PoemTalk

democracy at 10th & A (PoemTalk #25)

2009-11-07T12:19:00.024-05:00

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Joe Milutis came in from Seattle for this session, and met up with Zack Pieper (wandering eastward from Milwaukee), drove down from northeastern Pennsylvania together and joined Al Filreis, our host, and Erica Kaufman (training southwest from New York) at the Writers House, where it was time to consider a poem that is either specifically about a postage-stamp-sized offbeat haven (the lower East Side of New York of a certain era) or generally about the whole America from which indeed our PoemTalkers gathered. Well, probably both.

Joe calls Alice Notley's "I the People" a poem writing out the "agon in American culture." Zack speculates on why Notley was embarrassed by the title (a remark she makes in introducing it): it's "a gentle parody," Zack offers, "of the way political language abstracts things," but troubling is the general over-use (especially on the Left) of the term "the people" in particular. Al ponders the possibly unambiguous skeptical politics of the title (overt): the title, he contends, is red meat for those who want to see leftist politics here, but the body of the poem is less obviously in the liberal-left rhetorical tradition of talk about democratic rights.

For Zack this is a poem full of things people think when they are walking around during the day, but the result is not mundane. On the contrary, it has a mystical quality. Later, following from this, Erica offers her ideas on how this poem might be taught under the rubric of the New York School of poetry. But right away Erica says its "walking around"-ness is an aspect of the poem she particularly likes: a glimpse at routine thoughts while at the same time a political commentary on the possessive and on the subject.

"I the People" is a poem that makes one wonder: Which comes first in American democracy, the "I" or the "we"? Joe notes that while these are "the two ends of the problem," the vast middle ground between "I" and "we" is both intimate and fraught.

The book in which this poem was collected is titled Parts of a Wedding and the PoemTalkers appropriately consider the mentioned wedding. Joe tries out a (as it were) pedestrian psycho-geographical reading of the spot the poem seems to occupy - at 10th & A. There's a church there. A wedding is letting out? Erica is asked if this specific geography makes the poem more or less alluring to you, and observes that it could be read of a satire of what you gain when you're married. The certain rights and certain status. And thus we are back to the rights-stipulating Preamble. 10th & A, in one sense, is an exception to the way America has interpreted the Constitution's opening words. It is perhaps where democracy "gets really realized" at the level of the body. Zack is sure that in the poem "personal vision and its realization will out-ride any mode of political abstraction." It's a poem about feeling the democratic power of the personal while not shirking the ideological imperative.

Our recording of the poem is from Alice Notley's reading at Buffalo in 1987. Notley's PennSound author page includes four full readings and dozens of individual poems. And here is the text of the poem.

Our director and engineer for PT#25 is James LaMarre and our editor, as always, is Steve McLaughlin. Above, from left to right: Joe Milutis, Zack Pieper, Erica Kaufman.

air for roses (PoemTalk #24)

2009-10-19T12:16:00.022-04:00

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Listening to this show, this discussion of Barbara Guest’s casually and yet densely allusive poem “Roses,” you will hear about Juan Gris-style cubism circa 1912 (in his own “Roses”), about William Carlos Williams’ famous celebration in “The rose is obsolete” of a new kind of rose – the metal rose, the sharp-edged rose, the lovely unlovely rose – and also about a memory from the age of 8 that Gertrude Stein often retold as a way of explaining her views on the difference between art and nature. Is that difference a problem – an anxiety, a cause for reluctance - for the modernism-conscious poet who comes after modernism, such as indeed Guest, who has an instinct to make room in her writing for the ill person requiring real air to breathe?

Al and sometimes the other PoemTalkers felt that this is a rebuke of modernist airlessness. Natalie Gerber (at right) and sometimes the others felt that this is more likely an expression of skepticism about postmodern art and perhaps a fresh return to the moment of 1912 – the thrilling New Era of collage-y paintings such as Gris' “Roses,” which is (arguably) dated 1912 and which was a canvas Gertrude Stein herself owned. Randall Couch points out that the poem looks at a fork or divergence in the modernist evolution or modernist family tree, a turning point Guest feels is worth going back to. Michelle Taransky (at left) notes that the art in the poem is an art already encountered even as the poem itself imagines the possibilities of a fresh encounter.

As Natalie aptly puts it, we are discussing a poem that is testing out its stance in response to the modernist approach to representation.

Here's one version of Gertrude Stein's telling of her early encounter with painting:

It was an oil painting a continuous oil painting, one was surrounded by an oil painting and I how lived continuously out of doors and felt air and sunshine and things to see felt that this was all different and very exciting. There it all was the things to see but there was no air just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously knowing that there was no air. There was no air, there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own.

Williams saw Juan Gris' "Roses" (also called "Flowers") and it is widely considered to be the source of "The rose is obsolete."

This phrase in Guest's poem - "shoe which never floats / and is stationary" - refers, as Randall reminds us, to the painting by Fragonard whose famous short title is "The Swing": the young lady swinging upward lets fly her slipper, which the painter catches in mid-air. And what kind of air is that? (Here again this was a scene Williams pondered, in his anti-descriptive poem "Portrait of a Lady." What kind of man is Fragonard, asks WCW there.)

Roses

“painting has no air . . .”
          —Gertrude Stein

That there should never be air
in a picture surprises me.
It would seem to be only a picture
of a certain kind, a portrait in paper
or glue, somewhere a stickiness
as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness
of another genre. It might be
quite new to do without
that air, or to find oxygen
on the landscape line
like a boat which is an object
or a shoe which never floats
and is stationary.

                  Still there
are certain illnesses that require
air, lots of it. And there are nervous
people who cannot manufacture
enough air and must seek
for it when they don’t have plants,
in pictures. There is the mysterious
traveling that one does outside
the cube and this takes place
in air.

               It is why one develops
an attitude toward roses picked
in the morning air, even roses
without sun shining on them.
The roses of Juan Gris from which
we learn the selflessness of roses
existing perpetually without air,
the lid being down, so to speak,
a 1912 fragrance sifting
to the left corner where we read
“La Merveille” and escape.

"Roses" was included in Guest's book Moscow Manions (1973). The Barbara Guest PennSound page is here, and of course it includes a recording of Guest reading "Roses". The recording was made at Artist's Access Studio, New York, New York, May, 1984. The producer was Anne Becker, and the recording engineer was Peter Darmi. Our PoemTalk engineer was James LaMarre and our editor was, as always, Steve McLaughlin.

living with terror (PoemTalk #23)

2009-10-05T11:11:00.009-04:00

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Back in 2001 the people of the Kelly Writers House wanted to bring Cid Corman--long by then a resident of Kyoto, Japan--to Philadelphia to be with us, give a reading, meet some of his readers. But one thing or another--cost, Cid's health--made this impossible. So we set up a combination of phone link to Cid in Kyoto and a live audiocast feed; in this way, the fifty of us in the Arts Cafe of the Writers House and another 75 or so listening on their computers around the world were able to enjoy a reading by Cid, ask him questions, and make at least that limited sort of contact with the founder of Origin, crusty prolific exile, author of tens of thousands of poems. The November 2001 event was moderated by PoemTalk's producer and host, Al Filreis, along with Frank Sherlock, Fran Ryan and Tom Devaney.

