========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 01:07:38 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: George & Ludwig Gabrielle Welford wrote: "Did Oppen read Wittgenstein?" My impression is that Oppen was more affected by Heidegger & checking the Selected Letters that seems to be confirmed. Wittgenstein is cited a number of times, often in connection with Zukofsky, he even refers to Zukofsky as "playacting Wittgenstein" and refers to _Bottom_ as "replete with Wittgenstein". However there's an interesting reply to a letter from Duncan in '75 in which he says "You were saying the recent poems are incomprehensible ? I don't really think so. And was not thinking of that which cannot be said in language-- of that indeed silent however unwillingly. I was confused by the entry of Wittgenstein--". Apparently Duncan found the recent work which wld've been _Seascape: Needle's Eye_ & I guess, _Myth of the Blaze_ (which I think is his best, that work has been very important to me personally), "incomprehensible" but mentioned Wittgenstein which seems to me astute. It sounds, however that he was thinking of the _Tractatus_, but I think the later Wittgenstein more accurate. In a footnote Oppen says "But I thought that I was simply pointing to things. . ." & I think he was, & I think you were when you made that connection. There may be others on the list who know more about this Witt/Op/Dun thing? --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 01:21:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: 20th century poetics and child poetry Just a bit of information on this, Harryman's _the Words_ (part of which has been an Abacus) is her "rewrite" of Sandburg's _Rootabaga Stories_. David Shapiro's done a lot of great work with kids, maybe he inspired Padgett? so the story goes. . . & w/ his son there's some terrific stuff he includes in his most recent book _After a Lost Original_ . Half of the vocabulary of that thing of mine in _o blek 12_ came from a 1932 edition of _Mother Goose_. Let's all go out & play. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 22:24:41 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 13 Jul 1995 to 14 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507150403.VAA05921@leland.Stanford.EDU> Thank you, Joseph Zitt, for the nice plug. RADICAL ARTIFICE is indeed in print --in fact in paperback, out a few months ago, should be readily available @$16.95. And Dance of the Intellect is being reissued by North- western which did Poetics of Indterminacy and which is doing Hank Lazer's new collection as well as Bruce Andrews's essays. Northwestern has an enlightened editor of the new avant-garde series named Rainer Rumold, dept of German & comp lit, as well as Susan Harris, editor, who is terrific. They will be putting out some interesting things. A query: does anyone know anything about the English poet Glyn Maxwell? He is the guy who wrote the snidest review I've ever seen of Bernstein, Linda Reinfeld, Anthony Easthope, Steve McCaffery etc. for Times Lit Supplement --mixing these people in with Larkin etc. in a meaningless hodgepodge. What are Maxwell's own poems like? I've only seen one or two but gather in England he's very much "admired" by the Establishment. I ask because I am doing a talk on the relation of literary journalism (is there any?) and lit crit and am planning to say, among other things, that this Buffalo net contains more useful material than the "lit journalism" outlets, at least so far as poetry is concerned. But it wasn't always so: have been reading very old New York Times Book Reviews and in 1904 or so there were actually good long reviews of Paul Dunbar among others! Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 07:57:50 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Soul Regarding use of the word "soul", I agree with Brian: >i still cannot >find anything in these words that does not bring back the ol' immaterialism, >irrationalism... Words like "soul" and "spirit" seem to be too weighed down with mystical baggage to be useful in any other context, such as discussing whether poetry comes from one's "soul" or "experience". A human personality is shaped by what one experiences through one's senses, perhaps by physical actions upon the brain, and by one's genetic material. To say that poetry can come from one's "soul" without experience is nonsensical - in order to write a poem, one must have language, which implies the experience of learning that language, which inevitably shapes the poem. > religion's replacements, science and money, don't > want anything to do with such notions because discussion along spiritual > lines points up the poverty of science and money with regard to the soul. I'd contend that, rather than "point[ing] up the poverty of science ... with regard to the soul", "discussion along spiritual lines" shows itself as vapid and superfluous, lacking in explanatory value. That is, if you take "soul" and "spirit" to signify some essence of the self that can exist independently of a material body. If, however, you take it to mean that "part" or "faculty" of our mental processes that "feels" rather than thinks, then some phrase such as "the emotions" could substitute for "the soul". This concept is perhaps too close to the romantic conception of "the heart" for my liking, and phrases such as "this poem comes from the heart" are all too often a code for "watch out, tedious uncritical sentimental outburst coming up". I prefer to use the word "mind". I'm not sure that we can readily make useful distinctions between the part of us that thinks and the part of us that feels - thinking and feeling may be part of the same process. What I hope for in poetry is a tender logic, a rational passion. Tom. ______________________________________________________________________________ I/am a background/process, shrunk to an icon. | Tom Beard I am/a dark place. | beard@metdp1.met.co.nz I am less/than the sum of my parts... | Auckland, New Zealand I am necessary/but not sufficient, | http://metcon.met.co.nz/ and I shall teach the stars to fall | nwfc/beard/www/hallway.html ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 08:08:20 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Glynn Maxwell >A query: does anyone know anything about the English poet Glyn Maxwell? >He is the guy who wrote the snidest review I've ever seen of Bernstein, >Linda Reinfeld, Anthony Easthope, Steve McCaffery etc. for Times Lit >Supplement --mixing these people in with Larkin etc. in a meaningless >hodgepodge. What are Maxwell's own poems like? I've only seen one or >two but gather in England he's very much "admired" by the Establishment. Marjorie, I bought one of his books ("The Mayor's Son", I think) a year or so ago, and read it no more than once. I guess that says something about my impression of his work. From what I remember, it was quite formal (a lot of end-rhymes) and vaguely satirical. Probably quite clever, but forgettable. I might be able to look up his book tomorrow to see if that refreshes my memory. If you want to see a snide review, take a look at Jane Stafford's review of Michele Leggott and Murray Edmond in NZ Books. Unbelievable. Tom Beard. ______________________________________________________________________________ I/am a background/process, shrunk to an icon. | Tom Beard I am/a dark place. | beard@metdp1.met.co.nz I am less/than the sum of my parts... | Auckland, New Zealand I am necessary/but not sufficient, | http://metcon.met.co.nz/ and I shall teach the stars to fall | nwfc/beard/www/hallway.html ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 04:19:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: 20th century poetics and child poetry Ira, You are right on target with your comments on Carla Harryman's work. Carla has spoken of P.D. Eastman's Go Dog, Go, as her "most influential" book, and only half tongue in cheek. In a similar manner, Margaret Wise Brown (Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon) clearly thought herself influenced by Gertrude Stein (though her sense of the stanza more often reminds me of the very early Robert Duncan (cf. the old City Lights edition of the Selected Poems, pre-Opening of the Field). Ron Silliman rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 04:35:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: child poets >On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Charles Alexander wrote: exhibitions this year is a children's book art exhibition, and one staff members wanted to exclude the children from being counted as artists. I think that is NOT a good idea. >> >I do I do agree. > >Gab. > Me too. At the big Cage exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum is a "compose your own Cage score" computer program, basically a point and click mouse and computer screen deal, with textual quotes from Cage on screen, snippets of his works, that of others (Morton Feldman fits very nicely in), excerpts from interviews, readings, etc. One of my three-year-old twins got to the mouse and had about a half dozen adults wearing headphones all nodding in total appreciation for about 10 minutes. His instincts were absolutely equal to the task. Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 12:32:24 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Glyn Maxwell Maxwell is certainly one of a number of 'star' poets currently being built up by the Brit Lit Establishment. Anybody hear of the 'New Gen' Poets from '94 - a joint puiblishers and Poetry Society opinion-forming media binge? Here's a bit of Maxwell, speaking for himself in a selection of 'poetry & the gulf war' from Poetry Review in '92. He's talked of sometimes as a poet whose work signals the arrival (read as acceptable manifestation) of 'post-modernism' in British Poetry! He cites Bob Dylan as his major influence. The Poem's called 'Queen of Mice' and I'll quote a short section from a 'competition-tailored' 42 odd line length - I really can't be bothered to read him or count them that closely, sorry he's got a vacuous affected prosody that bores the ^ out of me so much so that I've a appended a quick remix:- '... hands in pouches, disabused, in the wind, nor are they shocked who hurt and putt in the distance, beam or denounce or hurry across this carpet. There is nothing up with the black mice in their normal crannies of the 'Mice and Queen', smoking Embassies, and futures spring to mind as digits dance ahead and the Old Quarter of Babylad goes 'boom boom' at the point of a gag. There is nothing up with the dots that are not to blame. There is nothing up with the fleeing illiterate fauna and the fires you might see are not burning. The jails are calm as hell. . .' hands in - a disabused wind shocked into distance beamed across carpet black crannies of future springs mind, dances to the point of gag nothing up with burning calm love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 11:00:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Leaves from a Book Unbound Texts generated by active readers of my machine modulated piece, Book Unbound, can now be read on the world wide web. There are now 'leaves' by James Waite, myself, Steve Balogh, Jim Rosenberg and Herb Levy. I hope to receive more from others soon. To go straight to the leaves, visit: http://www.inforamp.net/~cayley/inleaves.html For more information about the context of this work: http://www.inforamp.net/~cayley/inhome.html A brief blurb on Book Unbound follows: BOOK UNBOUND Indra's Net VI When you open the book unbound, you will change it. New collocations of phases generated from its hidden given text - a short piece of prose by the work's initiator - will be displayed. After the screen fills, you will be invited to select a phrase from the generated text by clicking on the first and the last words of a string of language which appeals to you. Your selections will be collected on the page of this book named Leaf, where you will be able to copy or edit them as you wish. They will also become a part of the hidden store of potential collocations from which the book will go on to generate new text. That is, your selections will feed back into the process and change it irreversibly. If you continue reading and selecting over many sessions, your preferred collocations may eventually come to dominate the process. The work may then reach a state of chaotic stability, strangely attracted to one particular modulated reading of its original seed text. London: Wellsweep & Engaged, May, 1995. ISBN 0 948454 97 0 (disk version). ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 12:24:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: writing/teaching oh ya, oh ya, it's back to that passionate teaching stuff, and often it's: this is my classroom AND HAVE I GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU! Ya, well, why not just be passionate, period, particularly when it's so godawful hot, and where are you anyway? ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 13:52:20 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: filtered and unfiltered In-Reply-To: <199507150402.AAA124339@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Automatic digest processor" at Jul 15, 95 00:00:39 am Gabrielle Welford writes: "Did Oppen read Wittgenstein? Gabrielle" Yes, but Heidegger was much more important to him. In letters, he often associates Wittgenstein with Zukofsky (esp. Bottom: On Shakespeare). steve ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 14:39:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian W Horihan Subject: Soul Train In-Reply-To: <950714.192339.EDT.JSCHWA@TEMPLEVM> On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Judy Schwartz wrote: > What about music having "soul"? Rhythm, depth from within, and so on. . . maybe music has "soul" in the sense that neither, as notes or as a word, refer to anything but music and "soul." (as far as music being "soulful," that's usu. only applied to blues, gospel, and "soul" music anyway) "soul" is the most concrete thing there is, and music is a lot like concrete poetry. they can only derive meaning from their contexts--e.g. when a musical work quotes a line of Strauss or whoever, when "soul" is used in either religious or poetic discourse. music (i mean the kind w/o words) is all play--so a piece of christian music (say the new romantic Europeans, Part, Gorecki...) is only christian in that it refers back to the musical tradition of the church. This has been a problem for me, justifying my fondness for certain pieces whose composers I didnt agree with...like people who hate Orff's music cause of his assoc w/ the Nazis. there's a book called TOWARDS A SEMIOTICS OF MUSIC or somthing, i forget the author; anyone read it, found it useful? --brian. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 16:26:20 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Filet O Soul So there are untenable meanings (meanings that are given by metaphysical structures that can be deconstructed) of the word "soul". So many that the mention of the word itself makes us cringe. But why should this be? Don't we all as humans have a capacity to undergo experiences that can't be captured by the physical, can't be captured by the emotional, can't be captured by the intellectual, inclusive of all these aspects as they may be? Why not validate such experiences, why not allow a term like "spiritual" to describe them so we can explore them within language, which is what we have when we're _not_ undergoing them? Of course, such a term is not "precise". Ultimately, what term is? But vapid? Superfluous? Lacking in explanatory value? That depends on how wide your focus is of things to try and explain, beard. But is it really "explanation" of phenomena that poetry attempts? Or is it description and an imparting of a special kind of experience of phenomena? I do agree that thinking and feeling are quite intertwined, and by the same token, that body and soul are quite intertwined. I don't think "soul" is some "part" that can have a word like "the emotions" pinch-signify for it. It bears, for me, an uncanny resemblence to the "moving empty center" Charles Borkhuis describes in an essay in _Antenym_ 7 (due out in August), a non-essentialist essence. It is a little piece of absence around which presence occurs, and toward which it is drawn, kinda like static cling. And before one early historical soul-jacking during the period of lamentation literature, it meant "breath". And if that gives me any authority, I breathe it all back. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 16:29:43 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: Soul Train Hi Brian H: > "soul" is the most concrete thing there is, and music is a lot >like concrete poetry. they can only >derive meaning from their contexts See, you've made plenty of metaphorical hay out of "soul" :-) But is there anything that derives meaning from something other than context? Is there even anything that escapes context so that we could test this? Steve ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 08:32:43 JST Reply-To: nada@twics.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: nada@TWICS.COM Subject: child poetry/juvenilia I wrote the following poems when I was ten. Nixon and Agnew Who would of [sic] thought they would resign They had been king and queen Upon the throne of America The throne had broken beneath their weight Shall America too break beneath our weight? *********************************** Here I sit in my New York flat writing ads for the Zenith power company my mind wanders to thoughts of Spain tap shoes flourescent-painted apartments But I must stay here in my New York flat writing ads for the Zenith power company. ******************************** Cockroaches -- huge but tiny in the night they come and eat us to the marrow of our bones. Anyone else care to flaunt their juvenilia? Nada ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 08:34:39 JST Reply-To: nada@twics.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: nada@TWICS.COM Subject: soul vs. kokoro There are lots of words that can translate as *soul* in the Japanese language, but one of them, KOKORO, also means *heart* and *mind*. Japanese people, speaking English, tend to point to their chests when they say *in my mind.* Whorf, where are you when we need you? Nada ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:14:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: Soul Train the interchangability of terms-- a soul-by shooting, drive food, soul time, drive train... ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 21:35:24 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Glyn Maxwell,etc In-Reply-To: <199507160401.VAA19069@leland.Stanford.EDU> Thank you Tom Beard, and thanks, Chris Cheek for those marvelous messages. This is where the net really helps, yes? In the meantime, I found some of Maxwell's boring poems in the Bloodaxe anthology so I get the drift. What's interesting is that these "clever" non-poems can get attention; it shows what a low opinion the critics have of poetry because the assumption is that it's enough to make a clever joke or two or one little pun and you've got a fine poem, right? On Oppen/Wittgenstein/Heidegger: I worked on this while writing my Wittgenstein book and it's complicated because although Oppen thinks he's more like Heidegger, his use of language is often much closer to Wittgenstein's treatment of ordinary language. But not as close as, say, Creeley is. Still, "Of Being Numerous," for example, is a rather Wittgensteinian poem as Burt Hatlen pointed out some time ago. Or at least Witt. can help one read Oppen. Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 04:38:29 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Re: Filet O Soul >Don't >we all as humans have a capacity to undergo experiences that can't be >captured by the physical, can't be captured by the emotional, can't be >captured by the intellectual, inclusive of all these aspects as they may be? Examples? If you mean such experiences as falling in love, I'd say this was emotional/ physical. If you mean being struck by the beauty of a landscape or a mathematical proof, I'd say this was emotional/intellectual. If you mean the frisson that comes from reading or hearing a poem that moves you, I'd say that this was all three. I don't see a need to use the word "soul" to describe these experiences. If, on the other hand, you mean astral travel, visions of God, spoon bending, ouija boards and suchlike phenomena, then I am not convinced that such things exist, except as artefacts of the human nervous system. We could get into an argument about the existence of paranormal phenomena, but this is not the place for such a discussion. >But vapid? Superfluous? Lacking in explanatory >value? That depends on how wide your focus is of things to try and explain, >beard. But is it really "explanation" of phenomena that poetry attempts? >Or is it description and an imparting of a special kind of experience of >phenomena? Well, poetry doesn't usually set itself the goal of explanation, but this topic arose, not _in_ a poem, but in a discussion _about_ poetry, and whether one's poetry comes from one's poetry or one's experience. In this context, I still find the word "soul" useless when trying to explain "where" a poem originates. Even in "description and an imparting of a special kind of experience of phenomena", I find the word "soul" fairly useless. Phrases such as "I feel it in my soul" and "You touched my soul" reek of cheap love songs and greeting- card sentiment. Go on, tell me _how_ you felt it: a lance through the belly, a tug in the groin, a small fire at the base of the skull. >It bears, for me, an uncanny resemblence to the "moving empty center" >Charles Borkhuis describes in an essay in _Antenym_ 7 (due out in August), a >non-essentialist essence. It is a little piece of absence around which >presence occurs, and toward which it is drawn, kinda like static cling. This still seems like some kind of perception to me, a mental process. I still don't see a need for a word like "soul". I have a mind (or perhaps more precisely, I am a mind), and I have no difficulty seeing myself as a neurophysical process. I need no ghost in my machine. Tom ______________________________________________________________________________ I/am a background/process, shrunk to an icon. | Tom Beard I am/a dark place. | beard@metdp1.met.co.nz I am less/than the sum of my parts... | Auckland, New Zealand I am necessary/but not sufficient, | http://metcon.met.co.nz/ and I shall teach the stars to fall | nwfc/beard/www/hallway.html ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:41:26 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Jeff Morley In-Reply-To: <950714095707_114770270@aol.com> from "Jordan Davis." at Jul 14, 95 09:57:08 am A few decades ago I edited a collection of Canadian highschool poets/poems for a bigdeal publisher. Two of the poets turned out to be writers who got famous, one as a poet, one as a fiction writer. In the intro I said there was a lot of good stuff. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:46:34 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: child poets In-Reply-To: <0099356F.E9C56480.3690@cpcmg.uea.ac.uk> from "I.LIGHTMAN" at Jul 14, 95 12:43:41 pm I am having a hard time understanding Ira Lightman's response to my mentioning of Mina Loy. I would never attack anyone's love of Niedecker. I have loved her work for 30 years. I didnt say that she reminds me of Loy. I never introduced the context of gender. All I said was that Loy was really good at employing the space around words, and that one who reads Niedecker might have a look at that too. Lightman also put quotation marks around the words he attributed to me. I dont get the point of that at all. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:51:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: child poets In-Reply-To: <199507140448.VAA11475@slip-1.slip.net> from "Steve Carll" at Jul 13, 95 09:48:47 pm Thanks to Steve Carll for actually reading what I said about adults gobbling uyp the creativity in children and labelling them. Let a kid write a poem: dont tell her she's Emily Dickinson. Have you ever been an athlete, for instance, who gets called "The Next Pancho Gonzales" or something? Have you seen parents at Little league games, trying to make their kids into bonus babies? ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 21:51:09 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Re: George & Ludwig In-Reply-To: <950715010737_33148295@aol.com> Rod, thanks for the things I didn't know about Duncan too. And I'd say _Tractatus_ and later stuff are not as opposed as some people make out. All the stuff of Investigations is there, especially with that final appeal to silence and mystery. How many people on this list besides me are enraptured Wittgensteinians? Something about Witt. and what Ira said about children and language po. Something about a way of searching for knowledge that is open ended--completely unHeidegger as David Antin points out in an interview with Spanos. Just reading Ron Padgett's piece in _Talking Poetics_ Vol.I where he says about one kind of poetry: "Now there's another kind, where you get in the car with a thousand bucks, and you just start driving down the street and you don't have any idea where you're going to go. You come to the corner and you take a left, right, or straight ahead, unless you want to go backwards, which is a possibility too. It's much more interesting, it's more exciting. Of course you can end up running out of gas in the middle of the desert--it involves all sorts of dangers. But it's wonderful to be able to go to the typewriter at any given moment; you can wake up in your sleep and just start writing. And in fact that's really thrilling. I mean lots of times you write absolute baloney that way, real garbage. But it's usually more fun, and that's the kind of poetry I prefer writing." Is this where the politics of lang po comes in? Or should I say, maybe this could be where the politics of lang po comes in for me--unlearning the beaten paths of everything. Letting language take me instead of me taking language. Faith in meaning--Wittgenstein of course. Gab. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:56:57 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <01HSU2PZEWS2D1INUC@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU> from "Edward Foster" at Jul 13, 95 08:52:10 pm I am having a problem with Ed Foster's line "you don't teach books, chris, you teach yourself." a. does that mean that you teach yourself to students rather than teaching books? Well, I guess that could be interesting for a short while, but you might wind up teaching your identity to them instead. b. or does it mean that you teach yourself stuff? Well, that would come to an end after a while too, because you would run out of stuff you know. I wd rather think that you learn from somewhere. So that if you wind up as someone half as good as, say Spicer, you learn writing from outside. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 11:59:03 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Whorf (vs. Pinker) nada@TWICS.COM: > Whorf, where are you when we need you? Speaking of Whorf, I was pretty amazed by the outright savaging of Whorf in in Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_. I rather liked most of that book, and I suppose some of his criticisms of Whorf have some bite, but I was totally taken aback by the vehemence with which Pinker went after Whorf, and it seems to me that Pinker was guilty of setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. Basically, Pinker blasted what I would call "the strong Whorf hypothesis", that thinking occurs in *nothing but* language. He didn't really touch what is much closer to what Whorf was getting at, it seems to me, that the language one speaks has *an influence* on how one thinks. I'd be curious to hear comments from somebody else who's read Pinker's book. -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 13:25:45 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: George & Ludwig Gabrielle, Really, it's all there in the _Tractatus_? I'm not _that_ versed in L.W. but had thought the more contextual understanding of language games etc. comes after, late 20s? mid '30s? Re: "unlearning the beaten paths" -- Hejinian has a great statement on that, "Once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies." Which points to possibilities, that the ideas are already extant, within language, within contexts (which interpentrate, a context is always multiple & in the end not defineable, I'm convinced via me Mahayana reading (i.e. there are always more factors to be taken into account)) it is the writer's task (& delight) to find them. So self expression finally a problematic term? Cage used to always say that ideas were "in the air" -- how else explain more than one inventor coming up with the same idea thousands of miles apart. One could say, well technology had reached the point where that idea was possible-- exactly, that idea existed, waiting to be discovered, "in the air." Marjorie Perloff has sd that now it is Stein/Wittgenstein whereas for the last generation in was Heidegger/Pound, I think, or was it Whitehead/Olson. It's a useful point I think. Of course it's more multiple than that, but points to something actual I think. Re Padgett: His Collected (or it might be a big selected) is to be published soon by Godine. He & Berrigan used to give each other their "failed" poems to see if the other cld make something w/ them. Believe a couple of the Sonnets derive from Padgett material. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 12:45:57 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: Filet O Soul In-Reply-To: <199507152326.QAA07041@slip-1.slip.net> from "Steve Carll" at Jul 15, 95 04:26:20 pm I was reading Steve's post and as i was reading Cohen sang "bury my soul in a scrapbook". Nice ryme. Suppose you could say Net for scrapbook. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 13:08:30 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Whorf (vs. Pinker) In-Reply-To: from "Jim Rosenberg" at Jul 16, 95 11:59:03 am I have not read Pinker's attack on Whorf, but I have read others'. (Funny, I was just reccomending Sapir to my brother, who wants to start reading on language.) Here is what usually happens: the regular social scientists just hate a social scientist who (1) thinks with some creativity and beauty, and (2) gets popular with lay people. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 10:07:14 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching in so far as the text is something you like and enjoy and comment on you yourself are its student or pupil or follower: it teaches you -- that's the you yourself that you teach. What can you teach, say, Rembrandt, about painting or about Art? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 10:16:52 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching I would like "to teach" a book that accepts the term "soul", through and through. Before the mid-17th century it made sense in poetics and in hermeneutics, because it was the term under which the anagogical level of interpretation, the relation of God to the Soul, could be read. We don't have that one anymore. Our notions of allegory exclude the Anagogical. How can we read anything before 1660? The rationalisms of the 1660's deleted it and the Enlightenment wouldn't have it and the Romantics could only be nostalgic for it. Among other questions I'd ask: Aren't there any Gnostics left in poetry or did they all die with the Beat movement? ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 23:36:52 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Chiapas ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 15:16:14 -0600 From: juan manuel gomez gonzalez To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: EZLN: CONSULTA INTERNACIONAL July 3, 1995 Mexico D.F. To all artist of the world To all scientist and intellectuals To international public opinion In Mexico power is hardening and the presence of military intelligence begins to be felt in civil meetings and in governmental decisions. Before having to ask for help to alleviate the disaster we want to prevent it. The consultation that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) delivers to us today is a wake-up call that can radically change the destiny for Mexicans and probably for the entire world. The five questions that Zapatistas ask, oviously refer to their needs, resulting from social, economics and political oppresion of which they have been victims. However in a broader sense they speak to the necessities of all Mexicans, and as they relate to the horrors that the neo-leberal system has wrought, they become an issue of world-wide interest. We submit for your review the following proposal: To organiza an intense promotional campaign for the consultation in as many spaces as possible, concert hall, theaters, workshops, seminars, exhibits, video and film screenings, radio and television programs, the press, magazines, interviews, electronic mail and other contemporary media. In addition you can organize new activities during the month of July to concide with the schedule outlined by the Zapatistas; July for the international and August for the national consultation. We are proposing that each country organize the consultation in its own way, with us sharing the basic information, but allowing you and your organizations to design the methodology and the plan of action. We would like for some of you to visit our country and if possible give concerts or public forums; your international profile can help enormously to shape public opinion and to raise money which is in our case very scarce. Therefore, it would be great to promote the consultation through some Mexicans personality. In fact, trips to varius countries have already been organized by members of the comission of the comission of international linkage, and we hope to count on your support if possible in inviting Mexican artist to perform in your countries for the benefit of this project. In my case, as part of the international commission and as a musician, I can propose a simple performance, requiring only a piano and a microphone, although I would prefer to travel with an assistent. We are addressing all of those concerned for democracy, justice and liberty, to all those who in a book, a song or symphony express their commitment to the truth. To those in your classroom, in a conference or in your work who are everyday marking an effort so that the world would be better. We want Mexico to heve its first elections without manipulation by the authorities, we want to get rid of the impossibility of participating in the construction of a more habitable country. We trust in your intelligence, talent, and sensibility, we need you. Fraternally Guillermo Brisen~o P.S. If you want more information, please contact Guillermo Brisen~o, tel 661 8312 and 539 6548 (fax) in Mexico D.F. or the numbers and e-mail addresses that accompany this invitation. P.P.S. In Mexico, the non-governmental organization Alianza Civica will be in charge of the consultation an the Convencion Nacional Democratica (CND), of which we are a part, will undertake its promotion. The CND is also responsible for both organizing and promoting, with your help, the consultation on an international level. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 19:12:25 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: innocence and language In-Reply-To: To bring the twin trains head-on: after reading a lot of surrealist poetry and then Lyn Hejnian (whose work SLEEPS Rachel Blau DuPlessis called 'dreamlike without being surreal') I got convinced that the "ghost in the machine" of language poetry was the female misreader in western tradition, materialized in a sort of nondominance game played with(in) characters of language itself-- the literalizing female misreader, somehow caught poetically in the act (the way you can see a person backspacing over typos in a spilt-screen conversation) Like Francesca of Paolo fame... which reminds me of the article that started all this, Susan Noakes' "On the Superficiality of Women" Just a thought (does anyone know who this Gaspara Stampa was, that Rilke rites about in the DUINO ELEGIES?) "Love and love" Marisa ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 17:39:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: innocence and language In-Reply-To: from "Marisa A Januzzi" at Jul 16, 95 07:12:25 pm Marisa writes abt the "misreader being caught in the act" and likens it to split screen conversations typos. I like this idea and found myself in it today thinking abt palimpsest. It strikes me that Marisa is right on with regards to Hejinian. But I would say that, if palimpsest is another term for what is being described, this is also a feature, structural and conceptual, of at least some serial poem forms. Anyone? Thanks, Marisa. I'm off to look at My Life. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 14:17:24 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: innocence and language misreadings, Marisa, and curious typos on this list (I do plenty myself) recently: tauntology stduents whta teh genuis chnage blundle ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 23:12:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: palimpsets & misreadings Seems to me both the "palimpset" and the "misreading" terminology imply something's wrong, or awry. . . don't know. . . is this what you mean to imply?. . . I mean, Lyn's work seems to me thought through. Even the gaps. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 22:17:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: innocence and language In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: I got convinced that the "ghost > in the machine" of language poetry was the female misreader in western > tradition, materialized in a sort of nondominance game played with(in) > characters of language itself-- the literalizing female misreader, > somehow caught poetically in the act (the way you can see a person > backspacing over typos in a spilt-screen conversation) > > "Love and love" > Marisa this sounds really cool and smart but i'm not sure i know what you mean by "the ghost in the machine" of language poetry; why a specifically *female* (mis)reader for *langpo* specifically. ah--do you mean that langpo somehow "enacts" or literalizes a process of (an arguably politicized or politicizable) "mis"reading that is traditionally associated with or practiced by women? like stein or jane bowles who sometimes sound as if they got the idiom just a little bit wrong accidentally on purpose, and end up remaking language? this may be why i teach a lot of women language poets (in a number of courses entitled everything from "weird books by women" to "ecriture feminine and women language poets" to "women and the literature of trauma) and hardly any men, though i'm beginning to appreciate the male poets (mostly through live readings). I find it realtively easy to associate language "techniques" and rationales with women's "concerns," though i've thought of that as my problem, a kind of intellectual laziness or self-interested essentialism. I like the way you put it --if i read you right --if i read you wrong could you clarify?--md ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 21:36:20 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: palimpsets & misreadings Rod: >Seems to me both the "palimpset" and the "misreading" terminology imply >something's wrong, or awry. . . Oh, I didn't get that impression at all. I think the "mis" in "misreading" is ironic. If I'm not mistaken, that comes from its use in the argument over whether the reader ever really "gets" the author's "intended meaning". Insofar as the language employed by the author is polysemic, "every reading is a misreading" of the author's intent. But these misreadings, because the reader takes *some* meaning from them, become nonetheless tremendously liberating to the reader who stops worrying whether the author intended a certain meaning or not. And the palimpsest is similar--the writer tries to erase previous texts and lay a new one on top, but never fully succeeds; the reader can always see through to the other levels, to varying degrees. Some writers acknowledge these freedoms of the reader and use them as a means of maximizing the joy and freedom of writing, by allowing for the reader's intentionality and/or playing with possible "pretexts"; and I think this is a valid assertion to make about Lyn's work. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:23:36 +0900 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Geraets Subject: manipulators On behalf of a fellow Nagoyan, Bruce Malcolm, I'd like to ask does anyone know of text manipulation software, randomizers, whatever, that may be commercially available (or not, as the case may be). Scuze the vagueness of the request, but if you know of anything that may be interesting, please let us know. pp Bruce Malcolm frank@dpc.aichi-gakuin.ac.jp ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 08:27:38 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: where it comes from In-Reply-To: from "Brian W Horihan" at Jul 14, 95 05:28:57 pm What do we mean when we say, "Wow, she's got soul," or "Hey, let's take a ride on the soul train?" Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 08:24:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Re: sound symbolism Forgive me if I pass on taking up the actual questions raised by J G on this thread, despite having looked at sound symbolism - and motivated language generally - over the years. Still, members of the list may wish to know about an excellent piece on the subject by J H Pyrnne, a lecture published by Birkbeck College, University of London: J H Prynne: Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words, London: Birkbeck College, 1993 You used to be able to get it direct from Birkbeck for about GBP 6.00. Perhaps someone else on the list remembers the details. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 05:57:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: recent future reading The Lovely & Talented , my internet service provider, had a major hacker problem recently and was down for about two weeks while they cleaned up a few digital messes, searched for (& found a ton of 'em) back doors, installed some new equipment, and called more than 6,000 members to give us all new passwords. I only bring it up cause I'll be responding to some older threads that might should have died a natural death. I guess I'll be the first for Kenneth Goldsmith's next compilation of the list's readings. Beside Steve Shaviro's online classic Doom Patrols that I noted a few weeks ago (& many of the same poetry magazines everyone else mentioned), I've been reading in & at the following: Various chunks of Ron Silliman's Alphabet - Ron, when you wrote a week or two ago about not revising much in the Alphabet, did you also mean that you don't rearrange the order of sentences? A very odd collection of poems used as texts for a set of commissioned songs by eleven American composers for voice and piano that will be published (with luck) by the end of the year and recorded for a CD to be released in spring 1996. The only collection I can imagine to include both Nelson Bentley (composition by Thomas Peterson) and Jackson Mac Low (composition by Susan Stenger). The scores are musically as varied as the texts; Jane Gaines' Contested Culture, a very good legal studies look at the history of copyright/trademark law; A dreadfully dull book called Copyright's Highway, that doesn't seem to cover what I'm looking for; Midnight Blue by Nancy Collins, a refreshingly non-turgid (though not as good as Kathryn Bigelow's movie Near Dark) vampire trilogy, the last book seems like it's going to be a little too, uh, nice; Progress by Barrett Watten - this month's book for the Seattle reading group (looking at Mike Magoolaghan's list, he seems to think he can get by with just reading the (very good) new Aerial on Watten. Now _that_, Mike, would be pretentious); Samuel Delany's Atlantis: 3 Tales - a mainstream novel, not science fiction. I've been hearing about this for two years from a friend who just published a too-pricey-for-me limited edition of this, but Wesleyan's got a trade edition that the library already had; A half dozen mysteries my aunt sent me cause she remembered that my mom used to do so. Unfortunately my aunt's taste in mysteries isn't as close to mine as my mom's was: these seem to all be British vicarage things; A huge stack of Canadian, British & New Zealand poetry books picked up at BlaserCon that doesn't seem to be getting any smaller; & tomorrow I pick up 4 books the library is holding for me, 3 suggested in some way or another by folks on Paul Mann's Theory Death of the Avant Garde Alan Golding's From Outlaw to Classic George Landow's Hyper/Text/Theory plus Edward Strickland's Minimalism Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 05:57:15 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: manipulators >On behalf of a fellow Nagoyan, Bruce Malcolm, I'd >like to ask does anyone know of text manipulation >software, randomizers, whatever, that may be commercially >available (or not, as the case may be). > >Scuze the vagueness of the request, but if you >know of anything that may be interesting, please >let us know. > There's a very simple randomizing hypercard stack (therefore Macintosh only) called Dada Poet. This has very few user definable parameters, and it is quite random, not useful if you're interested in maintaining a semblance of grammar or syntax, but it is capable of some interesting bucket-brigade effects, in addition to general randomizing. Travesty is available for IBM-compatibles. I haven't used this but based on the book Sentences, recently published by Sun & Moon (don't forget to look for those blue M&Ms!), it seems to do some interesting things. If Bruce Malcolm is interested in doing some syntactic programming-level work, there's a very powerful, and funny, program called Kant Generator Pro that is set up to write large chunks of Kantian prose. The program also has modules for Husserlian prose, excuses, thank-you notes and several mathematical modules useful for programming in Pascal. It's possible to modify any of these modules to do other kinds of random generation within a generalized syntactic structure from list of vocabulary and/or phrases, but, as I said above, this takes some work. Kant Generator Pro is a GNU program, I have it for Mac, but I think it's available for other computer platforms, too. These are also several different anagram programs around, but that may be more text manipulation than you're looking for. I don't have addresses for these programs readily at hand, but all of them should be available on the Internet with archy, gopher, or some other search program. I've heard of several other programs that I haven't seen in action. I'd be interested in any other such programs people know of. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 06:04:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Exercise(s) Tony Green asked, in the context of the discussion about rules v looser practice: >are Chopin Studies "exercises"? or J.S.Bach Inventions or B Bartok >Mikrokosmos? These are finished compositions, but they also serve as exercises for performers who, by playing these compositions get practice in some particular technique, fingering, rhythmic patterns, articulation, etc. A related kind of poem-as-etude might be text-sound pieces which, if performed by people other than the originating writer, give the performer the opportunity to stretch their vocal "chops" in ways they haven't previously. A less directly related kind of "etude" might be any poems which are so unlike one's own thinking that to read them is to "exercise" one's intellect. That said, I think that because poems are rarely performed by readers other than the poet who wrote them (except of course in those enlightened classrooms people have been detailing in other threads), there are very few poems that serve the same kind of function as musical "etudes" do. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 06:04:33 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Brathwaite tapes, Lately I've been thinking a lot, and writing a little, about composers who digitally sample sounds made by others to make new pieces (John Oswald; Carl Stone; Bob Ostertag; Stock, Hausen & Walkman; David Shea; etc), so maybe I'm particularly conscious of intellectual property issues right now. Still it was surprising to see that several people had no qualms about offering to dub tapes of Brathwaite readings, including a tape that is a commercial product. Especially given the infrequent but common qualms people have about posting the text of other writer's poems on . Now I'm not a prude about this-I've dubbed and photocopied plenty of things for myself and others. But I dont' recall anyone saying they'd send a xerox when people posted to the list asking about the availability of a particular book or poem. Did this seem odd to anyone else? In any event, I think those LP recordings of Brathwaite's were of him reading The Arrivants, not Middle Passage, which is too recent a book to be released on vinyl by any semi-conscious company. Though George Bowering will be glad to note that albums by megapop stars like Hole are often pressed on vinyl for the collector's market. