Kurt Schwitters
from
the PennSound Schwitters Page
The Ursonate (or: Sonate in Urlauten)
1922-1932
"Ur
Sonata" performed by Kurt Schwitters at Ubu & PennSound:
sound files and score
View
just the score
Other recordings of the work by
Christian
Bok mp3
Butterfield
at Ubu)
Jaap Blonk at Ubu at
Adrian Khactu mp3.
Khactu has also written a listening
guide to Schwitter's performances (2007)
The Movements
of the Poem:
einleitung und erster teil: rondo
zweiter teil: largo
dritter Teil: scherzo
trio
scherzo
vierter teil: presto -ablösung
kadenz
schluss
Deformative versions:
Luke McGowan, Robo
Ursonate (2005) (18:36)
"The physical generation of the piece was
a remarkably effortless process on the part of the artist: Schwitters'
score was simply cut and pasted into a commercial text-to-speech
synthesis program with all further performative/compositional
decisions made by the computer. There was no attempt to
correct interpretive error, nor was there any tinkering with
the program's default prosody settings."
Linnunlaulupuu
(Finland 2005)
Kun Jia, Simultaneous
Ursonate (2006) (audio of Kurt Schwitters, Christopher Butterfield & Eberhard
Blum) (13:38)
Primiti Too Taa,
an animated short produced on a typewriter.
Produced and Directed by Ed Ackerman and Colin Morton in 1988
Schwitters' comments:
"The Sonata consists of four movements, of an overture and a finale, and seventhly, of a cadenza in the fourth movement. The first movement is a rondo with four main themes, designated as such in the text of the Sonata. You yourself will certainly feel the rhythm, slack or strong, high or low, taut or loose. To explain in detail the variations and compositions of the themes would be tiresome in the end and detrimental to the pleasure of reading and listening, and after all I'm not a professor."
"In the first movement I draw your attention to the word for word repeats of the themes before each variation, to the explosive beginning of the first movement, to the pure lyricism of the sung "Jüü-Kaa," to the military severity of the rhythm of the quite masculine third theme next to the fourth theme which is tremulous and mild as a lamb, and lastly to the accusing finale of the first movement, with the question "tää?"..."
The fourth movement, long-running and quick, comes as a good exercise for the reader's lungs, in particular because the endless repeats, if they are not to seem too uniform, require the voice to be seriously raised most of the time. In the finale I draw your attention to the deliberate return of the alphabet up to a. You feel it coming and expect the a impatiently. But twice over it stops painfully on the b..."
"I do no more than offer a possibility for a solo voice with maybe not much imagination. I myself give a different cadenza each time and, since I recite it entirely by heart, I thereby get the cadenza to produce a very lively effect, forming a sharp contrast with the rest of the Sonata which is quite rigid. There."
"The letters applied are to be pronounced as in German. A single vowel sound is short... Letters, of course, give only a rather incomplete score of the spoken sonata. As with any printed music, many interpretations are possible. As with any other reading, correct reading requires the use of imagination. The reader himself has to work seriously to becomew a genuine reader. Thus, it is work rather than questions or mindless criticism which will improve the reader's receptive capacities. The right of criticism is reserved to those who have achieved a full understanding. Listening to the sonata is better than reading it. This is why I like to perform my sonata in public."
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen
Wesleyan University Press
2007
932 pp.& with 92 "doodles"
Michael Rothenberg, ed.
Gary Snyder, forword
Leslie Scalapino, introduction
| sorrow where there is no pain what
marks here? score skids, fill up like the ice-tea truck my grandmother
kept forgetting before
the wave closed over the gap & none
the wetter for it or
that gives you something to wail in for Philip Whalen |
Whalen
at EPC
Whalen
at PennSound
Brent Cunningham
Interview with Robert Creeley
[May 1992, Buffalo]
(Oakland: Hooke Press, 2007).
Creeley talks about Pound and Olson, meeting Penelope, creative
writing workshops, the anthology wars (in which he recounts some
anecdotes from his Harvard days).
“Go to all the poetry readings and read all the magazines
and whatever but don’t for Christ sake buy into the workshop
ethos of ‘you show me your poems, and I’ll show you
mine,’” which I really dig, but which gets nowhere
frankly. I mean it isn’t that you’re going anywhere
anyhow, but you won’t get anywhere at all. Those poems
will just be a compromise of every instinct you have. If you
make your writing into consensus you’ll have compromised
everything that is specific in what you’re doing, unless
you’re the king of the mountain for some reason, unbeknownst."
Henry Parland
Ideals Clearance
translated from Swedish by Johannes Gõransson
Ugly Duckling Press
Brooklyn: 2007
Second-Wave modernist Henry Parland's centennial is coming up
this new year, though his work will be new to most English language
readers. (Parland's work can be provisionally located in the
vicinity of the Objectivists.) One of the instigators of radical
modernist poetry in Swedish, Parland died when he was just 22.
Like his great supporter Gunnar Björling (1887-1960), whose You
Go the Words, tr. Fredrik Hertzberg, was published by Gõransson’s
Action books earlier this year, Parland’s Swedish comes
via Finland. Parland was born in Russia and grew up in Finland,
only learning Swedish as a teenager; he lived for the final part
of his short life in Lithuania. Perhaps this distinctly non-national
poet speaks to us with all the more telegraphic intensity because
his true home are these poems.
|
just consider these two from Socks: I thought: VI. The Clearance Sale of Ideals [pp.32-35] & this from Flu XV. Lik I saw an ocean Corpses [pp.94-4] |
Guan Shan Yue (Mountain Pass Moon)' by Dai Shulun (732-789),
translated word-for-character &
in seeded-elaboration by John Cayley for 2007/8. Calligraphy
by Gu Gan from the book 'Tangshi Shufa'.
