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Archive 2009



Emma Bee Bernstein
In Memorium


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)

link    |  11-07-09-x



Keith Waldrop


photo: ©2009 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

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

Program 1: Keith Waldrop: full reading of selected poems (25:51): MP3

Program 2: Keith Waldrop in conversation with Charles Bernstein (30:13): MP3

 

link    |  11-07-09

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

 

link    |  11-06-09




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

Susan Bee
New Paintings
(2009)


The Gaze  
(12 x 16")

link    |  11-03-09

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.

 

link    |  11-02-09-x

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

 

link    |  11-02-09


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

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

link    |  11-01-09

70

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
link    |  10-30-09

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

link    |  10-28-09-x

Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk
Tan Lin

In cooperation  with the Museum of Chinese in America
P.S. 2 playground, 122 Henry St. NY NY
Saturday, November 14 1:00pm

A performance-based chalk translation and street drawing in a parking lot. Chalking of a Futurist manifesto, a Chinese manifesto, and a collaborative, real-time poetry “line” installation piece by New York writers. Writers include: Bruce Andrews, Chris Alexander, Joe Amrhein, Anselm Berrigan, Lee Ann Brown, Yina Chun, Sarah Gambito, Kristen Gallagher, Kenneth Goldsmith, Paolo Javier, Eric Laine, Joseph Legaspi, Frances Richard, Katherine Sanders, Oliva Shao, Phillipa Shao, Jeremy Sigler, Danny Snelson, Helena Zhang, and others.Chalk Playground is preceded by a live street-chalking exercise, TwitChalkLit, beginning at 9am at 315 West 36th street and terminating at P.S. 2 at 12:30pm. YouTube: TwitChalkLit.TwitChalkLit is rain or shine.For further details and updates: see Twitter: chalkknit.

The Futurisms of American Poetry
Charles Bernstein and John Yau
Museum of the Chinese in America
215 Centre Street (between Grand and Howard) /// New York, NY
Saturday, November 14 4:00pm

A reading/performance event with Charles Bernstein and John Yau.
With an introduction on Futurism in China by Defne Ayas.
Introduction by Chris Alexander and Kristen Gallagher. Organized by Tan Lin. I will be giving a performance of "Recantorium: A Bachelor Machine after Duchamp after Kafka" Sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop, Museum of the Chinese in America, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, and the Chinese American Association for Poetry and Poetics.

FREE, with museum admission.

link    |  10-28-09

 

from Girly Man

every lake has a house
& every house has a stove
& every stove has a pot
& every pot has a lid
& every lid has a handle
& every handle has a stem
& every stem has an edge
& every edge has a lining
& every lining has a margin
& every margin has a slit
& every slit has a slope
& every slope has a sum
& every sum has a factor
& every factor has a face
& every face has a thought
& every thought has a trap
& every trap has a door
& every door has a frame
& every frame has a roof
& every roof has a house
& every house has a lake

MP3

I recorded this in Oslo on October 23
for a recording related to Oslo Poesifestival 2009
Hear/read also poems by
Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen
 | Øyvind Berg | Caroline Bergvall 


link    |  10-26-09


Close Listening
 
withRégis Bonvicino
October 13, 2009 at Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania
Art International Radio, operating at ARTonAIR.org  / PennSound

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

link    |  10-25-09

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.)

link    |  10-19-09-xx

Nancy Spero 
(1926 - 2009)


link    |  10-19-09-x


Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

Joel Bettridge

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

link    |  10-19-09

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


link    |  10-16-09-x



New York Book Launches for

Girldrive:
Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism


There will be two events in NYC to celebrate
Emma Bee Bernstein and Nona Willis Aronowitz's

new book about young women and the future of feminism.

Girldrive reading at KBG Bar
Special appearances by 
Kathleen Hanna, Michele Wallace, and Carolee Schneemann.
7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29
KGB Bar, 85 E 4th St
between 2nd and Bowery
Manhattan. Near to B, D, F, V, 6.