Fast forward. Cid Corman died in 2004. Bob Arnold, Philip Rowland, Jack Kimball, Joe Massey and others have worked hard to keep Cid's poems within the view of readers--especially Bob Arnold whose Longhouse Press published The Next One Thousand Years, the Selected Poems of Cid Corman. And then, as part of the PoemTalk series, we staged a mini-reunion of the November 2001 Cormanite moderators, Fran, Tom, Frank and Al, to talk about one of our favorite poems, "Enuresis."

It means bed-wetting. The poem puts forward this audacious claim to understanding: I know the terror you've experienced in the midst of war because as a child I held my urine close to me for fear of my parents' terrifying enmity. The claim is made with such poetic consciousness (at the level of word choice and meter - and in the spoken performance) that one hardly doubts the power of the homefront psychic terror being remembered.

Enuresis

Terror--Ed--is not
Sitting in one's piss.
I know--I've sat there--

I've slept there and did
Most of my childhood.
That was warmth--in fact--

And comfort--in spite
Of the unconsealed
Unconsealable

Smell. Terror? That was
And always will be
Mother cursing Dad

And there there I am
Alone in that night
Hearing that door slam.

poetic electricity

2009-09-21T08:51:00.009-04:00

Writing in response to PoemTalk #22 on Zukofsky,the Cincinnati-based engineer Aryanil Mukherjee, whose site featuring translations of Bengali poetry we admire, sent us some helpful observations:

I thought I would share this with you if it makes any sense or sheds any new light with which certain aspects of the poem might be reviewed. The opening line [Its hard to see but think of a sea condensed..] made me think of exactly how an electrical condenser [ also known as a capacitor] works. Although, in the next line Zukofsky moves on to the transmission of light and waves, refers to electric stress, finally conditioning it with "unless the space the stresses cross is air". I thought that the construction and functioning of an electric condenser remains central to these lines.

Condensers build voltage and store energy [electric stress] with no real "material" actually conducting electricity. Their construction shows an air gap between the two walls across which the voltage or voltaic stress is preserved. In physics, when we compare electric circuits to elastodynamic spring-mass systems the condenser is equal to a damper which plays a similar role of dampening/amplifying a force [by reducing acceleration].

George Gamow, the Russian born American nuclear physicist, wrote a great deal of popular science. In one of these books [can't remember the title] he describes wave propagation comparing the sea to an electric circuit [and a mechanical spring-mass system] with several layers of capacitors or condencers in parallel. I thought Zukofsky's description of the sea came very close to Gamow's model especially where he talks about "many condensers large and small"...etc.

That a great deal of electric stress [and light] can be stored in between the surface waves and the seabed in layers and all of that can be actually "transmitted" without a real "felt" medium in between is perhaps not just scientific truth but also poetic electricity.

just begun to learn (PoemTalk #22)

2009-09-14T09:14:00.020-04:00

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One of the signal steps forward in the PennSound project--the gathering of recordings of modern and contemporary poets reading their own poems--was the release of the recordings of Louis Zukofsky, thanks to the generosity and cooperation of Paul Zukofsky. The recordings on PennSound's Zukofsky author page are being made available for non-commerical and educational use only (in line with PennSound's mission), and any other use can only be done by permission of Paul. (If you need to contact him, just write us and we'll put you in touch: poemtalk [AT] writing [DOT] upenn [DOT] edu.)

The Zukofsky recordings are remarkable! One of them was made in 1960 by Zukofsky at home, on a reel-to-reel tape machine. It was meant for the Library of Congress. It includes readings of some sections of the long poem Anew. PoemTalk 22 is a discussion of the gorgeous twelfth poem in the Anew series, which is untitled and gets mentioned by its first line, "It's hard to see but think of a sea." One gets a sense of its worked-at density from this first-line sentence alone.

The Anew poems were written between 1935 and 1944 and published in March 1946 at James Decker’s press in the small-format “Pocket Poetry” series. Marcella Booth has dated the writing of our poem precisely: January 16-17, 1944, a week before the poet’s 40th birthday. Several critics have contended that Anew was Zukofsky's attempt at a fresh start. William Carlos Williams, a great supporter of Z and an admirer of these poems, called the writing in this work "adult poetry." Perhaps he meant that Zukofsky was growing up, taking on seasoned topics. Certainly, at least, the end of our poem is quite personal, words coming from the poet's contemplation of his 40th birthday, of mortality's challenge to and provocation of open-ness. As Bob Perelman puts it (asked to compare this poem to others), "The poem is almost conversational. 'Gee, I'm 40. I'm thinking about my entire life.'" Much of our conversation--with PoemTalkers Perelman, Wystan Curnow (visiting us from New Zealand), and Charles Bernstein--is devoted to integrating the first part (full of the language of science) with the second (the personal retrospective).

Wystan, facing a vocabulary of science he didn't understand, wanted to look up the term "condenser" (what, after all, is a condenser really?), but then worried about his impulse to look it up. Is that a productive way of coming to understand Zukofsky's use in verse of electro-magnetism and wireless sound? "Condensed," after all, is an ordinary word--and a term of modernist poetry. (Bob points out Lorine Niedecker's contemporaneous use of condenser to refer to poetry itself, the act of writing in the modern way, in a famous poem that technically imagines the site of the poet-maker as a "condensery": "no layoff / from this / condensery.") "The poem," Charles says in praising its use of the referential language of science, "is not incomprehensible in that it will restore you to the knowledge you already had of what the word means."

Al asks, "What is the connection between the vocabulary of physics here and Zukofsky's wonderful stuff at the end about seeing many things at once?" "By the end," observes Bob, "I'm reminded more and more of the Romantics. It's Wordsworthian, from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. 'Wherever science goes the poet will go.'"* Which leads us to a discussion again of the personal elements in the poem: the specific romanticism of the child, causing double (and really: multiple) seeings.

"The poetics quote from this," adds Charles, "would be: 'I see many things at one time.'" Which is to say: it is an apt way of conceiving Zukofsky's poetics generally.

