katherine Parrish VIII. Apostrophe: Working Notes, v.3 October 2001 Darren Wershler-Henry and Bill Kennedy IX. Proverbs of Hell (Dos and Donts) v.2 Brian Kim Stefans http://www.ubu.com/feature/papers/feature_object.html --------------------------------------- ___U B U W E B___ http://www.ubu.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 09:27:30 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Jullich Subject: Re: Merbery / Ashrill In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii --- "K.Silem Mohammad" wrote: > For example, many of his poems have lots of water imagery, or sky imagery, or writing-poems imagery, etc. ------------------------------------------------------- That's how I read post-Ashbery/Language poetry: from the entire ~oeuvre~ downward to the individual word. When somebody's worth it, I read and re-read their books, back to back, in succession. And I'm a marginalia FIEND. I have a good memory for what words I've heard --- I can usually remember, with uncommon words, the last time a person spoke them in a conversation or where I'd heard it --- so there's a sort of reflex or ding! that goes off for me when a word reappears a second time in a book or across a series of book. And a total Jacob's Ladder when it appears three or more times! I mark those words off in the margin, often with symbols: my Howe books use the Greek ~theta~ for the theme of thinking or thought; Greek ~mu~ (not my sainted cat's name, which was Chinese) for memory, remember, forgetting, etc. (For a long time, I've used Gk. ~pi~ for "poetry.") Then, by a sort of concordance method, I can re-examine the meaning of any cell by how it's transacted over the full scale. Meaning can also be re-diagrammed into a sort of symbolic equation, semio-algebraically. David Buuck at ~Tripwire~ has the MS of the presentation I gave at the Barnard College Lyric Tradition vs. Language Poetry Women's Innovative Poetry conference, on Howe and this reading method, which I called "vertical reading." (I'm pretty sure ~Tripwire~ will thumbs down on it.) Theoretically, it's very sensible: with "asyntactical" poetry, the ~de're`glement~ (Rimbaud) has only been traced along the syntax, the horizontal level; the paradigmatic axis, or the chain of substitutions and iterations for any word/synonyms, remains untouched. Any poet's unconscious idiolectical drives to re-use the same words is quite personal and revealing. (There's a book on Wallace Stevens called ~Obsessive Images,~ I believe.) The associations are extremely subjective or private, and usually hermetic to anyone who doesn't intimately know the person: mere letters can become hieroglyphs for people or associations (the letters in the author's name, obviously), the way that Schumann tucked away his mistress' and Clara's names in the ASCH motifs. The only catch is that, by vertical reading, words and word clusters do wind up meaning something, definitely, from macrocosm to microcosm, but it's often something ~completely different~ from the dictionary or standard meaning of the word. ...so that in contemporary poetry recurrent words are often place-holders or "wild cards" that stand in for private meanings. An interesting exception, in John Ashbery, is his use of hapax legumenon (words that turn up only once), such as "jacaranda," e.g. > Furthermore, as I've been suggesting, they > frequently meet with a great deal > of success A critic's job is to impose a coherent template over any poetry, or object of study. (The opposite of that was Deconstruction, which took apparently cohesive texts and exposed their inconsistencies and contradictions, ... but ultimately Deconstruction received a great deal of negative backlash in America.) I once went in during her office hours, with the art critic (diva!) Rosalind Kraus. (That I merely dared to go into her office left Ph.D. candidates pale.) I had found (David Hockney may have pointed it out, actually) a visit that Picasso made to the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona, and I wanted to say (or Hockney had said) there was a link between Gaudi's broken crockery facade surfaces and Picasso's cubism; I wanted to say that the elongated figures in Picasso's Blue Period was El Greco (I am an ectomorph) . . . And Kraus became famously impatient with me, and said: "It doesn't matter if it's true or not! It's about which *INTERPRETIVE GRID* you superimpose over anything." The "trick", as you say, isn't John Ashbery's. It's the critic's. One is taught to "write through" a secondary critical work: I took classes where some post-structuralist was assigned almost randomly, and you had to find a way of writing about the artist via those ("unrelated") texts. > So > for example, "Self > Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is on one level a poem > of meditation about art, > identity, etc., Sorry for the autobiographical reductivism,--- but he had also just lost his job (or was on the brink of losing it) as art critic for ~Art in America,~ whose ownership had changed hands. (...what irritates me is what people ~won't~ say about "Self-Portrait", which should be so obvious: that it's about ~narcissism.~) > Ashbery's, however, are like reversible jackets you > can wear to either Iowa > City or Buffalo. That's absolutely brilliant. He'd love it! I hope some List reader who's in contact with him mentions that. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 12:26:16 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Vernon Frazer Subject: Re: "New Poet" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I like the idea of "we're different, not better or worse." Sometimes reading a writer from a "different" group teaches me a technique I find useful in my own writing. Ishmael Reed is a good example. As a person with a "disability" (Tourette Syndrome), I work hard enough at writing to expect my work to be judged on its merits, not my neurological condition. Nevertheless, I find that my condition influences my use of the page as much as my reading of Olson, to cite one example. I've also found that my condition gave me certain abilities that offset its disadvantages. My surplus dopamine enabled me to complete my work ahead of my co-workers and sneak in some writing time at the office.) People need to express themselves, whether they're disabled or not. Some of them will become full-time writers, others will write simply to purge their feelings. I make a distinction between a person who writes one crude draft and feels good afterward, and a person who polishes the draft to a professional piece of work. For some people writing is art, for others it's therapy. As long as the person knows the difference, I don't have a problem. I don't begrudge people with disabilities their publication in the newsletters of organizations that serve them. Much of the writing I read in this vein is badly-rhymed "poor me" poetry that readers find heart-warming. I just wish the same organizations would give more support to the people who can articulate their condition better. But then, we (or I) might not be saying what the organizations want to hear. Vernon Frazer ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael amberwind" To: Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 11:43 AM Subject: Re: "New Poet" > Beethoven went deaf, Dante was blind, and > according to rumour, so was Homer. There were no > social programs for these people. They do not > continue to be studied over the centuries because > of their "special interest" status, but because > of what they *said*. > > I think it is condescending to grant some sort of > special dispensation based on disabilities, > especially in literature, which is arguably one > of the most level playing fields there is. > > It is not a question of of conforming to socially > accepted norms. If a deaf poet puts on a > performance for the deaf, they have conformed to > a set of normalised expectations, namely those > within the deaf community. > > We seem to have the idea that everyone can and > should be able to do everything. There *are* > things the handicapped cannot do. That's what > *makes* them handicapped! > > Were I too lose my arms, legs, hearing and > eyesight in the next five minutes, I would still > expect that anything I write be judged against an > "objective" standard. If I had to talk into a > tape recorder, then so be it. > > Of course we are dealing with not art and > aesthetics anymore, but political correctness. > There is truth in what Harold Bloom calls "the > literature of resentment". I prefer to think of > it as an utter lack of commonsense. > > A poem may or may not be interesting in the > context in which it was written, but that should > not be the final criteria. > > >>Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:23:26 -0500 > >>From: Millie Niss > >>Subject: Re: "New" Poet > > >>You said I said: > > > 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF > AGE > OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? > OR > CLASS? ETC.?) > > Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, > again, > I have to re-translate it: > > If the sick wish to advance the social > assimilation of > their fellow disabled, they should conform to > socially > accepted norms. > > Am I misrepresenting the thought? > > It's better for the disadvantaged or special > caste to > ~impersonate~ the privileged majorities, in order > better to promote inclusion of their group? > ------- > > You didn't misstate what I said but you lost the > context, which was that > "sadly" this is true. I also said that > logically, if we wanted to prove > that we aren't morons by writing poetry, we > should only have to write the > poetry average people who are not morons write, > which generally isn't very > good (to use a loaded term, of course). > > I think it is silly to make poetry-writing the > center of a claim that > disabled people are as worthy of respect or love > or care as other people. > All people are worthy of respect, etc., by virtue > of being human, and there > are certainly som ediability groups whoo can > never write as good poetry as > non-disabled folks (say people who are multiply > handicapped and can neither > move nor speak and are mentally retarded (one > hopes these people have > extremely sever mental deficiencies because if > they are even conscious of > existing it must be hellish)). > > A lot of times minority groups claim to have a > culture of their own and want > not to be judged by the standards of the > majority. Perhaps a group very > invested in this idea wouldn'ty want to compete > in the field of poetry > because it isn't their domain. Or they would > have a poetry so different > from ouirs that we couldn't understand it. > Recently, disability groups have > made use of the "we're different, not better or > worse" idea. The Deaf (who > demand the right to be capitalized) have done > this the most, presumably > because they share a language that non-Deaf > people rarely if ever achieve > fluency in. Deaf poetry does exist and it is > incomprehensibe to non-Deaf > people, although there are also productions which > try to mix Deaf and > hearing words, music, and dance. > > ===== > ...I am a real poet. My poem > is finished and I haven't mentioned > orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call > it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery > I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. > [from "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara] > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send your FREE holiday greetings online! > http://greetings.yahoo.com > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 