John
Cayley author page
|
DEFINITIONS
OF BRAZIL
Brazil is located on the southern tears of the Americas Brazil is a jungle with snakes who eat cakes Brazil speaks Lebanese, Portuguese, Japanese, Guarnaríse, Tupiese, Inglese Brazil is an adulterating medley of intoxicated syncopations Brazil has no relationship with itself because it has a relation only to itself Brazil lays its cool hands on your hot head Brazil was colonized by Indians who turned the Portuguese into natives Brazil’s Tolstoy is now doing tricks in a favela Brazil is a land of palms and psalms Brazil is the model of a model Brazil is a charm bracelet that has become the necklace of the continent: São Paulo more European than St. Paul, Brazillia more bureaucratic than Geneva, Rio more alluring than Boca “They've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil” In Brazil, the cuckoo sings “macaw, macaw, macaw” Brazil is private property of no man’s God and no woman’s Fury The patron saint of Brazil is its dreams, just as is its Devil Brazil is a carioca not a polka Brazil is Carmen Miranda’s Tutti Frutti hats, Caetano Veloso’s all-weather tropicalismo, Bebel Gilberto’s number on the charts. Brazil is the Elis and Tom “Waters of March” International Airport and Spa Brazil is caipirinha with feijoada (caipira with fedora) Brazil is home of the cassava or tapioca, what you call yuca, or mandioca or aipim or moogo or macaxeira or singkong or tugi or balinghoy or manioc Brazil is the black mask of the PCC inscribed with the words traitor, betrayer Brazil is 186 million stories, 186,000 poems, but only these definitions Put your stocks in Brazil and your bonds in China, or is it the other way around? Brazil is a figment of the imagination of the Amazon If Pelé is poet laureate of Brazil, without ever writing a word, then Ronaldo Gaúcho is the Nijinsky, without ever having set foot in the Ballet Russe Brazil is not emerging it’s proliferating The official religion of Brazil is not just samba but macumba and umbanda, tarantella and churrasco Candomblé is the Brazil wood of world philosophy Brazil is Fred & Ginger Flying Down to Rio with Dolores Del Rio Under the veneer of its vivacity, Brazil is violent, a vile viper playing a violet viola. In Brazil, anything goes for a chance, for a price, for a piece, for a dance, for a fight, for a night; jeitinho brasileiro is born free but everywhere in chains Brazil’s face never shows its heart even when they are identical Brazil stars Bob Hoskins, Jonathan Pryce, and Robert DeNiro Brazil was written by Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard Brazil is concrete and syncretic Brazil is impenetrable and forgiving Brazil is cannibalizing and carnivallizing Brazil is a baroque barcarolle with a bossa nova beat Brazil’s Lula is a little loco, but not as loco as Lucy On Ipanema beach, at the very moment when dusk turns to night, you can hear Orpheus singing for Eurydice; he sings an elegy called Brazil In Brazil,
the real is the only currency that counts
|
English language web site for SIBILIA
Thom
Donovan
on the New York celebration
of Hannah Weiner's Open House
in Fanzine
»»»»»»»»»»»
Steve
McCaffery
interview
in Rain Taxi
»»»»»»»»»»»
Maggie
O'Sullivan evening reading at Penn on Oct. 11
(note: this has been recently added to the Close Listening
performance
from the same day)
for PennSound news subscribe
to our RSS feed
written by Mike Hennessey
where you will find, announced today
that we have all the William Carlos Williams readings
available as singles.
»»»»»»»»»»»
Great
Moments in Taches Blanches
(my blank investigations)
Two not very good shots of a marvellous
artist's book by Louise Bourgeois
Hours of the Day
now on display in New York at the Carolina Nitsch Project Room.