Girldrive launch party
6 to 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30
A.I.R. Gallery, 111 Front St., #228, Brooklyn, NY.
Close to the York St. F stop (first stop in Brooklyn).

The book is available at bookstores and online as well.
More information at: http://www.girl-drive.com/

link    |  10-16-09


Videos of my performances at the
Futurism and the New Manifesto program
Museum of Modern Art / New York
February 20, 2009.


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


link    |  10-11-09

The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound

Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin

352 pages, paper $26.00 ISBN: 9780226657431  
Published November 2009 -- now out!

Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkinbreak that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies. 

Futurism and the New Manifesto program Museum of Modern Art / New York February 20, 2009. On the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.




link    |  10-10-09



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.

 

link    |  10-09-09

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

link    |  10-07-09

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

link    |  10-05-09



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

link    |  10-04-09

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

  • Introduction (0:56): MP3
  • Self-Organizing Networks (0:58): MP3
  • This Is One Way to Begin (0:23): MP3
  • Halcyon Road (0:32): MP3
  • The News (0:11): MP3
  • Unsub (027): MP3
  • The Virginia Monologues (6:06): MP3
  • Petirroja (1:15): MP3
  • My Dinner with Andrea (1:34): MP3
  • 1/2 a Poem for David Bromige (0:59): MP3
  • Exemplary Sentences (2:49): MP3
  • The Very Large Array (0:59): MP3
  • Emily's List (0:23): MP3
  • Stained Glass Widow (1:21): MP3
  • Epistemological Hesitation (0:10): MP3
  • For Michael Davidson (1:18): MP3
  • Child of the Willows (0:47): MP3
  • Legal Notice (0:27): MP3
  • On the Disappearance of Species (0:31): MP3
  • Glottophagia (1:02): MP3
  • In the Land of a Thousand Dunces (0:19): MP3
  • untitled (0:17): MP3
link    |  10-03-09-x

Leigh Davis (1955-2009)
New Zealand poet, a critic, an artist and a publisher


There is a good selection of Leigh's writing at www.jackbooks.com

-----

Ocotber 3, 2009

Dear Charles,
Leigh died this morning. There was no pain, indeed at no stage had there been any.
We have been reading a lot to him these last few weeks during which he has been bedridden
and unable to speak or read. In the time since he was first diagnosed he wrote two books,
Nameless and A Stunning Debut, the first of which will be published early next year.
love,
Wystan

-------

from New Zealand Book Council site

Davis was born in Wanganui. He attended Auckland University where he completed an MA First Class Hons in English. He went on to study at Victoria University of Wellington where he took numerous graduate papers including, economics, mathematics, and commercial law.

Since the early 1980s Davis has been a high profile businessman and merchant banker. He has worked in both the public and private sectors before going on to start JUMP - his management company.

Davis’s first book Willy’s Gazette (1983) won the Best NZ First Book of Poetry Award. Willy’s Gazette as well as co-editing the magazine AND with Alex Calder and Roger Horrocks from 1983 to 1985 established Davis as a leading avant-garde artist and public intellectual.

Late in the 1990s Davis returned to art/publishing with Station of Earth-Bound Ghosts (1998) an installation of flags (writing and visual art). Davis went on to publish Te Tangi a te Matuhi (1999) with Jack Books, another Davis project. Jack Books added their web site www.jackbooks.com in 2000 with the publication of General Motors a collection of poetry and visual art that is available as both a physical and virtual book.

In 2001 Jack Books published The Book of Hours, a trilogy that is available as both a physical and virtual book. Last year David’s poem ‘The Footstool’ from the General Motors collection was selected for the Best New Zealand Poems 2001. 

Leigh Davis has published widely as a critic. His essays on art and letters have appeared in Landfall, ArtAsia Pacific, and Brief Description. He has also contributed to art ventures and promotions including public lectures on art and poetry, as well as participating in the Bad Language Series (with Artspace) in 2001.

Davis describes his work as 'Book length contemporary poems which engage their physical media (books, textiles, web) as ideas in the work.'