13:20:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Duration Press Subject: Re: My Life Message to Bin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit laden, it seems to me, is neither the fierce warrior he is made out to be, nor, as richard here thinks, a prophet...rather a capitalist renegade bankrolling an organization whose activities he can't really participate in other than in the position of cfo...i'm reminded of that oft played footage clip of him firing the rifle & thought how awkward he looks both holding the gun, & how fragile he seems when the gun is fired...not much chance of that man on the front lines i'm afraid...i guess jihad is a wonderful idea when your job is to tell others to do the fighting... ----- Original Message ----- From: "richard.tylr" To: Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 7:40 PM Subject: Re: My Life Message to Bin > Bin Laden seems to me like a prophet... a kind of modern Jesus Christ and > he seems to talk poetically and enigmatically...a kind of gentle and > langorous version of Che Guevara whose book (about him) i carried aroound > and never read: I liked the idea of revolutionaries and revolutions > especially as a 20, 21 year old...never got as far as going to Vietnam like > the young man who joined the Al Qaeda...like Christ he (bin baby I mean) > will probably inspire a cult which could even turn into a religion: not > sure if I could become a Muslim but I would if Bush and Mr Wolf started a > big campaign against Muslims and banned that religion...mind you I'm a loner > I dont like joining things...just like the idea of big buildings crashing > down and explosions but then I suppose its a left over from watching all > those war movies ( from Amerika) in the 50s eg "The Battle of the River > Plate" (wow one ship coped in the magazine and the whole ship blew up!) and > "To Hell and Back" (with Eddie Murphy) and ones in which the Koreans > (Koreans?) were always the evil slant-eyed ones we loved to see blasted > heroically (heroically?) from the skies (they always flew Migs), and then > those cowboy movies when we always all cheered as children when the cavalry > arrived to save them from the frightening Red Indians, and there was always > Pop Eye with his spinach and The Three Stooges... > > But do you think that old bin baby would be interested in me poetry? Anyway > as I say i like the idea of bin Laden: maybe that's all he is, an idea...but > I hope not: could you pass on my regards? Cheers, Richard. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 15:06:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Geoffrey Gatza Subject: Re: My Life -- Bin vs Bond In-Reply-To: <004201c18e6f$1fdd5ec0$d35637d2@01397384> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Richard, I can see why you see him as a Jesus figure, but to me he is more of a James Bond foe. Larger than life while Martin Luther king is a JC figure if any there was this century. It's the movie industry that shapes our need for a man to turn into myth. From the days of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Die Hard, we need to have someone with vast amounts of wealth to stand up to the word they want to dominate these days. There are no more bad nations to go after with a global economy, one needs to be independent once the globe has been ought over and won. So with bigger bombs and spy networks developing one would figure would arise to form a Dr. No, or a Goldfinger. But we don't have a James Bond, nor does Tony Blair, who I love - he's like a Thatcher in drag - but that's not my point. Best, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza editor BlazeVOX2k1 http://vorplesword.com/ __o _`\<,_ (*)/ (*) -----Original Message----- From: UB Poetics discussion group [mailto:POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU]On Behalf Of richard.tylr Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 7:41 PM To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: My Life Message to Bin Bin Laden seems to me like a prophet... a kind of modern Jesus Christ and he seems to talk poetically and enigmatically...a kind of gentle and langorous version of Che Guevara whose book (about him) i carried aroound and never read: I liked the idea of revolutionaries and revolutions especially as a 20, 21 year old...never got as far as going to Vietnam like the young man who joined the Al Qaeda...like Christ he (bin baby I mean) will probably inspire a cult which could even turn into a religion: not sure if I could become a Muslim but I would if Bush and Mr Wolf started a big campaign against Muslims and banned that religion...mind you I'm a loner I dont like joining things...just like the idea of big buildings crashing down and explosions but then I suppose its a left over from watching all those war movies ( from Amerika) in the 50s eg "The Battle of the River Plate" (wow one ship coped in the magazine and the whole ship blew up!) and "To Hell and Back" (with Eddie Murphy) and ones in which the Koreans (Koreans?) were always the evil slant-eyed ones we loved to see blasted heroically (heroically?) from the skies (they always flew Migs), and then those cowboy movies when we always all cheered as children when the cavalry arrived to save them from the frightening Red Indians, and there was always Pop Eye with his spinach and The Three Stooges... But do you think that old bin baby would be interested in me poetry? Anyway as I say i like the idea of bin Laden: maybe that's all he is, an idea...but I hope not: could you pass on my regards? Cheers, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Murat Nemet-Nejat" To: Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 7:26 PM Subject: Re: My Life > In a message dated 12/20/01 11:11:48 PM, richard.tylr@XTRA.CO.NZ writes: > > >Murat. Thank you. At last: but would you immediately shred it or read