25 cloth panels 17.5' x 27"
published in 2006 by Carolina Nitsch and Lison Editions, NY
The show is up till January 26 at
534 West 26th (NY)
——————
Bill Berkson
reading last night in New York
from
Sudden Address
from Cuneiform Press
CHICAGO MARATHON READING
an off-site event coinciding with
the 2007 Modern Language Association convention
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28th from 7-9:30pm
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Avenue, in the Ballroom
FREE and ADA accessible to the public
Co-sponsored by the the Writing Program at the School
of the Art Institute and the Poetry Foundation
OVER 50 POETS:
Quraysh Ali Lansana, Joe Amato, Robert
Archambeau, Dodie Bellamy, Ray Bianchi, Tisa Bryant,
Charles Cantolupo, Stephen Cope, Josh Corey, Joel
Craig, Elizabeth Cross, Garin Cycholl, Michael
Davidson, Patrick Durgin, Joel Felix, Kass Fleisher,
C. S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Chris Glomski, Steve
Halle, Duriel Harris, Carla Harryman, William R. Howe,
Pierre Joris, Jennifer Karmin, Kevin Killian, Petra
Kuppers, David Lloyd, Nicole Markotic, Cate Marvin,
Philip Metres, Laura Moriarty, Simone Muench, Aldon
Nielsen, Mark Nowak, Kristy Odelius, Bob Perelman,
Kristen Prevallet, Jen Scappettone, Robyn Schiff,
Susan Schultz, Don Share, Ed Skoog, Kerri Sonnenberg,
Chuck Stebelton, Mark Tardi, Catherine Taylor, Tony
Trigilio, Nick Twemlow, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas,
Barrett Watten, Tyrone Williams, Tim Yu
A DISPLAY OF CHICAGO JOURNALS & PRESSES:
*ACM, http://anotherchicagomagazine.org
*The Canary, http://canariumbooks.blogspot.com
*Columiba Poetry Review, http://english.colum.edu/cpr
*Court Green, http://english.colum.edu/courtgreen
*Cracked Slab Books, http://crackedslabbooks.com
*Dancing Girl Press, http://www.dancinggirlpress.com
*Flood Editions, http://www.floodeditions.com
*Hotel Amerika, http://www.hotelamerika.net
*House Press, http://www.housepress.org
*Journal of Artists' Books, http://jab-online.net
*Kenning Editions, http://www.kenningeditions.com
*Make Magazine, http://www.makemag.com
*March Abrazo Press, http://www.marchabrazo.org
*MoonLit, http://moonlitmag.blogspot.com
*Sara Ranchouse, http://www.sararanchouse.com
*Switchback Books, http://www.switchbackbooks.com
*Third World Press, http://www.thirdworldpressinc.com
*TriQuarterly, http://www.triquarterly.org
AND MUCH MUCH MORE: Refreshments! Select books by
the readers for sale from Small Press Distribution.
The MLA Off-Site Marathon Reading is a satellite
tradition coinciding but unaffiliated with the Modern
Language Association's annual convention. This event
is curated by Robert Archambeau and Patrick Durgin.
The Chicago publications display is curated by
Jennifer Karmin.
Rod's
Postal Poetics
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Rod Smith
Every time I publish a book I go to Bridge Street Books, in Washington,
to do a reading at one of the most amiable and intimate spaces
around. And I hang out with Rod, who has made the place a poetry
hub. We usually go to a few museums – on this trip we went
to the Societé Anonyme at the Phillips and then over to
the Smithsonian. Fruitcakes?
November 19, 2006
(29 seconds, 4.7 mb)
download
for best viewing
Portrait Series One: Scalapino, Bergvall, Lakoff, Gross,
Bonvicino, Hills, Glazer
Portrait
Series Two: Drucker, Grenier, Joris, Lehto, Curnow, Sherry
Portrait
Series Three: Lauterbach, Mac Cormack, McCaffery, Berssenbrugge,
Piombino, Tuttle
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
edited by
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein
[pdf
here]
from
The Line in Postmodern Poetry
edited by
Robert Frank and Henry Sayre
Chicago: University of Illinois Press
1988
praxis & theory from
Johanna Drucker, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Hannah Weiner, P.
Inman, Tom Mandel,
Steve Benson, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Charles
Bernstein, Bruce Andrews
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E Lines
PEPC
Library
Robert Kelly
Earish
(homeophonic translations of Paul Celan)
= = =
ANGER IMPELLED by faun gone
from eye on the lass:
greened and shore up, shore up and greened.
In this laugh’s wretched gain, o eye mill.
= = =
UNLICKED AT they came, he
did each in dear
or swarm,
fly garuda art
the known one ― see,
be far on the engine,
eye in seeking spoke, horn,
balled each
sore wetter feeling in
forced.
Yellow Pages:
Outtakes
Nine years ago I went to Los Angeles to shoot
the
Yellow
Pages ads
with Jon Lovitz
(radio and TV)
Here
are the complete outtakes for the Yellow Pages Ads
note: for best playback, click on links below each image to download
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Outtake 1: Plottless ProseDecember 10, 1998
(6 min. 16 sec., 15.6 mb)
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Outtake 2: An Imagined LifeDecember 10, 1998
(11 min., 27.4 mb)
Outtake 3: The Ordinary
December 10, 1998
(11 min. 10 sec., 27.8 mb)
Outtake 4 : Time Capsules
December 10, 1998
(11 min. 08 sec., 27.7 mb)
Outtake 5 : A Real Truck
December 10, 1998
(11 min. 09sec, 27.8 mb)
Outtake 6 : Comparing Editions
December 10, 1998
(1 min. 38 sec., 4.0 mb)
Michael
Golston
Rhythm and Race in 20th century Poetry and Poetics:
Pound, Williams, ad Modern Sciences of Rhythm
Columbia University Press
Here is a Golston abstract relating the book:
"Phonoscopic Fascism: Rhythm, Race, and Poetic Form"
The early twentieth century saw a remarkable interest in the
subject of rhythm, an interest that transgressed discursive boundaries
and linked scientific and humanistic disciplines and the arts
in unusual ways. In my paper, I trace this phenomenon from the
1890’s to 1945, showing how experimental work on rhythm
done in fields including psychology, biology, physiology, musicology,
dance, and poetics produced a general theory of rhythm as an
indicator of racial identity. Bringing together texts from a
variety of sourcesincluding turn of the century French experimental
work on dialect and the vocal apparatus; Dutch phonological reviews
from the 1920’s; The Harvard Psychological Review;
the founding documents of Eurhythmics; Karl Bücher’s Arbeit
und Rhythmus; works by Carl Jung, Ludwig Klages, and Oswald
Spengler; and Nazi treatises on music and racial science, I show
how these ideas of racial rhythm ultimately came to play a role
in Nazi social policy, particularly in the musical pedagogy of
the Hitler Youth.
