Richard Tuttle
on Close Listening

photo: ©2006 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Close Listening
readings and conversations at WPS1.Org
Clocktower Studio, New York, December 4, 2006

Program One
Tuttle reads two texts,
"Close to Art" and "Differentials and Service"
and then discusses his writing and books with Charles Bernstein.

Complete Program (27:59)

Singles:
1. Close to Art (3:58)
2. Differentiation and Service (13:37)
3. Discussion with Charles Bernstein(10:12)


Program Two
Tuttle in conversation with Charles Bernstein. Tuttle talks about sound and color and the radio, about being at a loss for words, explains why beauty and the imagination have no place in art, and discusses "quietude" in American art."

Complete Program (28:40)

The two Richard Tuttle programs are my 23rd and 24th shows in the
Close Listening series at WPS1.
There is a full listing with streaming links in the WPS1 archive pages.

"Close Listening" follows on the 30 LINEbreak shows I did in the mid-90s
with Martin Spinelli, which are available at PennSound
Previous shows on this series,
as well as the related "Studio 111" series, recorded at Penn
have fearured:

 

link    |  12-18-06

This review
appears in the December/January issue of
The Brooklyn Rail.

The Weatherwomen’s Terror

link    |  12-15-06

link    |  12-13-06

NEW ON PENNSOUND

Robin Blaser reads from The Holy Forest
(UBC, 1995)
Complete Reading (36:30)
This CD comes from an issue of Collapse Magazine, published in 1996. The reading, which took place at the University of British Columbia's Frederic Wood Theatre, occurred at a conference held in honor of Robin Blaser's seventieth birthday entitled "The Recovery of the Public World, a celebration of his poetry and his poetics."


Tracie Morris at the Vision Festival with DD Jackson, New York, 1997 (55:39)


Robert Creeley's poem "So Quiet Here" set by composer David Felder, 2006 (7:35)
The work is in four sections:


Roy Kiyooka: A Reading at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1991
Complete Reading (34:58)
This recording was one of Kiyooka's last readings and was held in conjunction with an exhibition of his paitings in "The Flat Side of the Landscape: The Emma Lake Artists' Workshops." From the same issue of Collapse as the Blaser recording, above.


John Taggart at the Offpage series
Indiana Univerity of Pennsylvania


Anne Waldman CD
with music by Ambrose Bye
the eye of the falcon - New & Selected
with Ambrose Bye


Fall 2006 readings at Bowery Poetry Club / Segue Series (New York)

October 7, 2006
Stan Apps (35:42): MP3
Kim Rosenfield (38:00): MP3

October 14, 2006
Shanna Compton : available soon
Michael Magee: available soon

October 21, 2006
Meredith Quartermain (31:43): MP3
Peter Quartermain (34:00): MP3

October 28, 2006
Juliana Spahr (35:01): MP3
Bill Luoma (31:02): MP3

November 4, 2006
Michael Gottlieb (38:15): MP3
Rod Smith (31:11): MP3

November 11, 2006
Nick Piombino (35:10): MP3
Kimberly Lyons (33:20): MP3

===============

My MP4 video of Wystan Curnow
posted a couple of days back
didn't work on  some players so I have replace it with one that does work.
The streaming version remains OK.

============

Dan Weinstein has made an
OPML (outliner processing markup language)
version of the EPC Blog list
This format is new to me; it certainly makes browsing the list easier;
it's a kind of user-friendlier rss reader.

EHON
The Artist and the Book in Japan

October 20, 2006 through February 4, 2007
Humanities and Social Sciences Library, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street
New York

Another great show from the New York Public  Library at 42nd Street. This one is a tribute to the legacy of Robert Rainwater, the recently retired curator of the Spencer Collection. Curated by Roger S. Keys.
The show chronicles the Japanese "picture book" from 764 to present.
Note: the show is in two separate exhibition spaces on the main floor.

The Sutra of the Ten Kings of Hell.
(published 1594)




Gifts of the ebb tide = The shell book.
(published 1789)


One of the highlights of this show is Aboard the ship of inspiration, (published 1767), a perhaps forty foot scroll, based on a trip taken by artist Itô Jakuchû (1716-1800) and poet Daiten Kenju on the Yado River to Kyoto. As the trip progressed, Jakuchû and Kenju each made quick improvisatory sketches. Later the poems and drawings were assembled into the scroll. The experience of reading/viewing this scroll of is of page- and mind-expanding horizontality, as one walks along the banks of the work as it unfolds. A translation of the text is provided at each point it appears in the scroll. .