----

Leigh lived in Auckland. I had the pleasure to meet him a few times and I admired his work very much.

link    |  10-03-09

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.

link    |  10-02-09-x

Leigh Davis (1955-2009)
New Zealand poet, a critic, an artist and a publisher

A selection of his writing may be found at www.jackbooks.com

Ocotber 3, 2009

Dear Charles,

Leigh died this morning. There was no pain, indeed at no stage had there been any.
We have been reading a lot to him these last few weeks during which he has been bedridden
and unable to speak or read. In the time since he was first diagnosed he wrote two books,
Nameless and A Stunning Debut, the first of which will be published early next year.

love,

Wystan

from New Zealand Book Council site

Davis was born in Wanganui. He attended Auckland University where he completed an MA First Class Hons in English. He went on to study at Victoria University of Wellington where he took numerous graduate papers including, economics, mathematics, and commercial law.

Since the early 1980s Davis has been a high profile businessman and merchant banker. He has worked in both the public and private sectors before going on to start JUMP - his management company.

Davis’s first book Willy’s Gazette (1983) won the Best NZ First Book of Poetry Award. Willy’s Gazette as well as co-editing the magazine AND with Alex Calder and Roger Horrocks from 1983 to 1985 established Davis as a leading avant-garde artist and public intellectual.

Late in the 1990s Davis returned to art/publishing with Station of Earth-Bound Ghosts (1998) an installation of flags (writing and visual art). Davis went on to publish Te Tangi a te Matuhi (1999) with Jack Books, another Davis project. Jack Books added their web site www.jackbooks.com in 2000 with the publication of General Motors a collection of poetry and visual art that is available as both a physical and virtual book.

In 2001 Jack Books published The Book of Hours, a trilogy that is available as both a physical and virtual book. Last year David’s poem ‘The Footstool’ from the General Motors collection was selected for the Best New Zealand Poems 2001. 

Leigh Davis has published widely as a critic. His essays on art and letters have appeared in Landfall, ArtAsia Pacific, and Brief Description. He has also contributed to art ventures and promotions including public lectures on art and poetry, as well as participating in the Bad Language Series (with Artspace) in 2001.

Davis describes his work as 'Book length contemporary poems which engage their physical media (books, textiles, web) as ideas in the work.'

He lived in Auckland

 

link    |  10-03-09

Peter Seaton on Eclipse

Agreement

Crisis Intervention

The Son Master


link    |  10-02-09




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

link    |  09-30-09


2009 UC Press Online Book Sale.
Many of their key poetry book
including Blaser, Silliman, Mullen (both), Spahr, Bersssebrugge, Creeley, Olson, Vallejo
Stein, Waldrop, Antin, Clover, Darwish, Myung Mi Kim, Berrigan, O'Hara, Neidecker, Césaire
Poems for the Millennium
3
essential poetics books  by Hejinian, Retallack, Oppen, & Blaser
superb edns of Apollinaire and Mallarmé & Gavronsky's French anthology,
scholarly studies by Daniel Kane and Yunte Huang
Go to http://www.ucpress.edu/books/sale/
Save up to 70% on purchases when you use this code:10M7172.
Sale runs through October 31.

link    |  09-28-09-x

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:

Cans and Cassettes (c. 2006) & The Movie Factory (c. 2008) (34:56): MP3

Program #3:

Kuchar reads:
Letter to Bob Cowan (c. 2002)
Tribute to Curt MacDowell (2008)
French Fried (on French films) (2007)
AncesTree (2009)
& two recent letters of recommendation Complete Recording (27:06): MP3

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

 

link    |  09-28-09


As we near the close of our High Holy Day services for
5770, in these last hours of the Day of Atonement, Yom
Kippur, let us say the litanies of confession,
oshamnu:
 
We are filled with guilt, we have been in
bad faith, we have transgressed
against others and we have mouthed
lies. We have tolerated evil and prodded
our hands to violence; we have been
presumptuous, broken trusts, caused hatred
and resentment, framed falsehood;
We have counselled in self-interest, we have
failed in promise, we have scoffed
the powerless, minded the powerful, and blasphemed
against hope; we have rebelled too
little against injustice, we have been
selfish and arrogant, we have oppressed;
We have done badly, we have
corrupted ourselves and committed abominations;
we have gone astray and have led astray;
 
We have turned aside from our collective
good and it has availed us not at all.
 