Here is my own brief note on Golston's book:
Essentially, Golston reads poetic rhythm through the
essentialist beliefs of his modernist subjects. While Golston
doesn’t pose the issue as essentialism vs social constructivism,
that is one way to understand his point. Key is his discussion
of such racially/ethnically essentialist view of rhythms
as “Eurhythmics.” Golston quickly establishes the
racist ideology that underlies a number of modernist ideas of
rhythm, in particular in the work of Pound and Yeats, but with
much wider implications, including for Eliot. The idea that there
are essential rhythms for each race or people, mapped onto the
body, combined with the conviction that some rhythms are better
than others (the belief in Aryan superiority is foreshadowed)
is a toxic mix. In this way, Golston ups the ante on what otherwise
might be viewed as a kind of nostalgic idealization of the “folk” (and
folks rhythms: explicit or ghostly) as counter to urban alienation,
regimentation, and modernization. However, Golston’s book is
not scolding or dismissive of Pound or Yeats. He has absolutely
stellar readings and quotes from both poets and his critique
does not attempt to debunk the value of their poetry or dismiss
their poetics tout court. Indeed, given the more censorious tendency
among much contemporary cultural criticism, Golston’s approach
is exemplary of how to delve into the most disturbing aspects
of a poetic practice while leaving the reader, if anything, even
more interested in the poetry.
Golston’s
first chapter, with its emphasis on devices for showing rhythmic
patterns, and his emphasis on Abbée Pierre Jean Rousselot's "phonoscope" (College
de France) brings some otherwise esoteric material to the forefront
of the socio-cultural, aesthetically engaged poetics that he
articulates.
— CB
OCHO # 14
guest edited by Nick Piombino.
Featuring
Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Nada
Gordon, Kimberly Lyons, Gary Sullivan, Mitch Highfill, Brenda
Iijima, Sharon Mesmer, Tim Peterson, Corinne Robins, Jerome Sala,
Mark Young and Nico Vassilakis.
Cover art by Toni Simon
181 pages, 6" x 9"
________
a
few thoughts on
Todd Haynes's movie I'm Not There
from
The Poetics List
(founded 14 years ago & now moderated by Amy King)
General
Information
Archive
Early
Archive
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Water Control
Officer Report
The New Yorker
12/10/07
percent of poems with
water images: 100
Charles Simic, line one: “I’m a child of your rainy
Sundays”
D. Nurkse, title: “Picnic by the Island Sea”
Kevin Young, penultimate line: “in the rain”
The
New Yorker
poetry like a warm bath
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
===========================
Mike Hennessey continues to put together a
daily
RSS feed
of PennSound highlights & new acquisitions
most recently In the American Tree
radio show from the Bay Area from the late 70s
==================
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 December 2007
“we interact as presence within presence
as spirit twice its equal in spirit
so that a range of beasts burns between us”
Will Alexander, Exobiology as Goddess
Dear Poetry Community,
Will
Alexander
one of our most original and energetic lights, is ill with
cancer.
The last few months have seen Will in and out of County USC,
and otherwise unable to maintain his teaching and reading schedule.
Will was freelancing, so his resources to financially cope with
this situation are exhausted.
We are collectively asking you to help fund Will's living expenses
while he is in treatment and working on recovery. Sheila Scott-Wilkinson,
Will's long-term partner, is acting as Will’s primary caregiver
and financial manager. She and Will have opened a special joint
checking account to receive these monies. Checks can be addressed
to 'Sheila Scott-Wilkinson', and mailed to the following address:
Sheila Scott-Wilkinson
400 South Lafayette Park Place, #307
Los Angeles , CA 90057
Love and Peace,
Thérèse Bachand
Jen Hofer
Andrew Joron
Harryette Mullen
Diane Ward
Plese
use this address
not Poets in Need
for contribution for Will.
Susan Bee's
Marat/Sade poster (1970)
more juvenilia
In 1970 I directed a production of Marat/Sade
with Leonard
Lehrman doing an astounding job as music director.
David
Ignatius reviewed it
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©
appalling
and appallingly similiar
reviews of Ashbery and Whalen
in today's SF
Chronicle
(pdf)
©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©
just in
NO: A Journal of the Arts #6
Issue Six:
Charles Altieri, Beth Anderson, John
Ashbery, Oana Avasilichioaei, Charles Bernstein, Miles
Champion, Evan S. Connell, Guy Debord (a book-length film
transcription, intro. by Joshua Clover, tr. Lucy Forsyth), Allen
Grossman, Camille Guthrie, Alexander Kluge (tr. Hughes & Brady),
Chris Nealon, Gale Nelson, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Joan Retallack, Lisa
Robertson, Michael Zanzone, Ulf Stolterfoht (tr. Rosmarie
Waldrop), Arthur Sze, Fiona Templeton, Jalal Toufic, Magdalena
Zurawski
©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©
Thom
Donovan
on Hannah Weiner
(from his remarks last Wednesday at the Poetry Project event)
©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©
My
Ashbery piece now on-line
(as I learned from reading Ron Silliman's blog)
Lori Emerson's EBR poetics feature
Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren't You the Kind that Tells: My Sentimental Journey through Future Shock and Present Static Electricity. Version 19.84
[Note
this document is best heard with
Quixotic's
Tympanic Membrane Firmware
bundled to the CNS 98 operating system.
Upgrade now.]
