Bronx Museum of Art

PERFORMA 09
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15, 1:00pm
North Building—2nd Floor
Admission: Free
Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and Charles Bernstein
will discuss topics related to the legacy of futurism.

note also:
Nov. 15 Peforma events with Tan Lin amd John Yau

recommended:
David Antin
"Words to the Wise"
(2009)

Keith Waldrop

photo: ©2009 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Close Listening
Art International Radio, operating at ARTonAIR.org
November 7, 2009

When I was in Århus, Denmark, last month
Jean-Marie Gleize and I noticed this paining of a private poetry reading in the Århus museum.
Jens Ferdinand Willumsen
Sophus Clausssen Reading Poems
1915

The Lady Lilith
[for Emma] 
(2009, oil on linen, 20 x 16 ").

Susan Bee
New Paintings
(2009)

• Angels in the Woods (16 x 20")
• Angel Sings (16 x 18")
• Behind Bars (16 x 20")
• Drive By (14 x 18")
• Girl by the Window (18 x 14")
• Harbor of Illusions (37 x 50")
• My Valentine (8 x 8")
• Shoreline Blues (16 x 20")
• Starburst (12 x 16")
• Woman Tormented by Demons (18 x 14")

The Gaze  
(12 x 16")

Sarah Dowling
Security Positions
Montreal: Snare Books
In these exquisitely reserved poems, the relation of person to body, stare to reflection, touch to sight is incised in a poetic dry point that cuts deep. Sarah Dowling’s Security Posture is both elusive and evocative. It shimmers with erotic precision.

Joel Bettridge
Presocratic Blues
Tucson: Chax Press
We breathe in Greek and exhale the pure products of Americana; a vernacular philosophy. Joel Bettridge not only knows this but has strummed it in poems witty, raucous, and bluesy.

Norman Fischer
Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons
San Diego: Singing Horse Press
Fischer's most rhetorically expansive book. In the four works that comprise this this book, Fischer absorbs the energies from his great translations of the Psalms and the narrative elan of Sailing Home and continues the self-reflective lyric work of his pervious books. In the "Voices" section he speaks through several personae, including one Reb Yosl of Kemenetz, "a simple tailor of Lithuania," whose prayers are tonic because so down-to-earth. Here's a poem called "Err" in the voice of Elena Rivera: "letters, not yet words // tear freedom loose // from rude wretched world". The final and longest section of the book, "Seasons" is vintage Fischer, a serial poem of mostly one to three words, clusterd in one tofour line stanzas: An astonishing and exuberant work.

Got to see this last night. Richard Foreman in classic form: part happening, part Dada, part Surrealism, part reverie, part Pirandello, part Brecht, part mesmerizing, always bend-bending; totally Foreman. Dafoe is a powerful counterweight to the Foreman circus, exerting a sheer physical presence as one of Foreman's recurring Quixotic figures (Don Juan, King Rufus, and the Mind King go to Poetry City).

The New York Public Theater
October 27 - December 6 
$65/$75 Saturday evenings. 
But for readers of this site:
$40 tickets.
Valid performances are 10/27--11/15. 
The code is SAVANT4

click on image for readable version; or go to hi-res

"Paradise Lost," New York Post
Nov. 1, 2009

Recordings made on the occasion of Jerome McGann's 70th Birthday in 2007

1. For Love Has Such a Spirit that if It Is Portrayed it Dies (from Controlling Interests)(6:01): MP3
2. The Simply (from The Sophist)(15:58): MP3
3. from Lines of Swinburne (from The Sophist)(1:15): MP3
4. A Foin Lass Bodders Me by Louis Zukofsky (6:04): MP3
5. Don't Get me Wrong (from Girly Man)(1:30): MP3
6. Shenandoah (from Girly Man)(2:39): MP3
7. Lenny Paschen Redux (1:00): MP3
8. Wherever Angels Go (from Girly Man) (1:37): MP3
9. Sad Boy's Sad Boy (1:25): MP3
10. Loneliness in Linden (1:16): MP3
11. from Canti Antichi (from Girly Man) (1:00): MP3
12. Dea%r Fr~ien%d, (3:38): MP3
13. Shenandoah (2:39): MP3

Caroline Bergvall
on the Serpentine Poetry Marathon
at the Poetry Foundation web site

" ...
The Poetry Marathon used the idea of “poetry” very loosely, nearly archaically. It is more to do with doing and making (language) than with applying the stricter and formal bounds of any art form per se. Indeed the remit for “poetry” this weekend is “performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars, and musicians.” As such it is an umbrella term, a reminder that everybody writes, sometimes. However, in the context of a highly secluded British poetry culture, perhaps they’ve taken the idea one step too far. ...