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 09:16:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <199507141643.JAA24087@fraser.sfu.ca> On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Carl Lynden Peters wrote: > > Here's a twist on the subject: Should students be required to compose > > poetry in a poetry course (I don't mean in a poetry-writing course)? > > > --yes, and it should go without saying. i don't think you can teach art > if you can't make art You're kidding, right? They *should* be *required*? Just like that? All students? Every class? Every unqualified "should" and its unqualified affirmation gets me to thinking: What is gained and lost in this kind of conversation? Obviously one thing that's lost is any concept of a non-pedagogical possibility for poetry. Who said the students in the class were going to be teachers? Carl's response, not to put too fine a point on it, constructs a seemingly inevitable linear development from student to teacher. Just because many on this list, including me, have moved in such a direction doesn't mean that others might take a poetry course for a hundred other reasons, just as valid. And just because somebody decides that *they* "should" teach poetry writing in a poetry reading course doesn't mean that others "should" follow. I'm not saying they shouldn't. I have gone both ways, depending on the occasion, and found benefits in several different class-constructions. Not all of us teach poetry as "art," either. Apologies for the tendentiousness of this post. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 09:27:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: Whorf (vs. Pinker) In-Reply-To: <199507162008.NAA10360@fraser.sfu.ca> On Sun, 16 Jul 1995, George Bowering wrote: > I have not read Pinker's attack on Whorf, but I have read others'. > (Funny, I was just reccomending Sapir to my brother, who wants to > start reading on language.) Here is what usually happens: the regular ^^^^^^^ > social scientists just hate a social scientist who (1) thinks with ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > some creativity and beauty, and (2) gets popular with lay people. Have read Pinker, will comment soon, but just to say: Pinker's not a social scientist, strictly speaking, but a cognitive neuroscientist. He's very close to a biologist, in fact. So he doesn't just hate popular social scientists: if you read the last chapter of his book, you'll see he hates them ALL! Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 09:01:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carl Lynden Peters Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: from "David Kellogg" at Jul 17, 95 09:16:32 am > > On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Carl Lynden Peters wrote: > > > > Here's a twist on the subject: Should students be required to compose > > > poetry in a poetry course (I don't mean in a poetry-writing course)? > > > > > --yes, and it should go without saying. i don't think you can teach art > > if you can't make art > > You're kidding, right? They *should* be *required*? > Just like that? All students? Every class? > david, yes, i am serious. what i'm aiming at in my statement is the notion of the poem as a way of knowing. several initial questions immediately come to mind: --how could one _teach_ that? --how does one _demonstrate_ that? my current studies are such that these questions are of immense interest to me. i don't see this approach (and it's one of many approaches) as linear, either take care, carl ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 12:07:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rae Armantrout Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing... Dear Tony, You ask if there are any Gnostics left in poetry (since the beats). I would suggest Fanny Howe. Rae ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 13:46:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <199507171601.JAA17878@fraser.sfu.ca> On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Carl Lynden Peters wrote: > yes, i am serious. what i'm aiming at in my statement is the notion of > the poem as a way of knowing. several initial questions immediately come > to mind: --how could one _teach_ that? --how does one _demonstrate_ that? > my current studies are such that these questions are of immense interest > to me. i don't see this approach (and it's one of many approaches) as > linear, either > Glad to hear it. It just seemed to me that the discussion was in danger of turning into a seminar on what a poetry class should be; I didn't detect the pluralism demonstrated above in the earlier post. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 13:24:42 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gale Nelson I was reading from "Meaning Is to Be Here," A Selction from the Daybook of George Oppen (edited by Cynthia Anderson, Conjunctions 10) to a group of writers in a summer program here in Providence, and found a few fragments that seemed relevant to discussions here: I will have to say what I can without the magnificent King's x. No disclosures, of course, that I can make, but just to say truthfully what it is to live. And see: or begin. Because someday -- everyone will be terrified. They have so far managed to find militant atheism or disguised atheism as comforting as militant religion or disguised religion. It won't last much longer. The physical scientists are giving no one any peace. The philosophers are strangely exhilarated to be proving rigorously that their statements don't mean anything or have no importance. Won't last long. Raises a question of survival. We must somehow get hold of what we know and what we can't know, and begin, to live with it. Not an abstract, nor even a private matter. Most of our laws are theocratic: our punishments assume an absolute moral judgment. The death penalty could not exist today without the habit of speaking of a transcendental morality. Our judgments and our punishments are theocratic. They will collapse. We had better start talking. We must wean ourselves from narrative, which is everyone's art form, because everyone really knows -- it is the most obvious of facts -- that every life ends badly. Very badly. Not only death, but loneliness, desertions *irreparable* physical injury. Every ship sinks. All the calamities the hero escapes he does not escape. We had better talk. Even tho we are afraid of being overheard by the children. Or someday we will die of despair when we overhear the children. We haven't begun to talk, or we have talked nonsense. A simple poetic undertaking: to see if life is livable, to make life livable. Without lying. Not that I wouldn't be glad to: people are becoming too discerning. We are consciously lying to each other by now. But I mean to become part of a discussion among honest people. (p. 189) *An epigrammatic post-script:* 'Form is never more than an extension of content' It had better not be an *extension! perhaps a compression* Form is what makes the poem *graspable* Sincerity is the attention outward. Objectification is creation obviously enough. to write at the moving edge is both of these, or perhaps more than these *the infinite* (p. 199) i do not hear the rhythm as the poem forms -- the beginning, the speed of the poem -- rather it is a shape, in fact a silence The shape silently forms as if 'above' me -- the effort of the writing, the finding of the cadence is the care not to shatter this presence -- tho often it must be shattered and only then restored (p. 200) Cheers, Gale Nelson ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 11:17:49 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: Re: where it comes from In-Reply-To: <199507171227.IAA09666@blues.epas.utoronto.ca> On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Michael Boughn wrote: > What do we mean when we say, "Wow, she's got soul," or "Hey, let's > take a ride on the soul train?" > > Mike > mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca > [appologies to Ira who's heard this already--] I had read in Cixous recently that she locates the soul at the body. Which I thought was groovy, but was still thinking on how this is. I mean to say that I liked the idea that the body was the locus of the soul, but what did this mean. Then on Saturday I was listening to a program on NPR about vocalese--how do you spell that?--which is when the singer tries to make his/her voice behave as closely as possible to the way a musical instrument behaves--and I thought, THAT'S IT!! That is writing the body (cf Cixous)-- makingthe language behave as closely as possible to the way the body behaves-- and that is how/why the body as the location of the soul works for me. If we make the soul of the same behaviors of the body--labor, sweat, sex, touch (to communicate is also to touch, remember)--we can deal with it. If soul, or consciousness--and I think they are awfully the same--are always absent--and absence--always off, away from us in the ether somewhere--how can we know them, or even experience them, and most especially articulate them? But if the body is the soul--it does become present--and a presence--we can know it, experience it, share it--WRITE IT. Soul is important--it is what writing has been about and after as long as their has been writing. But I think, I really do, that if we allow the body to be the soul, that writing becomes a lot more successful, more COMMUNICATIVE. . . Best, ShaunAnne ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 12:08:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lindz Williamson Subject: Re: Filet O Soul In-Reply-To: <199507161945.MAA09426@fraser.sfu.ca> On the origins of poems topic I used the word soul and I'm really impressed with the continuing debate. Howxever I still must say the soul is my center of inspiration. It has nothing to do with organized religion or or celestial sensations. It's the part of me that exist beyond the buzzing of my neurons and the pumping of my blood. It is that which translates chemical reActions and elctric stimlations of living into the thought I pour on to the page. The mind and the body are extingiushable, but not the soul. The mind and body are needed in order to function in life, but a soul is needed in death. I'm not sure if poetry is really needed any where, but it does prove to be a nice fringe benefit. The fact that creativity is not a necessity in the basics of life (food, shelter) but is such an integeral part of my own being comforts me. It is an unexplain element in my life that I must feed and satisfy, therefore I will nurture it and label it my soul because I can only hope it will serve a greater purpose later in my life/ or in my death. Lindz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 12:14:41 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: gnostics In-Reply-To: <950717120701_34463100@aol.com> from "Rae Armantrout" at Jul 17, 95 12:07:02 pm Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasnt there a piece written about Spicer and Gnosticism? And, for a wonderful take on Gnosticism, and everything else under this sun, I suppose, try Phil K. Dick's _Valis_. Something about SF (San Fran and Sci Fi) and Gnosticism? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:19:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: Oppen/Heidegger/Wittgenstein In-Reply-To: <199507170401.AAA141925@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Automatic digest processor" at Jul 17, 95 00:00:17 am Marjorie Perloff writes: "On Oppen/Wittgenstein/Heidegger: I worked on this while writing my Wittgenstein book and it's complicated because although Oppen thinks he's more like Heidegger, his use of language is often much closer to Wittgenstein's treatment of ordinary language. But not as close as, say, Creeley is. Still, "Of Being Numerous," for example, is a rather Wittgensteinian poem as Burt Hatlen pointed out some time ago. Or at least Witt. can help one read Oppen. Marjorie Perloff" Dear Marjorie: What Hatlen piece are you thinking of? I'd like to read it--right now, Oppen seems to me so saturated with Heideggerian assumptions that i have a hard time seeing the Witt. connection, but i *am* curious. steve ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:30:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Recording of Spicer reading Language? Does anyone know if there is a recording of Jack Spicer reading from Language? I and a friend of mine are dying to hear it, if there is one. Thanks, Willa ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:58:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: accidental poetics In-Reply-To: <199507170401.AAA141925@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Automatic digest processor" at Jul 17, 95 00:00:17 am I was just in a fairly minor car accident the other day--i.e. i'm more or less fine, tho' the car wuz "totalled." Anyway, the rental i'm driving has a sticker reading "Berglund," presumably the name of the car dealer, on its rear, and the osteopath i wuz sent to is nambed Gelburd. I can't get the fact that these are nearly perfect anagrams out of my head. This partly has to do with the way memory works i guess--i keep misremembering the doctor's name, and so have continually to rehearse the differance. But also has to do i suppose with the/my tendency/compulision to read everything, even a car accident as a linguistic event. Does this sort of thing happen to "you" too? And btw, has anyone seen The Postman (Italian flick about Neruda in Italian exile and his relationship with the titular mailman, or to be less poetcentric, it's about the mailman's relation to Neruda). Pretty romanticized i guess, but i was rather touched to see some sort of film treatment of what it means "to be a poet," and of the social fact of being-a-poet as well (not just the tortures of the Divine and Solitary Afflatus, like a bad case of gastroindigestion etc etc (and even my mailman/poet centricity qualifications above are inadequate, 'cause the mailman does turn out to be a sort of poet too... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 16:28:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Niedecker/Loy/George In-Reply-To: <199507160746.AAA07477@fraser.sfu.ca> On Sun, 16 Jul 1995, George Bowering wrote: > I am having a hard time understanding Ira Lightman's response to my > mentioning of Mina Loy. I would never attack anyone's love of > Niedecker. I have loved her work for 30 years. I didnt say that she > reminds me of Loy. I never introduced the context of gender. All I > said was that Loy was really good at employing the space around > words, and that one who reads Niedecker might have a look at that > too. Lightman also put quotation marks around the words he attributed > to me. I dont get the point of that at all. > As the "list lurker" who loves Niedecker and was supposedly "attacked," I just have to say, George, I interpreted your comment just as you meant it. I was glad you responded to my admiration of Niedecker and suggested another poet whose work I might like as well. --Willa ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 17:41:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: Re: gnostics Not quite sure what we mean by gnosticism here (was Dickinson a gnostic? was Harold Bloom?) but I _had_ heard a rumor that Leonard Schwartz & Joe Donahue were editing an anthology of contemporary gnostic poetry... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 15:38:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: Recording of Spicer reading Language? In-Reply-To: from "Willa Jarnagin" at Jul 17, 95 03:30:35 pm When I was researching Spicer for George I didn't come across one ( a reading of Language, that is. And that was my central focus). The Contemporary Lit. Collection here at Simon Fraser actually had one or two readings, I think, besides the Vancouver Lectures. I think Charles Watts is on the list still. He knows best. Charles? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:02:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: gnostics In message <199507171914.MAA07441@fraser.sfu.ca> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasnt there a piece written about > Spicer and Gnosticism? And, for a wonderful take on Gnosticism, > and everything else under this sun, I suppose, try Phil K. Dick's > _Valis_. Something about SF (San Fran and Sci Fi) and Gnosticism? yes, i'd in fact suggest the berkeley renaissance crowd, of which Dick was an fringe member. I've heard blaser, duncan and spicer referred to as "gnostic platonists," whatever that means. md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 20:57:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching no, george, it means simply, for one thing, that no two people read a book the same way, or, elegantly, from emerson: "it depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem." - "we see only what we animate." ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 21:01:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: innocence and language Marisa, Just read a beautiful piece by Noakes on Dante. Who is she? What else has she written? Where can I find "On the Superficiality of Women"? Burt ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 13:08:06 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: manipulators Jackson Mac Low would know I guess, perhaps a New York lister cd find out? ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 13:13:20 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching Carl, wouldn't it get in the way, not knowing what the instruction means: write a poem. Write a what? what counts as a poem? finding that out is something between teacher and student. Do you get faced with: I cannot do this exercise, because you have provided insufficient protocols for me to begin. (I got this last year from disgruntled students who had, with some additional specifications, been asked to write an introduction to an imaginary exhibition. How much worse with a "poem". What models for poem do you 1 offer, 2 propose,3 advise, 4 leave blank?) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 19:25:42 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: reading list Now that I've seen what it is, I want to thank Kenneth Goldsmith for, apparently, tracking all of the books referred to on , not just people's summer/bedside reading lists. This should not be a thankless task. After getting nearly three weeks of mail at once, I've ended up nuking lots of posts (none of the really important, and interesting, ones by you who is reading this now, of course-just those other messages) before really reading them & found (oops) I'd lost a few book references I'd wanted to keep in this way. Many of them were still around 'cause I'd saved Kenneth's Reading List post(s). (Just what I need, a list of more books I haven't read yet or want to re-read.) But really, thanks, Kenneth. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 22:59:42 -0400 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: manipulators >On behalf of a fellow Nagoyan, Bruce Malcolm, I'd >like to ask does anyone know of text manipulation >software, randomizers, whatever, that may be commercially >available (or not, as the case may be). > >Scuze the vagueness of the request, but if you >know of anything that may be interesting, please >let us know. > also for Mac, a program called "TextMangle" (an implementation of Travesty? i think), and one called "Deconstructor". if you can't find these on the net, contact me backchannel... luigi au462@cleveland.freenet.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:02:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: gnostics someone said that duncan blaser and spicer are "gnostic platonists" though this may be true of duncan, spicer was more "skeptical" or at least less "platonic"--to lump the three together obscures the debates and passionate arguments between them (with robin often getting caught in the middle, both philosophically and emotionally--not mere bio ad hominen) that had much to do with making the scene so vital...cs ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 22:23:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: innocence and language In message <00993810.E557320E.8@admin.njit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Marisa, > > Just read a beautiful piece by Noakes on Dante. Who is she? What else > has she written? Where can I find "On the Superficiality of Women"? > > Burt i'm maria not marisa, but i know who susan noakes is cuz until just a year ago she was dean of faculty in my division of this huge state university. she's a french scholar/medievalist feminist, and she's really nice, she was really helpful in my tenure process and sympathetic to the incredible tsoris i encountered at the hands of my incompetent and unethical departmental superiors. now she's part time at U North Carolina and part time here, at Minnesota, in each univ's respective french dept. i'm sure she;d be tickled to know her work was being read/lauded on the poetics list. she also has an essay in the jonathan boyarin collection i mentioned a few months ago, from UMN press, on the anthropology of reading (can't remember the main title, book's in office, i;m at home). is that the article you mean, marisa? (i must confess i've not read the boyarin book, except for his own essay, and i've not read my colleague s noakes's work either).--md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:27:45 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Gloucester Is anyone on this list near/in Gloucester or familiar with it? I am interested in some advice/tourist/practical information. If so, could you mail me "backchannel"? I appreciate it, Loss lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 22:27:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: gnostics In message <01HSZSDEKYHE8Y650T@albnyvms.BITNET> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > someone said that duncan blaser and spicer are "gnostic platonists" > though this may be true of duncan, spicer was more "skeptical" or at > least less "platonic"--to lump the three together obscures the debates > and passionate arguments between them (with robin often getting caught > in the middle, both philosophically and emotionally--not mere bio > ad hominen) that had much to do with making the scene so vital...cs yes of course. the person (who will remain nameless) who said this was someone i didn't think was the brightest light on the block...but since it was, i think, the last time (1987 or so) i heard of gnosticism as a category for postwar american poetry i thought i'd pass it on.--md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 22:34:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Filet O Soul In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > On the origins of poems topic I used the word soul and I'm really > impressed with the continuing debate. Howxever I still must say the soul > is my center of inspiration. > > It has nothing to do with organized religion or or celestial sensations. > It's the part of me that exist beyond the buzzing of my neurons and the > pumping of my blood. It is that which translates chemical reActions and > elctric stimlations of living into the thought I pour on to the page. > The mind and the body are extingiushable, but not the soul. The mind and > body are needed in order to function in life, but a soul is needed in > death. > I'm not sure if poetry is really needed any where, but it does prove > to > be a nice fringe benefit. The fact that creativity is not a necessity in > the basics of life (food, shelter) but is such an integeral part of my > own being comforts me. It is an unexplain element in my life that I must > feed and satisfy, therefore I will nurture it and label it my soul > because I can only hope it will serve a greater purpose later in my life/ or > in my death. > > > Lindz does this, perhaps, have anything to do with deleuze's hypothesis that the self is an unstable, shimmering boundary between two becomings? what wd happen if the word "soul" was used here? also, brian, the only thing that comes to mind in your very interesting query is some big deal (though physically "slim") book about freud that came out in the 80s, excerpted in the New Yorker, by some big deal guy, maybe Bruno Bettelheim? could that be? claiming that the word freud used for ...was it consciousness? mind? self? you can see these secondhand references make a deep impression ...could actually be profitably, and faithfully (no pun intended) translated and/or understood as "soul." i don't know if that rescues the word from mysticism or conversely imputes a mystical bent to freud, but there you have it. maybe this is as flaky an idea as "gnostic platonism."--md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:37:56 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: innocence and language In-Reply-To: <300b292c5381002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 17, 95 10:23:46 pm > was being read/lauded on the poetics list. she also has an essay in > the jonathan boyarin collection i mentioned a few months ago, from > UMN press, on the anthropology of reading (can't remember the main > title, book's in office, i;m at home) Maria, is that _The Ethnography of reading_? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 21:12:28 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lindz Williamson Subject: Re: where it comes from In-Reply-To: Shaunne wrote: Soul is important--it is what writing has been about and after as long as their has been writing. But I think, I really do, that if we allow the body to be the soul, that writing becomes a lot more successful, more COMMUNICATIVE. . . Yes, yes , yes I agree, love Lindz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 22:41:00 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching "Not all of us teach poetry as `art,' either." David Kellogg, could you explain this statement? If not art, then what? Or perhaps we have different definitions of art? thanks, charles alexander chax press minnesota center for book arts phone & fax: 612-721-6063 e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 21:34:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lindz Williamson Subject: Re: Filet O Soul In-Reply-To: <300b2b9f5937002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> SOUL O who shall from this dungeon raise A soul inslav'd so many ways? With bolts of bones; that fetter'd stands In feet; and manacled hands; here bkinded with an eye; and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as twere, in chains Of nerves and arteries and viens; Tortur'd, besides each other part, In a vain head and doubles heart. BODY O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? which stretch'd upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame (A fever could but do the same); And wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die; a body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possess'd Andrew Marvell "A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body" Lindz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 21:36:30 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carl Lynden Peters Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: from "Tony Green" at Jul 18, 95 01:13:20 pm > > Carl, wouldn't it get in the way, not knowing what the instruction > means: write a poem. Write a what? what counts as a poem? finding > that out is something between teacher and student. Do you get faced > with: I cannot do this exercise, because you have provided > insufficient protocols for me to begin. (I got this last year from > disgruntled students who had, with some additional specifications, > been asked to write an introduction to an imaginary exhibition. How > much worse with a "poem". What models for poem do you 1 offer, > 2 propose,3 advise, 4 leave blank?) > tony, --these are important questions and i appreciate them, thank-you. interesting: i just just talked with one of my instructors for medieval lit. abt an essay draft. she told me it was an excellent paper, but distant. _distant_! --i had know idea what she meant by that --> for a second. then she noted to me that "there is no _you_ in this paper." i asked her: do you mean there's no _poetical_ i? "exactly," she said. i suspect that it is my unfamiliarity with the material which inspired the death of my poetical i in this paper. but i'm going to go back to this essay and find it. i'm not sure how but this relates to your post. we are words and our meanings change (bp) take care, carl ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 21:37:52 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Jul 1995 to 17 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507180402.VAA14019@leland.Stanford.EDU> Steve--the Hatlen essay on Oppen's "Wittgensteinian" (as opposed to Poundian or Imagist) aesthetic is in SAGETRIEB, one of the first issues so I think around '83. I don't have the reference at my fingertips--if you can't find, I'll look at my files. I think it was vol. 1 or 2 of SAGETRIEB and he's arguing that Oppen and Zukofsky can't be understood via the Pound-Williams axis. Now that I think of it, the essay deals more with Zukofsky than with Oppen but the point holds because Burt is talking about the Objectivists in a broader way. Best, Marjorie P. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:14:12 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <91006.mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu> from "Charles Alexander" at Jul 17, 95 10:41:00 pm Charles Alexander asked David Kellog, and I'm paraphrasing, If we don't teach poetry as art, then what do we teach it as. Well, I'd like to butt in, if I may. I haven't taught poetry, yet. But the first alternative that jumps to my mind is poetry as symbolic action (Burke). Genres and formal registers as the signatures of a or many discursive communities. I suppose, if this is not teaching it as "art", then this goes back to--oh god, no==poetry as politics and authority (or authorities). I'll stop here because i don't want to go out there today. I'm feeling fragile. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 01:35:33 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Niedecker/Loy/George In-Reply-To: from "Willa Jarnagin" at Jul 17, 95 04:28:11 pm Further for Willa J. (thanks): You might enjoy, if you havent seen it, my colleague Jenny Penberthy's collection of Niedecker's letters to Zukofsky. The letters dart and pin almost as nicely as do the poems. Oh, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 02:28:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: recent future reading >Various chunks of Ron Silliman's Alphabet - Ron, when you wrote a week or >two ago about not revising much in the Alphabet, did you also mean that you >don't rearrange the order of sentences? > Well, I regularly keep a notebook of sentences as they occur to me and for some projects (as with the still-in-progress K section of the Alphabet, Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect) I use them a lot. With others not at all. Otherwise, no, I don't rearrange the order of sentences. >Progress by Barrett Watten - this month's book for the Seattle reading >group (looking at Mike Magoolaghan's list, he seems to think he can get by >with just reading the (very good) new Aerial on Watten. Now _that_, Mike, >would be pretentious); Progress remains one of my two or three favorite books in the universe. Enjoy! Ron ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 05:45:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: misreadings/Noakes (a bit l-o-n-g...) In-Reply-To: <300b292c5381002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> It is really such a pleasure to post to this list (esp. at 4:30AM!)-- thanks to all (Ryan, Rod, Steve, Maria, Burt, Maria, and several back-channelers) who ask and rescue so intriguingly. Susan Noakes' essay "On the Superficiality of Women" is in a collection she edited with Clayton Koelb, called THE COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON LITERATURE (Cornell UP 1988). Elements of the argument may well appear in her book TIMELY READING: BETWEEN EXEGESIS AND INTERPRETATION-- which I haven't seen, but whose title illustrates, I'd guess, her attempt to re-mark the dichotomous western repertoire of 'figures of reading' (good/bad, active/passive, penetrating/superficial, legitimate/illegitimate, male/female). Noakes reads Bonaventure, Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, and Flaubert for depictions of female misreaders whose "superficial reading is an indicator of moral deficiency" (it ain't hard for her to find them there) not jest to show that this is a privileged topos in western lit., but also (she hopes) to ease the impasse in the field of hermeneutics (1988: deconstruction & its critics) by questioning the meaning of these obsessively dichotomous signs of reading. (well, okay, 'jest' was a joke!) As I reread the piece, I felt that it was a shame that Noakes doesn't just recuperate this figure of the cheeky "suerficial" misreader for feminist or otherwise devious purposes, which is what I think Hejinian does at times, especially in MY LIFE. Of course I would have to work a lot harder to make this argument run smoothly (for one thing, I'm working with a model of poetic text materialized AS a sort of reading.. for another, I'm nowhere near my copy of Hejinian's book.) The word 'misreading' was rescued ably by Steve-- thanks Steve!-- and I wld like to add jazz improvisation to his suggested list of its kindred techniques (palimpsest, serial form). Hejinian absolutely seems to me a 'clean' writer: very careful with/in her writing, working word by word and even syllable by syllable to create patterns and inviting drifts of meaning. It seems paradoxically controlled-- and yet-- I saw her read at Temple a year or so back, and was struck by the way she tossed the pages to the side, once read. She even called attention to the gesture as one she picked up from watching jazz musicians perform, and it really brought the element of purposive play from within her work. Rod Smith's posting, then, interested me: I think when anyone mines the less 'controllable' resources of language profoundly-- the results look somehow 'awry,' a-miss, unmasterful... this is worse when the writer's female and others (!editors!) all too readily question their 'mastery' of the language. This happened with Dickinson and it happened with Loy-- both of whom are, like Hejinian of course-- miles ahead of their readers. Like Maria I am readily engrossed by writers who seem to be "getting the idea just a little bit wrong accidentally on purpose"-- and end up reinventing the medium in the process. Just to clarify my original post, then, borrowing from Maria's almost miraculous paraphrase: "Langpo 'enacts' or literalizes a process of (an arguably politicized or politicizable) 'mis'reading that is traditionally associated with or practiced by women"-- 'women' understood as discursive entities (Noakes' female misreaders: Eve, Francesca, Emma Bovary...), as flesh-and-blood-and-soul language practitioners, and as textual operations or characters within language itself. Silly, probably, in these last 5AM formulations... but-- tenable? Marisa ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 02:52:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Gnostic Howe? Rae, you wrote, > > "You ask if there are any Gnostics left in poetry (since the beats). I would suggest Fanny Howe." I would love to learn more (particularly since I tend to think Fanny among the most underappreciated poets of my generation). I love the poetry, but my lack of the terms here always prevents me from seeing her lyrics, even at their most openly spiritual, as Gnostic. Can you give an example of how it informs a particular poem? Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:26:54 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Gnostic Poets Supporting Rae's suggestion of Fanny Howe. Adding an English poet and performance / installation artist Brian Catling. And the poet David Miller. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 06:38:40 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden <74277.1477@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: who is Gaspara Stampa Marisa, Found this in _Rilke, a Life_ by Wolfgang Leppmann: "While working on _Malte Laurids Brigge_, he became engrossed once more in the type of unrequited love, transcending its object, that he found represented by women like the Renaissance poetess Gaspara Stampa..." Reading a little in this book makes me long for an antidote of Kafka, or at least Woody Allen: "Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me. But why? I kept imagining I saw shadowy forms, and at 3 a.m. the underwear I had draped over a chair resembled the Kaiser on roller skates. When I finally did fall asleep, I had that same hideous nightmare in which a woodchuck is trying to claim my prize at a raffle. Despair." Hope the (Stampa) reference helps-- Rachel Loden ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:27:05 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Randomising Text Generation from Treknobabble: To amplify the resonant efficiency would not be logical, because the theta tube would then create the holographic incursion. It's just possible that the trans-warp conduit would decelerate the binary wave, but only if we enhance the gravitational carrier and stabilize the artificial particle! It's just possible that the adaptive micro-replication would decelerate the temporal multiplex, but only if we analyze the anti graviton and shatter the replicative magnetic! If we can redirect the cytherian entity, we might be able to inhibit the proto tunnel and decode the metagenic plasma! To create the alignment grid would not be logical, because the replicative thrust would then resonate the magnetic transporter. Captain, I canna encrypt the cloud because the artificial warp is about to enhance the cloaked carrier! To destabilize the interstellar alignment would not be logical, because the molecular pattern would then decode the localized echo. It's just possible that the containment hologram would stabilize the static flux, but only if we decay the non-linear signature and amplify the servo-mechanical shield! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 08:57:22 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David McAleavey Subject: Oppen & Heidegger, etc. In-Reply-To: <199507170403.AAA16609@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Years ago I explored a little Heidegger in connection with Oppen. I do believe Oppen was affected by H., validated in his perception of the wondrousness of the moment, or of at least some moments of existential focus & attunement (related to the Heideggerian notion of "clearing"). No doubt Oppen was also affected by Wittgenstein; and by modern mathematics; and other philosophers. When I spent a couple of weeks with George and Mary in January 1978, in S.F., examining their library, his notes, and speaking with them several hours a day, I found a copy of Heidegger on the table beside the reading chair in their kitchen/dining room/living room, right beside the box of fig newtons. But George said to me, "I don't know what I really got out of that [referring to Heidegger] -- I don't really understand it," -- or words which I took to have that meaning. He was already complaining a lot about his loss of memory (though he actually appeared unimpeded, and to be able to recall a great deal), and his being somewhat befuddled by his earlier self's seeming to have been nourished by Heidegger =could= conceivably be explained as relating to the onset of weakened intellectual acumen due to senility. Or it could be explained by the older man's judgment that his younger self hadn't known as much as much as he'd thought at the time. Which could be correct or incorrect. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 09:41:15 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <91006.mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu> On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Charles Alexander wrote: > "Not all of us teach poetry as `art,' either." > > David Kellogg, could you explain this statement? If not art, then what? Or > perhaps we have different definitions of art? My own work focuses on poetry as a social field -- a discourse which, like any other, has certain self-emerging rules, codes of reproduction, and so forth. I want to analyze this field without isolating certain things as "art." Rather, I analyze the very process of such isolation which goes on very well without my help, thank you very much. This is not to exclude perspectives which art-ify the subject, only to ensure that other perspectives, including my rather sociological one, are not barred from the get-go. For more info: I suppose this is the time to mention my essay forthcoming in *Cultural Critique*, who knows when, this summer or fall, called "Literary History and the Problems of Oppositional Practice in Contemporary Poetry." It makes an argument for the usefulness of a concept of a social field, which I call "the poetic," bearing roughly the same resemblance to poetry as "sexuality" does to "sex" in Foucault. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 09:46:51 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing/teaching In-Reply-To: <199507180614.XAA00431@fraser.sfu.ca> On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Ryan Knighton wrote: > Charles Alexander asked David Kellog, and I'm paraphrasing, If we > don't teach poetry as art, then what do we teach it as. > > Well, I'd like to butt in, if I may. I haven't taught poetry, yet. > But the first alternative that jumps to my mind is poetry as symbolic > action (Burke). Genres and formal registers as the signatures of > a or many discursive communities. I suppose, if this is not teaching > it as "art", then this goes back to--oh god, no==poetry as politics > and authority (or authorities). I'll stop here because i don't want > to go out there today. I'm feeling fragile. Righto! Though we don't need the self-justification of political ends to rationalize the analysis of the workings of a community. If there's no outside such communities (Burke), texts (Derrida), fields (Bourdieu), then transcendence is a sham anyway, and political as well as artistic forms of liberation need to be qualified. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 09:48:51 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: Filet O Soul In-Reply-To: I would have thought that this list would have no patience with the word "soul" if only because it occupies 50% of the ever-so-romantic Helen Vendler's new book title, *Soul Says* (which title is taken from a poem of Jorie Graham's). Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 07:23:58 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: manipulators luigi bob drake, thanks a lot for mentioning TextMangler and Deconstructor. While looking for these programs this morning, I found what should be a useful website for John Geraets, Bruce Malcolm, and anyone else interested in algorithmically distorting previously written text. The page is called & the URL is . From this page you can download most of the programs previously mentioned and many others for Macintosh, IBM, and Unix machines. There are also links to related sites, some of which generate text while you wait. For example, if there are any graduate students who haven't chosen a dissertation topic on the list, there's a link to a site that generates postmodern thesis abstracts. I downloaded a few programs, but won't have a chance to try them out for a day or two. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 10:12:39 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Schwartz Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Jul 1995 to 17 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 18 Jul 1995 00:01:25 -0400 from In reply to Shaunanne Tangney's message of July 17 (abou Cixous and the soul being in line with the body): I support this idea, but I would suggest it came about much earlier, i.e. Walt Whitman: "Was somebody asking to see the soul?/See, your own shape and countenance, persons,/substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers,/the rocks and sands." --Judy Schwartz ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 10:19:11 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Schwartz Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Jul 1995 to 17 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 18 Jul 1995 00:01:25 -0400 from On July 16 Lindz Williamson wrote: "The mind and body are needed in order to function in life, but a soul is need in death." I find this difficult to contend with, as it implies first a strangely robotic view of living beings , (although I know western tradition would support a kind of separation of the two) and second, an insistence on the Christian view of the soul, which seems to negate what I find most vital to the line of poetry descending from the Imagist/Objectivist tradition. George Oppen used the word "faith" to describe his poetics (and here I will quote him from Michael Heller's book on the Objectivists): "faith" "that the nouns do refer to something; that it's there , that it's true, the whole implication of these nouns; that appearances repres ent reality, whether or not they misrepresent it." I like this use of the word "faith," and feel that term with strongly religious connotations can shed light on secular poetry, and, in so doing, be reclaimed so to speak. I guess my point here is that I am sorry to see the word "soul" condemned to "death," when it has so much to offer to the living. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 11:01:44 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "J. H. Krick" Subject: Imagining Beckett's Notebooks Hello List, Lately I've been thinking a lot about the notebooks (journals? diaries?) of Samuel Beckett. He must certainly have kept some, and imagining what they might contain has filled a few idle moments rather roundly. Where are they? What has become of them? Is anyone at work editing them or do they languish somewhere, not to see the light of day for years hence? Does anyone know anything about this? I should mention that my interest in notebooks, diaries, and journals runs far beyond fantasizing about Beckett's possible jottings. My groovy, now, a-go-go lifestyle only allows me to read for pleasure a very little bit, certainly not with the sustained attention required to complete even a short novel read in a linear fashion in a reasonable amount of time. Thus I like things that can be dipped into almost anywhere, at any time, without the need to maintain any sort of continuity. (Like poetry). Some examples of the genre I've been through are Gide's notebooks, a little volume of Ionesco called, I believe, "Past/Present, Present/Past," a number of Antaeus devoted to the form, John Cheever's journal, and, and of course Kafka, uh....others. Can anyone recommend any of this sort of writing that I should know about? I suppose this thing could lead into a more general discussion (as these things seem to do) of whether the author should (does?) have a concious literary intent in journalizing. Can such a thing be avoided? Can someone write a journal which is REALLY not intended for another reader? Lurking here, John Krick ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 11:16:14 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X From: Alan Golding Subject: Various Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu Someone (sorry I forget who) recently mentioned a Lawrence Rainey essay on HD that apparently calls her a minor poet because she didn't write manifestoes or publicly articulate a poetics outside her poetry. I'd be interested to see this--can you please provide the full reference? If this summary is accurate, I find it mind-boggling that this argument can still get made. But then it's not so long ago that a highly regarded Dickinson scholar, David Porter, was questioning ED's "majority" ("divine majority"?) for the same reason. Gale, thanks for the wonderful, moving quotations from Oppen. Every time I re-encounter him, which I try to do as often as possible, I'm reminded what a great human being he was as well as a great poet. On another subject, does the list know about Robert Sheppard's ongoing labor of love, Pages, subtitled "resources for the linguistically innovative poetries" of the UK? Many of you will, but perhaps some won't. It's a great resource for texts of and information on current "experimental" British poetries, and the arrival of recent issues on Cris Cheek and John Wilkinson coupled with the metion of Glyn Maxwell prompted me to mention it. Each issue of Pages is about 20-25 pages, around half or so devoted to new work by the writer and the other half to a couple of short essays on his/her work and a bibliography. I've found it a great way to keep in touch with and learn more about recent interesting British work. Issues beyond those I've mentioned have included (I'm working from memory here) Hazel Smith, Ulli Freer, Gilbert Adair, Adrian Clarke. Robert plans twelve issues on 12 writers, and I'm not sure where we're up to, but they're available from Robert Sheppard, 239 Lessingham Avenue, London SW17. Single issues are 3 pounds sterling, or all 12 for 12 pounds (though I paid in dollars). Talk your libraries into getting them too! I lost a ton of mail from around 6/30 to 7/12 in a system crash, so if anyone wrote to me then, please try again. It's not that I'm ignoring you! Alan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 08:41:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Alphabetic Progress (was Re: recent future reading) >>Various chunks of Ron Silliman's Alphabet - Ron, when you wrote a week >or >>two ago about not revising much in the Alphabet, did you also mean >that you >>don't rearrange the order of sentences? >> > >Well, I regularly keep a notebook of sentences as they occur to me and >for some projects (as with the still-in-progress K section of the >Alphabet, Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect) I use them a lot. With others not >at all. Otherwise, no, I don't rearrange the order of sentences. Thanks for the clarification, Ron. I was thinking mostly of the extreme patterning of sentence-types in Garfield (if "patterning" is the right term for what looks like pretty even distribution) or the 12 twelve-line verses that read like parody/homages early on in Oz, but also some of the slighter stylistic differences between months in Jones (which otherwise reads like its in chron order like the other sentence-a-day leter/sections). > >>Progress by Barrett Watten - this month's book for the Seattle reading >>group (looking at Mike Magoolaghan's list, he seems to think he can >get by >>with just reading the (very good) new Aerial on Watten. Now _that_, >Mike, >>would be pretentious); > >Progress remains one of my two or three favorite books in the universe. >Enjoy! I hadn't gotten around to Progress when it came out, but I'm liking it a lot. & now that my teasing aside to Mike has been posted to _twice_, I'd better have some things to say about it in a couple of weeks. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 08:41:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: the one-two writing/teaching Hearing poetry read aloud is great: everyone teaching poetry should read some, get their students to read and bring in poets and/or tapes of poets. & getting students to try writing poetry is a cool idea, too. But it won't work with every student, every teacher, or at every school. And where do you draw the line on something like this? Do students have to write novels to understand the way of thinking that novelists bring to bear on their work (Do they have to write one in the style of Kathy Acker and then one in the style of William Gaddis and then one in the style of Angela Carter and then one in the style of Edmund Crispin, so they get a sense of the breadth of what passes for novels today?) Do they have to know how to paint to take art history classes? For that matter, do you have to know how to sew to wear clothes or to like the way they look? Do you have to be able to fix a car (I won't even say build one) to be able to drive? One of the problems people have in learning advanced math & science comes from being expected to recreate the thinking used in labwork or proofs, without having enough background to understand where the thinking comes from. & let's face it, poetry isn't much less arcane than math or science for most people. This is probably one of those posts for which I need the disclaimer that I'm not a poet. I'm not a teacher, either. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 11:48:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: location of the soul the location of the soul in the body by helene cixous ranks as one of the towering intellectual achievements of our time. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 12:36:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: innocence and language In message <199507180337.XAA10812@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > > was being read/lauded on the poetics list. she also has an essay in > > the jonathan boyarin collection i mentioned a few months ago, from > > UMN press, on the anthropology of reading (can't remember the main > > title, book's in office, i;m at home) > > Maria, is that _The Ethnography of reading_? yeah, that must be it.--md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 13:33:29 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll Allen Ginsberg's location of the soul within the jelly roll ranks as one of the great gastronomical achievements of our times. Yum yum. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 11:00:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Jul 1995 to 17 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <950718.101619.EDT.JSCHWA@TEMPLEVM> On Tue, 18 Jul 1995, Judy Schwartz wrote: > In reply to Shaunanne Tangney's message of July 17 (abou Cixous and the soul > being in line with the body): I support this idea, but I would suggest it > came about much earlier, i.e. Walt Whitman: "Was somebody asking to see the > soul?/See, your own shape and countenance, persons,/substances, beasts, the > trees, the running rivers,/the rocks and sands." > --Judy Schwartz > oh, yes, absolutely--lovely! old Walt! --everything is always already written-- --ShaunAnne ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:26:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Soul Train Today in the Globe and Mail, the TV reviewer in talking about a documentary on Antelope Valley CA referrd to the suburban housing developments there as "souless". What does that mean? On the CBC a couple of weeks ago I heard that 1955 lecture in which Leonard Bernstein explains jazz. At one point, he compares a song done by Bessy Smith and the same song done by an opera type. "Souless" might be a good word to describe the second version. And then there's Mr. Olson who seems to have anticipated Ms. Cixious on this point: . . . Here then wld be what is left out? Or what is physiologically even the 'hard' (solid, palpable), that one's life is informed from and by one's own literal body--as well, that is, as the whole inner mechanism, which keeps us so damn busy (like eating, sleeping, urinating, dying there, by deteriorations of sd 'functions' of sd 'organs')--that this mid-thing between, which is what gets 'buried,' like, the flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one uses, literally, to get about etc that this is 'central,' that is--in this 1/2 of the picture--what they call THE SOUL, the intermediary, the intervening thing, the interruptor, the resistor. The self. --Proprioception, 1965 Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:35:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: HD and Rainey In-Reply-To: from "Alan Golding" at Jul 18, 95 11:16:14 am Dear Alan: Yeah, the essay is in a collection called *Representing Modernist Texts*. It's an interesting essay. His main target is certain tendencies in HD scholarship which, from my point of view, can use some healthy criticism. The problem is that Rainey's miscogynism gets in the way, he's so anxious to tar feminist criticism generally. The attack on HD is by way of proving that all those girls are wrong and HD's really not all that good a poet. The point about her being an intellectual light weight because she didn't engage in polemics about poetics is part of his making of that case. There was recently a big faluffle about it over on the HD list. I'd be interested to know what you think after you read it. Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:21:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Imagining Beckett's Notebooks J Krick writes: > Hello List, > > Lately I've been thinking a lot about the notebooks > (journals? diaries?) of Samuel Beckett. > I should mention that my interest in notebooks, diaries, and > journals runs far beyond fantasizing about Beckett's > possible jottings. Can anyone recommend any of this sort of writing that I should know about? off the top, joe orton's diaries are a real kick. dorothy wordsworth's journals are the best vacation reading i've ever enjoyed. i think jenny penberthy, whose name was recently mentioned, is editing lorinne niedecker's journals. then there's always allen ginsberg's indian journals. --md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:33:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: the one-two writing/teaching herb levy writes: > Hearing poetry read aloud is great: everyone teaching poetry should read > some, get their students to read and bring in poets and/or tapes of poets. > > & getting students to try writing poetry is a cool idea, too. But it won't > work with every student, every teacher, or at every school. > > And where do you draw the line on something like this? > well, the purposes are different. i don't do it only so that students can get a sense of being "inside" a particular writer's process, though that's part of it; sometimes, for the more analytically minded, it helps to illuminate what it is they think characterizes a writer's style. then we can discuss that, whether it's so or not, etc. for example, when i have students imitate a writer who is African American, often the students use what they think is Black English in ways tht the writer never does --in third person narration, when the writer only uses it in dialogue, or for characters that, in fact, use standard english. or, for example with Lyn Hejinian's My Life, some people wrote about their childhoods without using any other aspects of her style...in imitating ginsberg, some use lots of "obscenities" and others simply repeat the word "holy" at the beginning of lists of their friends and favorite hangouts. so its a useful exercise in several different ways. sometimes simply by emulating the sentence structure of, say, emily bronte students stretch their own syntactic imaginations. and i do envy those who can sew their own clothes and fix their own cars, and do believe my life would be richer, or i'd be less intimidated by cars and clothes, if i knew even a few rudimentaries. i especially wish i knew how to brawl, physically, cuz i envy the insouciance with which people who do know how to take care of themselves in that way enter high-risk places at high-risk times of day/night.--md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 15:29:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: computer generated text WWW site There is an amazing WWW page dedicated to computer generated text complete with zillions of programs and resources. It's wild. http://www.uio.no/~mwatz/c-g.writing/ peace, kenny g ==================================================================== kgolds@panix.com http://wfmu.org/~kennyg ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 16:14:56 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll In-Reply-To: <950718133328_35322246@aol.com> Aristotle's location of the soul in the pineal gland ranks as one of the great anatomical achievements of classical times, despite his having being savaged by Allen Ginsberg almost in the same way that Steven P (in the Language Instinct) savaged Saint Benjamin Lee Whorf (or Einstein Newton to give an example from another field of human knowledge). On Tue, 18 Jul 1995, Rod Smith wrote: > Allen Ginsberg's location of the soul within the jelly roll ranks as one of > the great gastronomical achievements of our times. Yum yum. > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:47:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: who is Gaspara Stampa rachel loden writes: > > > Reading a little in this book makes me long for an antidote of > Kafka, or at least Woody Allen: "Getting through the night is > becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy > feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to > shampoo me. But why? I kept imagining I saw shadowy forms, and > at 3 a.m. the underwear I had draped over a chair resembled the > Kaiser on roller skates. When I finally did fall asleep, I > had that same hideous nightmare in which a woodchuck is trying > to claim my prize at a raffle. Despair." > > this is, i take it, woody allen? i'm tempted to say, in a paroxysm of ethnic chauvinism, "but rilke could never write anything like this!" granted, allen becomes tiresomely predictable at times, but his more subtle confreres, for example kafka, lenny bruce et al, have that pretension-deflating knack that cynthia ozick, max weinreich, benjamin harshav and others have associated with a "yiddish consciousness." somehow, i feel that i'm introducing a potentially explosive element into the list by saying this --don't flame me too badly,but i'm curious about what y'all think, folks. waiting for the other shoe to drop, md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 13:35:26 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Reginald Johanson Subject: soul I've never seen the benefit of trying to define soul, or to try and make it a less hazy or indistinct concept as some listers have been trying to do--to the end of rejecting it as a meaningful idea/word. It's a word that crops up in the presence of a sense of depth, it's a word with no referent whatsoever except for this feeling of depth. How, from a materialist perspective, is this a problem/threat? ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 14:10:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Reginald Johanson Subject: soul It seems that we could divide the listings on the issue of soul into two general areas--an irritated an impatient rejection of the word along materialistic lines, and a willingness to use the word and entertain the idea along sensual lines--that is, a willingness to use it in situations that seem to call for it. I like the irreverence of Filet-o-Soul and Soul train and baby's got soul and all of that. I guess I'm having a harder time understanding the sense of impatience that comes through in some of the postings, the desire to banish the idea altogether as an embarassing anachronism. Just because it's used in pop songs and sappy poetry doesn't make it nonsense, and just because it has been used by repressive religion to authorize repression doesn't make it any less of a present, pressing phenomenon. And it is just for this reason that we can't talk about it without some heat. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 15:44:39 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Watts Subject: Re: Recording of Spicer reading Language? In-Reply-To: <199507172238.PAA00929@fraser.sfu.ca> from "Ryan Knighton" at Jul 17, 95 03:38:09 pm Yeah, I'm still on the list. Ryan, you missed it. We (the Contemporary Literature Collection at the Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University) have a tape of Spicer reading, with Robin Blaser and Stan Persky, at the New Design Gallery in Vancouver in June, 1965. He reads "Thing Language," "Intermissions," "Transformations," "Morphemics," "Phonemics," and "Graphemics." We have another copy of a tape on which Spicer reads all the foregoing, plus "Love Poems." I don't know -- haven't listened to them in a long time -- whether they are two recordings of the same reading or recordings of two separate readings, the one at the New Design Gallery, the other at Warren Tallman's. Anyone can listen to these tapes here at SFU. If someone wants a copy for her own listening, she must apply to Spicer's literary executor, Robin Blaser, for authorization to allow a copy to be made. And we'll need a copy of that authorization on file in order to make the copy. Charges for fast copying and postage would apply. And the understanding would be that no further copies of that copy would be made. Cheers, Charles > > When I was researching Spicer for George I didn't come across one ( a > reading of Language, that is. And that was my central focus). The > Contemporary Lit. Collection here at Simon Fraser actually had one > or two readings, I think, besides the Vancouver Lectures. I think > Charles Watts is on the list still. He knows best. Charles? > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 18:03:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: adpoems found this at the glasses store while getting my glasses "stripped" of their "anti-reflective" coating --it's an ad for the KOURE eyeglass company. it's titled "The Sunshine in Me and KOURE" and i'll give only the last sentence, my favorite: "As the sun goes down in the west making the sky blushing red, I'm wishing for the another tomorrow and KOURE is always along beside me." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 21:24:19 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: innocence and language okay, does anyone have an email address for Noakes, and the name of the article on the anthropo. of reading would be nice to have too. thanks so much. burt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 01:40:52 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Bless my soul, a gnostic agnostic! From: Reginald Johanson >I like the irreverence of Filet-o-Soul and Soul train and baby's got >soul and all of that. I guess I'm having a harder time understanding >the sense of impatience that comes through in some of the postings, >the desire to banish the idea altogether as an embarassing >anachronism. I guess if any sense of impatience came through in my posts, it's because the word "soul" has so many different meanings that it leads to the risk of real misunderstanding. If I said, for example, that "my poetry comes from my soul" and someone replies, "ah, you mean the part of you that lives on after you die", then that is NOT what I meant. When soul=mind, soul=consciousness, soul= emotions, soul=body and soul=immortal spirit, communication really breaks down. I know that misreadings and ambiguities are not only (to some extent) inevitable within language, they can be desirable as well. It's just that when a word has specific implications for some people, and these implications are definitely NOT what I want to convey, then I cease to find that word useful, either in poetry or prose. For example, when Lindz talks of the mind and body being extinguishable, but not the soul, then this is not what I want to say. I like Shaunanne's formulation of the soul being the consciousness - this is closer to the mysteries of selfhood that I think a lot of people mean when speaking casually of the "soul". The word "consciousness" does not require the soul to live independently of the body (a fascinating book on consciousness, including stories by Borges and Stanislaw Lem, and essays and dialogues by Douglas R Hofsdatder and Daniel C Dennett, is _The Mind's I_, edited by Hofsdatder and Dennett), but does lead to a broad discourse on selfhood, subjectivity and what it means to be an "I". However, it's not what I'd use to describe the source of my poetry. The word "mind", while it may seem hopelessly broad and general, sums up for me the vast range of mental processes - from the neural structures that shape my aural and visual perceptions, the unconscious machinations of the dream-state, the net of language in which my ego is caught, to the conscious cognitive processes that constitute my judgement of structure, rhythm and image - that result in words being set down upon the page. Moving on, I'm intrigued by the discussion of "gnostic poets". What does everyone take the word "gnostic" to mean? My dictionary defines it as "having esoteric spiritual knowledge" - which would include theologians, channellers, druids, tohunga, pantheists and a slew of other mystical heirophants - but I assume that there is a more precise definition. To me, as an agnostic, it would mean "everything that I'm not". I remember an anecdote about Bertrand Russell being imprisoned, and his gaoller asking him "Religion?" so that he could fill out his form. When Russell replied "agnostic", the warder furrowed his brows, then looked at him thoughtfully and said "Well, I guess we all worship the same god, don't we?" On another tack, I think it was Marjorie who said that our generation's poetic/ philosophical mentors were Stein/Wittgenstein, whereas the previous generation had had Pound/Heidegger or Whitehead/Olson. So, for someone like me whose philosophical mentors include Popper and Ayer, perhaps Alan Turing, or looking back to Diderot and d'Holbach, who would occupy the poetic side of the relation? Just a few thoughts, Tom. ______________________________________________________________________________ I/am a background/process, shrunk to an icon. | Tom Beard I am/a dark place. | beard@metdp1.met.co.nz I am less/than the sum of my parts... | Auckland, New Zealand I am necessary/but not sufficient, | http://metcon.met.co.nz/ and I shall teach the stars to fall | nwfc/beard/www/hallway.html ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 19:12:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: The Recording Angel In-Reply-To: <199507180400.VAA26491@isc.SJSU.EDU> Since there appears to be some confusion on this matter, let me assure all and sundry that any tape I offer to dub for anybody is either in the public domain or has been made, by me, with the permission of the author. The other confusion is due to my own hurry in writing. The Brathwaite LP's were, indeed of _The Arrivants_, and include Rights of Passage, not Middle Passage. The later tapes I made of Brathwaite include brief passages from Middle Passage. These are not for commercial circulation or rebroadcast, but can be listened to by them's what's doing research. By the way, I've recently discovered that there is quite a bot of poetry available on tape from the Pacifica Archive here in L.A. at reasonable rates. Quite a bit as well as a bot. Much of this material is generally not known about, as it was never distributed through stores (nor made available on late night TV.) I've found one fascinating tape from a '64 poetry conference of some type held in San Francsico; the tape I've got beginbs in the middle of things, so I'm nosing around Pacifica's microfiche to see what else may have been taped that week. Apologies agin for all the flubs in my posts -- the cursor keys on this borrowed system don't do what you'd expect -- When I am in San Jose I am able to clean up the text before I send it -- but then I miss out on the sherr pleasures of "beginbs." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 19:14:24 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Benjamin and Film? In-Reply-To: <199507180400.VAA26491@isc.SJSU.EDU> A colleague here asks if anyone knows of good critical work in film studies that makes extensive use of Walter Benjamin's work. I know plenty about Benjamin, but little about film criticism. Anybody out there have any titles they can think of? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 12:43:31 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing... thanks, Rae, for the name, I haven't seen anything by Fanny Howe since I had a subscription to United Artists, so will have to check this out. Really dualist, really being lost in a fallen worlds, looking for outs for the poor soul? I think it was reading Olson that led me to read Henry Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, which has a good deal to do with a poetics that is "soul" orientated. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 23:45:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: Stampa/bedside In-Reply-To: <300c0fb7250a002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> Rilke dragging as Woody Allen: thanks Rachel Loden, for making me squint a lot at my screen and wish i'd gone to bed earlier last night!! Thanks too for the citation. Note to John Krick: the question is, how much do you like wondering if you're a reading voyeur?! Better sometimes even than journals are writers love letters. Arthur Cravan's letters to Mina Loy for instance are amazing, but only in French I think-- like Musset's for George Sand, as some blurbwriting stunt artist says. Woolf's journals are a sort of endless summer of disconnected wonderful reading. And somebody ought to agree to publish Ted Berrigan's, which are full of unexpected twists. ----Marisa ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 23:07:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jonathan Brannen Subject: Re: The Recording Angel Concerning dubs of commercial recordings: thanks to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, all blank audio media when purchased contain a tariff. These funds are intended to compensate copyright holders for loss of royalties that may result from home recordings. In other words every time you buy a blank cassette you are automatically making a royalty payment to a fund divied up between ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, organizations which exist to collect royalties for and distribute royalties to the copyright holder. Distribution is, of course, based on sales statistics. So the chances are much better that ASCAP will assume that the dubs being made are of Michael Jackson's HISTORY rather that Brathwaite's MIDDLE PASSAGE and give him the cash (give Jackson, that is) instead of, unfortunately, Brathwaite. The point is that although the recording industry doesn't want this to become common knowledge, you purchase the right to make a legal dub of commercially recorded materials every time you buy a blank tape as long as that dub isn't intended for resale. That less commercial "artists" will never see any of that money is an injustice, but it is a separate issue. Jonathan Brannen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 00:01:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian W Horihan Subject: Re: who is Gaspara Stampa In-Reply-To: <300c0fb7250a002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> Marisa--this is kinda late, but if you're still wondering here's a note from my copy of Duino Elegies: "She was born in 1523, in Padua, of a noble Milanese family, by whom, as her contemporaries would have said, she was 'exquisitely' educated. In Venice, at the age of 26, she fell desperately in love with the young Collaltino, Count of Collalto and Lord of Treviso. After a few years of mutual happiness, he went to France to fight for Henry II, forgot her, and consoled himself with other beauties. when at last he returned, a kind of duty prevented him from openly breaking with the woman he no longer loved. At first she was full of happiness; then she began to learn the truth. He finally left her and married. She consoled herself partly with other lovers and partly with religion, and died in 1554, at the age of 31. The whole story of her love for Collaltino is recorded in some 200 sonnets..." And on the subject of love letters (I mean yr suggestions, and now mine, to John Krick, and not Gaspara's): Joyce has some really weird letters to Molly around 1916 (?) when she was in Dublin, he away somewhere on the continent, in which he demands she buy pretty underclothes for herself...and something about a whip. --brian ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 01:33:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll The pineal gland! That's where it is! I can't beat that. Tho I would revise to say "TOWERING gastronomical achievements of our time." Re these discussions about soulsters, souling, circular solemnity. We don't know, really, do we? So the folks who KNOW bygod abt the soul & the folks who deny any existence of aforesaid, & are _completely_ convinced of such, _both_ deserve to be made fun of. That's not too much the way the conversation has gone here-- but a bit. Those that front it as a completely subjective experience are the only ones, I think, who are "right." Mark Wallace has an interesting essay called "On Genre as Conversion Experience" in which he points out that there are certain ways in which artistic communities can be seen to mirror the behavior of religious communities. One has a "conversion experience" to a particular form of artistic practice which one then defines oneself with/by to the exclusion of other ways of writing/painting/thinking. Which raises the interesting question of a seeming schism between a very real conversion experience, a powerful spiritual experience, which leads, often, to completely bogus behavior. Duchamp sd "God is man's stupidest idea." One could twist that to mean "it's the most obvious." As a sometime buddha wannabe I prefer to try to keep both in mind. I mean, after all, nothing exists. . . sort of. --Rod Jorge wrote: >the location of the soul in the body by helene cixous ranks as one of the >towering intellectual achievements of our time. I wrote: >Allen Ginsberg's location of the soul within the jelly roll ranks as one of >the great gastronomical achievements of our times. Yum yum. Jorge responded: >Aristotle's location of the soul in the pineal gland ranks as one of the >great anatomical achievements of classical times, despite his having being >savaged by Allen Ginsberg almost in the same way that Steven P (in the >Language Instinct) savaged Saint Benjamin Lee Whorf (or Einstein Newton >to give an example from another field of human knowledge). ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 00:44:01 +0000 Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Joseph Zitt Organization: HumanSystems Subject: Re: Imagining Beckett's Notebooks On 18 Jul 95 at 14:21, maria damon wrote: > off the top, joe orton's diaries are a real kick. dorothy wordsworth's journals > are the best vacation reading i've ever enjoyed. i think jenny penberthy, whose > name was recently mentioned, is editing lorinne niedecker's journals. then > there's always allen ginsberg's indian journals. --md There's also John Cage's "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)", sections of which appeare in various of his books from "A Year from Monday" on. There's a Wergo 10-(I think)-CD set of his reading of them. ---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------- |||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Human Systems \||| ||/ Organizer, SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \|| |/ Online Representative, Austin International Poetry Festival \| / Joe Zitt's Home Page\ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 02:46:28 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen? Several years ago when I was in Russia, Viktor Mazin, my translator there, showed me a samizdat journal of American writing in Russian translation devoted to Woody Allen, Louis Zukofsky and myself. Ron ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 02:56:04 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: The Recording Angel Aldon, Clark Coolidge had a program on KPFA (Pacifica) in the late sixties that was very NY School oriented, lots of fun to listen to (and was my first exposure to Clark as well). Is that in the archives down there? What about Jack Spicer's folk music programs (also from KPFA circa 1949-50)? I didn't start listening to KPFA until around 1958 when I got an FM radio as a christmas present, but my understanding is that Jack & Robin used to have singers and others into the studio and read and drink red wine. David Gitin also had a program on KPFA in the 60s. I remember him playing Olson, for example. Things to look for in the Archives. Have fun with your keyboards. Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 03:25:43 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: Sarton & Spender Just a note to acknowledge the passing of two poets over the weekend, May Sarton & Stephen Spender. Never met Sarton. Played basketball with Spender once, though, circa 1970. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 08:55:09 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden <74277.1477@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Franz K. Maria, Here's Kafka (for real this time) on the "ethnic chauvinism" you mention: "What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." Speaking as a Jew, I can't think of anything truer, or funnier --or more Jewish--than that. Rachel Loden ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 08:46:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: hits of Pam Poetics, Up late last night and hearing a terrifying story about inhalant-abuse by native-american children it occurred to me that a better formulation for the shrine than Wittgen(stein) might be Ashbery/Deleuze... I _must_ have a body, it's a moral necessity, a "requirement." And in the first place, I must have a body because an obscure object lives in me. But, right from this first argument, Leibniz's originality is tremendous. He is not saying that only the body explains what is obscure in the mind. To the contrary, the mind is obscure, the depths of the mind are dark, and this dark nature is what explains and requires a body. --Gilles Deleuze, _The Fold_, p. 85, UMn Press 1993 So is that why we have texts (even though we write the same poems over and over)? Or, how do we read Olson (who pretty much transliterates Whitehead and the historical society into verse) in a Wittgenstein-flooded world? Or, can you read Olson without turning off your hearing aid? Is that what the excellent Creeley-edited selected Olson is for, to move Olson across the divide? Jest curious, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 07:54:56 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll >Allen Ginsberg's location of the soul within the jelly roll ranks as one of >the great gastronomical achievements of our times. Yum yum. Well Charles Mingus, for one, had a piece called My Jelly Roll Soul, on, I think, the album titled "Oh Yeah" from the mid 1950s. &, as long as people are dropping names right & left on the issue of soul=8A Call me a pagan, but since McCullough & Weiner (among others) located the mind in the body, I've always assumed that's where the soul was too. Though I don't think they're the same thing. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 07:55:15 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: The Recording Angel >Concerning dubs of commercial recordings: thanks to the Audio Home >Recording Act of 1992, all blank audio media when purchased contain >a tariff. These funds are intended to compensate copyright holders >for loss of royalties that may result from home recordings. In other >words every time you buy a blank cassette you are automatically making >a royalty payment to a fund divied up between ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, >organizations which exist to collect royalties for and distribute >royalties to the copyright holder. Distribution is, of course, >based on sales statistics. So the chances are much better that >ASCAP will assume that the dubs being made are of Michael Jackson's >HISTORY rather that Brathwaite's MIDDLE PASSAGE and give him the >cash (give Jackson, that is) instead of, unfortunately, Brathwaite. >The point is that although the recording industry doesn't want this >to become common knowledge, you purchase the right to make a legal >dub of commercially recorded materials every time you buy a blank >tape as long as that dub isn't intended for resale. That less >commercial "artists" will never see any of that money is an injustice, >but it is a separate issue. > >Jonathan Brannen Jonathan - I brought up my concerns about ownership & copying tapes or texts for all the reasons you raise here. The real issue isn't the law. Copyright law is fucked in a big way, especially as it pertains to sound recordings. Royalty payments are collected and redistributed by monopolistic licensing companies (ASCAP & BMI in the United States) who as you correctly describe it, only understand the economics of big budget pop music. The issue is who ends up getting paid for what uses of their work and the morality of how payments are made for the "fair use" and "individual use" aspects of the copyright statutes. I think when you're talking about work with limited sales potential (like poetry or new music) following the letter of the law doesnt always feel like it's enough. - H Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 07:55:22 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: The Recording Angel >Since there appears to be some confusion on this matter, let me assure >all and sundry that any tape I offer to dub for anybody is either in the >public domain or has been made, by me, with the permission of the author. > >The other confusion is due to my own hurry in writing. The Brathwaite >LP's were, indeed of _The Arrivants_, and include Rights of Passage, not >Middle Passage. The later tapes I made of Brathwaite include brief >passages from Middle Passage. These are not for commercial circulation >or rebroadcast, but can be listened to by them's what's doing research. > >By the way, I've recently discovered that there is quite a bot of poetry >available on tape from the Pacifica Archive here in L.A. at reasonable >rates. Quite a bit as well as a bot. Much of this material is generally >not known about, as it was never distributed through stores (nor made >available on late night TV.) I've found one fascinating tape from a '64 >poetry conference of some type held in San Francsico; the tape I've got >beginbs in the middle of things, so I'm nosing around Pacifica's >microfiche to see what else may have been taped that week. Aldon - I'm not trying to be weirdly puritanical about this. (But I realize that I am being weirdly puritanical about this.) Make copies of whatever you feel comfortable about, especially of those things that Brathwaite approved. I assume that no one on this list would be trying to make big bucks by bootlegging Brathwaite recordings. (I assume that no one on this list would think they could make big bucks in this way, but that's another issue.) It's just that I've spent a lot of time working with composers who work under a slightly different royalty situation than do writers, so I may think about it differently than many people on this list. As Jonathan Brannen posted elsewhere, when you're talking about something with very little commercial potential, like spoken word or new music, how royalties get distributed for recordings often has very little to do with how many copies of something were sold. To my mind, this makes the issue of what's right more important than what's legal, but maybe I'm just funny that way. &, like I said earlier, I've xeroxed and dubbed my share of copies and I'm sure I'll continue to do so from time to time. As to the Arrivants LPs; unless the record company screwed up big time on filing the original copyright forms (to the extent that they were never legally registered), they won't legally be in the public domain until long after Brathwaite is dead. As we all know, however, these recordings are long out of print, and it's incredibly unlikely that they'll be reissued any time soon. So you be the judge. - H Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 11:42:32 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: A colleague of mine (who is also my wife) asked me to forward this request to the List for reviewers and journals who would review her novel, and for the addresses of certain lists as she describes below. thanks. -bk Comments: cc: simmons@admin.njit.edu From: ADMIN::SIMMONS 19-JUL-1995 10:40:29.21 To: KIMMELMAN CC: SIMMONS Subj: bulletin boards I would like to have help locating bulletime boards with a particular interest in contemporary American fiction, expecially multi-cultural works. I am particularly interested in work by Asian Americans as I am working on a book about Maxine Hong Kingston. I've recemt;u recently finished a book on West Indian writer Jamaica Kincaid. I am also looking for people interested in reviewing my novel, "Dreams Like Thunder," published by Story Line press, favorably reviewed in the NY Times and LA Times, and winner of the Oregon Book Aaward for Fiction in a field that included Ken Kesey. The novel is set on a little farm in Eastern Oregon over several days in 1959, and seeks to examine the myth of the frontier that continues to dominate the family's life into the 20th cenury. For rview copies write: Joseph Bednarik, Story Line Press, 27006 Gap Road, Brownsville, OR 97327-9718. My address is: simmons@admin.njit.edu Thanks for your help. Diane Simmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 09:15:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: the one-two writing/teaching Maria Damon (whose name looks odd indeed, capitalized after seeing it online all lower case for so long. I hope you don't mind, Maria) writes: >herb levy writes: >> Hearing poetry read aloud is great: everyone teaching poetry should read >> some, get their students to read and bring in poets and/or tapes of poets. >> >> & getting students to try writing poetry is a cool idea, too. But it won't >> work with every student, every teacher, or at every school. >> >> And where do you draw the line on something like this? >> >well, the purposes are different. i don't do it only so that students can get >a sense of being "inside" a particular writer's process, though that's part of >it; sometimes, for the more analytically minded, it helps to illuminate what it >is they think characterizes a writer's style. then we can discuss that, >whether >it's so or not, etc. for example, when i have students imitate a writer who is >African American, often the students use what they think is Black English in >ways tht the writer never does --in third person narration, when the >writer only >uses it in dialogue, or for characters that, in fact, use standard >english. or, >for example with Lyn Hejinian's My Life, some people wrote about their >childhoods without using any other aspects of her style...in imitating >ginsberg, >some use lots of "obscenities" and others simply repeat the word "holy" at the >beginning of lists of their friends and favorite hangouts. so its a useful >exercise in several different ways. sometimes simply by emulating the sentence >structure of, say, emily bronte students stretch their own syntactic >imaginations. You've very eloquently described some of the value of having students writing in the style of poems and poets they're studying. It's obviously a good tool & you've gotten some really good results from it. It clearly can help get at some levels of understanding (and misunderstanding) the writing that may not be verbalized any other way. My point's just that, unfortunately, there's lots of students for whom such an exercise might be more frustrating than illuminating, and, far more unfortunately, lots of teachers who wouldn't be able to draw useful lessons from "unsuccessful" imitations as you have. In the wrong situation(s), in the wrong hands perhaps, this teaching technique could be dreadful, though. Just as some poets are "better" at some kinds of poems than others, some teachers and some students are "better" at some kinds of teaching and learning (not necessarily respectively). >and i do envy those who can sew their own clothes and fix their own cars, >and do >believe my life would be richer, or i'd be less intimidated by cars and >clothes, >if i knew even a few rudimentaries. i especially wish i knew how to brawl, >physically, cuz i envy the insouciance with which people who do know how >to take >care of themselves in that way enter high-risk places at high-risk times of >day/night.--md Believe me, I share your envy. But, as you obviously understand from the teaching experiences you describe here, the issue in having students write in the style of various writers isn't so they'll end up simply envying these poet's skill. Your last sentence has given me one more reminder to look at your book, titled, I think, "at the dark end of the street," which I only know of from a friend who likes Bob Kaufman's work a lot (& who, for a jazz oral history project ended up interviewing, and pissing off, Bumps Blackwell's widow). Bests, H. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 09:59:31 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 17 Jul 1995 to 18 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507190438.VAA07723@leland.Stanford.EDU> Re: Rainey's piece on HD (for Alan Golding): you should know that the essay (now identified by someone else for Alan) was first given as an MLA talk where Rainey was almost stoned for his attack. The drawing of battle lines is too bad because surely it should be possible to criticize HD without using those particular arguments or lines of attack. As for Vendler's title SOUL SAYS, in fact that isn't taken from Jorie Graham as David Reynolds suggests but from George Herbert--can't remember the name of the poem and there may be more than one but it goes along with the typical Herbert strategy of Body vs. Soul speaking, or as in "Love" ("Love says, "You shall be he"). Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 13:11:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: The Broadcasting Angel Comments: cc: ahs@acpub.duke.edu Hey all, A colleague and friend of mine is doing work on POETRY AND RADIO as well as other forms of mechanical voice reproduction and transmission, between the twenties and the forties. I don't know anything about the subject, and I'm wondering if anybody here knows of interesting collections or recordings related to radio broadcasts of poetry in the period. She is NOT a member of the Poetics list, and would like any responses directed to her at ahs@acpub.duke.edu Thanks in advance for any response. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 12:26:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Franz K. rachel loden writes: > Maria, > > Here's Kafka (for real this time) on the "ethnic chauvinism" > you mention: > > "What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in > common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, > content that I can breathe." > > Speaking as a Jew, I can't think of anything truer, or funnier > --or more Jewish--than that. > > Rachel Loden yes, brilliant --both you and the K-man. thanks for that gem!--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 12:39:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll herb levy writes: > >Allen Ginsberg's location of the soul within the jelly roll ranks as one of > >the great gastronomical achievements of our times. Yum yum. > > Well Charles Mingus, for one, had a piece called My Jelly Roll Soul, on, I > think, the album titled "Oh Yeah" from the mid 1950s. > > &, as long as people are dropping names right & left on the issue of soul=8A > > Call me a pagan, but since McCullough & Weiner (among others) located the > mind in the body, I've always assumed that's where the soul was too. > > Though I don't think they're the same thing. > > the blues vernacular term "jelly roll" for sex/vagina and its frequent appearance w/ "soul" as rhyme word might suggest that cultures other than the christianized northern european ones have long associated the soul, not only with the body, but with its sexual functions among others. not to claim that other cultures don't have their own dualisms, but the body/soul one seems to have had such a crippling and yet culturally forceful, and sometimes even productive, effect on Northern Euro-American culture in particular.--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 13:51:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rae Armantrout Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing... Dear Tony, I recommend Fanny's latest books of poems, The End. Just read it and see if you see what I mean. Rae ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 14:54:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jonathan Brannen Subject: Re: Holy Soul Jelly Roll Guess it must be jelly 'cause jam don't shake like that! Jonathan Brannen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 16:26:41 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 17 Jul 1995 to 18 Jul 1995 Comments: cc: Marjorie Perloff In-Reply-To: On Wed, 19 Jul 1995, Marjorie Perloff wrote: > As for Vendler's title SOUL SAYS, in fact that isn't taken from Jorie > Graham as David Reynolds suggests but from George Herbert--can't remember > the name of the poem and there may be more than one but it goes along > with the typical Herbert strategy of Body vs. Soul speaking, or as in > "Love" ("Love says, "You shall be he"). sic: it was me, David Kellogg, and not David Reynolds, who said that. And also: I'm sure the Herbert connection isn't lost on Vendler, for whom it no doubt serves to reinforce her view of Graham as part of the great Stream of Poetry, but in fact Vendler writes: "Lyric, from the Psalms to 'The Waste Land,' seemed, when I was seventeen, to be the voice of the soul itself. This, I take it, is what Jorie Graham means in calling one of her poems 'Soul Says,' which I have borroed as the title for this collection of essays about lyric poetry." Vendler, *Soul Says*, p. 3 So while the title may be indirectly from Herbert -- one of Vendler's favorite poets -- it's *directly* from Graham. (The poem "Soul Says" also provides the epigraph for Vendler's collection). Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 16:31:25 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Re: Soul/body In-Reply-To: On Wed, 19 Jul 1995, Herb Levy wrote: > &, as long as people are dropping names right & left on the issue of soul= =8A >=20 > Call me a pagan, but since McCullough & Weiner (among others) located the > mind in the body, I've always assumed that's where the soul was too. >=20 > Though I don't think they're the same thing. I think they are the same thing, just in different degrees. They're both=20 life. So which is more alive, the body or the soul? Which is more the=20 poem: its physical manifestation as words on a page and sound in the air,= =20 or its abstract life in the mind of the reader? I'm glad to see discussion of the soul. But maybe that's because I never=20 lived in a college dorm. Willa J. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 16:16:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jonathan Brannen Subject: Re: The Recording Angel Herb, I agree that when tapes of poetry readings are available for purchase they should be purchased rather than dubbed. Unfortunately, most poetry readings aren't recorded, and of those that are, few are available commercially. I wouldn't distribute copies of a reading I've taped without the poets consent and I assume that others who exchange dubs of reading are also acting in good faith. I think because of the non-commercial nature of such recordings this is a a fair assumption. Poetry has to rely on informal and unofficial means of distribution because most formal and official channels are closed to it. I also think it helps a poet extend her or his audience and promotes the sales of books. I have no problem with anyone making dubs of readings I've given or photo-copying my out-of-print books for personal use. I'd be interested hearing how others view this in terms of their work. Jonathan Brannen ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 16:16:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: the one-two writing/teaching > herb levy writes > ... > a friend who likes Bob Kaufman's work a lot (& who, for a jazz oral history > project ended up interviewing, and pissing off, Bumps Blackwell's widow). > > Bests, > > H. do tell, if you're at liberty. how'd s/he piss Mrs Blackwell off? i talked to marlene blackwell once on the phone and she was quite gracious, more so than another one of BK's sisters who regarded me with suspicion.--md > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 22:08:58 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: soul review So, the 'soul' is 'constructed'? As 'identity' - 'culture' - 'language' - 'syntax' - 'metaphor' - 'materiality' - 'spirituality' - 'belief' - are at their least 'constructed'? invoke hubris resist such formulation and defy the gods (at peril) - "oh, great cynical One!" love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 22:09:04 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Sampling and Copyright Some of you might have already got notice of this new list and conference - for those who haven't, maybe see you there: >New Discussion List (a "message group," really): TECHNOCULT > >Music and Technoculture List >Moderators: Rene T.A. Lysloff and Randal Baier > >The term technoculture describes social groups and behaviors characterized >by creative strategies of technological adaptation, avoidance, subversion, >or resistance. It is formulated with the assumption that technology, >rather than being separate from or outside of culture, is saturated with >cultural meaning and, in turn, fully assimilated into the lived >experiences the humans that use it. Changing technologies thus also >implicate cultural practices involving music--including musical >creativity, production, reproduction, consumption (and reception), >aesthetics, and even scholarship. > >The purpose of TECHNOCULT is to discuss the implications of new media and >information technologies in relation to musical experience (whether live >or mediated). TECHNOCULT has been set up as an electronic forum in >anticipation of the upcoming preconference symposium, "Music and >Technoculture," at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on >October 18, 1995 (preceding the 1995 Meeting of the Society for >Ethnomusicology, also at the Biltmore Hotel, October 19-22). Some of the >questions to be addressed in the symposium will be: Can and should the >individual tones, rhythms, or timbres of a musician or a musical style, >even a whole musical culture, be protected through copyright laws? Where >does ethnomusicology stand in regard to cross-cultural plunderphonics (the >creative appropriation of musical sound), especially with the advent of >digital sampling technology? How has such technology change musical >creativity? Can even the most abstract stylistic elements of music, >simply the "sound," "feel," or "groove" of a composition or performance be >owned, or appropriated and commodified? Should digital sampling and >recontextualization be regarded as audio-piracy or musical creativity? > >Indeed, digital sampling is perhaps the most controversial form of musical >technology in recent history: it blurs the line between musical production >and schizophonic reproduction. In other words, samplers have a parasitic >relationship with the past (since all sampled sounds are, after all, past >sounds) and yet it has revolutionized musical creativity by liberating >sound entirely from its source of production and allowing it to be >completely malleable. Fields such as musicology, ethnomusicology, >communications, anthropology, performance studies, etc., have yet to >examine the broader implications of digital and other new technologies to >the study of music and culture. > >We hope that TECHNOCULT and the planned Symposium will, at the very least, >raise important questions for further examination and discussion. To join >TECHNOCULT and/or for further information on the preconference symposium, >send a message to Rene T.A. Lysloff (LYSLOFF@vms.cis.pitt.edu) or Randal >Baier (REBAIER@umich.edu). > >----[end of announcment]--- love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:54:39 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: doing the one-two writing... Dear Rae, you are assuming easy access. A lot depends on library acquisition and time-delays as well. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:16:27 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: SoUl as I understand it the soul must be that which moves that which moves --- is "language-game" no? but yes. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Soul talk is all in with God talk and love talk. When we romance one another. When we do not like one another very much at all we make up nasty little poems to one another. Infantile, yes. Ecstasy / orgasm, yummy, yes please, is anchored, lo and behold, to a kind of purchasing power: enter the sex-consumer. I ask you, where's the soul in it, I ask you ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:41:45 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: soUl "....The phenomenon is that which shows itself, that which is apparent and which in its appearance shows forth something which can reveal itself therein only by remaining concealed beneath the appearance. Something shows itself in the phenomenon and can show itself there only by remaining hidden...." Henry Corbin, trans Peter Russell "The concept of Comparative Philosophy. Golgonooza Press, 1981 The search for a location for the soul supposes that NOTHING is that can be so concealed ( / revealed ). EVERY THING must have a locus? within Extension? That sounds awfully like Descartes's problem of mind/body ( although it is not the " mind " that is the name for what has " passions ", it is the "Soul" that has "passions" in his writings. The concern I have here is that our "language environment" (remember Tom Beckett's first number of The Difficulties, the "language environment" questionnaire replied to by various writers ) has eliminated. largely, a very large thread of discourse. This results I suppose from the Mind/Body dualities and problems of 16th/17th century writing. This thread is recoverable and is possibly crucial to the fullest and widest and richest poetics so many of us on this list evidently are moved to desire. (It does not have to break into any orthodox religious trot at the touch of James Joyce's wife's whip). It may be situated within the continually pressing thought of our living within our families, of generation, of succession, of love (and anger and kindness and malice...) and I am reminded of the effort to conceive of these relations also as animating the behaviour of artists in their community, as clearly shown by Paul Barolsky in his studies of Vasari's Lives ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:46:07 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: (Fwd) map of Glos. for Loss Descartes soldier in a time of religious wars a map of Dogtown: St cod via Sophia, Fishermans / racks Field, Fishermans / in a field 2 acres on which to dry like snow fences or tables at a lawn party & ladies in boots who wear coifs to keep the sun from burning their necks The Shoreman, Sunday Sept 10 1961 7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 note: re breathing that a breath between "coifs" and "to keep" is in MID-LINE and would be a good way to read this aloud I'd propose the following: ACROSS THE BEAT the feet, the voice droning. As in rap it doesn't matter what you talk as long as you are doing "that" talking (I think it's the setting down that's the problem ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 18:47:10 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: soUl In-Reply-To: from "Tony Green" at Jul 20, 95 10:41:45 am "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself." Heraclitus has soul. He just can't find it and that's AOK. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 00:04:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: (Fwd) map of Glos. for Loss In-Reply-To: from "Tony Green" at Jul 20, 95 10:46:07 am " M A P " -- for Tony Green -- X - this isn't X - "rustic"? X - - per bk? X - - W - - --------System-------Gloucester o A - - - | T - - - | Boston o E - - | R - - | X - - - - W Engagement------Absemce-- X - - - - A X - - - - T o Buffalo o what town is X - - - E this Warsaw - ? X - - R but t h e r e i s X - ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 16:05:40 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: (Fwd) wittgen(stein) and soul Received and forwarded for Gabrielle who has had electronic problems ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 15:53:42 -1000 From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: wittgen(stein) and soul To: t.green@auckland.ac.nz Hi Tony. Would you mind forwarding this to the Poetics list for me? I'm dying to speak and have been bumped because my address has changed. So far, cannot get the listserv to resubscribe me. If it's too much trouble, just let me know. Gabrielle On Wed, 19 Jul 1995, Jordan Davis. wrote: > in a Wittgenstein-flooded world? Oh, would that this were true. People on this list not included, the world that even thinks about Witt is about as microscopic as you can get, and the continued proliferation of the dread disease, dichotomy mind, is proof that his presence is but a trickle. As a wittgen(stein)ian, won't one go about asking what in fact we can and can't say about soul to explore the boundaries of its possibility? Gabrielle ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 22:18:31 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: where it comes from ShaunAnne opened this can of worms: >I had read in Cixous recently that she locates the soul at the body. A couple of years back I was watching one of the lectures in Joseph Campbell's _Transformation of Myth Through Time_ where he was talking about the classical Vedic chakra system, which seems to make a distinction between the "gross body" and the "subtle body", which I take to be rough equivalents of what we commonly call "body" and "soul". Neophytes are always discovering the subtle body and wanting to negate the gross body, but, Campbell said, this is missing the point, which is that the subtle body is to be experienced _through_ the gross body. So maybe the idea is really old. Or maybe Campbell had been reading Cixous. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 01:20:36 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: where it comes from In-Reply-To: <199507200518.WAA22916@slip-1.slip.net> Also check out Kristeva's book, New Maladies of the Soul, for more inter- twining - Alan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 02:18:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: SoUl can we talk abt something else please. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 02:15:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: Soul/body It just hit me that this discussion on the "soul" has skirted around a far more formidable (and perhaps familiar) terms, "the self" and ITS effectiveness, which poststructuralism and langpo may have ironized (at least in their blatant codifications). But the issue has not gone aaway as a site for many "responses" of varying degrees of emotional/ intellectual/formal intensity (at least rhetorically). Perhaps because it is more perilous, it opens up the can of worms of art's relationship to life, and not in a merely abstract way, that life may be a poem and a poem only life and what then of the poet, the rimbaudian cork???? tossing tossing, or willing willing, why not both? why not neither... and such "overcomplications of subjectivity" have a tendency allegedly to get in the way of the play of surfaces and the aestehtic distancing or, on the other hand, are accused of a certain aesthetic distancing by those who want the self as a given or ground, a donnee or readu- made, as both hardcore "straight" poets and hardcore "avant-garde" poetry (assuming either really exists as more than an impulse in the poems of most of us---cf. Zukofsky's "Shakespeare argued with no one, only in itself") beg the question that is the self, or the society or institution that takes the form as the "question which is the self" since there is a party in my mind and I hope it never stops, especially if one realizes that "to be alone in a crowd" (in the crowd that's also conceivably "inside one") may be the distance in which only thought can occur, emotionalizing intellect, the dramatizations that prefer to see the self strategically as a vista from which to criticize society cold and calculatingly even as it rages in a frustration beyond--or at least between-words....chris stroffolino ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 00:07:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: Archives (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 16:06:20 -1000 From: Gabrielle Welford To: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: Archives Dear dear Shaunanne, would you pleeeez forward this to the Poetics list for me. I know you are embodied with a visit, but I am bumped temporarily off the list because my address has been changed by my listserv. I will obliged be... Love G. I think Kenneth Rexroth did a program on Mina Loy (was it on KPFA too?) that I would love to hear. And wasn't there an radio interview with her in Aspen before she died? Gabrielle ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 21:15:42 JST Reply-To: nada@twics.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: nada@TWICS.COM Subject: nyc visit I and my friend Masaya Saito will be visiting NYC from Tokyo from August 10 to 20. Any tips on good events, connections, sites, and festivities would be much appreciated. YOROSHIKU NE Nada (nada@twics.com) departure to US on July 23 Japan time. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:34:15 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden <74277.1477@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: who is Woody Allen Ron, Hilarious about the strange samizdat bedfellows. Especially if (as I assume) the project was commenced in a spirit of deep intellectual seriousness... Woody Allen is Allen Stewart Konigsberg, originally. So-- Silliman, Konigsberg and Zukofsky--a law firm, perhaps, in a Marx Bros. movie? Cyrillic subtitles of course. Uh oh, better go back to my corner and be content that I can breathe-- Rachel ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 06:31:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Davidson Subject: Re: Archives (fwd) Comments: To: st@SCS.UNR.EDU On the matter of an interview with Mina Loy in Aspen: Paul Blackburn conducted an interview with her late in her life, and it was recorded. The tape can be found at the Mandeville Dept. of Special Collections, Universityof California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093. Write to Lynda Claassen, head of Special Collections. Michael Davidson ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:40:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen rachel loden writes: > Ron, > > Hilarious about the strange samizdat bedfellows. Especially > if (as I assume) the project was commenced in a spirit of > deep intellectual seriousness... > > Woody Allen is Allen Stewart Konigsberg, originally. So-- > Silliman, Konigsberg and Zukofsky--a law firm, perhaps, in a > Marx Bros. movie? Cyrillic subtitles of course. Uh oh, better > go back to my corner and be content that I can breathe-- > > Rachel yeah, ron, great anecdote, meant to ask you, did your agent or translator or did the journal itself propose in an introduction or some such a "vision" or rationale for grouping the 3 of you together? if so, what was it? i once had students, in a class in which we were reading yeats, read woody's spoof on the yeats norton headnotes in --is it without feathers? -one student, from Cameroon, didn't understand that the piece was a joke and gave a presentation on it as if it were a serious piece of anecdotal literary biography. and most students didnt even realize it was a spoof on yeats, even though they'd read him in the norton anth. that was the object of satire. anyway, that's minnesota for you --no sense of irony and play.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:51:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: (Fwd) map of Glos. for Loss In message loss writes: > " M A P " > > -- for Tony Green -- > X - > this isn't X - > "rustic"? X - - > per bk? X - - > W - - > --------System-------Gloucester o A - - - > | T - - - > | Boston o E - - > | R - - > | X - - - > - W Engagement------Absemce-- X - - - > - A X - - - > - T o Buffalo o what town is X - - > - E this Warsaw - ? X - > - R but t h e r e i s X - __________________________________________________________ MEGACOOL! can i bring this in to my summer poetry class, loss? also, here's a proposal for community on the list (yes, the sad truth is, i'm a die-hard addict by now --i gotta getta life!!): have local gatherings (mpls, buff, sfu, etc) of list people --i'm assuming this might already be happening in places where there's more of a scene than here. and then maybe how about a yearly list festival in some central place, buffalo perhaps, or vancouver, where we all get to see what each other look like and sound like in the embodied flesh? or is that too corny?--md ps soon to follow, what i did on my summer vacation, or, my 2 wks at naropa institute. stay suspendered, folks, i didn't get down with allen ginsberg.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 07:57:04 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: (oral) history teaches what history teaches >> herb levy writes >> ... >> a friend who likes Bob Kaufman's work a lot (& who, for a jazz oral history >> project ended up interviewing, and pissing off, Bumps Blackwell's widow). >> >> Bests, >> >> H. > >do tell, if you're at liberty. how'd s/he piss Mrs Blackwell off? i talked to >marlene blackwell once on the phone and she was quite gracious, more so than >another one of BK's sisters who regarded me with suspicion.--md I don't see any harm in telling what I know of the story, but I don't have any juicy details and I doubt there really are any. A Seattle writer, Paul de Barros (another one of those Seattle writers whose creative work is published more in Canada than in the States) produced an oral history of the Jazz scene in the Seattle area through the mid-Sixties. (Jackson Street After Hours, published in 1994, by Sasquatch Press.) Blackwell was a band leader in the area from some time in the forties on. He later was a record producer and/or manager for various R&B performers. Based on his research, de Barros made him less central to the Seattle jazz scene in the completed book than his widow thought was appropriate. It was only later that he found out that Blackwell's widow was one of Bob Kaufman's sisters, but by then he knew from their previous communications that he'd be unwelcome if he tried to explore the issue with her. That's it, sorry it's so dull. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:59:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: wit and sould Gabrielle (and all): Did Wittgenstein ever use the word "soul"? Somehow I can't imagine that. Am I wrong? Burt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 08:55:12 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Organization: University of NC at Greensboro Subject: free verse foot Some time back Donald Wesling's "The Prosodies of Free Verse" was mentioned as a good treatment of the subject. Finally found it in TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE IN RETROSPECT, Harvard UP, Harvard English Studies Series : No. 2, 1971. So it's not exactly the latest thing. There is this passage: Since, however, there is no free verse foot, and since it is strictly impermissible to alter typography in a genuine confrontation of all the linguistic features of the line, we must accept Zygmunt Czerny's axiom that each line in free verse is "quantitatively independent of the previous one" and Barbara Herrnstein Smith's that the line is "not a constant unit but the acknowledgement of a limit of variability." In fact, the line is the notation of how the poem is to be read. I wonder if whoever recommended this essay, or anyone else, cares to comment on those statements, especially on the assumption, "there is no free verse foot." Tom Kirby-Smith English Department UNC-Greensboro Greensboro NC 27412 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 11:02:30 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Soul/body Cris, How about, to use contemporary language, we try to talk about the self by acknowledging the truth of (forgive the jargon:) "subject-positionality" yet by going beyond that ideo-linguistic node? Burt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 11:09:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: Madge Herron (fwd) (I'm forwarding this message through Marisa because my local listserv has changed my address--just in case anyone starts wondering whether Marisa and I are part of a new extraterrestrial entity...) Does anybody on the list know if madge herron is still writing? Just saw one of her poems in a wonderful collection--Love Poems by Women. I used to know her in London when I was doing a market stall in Camden Town--very very long ago in my youthly youth. Liked her a lot. She once told me she felt as though her face was hanging from her eyebrows. Gabrielle ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 08:19:41 PDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerry Rothenberg Subject: Re: Archives (fwd) The Mina Loy interview I know of was taped by Paul Blackburn & someone else (maybe Creeley, maybe Vas Dias) in Aspen. There's a copy in the Blackburn Collection at the Archive for New Poetry in UCSD's Central Library, and I'm pretty sure they'd be willing to dub. The collection curator is Brad Westbrook & the library (Special Collections) number is (619) 534-2533. I haven't heard it in years, but I remember it starts with a discussion of her false teeth -- a condition she had from childhood. Good hunting. Jerome Rothenberg ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:47:32 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 17 Jul 1995 to 18 Jul 1995 Marjorie: Herbert writes: You shall be he. the poem then continues: I the unkind, ungrateful - Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth lord, but I have marred them, Let my shame go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? - My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. (written from memory so I hope it's right). Now: You are suggesting that the carnal acts of sitting and eating will lead to the knowing of Christ, Love or whatever? Also: Has anyone ever written about what to my late 20th-century American mind seems to be the sexual overtones (homosexual at that) of the last lines? Burt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 16:09:22 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: The Recording Angel Mixed feelings re - copying for my own work. Basically for out-of-print books and recordings of readings I'd encourage a proliferation of pirating. Ye Olde Total Anti-Copyrighte Brigade. Would prefer drediting (it's a lovely typo but I mean crediting before anyone gets a Judge joke edgeways) but am also keen on anonymity and alias use. Guess if appropriation for wanton profit was involved I'd like to be consulted. Main bug is not so much the question of money as the question of abuse of intention through manipulation of context. Anyone read the post on Technocult - I'm curious about the implications of their idea that a 'culture' could be copyrighted? It harks back to an antique discussion but I'm of the opinion that work produced in a format for which it was not composed is tantamount to a translation. Hot example would be what happened to J.H. Prynne's wonderful separate books in the mish-mash of the Allardyce Barnett collection. An unappealling travesty of presentation. And maybe Herb this is part of the discussion re - copying too. There's some curious and subtle demaractions operating here and I thank you all for raising them. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:50:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: free verse foot tom kirby smith writes: > > > I wonder if whoever recommended this essay, or anyone else, cares to > comment on those statements, especially on the assumption, "there is > no free verse foot." i still can't accept the fact that there's no free lunch (having an academic position is the closest i've been able to come); somehow this other matter seems easier or less traumatic for me to take in.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:31:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: Re: Soul/body In-Reply-To: <01HT2RC6BB768Y6DLC@albnyvms.BITNET> Chris: can the line between art and life be thinned grammatically?? (thanks for the demo) Brian: thanks for the Gaspara Stampa post-- I'm off to find the 200 sonnets, if extant. Anyone female and Venetian who waits til 26 to hook up (in whatever century) is going to be interesting. Anyone interested in the Loy tape: Yes, it's at UCSD-- interviewers are Blackburn and Vas Dias, sound quality only so-so. I made a transcript of it-- 30+ pages-- and was talking with Carolyn Burke about possibly publishing some of it somewhere. Any ideas? If anyone wants the transcript, just send me postage (sorry to be so cheap, but right now it's the only way I can get anything to anyone short of handing it off) Juliana (sorry to go listwide): please send address: I want to answer your post, for which, thanks! --Marisa (aka Gabrielle, channel 3) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 09:26:22 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Organization: University of NC at Greensboro Subject: free verse foot Some time back Donald Wesling's "The Prosodies of Free Verse" was mentioned as a good treatment of the subject. Finally found it in TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE IN RETORSPECT, Harvard UP, Harvard English Studies Series : No. 2, 1971. So it's not exactly the latest thing. There is this passage: Since, however, there is no free verse foot, and since it is strictly impermissible to alter typography in a genuine confrontation of all the linguistic features of the line, we must accept Zygmunt Czarny's axiom that each line in free verse is "quantitatively independent of the previous one" and Barbara Herrnestein Smith's that the line is "not a constant unit but the acknowledgement of a limit of variability." In fact, the line is the notation of how the poem is to be read. I wonder if whoever recommended this essay, or anyone else, cares to comment on those statements, especially on the assumption, "there is no free verse foot." Tom Kirby-Smith English Department UNC-Greensboro Greensboro NC 27412 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 09:36:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen "Is It Without Feathers?" is the full title of the mauscript Allen Konigsberg submitted to the Yale Younger Poets series before he found his true calling writing jokes for the Tonight Show. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 11:56:26 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: SoUl In-Reply-To: <950720021858_118854437@aol.com> Been gone most of the summer, but came back to find this latest interesting discussion on the "soul." I'm wondering if "soul" is exactly what we do not have at this point. The main thing that cont. conditions make impossible. "The cry of the soul in a soulless world (sic)," doesn't mean that there is not a soul out there, in here, but that it is irrelevant. Might as well have a dodo residing in your abdomen. But if we do not have a "soul" neither do we have a "body." ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:04:05 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: Soul Train In-Reply-To: <199507181826.OAA21581@blues.epas.utoronto.ca> Cool! My hometown made news! Which Globe and Mail? AV demonstrates what happens when your city councils are dominated by real estate agents. Most of whom from LA, called in some circles the Evil Empire. Thanks, Eric. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:33:11 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Taylor Organization: PSU Cramer Hall Subject: Re: V GER/The Vision Project V GER/The Vision Project you tell me yours and I'll tell you mine Looking toward the Millennium, contemporary poetics of passage All forms, 2/b electronic, an open file report updated, organic, alive Submit to Thomas Lowe Taylor, Oysterville WA 98641-0216 or to taylort@pdx.edu Long-term project: permanent, slow, varied, graphics to be added as I learn. Put yourself out, not "same stuff, different day." WE ARE IN CONTROL ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:39:01 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Taylor Organization: PSU Cramer Hall Subject: V GER/The Vision Project V GER/The Vision Project You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine. Looking toward the Millennium, contemporary poetics of passage. All forms, electronic, open-file report updated, organic, alive. Query & submissions (snd snmail addr) to: anabasis, Thomas Lowe Taylor, oysterville WA 98641-0216 or: taylort@pdx.edu Put yourself out, not "Same Stuff, Different Day" WE ARE IN CONTROL ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 11:14:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Duras In-Reply-To: from "Herb Levy" at Jul 20, 95 09:36:32 am Does anyone know anything about Marguerite Duras? I just finished two novellas by her and an interview. What I'm curous abt is Alberto Manguel's observation that she is viewed as a "best-seller" by the French "intelligentsia". And, secondly, her relationship to Coach House Press and its ilk. Fine writer, I thought, with fine language. Thanks. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 14:10:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 17 Jul 1995 to 18 Jul 1995 In message <00993A16.AE4D165E.51@admin.njit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Marjorie: > > Herbert writes: > You shall be he. > > the poem then continues: > > I the unkind, ungrateful - > Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. > Love took my hand and smiling did reply, > Who made the eyes but I? > Truth lord, but I have marred them, > Let my shame go where it doth deserve. > And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? > - My dear, then I will serve. > You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. > So I did sit and eat. > > > (written from memory so I hope it's right). > > Now: > > You are suggesting that the carnal acts of sitting and eating will lead > to the knowing of Christ, Love or whatever? > > Also: Has anyone ever written about what to my late 20th-century American > mind seems to be the sexual overtones (homosexual at that) of the last lines? > > > Burt sexual it is, but the person to whom this stanza meant everything is the anti-sexual, fatally anorexic Simone Weil. it was her favorite piece of literature. talk about body/soul dichotomies.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:39:14 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Recording the Devil in the Details In-Reply-To: <199507200359.UAA26994@isc.SJSU.EDU> Maybe everybody just reads too quickly on this line. My post said that any tape I offer to dub for someone is either in the public domain or was made by me with the author's permission. I never said or suggested that the LPs of the Arrivants had passed into the public domain. That should leave one clear option, no? If, by the way, anyone is willing to pay big bucks, or get their University library to do so, the Library of Congress can dub you a tape of Brathwaite's quite lengthy reading there, introduced by Anthony Hecht (?!?!?@@#), which is where I first met EKB. For the jazz fans -- Pacifica Archive has a 58 minoute tape of a parking lot interview with John Coltrane, just about a year before Coltrane's death. It goes for $10.00 and is known to the Archive as A3-BC1266 -- You can order from Pacifica Radio Archive -- P.O. Box 8092 - Dept. K - Universal City, CA - 91608-0092. $3.80 shipping charge. (It goes down as you order more cassettes, so you might ask fro their current list of titles, which is not there entire list of titles). Ron, thanks for the tips. It will take me some time to find out if Pacifica has any of that, as there filing system is more than usually inconsistent. By the way, I need your PA address so I can send you _lls_ ; I was offline when you provided it before - backchan. if you don't want to broadcast it to the world. for, their, etc. correct above as needed -- Yesterday, Marjorie told me of a review of the Hoover PostMod anthology in the current New Criterion by John Haines,,,, a more than usually amusing bit of stupidity -- His question is, since Post Mod means anybody after Modernism, where"s Anne Sexton, James Wright, etc. -- but, of course, he does not ask where certain other poets born subsequent to modeernism (_and_ modernism_) might have been left off-- Following this logic, we might well ask why Edwin Markham has been so consistenly absent from anthologies of Modernism, despite his clearly having been alive during the Modernist period (actually, you'd be surprised at some of the Modernists who _did_ read Markham). But then, I expect any day now to hear a ganster rap version of Markham's "The Man with the Hoe." what goes around, etc . . . ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 14:24:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: (oral) history teaches what history teaches herb levy writes: > > I don't see any harm in telling what I know of the story, but I don't have > any juicy details and I doubt there really are any. > > A Seattle writer, Paul de Barros (another one of those Seattle writers > whose creative work is published more in Canada than in the States) > produced an oral history of the Jazz scene in the Seattle area through the > mid-Sixties. (Jackson Street After Hours, published in 1994, by Sasquatch > Press.) > > Blackwell was a band leader in the area from some time in the forties on. > He later was a record producer and/or manager for various R&B performers. > Based on his research, de Barros made him less central to the Seattle jazz > scene in the completed book than his widow thought was appropriate. > > It was only later that he found out that Blackwell's widow was one of Bob > Kaufman's sisters, but by then he knew from their previous communications > that he'd be unwelcome if he tried to explore the issue with her. > > That's it, sorry it's so dull. > > > Herb Levy > herb@eskimo.com not dull at all, to me, a kaufmaniac. thanks. i'll try to hunt down that jazz book. it's interesting to peel back the myth that kaufman somehow came out of nowhere into autodidactic literacy --his family is a very well-respected and well-connected part of the new orleans Black bourgeoisie, as his sisters' subsequent careers indicate.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 13:24:11 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Taylor Organization: PSU Cramer Hall Subject: Re: SoUl Huh? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 01:33:12 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Souled Out Soul/Body We'ave all been hyphenated far too long - there's a crunch coming. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 20:48:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian W Horihan Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: <199507201814.LAA07630@fraser.sfu.ca> probably one of the reasons she's a "best-seller" is that she's also a filmmaker, and many of her films are versions of her plays and novels, which always makes the latter sell. I'm thinking of that movie THE LOVER that she didnt direct but which was based on her book of same name. after that a new edition of the book came out w/ a gross glossy picture from the movie on its cover. (also she wrote the script to the wonderful Resnais film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR that i'm going to watch right now.)--brian ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 22:22:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: Recording the Devil in the Details Dear Aldon (etc.) Or rephrase this--- Aldon said there was a review by John Haines of the Hoover anthology-- John Haines the Alaskan "nature" poet??? Someone told me a year ago he had a poem called "Hotel Laundry Mat" published somewhere as a parody of Ashbery---does anybody know anything about this, or where i could find it---I'm curious about it--or know any other good parodies (aside from, say, John Yau and Michael Gizzi's UNDERWEAR AT REST)...this does not mean I'm a "fan" of Haines btw... cs. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 15:05:21 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: free verse foot tho the poem may be "read" in lines, reading across them, i.e. enjambment is nevertheless still a [necessary] option and breathing can plainly happen in mid-line, as in the Olson piece from Maximus I quoted for Loss Glazier going to Gloucester. I think it is more important at all times to hear a beat going against which the verses are spoken, so that the ground/constant (heart, according to Pound) can be felt, while all manner of running over and syncopation takes place, because of the irregular way that spoken language is sounded. The worst assumption would be that the stresses in the verse (where they are found to be strong weak and indeterminate as in most prosodic divisions) must be regularised and MUST correspond to "the beat". ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 21:26:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: Filet O Soul >I would have thought that this list would have no patience with the word >"soul" if only because it occupies 50% of the ever-so-romantic Helen >Vendler's new book title, *Soul Says* (which title is taken from a poem of >Jorie Graham's). No, I'm not gonna put the blame on the word. It's Helen Vendler I'd have no patience for. Except I'm not familiar with her. I'm with Reginald on this (though I can certainly understand Rod's feelings on the subject): really, if we're gonna talk about this, we're going to have to be more careful to listen to each other with an ear toward trying to understand what is meant when one person uses the word as opposed to another, because there are very fine lines and subtleties involved rather than one monolithic "meaning" that has to be accepted or rejected. Otherwise we could just have a polemics-fest based on reductive readings of each other's posts, which won't be useful to any of us. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 22:20:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: On Thu, 20 Jul 1995, Brian W Horihan wrote: > probably one of the reasons she's a "best-seller" is that she's > also a filmmaker, and many of her films are versions of her plays and > novels, which always makes the latter sell. I'm thinking of that movie > THE LOVER that she didnt direct but which was based on her book of same > name. > after that a new edition of the book came out w/ a gross glossy picture > from the movie on its cover. (also she wrote the script to the wonderful > Resnais film HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR that i'm going to watch right now.)--brian > Brian-- Do you own a copy of Hiroshima Mon Amour? I have the text/script--but NEED a copy of the film, and my local video--big surprise!--has never even heard of it! If I sent you a tape, do you have the possibility of taping it for me? Thanks! ShaunAnne st@scs.unr.edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 01:21:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: wit and sould following that-- is there a Wittgenstein concordance? -- damn I cld write some poems w/ that! Burk K wrote: >Did Wittgenstein ever use the word "soul"? Somehow I can't imagine that. >Am I wrong? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 22:43:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 19 Jul 1995 to 20 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507210401.VAA16561@leland.Stanford.EDU> The John Haines review (I didn't even know he was a poet) is truly astonishing, even for New Criterion. Ashbery is dismissed as "gibberish," Olson as "nonsense" and "posturing" and so on, down the line. And he sounds so self-confident. Maria: "Love" in Herbert's Love, clearly Christ, no? Love is the gentle and polite host, who 'forgives" the sinning guest and offers him the Eucharist--"you must sit down, said Love, and taste my meat. / So I did sit and eat." Conversion parable. If you want to see it as sexual, well sure, communion can always be interpreted that way but I think it's slightly far fetched. (it seems to me we've had this conversation...) Tom: how can there be a free-verse foot? By definition, free verse means you're not counting stresses or syllables so what is a free-verse foot? xxx Marjorie ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 17:33:28 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wystan Curnow Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland Subject: Re: the one-two writing/teaching Comments: To: herb@ESKIMO.COM Dear Herb, The subject seems to have run its course, but here's an addendum. .Yep, students should write poetic essays in their courses. That's what I say. Poetic means having one. My doubts, the problem, is with the institutional norm, the expository essay--what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again. Isn't contemporary poetics shaped by resistance to the poetics of everyday essay assignments among other language products? Aren't they, isn't it? Wystan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 01:46:42 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: (oral) history teaches what history teaches md- being a kaufmaniac you may already know or be involved but in case not I thought I'd tell you there's a selected B.K. coming soon from Coffee House I believe-- cld get more exact details if you want'em. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 22:49:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: furnished In-Reply-To: <950721012130_37441012@aol.com> from "Rod Smith" at Jul 21, 95 01:21:33 am Hey, I'm moving soon and was thinking abt my stuff and how I will arrange it and wondered if anyone in here has ever tried aleatoric furnishing. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 03:51:59 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: coffee brewing Rod Smith writes: "md- being a kaufmaniac you may already know or be involved but in case not I thought I'd tell you there's a selected B.K. coming soon from Coffee House I believe-- cld get more exact details if you want'em. --Rod" Coffee House is also publishing, next year I believe, a collected writings of Paul Metcalf, which may be two big volumes or four smaller ones, not necessarily all issued simultaneously. That & the Kaufman sound good, but overall, there's a press I can't quite figure -- but then I tend to like surprises. charles alexander chax press minnesota center for book arts phone & fax: 612-721-6063 e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 03:35:19 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Herbert & Communion Burt, I remember reading Herbert as a grad student, and there was ample discussion of ecstatic communion with Christ being presented as a sexual communion. I wouldn't even call it "sexual overtones" as you suggest. I think it's pretty obvious in the poem you quote and others. And it seems there is a fairly wide literature about religion as sexual ecstasy, and I'm certain there have been commentaries on Herbert taking this issue on. Seems to me that when the object of desire is Christ, the sexual communion is bound to have homosexual overtones. I'm sorry I'm not a student in the field and can't give you citations, but I'm sure someone on this list can. charles alexander chax press minnesota center for book arts phone & fax: 612-721-6063 e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 08:31:30 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: wit and sould In-Reply-To: <00993A18.65B2705E.25@admin.njit.edu> from "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" at Jul 20, 95 10:59:49 am > Did Wittgenstein ever use the word "soul"? Somehow I can't imagine that. > Am I wrong? > > Burt > This is not news, as others have circled the same point, but I think W's response would be to ask what the word means in the specific language games in which it is used. I think his impatience with metaphysics extended to skepticism as well, in so far as skepticism is a kind of negative metaphysics. What do you mean by "wrong"? Best, Mike ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:09:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: free verse foot In-Reply-To: from "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" at Jul 19, 95 09:26:22 am > I wonder if whoever recommended this essay, or anyone else, cares to > comment on those statements, especially on the assumption, "there is > no free verse foot." > I guess it depends on what you mean by "foot" and by "free verse". The combination of these two terms here suggests to me a response to tradtional verse forms in which the length of the line is determined by the accretion of a regular number of syllabic units and stresses. In this particular case, Wesling seems to want to leave the word there in that traditional significance, so that he can use it to make specific distinctions with irregular verse forms. I don't think there's any reason you have to, though. Prosody ain't metaphysics, though they tend to treat it like that over on the CAP-L list. If you follow W.C. Williams' thinking (and though I know some others don't treat it as actual thinking--notably the Wintersian rearguard--I do) then the "foot" gets kicked into the 20th century, where, along with all other forms of measurement, it becomes variable, in which case it can be applied meaningfully to irregular verse forms. In Williams' case he uses it as equivalent to his line. But you don't have to leave it there, either. I mean it comes to us from the Greeks who used it as a measure of duration. The English changed it into a measure of stress (first known use listed in the OED dated at 1050). Williams tried to push it toward a measure of the fundamental rhythmic units which constitute the founding sense of colloquial speech. Good luck trying to fix it somewhere. Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca "A foot is to kick with" --Charles Olson ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:15:47 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: hits of Pam In-Reply-To: <950719084645_35983385@aol.com> from "Jordan Davis." at Jul 19, 95 08:46:50 am > So is that why we have texts (even though we write the same poems over and > over)? Or, how do we read Olson (who pretty much transliterates Whitehead and > the historical society into verse) in a Wittgenstein-flooded world? Or, can > you read Olson without turning off your hearing aid? Is that what the > excellent Creeley-edited selected Olson is for, to move Olson across the > divide? Jordan: Please excuse my density (too many folds this A.M.?). I'd like to follow you here, but I'm a bit unclear what you mean by "Wittgenstein-flooded world", and also by "the divide" whcih is obviously related to it here. Can you unfold this a bit? Best, Mike mbougn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:02:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: (oral) history teaches what history teaches In-Reply-To: <950721014641_37455040@aol.com> from "Rod Smith" at Jul 21, 95 01:46:42 am Rod, here's another kaufmaniac. do keep us informed about that selected -- great news to hear it's coming. Pierre ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | He who wants to escape the world, translates it. Dept. of English | --Henri Michaux SUNY Albany | Albany NY 12222 | "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | need not tell anyone, for you know how email: | such things get around." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| --Mrs. Melville in a letter to her mother. ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:00:49 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: from "Shaunanne Tangney" at Jul 20, 95 10:20:48 pm Early Duras is excellent, especially the novels _Un barrage contre le Pacifique_, Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein_ & _Le marin de Gibraltar._ Early success was indeed due to the par_Moderato Cantabile_ & _Detruire dit-elle_. The big fame came of course with _The LOvers_, the book, which was a major bestseller, but not the movie. There is a selected Duras out in English, called _Outside_ (Beacon Press, 1986)Her fame, at least in France, is also connected with her antics as war-time friend of Francois Mitterand, & with her phenomenal bouts with alcolism. (cf. the book one of her companions, Yann Andrea, wrote on her drying out, under the title _M.D._) What I prefer of her writing -- besides the early novels -- are smaller texts, before all _The Malady of Death_ (translated by Barbara Bray, Grove Press 1986). A good entrance into that text & in to her work in general is the second part of Maurice Blanchot's _The Unavowable Community_ (Station Hill Press, 1988, translated by your humble servant). ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | He who wants to escape the world, translates it. Dept. of English | --Henri Michaux SUNY Albany | Albany NY 12222 | "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | need not tell anyone, for you know how email: | such things get around." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| --Mrs. Melville in a letter to her mother. ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:46:52 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: wit and sould - Rod In-Reply-To: <950721012130_37441012@aol.com> from "Rod Smith" at Jul 21, 95 01:21:33 am > following that-- is there a Wittgenstein concordance? -- damn I cld write > some poems w/ that! Rod, Here it is (in German): Concordance to Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen, compiled by Hans Kaal and Alastair McKinnon. Leiden : E. J. Brill, 1975. Loss ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 08:55:16 CST6CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Organization: The University of Alabama Subject: Re: anthologies Marjorie et al-- Yes, Haines is a poet. Quite popular in the 60s & 70s. A hybrid of Snyder's eco-concerns and the deep image scene (of the Bly, Merwin version). Books published by Wesleyan; also, lots of poems by Haines in George Hitchcock's _kayak_ magazine (_kayak_ also published at least one book by Haines, about the same time they also published one of Charles Simic's first books). My essay/review on anthologies--Hoover, Messerli, & Lauter's Heath anthology of American Lit--is in the current issue of _Contemporary Literature_. My piece begins with a note thanking the Poetics Group for the discussion of anthologies held last year about this time. Hank Lazer P.S. I'll be in Boston/Cambridge July 25-30. Any suggestions from those on the list of things not to miss, places to go, etc.? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:59:01 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Pangborn Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: Re: wit and sould 422. What am I believing in when I believe that men have souls? What am I believing in, when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey. --Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations I_ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:56:49 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Organization: University of NC at Greensboro Subject: free verse foot Didn't mean to post my first message twice; I had received some sort of electronic rejection message the first time I sent it, a day before, and thought it never went through. I am still hoping for more opinions on whether or not there is such a thing as a free verse foot. I myself lean towards the syncopation idea, with Pound's "The Return" as the pre-eminent example. As I state it, this view may seem Jesuitical to many on this list, but I think that it made a great deal of difference that Williams and cummings started out, as adolescents, imitating Keats; that Pound's proclamation, "no Tennysonianess," was based on a good acquaintance with what he rejected; that even Ginsberg tried to write like Allen Tate to start with; that Denise Levertov grew up immersed in English accentual-syllabics; that way on back H. D. and Amy Lowell felt even more constrained and oppressed by the poetic heritage than did T. E. Hulme and Ford Madox Ford. Maybe if I quote Mallarme it won't seem so offensive to say, "Je dirai que la reminscence du vers strict hante ces jeux a cote et leur confere un profit." [No way to do diacritical marks here.] I think Eliot got his "haunting" theory of f.v. from this statement. Just because a question has been debated for a hundred years is no reason to quit discussing it. Chronological parochialism. Time-blinkering. Intellectual life of the sea-anemone. Tom Kirby-Smith English Department UNC-Greensboro Greensboro NC 27412 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 09:58:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 19 Jul 1995 to 20 Jul 1995 marjorie perloff writes: > > Maria: "Love" in Herbert's Love, clearly Christ, no? Love is the gentle > and polite host, who 'forgives" the sinning guest and offers him the > Eucharist--"you must sit down, said Love, and taste my meat. / So I did > sit and eat." Conversion parable. If you want to see it as sexual, well > sure, communion can always be interpreted that way but I think it's > slightly far fetched. (it seems to me we've had this conversation...) > > xxx > Marjorie Marjorie: this is a fine point, but it was someone else who asked about the (homoerotic) sexual overtones of the poem. i was the one who responded by saying it was Simone Weil's favorite piece of lit. But, that said, i do think there's validity to the now-forgotten-who-it-was person's question. Yes, we have had this conversation re Stein; i think things are sexual, you think that's possible but far-fetched. that conversation led to my favorite chapter in my book, for which thanks, also thanks for lunch at MLA, I learned later (from Peter Q or Bob P or Al F) that you were my benefactress.xxx--maria ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:01:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: (oral) history teaches what history teaches In message <950721014641_37455040@aol.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > md- > being a kaufmaniac you may already know or be involved but in case not I > thought I'd tell you there's a selected B.K. coming soon from Coffee House I > believe-- cld get more exact details if you want'em. > --Rod hiya rod, yes, david henderson and i wrote essays for it. i only henderson's advertized in the catalogue tho. so i'm not sure what the scoop is. mine was a rewrite of the kaufman chapter in dark end of the street. the book is the entirety of golden sardine, which is, incredibly, out of print, a few selected from his new directions books, and a handful of previously uncollected poems. yeah, i'm gonna snatch it up when it appears.--md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:09:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Duras pierre writes: > What I prefer of her writing -- besides the early novels -- are > smaller texts, before all _The Malady of Death_ (translated by Barbara > Bray, Grove Press 1986). ... i've found this a great text to teach, esp in connection with the master/slave dialectic... wasn't it dictated, rather than written, because she was too out of it (alcoholically) to hold a pen? amazing, that it shd come out of an alcoholic "stupor"--md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:17:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Morris" Subject: Re: The Recording Angel In-Reply-To: I feel like one of those students in a class who leans forward listening all semester but doesn't say anything for so long it becomes almost physically impossible to force her voice out into the air. Here I am, though, delurking to enter the recording angel stream. It was me, way back, who offered--wrongly--to dub a tape which may still be available commercially and which therefore may still be providing the poet and the folks who taped him and made his sounds available some much deserved revenue. I apologize. I appreciate the postings by Herb Levy, Jonathan Brannen, Aldon Nielson, and others. My offer to dub the tape came not from greed or wilful criminality (she said defensively & no doubt unnecessarily) but from haste and thoughtlessness. It also came, I know, from a long history of teaching and writing about and wanting to read and listen to writers whose work has been/is out of print and unavailable through commercial channels. Whenever I can, I order in-print books for my classes--of course--but I have also (are the feds listening here? I'll confess anyway) xeroxed bits on Stein from The Language Book without writing away and paying a fee (or more accurately passing on to my students a fee) for them, passed around a frayed xerox of The Bedouin Hornbook, and copied an H.D. text published only in an out-of-sight expensive ($375) art-book format. For this reason, I'm deeply grateful to Doug Messerli for the Sun & Moon anthology which makes so many hard-to-find poems available and for Sun & Moon's intent to bring Mackey's Hornbook into print, and for all the other small presses and journals which keep this work circulating. As teacher and critic, I feel an important aspect of my role is as disseminator: to unblock access, to open things up, to scatter widely. Although xeroxing an out-of-print poem may not profit in the writer or publisher in the short term, it has long term effects crucial for all of us: it generates readers/listeners/buyers/thinkers for books, recordings, anthologies, journals, and performances, etc. My bottom line, I guess, is the more people who think about this stuff, the better. Thanks to Herb Levy and the rest of the commenters in this stream, I see I need to be more alert and careful in this dissemination, however--. I remain . . . Chastened in Iowa, Dee Morris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:20:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: anthologies hank l. writes > > My essay/review on anthologies--Hoover, Messerli, & Lauter's Heath > anthology of American Lit--is in the current issue of _Contemporary > Literature_. My piece begins with a note thanking the Poetics Group > for the discussion of anthologies held last year about this time. > > Hank Lazer > > P.S. I'll be in Boston/Cambridge July 25-30. Any suggestions from > those on the list of things not to miss, places to go, etc.? you must go to grolier's, on plympton st. in harvard square. legendary poetry book store with cool lady and dog. greet the dog as jessica pumpkin (or the less formal "jessie p") and the lady will be nice to you. also the busch-reisinger museum in harvard square and the gardner museum in boston. both very lovely, small museums (i hate big ones). my dad used to work at the peabody museum on "divinity" ave in cambridge, in the antrho dept, and they had some cool mummies on the top floor. but i think they were removed cuz they were drawing "inappropriate" interest. that museum has a collection of glass flowers made by some french brothers, which are supposed to be extraordinary, but i;ve blocked them from my memory because of the innumerable times i was dragged to see them in tow with my parents and their visitors from out of town. the cafe algiers, in the brattle street building, is a long loved place of mine, though it used to be funkier, underground, full of chess-playing pretensious wanna be writers ("joyce is the only other writer as dedicated wordplay and etymologies," one said to me once when i was about 17. other than whom, i asked. well, me, he replied), and plo supporters. now it's more ordinary, but still a point of nostalgia for me. as for anthologies, i wasn't on the list at the time of the discussion, but i'm spozed to give a talk at mla on that subject. anyone care to recap the major aspects of the discussion? or, how cn i get hold of the "transcripts" thereof?--md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:47:55 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: new meanings for old words or old meanings for new words? Reinvigorating apparently stranded terminology (of which we might well all have a lengthy list) is one of 'our' poetries' more intriguing functions. In the process poetry can sensitise agendas that have lain dormant or been wilfully ignored. I appreciate Steve's point regarding specificity and subtlety of discourse and of listening (with a wide angle) to each other's curiosity in these respects. Challenge is to navigate beyond the routine ironising of pomo without being po-faced or as Steve points out (invoking 'soul food' as the indulgence of the Romantics) - nostalgic. Interfuse the ordinary and the extraordinary - bringing spirituality into an integral engagement with the everyday? Compose the day. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 13:17:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: <300fc3120862002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 21, 95 10:09:07 am Maria writes: >i've found this a great text to teach, esp in connection with the master/slave >dialectic... wasn't it dictated, rather than written, because she was too out >of it (alcoholically) to hold a pen? amazing, that it shd come out of an >alcoholic "stupor"--md I don't remember the dictation part, or, rather don't know if that is how that specific text was composed, but indeed, she did dictate some of her writings. If you remmebr where that story comes from, I'd be interested in knowing more about it. ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | He who wants to escape the world, translates it. Dept. of English | --Henri Michaux SUNY Albany | Albany NY 12222 | "Herman has taken to writing poetry. You tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | need not tell anyone, for you know how email: | such things get around." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| --Mrs. Melville in a letter to her mother. ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 13:28:30 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: <199507211300.JAA05627@loki.albany.edu> I have never gotten over Destroy, She Said, which has continued to affect my own work, as voices become untethered, lose their moorings, become slightly dangerous - Alan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 12:26:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Morris" Subject: opportunity knock In-Reply-To: <300fc5cc1852002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> The MFA in Nonfiction Writing program at Iowa has just this morning been notified that we've been allotted three Patricia Roberts Harris fellowships for minority students to enroll in August, so I'm writing to ask if anyone knows of a writer who might be interested in applying. The MFA in Nonfiction Writing is not connected with the Writers Workshop but with the Iowa English Department. It's a relatively small program (about 12-15 entering students a year) for people who want to concentrate on writing nonfiction essays. It's a two-and-a-half year commitment ending in a thesis (a book of nonfiction essays). The people teaching in the program include Patricia Foster, Tom Simmons, Paul Diehl, Carl Klaus, and Susan Lohafer; visitors have included Patricia Hampl, Terry Tempest Williams, Gerald Early, etc. The students are generally older, some come from a publishing background, some are experienced writers, most are people who've written at night after their regular job is over and want to see what it would be to follow out a writing life. The PRH fellowships offer a 12-month stipend for $14,400 plus (I think) tuition. If you know of anyone who would be interested, have him/her contact Paul Diehl (319/335-0473 or 319/338-5754) or e-mail me at the above address or call (319/354-0492) ASAP. At such short notice, people can apply by faxing a creative nonfiction writing sample and a short letter. Since everything here shuts down by August 4th to start again August 21st, we'd have to make decisions in ten days or so. If you know of anyone who might qualify--i.e. is a passionate and committed writer interested in nonfiction essays and a person of color--let them know as soon as possible.. Thanks, Dee-- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 11:04:23 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: Duras In-Reply-To: <199507211300.JAA05627@loki.albany.edu> from "Pierre Joris" at Jul 21, 95 09:00:49 am Thanks everyone for the info. I'm trying to track down the films, now. If anyone is interested, the text I found is called Two By Duras, pblshed by Coach House ( i think I puth this on one of my bedside lists, but just got to it). Cheers. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 11:45:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Grolier Books & the Perils of Essentialism I want to second Maria Damon's suggestion about Grolier's in Cambridge and make an additional suggestion that you always ask for anything you can't find there. Everything isn't in one alphabetical order in the general shelves. There are a number of special interest areas (for example some, but not all, geographic areas, ethnic groups, styles, and languages have their own shelves) which aren't always easily marked, but where you can often find books that don't seem to be there. I was there soon after Robin Blaser's Holy Forest was published and it wasn't in the general section, it wasn't in the Gay section, but there were several copies in the Canadian section. I don't remember if all of Edmond Jabes books were in the French section or the Jewish section, but he was only in one or the other. What gets stocked in the Language poetry section seems often to be determined more by a book's publisher than anything else. This can be frustrating, but once you know to ask the number of books available at Grolier's nearly doubles. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 15:20:11 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X From: Alan Golding Subject: Various and sundry Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu Marisa: You probably know about the Loy book that Keith Tuma and Maeera Shreiber are editing (do you have an essay in it?). Maybe that would be a possibility for your Loy transcript? Or Sagetrieb? Haines on Hoover: Well, again, as with the Rainey/HD shenanigans, and D. Porter on ED, the mind boggles . . . mine seems to be boggling a lot lately, and doing little else. But more seriously: I've written a little on the Weinberger and Hoover anthologies in From Outlaw to Classic, but am in the process of doing more, on them, on Doug Messerli's anthology, and on Dennis Barone and Peter GAnick's. I'd be interested in reviews of any and all of these that any of you might come across. (I know Hank Lazer's piece in Con. Lit., something from TLS, a Thom Gunn review in Threepenny Review.) On tapes: the taping thread prompted me to mention something you might find of use/interest. At the Twentieth-Century Lit. Conference here, we videotape the keynote readings, talks, and performances, and copies are available for non-commercial use (the authors have signed a release) at around 10 or 15 bucks. So there's some spectacular performances from recent years from Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, David Antin, Clayton Eshleman, Ed Dorn, just to mention a few likely to be of particular interest to this list. Also Sherley Anne Williams, Michael Burkard, Louise Gluck, Enid Dame, Alicia Ostriker, Eleanor Wilner (nearly put Elinor Wylie!), Jonathan Holden, W. S. Merwin. The tapes of Charles, Susan, and David are particular faves of mine. Have a good weekend, y'all. Alan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 12:44:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Open Mike Titles In-Reply-To: <199507211717.NAA05928@loki.albany.edu> from "Pierre Joris" at Jul 21, 95 01:17:40 pm More Likely Open MiKe Titles (add to Regs and stir): The Bastard Peeped How I Get Off in Detail Howl II Crossing the Perplexing Void Thing Let Me Tell You Something About Yourself Youre Too Stupid To Know Heaven Pissed Me Off Howl III I Cant Hear Myself Think Sometimes Litter Dispatch Carry Me Back To Ol Virginie Feeling Pigeon Parked Ode to Howl II If I Were Terminally Ill Keep Off Grass, It Said Perfect I Love My Bike So Much Nipple Nipple Nipple Gauche Sins What Is This In Hell Stillborn and Other Edibles I Need A Lift To Miami, Man Bummerdrag You Know What Its Like When Its Like That Fuck You, Aunt Helen Once Upon a Trailer Park Calm Do Tell, Suzy Q Make Me Squeal With Your Vibe Bunyons Blue Ox Fell The Fat Ladys Singin I Wrote This All By My Lonesome Roadkill Grill Punt Me and Sister Anna on the TransCanada Got a Chevy Full of Neuroses ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:34:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: the politics of dub For the sake of a bit more than argument I'd like to take an anarchist stance on this issue. I don't think our lurker friend should feel guilty for offering to copy that tape. The technology exists, she has the tape, she cld get it to M.D. as easy or perhaps easier than he cld order it. It is also quite possible that hearing this tape wld cause listener(s) to buy books they might not otherwise have bought. The Grateful Dead encourages bootlegging of their music-- it ain't hurt them. They've been consistently one of the top grossing bands since the late '80s. Bob Dylan hates bootlegging-- but I think he has benefited from it as he doesn't release his best work (or rarely)-- people can find out just how good he is from bootlegs & maybe buy more albums &/or go to concerts as a result. (He's worth seeing agn by the way, just plain didn't care for a while there). This seems to me true of less commercial work as well. I know people have bought books by poets that I've taped for them they would not otherwise have bought. The propaganda goes that one is taking money out an artist's pocket when one makes a copy. I don't think that's the way artists end up making money. They do it largely via garnering reputation which eventually receives monetary reward (usually institutional). You're not likely to garner anything if people can't encounter yr work. There are trickier questions here too which Cris C articulated well. But to take it even further-- Why is a performance of music not as much the "property" of the people in the room as of the musicians. It is a collective consensual experience after all, & should be recognized as such. To get more to the heart of it I think is that there seems some idea that there will be justice if the rules are followed. Ain't with that. The rules are written by a ruling elite in their interest, they will be the ones to profit when the rules are followed. Personally, that curbs my enthusiasm for following the rules. Kathy Acker's mess over 4 pages of Harold Robbins' which was substantially altered is an example of this. (She has an excellent piece in the first _Postmodern Culture_ (available via e-mail pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu. it's indexed as ACKER.99) abt this that actually also bears very interestingly on the soul thing (what abt "spirit" anyway, let's be bald abt it, o no, maybe I've started it up agn)). I'm NOT making a case for Pirating, I hope that's obvious.I'm not sure it is tho, maybe I'm arguing for A COMMUNITY OF PIRATES THAT HAVE BRAINS. However _selling_ other artists materials w/out their consent is not what I'm referring to. Making it available to others where it otherwise wld not be (at no profit to the provider) is what I'm talking abt. So I don't see, in the end, any valid moral or economic arguments against using my tape dubbing system as I please. Or, for that matter my desktop xerox (which I just got, FREE. Ha!) I am after all lucky enough, i.e. priveleged enough to have access to a lot of cultural materials, which NEED to be shared, I think. If for any reason anyone has a tape of my work they want to copy or wants to xerox something, go for it. (Actually there are a few readings I've done I know were taped that I never got copies). But the work, IT'S NOT MINE ANYWAY, & I'm not sure it ever was. Cage: "ART IS CRIMINAL ACTION." I wonder sometimes if you can tell it's art by how many people need to dismiss or attack it. {That's not asking to be attacked, just a little old opinion from a silly wittle poet in the age of mechaniacal (not sic) repatriation. . . --Rod PS- Clint Burnham's _The Jamesonian Unconscious_ is out from Duke. References a number of language poets & punk bands in a rather concomitant monad-analogical heist picture of misdiagnosis, i.e. it's precisely the tool to confuse personal ethics for class struggle in a different register and for quite different narrative ends. Check it out. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:59:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: fishmonger Mike I have to catch a train in an hour so I'll rush this and mess it up. It may be that my brain was steeped in Deleuze. However. It does seem to me that there are these reverences that go beyond criticism--let's call them loves. Wittgenstein, in my neighborhood, seems to be one of those. And the ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 19:19:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Various and sundry A.G.-- Please post a number &/or address for these tapes of CB, SH, etcetal. Thanks. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 20:45:55 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: prosody and conversion Marjorie, I was the one who suggested the sexual - Herbert connection. But of course the conversion thing--yet, how does sitting fit into that concept? I of course can imagine eating (eucharist). On the subject of free or enslaved verse and feet: I just in the mail today got a copy of : RETHINKING METER: A NEW APPROACH TO THE VERSE LINE by Alan Holder, Bucknell UP. I won't go through the entire jacket copy, but here are some snatches of it: "the committment to the foot as a measure satisfies ad desire for a poem to display a system" "But that system is achieved only at the cost of [etc.]" Holder "discards the approach" whereby on the one hand there is the ideal line and on the other the actual line and the reader apprehends a tension" [that was a paraphrase] i.e., Holder's approach avoids a dualism. also the book criticizes previous theoretical approaches including those purporting to be non-dualistic. Holder finally discards the notion of meter altogether and thus approaches the line not through the foot but the phrase. Yet H. still feels that the "line" is what marks poetry from prose. He draws on linguistics among other disciplines to make his argument. I would imagine Holder is looking for reviewers. He can be reached for whatever reason at the Dept of English, Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park ave., NYC 10021, USA. BK ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 20:51:05 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Herbert & Communion Charles, I can see the sex-religious thing in the Middle aGes before Luther than in Herbert's time (I'm thinking now of Boswell's book on same-sex early and mid Middle Ages religious ceremonies--though I will have to say that the book is controversial, but Boswell had a good rep. over all; I' haven't read it but heard him on the radio one day, very convincing.) anyway, thanks. maybe you (we) are right. burt ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 20:55:52 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: anthologies Hank, Marjorie,et al., Haines is in the Story Line Press stable, whence springs neo-formalism etc., sired out of Hudson Review, Bruce (mr. obtuse) Bawer of New Criterion infamy. Well, I shouldn't say sired, since Haines is no young man. got carried away with the equinious possibilities. BK ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 23:03:09 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Blair Seagram Subject: KennyG's Home Page/Visual Poetry Comments: cc: wr-eye-tings@sfu.ca To those of you interested in visual poetry: I have been sending gif files to Kenny Goldsmith and he has been putting them up on his home page. At the moment I am the only person he has listed under visual poetry. I need some company! And I know Kenny wants a bigger selection, or should I say, he wants a selection. Sooooo, I am encouraging people to send him their work. You may want to check out the page first. The address is: http://wfmu.org/~kennyg/ If you don't have a graphics browser, like Netscape, you can get his page but you won't get the visual files. I am on a Mac and I'm not sure who else is. My procedure is to bring my work into photoshop and make the necessary adjustments for the home page there, then save the piece as a gif. After that I send it to Kenny as an attachment. Photoshop is the only program I know of that will save a file as a gif, which I think is better than jpeg. I have written quite a few things in Quark Xpress. Unfortunately one cannot bring a Quark eps into Photoshop with any degree of success. Contrary to what one would think, eps is not a universal format. This means anything I want to put on the web that I have written in Quark will need to be recreated in another program. For me, that would be Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator eps's are compatible with Photoshop and come in with no problem. You can work on an Illustrator file in Photoshop should you so desire. Failing that, a person can scan in a visual poem and save it as a gif in photoshop. However the file will no doubt be larger than a file created directly on the computer. Once in Photoshop 1. Save your document. 2. Under Image choose Image Size and set the Resolution to 72 pixels/inch.(OK) 3. Under Mode choose Indexed Color and set the Resolution to 8 bits, the Palette to Adaptive Color and the Dither to Diffusion.(OK) 4. Save as CompuServe Gif. 5. Send as an attachment to Kenny. Backchannel me (blairsea@panix.com)if you have any questions or problems. Backchannel Kenny (kgolds@panix.com) if you want to know more about the home page etc. I might mention here that poems configured on the unix bulletin boards directly, will hold there formatting if I print them out directly from the list, but lose their formatting when I save them to my hard drive and try to print them out in teachtext or MS Word. This happened today when I tried to print out a post of Karl Young's with a poem made by configurations of the word love, with an emphasis on evol. I believe it is by bpNichol whose work I know only through these lists. Luckily I still had the poem on my mail list and was able to print it correctly. Sweet dreams Blair ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 23:30:29 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Blair Seagram Subject: continued home page Comments: cc: wr-eye-tings@sfu.ca PS - I forgot to say that if you are scanning in images, scan them in at a higher resolution that 72 dpi. If possible try 300 dpi or if not 200 dpi, then after you have saved your doc in Photoshop, reduce the resolution in image size to 72 pixels. Keep the size at 100%. This will improve the quality of your image. Goodnight. Blair ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 21:34:43 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: juvenilia >Anyone else care to flaunt their juvenilia? > >Nada Hoo boy. I'm still not sure if I'm *out* of my juvenilia yet. These are great poems, though. Thanks for sharing. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 21:34:45 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: free verse foot > Since, however, there is no free verse foot, and since it > is strictly impermissible to alter typography in a genuine > confrontation of all the linguistic features of the line, > we must accept Zygmunt Czerny's axiom that each line in > free verse is "quantitatively independent of the previous > one" and Barbara Herrnstein Smith's that the line is "not > a constant unit but the acknowledgement of a limit of > variability." In fact, the line is the notation of how the > poem is to be read. > > >I wonder if whoever recommended this essay, or anyone else, cares to >comment on those statements, especially on the assumption, "there is >no free verse foot." I think there is no *single* "free verse foot", though each poem or section or line of free verse poetry has obviously some patternable collection of beats (anyone read Jim Rosenberg's recent post of his "Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space"?), that it sets up, ad-hoc, as it were. I'm not sure why it's impermissable to alter typography (whose permission does one have to obtain?), though, or how this would constitute a genuine confrontation of all the linguistic features of the line, so the two axioms have to be withheld until someone can explain it to me. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 23:54:30 +0000 Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Joseph Zitt Organization: HumanSystems Subject: Re: KennyG's Home Page/Visual Poetry Comments: To: Blair Seagram On 21 Jul 95 at 23:03, Blair Seagram wrote: > To those of you interested in visual poetry: > > I have been sending gif files to Kenny Goldsmith and he has been putting > them up on his home page. At the moment I am the only person he has listed > under visual poetry. I need some company! And I know Kenny wants a bigger > selection, or should I say, he wants a selection. Sooooo, I am encouraging > people to send him their work. > You may want to check out the page first. The address is: > http://wfmu.org/~kennyg/ Great! I've taken a look and like what I see. I'm about to start putting a new work on the Web as a series of GIFs (since page design is important to it, and GIFs are a whole lot more accessible and compact than Postscript or just about anything else), and will contact him about linking to it. > I am on a Mac and I'm not sure who else is. My procedure is to bring my > work into photoshop and make the necessary adjustments for the home page > there, then save the piece as a gif. After that I send it to Kenny as an > attachment. For what it's worth: I'm developing mine in Word for Windows. Once a page is done, I use a screen capture program, SuperClip (available from the SimTel mirror archives) to grab the window. I then trim it to a consistent 375x490 pixels in SuperClip, save it as a GIF, then go into LView and convert the GIF to B&W. The resulting GIFs are running about 8 or 9 K. (The stuff should be at http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt/tsiuf/ by Monday or so.) ---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------- |||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Human Systems \||| ||/ Organizer, SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \|| |/ Online Representative, Austin International Poetry Festival \| / Joe Zitt's Home Page\ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 00:22:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: prosody and conversion burt k writes > Marjorie, > > > snatches of: committment to the foot as measure satisfies ad desire for a poem to dis/ pla(y)ce a "system" adpoems, foot fetishism, snatching desire out of displaced systems of dis/play...someone witty could base a whole standup routine on this issue --anyone wanna go for it?--md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:08:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Sheila E. Murphy" Subject: Re: aleatoric furnishing Ryan, You remind me of one of my favorite arrangements: the empty apartment up in Escanaba (effectively a pre-life now, it seems) before the furniture arrived. Not what you are getting at, I know. But is was my favorite or among my favorite arrangements. Felt abundant, as do many such reversals. But as for aleatory, I might propose creating a nice tone row of your liking, then assigning notes of the scale (chromatic, of course) to various objects and then placing them in a row. of course, there's always the old favorite of drawing numbers from a hat (or crayons - but not on a warm day and not in Phoenix) and determining a nice little chancy order in which things can be allowed to land and be awhile. I've just gotten off a plane from LAX, which I'll blame for this odd little missive. Best of luck with your move! SEM ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:13:53 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen Rachel wrote... >Woody Allen is Allen Stewart Konigsberg, originally. And it was my grandfather who acquired the name Silliman when he was adopted. Otherwise I would be Ron McMahon, so McMahon, Konigsberg and Zukofsky--a law firm, indeed. I've always had the light alienation from my name (having had virtually no relationship to my father or his family) that I took Edward Howard Symmes to have had once his adoptive parents rechristened him Robert Duncan. How is it Zukofsky seems to have "kept" his name across history? Or did he? Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:34:52 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen Maria, to your question: did your agent or translator or did the journal itself propose in an introduction or some such a "vision" or rationale for grouping the 3 of you together? I have no idea. It was the first time in my life where I was in a grouping in which I was the "tall" one. (Not, however, the first time I was the "the goy") Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:47:04 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: Soul/body Gabrielle, "If anyone wants the transcript (Loy/Vas Dias), just send me postage..." So where do we send this postage? Do get back up on email. It's very confusing to see you channeled hither and yon. All best, Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:50:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Bryher Does anyone know of a good collection of the writings of Bryher, HD's companion? Ron Silliman rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:57:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Address Aldon, The address is: 116 Biddle Road Paoli, PA 19301 Everyone is encouraged to send me their latest mags and/or books. Out here, Borders looks like Cody's (while everything else looks like Borders). The major confusion I see in the bookstores is whether Khalil Gibran is poetry or philosophy.... Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 04:19:44 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: A foot to kick John Haines with Marjorie, I liked Haines' Wesleyan books in the 60s mildly. His neocon side (like that of Roger Shattuck, who had one very interesting book of neosurreal poems during that decade also) had not yet emerged. The New Criterion is quite amazing, particularly given Hilton's stance that the function of modernism was to establish standards and that this is the proper role of the critic. >Tom: how can there be a free-verse foot? By definition, free verse means >you're not counting stresses or syllables so what is a free-verse foot? Are there not "feet" in all prosody? Free verse means not being artificially bound by a set pattern thereof. Again, to recall McClure sending his students off to the zoo to "scan the lions"... Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 04:24:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: furnished > Bruce Andrews used to have his book collection organized by the color of the jacket design, a rainbow effect (that meant he had to remember what a given book looked like and hope that sun fading didn't alter the order). Don't know if he still does.... Ron rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 09:40:00 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: Re: furnished re: Ron's "Bruce Andrews used to have his book collection organized by the color of the jacket design..." Last I heard, the books were color-coded still. But will we really know? bruce is now the only poet I know who doesn't have or use a computer (and I am trying to remember if I've ever had a typed note from him...). Why does this seem at once so unlikely and so appropriate? Tom Mandel ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 09:19:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen ron silliman writes: .. it was my grandfather who acquired the name Silliman when he was > adopted. Otherwise I would be Ron McMahon, so McMahon, Konigsberg and > Zukofsky--a law firm, indeed. --reminds me of this Jewish joke where an Irish guy goes into a store named Houlihan and Rosenbloom, and is greeted by a little old man in yarmulke, beard, etc. The customer says, "Isn't it a wonderful surprise to see our two people getting along so well and working together." The little old guy beams and nods and says, "I've got an even bigger surprise for you. I'm Houlihan." > > I've always had the light alienation from my name (having had virtually > no relationship to my father or his family) that I took Edward Howard > Symmes to have had once his adoptive parents rechristened him Robert > Duncan. -I thought it was the other way around, his adoptive parents were named Symmes and he was Robert Symmes until he came of age and did his research, then he switched back to Duncan?--(faas biog?) > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 09:33:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Duras pierre writes of m duras's maladie de la mort: > > I don't remember the dictation part, or, rather don't know if that is > how that specific text was composed, but indeed, she did dictate some > of her writings. If you remmebr where that story comes from, I'd be > interested in knowing more about it. > I remember hearing this from a student who did a presentation on it in class. she had the information from an article on duras, or from, as i recall, reviews of the book, which was apparently not well received. the general sense this student conveyed was that duras, otherwise tremendously respected, was seen to be "falling down on the job" in this instance --not by the fact of dictation, but by the book "itself." sorry this is such an impressionistic unscholarly response, pierre. y-day i was cleaning out my office and came across a small note in someone else's handwriting, about a "journal of durassian studies." maybe those were the student's notes and that was her source. hope all's well chez toi (et vous) in albany!--md ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 09:37:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: my other obsession does anyone know of any jewish cultural studies lists on the e, and how to subscribe? i'm anxious to spend 100% of my time, rather than simply the current 90% of my time, in front of my monitor while the short minnesota summer cavorts carnivalesquely around me.--md ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 10:44:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "A. Morris" Subject: Re: Bryher Comments: To: Ron Silliman In-Reply-To: <199507221050.DAA23143@ix5.ix.netcom.com> On Sat, 22 Jul 1995, Ron Silliman wrote: > Does anyone know of a good collection of the writings of Bryher, HD's > companion? > > Ron Silliman > rsillima@ix.netcom.com > Ron: There is no collected writings and I'm not sure what's still in print but a good university library--or even public library--should have two of her more interesting pieces: The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940-46 (about living through WWII in London) and The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (about her life as a writer and dedicated to "my master, Stephane Mallarme"). Unlike Mallarme, as you no doubt know, she mostly wrote historical novels: Ruan, Gate to the Sea, Roman Wall, The Player's Boy, The Fourteenth of October. She also founded, edited, and wrote for Close Up, one of the first journals of avant-garde cinema & theory, which can be located in university libraries in microfilm. Her poetry is here and there in little journals of the twenties and thirties but never gathered, at least that I know of. She also wrote a pretty interesting early developmental novel called "Two Selves," part of which is a fierce attack on education in England. Dee ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 13:13:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: furnished In-Reply-To: <199507221340.JAA22008@yorick.umd.edu> from "Tom Mandel" at Jul 22, 95 09:40:00 am Sheila, Tom, Ron, etc... Colour seems to be the favoured system. Unfortunately, being mostly blind, my stuff is drab in this respect. I like S. Murphy's jet=lagged idea to draw numbers or use cards, but I don't have any. My most recent notion is to arrange my furniture and kitchen as I do my books: alphabetically. This is very arbitrary and Nicholesque. Moreover, when bumping about in the dark, or in a stupor, or for fun, I can navigate by touch translated to letter. Ah, my couch==my coffe table must be behind me. Or, did I call it a chesterfield when I was setting up shop? I think I will now backtrack to bed. Goodnight all. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 13:44:31 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: furnished Tom, bruce is now the only poet I know who doesn't have or use >a computer (and I am trying to remember if I've ever had a typed >note from him...). Why does this seem at once so unlikely and so >appropriate? Let's see: Leslie Scalapino I believe still types (tho she lurks here through Tom's university account I do believe); ditto Eigner, Weiner, Grenier (when he isn't scribbling). I was at one of the evenings that Kevin Magee and Myung Mi Kim have been putting on in El Cerrito and a discussion of the internet rose briefly, to be met by several of the 25 or so poets by the "oh, that's for those with computers" class line. Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 13:16:49 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: Exercise(s) Herb Levy: > there are very few > poems that serve the same kind of function as musical "etudes" do. "Variations Done for Gerald Van de Wiele", by Charles Olson. Yes?? If someone asked me what was my "favorite poem", I would have to say that this poem blew my mind at a fairly young age as the most amazing poem in the English language, and I haven't changed my opinion since. -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 13:23:34 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: manipulators John Geraets: > On behalf of a fellow Nagoyan, Bruce Malcolm, I'd > like to ask does anyone know of text manipulation > software, randomizers, whatever, that may be commercially > available (or not, as the case may be). I haven't used chance to produce "final outcomes" in my work for a very long time, but I use chance as an indispensable "precompositional" aid, permuting reservoirs of words as part of a process of making "prompt sheets" that I write from to produce the final outcome. The program that I use to do this is a simple portable C program; it assumes as units whatever text is between blank lines, and pseudo-randomly permutes these. If anyone has any use for it, send me E-mail and I'll send it to you. -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 17:33:41 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Marjorie Perloff: > Tom: how can there be a free-verse foot? By definition, free verse means > you're not counting stresses or syllables so what is a free-verse foot? Sigh. Beeeg sigh. [Risk of sounding petulant sigh ...] Umm, Marjorie (and all the other folks wondering this) please *read* section I.3 of the article I posted here not so many days ago called "Notes Toward a Non-linear Prosody of Space." It contains a very detailed and specific proposal for how a concept of free-verse foot can be constructed. I do prefer a new term (I use 'measure') over foot, precisely because foot does have so much baggage. If you believe that the concept presented there is not viable, I would be *delighted* to hear the argument. The ideas in the first part of that article are well over 20 years old. I remember giving a workshop on this at Mark Linnenathal's (sp?) class at the Poetry Center in S.F. A couple of days later I spoke to one of the students who was there. He said that as I was talking, he was saying to himself "well that all sounds nice but surely he can't be talking about poets like, say, *Creeley*." Then we *scanned* Creeley. He said it blew his mind. A couple of the names of students I remember from that class were Keith Shein and Ted Pearson. (I think Beverly Dahlen was there too, but am not sure.) -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 08:14:34 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Sheila E. Murphy" Subject: Re: Exercise(s) Jim Rosenberg writes: >"Variations Done for Gerald Van de Wiele", by Charles Olson. Yes?? > >If someone asked me what was my "favorite poem", I would have to say that this >poem blew my mind at a fairly young age as the most amazing poem in the >English language, and I haven't changed my opinion since. Jim, I don't have the "Variations" poem by Olson. Where does that appear? Thanks. Sheila Murphy ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 19:15:06 -0400 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: Exercise(s) "Variations done for Gerald Van De Wiele" appears in _The Distances_ (Evergreen), & in _Archaeologist of Morning_ (Grossman); praps others , but those were on the desk... luigi ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 18:40:52 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: the politics of dub I have to agree with Rod here, as a receiver of cultural materials who doesn't want to be reduced to his roles as producer and consumer. With both music and literature, I certainly give whatever economic support I can to those who are doing work I'm interested in, but I'm myself below the poverty line, so I have to improvise. That means having stuff taped and Xeroxed for me. If it really blows my mind, I do go out and buy it "for real", so the artist who feels her work has been appropriated by these activities might look at them as a kind of "loss leader". I have a certain set amount of money I can spend, whether I can "bootleg" or not. Not being able to bootleg only means I'll be less aware of what's out there when I'm able to spend the money, and therefore less likely to take a chance on someone whose work I'm not familiar with. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 13:46:17 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Sheila E. Murphy" Subject: Re: Olson Poem Jim, I just came upon the "Variations..." poem by Olson in the Collected...Thanks for mentioning this wonderful piece, which I'm enjoying. (I'll use any excuse to read Olson, any time). Best, Sheila ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 21:27:35 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot In-Reply-To: from "Jim Rosenberg" at Jul 22, 95 05:33:41 pm I cant believe, all these years later, that some readers (listeners?) still think there can be poetic feet only in regular verse. (As if feet cannot dance the way WCW describes his dancing in Book V) That is like the English people who still think that rhyme means end-rhyme. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 21:49:17 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: aleatoric furnishing In-Reply-To: <199507212308.QAA00968@bob.indirect.com> from "Sheila E. Murphy" at Jul 21, 95 04:08:59 pm Ryan, I think you should arrange yr furniture by size. If you have rtooms, put all the big things in one room till it is full, and thern middle sized things in the next one, etc. If you have enough rooms the last one will just have the salt shaker in it, and that is something you could sit and look at, count the holes, make yr guests guess the number. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 21:53:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: anthologies In-Reply-To: <300fc5cc1852002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 21, 95 10:20:47 am How could anyone recommend places to see in Boston without mentioning Fenway Park? A guy in yr Congress a few years ago tried to have it preserved as a National Park, a good idea that got shot down. If George Stanley & I were going to Boston we wd go to Fenway Park. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 06:41:02 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden <74277.1477@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: who is Robert Duncan Ron and Maria, My understanding, too, is that Duncan was born Edward Howard Duncan, and adopted as Robert Edward Symmes. Hilde Burton (his longtime friend) would know, and I could ask--but it's in the bio, yes? Rachel ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 06:57:30 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden <74277.1477@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: rebbe-l Maria, I just got a list of Jewish lists by sending the message "lists global Jew" (w/out quotes) to listserv@listserv.net If you have any trouble I can forward it to you-- Rachel ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 10:01:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: rebbe-l In message <950723105730_74277.1477_HHJ10-5@CompuServe.COM> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Maria, > > I just got a list of Jewish lists by sending the message > "lists global Jew" (w/out quotes) to listserv@listserv.net > > If you have any trouble I can forward it to you-- > > Rachel thanks,rachel. now my modem and i can just sit here in the dark into perpetuity. that "global Jew" phrase seems to intimate...well, how shd i say it...a conspiracy? --rebbe w/out a cause ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 08:51:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: George and Ludwig (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 22:55:56 -1000 From: Gabrielle Welford To: Shaunanne Tangney Subject: George and Ludwig Dear Shaunanne. It's happened again. I thought I was subscribed ok, but NOT! Could you forward this for me? No changing things if you don't agree with them! Gab. On Sun, 16 Jul 1995, Rod Smith wrote: > Gabrielle, > Really, it's all there in the _Tractatus_? I'm not _that_ versed in L.W. but > had thought the more contextual understanding of language games etc. comes > after, late 20s? mid '30s? > Well, in fact there are those who see much more of a continuum between Tractatus and PI, among them my erstwhile teacher Peter Winch. The argument is something like--and since it is more than 20 years since I was immersed in this, forgive me for rusty hinges--even at the early stage of the Tr, Witt was pursuing an internal logical investigation of what is and what is not possible. It was in fact an investigation of the logical workings of language even at that stage and not an empiricist attempt to splice language to the world. E.g., 6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is _logical_ necessity. Or 6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts--not what can be expressed by means of language.//In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.//The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. > Re: "unlearning the beaten paths" -- Hejinian has a great statement on that, > "Once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for > vocabularies." Yes, I like that. Which points to possibilities, that the ideas are already > extant, within language, within contexts This, to me, gets dangerous again--as though the ideas like things exist somehow within language but independent of it. Back to the private image and solipsism. Cage used to always say that ideas were "in the air" -- how > else explain more than one inventor coming up with the same idea > thousands of miles apart. One could say, well technology had reached the > point where that idea was possible-- exactly, that idea existed, waiting to > be discovered, "in the air." > We speak in wonderful metaphors (I'm getting pictures of ideas like puppies waiting for an owner to come home). It only gets tricky if one starts taking the metaphor seriously and concretizing it and using it to explain the world. Look at how people make theories out of their feelings, then concretize the theories and make the world fit their feelings. It is possible to say "ideas are in the air." That's one of the things we can say about ideas. What does that mean, though, about the world? Gab. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 09:54:23 PDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerry Rothenberg Subject: Re: who is Robert Duncan On the matter of Duncan's name(s), the information is all there in Duncan's A SEQUENCE OF POEMS FOR H.D.'S BIRTHDAY, 4th section: born Edward Howard Duncan, change of name described as "Robert they called me after a friend of my adopted father's who had died. And they kept from my old name Edward. Robert Edward Symmes." (from _Roots & Branches_) One of the terrific Duncan poems of the late 1950s ... tying the personal to much else (search for the missing Father/Mother -- even a little [dare we say it?] "gnostic'). Jerome Rothenberg jrothenb@carla.ucsd.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 10:54:14 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: furnished Ryan, put your furniture up any old way. The setting'll become aleatoric soon enough. All that talk about Bruce Andrews organizing his books by the colors of their covers reminded me of another non-alphabetic cataloging system. When I was in college, a friend kept his records in order of date of composition (or, in the case of jazz, pop, or world music, date of recording). Since he was interested in most kinds of music, this made for some nice juxtapositions. For instance, which Be-bop records were made around the same time as Messiaen was writing Quartet for the End of Time, which (western) classical pieces composed around the time of the Ramayana Monkey Chant (not, by the way, a traditional work, but a contemporary composition from the early 20th century), etc. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 10:54:27 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Exercise(s) Jim Rosenberg writes, quoting from an earlier post of mine: >> there are very few >> poems that serve the same kind of function as musical "etudes" do. > >"Variations Done for Gerald Van de Wiele", by Charles Olson. Yes?? > >If someone asked me what was my "favorite poem", I would have to say that this >poem blew my mind at a fairly young age as the most amazing poem in the >English language, and I haven't changed my opinion since. Jim Rosenberg is right. Forget my previous comments. Clearly, any poem that has had this kind of effect on any reader, has helped that reader to develop their own reading/perceiving techniques in a manner analogous to a musical etude as an exercise as practise for a particular performance "problem." Bests, Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 11:07:22 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 21 Jul 1995 to 22 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507230403.VAA14480@leland.Stanford.EDU> On free verse foot: I strongly recommend Henri Meschonnic's THEORIE DU RYTHME, unfortunately not yet translated, but about to be I think. What HM teaches us is that prosody most always be historicized: one period's "verse" is another's "prose" etc. Now , yes, of course Creeley's poetry can be scanned in the sense that you can count stresses (and slacks) per line, talk about secondary sound features like alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, and come up with very definite patterns--but "foot" implies a fixed metrical unit so I do agree with Jim that "measure" is better but even that's not totally adequate. I think a big project right now should be to look more closely at period style today and determine why just about every poet on this net and other interesting, innovative poets don't write metered verse or even free verse, in a Williams-Creeley sense but write what's much closer to Skeltonics or doggerel on the one hand, prose on the other and the sense of "music" has dramatically shifted in, say, the last 20 years . That might be a more fruitful avenue of investigation (i.e., historicize) than to try to define "the foot" or "the measure" which, as Meschonnic shows, can never quite be done. Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 15:54:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: George and Ludwig (fwd) Thanks for the great feedback Gabrielle. I'm not stuck on the position I presented (or maybe I am) but for the sake of the network of standard stoppages I'll spin out a "defense." Key to the differences we might have I think is this passage: I wrote: >. . .Which points to possibilities, that the ideas are already > extant, within language, within contexts. . . You responded: >This, to me, gets dangerous again--as though the ideas like >things exist somehow within language but independent of it. Back to the >private >image and solipsism. I don't see how what I wrote cld be construed as taking a position which implied the formulation "within language but somehow independent of it." What I wrote seems to me to be saying pretty much what the Hejinian quote I cited is saying. Which is precisely that ideas are not private (subjective), but rather contextual (intersubjective), in ways we don't entirely understand-- thus the "in the air" formulation. A more accurate formulation is probably not possible because no context is _ultimately_ defineable, because all contexts are interrelated. This is a bit of Buddhist propaganda, but it seems to me useful. (I'm not arguing that there's never enough information in a given situation to act, merely that there are always more elements which could be taken into account). To boil it down perhaps what I'm saying is that every idea is an interaction. That the "heart of an idea" is not locatable "except in its use"! > It only gets tricky if one >starts taking the metaphor seriously and concretizing it and using it to >explain the world. It seems to me the viability of this articulation is only apparent precisely when it is concretized. A good example of this is Cage's process in his later writings such as _Themes & Variations_ , _I-VI_, & "Art Is Either A Complaint Or Do Something Else." In this series he tried, & I think he often succeeded, "to find a way of writing which though coming from ideas is not about them; or is not about ideas but produces them." The manner in which he did this is outlined in the introduction to _I-VI_ and in the interview w/ Joan Retallack in _Aerial 6/7_, among other places. Briefly, it involved subjecting a source text (or texts) to chance operations which then presented him with a mix of source materials in which he then searched for ideas, eliminating materials which allowed them to emerge. These were not necessarily semantic "ideas" but could as well be "musical"-- i.e. related to the sound and texture, the movement of language, as well as to the making of statements, obviously they are always in some sense both of these. Though one need not cite Cage to illustrate my point. Ashbery's "floating pronouns" in a poem like "These Lacustrine Cities," or Mallarme's famous "All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice" ("Tout Pensee emet un Coup de Des") can't figure how to get diactical markings on this new keyboard)), relate to what I'm saying. More recently Carla Harryman's "Toy Boats" in _Poetics Journal 5_ seems to me an excellent articulation of the ways of thinking about these issues I'm forwarding. She writes: "I am an indication of what occurs around me." & also, beautifully, "Both belief and denial throw existence into question." She ends the piece with the following paragraph: "A structure for writing that comes from anticipation relative to an elsewhere, which to become a somewhere-- i.e., a writing --must borrow from the things of this world in their partiality." So, that's what I think right now. To respond to a few other points-- I suspect that the idea of a schism in Wittgenstein's thought is based partially in the events of his life, & I don't think that's an entirely bogus point of view. In retrospect we can see the seeds of the late thought in the early but there does seem an openness to a less proscriptive investigation in the later work I think. It seems to me in the _Tractatus_ that he, like Pound for so long, wanted to make it cohere. Also you wrote: > Look at how people make theories out of their feelings, then concretize the theories and make the world fit >their feelings. It's become a bit of a cliche to say, but I'm not sure in the end we can distinguish between emotion & intellect. That perhaps an oversimplification, and if I were a scientist I might not say that. However, I was reading in Alan Ryan's biography of Dewey last night-- Dewey argued that "what scientists do when they try to understand the world is not very different from what any of us do when we try to decide what to do or think"-- this _feels_ right to me. (Dewey eschewed both violent revolution & acceptance of the status quo in favor of the slogan "Intelligent Action!" & although tagged "pragmatist" prefered the term "experimentalism" -- i.e. find out what works and do that. Chomsky went to a Deweyite school in Philadelphia til the age of 12.) & finally (I didn't expect this to be such a long post, geeze, now I have to keep myself from writing another lengthy response to a, to me, seriously reductive comparison of Zorn & Cage by Kevin McNeilly which appears in the Jan. _Postmodern Culture_-- don't nobody tell Bruce how much time I'm spending on here, I'm supposed to be working on the Andrews issue of Aerial, it's our little secret, please) Gabrielle wrote: >We speak in wonderful metaphors (I'm getting pictures of ideas like >puppies waiting for an owner to come home). I'm exactly arguing that ideas don't have "owners," but we come home to them whether we want to or not. Art's part of what makes us aware of when they're around. & some may be puppies, some grown-up, some old, some dead dogs-- mutts, chihuahuas, pit bulls, lassies, Snoopys & Goofys (Baudrillard?) &, of course, east german shepherds. ggrrrrawwlrrrruff! ruff! ruff! --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 13:01:16 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: Exercise(s) In-Reply-To: from "Herb Levy" at Jul 23, 95 10:54:27 am Could we say that Mac Low's reconfiguration of the letters in a name )please tell me you know which poem I'm thinking of , because the name escapes me this morn( is a variation on a theme? An etude without etude? ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 13:03:30 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: bootless feet In-Reply-To: <199507230401.VAA03032@isc.SJSU.EDU> a snake casually suns itself on a relational data base the virtual worm turns inside the actual apple any port in a storm any fact in a fury many modems phone home smash the windows tear the bulletin boards from their hosts tear the hosts themselves from their net who touches this touches a screen ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 13:09:20 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Murphy's Law In-Reply-To: <199507230401.VAA03032@isc.SJSU.EDU> Despite the fact that she didn't call me while she was in California (perhaps because I haven't gotten around to answering any letters for six months) -- I want to mention to everybody Sheila Murphy's book _A Clove of Gender_, recently released from Stride press. Contains "Literal Ponds," "Informal Logic," and much else of value -- what the blurb writers like to call "a substantial collection" -- & by way of early warning -- Harryette Mullen's _Muse & Drudge_ will be out from Singon Horse very soon -- and it's the largest collection of her work in over a decade -- good stuff throughout -- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 15:26:30 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: sing on sing on Aldon Nielsen writes: "& by way of early warning -- Harryette Mullen's _Muse & Drudge_ will be out from Singon Horse very soon -- and it's the largest collection of her work in over a decade -- good stuff throughout --" Is "Singon Horse" the same as "Singing Horse," the press of Gil Ott in Philadelphia? And Gil, are you here lurking anywhere? Love to you . . . all best, c and ps -- Mac Low has done a lot with names, perhaps most famously a series on the names of The Presidents of the United States -- marvelous work charles alexander [===========^^============] chax press [ <> ] minnesota center for book arts [ maybe a <> pages ] phone & fax: 612-721-6063 [ time <> letters ] e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu [ upon <> frames ] [ once <> motion ] [ <> ] [===========vv============] ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 15:57:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: bootless feet aldon writes: > a snake > casually suns itself > on a relational data base > > the virtual worm > turns > inside the actual > apple > > any port in a storm > any fact in a fury > many modems phone home > > smash the windows > tear the bulletin boards from their hosts > tear the hosts themselves from their net > > who touches this > > touches a screen to which i say amen, oh footless boot. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 10:22:48 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: more Meschonnic It's good to know that Meschonnic on rhythm is as interesting as suggested by Marjorie Perloff. There's a writer who is really engaged with rhythm-values. His translation of the Book of Jonah into French in the "original rhythm" and his comments on it are well worth reading. It would be of some interest to Jewish listers. ( nrf Gallimard, 1981). ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 18:43:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: FUNKHOUSER CHRISTOPH This is an Announcement for the imminent publication of _The Little Magazine Volume 21_, the literary journal produced by graduate students in the English Program at the University at Albany, produced as a cd-rom for IBM / Windows. At present there is a functioning demo, soon to be available. Cost is $15 direct from publishers, about $10 more through distributors (Fine Print and Bernard DeBoer). Send checks or cash to The Little Magazine c/o SUNY Albany Dept. of English 1400 Washington Ave. Albany, NY 12222 INGREDIENT STATEMENT: multimeDia writing ImagerY sound Will Alexander Lori Anderson Don Archer Meg Arthurs Susan Bee Charles Bernstein Hakim Bey Roberto Bocci David Bookbinder Charles Borkhuis Susan Brenner Sean Bronzell Harvey Brown Lee Ann Brown Mark Cheney John Clarke Jim Cohn Stephen Cope Eric Curkendall Jacques Debrot Ray DiPalma Phillip Djwa Nancy Dunlop Gully Foyle Lawrence Ferlinghetti Benjamin Friedlander Chris Funkhouser James Garrison Belle Gironda Loss Pequen~o Glazier Robert Grenier Ben Henry Joyce Hinnefeld Robert Hiles Jim Hauser Geof Huth Julie Ivey Lisa Jarnot Pierre Joris Lisa Kaplan Charlie Keil Bill Keith Robert Kendall Richard Kostelanetz Tuli Kupferberg Steve Laufer Kurt Lohr Bill Luoma Jackson Mac Low Nathaniel Mackey Laura Marello Murphy McCullough Marty McCutcheon Michael Melcher H.D. Moe Trudy Morse Murat Nemet-Nejat Nicole Peyrafitte Geoffrey Polk Purkinge Jed Rasula Piero Resta Stefano Resta Douglas Rothschild Situ@tion Critic@l! Stephan Said Linda Smukler Chuck Stein Chris Stroffolino Anne Tardos Nathaniel Tarn Eugene Thacker thelemonade Rodrigo Toscano Chris Vitiello Ben Yarmolinsky Katie Yates We hope to hear from you, Chris Funkhouser, editor Belle Gironda, assistant editor Ben Henry, technical editor litmag@cnsunix.albany.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:16:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 21 Jul 1995 to 22 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: from "Marjorie Perloff" at Jul 23, 95 11:07:22 am I do not hear how a "foot" implies a fixed metrical unit. Perhaps one may imply such a thing when using the word, but how can the word do so? Surely, it is to historicize the usage of the word "foot" when one goes to histoprical figures who support the idea of a free verse foot; and in fact does it not historicize it when one first maintains that there is such a thing, after years of regular walking. For the majority of my life, and it has not been a short one, I have understood the post-Hopkins foot to be what the oldtime linguist-prosodists called a principal stress. I have no trouble hearing the moments when ol' Doc Wms' feet come down on his attic floor. (Didnt we have some of this kind of conversation when jazz musicians stopped counting bars?) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:19:14 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: furnished In-Reply-To: from "Herb Levy" at Jul 23, 95 10:54:14 am I have a friend in Montreal who keeps his books sorted according to height. It works out pretty well, when you come to Black Sparrow Books or Grove Press stuff. But one will find Bukowski next to Bromige, and that was something bromige complained about back when Buk. was "The Outsider of the Year." ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:30:19 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Canadian foot vs. US foot? George Bowering writes > >I do not hear how a "foot" implies a fixed metrical unit. I agree completely unless (and it's a big unless) we are talking strictly in historical terms of what the academy circa the early-mid 1950s meant by that phrase. So here is where Marjorie's argument about you must historicize prosody makes some real sense. It's the way I understood Josephine Miles telling Melnick and I back in '69 or thereabouts that when she was younger she and her peers "did not know how to hear Williams," could not fathom what it was supposed to sound like on the page. Me, I'm waiting for someone to reinvent Adelaide Crapsey's use of math in all of this. No? Ron Silliman rsillima@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:32:49 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 21 Jul 1995 to 22 Jul 1995 George, >(Didnt we have some of this kind of conversation when jazz musicians >stopped counting bars?) > Which explains all those bloated livers, right? Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:39:13 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: furnished But one will find Bukowski next to >Bromige, and that was something bromige complained about back when >Buk. was "The Outsider of the Year." > But you won't find Mickey Rourke portraying Bromige on the silver screen (nor Faye Dunaway Cecilia).... [Actually, in the portrayal line, Tom Marshall was visiting this week and saw a photo of my brother--who is a born-again christian living in a "community" in Waco, TX--and thought it was George Bowering. Since my brother and I have often been mistaken for one another--in spite of the fact that he's 7 inches taller--this is a sobering thought] Ron ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 17:51:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: furnished In-Reply-To: <199507240019.RAA05406@fraser.sfu.ca> from "George Bowering" at Jul 23, 95 05:19:14 pm Oh hell, Bromige will be next to Bukowski if they are sorted alphabetically, anywayu! David should change his name to Symmes. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 22:27:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: braman sandra Subject: libraries And then there was the librarian who thought that the books should be arranged according to their individual identities as chess pieces, rather than by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems. He was going in after hours and rearranging books for his employer library for months until they discovered what the problem was.... Sandra Braman ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 23:41:12 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: POEMS Syndrome I was browsing through the Rare Disorders database of my Family Doctor CD Rom and came across the following entry--POEMS Syndrome. I know there are many poets on this list. I hope you are aware of your own pathology!! My apologies to those who are really suffering from this terrible problem, but a definition's a definition. Dodie Bellamy 789: POEMS Syndrome POEMS Syndrome is an acronym for Polyneuropathy (a disease of many nerves), Organomegaly (the enlargement of an organ), Endocrinopathy (a functional disorder of an endocrine gland), M protein (monoclonal immunoglobin, a type of antibody), and Skin changes. Symptoms Each letter of POEMS Syndrome stands for the following symptoms: Polyneuropathy is a disease of many nerves that causes tingling, numbness, burning pain, deficiencies in perception and vibratory sensations usually in the limbs. Organomegaly may affect any organ such as enlargement of the spleen (splenomegaly) or enlargement of the liver and the spleen (hepatosplenomegaly). Disease of the endocrine system may affect any endocrine gland (a gland that secretes hormones directly into the blood stream). Deficient secretion of the thyroid hormones (hypothyroidism) may occur. Sexual functioning may be affected in POEMS Syndrome due to dysfunction of hormone secreting glands. Adrenal secretion of hormones may also be insufficient. Elevated levels of M protein are usually found in the blood. Skin manifestations may include increased pigmentation (hyperpigmentation) and thickened skin resembling Scleroderma (see Related Disorders section of this report). Swelling of the lymph nodes (adenopathy) may also occur. An abnormal accumulation of fluid (edema) in the abdominal cavity (ascites), in connective tissue (anasarca), or in cells and tissues may also occur. Most of the patients have a malignant bone marrow disease called Multiple Myeloma. Abnormal proteins are usually present in the plasma. (For more information on this disorder, choose "Multiple Myeloma" as your search term in the Rare Disease Database.) Causes The exact cause of POEMS Syndrome is not known. It has been suggested that it may be an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune disorders are caused when the body's natural defenses (antibodies, lymphocytes, etc.), against invading organisms suddenly begin to attack perfectly healthy tissue for unknown reasons. The abnormal proteins from the multiple myeloma tumor is another possible cause for this multi-system disease. Affected Population POEMS Syndrome is a rare disorder affecting males and females in equal numbers. Therapies: Standard Treatment of POEMS Syndrome involves immunosuppressive drugs such as melphalan and prednisone. Therapies: Investigational Plasmapheresis may be of benefit in some cases of POEMS Syndrome. This procedure is a method for removing unwanted substances (toxins, metabolic substances and plasma parts such as antibodies and abnormal proteins) from the blood. Blood is removed from the patient and blood cells are separated from plasma. The patient's plasma is then replaced with other human plasma and the blood is retransfused into the patient. This therapy is still under investigation to analyze side effects and effectiveness. More research is needed before plasmapheresis can be recommended for use in all but the most severe cases of POEMS Syndrome. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 09:26:38 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: the politics of dub excuse me for interrupting out usual rarefied discussion, but I am getting a lot of what I can only describe as protocol-like garbage preceding every message from POETICS. I've written to the list-serve and got my message, along with more garbage, spit back to me. am I the only one experiencing this problem all of a sudden? burt kimmelman kimmelman@admin.njit.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 09:33:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: rebbe-l Maria Damon, I'm trying to forward the addresses to you which you were interested in, but somehow my message is not getting through. can you back channel me? burt kimmelman@admin.njit.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 10:12:35 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Organization: University of NC at Greensboro Subject: free verse foot I never can remember whose lyrics these are and who I saw acting them out on MTV, but no doubt other people do: I can't dance-- I can't talk-- The only thing about me is the way that I walk. to which I would add, I got the rhythm-- I got the beat-- I'm the guy that walks with the free verse feet. As far as I know Winters never did repent of having invented a free verse foot when he was in his, and the century's, twenties. For someone who rebuked Hart Crane for lack of repentance (a very well- intentioned act) this is remarkable. gee i hope i didn't step on anyone's feet Tom Kirby-Smith English Department UNC-Greensboro Greensboro NC 27412 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 09:01:48 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Taylor Organization: PSU Cramer Hall Subject: Re: Open Mike Titles Comments: To: POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@PSUORVM.CC.PDX.EDU what an arrogant son of a bitch ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 12:19:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: pleasures of rejection A little something from the 'Net: > > > > > > Every writer has received rejection slips; too many of > > them for most. The Financial Times has quoted the "mother of all rejection > > slips" translated from a Chinese economic journal. It goes like this: > > > > "We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish > > your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower > > standards. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we > > shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine > > composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and > > timidity." > > > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 13:05:20 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: the politics of dub In-Reply-To: <00993D30.0A93B6FE.84@admin.njit.edu> You may have the full-header option turned on in your mail reader by accident; if it's Pine, hit control-H. I'm getting normal headings; if I need full-header, control-H toggles it on as well. Alan On Mon, 24 Jul 1995, Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT wrote: > excuse me for interrupting out usual rarefied discussion, but I am getting > a lot of what I can only describe as protocol-like garbage preceding > every message from POETICS. I've written to the list-serve and got my > message, along with more garbage, spit back to me. am I the only one > experiencing this problem all of a sudden? > > burt kimmelman > kimmelman@admin.njit.edu > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 11:36:15 PST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Taylor Organization: PSU Cramer Hall Subject: Re: free verse foot Phil Collins, I think. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 15:12:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: infograms/utopian rhyme Here's a top 10 of anagrams for "information superhighway" making its way around the Net. 10.Enormous hiary pig with fan 9.Hey ignoramus--win profit? Ha! 8.Oh-oh, wiring snafu: empty air 7.When forming, utopia's hairy 6.A rough whimper of insanity 5.Oh, wormy infuriating phase 4.Inspire humanity, who go far 3.Waiting for any promise, huh? 2.Hi-ho! Yow! I'm surfing Arpanet! 1.New utopia? Horrifying sham runners-up: Fury, morphia, a wise nothing Hey, what of inspiring amour How pithy--a finer ignoramus I swamp, horrify huge nation I whisper nothing of my aura Newt has a horrifying opium This warning of my euphoria Whining, amorphous--yet fair Why shun origin of primate? Wishing for a utopian rhyme PS. I'm not responsible for the ranking here. Several of the runners-up are better than the top 10, but ain't that always the way? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 14:35:33 CST6CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Hank Lazer Organization: The University of Alabama Subject: Re: thanks I'll be out of town (& without computer access) for the next week. I wanted to thank the group for many stimulating directions of conversation. As I was working on some poems last night, I ran across this one, which I send out in the spirit of such thanks: #146 (of a series called DAYS - this one 7/13/95) for this the mystical might have said soul though others would have it otherwise which to contend among of yes being numerous cacophony of many talking thinking Hank Lazer ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 13:55:29 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Watts Subject: Re: furnished In-Reply-To: <199507240051.RAA07200@fraser.sfu.ca> from "George Bowering" at Jul 23, 95 05:51:38 pm Not if yr library's big enough, Jawj. Don't you have Bronk, Broughton, Brownstein? Whut about Lennart Bruce? Lenny Bruce? Joseph Bruchac? Bryher? Paul Buck? David Budbill? Mel Buffington? Bromige has plenty of name buffering, if yr liberry's lawge enuf. > > Oh hell, Bromige will be next to Bukowski if they are sorted alphabetically, anywayu! David should change his name to Symmes. > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 12:05:57 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Marjorie Perloff: > I think a big project right now should be to look more closely at period > style today and determine why just about every poet on this net and other > interesting, innovative poets don't write metered verse or even free > verse, in a Williams-Creeley sense but write what's much closer to > Skeltonics or doggerel on the one hand, prose on the other and the sense > of "music" has dramatically shifted in, say, the last 20 years . That > might be a more fruitful avenue of investigation (i.e., historicize) than > to try to define "the foot" or "the measure" which, as Meschonnic shows, > can never quite be done. I would need to do an awful lot of scanning before reaching a conclusion like the one above; I'm a bit puzzled by what should constitute *the data* for a "historicization" concerning metrics if not the actual metrical structure of the poems involved. I.e. it seems to me you must scan first *then* relate the results of the data to what you know about history. If you decline to scan -- pronounce scanning as "not being fruitful" -- then what is the basis on which judgments like the one above are made??? Normally I tend not to be evangelical on any subject, and I certainly don't want to get into a food fight with anyone over "x is more fruitful than y", but I find myself totally baffled by all this negativity over metrics. I consider it a tool -- in the presence of many other tools -- no more no less. It can be *very interesting* to discover how the metrical structure of a poem works. The a-priori-template foot methodology *does* seem inappropriate for a great deal of recent poetry; all the more reason to seek a new methodology. Marjorie, when you say defining the measure "can never quite be done" I'm not sure what you mean here. If you mean that one can not be guaranteed of being able to produce *predictive formulas* for where the measure boundaries will fall, I agree with that completely. But if you mean the *concept* of measure can never be completely defined then I don't agree at all. The concept of measure, as I've explained it, stands or falls on the ability of listeners to *hear* those boundaries of low bonding strength. My belief is that once this methodology is demonstrated, these boundaries are as easy for people to locate as stress degrees. I haven't read Meschonnic -- thanks for the reference -- so perhaps I ought to defer judgment, but having a method for mapping metrical structure seems useful to me. George Bowering: > For the majority of my life, and it has not been a short one, I have > understood the post-Hopkins foot to be what the oldtime > linguist-prosodists called a principal stress. Yes! Where I would expand on this, George, is simply to map the *direction* the unstressed syllables go in "attaching to" the stress -- i.e. to *which stress* does a given unstressed syllable "belong". Ron Silliman: > So here is where Marjorie's argument about you must historicize prosody > makes some real sense. It's the way I understood Josephine Miles > telling Melnick and I back in '69 or thereabouts that when she was > younger she and her peers "did not know how to hear Williams," could > not fathom what it was supposed to sound like on the page. I'm quite emphatic that metrics has to take place with respect to *a recitation* -- in fact it works best if you have a tape recording you can play over and over and even slow down if need be. If someone believes the role of prosody is to allow the reader to extrapolate the sound based only on the printed page then yes, the concepts I've been presenting will be very unsatisfying. (Of course the arrival of multimedia makes it easier than ever to include the sound with the text.) [Incidentally, apologies if my responses seem a tad out of sync with some others -- I've got my poetics list subscription set to digest, so I don't see responses til sometime after midnight.] -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 18:16:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: secrecy/confidetiality charles b et al: i have a question about the confidentiality of the list. in perusing the opening materials i got when first subscribing, i saw for the first time that people aren't supposed to know about this list. ( i hadn't read all the stuff thru cuz all that kind of technotalk, which i assumed it was, how to do this, how to do that, is a bit intimidating to me.) well, i've already told one student about getting on the list --he's done so and made some remarkable contributions. i want, moreover, to bring some stuff frm the list, like loss's concrete-poem map of buffalo/gloucester, and the anagrams for info. superhiway, to my poetry classes to show them how much and varied and fun activity there is in the poetry world. is this verboten? is the confidentiality a legal matter or one of personal preference, i.e. keeping the list small and intimate? charles, maybe you --or anyone --can explain this to me before i do something untoward.--maria d ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 17:10:10 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: pleasures of rejection In-Reply-To: <199507241619.MAA94458@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Steven Howard Shoemaker" at Jul 24, 95 12:19:05 pm Rejection slips? Oh, I remember those. Wonder what they are like now.... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 17:17:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: furnished In-Reply-To: <199507240039.RAA14038@ix5.ix.netcom.com> from "Ron Silliman" at Jul 23, 95 05:39:13 pm I have never been in Waco. I have been , 30 years ago, in El Paso, and that was scary enough. But if Ron Silliman's bro is 7 inches (or as say up here, 12 cm) taller than Ron, and if the stories that tell me that Ron is 6 foot 6, well, I aint that tall. I am only 15 inches taller than Carol Berge. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 17:22:37 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Sarton & Spender In-Reply-To: <199507191025.DAA29490@ix5.ix.netcom.com> from "Ron Silliman" at Jul 19, 95 03:25:43 am I finally saw an obit re Spender in the Vancouver _Sun_ but nothing on Sarton. I eh never played basketball with Spender, but he was the first famous poet I ever heard read, followed by Marianne Moore and Kenneth Patchen. I was surprised to see that Spender pulled a hankderchief out of his jacket sleeve. So THAT's where poets keep them, I thought. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 17:27:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen? In-Reply-To: <199507190946.CAA25919@ix5.ix.netcom.com> from "Ron Silliman" at Jul 19, 95 02:46:28 am What a coincidence, Ron!~ I have, as you know, just come back from Petersburg (I am going to try to write the trip off as research in Hejinian studies), where I saw a little anthology of 3 poets: (I am bowing to variopus pressure on this net, to concede that pop singers are poets and artists): Huey Lewis, Dewey Redman, and Louis Zukofsky. It was published by the Ducklings Press, Leningrad. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 21:27:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: secrets of the list In-Reply-To: <301429b74e37002@maroon.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 24, 95 06:16:09 pm Maria, > charles b et al: i have a question about the confidentiality of the > list. in perusing the opening materials i got when first > subscribing, i saw for the first time that people aren't supposed to > know about this list. I'm not speaking for Charles but I can give you my sense of it; at least you will have one person's thoughts. I don't think there's a rose hanging upside down over the mainframe that houses the list. (Though that's not a bad image...) The intention is not to have the list listed in all the lists of lists that get published, thereby causing a lot of casual foot traffic. This also includes not posting the existence of the list to other lists, where people who might subscribe to lists just because they like to subscribe to lists might subscribe to this list. It would be better I would think for the number of subscribers not to get too large only because at a certain point there can't be a sense of who's there if it's among thousands. > well, i've already told one student about getting on the list --he's > done so and made some remarkable contributions. Word of mouth has always been fine, I believe. (And students would count, I would say, unless it was an assignment say, for each student to subscribe and be required to make make twenty postings ...) > i want, moreover, to bring some stuff frm the list, like loss's > concrete-poem map of buffalo/gloucester, and the anagrams for > info. superhiway, to my poetry classes to show them how much and > varied and fun activity there is in the poetry world. is this > verboten? is the confidentiality a legal matter or one of personal > preference, i.e. keeping the list small and intimate? charles, > maybe you --or anyone --can explain this to me before i do something > untoward. I'd use the same instincts you would if you were at a reading and some photocopies were handed out. It's thoughtful to ask the posting person before recirculating, I would think (and one is usually honored by such a request!) though you wouldn't technically break any laws by not doing so. I think such thoughtfulness more than any sense of rules will do the most to maintain the level of trust necessary to such a list. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 21:48:04 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: <199507250404.VAA06961@leland.Stanford.EDU> For Jim Rosenberg, Tom Kirby, George Bowering et al: I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I don't care about metrics. ON THE CONTRARY! I'm the person whose first book (dissertation) was about Yeats's use of rhyme and I've written quite a lot about specific metrics over the years. All I meant was that the word "foot" is applicable only in cases of syllable-stress prosody (i.e. meter), where we count feet. In the case of alliterative verse, the basis is the number of stresses per line, never mind how many unstressed syllables in between. In such a case (for instance Hopkins, a good deal of Auden)what does a "foot" mean? See, on this point, the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--various relevant articles. My point about free verse is different. Strictly speaking, free verse means no counting, a variable line, and the line as unit rather than the foot, or number of stresses or number of syllables per line, and so on. But in practice, of course a poet like Williams kept the variability limited: most of his earlier poems use between 3 and 5 stresses per line and the syllable count is not all that variable either. Now: if Williams writes "free verse," what does John Ashbery write? His long lines are purposely prosaic with very little rhythmic repetition. To speak of free verse in this case and many others seems misleading and I think we need to be more specific. But of course, as Jim says, you always start with actual analysis of stress, syllable count, pitch, juncture, etc. Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 02:03:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 The search for a "new" term (or conceptualization) for the kind of verse someone "like Ashbery" writes is intriguing in that to dismiss him as merely "discursive" (or to valorize him for same reason) seems beyond the point...Yet, reading backwards from the contemporaries, many modernists (Stein, Stevens, Riding) seem to be equally removed from "song"--either in that they have a plainness in their diction or a hypnotic rhythm "akin to the saxophone"(as Eliot said of Stein)--Of course, "The Four Quartets" and some Moore (who despite her rhyme was tonally) also seem to be important "precursors" of a certain I-don't-want-to-say-discursive tone. But perhaps Moore would be disqualified because of the rhyme (as would Stevens because of the iambs?) as an alternative to "free verse"--Yet, when one reads Ashbery or Perelman or Harryman (scratch harryman for now--it makes it too complicated), one is definitely not reading most of O'Hara or Mayer or Armantrout? Would Marjorie, or anyone else say that the latter (O,M,A,) would fit under the rules of "free verse" as presumably so would Spicer and Weiners? And if this is this case, is this distinction argued on any grounds other than the "lyric" vs. "Discursive" debate? Chris Stroffolino ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 10:02:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 c stroffolino writes: > a hypnotic rhythm "akin to the > saxophone"(as Eliot said of Stein)-- chris--do you know how eliot intended this ? was it pejorative, admiring, neutral or all or none of the above?