A lion, a flinch, and an extraterrestrial were in a lifeboat together and supplies were dwindling. Finally, the lion asked the extraterrestrial, "So what's the big deal about the Internet?" "Speed" said the flinch in a blink of a wince.
No matter how you look at it, speed
is a morally coded concept. With its etymological roots tied
at the groin to success, to think speed is to invoke a java applet
alternating flashing
SPEED
+++++++++
all
Others Pay Cash
Is it possible to imagine an ethics of speed to contrast with the moral insistence on speed as success, efficiency, progress? That is, to interrogate speed not in terms of whether it is good or bad but by means of reciprocal values in which rate is one among many factors, gauged for its aesthetic articulation more than as an absolute measure of anything? In other words, to break the moral coding of speed in order to release its many valences for aesthetic experience and ethical consideration?
Speed is always, anyway, relative to background, context, observer, observed, expectation, desire, loss, habit; what Einstein called the Special Theory of Relativity, as in: the station moves along the tracks looking for the train.
An ethics of speed might begin by noting that human sexual response is often enhanced by prolongation, actively slowing down, what's the rush, it's not a race, it's not the goal but the getting there, getting by, the doing not the done, energia not kinesis, distraction not attention, digression not forward movement.
What Muriel Rukeyser calls "the
speed of darkness"
(70 beats per minute at rest, doubled in motion).
"Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive," it's John Henry versus the steam shovel in three rounds at the Garden, with running commentary by Bob, or is it Ray?, Slow Talkers of America, or then again the tortoise beating the hare, Charlie Chaplin deranged by Taylorization, Marinetti writing odes to acceleration, Ozu head to head with Jacki Chan in Swift Justice: The Bonneville 500 Story, XT, AT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium 1, 2, you're out.
As if the choice were between the assembly line and the verse line.
When I was 12 years old I enrolled in a summer Evelyn Wood speed reading course, lured by the image of the man who read a dozen books a day, itself echoing that mad desire Thomas Wolfe writes of in Of Time and the River when as a student at Harvard he wanted to read all the books in Widener library. After getting a hang for the Evelyn Wood system, I was able to read Albert Camus's The Stranger in twenty-five minutes. "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." I still remember the starting line, and it is the sort of blur Camus evokes here that is the sensation of this kind of speed reading. You might call it virtual reading. But the Wood people made a disclaimer that would be welcome in today's cultural speed-up: You can only read as fast as you think.
When I was in college we made the
distinction between books we would like to read and books we
would like to have read. Or then again there was the legendary
story of the student who writes the best exam of his life on
speed, the only problem being that he writes over and over on
the same line of the page.
SPEED KILLS
the poster said, but it also chills and chills out.
Up to speed but off the wall.
Looking at something fast you get the advantage of an overview, you see patterns not discernible up close, but you may lose the detail. Can't see the thread only the weave. Is that a technical problem to be solved, an aesthetic problem to be explored, or an ethical problem to be acknowledged?
Efficiency without reason is desperation.
One wants - I want - to slow reading down and speed it up at the same time. That is, I want to have thick meaning and then accelerate it, as if the reader might download a zipped poem that proceeds to unpack itself in the mind, over time. By this method, one combines quick delivery - condensare - with "heavy reason." (Laura Riding, in "By a Crude Rotation": "To my lot fell /... A slow speed and a heavy reason, / ... And then content, the language of the mind / That knows no way to stop.")
Art is the ketchup that loses the race.
The political unconscious of postmodern speed is the transcendence of the body and of history, of the resistance in the materials, of the space between here and there, of the time it takes (that time takes as much as it gives); that is, of our animalady, the limits that we live inside of (as Charles Olson put it), our grounding in and as flesh.
(As if you could accelerate the pace of recovery without wounding healing.)
Which is to say that there is in our culture, an intense dissatisfaction with the pace of things, the planned obsolescence now known as obsessive-compulsive upgrade disorder (UCUD), with a culture driven by the values of efficiency, celebrity, market penetration, and disposability. In equal proportion to being beneficiaries of this culture, we feel betrayed by it and beholding to it (as the drug is the master of the addict). We have alternatives, but it is our habit to deride these because they offer resistance instead of assimilation, purposelessness instead of profit, blank spaces in place of demographic rationalization, reflection rather than production, inquiry in place of accumulated knowledge. The alternative is to acknowledge the value of stopping, of derailing, of getting off the machine, in which case we may find that we were not speeding at all, just spinning our wheels without traction. I know I am - and I want to do that some more.
If technology is the answer, what is the question?
Our halls of culture boast newly efficient systems designed to maximize the flow of people through spaces that tokenize the aesthetic experience into voiceover tours with take-home souvenirs, making a trip to some museums more like a walk in a mall than contemplating a bust of Homer. Instead of making ourselves tourists to our own culture, we might create ever more dwelling spaces in which to reflect on art, salons that stop the flow of traffic, that encourage the viewer to rest, to flounder, even to be confused - indeed to be consumed by the art rather than to consume its representations.
Much of the prized and popular writing of our time is written to increase the speed with which it can be read. Our colleges are charged with teaching students a kind of expository writing that emphasizes efficient expression and plainness and that demonizes complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, or anything else that might bog readers down in the writing. Such ideologically blindered writing is governed by the three Cs of Strunk and White Elements of Style fundamentalism: Clarity, Concision, Coherence. In this context, it is useful to note how close this ideology of writing is to the moral discourse of speed. Yet there is another kind of writing, a writing that slows you down, that makes space for the reader to think, to respond, to wander, to savor. That takes pleasure in complexity and finds complexity in pleasure, that isn't interested in producing a meaning for the reader to skim off the top but to provide a pool of thought - a sound - in which to swim.