...A closer look revealed that only a very small handful of poets from the many (established and less established) scenes of Britain were represented. The gender and ethnicity count among these was also troublingly unequal, where this is in fact the one thing the Brit Po establishment has represented quite systematically, even at the expense of other, more formally pertinent values. This struck me as the clearest sign of the scission between visual arts and poetic practice in Britain. ...

....Furthermore, although a number of the chosen artists are known for dealing with writing and language pertinently and intrinsically as part of their artwork ... it was something of a disappointment to see so many of them react with undisguised anxiety at that same word, “poetry.” Otherwise lucid, articulate artists found themselves in the throes of open self loathing, “I don’t know poetry,” “I dont know what to read,” choosing to calm the audience by reading from known values such as Eliot, Ted Hughes, Lorca, and Hamburger’s Celan, rather than tracing their own engagement with writing as part of the event. Here, poetry itself was treated as a historical, in the sense of acquired, decorative, rather than productive, mode of functioning. ....

"

read more

Conversation with Charles Bernstein (29:27): MP3
Reading (34:52): MP3

Segmented Reading: Translations Read by Bernstein

1. Introduction (2:15): MP3
2. El Mataa (1:08): MP3
3. El Mataa (1:09): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
4. "Imagem impossível," interspersed with "Image Impossible"(3:12): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
5. Outra tempestade (0:42): MP3
6. Another Storm (0:48): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
7. Poema sério (0:48): MP3
8. Serious Poem (0:37): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
9. Tatugem (0:55): MP3
10. Tattoo (2:11): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
11. Azulejo (0:34): MP3
12. Blue Tile (0:27): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
13. Azulejo (0:26): MP3
14. Caminho de hamster (1:12): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros
15. The Hampster's Way (1:14): MP3
16. Definitions of Brazil with Charles Berstein (7:21): MP3
17. Cocaine Kate (3:58): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein and Maria do Carmo Zanini
18. Prosa (0:55): MP3
19. Prose (1:04): MP3 tr. Charles Bernstein
20. Untitled (1:05): MP3
21. Sem título (1:14): MP3 tr. Odile Cisneros

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3
ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson
Panel and Reading
at Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania
Oct. 7, 2009

Complete Discussion (1:22:09): MP3 / MOV

Complete Reading (1:46:24): MP3 / MOV

segmented reading:

1. Introduction by Charles Bernstein (3:41): MP3
2. Introduction by Michael Gamer (4:46): MP3
3. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffery Robinson (11:51): MP3
4. Charles Bernstein (12:12): MP3
5. Jerome Rothenberg (3:38): MP3
6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (12:04): MP3
7. Jeffery Robinson (6:29): MP3
8. George Economou (13:33): MP3
9. Jerome Rothenberg (3:02): MP3
10. Rochelle Owens (16:05): MP3
11. Jeffery Robinson (1:50): MP3
12. Bob Perelman (13:33): MP3
13. Jerome Rothenberg (1:23): MP3
    

N.B. cut 4 [(12:12): MP3] is a montage
For Emma:
After Edward Lear’s “The Old Man of Whitehaven”
My tr. of  an 1847 poem from Hugo’s  Les Contemplations
From Swinburne, “The Ballad of Burdens”
My tr of Heine’s "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht" followed by my poem after "Der Tod" from Shadowtime:
“The Introvert,” after Wordworth’s The Hermet
An excerpt from Whitman’s “RESPONDEZ!”
My tr. of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous”: “Be Drunken”
Blake’s “The Sick Rose” from Song of Experience

Publishers Weekly web edition
starred review

  Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism
Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein. Seal, $19.95 paper (256p) ISBN 9781580052733
Embarking on a road trip across the U.S. to engage with contemporary women, writer Aronowitz and the late artist Bernstein (1985-2008) assert that “all we want is conversation.” Through 127 casual discussions with female college students, burlesque dancers, musicians, nuns-in-training, single mothers, abortion clinic staffers and others, the authors privilege the unique experiences and perspectives of both established activists and women who hesitate to identify with any notion of feminism. Coupling luminous, enigmatic photography with insightful diary entries, the pair contribute sharp commentary on modern womanhood and gender issues. The project is most striking when exploring the personal stories of interview subjects, but the authors’ ambitious scope makes some encounters feel repetitive. Clearly a work of passion for Bernstein (who committed suicide before the book’s publication) and Aronowitz both, the authors share of themselves generously, imprinting the “open-ended, fluid conversation” with their voices, feelings and personalities. (Oct.)