it > >or > > > >translate it to bin Laden to send that gentleman insane if he's NOT a > > > >computer generated graphic? Cheers, Richard. > > Richard, > > I would definitely read it and then send it to Bin Laden with a little note: > to a fellow artist ... > > Cheers. > > Murat ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 16:26:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: The Poetry Project Subject: Poetry Project New Year's Day Marathon Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit JANUARY 1, 2002, TUESDAY THE POETRY PROJECT'S 28TH ANNUAL NEW YEAR'S DAY MARATHON READING Spend the first day of the new year with the best of downtown poetry, performance, dance, music, and multimedia with OVER 100 PERFORMERS AND READERS including PHILIP GLASS, PATTI SMITH, EDWIN TORRES, JIM CARROLL, RICHARD HELL, TAYLOR MEAD, YOSHIKO CHUMA, LENNY KAYE, ANNE WALDMAN & many others!. 2 pm - past midnight, $15, $12 for Poetry Project members, students & seniors. Tickets are available at the door the entire day of the event. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis. Refreshments will be available and special Poetry Projects books will be on sale. Come join us to celebrate the New Year! -- Unless otherwise noted, admission to all events is $7, $4 for students and seniors, and $3 for Poetry Project members. Schedule is subject to change. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 131 E. 10th Street, the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. Trains F, 6, N, R. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Please call (212) 674-0910 for more information, or visit our Web site at http://www.poetryproject.com. If you are currently on our email list and would like to be on our regular mailing list (so you can receive a sample issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter for FREE), just reply to this email with your full name and address. Hope to hear from you soon!!! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 23:07:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Perdita Schaffner In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Via the EP discussion-list, this message: Dear H.D. Society members, I am a grandson of H.D. and have been reading your postings with interest over the past couple of years. I'm afraid that now I have some bad news to share with you. My mother Perdita, H.D.'s daughter, died on Wednesday at her home in East Hampton. I know that many of you were her friends and correspondents. What follows is the text of an obituary I wrote that will appear next Thursday in the East Hampton Star. Val Schaffner PERDITA M. SCHAFFNER Perdita Macpherson Schaffner died on Dec. 26 at her home in Springs. She was 82. Mrs. Schaffner was the author of many published essays as well as a number of unpublished stories and novels. She was an active philanthropist and served on the boards of cultural institutions such as the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, Poets and Writers Inc., and Yale University's Beinecke Library. She cultivated a wide range of friends here, in New York City, and in Europe. In academic circles she was known as the daughter of the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under the pen name H.D. She was born in London on March 31, 1919, and was raised in a highly unusual household there and in Burier, Switzerland, near the town of Montreux. The identity of her father was a subject she long refused to discuss, although she was amused when biographers and dissertation-writers deduced that he must have been the poet Ezra Pound, who at one time was H.D.'s fiance, or the novelist D.H. Lawrence, who was a close friend. Although Mrs. Schaffner was originally named Frances Perdita Aldington, H.D. being married at the time to the British novelist Richard Aldington, he was not her father either. It was not until 1983, in an essay included with a reissue of her mother's novel Bid Me to Live, that she publicly identified him as the character who in that roman a clef is called Vane, and who in real life was Cecil Gray, a Scottish music critic and minor composer. Like Vane and the novel's protagonist, the musician and poet carried on an affair in the final months of World War One, and he quickly disappeared from her life and that of his daughter, who would meet him on only one occasion, in 1947, by chance, in the entourage of the writer Norman Douglas on Capri. At the height of the flu epidemic that followed the war, H.D. was alone and ill in an unheated room in a seedy London rooming house, on the verge of labor, when she was rescued by her young friend Winifred Ellerman, who wrote novels under the name Bryher and was heiress to a shipping fortune. In what became a lifelong relationship, Bryher took mother and daughter under her wing. Perdita (the name comes from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale) grew up in a menage that included H.D, Bryher, and the latter's husbands, starting with Robert McAlmon, a novelist who later chronicled those somewhat manic years in a memoir titled Being Geniuses Together. Bryher's second husband was yet another novelist, a debonair Scotsman named Kenneth Macpherson who, like her, was in love with H.D. The couple formally adopted her child, who took the name Perdita Macpherson, and all four set up house in a towering Bauhaus structure overlooking Lake Geneva that doubled as a studio for avant-garde films and was also home to an assortment of dogs, cats, and monkeys. They divided their time between Switzerland, London, and Paris, where they were at the center of a group of literary and artistic figures, some of whom, including Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell, Mrs. Schaffner would later recall in a series of vivid, witty essays. Surrounded by writers, the girl seldom had a chance to meet other