But you are right in
all that has become us,
you have acted truthfully
but we have wrought
despair. What shall we say
before you, who dwell
within, and what shall we
recount to you, who abide
in the heavenly and know
all things, hidden and
not hidden?
 
May it be our will to forgive and be
forgiven, may we grant, and be granted,
remission for all our transgressions
.
 

———

This is the 18th section of  "A Person Is Not an Entity Symbolic but the
Divine Incarnate" from The Sophist (1987). (The Hebrew year has been updated.)  
The poem is a revisioning (and reversing) of the Yom Kippur prayer of confession (also spelled "Ashamnu").
In Hebrew, each of the 24 confessions begins with a different letter of the alphabet (with the last letter repeated).


link    |  09-27-09



I will be reading at Harvard
on Monday, October 5
at 5pm
in the Kresge Room in Barker Center
(12 Quincy St)


link    |  09-25-09-x


Girldrive

Emma Bee Bernstein &
Nona Willis Aronowitz

now out!

Girldrive reading at KGB Bar in NYC on Oct 29 at 7 p.m.
Girldrive launch at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC on Oct 30 at 7:30 p.m.


from Seal Press

Nona and Emma have done what I suspect many women, young and old, have
always dreamed of doing: Hit the open road with nothing more than a
partner in crime, a full tank of gas, a playlist of good music, a pad
of paper, a camera, and an unyielding curiosity. The duo - self-
described progressives from New York with impeccable credentials in
East Coast establishment feminism—aren't content to let their
backgrounds define the history of gender equality in the U.S.... or
its future. Instead, they take—nay, create—the opportunity to
explore the nooks and crannies of their country, their female
compatriots, their friendship, and their own psyches through a Thelma
& Louise-like trip around the United States in which they interview
and photograph a diverse sampling of American women. Unlike the title
characters of that beloved 1991 film however, Nona and Emma's journey
is notable in that they are traveling to, not away, from something,
namely, an understanding of contemporary feminism, both its successes
and limitations. Girldrive is part travel diary, part social document,
part art exhibit and, sadly, part eulogy; not only do I recommend it
highly, I have to admit that I'm insanely jealous I didn't think of it
first.
—Anna Holmes, Founder/Editor, Jezebel.com

Girldrive is the first book on feminism I’ve seen based on the Web 2.0 model: short conversational stories, striking pictures, multi-racial. I wanted to click “share” every time I started reading another young woman’s reflection on gender and politics and how the two intertwine with race, class and geographical experiences. It reminds me that feminism (like this country) has its strength in its diversity, in its many voices. Girldrive is truly a roadmap to feminism today and a must-read for anyone who wants to know where its future is headed.
—Daisy Hernández, Editor, ColorLines magazine

Girldrive is a fascinating, fiery, dramatic whirlwind tour through
modern-day women’s lives. Aronowitz and Bernstein treat feminism both
as sacred and something that can, and is, being refashioned, and in
some cases, dismissed in favor of other ways of advancing change.
Thankfully, they don’t only talk to self-described “feminists,” but to
all sorts of women of different ages, races, sexualities, and belief
systems. Girldrive is very likely to make you excited, impassioned,
and, at times, infuriated--and that’s a good thing. Rather than
handing you preformatted answers, Girldrive lets its diversity of
opinion speak to you, rather than for you.
—Rachel Kramer Bussel, Editor, Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women, Host,
in The Flesh Reading Series

 

Girldrive web site


 

link    |  09-25-09



Collected Poems by Larry Eigner

edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier
Stanford University Press
is forthcoming December 2009
(four cloth volumes, 1848 pages)

There is no 20th century American poet more present, more pertinent, more necessary than Larry Eigner. The editorial focus in this definitive collection is to present Eigner’s work in a manner that rigorously adheres to the author’s typewritten manuscripts as the best guide to the visual shape of each poem. As a result, this astonishing edition is the first full-scale publication of Eigner’s serial poetry that give a comprehensive experience of both the epic scale and meticulously intricate details of his aesthetic vision. Grenier and Faville have done a heroic job assembling the poems of an American hero, whose splendor shines through each and every one of these pages and whose spirit lingers in the spaces between the words.