Nancy Spero 
(1926 - 2009)

Reading as Belief
Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

Joel Bettridge

Palgrave Macmillan, 10/27/2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61942-5, ISBN10: 0-230-61942-8
cloth only, $75

here is the publisher's informaiton:

Reading as Belief advances the provocative idea that the disruptive techniques of recent innovative poetry require readers to become believers, occupying the same philosophical ground as the religious faithful. Pairing the poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews with John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and drawing on the work of diverse thinkers such as Wendy Brown, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, William James, and Gilles Deleuze, this book demonstrates how belief, faith and language-attuned critical inquiry share an epistemology, one concerned with making meaning in the absence of certainty. Bettridge argues that recognizing such common ground helps overcome the cultural and philosophical impasse following the collapse of modernity’s central narratives about language and liberal subjectivity.

“Bettridge’s Reading as Belief is surprising, provocative, and engaging.  On the surface of it, to link Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews to John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and to do so around issues of faith and poetics will strike most readers as quite peculiar.  And that is precisely the heart of the book’s attractiveness: providing us with a truly fresh perspective for considering the premises of experimental poetry and poetics as modes of faith.  Bettridge asks us to consider the ethics of reading, instructing us to think about the relationship of poetics to faith. The result is a strange, wonderful book that points toward an ethics of engagement that applies equally to poetry and scripture and that leads us toward a mode of reading that links fully with the conduct of a life.”—Hank Lazer, author of Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008

“Bettridge offers a dare. He dares you to read the notorious Language poets as if they professed a faith. What faith? A faith that creative readers, residing in the gap between words and the world, can constantly remake themselves and what they know.”—Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame

IDIOT SAVANT
 (World Premiere) 
Written and Directed by RICHARD FOREMAN 
With WILLEM DAFOE 
Presented in association with Ontological-Hysteric Theater at

The New York Public Theater
October 27 - December 6
$65/$75 Saturday evenings.
But for readers of this site:
$40 tickets.
Valid performances are 10/27--11/15.
The code is SAVANT4

Marie asks the Idiot Savant, "But what makes certain words - magic?" What follows is a wild theatrical odyssey that could only have sprung from the fantastical mind of Richard Foreman. This new work is a philosophical comedy, in the great tradition of Ionesco and Preston Sturges. From precise existential and metaphysical acrobatics, to a ridiculous game of inter-species golf with a Giant Duck, IDIOT SAVANT is a fresh, bracing and hilarious exploration of the boundaries of the legitimate.

Tickets and more info

F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)
MP3 audio

.mov video for download

Mina Loy, "Aphorisms on Futurism" (1914)
MP3 audio

.mov video for download

Charles Bernstein,
"Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums & Implausibly Deniable Links" (2008)
MP3 audio

MP4 video for downloading

THE IMPROBABLE POETRY OF THE AMERICAS

Régis Bonvicino   

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the world’s superpower, a condition that was confirmed in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union.  To speak, then, of a “Poetry of the Americas” is, to a certain extent, to speak of a poetry of centrality. The advantages achieved by the force of American capitalism have given American poets worldwide visibility. The usual cultural flow was inverted: American poetry came to influence and nourish the various poetries of Europe and—to a lesser extent—of Latin America. Through the opposite mechanism, the United States exported its modernism (Objectivism, Imagism, Gertrude Stein) to Europe and fascinated the other Americas.
continued here on Sibyl, Sibila's English Language Portal

Bonvicino will present this talk on Weds.Oct. 14 at the Poets House in NY at 7pm, along with a bilingual reading (details at my post last week). He will also be reading and talking with me at the Kelly Writers House at Penn on Tuesday, October 13.