How can we find ways to support that, to support a writing - and more generally noncommerical contemporary art - that does nothing concrete, that is noninstrumental, that raises questions more than providing answers. One way is as simple as could be: direct support for the production of works through those independent presses or writing centers or web sites, as well as noncommerical art spaces, that publish and present and distribute art. Without direct support for literary publishing, the small presses will not be able to survive in their present form - and the same could be said for the nonprofit sector of the other contemporary arts. And I am not talking about seed money, or money to build better bureaucratic and promotional structures, which are two favored ways to mime, while actually undermining, direct support for the production of literary works and works in other art media.
When the hare always wins, that's morality - speed as success - not ethics. And it sure isn't aesthetics either.
God speeds but she also breaks for humans.
____________________________________
Written for "Key
Words" conference (speed, betrayal, healing) at the Rockefeller
Foundation, June 12, 1998 and originally published in Shark #2
(1999).
±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±±
ebr
www.electronicbookreview.com
new gathering of 19 esssays on the new poetry in the electropoetics
thread
asssembled by Lori Emerson including
Introduction: ceci n'est pas un texte Lori Emerson
Biopoetics; or, a Pilot Plan for a Concrete Poetry Eugene
Thacker
Speed Charles Bernstein
The Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of
Strickland's V Jaishree Odin
Robert Creeley's Radical Poetics Marjorie Perloff
An Inside and an Outside Robert Creeley's last published books Douglas
Manson
Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning Douglas
Barbour
How to Think (with) Thinkertoys: Electronic Literature Collection,
Volume 1 Adalaide Morris
Letters That Matter: The Electronic Literature Collection Volume
1 John Zuern
Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before) Chris Funkhouser
Eshleman's Caves: a review of JUNIPER FUSE Jay Murphy
The Linguistic Cartography of Toilets and Ginger Ale on Canadian
poet Stephen Cain Angela Szczepaniak
Three from The Gig: New Work By/About Maggie O'Sullivan, Allan
Fisher, and Tom Raworth Greg Betts
Soft Links of Innovative Narrative in North America on Biting
the Error: Writers Explore Janet Neigh Seeing the novel in the
21st Century
on Steve Tomasula Mike Barrett
The Comedy of Scholarship om HughKenner Katherine Weiss
& & more &&
Harry Partch’s
Delusion of the Fury
Dean Drummond, Musical Director, with Newband
John Jesurun, Stage Director
Japan
Society (NYC)
info
Tuesday, December 4 and
Thursday through Saturday, December 6 - 8 at 7:30
pm
First restaging of this major work by Second Wave American modernist
composer Harry Partch.
——========+++++===========****++++++++++____________
two recent readings
of mine on PennSound
Yale University Beinecke Library
Oct. 16, 2007
MP3 (49:49)
Mo
Pitkin's, New York
June 6, 2007
reading with John Ashbery
Sponsored by Poetry magazine & McSweeney's "Chain" issue
Opening comments on Ashbery (4:04): MP3
2. Design (1:12): MP3
3. Sad Boy's Sad Boy (1:38): MP3
4. "Dew and Die" from Shadowtime (4:47): MP3
5. "One and a Half Truths" from Shadowtime (2:30): MP3
6. " Madame Moiselle ...." from Shadowtime (0:48): MP3
7. "every lake ..." from Girly Man (1:39): MP3
8. A Theory's Evolution (1:57): MP3
9. The Honor of Virtue (0:24): MP3
10. Loneliness in Linden (1:28): MP3
11. Kiss Me Tommy (Brush Up Your Chaucer) (4:48): MP3
========+++++===========****++++++++++____________
Haven't as yet seen this, but here's the announcment of another
from the very energetic Louis Armand:
eds. Robin Purves & Sam Ladkin ISBN 978-80-7308-194-2 (paperback). 261pp. Publication date: November 2007
Litteraria Pragensia
This collection of essays does not seek to fashion a bespoke 21st-century Albion from the remnants of Britain's various poetic traditions. The poetry considered here, and its criticism too, is by and large critical of the"new imperial suitings" beneath which the old and new networks of power run. The work gathered in these pages knows language and culture to be profoundly complicit across the board in the extension of acts of domination, from the preparation for and execution of war, to the composition of the suicide note, from the overt corrupting of the democratic franchise, to cold calling's interpellation of the human subject as consumer-in-waiting.
Contributors to this volume include:Thomas Day, Keston Sutherland, Alizon Brunning, Robin Purves, J.H. Prynne,
Bruce Stewart, D.S. Marriott, Stephen Thomson, Craig Dworkin, Sophie Read,
Sara Crangle, Malcolm Phillips, Tom Jones, Josh Robinson, Sam Ladkin, Jennifer Cooke, Ian Patterson. Robin Purves is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. Sam Ladkin is a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
now out
CONTEMPORARY
POETICS
Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice,
for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Louis
Armand
ISBN 0-8101-2359-2 (paperback). 384pp.
Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stephane Mallarme in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary.
Charles Bernstein
How Empty is my Bread Pudding?