Title calligraphy


Translation of poem:
"Mountains colored high and low, pale mist far off; people’s dwellings here and there, kitchen smoke nearby"

Another favorite of mine, not pictured, is by Senshôte Fukon, eight early 19th century pattern poems shaped in brocade patterns made of out of the syllables of the eight interwoven poems.

The Spencer Collection has made available extensive digital images from the show:
"More than 1,000 images encompassing 1,200 years of Japanese book art, including Buddhist sutras, painted manuscripts, portraits, landscapes, calligraphic verse, and photographic books, with related drawings and woodblock prints."

from 36 Great haikai poets
(published 1799)

PEPC
is pleased to announce
the digital edition of



More Works
by Wystan Curnow
at Jack Books

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


Wystan at Penn


Wystan Curnow
Wystan had just come to town from the Creeley conference. In 1993, he had spent a semester in  Buffalo as a Poetics Program Fellow (along with Arkadii Dragomochenko, Eric Mottram, and Ernesto Livon-Grosman). I asked him about going to graduate school at Penn, where he was the first New Zealander to get a PhD in English in the U.S.
October 18, 2006
(download mp4: 45 seconds, 5.8 mb)

link    |  12-09-06

link    |  12-08-06

link    |  12-07-06

photo: EPC Robin Blaser author page


The Fire
Collected Essays of Robin Blaser
Edited and with a commentary by Miriam Nichols
University of California Press

Robin Blaser’s best known essay is “The Practice of Outside,” his extended introduction to the poetry of Jack Spicer that appeared in The Collected Books. This is one the key works of poetics to emerge from the New American Poetry, comparable, in its own way, to “Projective Verse” by Charles Olson, Jack Spicer’s Vancouver lectures, and Creeley’s A Quick Graph. Unlike Olson or Creeley, though, Blaser published his first essay only in 1967, after he turned 40 and after he had established himself as a poet. Indeed, the bulk of the collected essays are from after 1980; the signal exceptions being “The Fire” (1967), “Particles” (1969), and “The Stadium of the Mirror” (1974). His poetics has the advantage of its belatedness, but its belatedness is also exemplary of an aversion to the programmatic and his commitment to a space of in-between that refuses the abstract binary logic of contradiction in favor of a generative “polar logic” of nonidentity and disjunction. This could be described as the ethical basis of Blaser’s aesthetics.

There are internal reasons, aesthetic reasons, for Blaser’s aversion of canonical publication. This is the first collection of his essays and it is being published simultaneously with an expanded American edition of his collected poems, The Holy Forest, also from the University of California Press. For one thing, his work insists on elusiveness as a social investment not just a literary trope. It questions a semiotic economy of accumulation (intersecting with Baudrillard’s and Bataille’s interest in a “general economy”).

Miriam Nichols has done a supremely meticulous job as editor for both the poems and essays. She has provided a set of notes that are both useful and comprehensive: uncredited citations are documented, allusive reference are made concrete (a true labor of love given how difficult this must have been to do). Nichols’s insistence on providing these paratexts will make this edition definitive for the foreseeable future. Her introduction details the main contributions of these essays and their historical significance. Indeed, she has turned what could have been a valuable essay collection into a superb scholarly edition.

Compared to the essays by his immediate contemporaries, Blaser’s are, by design, philosophically more sophisticated. While Blaser wears his polymathy lightly – often in the form of allusive citation – he is deeply informed by, but by no means entirely in synch with, many of the poststructuralist thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s, and also with the key currents in European philosophy from phenomenology to existentialism to the Frankfurt school. At the same time his poetics is best understood as a deepening and a socializing/historicizing of the poetics of the New American poetry. There are certainly many productive differences – and productive continuities – between his work and the philosophers with whom he affiliates himself. Blaser’s essays also make more apparent the affinities with, and the differences between, the New American Poetics and the poetics of the next generation.