PoemTalk 22 ends with a discussion of why Zukofsky is not better known. No conspiracy theories here, but a perhaps useful conversation about why writing not easily (quickly) read gives such pleasure. Wystan makes this point most clearly--movingly. There is, alas, little Zukofsky in print, but Charles himself has done something to correct that sorry state of affairs: the new condensed (as it were) Selected Poems, which he edited for Library of America. In that volume you will find this poem, the twelfth of Anew, which Charles was happy to include (as somewhat representative) and which Bob, summing up, simply calls a "great" poem, one of the "greatest hits."

PoemTalk's engineer and director is James LaMarre and our editor, as always, is Steve McLaughlin. PoemTalk is conceived, produced and hosted by Al Filreis. Administrative support is provided by the amazing Mingo Reynolds. The series is co-sponsored by the Kelly Writers House, the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing--both at the University of Pennsylvania--and by the Poetry Foundation, where Anne Halsey is a great supporter. Wystan Curnow's extended visit to Penn was made possible by a generous grant from the office of the provost at Penn. His readings and talks at the Writers House were sponsored by the Writers without Borders series, funded by a gift from Seth Ginns. For links to audio and video recordings of these events, click here. Permission to use the recordings of Louis Zukofsky has been granted to PennSound by Paul Zukofsky. Photo credit, above: (c) Elsa Dorfman.

* Wordsworth: "The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science."

totally indivisible (PoemTalk #21)

2009-08-24T08:21:00.013-04:00

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In PT #21 we talk about a poem by Charles Bernstein written in 2002, published in World on Fire and eventually collected in Girly Man: "In a Restless World Like This Is." As Marcella Durand informs the PoemTalkers, the title is taken from the lyrics of a sweet 1940s song, sung later by Nat King Cole, Doris Day, et alia. Why derive the title from so sentimental a source? Hank Lazer and Marcella each speculate: it's the postwar thing, bitter-sweet, looking simultaneously forward and back, done with it but still needing the balm. Okay, but why now, here--why in this poem?

It's a post-9/11 poem. Eli Goldblatt describes for us Bernstein's initial written responses to 9/11, providing us a context for this poem's unstraightforward all-preamble going-nowhere-ness. Al asserts the obvious: the poem enacts the restlessness the speaker feels: linguistically, tonally, idiomatically. The "no" of the fourth line is one of those staring-over words, as is, of course, "well" in line 8. The poem gives us an alternative "way" or path from the (non)start of its opening to the (non)finish of its ending. It is the opposite of an A->Z poem. There is not a single direction, not a point, and, needless to say--ah, but we at PoemTalk say it!--that is its point.

Where are we going? What is going to happen next? Is it narratively possible to discern ("Not long ago" is story-telling phrasing)? Ah, but "maybe I dreamt it / Or made it up, or have suddenly lost / Track of its train." If you decide you need to go "In one direction" only, you'll find--note the contorted, merged idiomatic language--that "you'll / Have to go on before the way back has / Become totally indivisible." The final word, the PoemTalkers agree, is a national word--a term from the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America, yet a notion that counters rather than abets the concept of discrete parts, clear paths, moving along the road from regress to progress.

In a Restless World Like This Is

Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it
Or made it up, or have suddenly lost
Track of its train in the hocus pocus
Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend
The turn around the corner, come at it
From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball
Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune
Tellers--well, you can see for yourselves there's
Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even
Rocks occasionally break if enough
Pressure is applied. As far as you go
In one direction, all the further you'll
Have to go on before the way back has
Become totally indivisible.

Our recording of the poem was made during a moving outdoor reading in September 2003 at the Kelly Writers House. It and all PoemTalk poems are available through PennSound.

We note that the phrase "World on Fire" is also taken from a popular song--of 1941. Here's more.

As always, at the end, we gather some paradise. Marcella's suggestion, which was omitted from the final edit, was one we are happy to pass along nonetheless: Tisa Bryant's new book, Leon Works.

We at PoemTalk are grateful as ever to James LaMarre for his expert engineering and directing, and to Steve McLaughlin, our masterful sound editor.

choice and style (PoemTalk #20)

2009-07-30T14:40:00.021-04:00

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"Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" is an early poem of Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones. It was published in a periodical in late 1963 and we're assuming--for the sake of our discussion, which gets into some political history--that it was written earlier that year. Our recording was made at the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference held in the summer of 1964.

Mecca Sullivan, Herman Beavers and Alan Loney were our PoemTalkers for this quietly provocative--and perhaps brutally self-critical--poem. All four of us saw two political and aesthetic scenes, at least in the opening: "the back trails" of pre-Independence Kenya, and "American poets in San Francisco," certainly standing in, at least momentarily, for Baraka's two somewhat distinct concerns at the time: post-colonial radicalism, and the Beat aesthetic. One could say, not quite accurately--but helpful for starters--that this was a time when Baraka was making the move from his Beat nexus to world-conscious political heterodoxy.

Mecca and Alan discuss the apparently ironic juxtaposition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Jomo Kenyatta, the Euro-trained anthropologist Kikuyu tribesman who helped lead the Kenyan negotiations with the British. Mecca wonders if, as elsewhere in his writing, Baraka is making Mozart as a cultural symbol susceptible to criticism in light of non-European struggles for basic freedoms. Is the "zoo of consciousness" the situation one finds oneself after one has separated and lost ("Separate / and lose") or is it indeed endemic to the decision to cross aesthetics, share "in- / formation" (formalisms), and assimilate apparent opposites? Do we need to figure Kenyatta walking on the back trails, in sun glasses (a marker of "cool," one of us says), wearing spats, in order to shake into being a real postcolonial anthropological notion? It's not just "choice, and / style." Well, it's that, but also more--for the "beautiful / categories" with which we discern what gets to be called beautiful are not necessarily things we should "go for."

We're grateful to Alan Loney for sidetripping during his U.S. visit from Australia. And as always we're happy that Steve McLaughlin is our crackerjack editor and that James LaMarre does our engineering and recording.

Visit PennSound's Baraka page here. Our poem is here. Click on the image of the text below and you'll see a larger, readable copy.

learn the language (PoemTalk #19)

2009-07-06T16:44:00.029-04:00

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At right, left to right, PoemTalkers Tom Mandel, Sarah Dowling, Rodrigo Toscano.

Bob Perelman began to write "The Unruly Child" using as a pattern Cesar Vallejo's "The Right Meaning". Vallejo: "Mother, you know there is a place somewhere called Paris. It's a huge place and a long way off and it really is huge." The Peruvian's own mother had been dead many years at the time her son wrote the prose-poem, and it is a sad call back from late 1930s Paris (with all its politics, both fascist and antifascist--a tense scene in which Vallejo participated) to a lost Peruvian motherness - pre-self-exilic, pre-political.