After Language Poetry: Modernity & its Discontents
Kevin Nolan
Getting Past Odradek
The Avant-Garde & the Wake of Radical Modernism
Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism
Ricardo Nirenberg
Metaphor: The Colour of Being
Vagueness
AND &
Readings Notes
Lost and Found
Augusto de Campos
Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto
Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium
Epigrams, Particle Theory and Hypertext
Image Heuretics
The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life
From Hypertext to Codework
Codeworld
Louis Armand
Techno-Poetics in the Vortext
Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap
Traps or Tools and Damage
Discontinued Meditations
Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text
Just in —
Jackson Mac Low
Thing of Beauty
New and Selected Works
Edited by Anne Tardos
University of California Press
In this generous selection of Jackson Mac Low's work, we can
see, first hand, the poet's profound understanding of the physics
of language and his exuberant articulation of the sounds of words
in unpredictable motions. The multiplicity of Mac Low's forms
and his rejection of any hierarchy among the forms of poetry
(objective and subjective, expository or nonrepresentational,
lyric and epic), along with his refusal to identify poetic composition
with a characteristic "voice" of the poet and his rejection of
traditional aesthetic standards of beauty, are among the chief
marks of his iconoclastic genius. Mac Low's magnificent and multidimensional
poems open vast expanses for the imagination to inhabit.
Mac Low EPC page
Mac
Low PennSound page
PennSound's
new Bob Cobbing page
was curated in conjunction with the Cobbing show
"Make
Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You"
at the Van-Pelt Dietrich Library
University of Pennsylvania
While she was at Penn, Maggie O'Sullivan made available
for the PEPC
Library
Bob Cobbing's
Sockless
in Sandals
1985
(pdf)
This is one of my first collaborations with Susan Bee
from 1971.
Matvei Yankelevich & Lev Rubinstein
Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov memorial, Bowery Poetery Club (NY),
November 18. 2007
Marina Temkina at the Prigov memorial
Lev Rubinstein reading Prigov
photos: ©2007
Charles Bersntein
link | 11-21-08
I will be reading with
Charles North
on Sunday, December 2, 2007, 7pm
at
Zinc Bar
90 W. Houston St
New York
———————
Art Theory Now: from Aesthetics to Aesthesis
Johanna Drucker
School
of Visual Arts: Tuesday, December 11, 7pm
Amphitheater
209
East 23rd Street, 3rd floor, free and open to the public
If the job of art criticism is interpretation, the task of art theory is to offer foundational principles for understanding the identity and cultural function of works of art. But what aesthetic theory accommodates Damien Hirst’s In the Name of God, Phil Collins’ The World Won’t Listen, Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital video works, the books of Dean Dass, or Robert Longo’s drawings of deep space or atomic blasts? How do we formulate aesthetic theory after Adorno? This lecture outlines a shift from aesthetics as the study of objects to aesthesis as a mode of experience and knowledge, and draws on ideas sketched in the author's recent article, "Making Space: Image-Events in an Extreme State," published in Cultural Politics.
Johanna
Drucker is Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University
of Virginia and the author of Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art
and Complicity (University of Chicago, 2006) and The Century
of Artists' Books (Granary, 2004).
Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department.
————————
.
The active networks of writers exchanging works through an engagement
with translation is the most important counterweight to nations,
states,and transnational corporations. The Internet makes possible
an unprecedented scale, depth, and quality of exchange; but these
possibilities will only be realized through complex organization
and editorial imagination. In this brave new world, literacy
is necessary but not sufficient. We have also to consider the
role of activist literary writing and translation in our post-literate
world, where readers and writers need both cultural and technological
literacy to be fully enfranchised in the global and local polis.
These are some of the themes I expect to see addressed at
WALTIC 2008.
The organizers provide this introduction
on their new website, together with registration info
The first ever WALTIC congress will be
held in Stockholm 29 June-2 July 2008. Our aim is to create a
forum of exchange of experience amongst writers, literary translators
and researchers engaged in and committed to the strengthening
of democracy and human rights. Our ambition is to achieve new
insights into reading and literature as tools for analysis of
contemporary society, social development and change.
The main themes for WALTIC 2008 are world literacy, intercultural
dialogue and digitalization. The congress will focus on the narratives
as mediators of knowledge and bearers of culture and collective
memory, with a view to developing guidelines for reinforcing
the role of literature in global society.
————————
BRAVO!
Yvonne Rainer's
RoS Indexical
at Performa 07 (NY)
with
Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally
Silvers
Photo by Paula Court.