Blaser’s essays do not lend themselves to quotation since they come to life not so much in any given sentence or gloss but rather in a process of thinking that moves from one citation to another. He cultivated insubstantiality and evanescence in a genre better know for hyperbole and imperviousness and arrogance. Blaser comes as close as any one to having created a poetics that manifests itself as a tissue of citation rather than substantive exposition or proposition (and he surely has in mind Walter Benjamin’s idea of a text composed entirely of quotations). The result is that he practices what he preaches: his “self” is subsumed by his “great companions” and by the language through which he encounters them. His submerged voice (let’s just say, voicelessness) is exemplary in the classical sense. Blaser’s is a poetics of deep listening, introjective rather than projective.

If “The Practice of Outside” remains the defining essay on Spicer, “The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead” is a crucial essay on Olson’s poetics. Using Whitehead as the avatar of a poetics of process (in a way that also calls to mind Dewey, Pierce, and Wittgenstein, but most of all Mallarmé and Blake), Blaser makes a powerful case for the limits of techno-rationality (what could also be called logocentrism) in the “Western box” (Olson’s term). Among the fundamental issues of poetics that Blaser addresses here and elsewhere is the need to think through analogy and resemblance – to think serially, in opposition to the radical epistemological limits of positivism (a recurring pole of critique throughout). Nichols’s usefully refers to Blaser’s “affective rendering of reflexivity.” Blaser questions the stable lyric expressive “I” without ever abandoning the possibility of poetic agency, through an inspired understanding of the relation of language itself, as the social, as “outside.”

link    |  12-06-06

Sibila
10 & 11
from São Paulo
& in Portuguese
now available

PURCHASE SIBILA
You can order SIBILA online with a credit card
go to
Livraria Martins Fontes
then click on “COMPRAR”
next to the cover of the issue you’d like

Sibila English portal

Kate Moss Sibila cover images for both issues are by Susan Bee.
Here is one of her originals:

It’s not looking great! Régis Bonvicino Cocaine, Kate it’s not looking great! a Chanel deu aquele troco em você a Burberry um adeus!  você precisa de uma ama-de-leite! Desatenta, anoréxica fumante, atéia ateou fogo em sua carreira  pare de incensar esses merdinhas dos Strokes sua filha se chama Lila Grace! você está sozinha hoje, numa clínica do Arizona  fora da plêiade! as curvas de Karolina Kurkova Diana Dondoe devastadora, na capa da Vogue  the myth of fashion made flesh a beleza camaleônica de Amber Valletta o sutiã de diamantes de Giselle  Tudo ruiu, Kate vá para o inferno ou para um mosteiro rasgue seus cartões de crédito  a H&M trocou você por Mariacarla Boscono bella ragazza sexy do calendário da Pirelli  que fazia boquete nos bosques aceite! a raggazza de Givenchy e do Cavalli agora também da Stella McCartney  Siga, sentindo-se “drácula”! Sua mosca cosmopolita! Cocaine Kate, it’s not looking great!     It’s not looking great! Cocaine, Kate it’s not looking great! Chanel bid you adieu Burberry’s iced you!  you need a wet nurse! addled anorexic atheistic nicotine maniac your career’s gonna burst  stop fawning that piece of shit from Strokes your daughter’s name is Lila Grace! you’re on your own now doing rehab in Arizona  your out of the Pleiades! as curvaceous as Karolina Kurkova Diana Dondoe devastating, on the cover of Vogue  the myth of fashion made flesh chameleon beauty of Amber Valletta Giselle’s diamond bra  All’s ruined, Kate go straight to hell or get to a nunnery no credit cards to cover you  H&M has passed you by for Mariacarla Boscono sexy bella ragazza from the calendar of Pirelli  who get blown in the park so get used to it! Givenchy’s and Cavalli’s ragazza and don’t forget Stella McCartney’s  So you feel like “Dracula”! You cosmopolitan flame! Cocaine Kate, it’s not looking great!  English translation: Charles Bernstein & Maria do Carmo Zanini.

link    |  12-5-06

A Conversation with  Henry Hills

On April 4, 1985,
Henry Hills and I walked through the park
and talked and talked.
Henry was putting together his book
Making Money,
based on his film Money.


from Making Money

HH: With film, when you deal with the shoots you have to deal with all the outtakes & so you have all this terrible shit that you don't ever want to see again that somehow you have to deal with a lot of times before you ever finally get rid of it. It lingers on. I still have hours of outtakes from MONEY rattling around in my head & these terrible lines & so that's why I didn't want to turn on the microphone right away. Actually it's kind of appropriate doing an interview walking just because so many ideas for the film came as I was walking & I even lots of times think of the movie as a kind of walking-type consciousness. It's kind of the way as you're walking down the street in New York so many things fragment your attention.