The gesture creates a distance and a desperate emotion at once. "I want both modes of address to resonate," Perelman wrote to us at PoemTalk before our discussion. "Vallejo's heartfelt/estranged address to his mother is further estranged by my detourned quoting, but it's heartfelt, too. Kind of a chiastic structure: heartfelt/estranged: estranged/heartfelt."

Tom Mandel, a second-time PoemTalker and an old colleague of Perelman, wanted (at least at first) to stave off theoretically sophisticated readings and to talk of the poem's speaker as Perelman himself: Bob the witty talented impatient poet, Bob the literally unruly son. In its late-70s/early-80s political context, the poem risked being deemed mere bourgeoisified radicalism; but on second much-later thought, it seems to succeed in tracing the deformed social development of the political son of the American mother who learns the language by refusing to learn its "right" meaning.

Thus the term "unruly" is crucial to all this poet's pajama play: a certain energetic conception of language has a politics. Sarah Dowling helpfully discusses the word "desirable" in connection with Marathon Oil. "If you're the unruly child," Sarah notes, "you have to ask questions as to why it [Marathan Oil] is not desirable." What values inhere in that skepticism? What do they do to the nostalgically summoned mother? "The unruly child," adds Rodrigo Toscano, "is a place for language to shake out in periods of instability, a transition from one historical moment to the next. And it seems to want to reset the terms under which he is willing to talk politically. He's trying to renegotiate how he's going to be a hostage to representation." Tom Mandel heartily agrees with that. In the poem, we have this directive: "Learn the language. / That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation." (It's a 1979/80-ish poem and the situation is of course the American Embassy hostage-taking in Teheran.)

"The Unruly Child" was published in To the Reader (1984), an early Perelman book, and then reprinted in Ten to One, his book of selected poems. He recorded this poem for PennSound's Studio 111 series in 2004, offering a brief comment on each poem recited. Before reading our poem, he mentions that To the Reader was the first book in which he regularly "used the present political landscape for subject matter."

The mother, memory, and language socialization are common themes for Perelman, returning in full force for the recent book The Future of Memory. Here a few lines from "To My Mother":

  people are real, me
        too, and I know
            the real one goes

cold at the end,
   it's written into the
       pen stroke I or
           body or language uses

to divide knowledge. Before
   teaching me social location,
       you died and undid
           the difference between now

and then....

Here is the recording we used for this episode, part of a session with students in which Perelman read poems, commented on most, and took questions. And here, below, is the text of "The Unruly Child" (click on the image for a larger view):

the sort of person you imagine (PoemTalk #18)

2009-06-09T07:55:00.014-04:00

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PoemTalk finally goes squarely at the question of authenticity, and - wouldn’t you know it? – we do so through a piece that is not in any conventional sense a poem. Lydia Davis’ “A Position at the University” (published with other similar short prose pieces in Almost No Memory) suggests to Jessica Lowenthal that on this day our show was “PoemProseTalk.” Fair enough. Is it a very short story – in the mode of what we call “fiction”? Not really. Is it a poetic parable in prose? (It struck Al at one point as very much like a pondering paragraph from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.) Thank goodness we brought sociologist David Grazian along. David observes that this piece is like an ethnographic field note. A field note that observes the following: In daily life, authenticity functions the way imagination does. What advantage is derived by writing about authenticity in this linguistically circular manner, in the grammar of mild-seeming discontent? Well, for one thing, it stipulates a poetics; the language of the piece makes us acutely aware as we read or listen that anxiety is the close kin of identity, because identity-naming is always partial whereas the named/identified subject is always hoping for wholeness. That discrepancy – that difference – creates a weird aura, and perhaps this is why Adrian Khactu senses that this piece belongs in the category of mundane SF, the newish sci fi mode in which there are no monsters, scientific abnormalities, cruel transformations. Perhaps the cruelest transformation is what happens every day when a person who thinks of herself in one way is assumed to have a “position” otherwise.

Here is a link to PennSound’s Lydia Davis page, and here is a link to the recording of her reading “A Position at the University” at the Kelly Writers House in 1999. And here is a link to the text.

Above, left to right: David Grazian, Jessica Lowenthal, Adrian Khactu.

The director and engineer for this episode of PoemTalk was James LaMarre, and our editor, as always, is Steve McLaughlin. We're always grateful to Mark Lindsay, too, who on this occasion bailed us out of some sort of technical difficulty, major for us, minor for him.

psycho-acoustics (PoemTalk #17)

2009-05-12T06:19:00.017-04:00

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We know one poet who can bring Kim Jong-il, Montezuma and Maggie Thatcher--and us--together to the table. It's Rodrigo Toscano, and more specifically the Rodrigo Toscano who wrote the poems collected in the book Platform. The word "platform," Al notes in this newest PoemTalk episode, suggests something programmatic, something being contended overall. And one plank, as it were, of this platform is--for Toscano--the relatively light (comic, playful, quick) poem "Poetics," suggesting an aesthetic program, maybe even an ars poetica. Taking this titular cue, the PoemTalkers this time, Randall Couch, Linh Dinh, and Emily Abendroth, sought to piece together the ranging geo-political references, heard the many different registers, tried to place them in a musical idiom, and either concluded that the "Psycho-Acoustic[...] / Jangling" makes a beautiful sound and has a special political force or that the jangling, while beautiful, puts the platform's meaning just out of reach. Al, Emily, and Randall take the former view of the poem, while Linh, in a dissenting mood, takes the latter.

That musical idiom is jazz. The political import of "Pyongyang"--the jarring disharmonious pesty capital of North Korea, an uncooperative element in any poem--leads us in one direction. But its sheer sound sounds more like jazz than communism.

But it does...
as an In Walk Bud
flips the whooole session
on its head

lexicals
in range
clash
and dash out

"In Walked Bud" is a Thelonious Monk piece (made into a soundy poem by jazz-minded Amiri Baraka). The session is what we call a gathering of jazz musicians somewhat improvisationally making their special noise, always a greater aural whole than the parts alone. The poem is a geopolitical session. The lexicals brought within range "clash," yes, but they also "dash out": appearing off the scale, as Pyongyang does in almost any so-called postcommunist discussion, and yet crazy musical 14ths can be worked just right to produce "perfect fifths / effects."

If you like this poem, it's because Toscano helps you imagine that the improvised postcommunist joint can start hoppin' and that a poem is just about the only place, for now, where such a "real summit meeting" (jazzworld phrase for bringing together just the right [blues] elements) can take place.

Really? Does Rodrigo Toscano really want Margaret Thatcher to join in--"as guest / jew-harp / soloist?" Sounds like a good deal of mockery there. But if she does join this performance of a Postmodernity Rag, notwithstanding the "formative / contradictions" of the European Union remaining "unresolved," we are left in the end with a reminder that we are all implicated. Postmodern political life makes a "ho'" of itself, just as Maggie does, just as we do. Emily Abendroth comments on this: can we like or accept one aspect of postmodern life but keep clear of and unimplicated in the rest?