Raymond Federman
(1928-2009)

Some questions for Raymond Federman

Raymond, what is the use of fiction? What is the use of stories? And what is the use of telling them, the same ones or different ones, over and again?
            How about historical memory? Collective memory? Does fiction serve to spark or to spank memory? To make sure people don't forget or to be sure they remember the right things, and also remember the right things about the right things? You are a survivor of the Holocaust, your family was killed during the systematic extermination of the European Jews during World War II. We have many memorials of this systematic extermination.  What do you think that such memorials should represent? Your work, which I would say is one of the most significant of the memorials to the systematic extermination process, in many ways veers into abstraction and digression — it refuses to represent those events.  Why do you evade history?  Is it that facts, or not any facts but those facts, refuse representation? But then do they refuse memory too? In any case, you make light of facts rooted (or is it rotting?) in that dark history.  But whose history? Your history? Our history? You refuse to be solemn in the face of those horrendous events that have, in all actuality, in living color and dead black and white, occurred historically, but also hysterically. What gives you the right ­— moreover, what gives you the nerve — to be funny about this? Why aren't you, not only a real survivor but a famous one, terribly solemn and profoundly serious, like the memorials that we have all grown accustomed to, that make us weep and in our weeping comfort us?  Your work seems to mock not only the possibility of accurate representation, but also the idea that mourning should be dignified. Do you think mourning is a joke? Why do you make readers so uncomfortable with your laughter, your self-consciousness? Why do you still kick up a fuss instead of writing with poignant, eloquent, tearful resignation?   
            What is 'The Voice in the Closet'?  Whose voice? What is the voice saying?
            When you speak of Federman, is that you? If so, why do you refer to yourself in the third person? Or are you not you to yourself? Did you lose that you in the closet? Or later? Who or what are you calling attention to when you name yourself, as you do so often, so insistently? Why do you call so much attention to this anxious act of self-naming? Is it because the name names an absence? Or is because in the absence of this naming you cease to exist to yourself, for yourself? Or for "us"?
            Do you think your work is better understood in Germany or in Europe than it is in the United States? In Germany, do you represent a response to a German catastrophe and is that why you take a place of honor as a witness of, and commentator on, that catastrophe? In the U.S., are you seen as just another unintelligible experimental novelist refusing to give the dignity of sense to the catastrophes of your lifetime? Is your work American in its refusal to represent, in its insistence that response and representation are mutually exclusive? Were your works made possible because they are grounded in a cultural space that is non-European or anyway (for you) post-European? In what ways would you say your works portray a coming of age in America that is also the coming of age of America?
            Ray, are you a poet or are you a fiction writer, and does it make any difference?
            Your work is often immersed in some of the seamier sides of male culture, and it has sometimes been read as sexist. Yet, why is there is so little reference to the outdoors, to men doing virile things in open spaces? Why is there so little male bonding? And what about the sexual desperation of the men in your books? How do you imagine male sexuality?
            Who is this guy who drops down by parachute into an Army barracks in the South in the 1950s? Why tell your story from the point of view of the man who fell to earth, or let's say to America? Why do you blur memoir with fiction? Why don't you take out the rough edges of that first encounter with America? Why does what is most 'experimental' about your books – the typography, the digressions, the multiple point of view, the insistent intrusion of aesthetics and philosophy – seem at first playful and then deadly, uncannily serious?
            How about improvisation, Raymond? Your work plays a lot with a feeling of spontaneity, of just going on, with the pleasure of telling the story as it is happening. But if that's true, why does your work seem so composed that it decomposes in its own afterburn?

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

 Raymond Federman LINEbreak from 1995(29:13): mp3
Dada Poem for Two Face to Face" with Raymond Federman & Charles Bernstein (40 seconds)
Federman EPC author page
*
Wiki page
Mark Amerika interview
Rain Taxi interview
Federman at 80: Buffalo Artvoice (Buck Quigley and Charles Bernstein)

photos ©Charles Bernstein, at Buffalo 10/18/08

I will be giving a talk at
Verbale Pupiller
in Århus, Denmark
on October 20

& a reading in Copenhagen at
Forfattersk2len
on Oct. 21

then I will be appearing at
Oslo Poetry Festival
October 23 and 24
giving a reading and delivering the keynote
in their annual "Attack on Poetry" lecture series
introduced by Caroline Bergvall, who will be performing in the festival.
also  Ellen Ugelvik will peform "Opus Contra Naturum" from Shadowtime