CB: But the movie seems more like JUMP as the song goes, than walk. Actually you could run a track of that back of what you have; it might work very well.

HH: Disco-mix.

CB: Right, MTV. I think it would work because you do have the same kind of flashing in & out, back and forth, which reminds me of jumping rope or just jumping, of course you think of 'jump-cut' obviously. Whereas a walk seems kind of a different pace than you're interested in . . . more like leaps or a hop, skip, & jump.

HH: I was thinking more of the mental pace than the physical pace. I mean walking in the park is different from walking down First Ave. or Bowery.

CB: Right, well that's true in terms of what you see, but your eye when you're walking, or at least the biological eye, whatever that might be, scans in a very different way. You might look at this & then look at that & you certainly get a break, but there's a kind of feeling of continuity of time that seems very different than what you're interested in.

HH: I see.

CB: You might go from one to another but it moves more like a pan in spirit.

HH: Or a cut to close-up or something.

CB: Yeah, that's right. But even when you close your eyes you can't create something similar to the kind of jump-cut that you're interested in. The mind seems to project continuity. It's very hard to actually create . . . that's why it's interesting to go to a film, because it forces you to be able to . . . forces you, allows you to be able to break out of the habitual projection of continuity that, it seems to me, it's hard to break out of by one's own devices, on a walk say, it's hard to create that. Sometimes you can do interesting things if you wear glasses, moving them around, twisting them & turning them just to create . . . . I do that at very boring poetry readings. I take my glasses off & try to look through them at different kind of oblique angles so I see the person's face kind of like in a funhouse mirror. Things like that might create a more visually interesting texture. But you generally have to be pretty resourceful to break out of the feeling of continuity: that's really the oppression of everyday life. That's despite the fact that Lyn Hejinian in her recent talk says that experience is discontinuous & Nick Piombino has labored with great eloquence to show the many ways in which that's true & the depth that that statement still has. Still there's an awful lot the mind does to compensate for that discontinuity. There's an incredible amount of energy the mind has in the involuntary brain, you might say, not voluntary, to create continuity out of discontinuity & it's boring. It's not an interesting experience to have all this continuity kind of thrust upon you & not be able to break out of it. So it's almost like the opposite of the normal view that the modern existence is fragmented. I think actually not at all. It's hard to actually experience things as discontinuous. I think things in fact are discontinuous & that the mind does take them in in 3 a discontinuous way---it's the kind of thing that psychoanalytically you could show---but there's an incredible amount of compensatory, automatic reflex that eliminates the ability to experience them as actual autonomous fragments---it's almost impossible. Because there's an incredible amount of anxiety of separation from things that seem . . . .

HH: In a congested situation, though, in Times Square or at a party, I think it's possible to fragment your attention, when there's lots of different voices going on & different images that you can be constantly shifting your attention from one to another.

CB: That's true, but it's almost like a light fragmentation versus a real, radical fragmentation, so that it's very easy to have kind of minor, superficial sensations of fragmentation which are in fact merely surface decoration on a continuous, on an experience which the basic thing you're producing is continuity through your conscious projection, through the projections you make & the consciousness you experience, the perception you experience, there can be these little intaglio, these little sgraffiti, that break up the surface. Sgraffiti being an artistic technique, marks made on the surface of . . . .

HH: To create texture?

CB: Or to create forms by cutting through to a differently colored ground underneath.

HH: So I interrupted the continuity of your. . . .