You got the microphone now, so...let's hear it. From the platform, your oration might begin: "A specter is haunting poetic discourse...."

- - -

Here's our PennSound recording of the poem, made in Buffalo in November of 2001.

because I am always talking (PoemTalk #16)

2009-04-08T08:00:00.011-04:00

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Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man" is in many ways a signature poem. Few poems we choose to discuss on PoemTalk are such. Many are downright unrepresentative. This one might indeed be unrepresentative but if a person knows just one Creeley poem this is probably it.

It's been much written about. In The San Francisco Renaissance Michael Davidson explores the "Beat ethos" with a detailed reading of "I Know a Man." Similarly, PoemTalkers Randall Couch, Jessica Lowenthal and Bob Perelman find beat here--but also its counterargument, and/or a rejoinder to its dark depth and to the beat propensity for driving nowhere (or somewhere) fast. Robert Kern in boundary 2--a 1978 essay--finds postmodern poetics in the Creeleyite anthem: in a nutshell, composition as recognition. Cid Corman (himself the topic of an upcoming PoemTalk) finds and commends the "basic English" of the poem, comparing it with a "more refined" and less effective poem on a similar topic by Louis MacNeice. Walter Sutton back in '73 drew a line of influence from Charles Olson's poetics to Creeley's "laconic" and "spasmodic" lineation and rhetoric.

The PoemTalkers talk about this remarkable instance of eloquent stammering. The stammer is perhaps the apt way--since form is never more than an extension of content, and vice versa, after all!--of heading into the surrounding mid-1950s darkness, only to be brought up short by the actual needs of the actual American road. It is not a resolution and not a capitulation, but an assertive and possibly ironic (funny, anyway) means of bringing up short. Or, in short: more stammering.

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Our friends at the Poetry Foundation have listed and linked all episodes of PoemTalk here. And, as always, one can subscribe to PoemTalk through the iTunes music store; simply type "PoemTalk" in the Music Store search box.

There are, at last count, eight different recordings of Creeley reading this poem - all to be found, along with much more, on PennSound's Creeley author page. Not long after his father's death, Will Creeley brought to us boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, which we have gone through carefully, digitizing, segmenting, identifying poem by poem.

surpassing things we've known before (PoemTalk #15)

2009-03-09T14:21:00.022-04:00

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Here, just below, is Lyn Hejinian's typescript of an untitled poem we've taken to calling "constant change figures" (click for a larger view):
It is one poem in a series Hejinian has been writing, a project she currently calls The Book of a Thousand Eyes. If it is finished (perhaps, she tells us, in the summer of 2009?), it might consist of 1,000 poems; more likely of 310 or a few more of them (the number she had completed at the time this episode was recorded). Some poems in the series appeared in The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes, published by Smoke-Proof Press--although, please note, our poem, "constant change figures," does not appear in that gathering. When Hejinian visited the Writers House a few years ago, she read 19 of these gorgeous little eyes, including ours. And it's the audio recording made during that reading that we use in our show.

To what extent does our notion of nature's picture--a picture of the many things we name "out there"--surpass the things we already know? We seem to deem memory nature's picture. So to what extent is experience the result of our living in time, a state producing senses that are familiar and yet move us forward toward new and different effects?

So, truly, constant change figures the time we sense. "Figures" there--a transitive verb at that point--enacts things: change makes things, shapes them, renders them, gets things just so.

As you can tell from the recording, we were astonished that these words could accomplish all that thinking about words? Can you imagine writing a poem of nine triads, 27 lines in all, each line this carefully rendered--a poem that in all uses far fewer unique words than the total number of words in the poem, far fewer than conventional utterances would need to employ. Fewer, let's say, than required by the language of philosophy telling of the same phenomena.

During our lively Hejinian PoemTalk, Tom Mandel in particular works out for us the way the shifting yet repeating triads are enacted. Bob Perelman focuses on Steinian memory (forgetting something himself along the way), Tom Devaney on the power of turned-every-which-way phrasal variations, Al Filreis on the Steinian mode (again) and the poem as a possible critique of the ideology of experience.

We agree that from the time of her great Stein talks* and of Writing Is an Aid to Memory Lyn Hejinian has conceived of writing itself, an act that is at once a matter of forgetting and remembering, as a definition (or an "aid" to the redefinition) of the past.

Is this poem itself--its very manner and form--an instance of what Hejinian famously observed in My Life - "the disquieting runs of life slipping by"? Yes. The four PoemTalkers seemed to agree on that at least. As Bob Perelman notes, the poem itself seems to slip by one. Succinct as it is, one can't seem to hold it all in one's mind at once.

- - -

* Click here for a PennSound recording of Hejinian talking about and reading her own writings through Gertrude Stein.

it's like a new reality, man (PoemTalk #14)

2009-02-03T08:01:00.013-05:00

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PoemTalk listeners will want to stick around for the end of this show in particular, when Nada Gordon, a first-time PoemTalker, recites her flarfistic rewriting of Wallace Stevens' late poem, "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Meantime, of course, we give the poem a good going-through. The talkers this time, beside Nada, are Lawrence Joseph and Charles Bernstein, and we were (for the first time in PoemTalk's short history) on the road, at Studio 92 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Anyone who deals with this poem has to understand the rhetorical gist of Stevens's "like": the cry he thinks he hears seemed "like" a sound in his mind; it was "like" a new knowledge of reality. Charles half-jokes that it's anachronistically (and uncharacteristically) a 1960s like: a cool "very," an intensifer, a pause. Al tries to stipulate that this is a Keats-at-the-casement poem: he's inside, looking out and hearing minimal late-winter birdsong. But Larry believes firmly in the radical open-ness of this poem: we are neither inside nor out. There is no conventional place of standing. "Three times in the poem," Nada has written elsewhere, "he says the sound was coming 'from outside.' But I don’t believe him. How can I believe this from a poet whose 'actual candle blazed with artifice'?"

This was certainly the threesome, too, to say interesting things about the alphabetical "c" that precedes the choir.

Our recording comes from the wonderful collection of recordings at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, and we wish to thank Don Share, Christina Davis, Peter Steinberg, and others who have taken such good care of that material. Stevens traveled to Harvard to record this poem on October 8, 1954 (he died in 1955).