children, for she was educated at home according to Bryher's eccentric educational theories. She did, however, become fluent in French, German, and Italian, skills that served in good stead when, as a young woman at the onset of World War Two, she took a job in with the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. She worked at a country manor called Bletchley Park where teams of translators pored over scraps of intercepted Nazi messages decoded by the top-secret "Enigma Machine" Later she was assigned to OSS headquarters in London. She lived through the Blitz and served as an air-raid warden with the novelist Graham Greene. At the OSS she became friends with many American officers, among them James Angleton, the poetry-loving spy who later earned notoriety as the CIA's chief mole-hunter. They encouraged her to visit the US, her mother's native country, and after the war she came and stayed. In New York she took a job as secretary for John Valentine Schaffner, a literary agent who was starting out in business and could not afford to pay her. They fell in love and were married in 1950, setting up both home and office in a century-old house on East 53rd Street that is one of Manhattan's few wooden structures. They had four children, Valentine, Nicholas, Elizabeth Bryher, and Timothy, all of whom grew up to be writers. Summers and weekends were spent at a rented house in Southampton, on land that is now part of the Conscience Point National Wildlife Refuge, and later at property the family bought in 1967, an 18th-century farmhouse near the end of Fireplace Road, Springs, that was originally the Parsons homestead. Following Mr. Schaffner's death in 1983 she moved to Springs full-time and developed a wide range of friends and activities here. She began publishing essays in The Star, in literary magazines such as Grand Street and American Scholar, and in editions of her mother's books, for which they served as prefaces or afterwords. One of them is included in the recently-published Best of the Pushcart Essays. She was a regular at meetings of a fiction-writing workshop and a Shakespeare study group. She became active on behalf of the Bay Street Theater and other local causes. She was a keen devotee of the theater--here, in New York, and in London on annual trips there--as well as of travel. Although Europe and the Caribbean were her most frequent destinations, she also visited Kenya, the Falkland Islands, Alaska, Turkey, and Korea. In Springs she built up a substantial library, particularly of contemporary novels, literary biographies, and histories of World War Two espionage. In 1996 she suffered a massive heart failure and spent two weeks in a coma at Southampton Hospital, where the doctors, having almost unanimously pronounced her case hopeless, dubbed her "our miracle girl" when she proved them wrong. Back home she gave up smoking, substituted red wine for Scotch whiskey, and cut down on travel but otherwise kept up her schedule of activities. Her heart remained frail, however, and following a seizure last month her condition began gradually to decline. She died at home, as was her wish, among her family and her six cats. She is survived by three of her children: Val, an author and former editor and columnist for The Star, who lives in Bridgehampton and Manhattan; Elizabeth, also a former Star columnist, who has a home and horse farm in the Northwest area of East Hampton; and Timothy, a poet and publisher who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Nicholas Schaffner, a composer and biographer of rock groups, died in 1991--a victim, as was his father, of AIDS. Also surviving are four grandchildren: Timothy's sons Wyatt and John and Val's daughters Kaya and Lia. A fifth grandchild, a boy who will be named Pada Macpherson Schaffner, is expected to be born within the next few days to Val and his wife Min-Myn. A memorial service will be held on Mrs. Schaffner's birthday, March 31, at a place to be announced. In lieu of flowers, contributions to the Bay Street Theater are suggested. ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm Email: joris@ albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 07:20:26 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "richard.tylr" Subject: Re: "New Poet" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I'm with you mostly on this: I dont think that ALL political correctness is a bad thing. It becomes bad when it becomes formulaic, or denies expression even of "wrong" opinions.... I took the point eg about cripples and how some poeple would be sensitive to that term for example but feel that my right to be eg acidentally insensitive, or to be strongly 'prejudiced'or whatever must be considered..hence my rather tongue in cheek "diatribe" [Cripples cripples cripples etc...] of course I wouldnt go around using rascist or insenstive terms for the hell of it for I feel that that is wrong: but it has to be acknowledged that they are used and sometimes we use them under stress or because we need to or we were stupid or it was right to or we wer angry or whatever.... some things are good that are PC but it can lead and often does lead to straight-jacketting: however in regard to the young boy we should yes be sensitive but he WILL get criticism: the next question is one of personal philosophy and development etc when is it or is it ever good to criticise (if it is obviously everyone is "criticisable") ..... I think that in general directing or urging people, or at least helping them to develop self development, confidence, esteem, is essential: but later we have the question of (given a "mature" populace who have developed a good inner strength so to speak) the desirability or otherwise of criticism at all: the best kind is that which unaggressively assesses as far as the critic is able, but also uncovers and inspires potential readers of a work. Better overall to talk about a writer one is very inspired by... Obviously if we think someone is "hopeless" or "very poor" as a writer we cant lie: but the answer there might be to avoid commenting on that writer ... actually a better way of critiquing might be to suggest ways a writer might alter his/her writing..... its problematic... In general we should be positive, but obviously ther are times when a discerning knife has to be used: but let the scalpel attempt to heal if possible! Possibly this is more problematic with "new" writers than those established. But overall I am in agreement. regards, Richard. ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael amberwind" To: Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 8:43 AM Subject: Re: "New Poet" > Beethoven went deaf, Dante was blind, and > according to rumour, so was Homer. There were no > social programs for these people. They do not > continue to be studied over the centuries because > of their "special interest" status, but because > of what they *said*. > > I think it is condescending to grant some sort of > special dispensation based on disabilities, > especially in literature, which is arguably one > of the most level playing fields there is. > > It is not a question of of conforming to socially > accepted norms. If a deaf poet puts on a > performance for the deaf, they have conformed to > a set of normalised expectations, namely those > within the deaf community. > > We seem to have the idea that everyone can and > should be able to do everything. There *are* > things the handicapped cannot do. That's what > *makes* them handicapped! > > Were I too lose my arms, legs, hearing and > eyesight in the next five minutes, I would still > expect that anything I write be judged against an > "objective" standard. If I had to talk into a > tape recorder, then so be it. > > Of course we are dealing with not art and > aesthetics anymore, but political correctness. > There is truth in what Harold Bloom calls "the > literature of resentment". I prefer to think of > it as an utter lack of commonsense. > > A poem may or may not be interesting in the > context in which it was written, but that should > not be the final criteria. > > >>Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 21:23:26 -0500 > >>From: Millie Niss > >>Subject: Re: "New" Poet > > >>You said I said: > > > 2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF > AGE > OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? > OR > CLASS? ETC.?) > > Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, > again, > I have to re-translate it: > > If the sick wish to advance the social > assimilation of > their fellow disabled, they should conform to > socially > accepted norms. > > Am I misrepresenting the thought? > > It's better for the disadvantaged or special > caste to > ~impersonate~ the privileged majorities, in order > better to promote inclusion of their group? > ------- > > You didn't misstate what I said but you lost the > context, which was that > "sadly" this is true. I also said that > logically, if we wanted to prove > that we aren't morons by writing poetry, we > should only have to write the > poetry average people who are not morons write, > which generally isn't very > good (to use a loaded term, of course). > > I think it is silly to make poetry-writing the > center of a claim that > disabled people are as worthy of respect or love > or care as other people. > All people are worthy of respect, etc., by virtue > of being human, and there > are certainly som ediability groups whoo can > never write as good poetry as > non-disabled folks (say people who are multiply > handicapped and can neither > move nor speak and are mentally retarded (one > hopes these people have > extremely sever mental deficiencies because if > they are even conscious of > existing it must be hellish)). > > A lot of times minority groups claim to have a > culture of their own and want > not to be judged by the standards of the > majority. Perhaps a group very > invested in this idea wouldn'ty want to compete > in the field of poetry > because it isn't their domain. Or they would > have a poetry so different > from ouirs that we couldn't understand it. > Recently, disability groups have > made use of the "we're different, not better or > worse" idea. The Deaf (who > demand the right to be capitalized) have done > this the most, presumably > because they share a language that non-Deaf > people rarely if ever achieve > fluency in. Deaf poetry does exist and it is > incomprehensibe to non-Deaf > people, although there are also productions which > try to mix Deaf and > hearing words, music, and dance. > > ===== > ...I am a real poet. My poem > is finished and I haven't mentioned > orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call > it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery > I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. > [from "Why I Am Not A Painter" by Frank O'Hara] > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send your FREE holiday greetings online! > http://greetings.yahoo.com > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 04:45:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Title: Nine Points of the Phenomenology of Painting MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII - Title: Nine Points of the Phenomenology of Painting "Title: "the canvas is an indeterminate size, sufficiently large to occupy a fair proportion of the viewer's angle of vision. color and textual attributes are also indeterminate, irrelevant, peripheral" Oil on white canvas, black text in imitation of courier." this title affixed to white label, traditionally placed to the left of the painting at an indetermin- ate distance. beneath: "THESE ARE THE FIRST ERRORS." description of painting: "Oil on white canvas, black text in imitation of courier." Text rescued from the painting: Upper left: "i reside here, huddled in flight within the corner. it's comfortable but requires energy, continuous maintenance. one false slip and i crash. this is half-wrecking zone, half-home. no one imagines i'm here; it's safe. someone or something else ... requires the same amount of energy ... has no place to huddle ... out in the open ... who knows " Upper middle: "this is impossible, all this energy; i'm sliding back and forth; you can't get to me; you can't find me; you know i'm not cornered; i can never be cornered; this is the sky, the heavens, the empyrean; this isn't the corner; the corner's always artifice; the corner takes a different kind of energy, a push; here it's towards the vertical; i'm always heading up, against the edge; the edge is a horizontal line" Upper right: "The edge is a point. The edge is one-dimensional. I gather towards the point. The point is natural; it's origin. It takes energy to remain in the vicinity of the point. The point marks the edge of the roof. This is a roof, neither sky nor heaven. You can always find me by my coordinates. This is the Cartesian fetishization of the real. This is the last of the systems of defense." Middle left: "I'm against the margin, the margin is a line, a vector, the margin points to the roof, the sky, the pole at pagoda center, I'm there, rubbed raw against the Thing, vertical and human, walking, not fucking, at attention, not supine, nothing's beyond the left; nothing's left of it." Center: "there's nowhere, there are names and no names, there are things and no things, there's nothing to grasp, i'm naked, vulnerable, you can see all of me, you can see through me, i'm the punctum of representation, this is the vanishing-point of the phenomenology of the real, arms and legs, mountains and valleys, waters and locomotives, herons and pagodas in all directions, frameworks and annihilations, states and processes, trans- formations, the name leaks, suppurations, double dimensions, i'm sliding in every direction, i can't see the lines or points, a spread or stain, splayed or residue, abject, the stigmata of effacement of the other, the strategic game, i.e. the location of the game, played out" Middle right: "This is it - the vertical body - compressed against the bar of the real - there's a bit of support for it - the vertical dimension, hierarchy - the frame's holding - always aware of the frame - this could be an infinite plane extending from here - imagine the possibilities - lungs and breathing - in the distance - nothing at all - I remember the center - I couldn't work there - couldn't begin or end there - all that blanked space - nothing - but here - there's a moment of parallel - every point has that - moment of perpendicular - the same - whole pencils of lines - filling in the interstices - cubisms of all sorts - spectacles of abstraction - styles - genres - I'm safe here - I could go on and on - " Lower left: "she's down in the corner... she's there with him... they're so safe... they're sleeping... look at them sleep... they can do anything here... this holds the rest of the image... this is the source of all rep- resentation... this doesn't have to do anything... this can't do anything ... another of the zero-dimensionals... they're fucking now... now they're drinking... they're whispering... i can almost hear them... they don't have to maintain anything... they're not sliding anywhere... they're cuddling... they're quiet and serene... they're at rest... they're holding their own... garnering sweetness and light... " Lower middle: "What are you thinking of? We're sliding back and forth? We're the base of all things! We're the foundation! What are we going to do? Is this the horizon at your foot? This is the foreground of every world! This is the earth against the ungraspable mysteries reaching upwards beyond the possibility of body, organism, original face! Are you claiming essentialism? Wouldn't this be essentialism, if such, if any, were the case? Of course, still it takes energy to hold on! It takes a bit of energy to avoid sliding to the point! Isn't the point zero? Isn't the point nothing at all? Look, an animal! Look, names and contours! Look, all sorts of things?" Lower right: "outlaw grasps of forms and substances, crashed caches of brushstrokes and inscriptions, compression algorithms of conversations and languages: LOOK WE'RE SAFE HERE TOO: the wall of the work where the signature sits: HERE: anywhere but there are expectations: IT'S CROWDING US OUT: what is: the names: all the names: but they're safe, the store- house: store-house of the real: something else, something else: I'LL LOOK IT UP; demarcation one again of origins: IT SAYS HERE AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT: one moment, one moment: " lit from an indeterminate distance, THIS IS AN ERROR, in consideration of the canvas - nevertheless, it's there _to be read_ as if there were an adjudicated syntax, acceptable, beyond which the world is differend. _ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 08:41:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Agha Shahid Ali In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Agha Shahid Ali, 52, a Poet Who Had Roots in Kashmir By ERIC PACE Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri- American poet who was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, died on Dec. 8 at his brother's home in Amherst, Mass., where he was staying. He was 52 and had lived in Brooklyn. The cause was brain cancer, the publishing house W. W. Norton announced. Mr. Ali was named a finalist for his book of poems "Rooms Are Never Finished," which Norton published in November. Almost 30 of its pages involve his elegy to his mother, who also died of brain cancer. Grief and violence