CB: Not at all, unfortunately not, there was simply a minor embellishment where we had this metaphor of stopping & being stopped & our walk being broken, but not real genuine fragmentation. It's just like a light mode of, uh, it's like when Sartre talks about 'petty anxiety' vs. 'real anxiety'. The kind of fragmentation that you might experience at a party with voices speaking & so on is, in my mind, analagous to 'petty anxiety', rather than the genuine anxiety of nothingness that Sartre talks about in Being and Nothingness. This is what I mean by this kind of more radical fragmentation & separation which is similar to an experience of nothingness, so that one feels broken off from something, one feels a chasm in one's own life. Grief reaction in general seems to relate to this, when there's an actual loss of an object, a person, a relationship, & coping with that is a very draining & obsessive experience of trying to search for the lost thing, person, experience in kind of a frantic going over channels in the mind, the mind's circuits in a gridlock because of that sense of loss & that of being broken off, so that seems, just as an example, the kind of experience of genuine fissure that one doesn't experience easily because there's an incredible vested interest, in terms of sanity & calm, to avoid facing that, although I think in reality you might feel it all the time, as if somehow when we walked here the ground would literally fall out from under us & we would tumble to the center of a fiery pit, which is of course what's happening but we're just simply able to screen it out so it doesn't happen. I mean happening psychically, you get a glimmer of this, y'know, I think, listening to the news & the general paratactic quality of the news that people are arrested in South Africa or 35 people are shot there, then they go to something else happening, some other disaster or Bernard Goetz buys a gun in Florida, one after another of unrelated events that have that kind of surface fragmentation that you're talking about, petty fragmentation, yet I think there's something very, something deeper when you actually tune into that every once in a while & it becomes incredibly frightening & bleak because of the synchronicity of these things going on. I mean when you think about some of these things going on that happen, unfortunately, very regularly, some of that anxiety that can be created by that & the fear & the depression that can be created when you think of what happened in Chile today or . . .

HH: Today?

CB: Just the way you said "today" but you turn it on & you hear something that merits that kind of shock, that's what I mean by the ground falling out from under you as you walk, falling in a fiery furnace, it's like a Jonathan Edwards image, but it puts you actually in more touch with whatever reality might be than the more placid idea of the solid pavement & the boats shining in the sun, not that that isn't true also, but what's true is that that's true & also this other thing is true & also things in between and other than that at the same time. That's what I think of as being this deeper sense of fragmentation or of genuine split & that I don't think is so easy to experience all the time. I think you would go mad if you experienced that.
..........


the full conversation
has just been published
in the first issue of
Midway
an on-line magazine.

link    |  12-03-06

Festival of Contemporary Japanese Women Poets
(NY, November 15-17, 2006)

drawings by
Mimi Gross



Kyong-Mi Park


Takako Arai

link    |  11-25-06

This year's Presidential Forum at the MLA Annual Convention
organized by Marjorie Perloff,
is called "The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound."
There will be both the main forum,
three affiliated workshops and readings,
but also two dozen or so related programs,
sponsored by specific divisions, discussion groups, and allied and affiliate organizations.
Read all about it:
Sound of Poetry/Poetry of Sound
(pdf file)

================

Speaking of sound ...

new at PennSound

Caroline Bergvall's
SHORTER CHAUCER TALES (2006)



These four pieces by Caroline Bergvall use the rich and entertaining setting of Chaucer’s medieval pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales for pointed or humourous commentaries on aspects of today’s corruptions, pleasures and blindspots. The texts are written in a mix of languages and feast on a weird and ill-assorted Euro-lingo: contemporary English co-exists with French, Middle English, some lost Latin, some altogether untraceable words, while direct quotes from Chaucer interrupt the BBC and other sources.

1. Party on: "The Host’s Tale": MP4 audio, 5’06”
2. Banned in Poland: "The Summer Tale (deus hic, 1)": MP4 audio, 2’52;   text published in Jacket #31 (Oct. 06)
3. The Pope addresses women: "The Franker Tale (deus hic, 2)": MP4 audio, 5’41”  )
4. Love song: "The Not Tale (funeral)": MP4 audio, 1’32”

Invited by Charles Bernstein and David Wallace and premiered at Fifteenth Annual Conference of the New Chaucer Society, Lincoln Center, NY, 28 July 2006. Co-sponsored by Poets House.
This recording: London 22 Sept 2006.

==========================

John Reynolds
"Pretty Ugly"
(2004)
text from
Let's Just Say
in
Girly Man
---------------
Girly Man appearances

Notre Dame
11/27, 11/28, 11/29
--
University of Chicago
PoemPresent
Renaissance Soietry
11/30 & 12/1