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

can't stop the cars (PoemTalk #13)

2009-01-12T13:17:00.015-05:00

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PoemTalk is back after a bit of a holiday hiatus. Happy to be back with episode 13 on Kathleen Fraser's disorienting prose-poem "The Cars." The piece appears in two paragraphs on a single page in Fraser's great book Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. At some point during our discussion we ask ourselves if there are any such mergings going on in "The Cars" and we agree that there are, certainly. For one thing, two categories so literarily basic as subject and object: the poet's subject position (the p.o.v. of the passenger in a car on an interstate highway) and the object of her gaze--a "dusky"-necked body, a dark or light-darkened man, dangerously crossing the highway at dawn, barely visible to the swiftly passing cars, looking for something he's lost. The person in the car, the narrative seer, sees him, but then she's past him. Did he make it? Did others see him? Does one want to see or to help, and are these categories discrete?

The PoemTalkers this time were Kristen Gallagher, CAConrad (both on our program for the first time) and a wonderful regular, Jessica Lowenthal. Conrad identifies strongly with the woman in the car and expresses real doubts about the man crossing the road. Kristen is, in the end, concerned about the gendered poetic ethics of observing danger for the sake of the poem, which, to be sure, is a problem she feels Fraser raises in the writing (and thus it is a poem about this very "journalistic" problem). Jessica, aided by informal commentary from Kathleen Fraser herself (delivered by surprise, somewhat unfairly, by Al), comes to believe that at the center of the poem's concerns is the disoriented body. Al agrees: it is a body in space, dislocated by interstate highwayness, with no place to stand, no light to define, no there to be there.

PoemTalk #13's engineer and director was James LaMarre and our editor as always is Steve McLaughlin. We at PoemTalk wish to express thanks to Kathleen Fraser (pictured above) for her generosity and assistance.

- - -

The cars

Sprinting across the freeway just ahead of them having set his left foot down directly onto the pavement from the ledge of the cement divide and edging his other leg forward deliberately—caught the way sports pages show an athlete with muscles condensed in the effort of crossing through a particular space—and then she sees the cars coming towards him giving off that early morning shine across their hoods almost colorless but precipitous in the four-lane parallel rush of metal and cannot tell if any driver straining into the distance further ahead has seen him or possibly has caught that glint off the long black flashlight he appears to carry with its up-beam turned on full and faintly visible due to the angle of early sun falling over the mid-western plains fanning out in every direction away from the sudden view of the airport hub’s acclaimed architectural design.

She sees the brief alignment of his body methodically finding its way across the freeway lanes blue baseball cap fit snugly over his head to just above the hairline here now dusky skin of his neck breaks into the picture. He’s made it halfway, she thinks but she can’t stop the cars rushing towards him even as he scans with concentration the worn lanes for the thing he’s lost as if he’s walking through the dark and shining his flashlight wherever the object might have landed, his right knee still lifting purposefully upward and forward.

listen, people

2008-12-06T13:50:00.001-05:00

We're happy to report that 22,000 people are now subscribing to PoemTalk through iTunes podcast subscription. This stat doesn't take into account the many thousands who download the audio files directly from a computer, nor those who steam the audio from this blog. It's just iTunes subscriptions.

There are several ways to hear PoemTalk. Here's one: go to the Poetry Foundation's PoemTalk page and click on "subscribe."

troubled sleep (PoemTalk #12)

2008-11-13T08:16:00.008-05:00

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Ezra Pound integrates - or, rather, doesn't quite integrate - a response to a stupid contemporary judicial ruling on censorship and a fragment from the Canticle of Simeon (Luke, 2:29-32) to make a powerful, comic (even schticky) satire on American culture of his time and perhaps of ours. How this works, variously (and depending too on which recording of Pound reading the poem you hear), is the topic of our twelfth PoemTalk. Talkers this time: Charles Bernstein, Joshua Schuster, Rachel Levitsky.

How broad is the satire? Is the figure whose sleep is troubled by Americans reading classics widely the anxious, sensorious judge, relieved that no one really reads the indecent classics? Or is he the modernist poet, aiming for whatever would strike such a man as indecent? (Is this just another early-Pound personae? Is it the performance of a subject position Pound would never quite occupy? Does the speaker's elitist animosity toward America confirm the judge's disquietude?

PennSound's Pound collection (it's complete - everything recorded by Pound that we know of) includes several readings of "Cantico del Sole." PoemTalk plays two of them, one from the 1930s, the other from the late 50s.

The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
       Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
      Troubles my sleep.
Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant,
Now lettest thou thy servant
       Depart in peace.
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation...
       Oh well!
       It troubles my sleep.

PoemTalk's director, engineer and editor is Steve McLaughlin, who, by the way, has recently taken a turn at selecting his 12 favorite PennSound recordings.

This episode of PoemTalk was recorded in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. Next time, PoemTalk goes on the road - to our Broadway studios in New York, for a discussion of a late poem by Wallace Stevens and the talkers are Nada Gordon, Lawrence Joseph, and Charles Bernstein. Stay tuned.

- - -

Tim Carmody reminds us of this later Poundian remark about Americans' reading habits: "This crisis as I see it was and is at the moment I write this (July 22, 1930) due to a fear that the American public is too stupid to buy books without buying bindings. The continental European buys books in paper covers at 50 or 60 cents per volume in order to see what is in them very much as the American buys magazines." (Pound, "How to Write," Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996], p. 90.)

- - -

Mike Hennessey's PennSound daily did a feature piece on this episode of PoemTalk, providing a good summary of the discussion and some helpful links. Go here for more.

paddling ladders (PoemTalk #11)

2008-10-06T09:35:00.005-04:00

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When a poet asserts she has the voice of no, does that mean she has it - has got that voice down, can do that voice - and wants to know it from the inside in order to get past it, or wants to doubt it, so that she and we can get on to the positive change we seek? Or is, finally, that voice her voice? A withering critique of present conditions (21st-century-style hyper-mediation; disorientation and alienation; natural disasters in response to which there are human-made failures): is that what this voice of no voices?

Well, you can imagine that our PoemTalkers, talking Erica Hunt's poem "the voice of no" from her magnificant illustrated book of poems Arcade, came to no simple conclusion to the above-posed questions. One reason is that the poem starts in a comically self-aware yet censorious maternal voice and then gives way, from a longer view and somewhat more omniscient p.o.v., to geopolitical social ills that indirectly but devastatingly follow (the personal is political for Hunt, for damned sure).

Elizabeth Willis joined us this time, as did Julia Bloch - for both, first appearances on PoemTalk. And an insightful regular, Jessica Lowenthal, formed up our foursome.

Here is the text of the poem. And here a link to Arcade, with illustrations by Alison Saar. Here is Erica Hunt's PennSound page and here is a link to the recording of our poem, "The Voice of No" (1:01).