Robert Grenier's Introuduction
now available at Sybil (Sibila's English language portal)

Larry Eigner had great eyes—he could look right through you, or, alternatively, he could look right at you (or both, at the same time).

That very presence of the eyes—and the intelligence and sympathy and ‘openness of understanding’ in them—was what was initially absolutely engaging to me, when I first walked up to the door at 23 Bates Road in Swampscott, Massachusetts in January 1971 (Larry’s workspace was the front porch)—this was determinative.

I was a creepy little magazine editor trying to crawl in there and get a poem (for nothing!) for my (unpublished) ‘periodical’ this—from the author of From The Sustaining Air, On My Eyes and Another Time In Fragments—and Larry welcomed me, warmly and openly. (This was his opportunity to talk…) His diminutive mother, Bessie, brought out a plate of snacks, and I was introduced to his father, Israel, who receded into the background of the house.

read more

new at Sibyl
Sibyl RSS feed



link    |  09-20-09


Segue Reading Series

Saturdays ar 4:00p to 6:00p
at Bowery Poetry Club, New York, NY


Oct 3: Zhang Er & Trey Sager
Oct 10: Laura Moriarty & Paul Foster Johnson
Oct 17: Keith Waldrop & John Keene
Oct 24: Catherine Wagner & Amy King
Oct 31: Kim Lyons & James Belflower
Nov 7: Mary Burger & Stefani Barber
Nov 14: Laura Elrick & Jesse Seldess
Nov 21: Evelyn Reilly & Cathy Eisenhower

 

link    |  09-19-09


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

Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems book jacket

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.

link    |  09-18-09


 

David Arnold

Poetry and Language Writing
Objective and Surreal


256 pages
Liverpool University Press

[jacket image]

publisher's blurb:
Language Poetry, Language Writing, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing—no matter the moniker, the impact of the movement and its particular pedigree of theory-conscious poetics, postmodern aesthetics, and non-academic stance cannot be denied. In this timely volume, David Arnold not only provides a means for coming to terms with this influential mode of writing and its ongoing crisis of representation but also reassesses the complex relationship between language poetry and surrealism, through discussion of some of late twentieth-century’s most innovative poets, including Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, and Barrett Watten.

Google Books preview of intro and toc
Google Books delightfully categorzes this book as "juvenile nonfiction."

Contents
The Scholarly Life of Language Writing
An Excommunicated Vessel?
William Carlos Williams
The SurrealObjectivist Nexus
Michael Palmers Poetics of Witness
The Writing of Susan Howe
Just Rehashed Surrealism? The Writing of Barrett Watten

link    |  09-15-09


Nona Willis-Aronowitz
has launched the new
GirlDrive web site
which replces the blog.
GirlDrive
-- the book --
coauthored by Emma Bee Bernstein
will be out in about 6 weeks

±±±±±±±±±±

Newark Star-Ledger review of Café Buffé

±±±±±±±±±±

Poets House's
Fabulous New Space
opens September 24 and 25

Saturday, September 26, 11:00am–5:00pm
Admission Free
Invocation of the Muse: Poets & Musicians Toast the New Poets House
11:00am:

A charismatic poet and musician who was featured in Bill Moyers’ Fooling with Words documentary, Kurt Lamkin delivers a spirited performance for children and their adults. This event starts at Poets House.
12:00–3:00pm:
Open House! Take a stroll through our new home.
3:00–5:00pm:
Join us for this blowout celebration on our new "front lawn," Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, with dynamic readings by acclaimed poets, including Meena Alexander, Charles Bernstein, Regie Cabico, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Cornelius Eady, Kathleen Fraser, Kimiko Hahn, Michael Heller, Marie Howe, Dave Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Marie Ponsot, Quincy Troupe and others, as well as poetry-inspired songs by Natalie Merchant. Cosponsored by the Battery Park City Authority.