were among his themes. In the poem "Of Light," published in the journal Poetry this year, he wrote: "From History tears learn a slanted understanding/of the human face torn by blood's bulletin." When Mr. Ali became a finalist for the National Book Award, the poet laureate of Maryland, Michael Collier, wrote: "As a Kashmiri, Ali is aware of the historical vicissitudes that breed violence and hatred in people who once lived together peacefully. His poems speak to the enduring qualities of love and friendship. With elegance and wit, they also speak to the difficulty of maintaining such relationships." Another American poet, Michael Palmer, cited Mr. Ali's links to poets ranging from the Urdu-language Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the Spaniard Federico García Lorca. Mr. Ali helped introduce American poets to a venerable Persian poetic form, the ghazal. Cultural ties and divisions were also themes of his. In his poem "Farewell" he wrote: "In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked/in each other's reflections." But another says: "A language must measure up to one's native dust./Divided between two cultures, I spoke a language foreign even to my ears." He spoke a combination of Urdu and English as a child, but he wrote all his poetry in English. Eight books of his poems have been published, and Norton plans to bring out another in 2003. Mr. Ali was born in New Delhi and grew up in Kashmir and in Indiana, where his parents were studying. He moved to the United States permanently in 1975. He held degrees from two universities in India and three in the United States and taught at several American universities and colleges. In addition to his brother, Agha Iqbal Ali, he is survived by his father, Ashraf, of Srinagar, India, the historic capital of Kashmir; two sisters, Hena Ahmad of Kirksville, Mo., and Sameetah Agha Murphy of Brooklyn; two nephews; and a niece. ________________________________________________________________ Pierre Joris Just out from Wesleyan UP: 6 Madison Place Albany NY 12202 POASIS: Selected Poems 1986-1999 Tel: (518) 426-0433 Fax: (518) 426-3722 go to: http://www.albany.edu/~joris/poasis.htm Email: joris@ albany.edu Url: ____________________________________________________________________________ _ > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 15:39:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: RFC822 error: Incorrect or incomplete address field found and ignored. From: Richard Frey Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: meeting for the notcoffeehouse Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Contact: Richard Frey 215-735-7156 richardfrey@dca.net (NOTcoffeeHouse)Poetry and Performance Series www.notcoffeehouse.org Sunday, January 6, 2002, 1 pm First Unitarian Church 2125 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19103/215-563-3980 New Poetry A new young poet, Brian Patrick Heston (at the U of New Hampshire MA in poetry program) is returning to Philly to read for us. Brian has published extensively in small press literary magazines. Also, we will present Francis Peter Hagen, who is bringing along his collaborators on a film project from which they will perform selected comic/dramatic scenes. There will also be an open reading afterwards as well as an unofficial celebration for Limited Editions, the literary magazine of Community College of Philadelphia, which won a little national recognition this year (only the 2nd time in its life). $1 admission. Poets and performers may submit works for posting on the website via email (attachment easiest for webmaster) to the webmaster@notcoffeehouse.org or works may be emailed to Richard Frey at richardfrey@dca.net or USPS or hand-delivered through slot at 500 South 25th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19146. More information: Church office, 215-563-3980, Jeff Loo, 546-6381 or Richard Frey, 735-7156. Website address: www.notcoffeehouse.org POETS & PERFORMERS PREVIOUSLY APPEARING AT NOTCOFFEEHOUSE: NATHALIE ANDERSON, LISA COFFMAN, BARBARA COLE, BARB DANIELS, LINH DINH, LORI-NAN ENGLER, SIMONE ZELITCH, DAN EVANS, BRENDA MCMILLAN, KERRY SHERIN, JOHN KELLY GREEN, EMILIANO MARTIN, JOSE GAMALINDA, TOSHI MAKIHARA, THOM NICKELS, JOANNE LEVA, DARCY CUMMINGS, DAVID MOOLTEN, KRISTEN GALLAGHER, SHULAMITH WACHTER CAINE, MARALYN LOIS POLAK, MARCUS CAFAGNA, ETHEL RACKIN, LAUREN CRIST, BETH PHILLIPS BROWN, JOSEPH SORRENTINO, FRANK X, RICHARD KIKIONYOGO, ELLIOTT LEVIN, LEONARD GONTAREK, LAMONT STEPTOE, BERNARD STEHLE, SHARON RHINESMITH, ALEXANDRA GRILIKHES, C. A. CONRAD, NATE CHINEN, JIM CORY, TOM GRANT, GREGG BIGLIERI, ELI GOLDBLATT, STEPHANIE JANE PARRINO, JEFF LOO, THEODORE A. HARRIS, MIKE MAGEE, WIL PERKINS, DEBORAH BURNHAM, UNSOUND, DANNY ROMERO, DON RIGGS, SHAWN WALKER, SHE-HAW, SCOTT KRAMER, JUDITH TOMKINS, 6 OF THE UNBEARABLES - ALFRED VITALE RON KOLM, JIM FEAST, MIKE CARTER, SHARON MESMER, CAROL WIERZBICKI-,JOHN PHILLIPS, QUINN ELI, MOLLY RUSSAKOFF, PEGGY CARRIGAN, KELLY MCQUAIN, PATRICK KELLY, MARK SARRO, ROCCO RENZETTI, VOICES OF A DIFFERENT DREAM - ANNIE GEHEB, ELLEN FORD MASON, SUSAN WINDLE - BOB PERELMAN, JENA OSMAN, ROBYN EDELSTEIN,BRIAN PATRICK HESTON, FRANCIS PETER HAGEN, SHANKAR VEDANTAM, YOLANDA WISHER, LYNN LEVIN, MARGARET HOLLEY, DON SILVER, ROSS GAY, HEATHER STARR, MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI, DAISY FRIED, KNIFE & FORK BAND, ALICIA ASKENASE, RUTH ROUFF, KYLE CONNER, TAMARA OAKMAN, ROBYN EDELSTEIN, SARA OMINSKY, THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI, CAROLE BERNSTEIN, RYAN ECKES, THE NIGHTBIRDS, MARJ HAHNE, TONI BROWN, MELISA CAHNMANN, DIANE GUARNIERI, SIANI TAYLOR, CATZIE VILAYPHONH, MICHELLE MYERS, NZADI KEITA, ANDREW BRADLEY, JOE CHELLIUS, A.V. CHRISTIE, SHELLY REESE -- Richard Frey 500 South 25th Street Philadelphia. PA 19146 215-735-7156 richardfrey@dca.net