Our engineers for this episode were Steve McLaughlin and James LaMarre, and our editor was Steve McLaughlin, now productively HQ'd in Rotterdam. The recording of Hunt's poem was made during a conversation with Charles Bernstein as part of his "Close Listening" series, June 20, 2005.

portrait, but of whom? (PoemTalk #10)

2008-09-08T09:00:00.007-04:00

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"Stein leaves no doubt...that she's doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits." So says Jerome Rothenberg--very helpfully--in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Christian Bérard." PennSound's Stein page includes a recording made in New York during the winter of 1934-35 of the first page of the poem as it appeared in Portraits & Prayers, the Random House volume that had just been published. The portrait of Bérard - a friend of Stein's, a painter and set designer and frequenter of her salon - had been written in 1928.

But back to Jerry's statement, meant to get us to talk about non-representational depictions, for (the first line of the poem) "Eating is her subject. / While eating is her subject. / Where eating is her subject" certainly does suggest, emphatically, that neither Bérard nor anyone else is the subject of the poem.

Bob Perelman joined us for PoemTalk 10 and noticed that when Jerry read the poem aloud for us he erred in reading the line "She ate a thin ham and its sauce." Jerry said "name" instead of "sauce" and Bob persuasively runs with that apt substitution. This is a poem about the named and not-named - or, as Lee Ann Brown, our third PoemTalker this time, noted, how language for Stein is something that can be eaten and, in that sense, purely enjoyed, taken in, consumed, made an embodiment.

I kept pushing my conversants to find an at least winking reference to Bérard, at least in the avoidance of him. We know that he was considered an improvisatory genius (in stage design) and had irresistible personal charm despite "his apparent indifference to personal hygiene."* He cut quite a figure in the Stein/Toklas flat, especially at dinnertime. Yet about Bérard's paintings, Stein quipped: "They are almost something and then they are just not."** This there/not-there quality of her subject's art--especially when contrasted with Picasso's and Braque's portraiture (the real instigation of the poem)--seems replicated in the poem's relationship to portraiture itself.

Such winking Paris-insider references aside - they become mere literary-historical background - we four took pleasure in the pleasure Stein obvious took here, word by word. Bob's sense of the punning "Withdraw" (pull back, yes; but also, draw one kind of portrait while withdraw another kind), Lee Ann's and Jerry's sense of child-like play on sounds, our all getting hungry during a late-afternoon talk about a poem dwelling upon "the difference between steaming and roasting," "breaded veal and grapes," "pigeon and a souffle"...these are elements of a language that is like food: delicious, to be taken in. Stein is perhaps to the literary critic as the lover of meals is to the foodie. The foodie's irony: there's talk about food and then there is its realist purpose. What if language were really seen in such a way? We'd all be happier.

PT #10 was directed and edited by Steve McLaughlin and recorded in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House. Our poem is available as a free, downloadable mp3 recording on PennSound.

* Dance Research Journal 22/1 (Spring 1990), p. 32; ** The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933, chapter 7.

the beginnings concept (PoemTalk #9)

2008-08-13T16:17:00.008-04:00

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Our PoemTalkers - this time Gregory Djanikian, Tom Devaney and Jessica Lowenthal - gathered to talk about a late poem by John Ashbery, "Crossroads in the Past," from his book Your Name Here (2000). Amid the usual Ashberyean ontological bounty here's a poem that disentangles the crossed lines of narrative middles and ends (and beginnings). Straightens things out, or at least imagines the goodness of such straightness. And indulges in a nostalgia for the way things were at the start.

Is it age - or the loss of a loved one - that draws an anti-narrative poet to beginnings at the end? That, in short, is the question we posed of this poem. And does such a thing undermine a career-long devotion to middles with implied pre-stories? The wind blows in the direction it blows, and can't be "wrong." What about a "relationship"? Can - or should - a relationship be talked back to its beginnings, a narrative housecleaning?

Jessica and Greg decided finally that the apparently definitive ending dead-ends in an obvious imagery and sentiment. Tom and Al disagreed, seeing the poem as thus a meta-poem: a poem about the poet who has reached a point where he must re-imagine "the beginnings concept" and who realizes its failure.

John Ashbery read this poem as a Kelly Writers House Fellow in the spring of 2002. We have video recordings of the reading and an interview/conversation moderated by Al Filreis.

Here is a link to the Poetry Foundation's PoemTalk page.

Here is PennSound's John Ashbery page. This page has grown enormously in recent weeks, as PennSound becomes the prime available-for-download repositories of audio recordings of this great contemporary poet. Here is a link to Ashbery's reading of our poem, "Crossroads in the Past."

PoemTalk #9 was recorded in Studio 111 at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing in Philadelphia. Our engineer-director and editor was Steve McLaughlin.

At top: standing from left, Tom Devaney and Jessica Lowenthal; seated from left, Gregory Djanikian and Al Filreis.

grease is the word (PoemTalk #8)

2008-07-07T11:08:00.007-04:00

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This time the PoemTalkers were Ron Silliman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Charles Bernstein, and our poem was Rae Armantrout's "The Way." Charles had already spoken with Rae about this poem briefly during their interview in the Close Listening series, so we went into our convo knowing that Rae sees the poem as having two compositional parts--a first part consisting of found phrases, items from the poet's notebook of linguistic observations, a collage of voices, no fixed I. "I am here" is Jesus revealed to you in a pew, but I is also a poem's prospective speaker: someone saying something tautological. Where else would you be, at the moment, than here? The second half, again according to the poet--revealingly or not--is a quasi-personal recollection: being read to as a child, getting lost in a story and thus feeling "abandoned" by the mother who gave her the gift of books. Gretel-like, does she "come upon" these trees, this wood, each time diving into the wreck of each new now-nonnarrative venture? The most relevant of such ventures being...this poem itself? Who is lost in it? Have we lost the poem's speaker, only to come upon her again (and again)?

Charles chants lyrics from Grease: Grease is the way I am feeling. Rachel reminds us that "I am here" can also read as "Kilroy was here" does - a marker left by someone who came randomly before. Ron helps us focus on the ending: a grand vision expected, a definitive something, the light coming down through the trees, and what we get is..."again." The sort of thing that keeps happening over and over. "Once" (as in "once upon a time") in "once again" (the fairy tale's synchronicity).

Here is Armantrout's PennSound page, and here is the 27-second mp3 recording of "The Way."

PoemTalk #8 was recorded in studio 111 of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Our director and engineer was Steve McLaughlin.

now is the time (PoemTalk #7)

2008-05-28T11:33:00.011-04:00

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Bob Holman spent a few hours away from the at-times paradisal Bowery Poetry Club to help us (PoemTalk regulars Jessica Lowenthal and Randall Couch) figure out what sort of beloved community Jerome Rothenberg had in mind when he wrote his possibly programmatic poem, "A Paradise of Poets". He published this short poem in a volume called Seedings and only then, a little later, published the book called A Paradise of Poets (which lacks the title poem). Confused? Please don't be. The poem is a working out of the major preoccupying themes of the book that followed.