Tuesday, October 6, 7:00pm
Songs of Ascension: The Psalms & Other Sky-Bound Structures
A Conversation between Norman Fischer & Meredith Monk
$10, $7 for students and seniors, Free to Poets House Members

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

Friday, October 16, 7:00pm
Living in Advance: A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corina Copp, 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

Details/Directions


±±±±±±±±±±

Bamf Conference

In(ter)ventions

Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering
Program dates: February 18, 2010 - February 21, 2010
Registration deadline: January 29, 2010
Early Bird registration: October 30, 2009

Director:  Steven Ross Smith
Presenters: Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Kathleen Fraser, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, Aya Karpinska, D. Kimm, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Marjorie Perloff, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah

±±±±±±±±±±

Glossator: Practice and Theory of .the Commentary, Vol 1 (2009
A new magazine devoted to commentary and gloss: includes Prynne on Wordsworth, Michael Stone-Richards on Cha's Dictée, and an interesting appropriation/rearticulation of a Bob Perelman poem (which has given rise to a new addion to the experiments list: take phrases from a source text and embed them into a narrative of your own construction).

±±±±±±±±±±

my translation of
Baudelaire's
"Be Drunken"

 

link    |  09-14-09


Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde
by Tyrus Miller
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Singular Examples provides acute readings John Cage, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Samuel Beckett, with special and very welcome attention to Jackson Mac Low. Of particular note is Miller’s account of Mac Low’s relation, via his diastic poems, to Ezra Pound and  Kurt Schwitters. This is a central motif of the book: the way postwar artists have responded to the legacy, and possibly the “theory death” of radical modernism. Miller offers a Salubrious Swerve from the more reductive, if still generative, theories of “influence” such as Harold Bloom’s. He reads Mac Low’s textual practice as responding, even elegizing, Schwitters and Pound, with a keen sense of the achievements of the modernist poets but with an eye (and ear) toward opening up the space of the present.

In a key passage in the book, Miller writes:

… these poems represent a singular mode of retro-avantgarde elegy: retroactively recapitulating the history and techniques of the avant-garde to release its unquiet ghosts from their compulsion to speak (or shout); performing the work of mourning that will let the avant-garde's claims on the future be at long last over …

In 1992, Antony Easthope edited a collection of essays called Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory. It was novel, and necessary at the time. I kept thinking of that book when reading Miller’s new book, given the way he takes for granted an aesthetic and philosophical orientation to his close readings (bringing to mind the work of Jean-Michel Rabaté, Gerald Bruns, and Herman Rappaport).

A highlight of the book is Miller’s use of Harold Rosenberg on “event” and Sartre on “situation,” as well as Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Giles Deleuze, in his discussion of  Mac Low’s work for dancers, The Pronouns.  

Miller offers a useful discussion of Brakhage – and Olson – on immanence, and in the process rescues Brakhage from a naïve Romanticism that is sometimes used to praise him but which undermines the importance of his work. And perhaps the best writing in the book comes in the discussion of Beckett and Miller’s use of Theodor Adorno to rethink some key Beckett motifs. Like Miller’s other bracketing of philosophers and artists, this one works both ways. He doesn’t so much use Adorno to explain Becket (one could just as well say he uses Beckett to explain Adorno) as consider Adorno and Becket as responding to the same historical and ontological problems – crisis really. And that final chapter on Beckett give a deep resonance to whole book.

link    |  09-13-09



Archive 2009
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Notable Books (2005)



PEPC Digital Editions:

      
Rough Trades — complete text of 1989 Sun & Moon Book, in html version
Red, Green, and Black, by Olivier Cadiot, tr. Bernstein -- complete text of the 1990 Potes & Poets book in html version

&

Disfrutes

complete text of 1974 poem in html version





Listen at  PennSound  ‡ Order the book