Wednesday, October 14, 7:00pm
CORRESPONDENCES:
A Reading & Conversation with Charles Bernstein & Régis Bonvicino

Charles Bernstein speaks with Brazilian poet and editor Régis Bonvicino
about contemporary Brazilian poetry, translation and, more generally, the poetics of the Americas. 
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members.
(Photo: ©2006 Bernstien/Pennsound)

Friday, October 16, 7:00pm
Living in Advance: A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corinna Copp, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Levitsky, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino, Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Geoffrey Young & Others . This evening celebrates the life and work of poet David Bromige (1933–2009), who was born in London, grew up in Canada, and arrived in 1962 in Northern California, where he spent the rest of his life, teaching and writing more than forty books of poetry. Cosponsored by the Poetry Project. Admission Free

Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY 10282

A. L. Nielsen:
Close Listening Reading and Conversation

& as written up by Mike Hennessey on PennSound Daily

Nielsen in conversation with Charles Bernstein (31:24): MP3

Nielsen's Reading of Selected Poems (25:38): MP3

Mira Schor on Close Listening
August 23, 2009

Reading
Mira Schor reads several of her essays: "Figure/Ground" from Wet and "Email to a Young Artist," "Recipe Art," and "Modest Painting" from A Decade of Negative Thinking. Schor is an artist, writer, and editor.

Conversation
Mira Schor discussion "wet" painting versus dry dogma, the state of art criticism, the relation of feminism to art and its reception, "modest" art, her use of language in her paintings, and her dual work as essayist and visual artist.

Schor is a painter living in New York. She is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. She is the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, published by Yale University Press in 2009. In early 2010 a second  collection of her writings, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life will be published by Duke University Press. She lives and works in New York City and Provincetown.

Peter Seaton on Eclipse

Agreement

Crisis Intervention

The Son Master

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry
Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman

This is a thrilling book and one that will be a foundational for the Poetics of the Amercas as we come to terms with it in North  America. 500 years of poetry from south of the U.S. border, in just 600 pages; this book is synoptic, a starting point, a map, a guide book. Short, concise, useful headnotes for each poet, the English translation, then the "original" (condensed by / horizontal lineation). And the translations are often fresh and engaging, bringing into English not just new voices but new tones, textures, and possibilities.

608 pages
ISBN13: 978-0-19-512454-5ISBN10: 0-19-512454-5

there will be a couple of events celebrating the book

Launch reading/celebration
Tues., October 6th, 2009, 7pm
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue, 
New York, NY
Cecilia Vicuña, Charles Bernstein, Sergio Bessa, Michelle Gil-Montero,  Clayton Eshleman, Molly Weigel, Liz Macklin, Monica de la Torre, Mark Lokensgard, James Scully, Odi Gonzalez, Daniel Shapiro, Gary Racz

note also


The exhibition, through October 31, features the work of poet/artists including Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidobro; illustrated books and periodicals by Torres-García; pre-Columbian ceramics, a Quipu fragment; a site specific sculpture by Cecilia Vicuña; and photographs and photocopies documenting pre-Columbian times to the present. Signed copies of the bi-lingual anthology will be available.

SoHo, New York

George Kuchar

Photo: Charles Bernstein/PennSound © 2009

Close Listening
readings and conversations at 
ArtOnAir

Recorded in Provincetown, Mass.
August 13, 2009

Program #1:

George Kuchar in conversation with Charles Bernstein (28:59): MP3

Program #2:

Program #3:

George Kuchar at PEPC: The Kiss of Frankenstein (2003)

just begun to learn
(PoemTalk #22)

Bob Perlelam, Wystan Curnow, Charles Bernstein
and host Al Filries (r to l) discuss
Louis Zukofsky's "Anew" #12 ("It's hard to see but think of a sea.")
which is collected in the the LZ Selected Poems from Library of America

Listen or download:
MP3

_____________________

Allen Fisher's Ekphrastics
published in the new on-line issue of Spine

here is one of the two published
with painting and poem by Fisher:

Proposals 31

Ocean series in
a rhythm of orange
squares of light
turn on and off are distant
lorries taking the hill
out of town
and return commodities
to an earth and methane
exhaust quarry

>

Proposals 31. Commentary.

Stratospheres are spreads of surfaces with boundaries and stimulate the discussion of identity and category.