And what a book it is! In A Paradise of Poets we re-visit Paradise...err, sorry....Paris, where the ghosts of JR's modernist forebearers (the generation of 1910, he says) appear to him in the guise of Left Bank street people, well dressed but destitute. He anticipates his own demise; he is lonely yet surrounded by the voices of poets he admires. And he realizes that a paradise of poets is only possible when one poet's line stops just as the next poet's line continues, a "line" indeed, as in lineage.

Bob, Jessica and Randall agree in our discussion that this is a heartfelt conclusion and that it must come in stages, beginning with the sort of poetic narcissism under the spell of which the poet believes that no one else can write his poem, even as he is writing over (literally on top of) that of his predecessor.

The world will not end when he does.

Asserting the centrality of such connectedness, Jerome Rothenberg, it was said by Allen Ginsberg, saved us all twenty years. Or, as Bob Holman put it, "He was Google before there was Google."

Here is the text of the poem. And here is the recording of the poem (mp3), and here is a link to PennSound's ample Rothenberg page. Of course JR is widely admired as one of the great performers of his and others' poetry.

Our poem was recorded for the Radio Readings Project on April 24, 1999. PoemTalk's director, engineer and editor for this episode was Steve McLaughlin.

hold your breath and gag (PoemTalk #6)

2008-05-04T11:46:00.008-04:00

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It's easy to imagine that when Tracie Morris (the performer and musical poet) and Kenny Goldsmith (father of Ubuweb, proponent of uncreative writing) joined me and Joshua Schuster as PoemTalkers there would be some noise, pure noise, and indeed there was. So why not go all the way and make our poem a sound poem: Jaap Blonk's insistently sounded performance of the phrase that is the title of a book by Madeline Gins. What the president will say and do. What, indeed?

Joshua and Kenny and I had seen and heard Blonk perform the piece in the very room where we recorded this episode of PoemTalk; Tracie and Kenny had heard him do it for the first time, at a conference in L.A. where Gins was in the audience. So we had this one covered from all sides.

"So," I asked, "what do you think is the deficiency of having only an audio recording of this?" thinking of Blonk's strained reddening face and neck toward the end of the piece: a giant of a man holding his breath and choking on words. Kenny's response to this question: "I don't think there's any deficiency, because he's such a good performer that the audio component of the performance carries the day. And if you're lucky enough to see him it's even more incredible in a different way, but I don't think anything is lost without him being there." Tracie agrees: "You listen. You just listen. There are so many great things he's doing with that piece."

So do, please, listen. Listen to us, yes, but listen especially to Blonk.

Tracie hears patriotic marching in the percussive deformation of the sound of the words (and specifically hears Sousa). Josh hear resonances with presidential politics (to which Tracie adds that she also hears chickens). That leads Josh and me to take some advantage of an apparent split in the soundy camp between the overtly political music poet (Tracie) and the pleasure-seeking all-words-are-already-political gatherer of verbal ambience (Kenny). The political/aesthetic binarism collapses rather quickly, but it's fun (and edifying) while it lasts.

Our recording of Jaap Blonk was made on November 11, 2004 at the Kelly Writers House, recorded by Chris Mustazza and now part of the PennSound archive. Kenny's UbuWeb has a wonderful Blonk page, replete with a bibliography.

As always, Steve McLaughlin was our director and our editor.

whaling ballads & sea chanties

2008-04-27T20:18:00.005-04:00

Thanks to erica kaufman who checked with Alice Notley about the line in Berrigan's "3 Pages": and if the weather plays me fair....

Alice writes: "'And if the weather plays me fair' is from a folksong. Ted had an LP of Ewan M[a]cColl, the Scottish folksinger, performing whaling ballads and sea chanties. It's from one of those."

doing not enough every day (PoemTalk #5)

2008-04-03T12:52:00.015-04:00

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A list of Bohemian pleasures. Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages" is a list poem, surely. He mentions ten things he does every day (including "read lunch poems," surely a reference to Frank O'Hara's book of that title) but the PoemTalkers - Randall Couch, Linh Dinh and special guest erica kaufman - had trouble counting them. We got to nine, and pondered. erica then suggested that she "would count 'NOT ENOUGH' as being ten." The last line of the poem. Those American things (heart attack, Congressional medal, second home) that immediately precede the last line...well, for Berrigan, they don't add up.

So our PoemTalk poem this time is a summing-up poem (Berrigan hinted as such a quality) that sums up by affixing "not enough" to the total. We four liked this sort of life, were turned on by it. Oh, set us down by the waters of Manhattan.

Aside from O'Hara there are further literary references here in this poem about leading the literary life. By the Waters of Manhattan is the novel of another important New Yorker poet, Charles Reznikoff. Al says: "'NO HELP WANTED' as a placard turns around the usual, 'You're an American boy, get a job.'" Ahabian resistance to progress and accumulation and reason, in a world of Starbucks. We found the rhetoric of folk song here, and we saw indeed deep traces of Moby Dick's irrational-rational aestheticism. "Hunting for the Whale" is one of the "ten" things a Berrigan poem does for us every single day.

For the purposes of introducing the idea of the list poem to people not used to seriatic ways of modern and contemporary poetry, we agree that this poem is the perfect instance with which to start. "Teachable" in that sense.

The poem is dedicated to Jack Collom, and our Linh Dinh phoned Jack himself for his thoughts. Listen to PT #5 and find out what Jack told Linh.

Recorded in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, PoemTalk #4 was produced by Al Filreis, edited and engineered by Steve McLaughlin. PennSound's Ted Berrigan page is a treasure trove of great recordings, including the famous 1981 reading of his Sonnets in their entirety. Our poem can be heard here. The poem was read on the radio show "In the American Tree" in 1978, during an interview conducted by Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson on KPFA, Berkeley.

"3 Pages" was published in Berrigan's book Red Wagon and here is a link to the text.

lineage of Ginsberg's vocal warble

2008-03-08T11:28:00.007-05:00

In response to PT #4, Tim Carmody writes: "Ginsberg's recordings of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience plays a larger role in pop music history than you might expect. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice gave the album an A- when it appeared in 1970 (close company with The Beatles' Let It Be, Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, and James Brown's Superbad). And you can hear shades of Ginsberg's distinctive vocal warble in his friends' and admirers' recordings: Patti Smith, David Byrne of Talking Heads, Tom Verlaine of Television, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. And Songs of Innocence and Experience got a fresh look in 2004, when Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Josephine Foster and other musicians associated with what came to be called 'freak folk' in San Francisco cited the voice and music on Ginsberg's record as an influence." [Above at left: Devendra Banhart.]