Conjunctions
#49
features a John Ashbery
tribute in honor of his 80th birthday
edited by Peter Gizzi and Bradford Morrow
Reginald
Shepherd on Some Trees (1956)
Peter Straub on The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
Charles Bernstein on Rivers and Mountains (1966)
Brian Evenson on A Nest of Ninnies, co-written with James
Schuyler (1969)
Marjorie Welish on The Double Dream of Spring (1970)
Ron Silliman on Three Poems (1972)
David Shapiro on The Vermont Notebook (1975)
Susan Stewart on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)
Brenda Hillman on Houseboat Days (1977)
Kevin
Killian on Three Plays (1978)
Ann Lauterbach on As We Know (1979)
Rae Armantrout on Shadow Train (1981)
Graham Foust on A Wave (1984)
Eileen Myles on April Galleons (1987)
Jed Perl on Reported Sightings (1989)
Ben Lerner on Flow Chart (1991)
Cole Swensen on Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
Marcella Durand on And the Stars Were Shining (1994)
Christian Hawkey on Can you Hear, Bird? (1995)
Anselm Berrigan on Wakefulness (1998)
Joan Retallack on Girls on the Run (1999)
Richard Deming on Your Name Here (2000)
Geoffrey O'Brien on Other Traditions (2000) and Selected
Prose (2004)
Robert Kelly on Chinese Whispers (2002)
James Longenbach on Where Shall I Wander? (2005)
Susan Wheeler on A Worldly Country (2007)
Here is a short excerpt from my essay:
Certain pervasive features in John Ashbery’s work make
their first appearance, full-blown, in Rivers and Mountains,
which was published in 1962, four years after The Tennis Court
Oath and the same number of years before The Double Dream
of Spring. In the poems of this collection, and especially “The
Skaters,” Ashbery introduces a nonlinear associative logic
that averts both exposition and disjunction. Ashbery’s
aversion (after The Tennis Court Oath) to abrupt disjunction
gives his collage-like work the feeling of continuously flowing
voices, even though few of the features of traditional voice-centered
lyrics are present in his work. The connection between any two
lines or sentences in Ashbery has a contingent consecutiveness
that registers transition but not discontinuity. However, the
lack of logical or contingent connections between every other
line opens the work to fractal patterning. “The Skaters” brushes
against this approach by suggesting that the point of contact
between the lines is a kind of “vanishing point.” In
order to create a “third way” between the hypotaxis
of conventional lyric and the parataxis of Pound and Olson (and
his own “Europe” in The Tennis Court Oath),
Ashbery places temporal conjunctions between discrepant collage
elements, giving the spatial sensation of overlay and the temporal
sensation of meandering thought. Skating is the adequate symbol
of this compositional method.
PLUS
Marjorie
Perloff on Ashbery's new selected
Notes from the Air
in Bookforum
(Dec/Jan 2008)
Erica
Hunt & Marty Ehrlich
performed together on Friday night
at Cue Art Foundation in New York.
It was a very rare opportunity to
see them collaborate.
photo: ©2007
Charles Bersntein
link | 11-18-07
[from the archive]
Doping Scandal Rocks Poetry
by Mike Freakman
July 30, New York (AHP2 News Service) – The poetry world has been rocked by recent revelations that several of the most prestigious national poetry contest winners in 2005 and 2006 were written with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Over the past decade, poetry contests have emphasized our openness to all participants, with the promise that each manuscript is judged on its merits along,” said Guadalupe Maximino Glumstein, the Chancellor of the International Poetry Contests Federation (IPCF). “Doping is a huge step backward in our efforts, since it gives an unfair competitive advantage to those who are willing to do anything, including risk long-term damage to their bodies and minds, in order to write the best poem.”
The IPCF advocates testing for performance-enhancing drugs as a prerequisite for national book publications, slam competitions, as well a poetry contests. Poets that violate IPCF rules would be ineligible for prizes or anthologies for penalty periods of one year for first offenders to eternity for repeat offenders. Poets that comply with IPCF guidelines get a sticker to affix to all their publications certifying their poems as doping-free.
“Unless we want poetry to sink back into the margins of society, we must assure readers that poets produce their work with their own sweat and imagination. When we teach a poem to a young person in a school setting, to inspire and instruct, we need to be able to say that anyone can aspire to write a poem as good as this. We can’t afford to send a message that doping is necessary to write the best poems. We have to have an even playing field.”
Several leading poets were asked to comment on the scandal but refused to talk on the record, for fear of provoking IPCF investigations of their conduct. Unlike the use of doping in baseball, track, and cycling, poets often use poetry-performance-enhancing drugs to cause temporary physical and mental impairment or paralysis, in order to hyperactivate their imaginative capacities. The practice has been shown to cause a number of long-term physical and mental maladies.
But 11-year old Daisy Threadwhistle of Incontrobrogliaria, New Jersey, was eager to speak on the record. Ms. Threadwhistle said she was very disappointed when a poem from her school reader was removed when its author tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. “ ‘The Moon Is My Revenge, Venus My Soldier of Midnight’ ” was my favorite poem this year. I feel cheated. I don’t think I want to read any more poems.”
In early 2006, IPCF introduced a battery of blood and psychological tests to detect poetic doping. An IPCF study group is now investigating whether the use of certain computer programs and search engines also should be banned from poetry.
link | 11-17-07
photo:© 2007 Bernstein/PennSound
Leslie Scalapino read on Tuesday
at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.
Her selected poems
IT'S GO IN HORIZONTAL
is due out this Spring
from the University of California Press.
Introduction by Charles Bernstein (3:33): MP3
Complete Reading (41:28): MP3
Discussion with Penn Students (1:25:43): MP3
————————
Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler-Henry
have edited
Alphabet
Game
a bpNichol reader
just out from Coach House
————————
Kenneth Goldsmith gives New York Times
blog readers
a
playlist
(a baker's dozen mp3s)
————————
MEMORIAL READING FOR
DMITRI ALEXANDROVICH PRIGOV
photo courtesy Ugly Duckling
Presse
with Lev Rubinstein, Charles Bernstein, Vitaly Komar, Marina Temkina, Christopher Mattison, Grisha Bruskin. Hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse.
Readings in Russian and English, plus a film screening.
Sunday, November 18th, 6pm - 8pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker
New York
————————
DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND
(A RICHARD FOREMAN THEATER MACHINE)
opening January 17, 2008
Foreman's
complete production notes (120pp pdf)
Foreman
@ EPC
Foreman Close Listening conversation (28:30): MP3