--md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 08:31:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen? >What a coincidence, Ron!~ I have, as you know, just come back from >Petersburg (I am going to try to write the trip off as research in >Hejinian studies), where I saw a little anthology of 3 poets: (I am >bowing to variopus pressure on this net, to concede that pop singers >are poets and artists): Huey Lewis, Dewey Redman, and Louis Zukofsky. >It was published by the Ducklings Press, Leningrad. Dewey Redman, eh? Who's pressuring you to consider jazz musicians as poets, George? Enquiring minds want to know. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 07:27:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Don Cheney Subject: Rock Me Amadeus sorry for the late post on the subject, but concerning the idea that rock musicians take their work seriously: i say that THE MEAT PUPPETS take their work seriously and give as evidence meat puppet Cris Kirkwood's description of the band's music (in Rolling Stone 5/19/94): "It's like a braunschweiger bust of Millard Fillmore set amid a field of frozen feces." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 08:47:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 >c stroffolino writes: >> a hypnotic rhythm "akin to the >> saxophone"(as Eliot said of Stein)-- > >chris--do you know how eliot intended this ? was it pejorative, admiring, >neutral or all or none of the above?--md Eliot's quote must be what made George Bowering think of Dewey Redman. Just more evidence of Ol' Possum's prescience. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 14:25:45 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: who is George Bowering? In-Reply-To: from "Herb Levy" at Jul 25, 95 08:31:08 am There's a rumour on the street in Toronto that "George Bowering" is actually a nom-de-guerre of some ad guy for Disney. Anybody else hear anything? Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:09:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 maria---eliot meant it negatively--but I got it from Riding's essay on "stein and the new barbarsm"---SHE meant it positively-- but the recognition of course on Eliot's part (Stein=Saxophone) makes me wonder whether "eliot was of the devil 's part without knowing it"--I mean devil positively, btw....chris ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:17:38 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: the politics of dub Alan, What do you mean "if it's Pine"? Anyway, I'll try control H--but when should I try it? (Sorry everyone for this unabashed display of private email problem with the List). ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:22:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: renga anyone? In-Reply-To: <199507250404.AAA91814@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Automatic digest processor" at Jul 25, 95 00:02:58 am Reading Araki Yasusada (an Hiroshima poet influenced by Spicer!) in First Intensity #5, it occurred to me that the renga form (in which a group of collaborators takes turns writing lines) could be nicely adapted to cyberspace--and where better than this list? So, in the hope that someone will take me up on the idea, here's a line: In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:36:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Jim (et al.), I see Marjorie's point. Anyway, let me be pollyannish and say that we don't have the tools to quantify modern and postmodern verse satisfactorily yet. now let me be a wet blanket and say that, thanks to grad school and beyond (the perils of an education where I saw/read enough poetry from various times and places to see that there is no definition of poetry which can be applied universally), poetry has been "demystified" for me; there is no such thing as poetry (though I'll play the scan game anytime because it is so much fun but inconclusive). There is only the poetic. And there is history, a pleasure and maybe of some use to scholar and poet alike. Scanning only makes sense when it is bracketed historically--which is not to say (again) that scanning isn't worth one's while--that is, if one wishes to talk about poetry. Burt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:14:24 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: libraries I recall that Univ of Edinburgh library, when newly installed in a modern building with very large floor areas, had Michelangelo Architecture, Michelangelo Sculpture, Michelangelo Painting several hundred yards apart under the auspices of Dewey. Also under Dewey, Bernini's Architecture was under Baroque and Christopher Wren's several blocks away under Renaissance. The librarian responsible at that time was simply not interested in discussing the arbitrariness of Dewey's style categories, in which Baroque was located in southern Europe while Northern Europe was undergoing a belated Renaissance. Effectiveness of any system depends on the discretion and flexibility of the user. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:01:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: who is George Bowering? In-Reply-To: <199507251825.OAA19622@blues.epas.utoronto.ca> from "Michael Boughn" at Jul 25, 95 02:25:45 pm I have heard rumours that there is some guy, a novelist or something, going around using the name "George Bowering." This man is an imposter. I am the real GB, and I am a simple first baseman and historian. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:05:33 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: who is Woody Allen? In-Reply-To: from "Herb Levy" at Jul 25, 95 08:31:08 am Hey, Herb, some of my favourite poets are jazz musicians. Like Cecil Taylor and Woody Allen. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:13:11 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 In-Reply-To: from "Marjorie Perloff" at Jul 24, 95 09:48:04 pm I think that I am getting something od what Marjorie is feeling when she introduces the difference between Williams and Ashbery. (Or how about the crossbred _Ko_ as in discursive endrime?). Certainly in Ashbery I do not hear much in the way of feet walking (though I think I still do in O'Hara's Lunch Poems). But I still dont hear feet as necessarily regular. Maybe this is because I grew up in the mountains, where you cannot march. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 10:36:15 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wystan Curnow Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 Comments: To: damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU Hi Maria, I wait with you for cris's reply.I thought maybe : saxophone=jazz. Which would make some sense of the *hypnotic*. Is Eliot *primitivizing* Stein? Wystan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 19:11:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot In-Reply-To: <00993E2C.DE0ADE3E.100@admin.njit.edu> This discussion has been interesting. I tend to agree with Burt that we don't know enough yet to say conclusive things about current meter. Even more: to talk about a "current" conception of measure as being particularly current tends to bracket others as "less current" and thus to install a kind of a priori evaluative axis which I don't think is particularly helpful. There are lots of measures at work today; that fact alone makes "periodization" in the sense that (I think -- correct me if I'm wrong, Marjorie) Marjorie implies hopelessly reductive, since all such measures are by definition current. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg The moment is at hand. University Writing Program Take one another Duke University and eat. Durham, NC 27708 kellogg@acpub.duke.edu --Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:39:41 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Schultz Subject: Rejected posting to POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (fwd) Here's a belated posting; like Gabrielle, I was exiled from the list for a time. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:29:47 -1000 From: L-Soft list server at UBVM (1.8b) To: sschultz@HAWAII.EDU Subject: Rejected posting to POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU You are not authorized to send mail to the POETICS list from your sschultz@HAWAII.EDU account. You might be authorized to send to the list from another of your accounts, or perhaps when using another mail program which generates slightly different addresses, but LISTSERV has no way to associate this other account or address with yours. If you need assistance or if you have any question regarding the policy of the POETICS list, please contact the list owners: POETICS-Request@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU. ------------------------ Rejected message (48 lines) -------------------------- Return-Path: <@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU:sschultz@HAWAII.EDU> Received: from UBVM (NJE origin SMTP@UBVM) by UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 9677; Tue, 18 Jul 1995 00:24:46 -0400 Received: from relay1.Hawaii.Edu by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Tue, 18 Jul 95 00:24:40 EDT Received: from uhunix3.its.Hawaii.Edu ([128.171.44.52]) by relay1.Hawaii.Edu with SMTP id <11434(5)>; Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:20:57 -1000 Received: by uhunix3.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu id <148527>; Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:24:24 -1000 Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 18:24:17 -1000 Sender: Susan Schultz From: Susan Schultz To: poetics@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: innocence and language (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 23:03:29 -1000 (HST) From: Susan Schultz To: UB Poetics discussion group Cc: Recipients of POETICS digests Subject: innocence and language Marisa & Maria--on the "ghost" in the machine, Joan Retallack has a fascinating essay, ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:(three essays onto shaky grounds)," where she suggests that the ghost in the machine of feminist writing is in fact masculine. Experimental writing may be feminist, she argues, but much experimental writing is done by men (Russian futurists, British and American moderns, and so on). "It may seem like a betrayal of the few courageous women who are our clear 'feminist' ancestors . . . to acknowledge a 'feminine' tradition dominated by males. But it is far worse to deny the presence of the feminine in language (as Ostriker and others do) by missing the fact that the feminine has never been exclusively 'embodied' in female writers." The essay can be found in FEMINIST MEASURES, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (U of Michigan Press). There are problems with the argument--why still call this move "feminine"?--but it is a marvelous antidote to Ostriker et al's essentialism. And it gives access to Retallack's own poetry (her new book IS good, Rod), which refuses to take easy gender-based "sides." Susan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 15:32:04 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wystan Curnow Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland Subject: Jerome McGann Dear Group. I need an e-mail address for Jerome McGann. Can anyone oblige? Wystan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 00:17:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: renga anyone? But at what point did she say to herself "I wanna be a wonk" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 22:31:13 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: renga anyone? Thanks, Steven Howard Shoemaker. You have begun the renga with a line as a sentence. Is this usual? Is it variable? Do feet fly? In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning charles alexander [===========^^============] chax press [ <> ] minnesota center for book arts [ maybe a <> pages ] phone & fax: 612-721-6063 [ time <> letters ] e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu [ upon <> frames ] [ once <> motion ] [ <> ] [===========vv============] ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 23:11:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Jul 1995 to 24 Jul 1995 chris s writes: > maria---eliot meant it negatively--but I got it from Riding's essay > on "stein and the new barbarsm"---SHE meant it positively-- but the > recognition of course on Eliot's part (Stein=Saxophone) makes me > wonder whether "eliot was of the devil > 's part without knowing it"--I mean devil positively, btw....chris thanks chris; riding on stein sounds like a trip. i'll save this tidbit for later use. i'm spozed to write something on stein in the next year... and this kinda fits in, or --i like it so much tht i'll make it fit in.--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 00:47:10 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: renga anywhat? I think the renga on the list idea a good one. I posted a sentence assuming that we were following "the linked verse" of responding with a line that is as far away as possible from the preceding. If I'm wrong about this scratch my wonk bit. I feel an obligation to point out that it's not clear that Haraki Yasusada actually exists. I published a group discussion in _Aerial 6/7_ called "Renga & the New Sentence" by what purported to be three Japanese poet/critics. I suspected at the time that it might be a fake, but chose to publish it anyway, as it was simply too good to turn down. I've since had a conversation that *seems* to confirm my suspicions (No, I can't say more than that). Tho it's still unclear. I've talked to at least one person that's pretty unhappy abt it. Implication being that an American posing as a Japanese from Hiroshima should be questioned. They're probably right about that. What caused me to question the "authenticity" of that text was that it was a little too good & the speakers were a little too knowledgeable to be, I thought, never seen or heard from by anybody on the scene. I mean this poetry gang of ours-- it's NOT that big. Does anybody out there know Tosa Motokiyu, &/or Ojiu Norinaga, &/or Okura Kyojin? I mean _besides_ Nils Ya. --Rod Steven Howard Shoemaker wrote: >Reading Araki Yasusada (an Hiroshima poet influenced by >Spicer!) in First Intensity #5, it occurred to me that the renga form (in >which a group of collaborators takes turns writing lines) could be >nicely adapted to cyberspace--and where better than this list? >So, in the hope that someone will take me up on the idea, here's a line: >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 23:17:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: renga anyone? In message <199507251922.PAA67736@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Reading Araki Yasusada (an Hiroshima poet influenced by Spicer!) in > First Intensity #5, it occurred to me that the renga form (in which a > group of collaborators takes turns writing lines) could be nicely > adapted to cyberspace--and where better than this list? > So, in the hope that someone will take me up on the idea, here's a line: > > > > > In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. In the crooks were nannies and in the nannies began responsibilities. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 23:54:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jonathan Brannen Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Burt, Poetry has been "demystified" for you so it no longer exists? Well, I never thought I'd find myself quoting Dylan Thomas but: "The tricks are easy to learn, it's the art that's difficult." (or words to that effect). Best, Jonathan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 02:11:25 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Marjorie Perloff: > I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I don't care about > metrics. ON THE CONTRARY! Good, I had a feeling I was misunderstanding something. > All I meant was that the word "foot" is applicable only in cases of > syllable-stress prosody (i.e. meter), where we count feet. Agreed. Your aversion to the word foot in a "free verse" context is based on counting, mine on the a priori character of the analysis, but we come out the same place. > My point about free verse is different. Strictly speaking, free verse > means no counting, a variable line, Agreed again. > and the line as unit rather than the > foot, or number of stresses or number of syllables per line, and so on. Whoa. I *don't* agree here. Surely everyone knows the syllables are there, and we all talk a lot about line-breaks, and without question there has been a lack of attention to an intermediate level *structural* metrical unit between the line and the syllable. In my opinion this is simply a gap in our methodology rather than the inappropriateness of such a unit. To return to Creeley for a moment: The non-standard measure boundaries at the end of the line are *very* prominent; everyone hears them. The *standard* measure boundaries in the middle of the two-measure lines are much more subtle. They (together with the fact that some lines are indeed one measure) are what gives Creeley's rhythm its subtlety, its fluidity, its very life it seems to me. If you only look for syllables and stresses and line breaks you miss this completely. It is exactly to give meaningful identity to a metrical unit intermediate between the syllable and the line that I've been talking about measure boundaries, bonding strength, etc. In my opinion, we haven't had much to say about an intermediate level metrical unit not because there isn't anything useful to say but because we *haven't been looking* for these units. (And why? Because 'foot' has so much baggage!) When you do go looking for them they are right there, in plain earshot, and pretty interesting. > Now: if Williams writes "free verse," what does John Ashbery write? I've never tried to scan Ashbery, but would love to try. Is there a tape of a reading of _Flowchart_ available somewhere? Until actually scanning Ashbery I would not want to predict the outcome; frankly the Creeley results surprised the hell out of me. > you always start with > actual analysis of stress, syllable count, pitch, juncture, etc. ^^^^^^^^ Now I'm confused again: perhaps we really *don't* disagree on an intermediate level unit of metrics??? -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 01:45:07 -40962758 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jim Rosenberg Subject: Re: secrets of the list [Since the subject came up of proper etiquette for telling others about this list ...] I am living in what I would call an overt state of corruption regarding whether this list should be closed or open. I say this because I believe it should be open, and yet I value the relatively high signal to noise ratio, which will, certainly, deteriorate if the list is completely open. Actually, to be a bit more accurate: it is technically incorrect to say the list is closed. The list is fully open in the sense that anyone who knows the correct E-mail address is auto-subscribed simply by sending a message. It is also technically incorrect that the list is "secret". The fact that it is openly archived on EPC -- along with enough address stamp information to give anyone who can put two and two together the information for how to subscribe -- means that it the list is, in an obscure way, being advertised. [That happens to be the way *I* found my way onto the list; *TWO* major members of the list (who will remain nameless) "invited" me to subscribe but didn't tell me how!] There is something mildly offensive about archiving the list in a publicly available place (EPC) and yet maintaining that the list is closed. We seem to be saying *OUR* words are worth archiving, dear net surfer, but *YOURS* are not, we won't tell you how to get on this list. This is pretty much contrary to the general spirit of the net, it seems to me. One point that I think should be made is that there is *no* "serious" newsgroup (that I'm aware of, at any rate) on USENET for discussing poetry. Where are the people who are not on this list who want to have a serious discussion of the poetries we talk about here supposed to go?? A private list should be *PRIVATE*. That means (1) subscription only by permission of a moderator; (2) archiving only by ftp under a non-anonymous account with a password; etc. One possibility would be to keep this list the way it is but start a parallel fully public list. It would try to enforce signal to noise ratio by sheer netiquette, the way most of the net does it. (Signal to noise ratio is *excellent* on most of the USENET technical groups; ht_lit, which has some parallel concerns to this list, is fully open and has a fine signal to noise ratio.) Hopefully, the open list would suck the life out of the pseudo- closed list; if instead the open list degenerates into a mess of mindless posturing then there is still the "closed" list to fall back on. It does trouble me that there is no open list/newsgroup for discussions of the kind we have here. To put it as bluntly as possible: Are we snobs, or what? -- Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/ CIS: 71515,124 WELL: jer Internet: jr@amanue.pgh.net ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 02:07:24 +0000 Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Joseph Zitt Organization: HumanSystems Subject: Renga Round the Poesy I don't know if this is a common thing in renga wrangling, but I'm interested in following up on what has started with the multiple second lines being offered -- perhaps we could set up an ongoing hypertext, branching off as the writing does so. (Pardon if this is a beentheredonethat -- I am but a poor wagon driver and unstudied in the ways of these lands B-]. ) ---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------- |||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Human Systems \||| ||/ Organizer, SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \|| |/ Online Representative, Austin International Poetry Festival \| / Joe Zitt's Home Page\ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 02:38:19 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Yasusada = Ern Malley Rod writes: "I feel an obligation to point out that it's not clear that Haraki Yasusada actually exists. I published a group discussion in _Aerial 6/7_ >called "Renga & the New Sentence" by what purported to be three Japanese poet/critics. I suspected at the time that it might be a fake, but chose to publish it anyway, as it was simply too good to turn down. I've since had a conversation that *seems* to confirm my suspicions (No, I can't say more than that). Tho it's still unclear." Both Avery Burns and Eric Selland swear that Yasusada is a fictive project, as are his translators. Selland, a translator of Japanese by trade who's spent years over there and knows the poetry scene intimately, should be in a position to know. Still, the work in Conjunctions is very good. I posted an enthusiastic comment to this list when it first came out that I believe Luigi-Bob may have reprinted in Taproot. Ron ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 02:57:58 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: secrets of the list Re Jim Rosenberg's > > >I am living in what I would call an overt state of corruption regarding whether this list should be closed or open. I say this because I believe it should be open, and yet I value the relatively high signal to noise ratio, which will, certainly, deteriorate if the list is completely open. Actually, to be a bit more accurate: it is technically incorrect to say the list is closed. The list is fully open in the sense that anyone who knows the correct E-mail address is auto-subscribed simply by sending a message. It is also technically incorrect that the list is "secret". The fact that it is openly archived on EPC -- along with enough address stamp information to give anyone who can put two and two together the information for how to subscribe -- means that it the list is, in an obscure way, being advertised. [That happens to be the way *I* found my way onto the list; *TWO* major members of the list (who will remain nameless) "invited" me to subscribe but didn't tell me how!] > >There is something mildly offensive about archiving the list in a publicly available place (EPC) and yet maintaining that the list is closed. We seem to be saying *OUR* words are worth archiving, dear net surfer, but *YOURS* are not, we won't tell you how to get on this list. This is pretty much contrary to the general spirit of the net, it seems to me. > I don't see anything "mild" in its offensiveness, actually. Anyone who has checked out the Usenet groups on poetry will see how closely they map to a vision of literature proposed, say, by Writers Digest. And I think there's a "fear" here that there would be "contamination" if this list were suddenly to show up in all the Listserv directories. Also, it's not strictly true that this is the only place to seriously discuss poetry. A somewhat more moderated group, CAP-L, maps fairly closely to the New Formalist set of concerns (or did until it got it's address posted here and I, Bill Luoma, Chris Stroffalino (sorry about that spelling) and others "polluted" it). My own sense is more openness is good, but how to go about that. I, for one, would have no compunction about listing this list on a very compatible discussion group (and I would include CAP-L and Joseph Zitt's Silence (Cage) discussion groups as two examples). Frankly, anybody who discovers the EPC and is intrigued by the Poetics archives ought to be told how to sign up (in fact, that should probably be a part of the archives, no?). Ron ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 03:02:57 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Renga 3 >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books That cooks would look to in the hope of ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 03:04:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Renga 1 > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 03:07:36 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: renga anyone? In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. In the crooks were nannies and in the nannies began responsibilities. And desire. To which, Mr Stanley, to wit, "Mistah Bowering, he... ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 06:52:01 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: secrets of the list About the list, open or closed, are we snobs? I never thought the list was closed, never was told that. What I was told was that the address should not be published on other lists, and particularly not on any directories of lists. However, there was encouragement to tell people about it and tell them how to subscribe if they so desired. Growth was expected, with some sense as well that the list would work best if there was at least a general sense of knowing the people on the list (not necessarily knowing them before they participated, but getting to know them on the list as well). My assumption was that eventually the list, no matter what participants did, would grow to a size that wasn't so cozy. But it seems people drop off the list and drop on. Some drop back off. Some drop back on. So it seems there remains (I've been here a year or more now) a sense of knowing who one is talking with. Admittedly the ability to reach the archived list at EPC (which I first found while browsing the web, although I did know about EPC before that) complicates things for me. It's so easy to find on the web (at least if one has Yahoo to point to art, then literature, then poetry) that it makes the list seem very open indeed. Still, I don't know that a change is needed in how it is managed. I don't know if we're snobs or not. If we think of it as closed, then, yes, we're snobs. I do agree with Jim Rosenberg that there is a need for a "fully open" place to discuss poetry & poetics. However, if there were such a place, would I find the discussion more or less enlivening than I find it here? I don't know; I suppose I'd try it and find out. Here I've heard about foot, soul, and jelly roll, buffalo wings, cassette royalties, and a little more. charles alexander [===========^^============] chax press [ <> ] minnesota center for book arts [ maybe a <> pages ] phone & fax: 612-721-6063 [ time <> letters ] e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu [ upon <> frames ] [ once <> motion ] [ <> ] [===========vv============] ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 07:01:52 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: renga anyone? On Wed, 26 Jul 1995 03:07:36 -0700, Ron Silliman wrote: In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. In the crooks were nannies and in the nannies began responsibilities. And desire. To which, Mr Stanley, to wit, "Mistah Bowering, he... suffers himself too much, perhaps a small tango would permit charles alexander [===========^^============] chax press [ <> ] minnesota center for book arts [ maybe a <> pages ] phone & fax: 612-721-6063 [ time <> letters ] e-mail: mcba@maroon.tc.umn.edu [ upon <> frames ] [ once <> motion ] [ <> ] [===========vv============] ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 08:37:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Samuels Subject: Re: Jerome McGann In-Reply-To: from "Wystan Curnow" at Jul 26, 95 03:32:04 pm dear wystan curnow: jjm2f@virginia.edu will get you there. the system routes it for you. lisa samuels > > Dear Group. > I need an e-mail address for Jerome McGann. Can anyone > oblige? > Wystan > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:43:18 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kali Tal Subject: CFP--1995 Sixties Conference, Deadline extended Comments: To: "Albert, Stew" , "Applebome, Peter" , "Arthur R. McGee" , "Boose, Lynda" , "Gotera, Vince" , "Heller, Scott" , "Kelsey, Ann" , "King, William" , "Levine Thal, Jan" , SIXTIES-L , WMST-L We've extended the deadline for the Conference to August 15. Please forward this call for papers to any appropriate list or person. !!!CALL FOR PAPERS!!! 1995 SIXTIES GENERATIONS CONFERENCE An Interdisciplinary Conference of Scholars, Activists and Artists October 5-8, 1995 Western Connecticut State University Danbury, Connecticut Proposals due: August 15, 1995 I invite you to join us for the third annual Sixties Generations Conference: From Montgomery to Viet Nam on October 5-8, 1995. Last year over 400 scholars and students joined us at Western Connecticut State University to hear more than one hundred presentations by academics, activists, and artists. The Sixties Generations Conference is a showcase for intelligent and lively academic work in a variety of disciplines and studies fields, but what makes it special is the interdisciplinary emphasis and the collegial atmosphere. We've demonstrated that mixing academics with artists, crossing disciplines, and spanning generations fosters a creative and collaborative excitement that can't be matched. Our evaluation forms showed that over 95% of those who attended last year will be back in 1995. Here are some comments we received: "The Conference provided a rare opportunity to not only learn from scholars and artists but to engage in fruitful discussion that multiplied the impact of the meetings many times over. The organization and administration of the conference was superb and the facilities excellent. What was most gratifying was how so many of the scholars and artists in their lives and work sought to cut across traditional boundaries of gender, academic disciplines, and even of age: there was a lively mix of younger students and scholars and well-established teachers and professors. I look forward to next year's meeting knowing it will be a highlight of my academic annual activities." "The conference was an outstanding mix of scholars, students, artists, participants, participant-observers, etc. One could sample informal networking and heavy-duty scholarship. The interactions of panels and audience was lively and informative. Keep it up!" "I particularly appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of the conference. If not unique, it is extremely rare. Vietnam veterans, scholars, antiwar activists, artists, musicians, and writers all dealing with the same subject--in a better society, Vietnam Generation would be recognized and nurtured as a national resource. We remain committed to interdisciplinary work and to seeking diverse presentations. We particularly encourage the participation of those traditionally under-represented in academic discourse, and we do not shrink from controversial topics. In addition to soliciting work from traditional disciplines, we enthusiastically invite presentations in African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Women's Studies, Native American Studies and other studies programs. We know that most of the best work at conferences is done between sessions, when people get the chance to talk, to share stories, to set up collaborations. So we do our best to make sure that there is plenty of time for these activities-we arrange for meals to be available at the conference site, set up a lounge for refreshments, and keep coffee and tea available all day long. We also arrange evening events--our Sixties style coffeehouse reading was so successful last year that we will do it again, breaking it up into two nights of poetry, fiction, multimedia and performance art. As usual, we are doing all this work on a shoestring. Viet Nam Generation, Inc., is a literary and educational nonprofit which cannot yet afford to salary its staff. This conference has been supported entirely by volunteer efforts, the registration fees of participants and by our book sales. The facilities are generously provided by Western Connecticut State University. We know that many conferences can afford to waive fees for those presenting papers, but we cannot. We do waive fees for those who would not otherwise be able to participate, and we do our best to find alternative housing for those who cannot afford hotel rooms. We're committed to the notion that no one should be turned away for lack of funds. To meet this goal we rely on support from those who do have funds-faculty members or others with full-time positions and decent incomes. In fact, we encourage you, if you can afford it, to pay an extra registration fee to cover someone else with fewer resources. We also encourage you to subscribe to our journal, Viet Nam Generation, a forum for interdisciplinary written work on the war. We publish many of the Sixties Generations Conference papers in the pages of the journal, which is now entering its seventh volume year. Your support enables us to continue our efforts. Part of our philosophy is that we do not rank those who attend the Sixties Generations Conference-there are no "stars" here; we don't even put your institution on your name tag. We have no "keynote" speakers or "special" sessions. Those who attend don't do it for their c.v. They do it-and we do it-because the work we all do is vital, because we believe in an alternative to the rest of the deadly dull gatherings which pass for conferences in academia, and because we are dedicated to building a community of scholars, activists, and artists who can support each other in our work. I look forward to seeing you in October. Kali Tal Sixties Project & Viet Nam Generation, Inc. 18 Center Rd., Woodbridge, CT 06525 203/387-6882; fax 203/389-6104 email: kalital@minerva.cis.yale.edu home page: http://kalital.polisci.yale.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 10:08:21 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot In-Reply-To: <00993E2C.DE0ADE3E.100@admin.njit.edu> > now let me be a wet blanket and say that, thanks to grad school and beyond > (the perils of an education where I saw/read enough poetry from various > times and places to see that there is no definition of poetry which can > be applied universally), poetry has been "demystified" for me; there is no > such thing as poetry (though I'll play the scan game anytime because it is > so much fun but inconclusive). There is only the poetic. And there is history, > a pleasure and maybe of some use to scholar and poet alike. > > Burt What a loss! Poetry has been demystified for you and you no longer believe in it. There's no such thing as poetry? I think this is where Theory goes back in time and kills its mother. What are we all talking about if there is no poetry? Come on. Of course there is. The more I "know" about poetry, the more mysterious it becomes. The more I write, the harder it gets. Just because there is no universal, static definition of poetry, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Though perhaps it is a matter of faith. We don't know what souls are either, but many of us believe we have them. Who knows what animates one pile of words and not another? But can you deny that some word combinations do "come to life," invoke something beyond narrative, some mystery? To me, the very undefinability (is that a word?) of a poem is what MAKES it a poem. I can't believe grad school can kill a great poem, because nothing can kill a great poem. Maybe the ability to fathom mystery is wounded by certain kinds of education. If somebody convinces you that you know that much, maybe you ought to wonder.... Willa J. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 08:33:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Nanker Phlege Subject: pseudononomous newbie hi all, been perusing and emotionally espousing over the past day-- this list, in particular. i have chosen an alias howevver some albany folks may know who this is...it is slightly easier to relate to cyber- folks when certain things are _not_ an issue....in terms of the current prosodic debate, i've found e.a.poe's essay _rationale of verse_ to be a witty and insightful adventure into that topic. dry, very dry posting, but there is so much to read, learn and digest (too bad there is no way to use _logic_ symbology on this screen, ie "therefore") i have chosen to receive these postings via the _digest_ able option, therefore responses may be referential to the previous day's discourse. have a great day. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 10:39:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Re: renga anyone? In-Reply-To: <199507251922.PAA67736@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books writing themselves senseless, battery low ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 08:18:39 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Yasusada = Ern Malley This is Kevin Killian . . . I have my own two cents to add about the Yasusada saga, but first I want to know if I understand correctly, is "First Intensity" publishing yet more "new" work by Yasusada? It seems like a nightmare from several years back. I remember trying to get in touch with Tosa Motokiyu who for some reason had a P O Box in Sonoma County somewhere, and was sent a phone number-it was like a spy novel by Ian Fleming. Anyhow late at night, say, after midnight, a woman called me up and told me that Tosa Motokiyu was not to be bothered any more, that he was going through a painful divorce and no, no matter what I thought, neither the Yasusada circle nor the Motokiyu-Norinaga-Kyogin circle had any homosexual implications. No unlike the Georgekreis or the Spicer group there was no homosexual taint to either Japanese group. "I was just wondering," I said defensively. "You have been misled, by your own imagination," she replied calmly. "You don't understand the Japanese way of life." This was so true I couldn't think of what to add. She explained that Japanese poets giggle at Western homosexuality. After we hung up I had this uneasy feeling and started wondering whether or not Motokiyu had been honest with me. Then I heard that the whole Yasusada corpus was very much a contemporary product of a middle-aged white male poet, well known in the US, but not well enough known for his own self-esteem as we say here in San Francisco. This man had come up with the idea of inventing a whole Hiroshima poetry to test the openness of U S magazines. He was frustrated that his own poetry was being rejected at every turn whereas people of color no matter how untalented were being published. "Yasusada" was to be his revenge on the whole idea of the "politically correct," "multicultural" range of writing being published & preferred today. I was sent dozens and dozens of Yasusada's poems, and like Ron, was impressed. This was clearly a labor of love, if a little crazy and, by implication, way homophobic and racist. These events took place several years ago as I say. But I am still smarting from that dry little laugh on the phone from Sonoma. If Lee Chapman is on this list perhaps she could clear up how and when she came in contact with the poetry she printed in "First Intensity"? Thanks you all! Rod writes: > >"I feel an obligation to point out that it's not clear that Haraki >Yasusada actually exists. I published a group discussion in _Aerial >6/7_ >called "Renga & the New Sentence" by what purported to be three >Japanese poet/critics. I suspected at the time that it might be a fake, >but chose to publish it anyway, as it was simply too good to turn down. >I've since had a conversation that *seems* to confirm my suspicions >(No, I can't say more than that). Tho it's still unclear." > >Both Avery Burns and Eric Selland swear that Yasusada is a fictive >project, as are his translators. Selland, a translator of Japanese by >trade who's spent years over there and knows the poetry scene >intimately, should be in a position to know. > >Still, the work in Conjunctions is very good. I posted an enthusiastic >comment to this list when it first came out that I believe Luigi-Bob >may have reprinted in Taproot. > >Ron ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 12:07:19 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X From: Alan Golding Subject: Various and Sundry II: The Smorgasbord Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu A number of folks have asked, backchannel and front(?)channel, about the taped readings that I mentioned: details on how to get them, etc. You should contact Harriette Seiler, the Twentieth-Century Conference director; e-mail is hmseil01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu. Harriette will have more specific information than I do on the exact tapes that are available, price, etc. Let me know if you have any problems getting hold of her. Tom Kirby-Smith and "I can't walk": Yes, Phil Collins, but if we're (I'm) going to be scholarly about it, Phil in his post-Peter Gabriel Genesis incarnation, not in his Phil Collins incarnation. On "soul," "spirit," etc. (I promise I won't say a word on it after this): for fine (in all senses) meditations on these issues by a terrific contemporary poet, see John Taggart's slim book on Hopper, Remaining in Light, and his recent essay collection, Songs of Degrees (U of Alabama P). The questions involved are more complicated than those of personal "belief," I take it; and I take it partly because even as a devout atheist who can occasionally approach agnosticism on a good day, I've found these books v. compelling reading. On the free verse prosody discussion: years ago I wrote an essay on Olson that began as an attempt to come up with some kind of system or methodology for analyzing/discussing non-metrical prosody. Part of my argument, however, was that one needed to approach this analysis on a poet-by-poet, case-by-case basis; that you could generalize about an individual poet's practice (or practices, allowing for work by the same person in different modes, different stages of their career, etc.) but that it was awfully hard to come up with a method that applied across different poets' work (except for something that operated at an unsatisfactory level of generality). And I tried to illustrate all this via what now looks like a rather pedantic and technical close prosodic analysis of "In Cold Hell, In Thicket." I have pretty mixed feelings about this essay now, but my excuse/defense is that at the time of writing (late '70s) hardly anything had been done on the subject as far as I knew, though I think Don Wesling was getting going on his work around the same time. Anyway, for anyone who's interested, the piece was in Language and Style 14 (1981). Alan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 11:37:57 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: secrets of the list charles a writes > About the list, open or closed, are we snobs? .. > > I don't know; I suppose I'd try it and find out. Here I've heard > about foot, soul, and jelly roll, buffalo wings, cassette royalties, and a > little more. > thanks for the thoughtful discussion, charles. but i missed the buffalo wings. has the soul been discovered therein?--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 13:41:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Free Verse Soot >Poetry has been "demystified" for you so it no longer exists? >Well, I never thought I'd find myself quoting Dylan Thomas but: >"The tricks are easy to learn, it's the art that's difficult." (or words to that effect). Can't say as I see how calling it "art" clarifys. & it's true, I hope, that the longer you write the more you learn, but I'm with B.K. in that the "poetic" is not finally defineable. You know it when you see it, & who sees it where is different, I think, for different people. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 14:27:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: George and Ludwig (fwd) Thanks for the great feedback Gabrielle. I'm not stuck on the position I presented (or maybe I am) but for the sake of the network of standard stoppages I'll spin out a "defense." Key to the differences we might have I think is this passage: I wrote: >. . .Which points to possibilities, that the ideas are already > extant, within language, within contexts. . . You responded: >This, to me, gets dangerous again--as though the ideas like >things exist somehow within language but independent of it. Back to the >private >image and solipsism. I don't see how what I wrote cld be construed as taking a position which implied the formulation "within language but somehow independent of it." What I wrote seems to me to be saying pretty much what the Hejinian quote I cited is saying. Which is precisely that ideas are not private (subjective), but rather contextual (intersubjective), in ways we don't entirely understand-- thus the "in the air" formulation. A more accurate formulation is probably not possible because no context is _ultimately_ defineable, because all contexts are interrelated. This is a bit of Buddhist propaganda, but it seems to me useful. (I'm not arguing that there's never enough information in a given situation to act, merely that there are always more elements which could be taken into account). To boil it down perhaps what I'm saying is that every idea is an interaction. That the "heart of an idea" is not locatable "except in its use"! > It only gets tricky if one >starts taking the metaphor seriously and concretizing it and using it to >explain the world. It seems to me the viability of this articulation is only apparent precisely when it is concretized. A good example of this is Cage's process in his later writings such as _Themes & Variations_ , _I-VI_, & "Art Is Either A Complaint Or Do Something Else." In this series he tried, & I think he often succeeded, "to find a way of writing which though coming from ideas is not about them; or is not about ideas but produces them." The manner in which he did this is outlined in the introduction to _I-VI_ and in the interview w/ Joan Retallack in _Aerial 6/7_, among other places. Briefly, it involved subjecting a source text (or texts) to chance operations which then presented him with a mix of source materials in which he then searched for ideas, eliminating materials which allowed them to emerge. These were not necessarily semantic "ideas" but could as well be "musical"-- i.e. related to the sound and texture, the movement of language, as well as to the making of statements, obviously they are always in some sense both of these. Though one need not cite Cage to illustrate my point. Ashbery's "floating pronouns" in a poem like "These Lacustrine Cities," or Mallarme's famous "All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice" ("Tout Pensee emet un Coup de Des") can't figure how to get diactical markings on this new keyboard)), relate to what I'm saying. More recently Carla Harryman's "Toy Boats" in _Poetics Journal 5_ seems to me an excellent articulation of the ways of thinking about these issues I'm forwarding. She writes: "I am an indication of what occurs around me." & also, beautifully, "Both belief and denial throw existence into question." She ends the piece with the following paragraph: "A structure for writing that comes from anticipation relative to an elsewhere, which to become a somewhere-- i.e., a writing --must borrow from the things of this world in their partiality." So, that's what I think right now. To respond to a few other points-- I suspect that the idea of a schism in Wittgenstein's thought is based partially in the events of his life, & I don't think that's an entirely bogus point of view. In retrospect we can see the seeds of the late thought in the early but there does seem an openness to a less proscriptive investigation in the later work I think. It seems to me in the _Tractatus_ that he, like Pound for so long, wanted to make it cohere. Also you wrote: > Look at how people make theories out of their feelings, then concretize the theories and make the world fit >their feelings. It's become a bit of a cliche to say, but I'm not sure in the end we can distinguish between emotion & intellect. That perhaps an oversimplification, and if I were a scientist I might not say that. However, I was reading in Alan Ryan's biography of Dewey last night-- Dewey argued that "what scientists do when they try to understand the world is not very different from what any of us do when we try to decide what to do or think"-- this _feels_ right to me. (Dewey eschewed both violent revolution & acceptance of the status quo in favor of the slogan "Intelligent Action!" & although tagged "pragmatist" prefered the term "experimentalism" -- i.e. find out what works and do that. Chomsky went to a Deweyite school in Philadelphia til the age of 12.) & finally (I didn't expect this to be such a long post, geeze, now I have to keep myself from writing another lengthy response to a, to me, seriously reductive comparison of Zorn & Cage by Kevin McNeilly which appears in the Jan. _Postmodern Culture_-- don't nobody tell Bruce how much time I'm spending on here, I'm supposed to be working on the Andrews issue of Aerial, it's our little secret, please) Gabrielle wrote: >We speak in wonderful metaphors (I'm getting pictures of ideas like >puppies waiting for an owner to come home). I'm exactly arguing that ideas don't have "owners," but we come home to them whether we want to or not. Art's part of what makes us aware of when they're around. & some may be puppies, some grown-up, some old, some dead dogs-- mutts, chihuahuas, pit bulls, lassies, Snoopys & Goofys (Baudrillard?) &, of course, east german shepherds. ggrrrrawwlrrrruff! ruff! ruff! --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 11:55:10 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: pseudononomous newbie George Bowering just commented the other day about pop star-poets & now here's Nanker Phlege on board. Hi, Nanker. I'd always thought your last name was spelled Phelge, but then, you would know. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 16:29:02 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Organization: University of NC at Greensboro Subject: ON THE CONTRARY I think that I was advised in THE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET never to say anything ironic by e-mail. Once Douglas Bush, lecturing at Harvard, made reference to the discovery of Wordsorth's illegitimate child and remarked drily, that "This discovery has done much to enhance his reputation in some quarters." A Boston Newspaper reported this as an example of the degeneracy of the academic profession. After that Bush advised, with some shade of irony, "Never be ironic!" With ingenuous candor I would like to say that Marjorie Perloff is absolutely right about this business of free verse feet/rhythms. (On the subject of John Cage, though, I'd rather observe a few minutes of complete silence.) Tom Kirby-Smith English Department UNC-Greensboro Greensboro NC 27412 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 16:40:44 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot re: periodization: substitute contextual for historical. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 16:44:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Nanker Phlege Subject: Re: pseudononomous newbie yes, the name has been changed to protect the innocent from copywrite issues. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 16:54:55 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Jonathan, Nothing "tricky" or facile about my relationship to the non-existent poetry, but rather the opposite. Like marriage perhaps. Get past the romantic stuff and really get down to the "real" thing, which ends up being expressed in one or another finite ejaculation that stems out of profound doubt or whatever. Don't mean to go Buddhist of Bronk on you, but anyway, let me say that I believe in poetry, yet cannot ever say comprehensively what it is, and this is good because this means that I am now looking not at the poetry but at the human beings who make/have made it. I.e., when I contemplate poetry I am using it as a tool for learning about, for coming to know, the human experience. Now I'm afraid I'm slipping back into the kind of pleasurable circular and double talk that I participated in with some others on this list not long ago about art etc., where to draw lines and so on. Please don't take what I said, finally, as being either nihilistic or trite. Rather, I am sharing with you my deepest concerns. And I welcome responses to what I say because I am listening. As Bronk once ended an early poem of his: "I'd talk to you if I thought I could. Tell me. What do you know?" [qtd frm memory] Burt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 17:16:38 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Willa, Cf. my last post to Jonathan. I did not say I did not believe in poetry. And yes, as you say, the mystery is the thing! Let me correct you on one point: theory has not spoiled poetry for me--it has deepened it for me. I am not afraid of knowledge (though I deplore jargon as much as the next gal or guy). My demystification came about from seeing so many "versions" of poetry that didn't conform to each other, in various times and places, that I had to conclude that poetry was culture specific. E.g, Beowulf's meter has what tto do with with, say, Haiku (or even Renga!). Now, as for "the poetic"--here I think we can begin to talk consistently about a human experience that transcends particular culture, period, etc. Burt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 14:03:39 +0000 Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Joseph Zitt Organization: HumanSystems Subject: Re: Renga 1 Comments: To: Ron Silliman On 26 Jul 95 at 3:04, Ron Silliman wrote: > > > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar Solemn air and sabbath retrograde ---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------- |||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Human Systems \||| ||/ Organizer, SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \|| |/ Online Representative, Austin International Poetry Festival \| / Joe Zitt's Home Page\ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 18:27:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Scheil Subject: Re: Renga 3 In-Reply-To: <199507261002.DAA08106@ix8.ix.netcom.com> On Wed, 26 Jul 1995, Ron Silliman wrote: > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books > That cooks would look to in the hope of many forms of soup comingled (miso-plum puree, chalk-salt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 14:48:41 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: AA/student loan protest I thought that some of you in California might be interested in Jamie's intention to get a protest rolling about the Affirmative ACtion cut at Berkeley and all the other cuts that are or will be devastating students, welfare recipients and many others. I'm sure she'd appreciate word from anyone who'd like to get involved. Gabrielle From: jaMarchant@aol.com A month or two ago (whenever it was) when I first heard about Republicans' prosed cuts in the student loan program, I could not believe it was real. I couldn't think they would seriously cut a program so needed and long standing while proposing more tax cuts for the wealthy and while we still provide cooperations with billions of dollars to help them finance overseas advertising. I was sure there would be protests and that "they" would do something to stop this from happening. Then last week when Wilson in a brash (I could use other adjectives, but I will refrain) political move eliminated all AA in the UC system despite protests from students, administration, and faculty, I deeply hoped that this would backfire on him, and again that "they" would protest and do something to make Wilson regret the day that he ever made such a rash move. Then last night after composing my second post about our common enemy--the richest 1% who control 40% of the wealth--(I hope I didn't wax too melodramatic in my sleep deprived state), I began to wonder who this mystery "they" that was going to stop Wilson and the Republicans on these two issues was. Regardless of how any of you feel about AA, the student loans cut if they go through we end up costing all of us in a very direct way--$1000s or $10,000s, and I know that most, if not all of us, are already broke and deeply in debt. If we, including myself, keep waiting around for "them" to do something, we may be waiting for the rest of our lives and end up in debtors' prision (since this now seems a very reasonable next move for the Republicans). It was then that I got my idea of organizing a protest march on Sacramento, protesting these two issues. I envisioned this protest occurring on the second weekend after Fall semester begins on the UC campuses (could someone attending a UC tell me when this would be?). This would give undergraduates time to return to campus and get involved. In my mind, this grew into a tremendous protest by getting, in addition to students, groups such as NOW, the League of Women Voters, Jesse Jackson and his group, the Mexican American Legal Defense league, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, etc., involved and acting as co-sponsors of the protest. I envisioned simulateous, although smaller, protests occuring in other states. In my sleep deprived state, this grew into the largest student protest since the 60s. So tell me have I come up with a brilliant idea, if slightly exaggerated idea, or do I need to go back to bed and get some more sleep? I can't do this alone. If you believe that it is a good idea and that it could work, would you be willing to help, or do you have advice as to how we should go about organizing such a thing? If I go ahead on this, Erik or any other Counsel representative, would the Graduate Student Caucus give its official support, meaning allowing us to use its name to give us creditability when contacting other groups? I really think that there is enough angry out there to mobilize people if someone would start the ball rolling. I'm leaving town tomorrow to attend a Conference in Mississippi and will be gone for about a week. I look forward (I think) to hearing your responses on this matter when I get back. You can send your responses to my personal email if you want since I'm not sure we should be taking up any more space on the list. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 14:50:25 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: UC Berkeley Regents Meeting - warning LONG (fwd) I thought the political among us would be interested in this close-up of the Regents' meeting at Berkeley. Gabrielle > > >FYI...some notes on last week's Regents meeting from Charles Schwartz, >UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus and Activist. > >\Regards, >Alan Inouye > > July 25, 1995 > > Governor Pete Wilson scored a major political victory >for his Presidential campaign when he lined up his friends on >the UC Board of Regents last week to trash the University's >affirmative action programs. What will the consequences be? > > Here is a collection of statements made at the Regents >meeting on July 20-21,1995, which should be of special interest >to UC faculty members. They go beyond the particular issue of >affirmative action and point out more fundamental challenges to >the University. At the end I have posed some questions for my >colleagues to ponder. > > ***** PLEASE RE-CIRCULATE THIS WIDELY ***** >_______________________________________________________________ >_______________________________________________________________ > > During the public comment period of the Regents meeting on >Thursday, a number of speakers recited the following statement >of principle, which is contained in Article IX Section 9 of the >Constitution of the State of California: > >"The University shall be entirely independent of all political >or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appoint- >ment of its regents and in the administration of its affairs" >_______________________________________________________________ > >DEAN HAILE DEBAS: "Governor Wilson, President Peltason, Regents, >Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for the privilege of >addressing you today. I am dean of the School of Medicine at >the University of California, San Francisco, but I have been >associated with UC since the early 1970s. The University of >California is an institution that I have come to love and >greatly admire. I am, therefore, greatly saddened that what >should be a solemn and deliberative meeting, the outcome of >which will have far reaching effects, has been hijacked by >political ambition and obscure personal agendas. > > "The debate on affirmative action raises two important >philosophical issues: 1) Does the public underwrite higher >education to benefit the individual or society? 2) In an >academic institution, what body or bodies appropriately >determine academic policy? > > "While watching CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday, I heard >Governor Wilson state that admission to the University of >California is based not on merit, but on race and gender. As a >UC dean, I feel compelled to respond to that extraordinary >statement. > > "The admissions policy at UCSF is not politically >motivated. It has been very carefully developed, debated, >modified and improved over the span of 30 years. An applicant's >race or ethnicity, as well as socioeconomic status regardless of >race, are considered during the second screening of our eight- >step admissions process. This information is used to evaluate >the hardships a student has had to overcome to achieve his or >her grade point average and MCAT score. We have no quotas or >set-asides. A process such as this is the only way to >effectively combat the inherent disadvantage of belonging to >certain racial or socio-economic groups in American society. > > "Our admission system has enabled us to achieve diversity >and national academic preeminence. One might ask, But can you >show that your affirmative action program directly benefits the >diverse population of California? The answer is unequivocally >YES! > > "A recent UCSF study conclusively confirmed what we have >long suspected: that African-American and Hispanic physicians >return to serve their respective communities, the very >communities that need more doctors! > > "Hence, if you, the Regents of the University of >California, believe that the public underwrites higher education >to benefit society, you cannot close your eyes to these >compelling findings. These accomplishments would not have been >possible without affirmative action. If you dismantle >affirmative action, you are denying the nation the healing >opportunity to reject the injustice of race and class >discrimination. > > "Now, let me be personal and take a look at my own career. >I have often examined and rejected that my success was due to >special considerations I might have received because I am Black. >Like some other successful minorities, I have wanted the world >to know that my success represents a personal triumph. > > "However, it would be both disingenuous and self-serving if >I failed to recognize, and publicly acknowledge, that without >the environment created by Affirmative Action, the doors would >have been closed to me. > > "And now for my final comments: 1) If you vote to dismantle >affirmative action, you are doing so in defiance and in utter >disregard, of the entire University: in defiance of its >president, of all its vice presidents, of all its chancellors, >of the academic faculty senates of all nine campuses, of the >systemwide academic council, and of the student leadership. >2) It would be an outrage if thirteen or fourteen regents, >acting alone, destroyed an historic instrument of social >progress in a moment of political frenzy. > > "At the very least, you should table the proposal until >you have adequately considered the individuals and communities >you will harm, and until you can examine it with the thought >and deliberation it deserves. Thank you!" >_______________________________________________________________ > -- Thursday evening, Regents' debate -- > >REGENT JOHN DAVIES (a close personal friend and political ally >of Governor Wilson): "I would like to go back and somehow >describe if I can the agonizing process we have all gone >through here as regents to arrive at this point. This is not a >recent political phenomenon. This subject started to percolate >over a year ago when a couple at San Diego complained about >their son being refused admission to the medical school in San >Diego. And that led to studies at the request of regents and >presentations beginning in November. All that time, as I >recall, there was no Presidential campaign going on. That's >just a false charge. This item ... [noise from audience] > > "I listened to you for six and a half hours; give me my >five minutes. We then had presentations throughout the first >six months of this year on various aspects of the subject of >affirmative action. ... This has been a very difficult process. >What I have learned from that process is that we use race in an >impermissible way in governing admissions and contracting and >hiring. The proof of it is a statement made here in response >to Regent Carmona's question, What would be the effect at >Berkeley of eliminating race as a factor in admissions? It >would take admissions [of African-American freshman] from 207 to >44. And if that isn't a significant factor, I don't know what >is. That's a dominant factor. > > "I agree with Regent Leach's analysis. We are not talking >about doing away with affirmative action. Everybody on this >Board supports affirmative action. [noise from audience] > > "We support the goal of achieving diversity. We realize >the necessity of having diversity on the campuses. The people >of this state have to feel that they are all a part, they have >to buy into a system that is healthy for everybody. We cannot >exist without doing that. The question is whether this is the >right tool to use. My opinion is that we have learned that this >tool does more harm than good. Now I am determined to find a >different way. And I think Regent Connerly's proposal directs >the Academic Senate to develop supplemental factors that could >be used, excluding race, to get us a diverse student body that >we should have. And if they can't come up with something that >will achieve that diversity, then we need new faculty. That >should not be that difficult. [noise from audience] > > "I am not talking about just economic factors, the whole >list of supplemental factors and it would include all the >disadvantages we heard spoken to this morning so eloquently by >people who have suffered from them. Those factors should be >considered, those are obstacles that are overcome, those >should help people be admitted into the University. But that >doesn't mean it is morally right to award places in the >University on the basis of race. I agree with Regent Leach in >that respect. So I support both of Regent Connerly's proposals." > >_______________________________________________________________ > -- Friday morning, public comment period -- > >REGENT ROY BROPHY: "Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am speaking on >Ed Policy 305, which is Shared Governance. That permits me to >say what I intend to say and that is: If there ever was a >violation of shared governance it occurred during the >affirmative action vote yesterday. I am not going to talk about >how the votes came about, I am not going to talk about >affirmative action. ... Your Board managed to circumvent the >president. Your board managed to circumvent the chancellors, >and also to circumvent the faculty and you managed to circumvent >the students. I would say staff too, I am sure they were >circumvented somewhere along the line, also it is going to >affect them. > > "But, it bothers me, not that we passed the thing, not >because of what we voted on, not really because of the political >pressure that was involved in the vote. But what bothers me >more than anything else is for us to circumvent the best people >we have, ...those are the Chancellors. That was so unfortunate, >and the president and the faculty and the students. But I only >hope in the future that we can keep it in mind that if we are >going to do something like this let's not have a quick vote and >shake hands and go home. We must plan for the future, in the >future, that everyone is involved in the process ..." > >_______________________________________________________________ > >PROFESSOR CHARLES SCHWARTZ: "Two items related to your agenda. >The first one is 507 on the Finance Committee: Budget Plan ... > > "In connection with budget problems, yesterday's action >raises serious budget issue that I think has not been called to >your attention. An essential part of Connerly's proposal to >change admissions policy involves the redirection and >improvement and enlargement of academic outreach programs to K >through twelve. This is the essential feature of the program >you voted in to get rid of race-based stuff and bring in >improved academic outreach. And I ask the very simple question, >What is that program going to cost? I believe it was >irresponsible of Mr. Connerly to bring that proposal to the >Board without a cost estimate. In that document, " > >REGENT JOHN DAVIES: "Point of order, Mr. Chairman, which item >does this discussion relate to?" > >REGENT CLAIR BURGENER (Chair): "Professor, which item on our >agenda today do your comments ..." > >SCHWARTZ: "This has to do with general budget planning." > >DAVIES: "I don't think there is any such item." > >SCHWARTZ: "507" > >DAVIES: "That is not a general budget item." > >SCHWARTZ: "It is integrally related to budget planning. 507 is >about cuts in next year's budget and among other things, they >are going to be a lot worse to deal with if you were truthful >and honest in the commitment this Board made, not just to try >and improve academic outreach, but in Connerly's words to >achieve effectively the increased UC eligibility of Latinos, >Blacks and other underrepresented groups throughout the country. >It was irresponsible of this Board not to ask for a cost >estimate before you voted for that. It is not going to be a >problem solved by throwing a couple of more million into the >outreach program. It is an enormously expensive job of social >engineering that you have committed yourselves to. And a very >practical question, Who is going to pay for that? Thank you, >on that topic." > >[Some dispute about time for further comments] > >SCHWARTZ: "I do thank you for that [additional 3 minutes]. It >will be on the implications of what you did yesterday in a >broader context. I am not going to argue the pros and cons of >affirmative action but what you did yesterday and its >implications for the University. A couple of the speakers >yesterday spoke to that question, most particularly Professor >Simmons and Dean Debas. I think you have no idea of the short >term and long term implications of the politicization that came >to this Board yesterday. [further objections are heard] > > "Mr. Davies will leave. He doesn't care to hear this. >This fundamental question of the independence, the political >independence of the university: What are and will be the >consequences? I don't know yet what the faculty at large >thinks, will think about this. But I am very frightened that >there will be - regardless of how many times people here say it >was not politics, it was some other issue - the impression >among many of the faculty at the University and faculty in the >national academic community, that this Board has violated its >obligation to protect the university from politics and has >railroaded in a most divisive political issue into the >University. And what enormous harm this can do. > > "I think we are going to have to address that issue. You >can not turn away from it. It will last for a long time. I >suggest, among other things, you review the history of the >Loyalty Oath in the fifties. Very interesting parallels; and >the great damage that was done by an overzealous Board of >Regents responding on high moral grounds to a strong popular >public issue. > > "It's worse than that. I think Regent Brophy was talking >about this: ... the very clear fracture within the Board; and >the very clear fracture between the Board and its appointed >administrative and faculty representatives. That is a very >serious issue whose repercussions are enormous. > > "Now, I know that Mr. Brophy [who chairs the Regents >presidential search committee] has problems in getting a >president that must be overwhelming. You may have one >perspective on it, but think about the perspective of faculty >people. What self-respecting college president would take this >job when he knows he's got a Board of Regents that is likely to >come ramming in with God-knows-what political issue next week? >But of course, you will find someone to be president. And what >will the faculty think of that someone? A political tool of the >Regents and whatever political clique happens to be in the >majority of the Board. That is not a very healthy way in which >to maintain a great university. > > "And it's worse than that. Because what also came out >clearly yesterday was that members of the Board, at least some >of them, believe that the administrators lie to them, conceal >facts, and are unwilling to sit down and discuss issues >seriously. That is an issue in which I have had personal >experience. And you are right. But how can you run a university >with such fractures in it? [the gavel is heard] > > "I have suggestions, but I've run out of time. Thank you." > >_______________________________________________________________ >_______________________________________________________________ > > Above and beyond the debate over affirmative action, we >see an ancient question now thrust before the faculty of the >University of California: QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES? >(who shall keep the keepers themselves?) > > The primary responsibility of the Regents is to keep the >University "entirely independent of all political or sectarian >influence"; but they themselves have now become the trespassers. >Who but the faculty, acting together, can mount the effort >necessary to restore the principle of academic independence, for >the benefit of this university and for others as well? And if >we fail to do this, what consequences can we expect? > > I invite your responses to this challenge. > > >Charles Schwartz schwartz@physics.berkeley.edu >Physics Department, UCB 510/642-4427 >Berkeley, CA 94720 > > > > -- Joe Aimone Department of English University of California, Davis joaimone@ucdavis.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 20:53:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Herb to George In-Reply-To: <199507260401.VAA26177@sparta.SJSU.EDU> Now that's an odd question to these ears. Jazz musicians who wrote and published poetry include Oliver Lake, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, and even , now and then, Dewey Redman. Don't know if son Joshua has had a try at verse yet. But then, the question was prbably meant to be ironic, no? maybe Dewey didn't actually write the poem I once heard him recite, though. & eliot wouldn't know a saxophone from a telephone. not his instrument -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 00:34:37 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Renga1 > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar >Solemn air and sabbath retrograde Why: these dots in the race when dreamt, did birds ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 21:59:19 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: the feminine > "It may >seem like a betrayal of the few courageous women who are our clear >'feminist' ancestors . . . to acknowledge a 'feminine' tradition >dominated by males. But it is far worse to deny the presence of the >feminine in language (as Ostriker and others do) by missing the fact that >the feminine has never been exclusively 'embodied' in female writers." >The essay can be found in FEMINIST MEASURES, edited by Lynn Keller and >Cristanne Miller (U of Michigan Press). There are problems with the >argument--why still call this move "feminine"?--but it is a marvelous >antidote to Ostriker et al's essentialism. Hi Susan-- Just out of curiosity, what would you suggest as an alternative to "feminine", assuming as I am that the term "feminine" has instead here been dislocated from "femaleness" to suggest a set of attributes possessed by both men and women? Or is this a misreading? Steve ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 03:03:12 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Huey, Dewey, Louis Of course in George's original list of Lewis, Redman and Zukofsky, he neglected to mention that Huey Lewis is the stepson of Lew Welch! ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 10:02:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Willa Jarnagin Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot In-Reply-To: <00993F04.0801138E.78@admin.njit.edu> > Cf. my last post to Jonathan. I did not say I did not believe in poetry. And > yes, as you say, the mystery is the thing! Let me correct you on one point: > theory has not spoiled poetry for me--it has deepened it for me. I am not > afraid of knowledge (though I deplore jargon as much as the next gal or guy). > My demystification came about from seeing so many "versions" of poetry that > didn't conform to each other, in various times and places, that I had to > conclude that poetry was culture specific. E.g, Beowulf's meter has what tto > do with with, say, Haiku (or even Renga!). Now, as for "the poetic"--here > I think we can begin to talk consistently about a human experience that > transcends particular culture, period, etc. > > Burt Burt, I was responding to your phrase "there is no such thing as poetry." But I'm glad you DO believe in poetry afterall. I don't think that knowledge can destroy anything, nevermind poetry. Theory is just another tool, another language, and I don't even think "jargon" is so bad; it's just words we invent to use among ourselves. I guess people are wary of jargon because it might seem to exclude those outside the 'circle'. But all circles of people, sub-cultures, whatever you want to call them, make up their own words to use among themselves. My sister and her husband and their two-year-old daughter have their own language. You're saying that poetry is culture-specific, but the poetic transcends cultural differences? That's an interesting thought. (Is this where your disdain for jargon comes from? Jargon is hyper-culture-specific, and therefore limits the poetic?) But it seems that FORMS of poetry, rather than simply the whole entity of a POEM, is what is culture-specific. Yes, Beowolf's meter has little in common with Haiku, but the emotional content of two such different kinds of poems might be the same. What do you think? Willa J. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 10:41:26 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jorge Guitart Subject: Re: Renga1 In-Reply-To: <950727003428_123947178@aol.com> On Thu, 27 Jul 1995, Rod Smith wrote: > > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar > >Solemn air and sabbath retrograde > Why: these dots in the race when dreamt, did birds > > > in flew inverted sabbath race in whistle window retrograde ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 11:03:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: Herb to George or Thomas to Frank (not Waldo, not Dylan, much less Zimmerman, or Lyden or Rotten in Denmark--a live album (not jazz tho improving--Eliotic) (BUdakon--Buddha--con--like the Naropa Catalogue's misappropriation of Shakespeare's "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin" (a little less than kind) with a little leaf, as if PIPING his wood notes wilde) Anyway--A.L. writes "and eliot wouldn't know a saxophone from a telephone" and that's the one frank didn't reach for to right a poem, right? cs. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 11:21:10 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Chronicle Just thought I'd mention that the Buffalo Poetics Program got a great writeup in _The Chronicle of Higher Education_ article, "Bridging A Divide Between Poetry And Criticism" on page A12 of the 7/28 issue. Well worth looking at! --Loss ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 11:30:39 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: beowulf (willa jargon) Willa raises a good point when she asks is it possible that the emotional content of Beowulf and "Haiku" might possibly be the same-- I've been thinking about the "two poles" of the British poetic tradition--that the two pieces often AT THE BEGINNING of most anthologies are Caedmon's Hymn and Beowulf--and though the story behind Caedmon's hymn is more interesting than the hymn itself (bear with me if i sad this before--it's kinda a schtick), the difference between the "lyric" and the "epic" sensibility in these two pieces that we see still I suppose exists today--- One could say that if Caedmon were a character in Beowulf he would actually be GRENDEL (if not Grendel's mother)--I think this notion of the "sensitive" lyric outsider running away from society vs. the "representative man" in Beowulf is quite emotionally distinct--- Yet,they are both potentially MALE COMPENSATORY fantasies--and perhaps the "difference" between Dickinson and Whitman is a better paradigm if I'd like to stress the emotional difference between "epic" and "lyric"--for while Caedmon wanted to see "God as a roof" Dickinson wanted the top of her head blown off and thus provides a better Anti-Beowulf strategy (if that's what you're looking for) ---well, enough for now--I've probably already said too much.... Chris S. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 12:07:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: renga worms In-Reply-To: <199507270601.CAA123543@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Automatic digest processor" at Jul 27, 95 00:01:52 am Joe Zitt writes: "I don't know if this is a common thing in renga wrangling, but I'm interested in following up on what has started with the multiple second lines being offered -- perhaps we could set up an ongoing hypertext, branching off as the writing does so. (Pardon if this is a beentheredonethat -- I am but a poor wagon driver and unstudied in the ways of these lands B-]. )" Yeah, it looks up this renga things opens up a whole can of hypertextual worms. I didn't think about that when I proposed it, but i guess thats a what-i-take-to-be-pretty-cool effect of transposing the form to cyberspace. But i guess if people just respond to whatever branching they like, and post their additions, the "thing" will/could unfold naturally in ever-branching hyper-dendritic form. Also: Charles Alexander, i think, points out that i started w/ a sentence and asks if that's usual. Well, i really don't know, but i guess you can do it however you like. The Yasusada, or make that "Yasusada," selections in FI are in sentence form, so i took them as a model. But i notice that in at least one of Ron Silliman's contributions, he removed the period from my first sentence, thereby starting a more stichic branching--which seems like a good idea too. Somebody else--I think Rod Smith--asked about/proposed a rationale of maximal disjunction between lines. Again, at the risk of belaboring the point, this seems like a good idea for a particular branching.... In any event, i hope people will keep posting, 'cause i'd like to see what turns up... steve ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 13:28:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: Re: Renga1 > > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar > >Solemn air and sabbath retrograde > Why: these dots in the race when dreamt, did birds > > > in flew inverted sabbath race in whistle window retrograde >We are feeling very good indeed among the lumber ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 13:33:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: Re: Renga 1 New renga rule: every fourth line must include the word "cloud" >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar >The book and the oboe on the grass under sun and cloud ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 13:41:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: rereading As a sort of corollary to Kenny Goldsmith's vanity fair question--what books are on your bedside table (which I just saw for the first time and am I embarrassed!)--I'd like to ask the list what books people are re-reading. I just went back to: _Differences for Four Hands_ by Rosmarie Waldrop _L'Archiviste_ by Laura Moriarty _Fermina Marquez_ by Valery Larbaud This was a thought provoked to speech by Juan Goytisolo's mildly vehement piece on rereading in the _50_ anthology from S&M. Curious, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 12:34:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot willa j writes: .. You're saying that poetry is culture-specific, but the poetic transcends > cultural differences? That's an interesting thought. yes indeed. could anyone say more? not so much about the first half, but the second. what is "the (transcultural) poetic"? a heightened sense of verbal "power," in whatever (aesthetic, medicinal, social etc) sense ? a frame of mind (as in,"bob kaufman was a poet 24 hrs a day, 365 days a yr", without writing a word for 10 yrs, etc)?--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:09:30 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Encyclopedia of Jewish American poets and Playwrights Sorry to all for talking publicly but maybe the following will be of general interest after all. Maria Damon: my backchannel messages to you keep getting kicked back to me. So: The editor of the Encyclopedia of Jew.-Am. Poets and playwrights, who last I heard was still looking for people to write entries, is Joel Shatzky, Dept of English, SUNY Cortland, NY 13045. e-mail: shatzkyj@nycorva.cortland.edu Hope this helps, BK ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:23:41 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Willa, last first: I don't think that haiku and four stress alliterative OE verse carry the same emotional charges. why this is is a big exploration. now as for jargon: yes you are right that jargon includes and/or excludes, and is defined by that function. but jargon is also a personal reaching-for, a poeticism if you will, and way to say something that has not been expressed, I think, and thus it can begin as not part of a group. Perhaps groups coalesce around jargon, when people with like goals are attracted to a discourse. My problem with jargon has to do with the fact that I wish for there to be unity in my experience. Often, jargon is fabricated and thus is of the present, and so the past, history, tends to get excluded. For instance, I may know what you mean if you were to talk to me about, say, "subject position," but I emotionally and maybe in some respects cognitively--certainly psychologically, feel more comfortable with the term "self," even as I may recognize that this term is so imprecise when discussing for example the Western sense of "self" in the twelfth-century and in the seventeenth-century and in the twentieth-century, that I cannot get very far with it. On the other hand, "subject-position" provides me with a revelation about individual consciousness vis-a-vis discourse within a group, etc., that I can begin to think deeply about the differnt senses of self at different times in history. Yet, damnit, "subject-position" is clumsy esthetically and in other ways and also severely limited. But most of all, it has very little to do with my life as a whole. I suppose the rest of my life will have to catch-up with my use of "subject-position" and not the other way around. Anyway, what this all boils down to is, that, frankly, I can't imagine, say, two people making love and using the term "subject-position" in their conver- sation (let's presume that some people talk while they make love_. I.e., it feels and therefore in some sense it is, unnatural. But I guess what we feel is natural changes? YOurse, Burt (sorry for being so long winded and round about) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:29:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: beowulf (willa jargon) Chris, How much the same or different is Feudal Japanes culture and earliest Christian German culture. I for one did not mean to set up the binary: lyric-epic. as for male-female, your point seems well taken. I also wonder, anyway, to get back to my original point on this, if you are reading Caedmon's Hymn in the original where the music will come through, where the textures are what perhaps one might have found if one were alive in pre-Millenium England or the Germanies. Burt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:10:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: Encyclopedia of Jewish American poets and Playwrights In message <00993FC3.D19A36DE.8@admin.njit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Sorry to all for talking publicly but maybe the following will be of general > interest after all. > > > Maria Damon: > > my backchannel messages to you keep getting kicked back to me. So: > > The editor of the Encyclopedia of Jew.-Am. Poets and playwrights, who last > I heard was still looking for people to write entries, is > Joel Shatzky, Dept of English, SUNY Cortland, NY 13045. > e-mail: shatzkyj@nycorva.cortland.edu > > Hope this helps, > > BK yes, thanks much. --md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 17:52:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: Re: Renga1 In-Reply-To: <950727132848_124288537@aol.com> > > > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > > > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > > > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar > > >Solemn air and sabbath retrograde > > Why: these dots in the race when dreamt, did birds > > > > in flew inverted sabbath race in whistle window retrograde > many forms of soup comingled (miso-plum puree, chalk-salt We are feeling very good indeed among the lumber Spotted 72 King Penguins (No's 32, 33 and 66 missing) ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 15:13:56 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Huey, Dewey, Louis In-Reply-To: <199507271003.DAA23817@ix2.ix.netcom.com> from "Ron Silliman" at Jul 27, 95 03:03:12 am But listen here, I am betting that good as they are, Huey Lewis's band aint going to remain news, so maybe they make good poetry but not great poetry. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 15:20:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: pseudononomous newbie In-Reply-To: <01HTBZUVYRO28Y6XU2@albnyvms.BITNET> from "Nanker Phlege" at Jul 26, 95 04:44:55 pm "copywrite"? --is this some sort of weak pun? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:31:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: Renga 1 In-Reply-To: <950727133300_124291642@aol.com> from "Jordan Davis." at Jul 27, 95 01:33:02 pm How about another rule: every fifth line must preceed the first: Before alive and bled by law> > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar > >The book and the oboe on the grass under sun and cloud > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:38:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ryan Knighton Subject: Re: rereading In-Reply-To: <950727134120_124297859@aol.com> from "Jordan Davis." at Jul 27, 95 01:41:50 pm No this will not be about "re rereading", although the subject line implies something thereabouts. Good question, though. Perhaps we should add why one is rereading something. Yes? Anyways, I've got salinger's Nine Short Stories back in hand, for better or for worse. This is because of a conversation with friends about the significance of fruit and color in several of them. SAdly, this is it. I don't find the time for rereading, it seems. And now that the question has been asked, I wonder why. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 13:53:35 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Schultz Subject: Re: the feminine In-Reply-To: <199507270459.VAA12527@slip-1.slip.net> Steve--yes, this is the question, isn't it? I think your reading is entirely right; my problem, in the context of this article by Retallack, is that "the feminine" is defined as/through "silence." While there's real intuitive truth to this, I'd like to see further distinctions. What is the difference, for example, between Laura Riding's silence and Gertrude Stein's? What is the force of that distinction? As for Stein, she put less fine a point on it in her geographical history of America: "in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman." Susan On Wed, 26 Jul 1995, Steve Carll wrote: > > "It may > >seem like a betrayal of the few courageous women who are our clear > >'feminist' ancestors . . . to acknowledge a 'feminine' tradition > >dominated by males. But it is far worse to deny the presence of the > >feminine in language (as Ostriker and others do) by missing the fact that > >the feminine has never been exclusively 'embodied' in female writers." > >The essay can be found in FEMINIST MEASURES, edited by Lynn Keller and > >Cristanne Miller (U of Michigan Press). There are problems with the > >argument--why still call this move "feminine"?--but it is a marvelous > >antidote to Ostriker et al's essentialism. > > Hi Susan-- > > Just out of curiosity, what would you suggest as an alternative to > "feminine", assuming as I am that the term "feminine" has instead here been > dislocated from "femaleness" to suggest a set of attributes possessed by > both men and women? Or is this a misreading? > > Steve > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 10:03:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: AWOL: August Happenings Comments: To: Mark Roberts August Happenings Australian Writing OnLine AWOL Happenings. A monthly guide to readings, book launches, conferences and other events relating to Australian literature both within Australia and overseas. If you have any item which you would like included in future listings please contact AWOL. AWOL is setting up a 'Virtual Bookshop' for Australian small magazines and presses. This will take the form of regular newsletters (which will be available both on the net and by mail and fax) which will pre/review new publications. This titles will then be able to be ordered by mail or fax. Associated with our Virtual Bookshop is our Sydney distribution service for small presses. Please contact us for further details if you want to distribute your publication to bookshops in Sydney. AWOL can be contacted by email at MRoberts@extro.ucc.su.oz.au, by writing to AWOL, PO Box 333, Concord NSW 2137, Australia, by faxing 61 2 747 2802 or by phoning 61 2 747 5667. AWOL posts are archived on the WWW at the following address http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/books/index.html then click on Australian Writing OnLine. ************************************************************************ NSW SYDNEY READINGS 4th Monday of each month...FUTURE POETS SOCIETY 8pm, Lapidary Club Room, Gymea Bay Road, Gymea. Details phone Anni Featherstone (02) 528 4736. Every Tuesday...POETRY SUPREME 9pm, Eli's Restaurant, 132 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. Details phone/fax (02) 361 0440. 1st and 3rd Wednesday ...POETS UNION 7pm, The Gallery Cafe, 43 Booth Street, Annandale. Details phone (02) 560 6209. 4th Wednesday...LIVE POETS AT DON BANKS MUSEUM 7.30pm, 6 Napier Street North Sydney. Guest reader plus open section. Admission $6 includes wine. Details phone Sue Hicks or Danny Gardiner (02) 908 4527. Every Thursday...POETRY ALIVE 11am-1pm, Old Courthouse, Bigge Street, Liverpool. Details phone (02) 607 2541. 1st Friday...EASTERN SUBURBS POETRY GROUP 7.30pm, Everleigh Street, Waverly. Details phone (02) 389 3041. 2nd & 4th Saturday...GLEEBOOKS READINGS 2pm, Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe. Details Nick Sykes (02) 928 8607. 3rd Sunday...POETRY WITH GLEE: THE POETS UNION AT GLEEBOOKS. 2-4pm, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe. Admission $5/$2 Details Nick Sykes (02) 928 8607. Every Sunday...THE WORD ON SUNDAY 11.30am Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay. 2 Admission $8/ $5. Details phone (02) 241 5876. Sunday 30 July at 2.30pm Writers at Macquarie. John Tranter discussing and reading from his book The Floor of Heaven Macquarie University, Building X5B Theatre 1 $10 (conc $5). Details and bookings 02 850 9658 or 02 850 7378. NSW WRITERS' CENTRE EVENTS WOMEN WRITERS' NETWORK 2nd Wednesday. 7.30pm, NSW Writers' Centre. Details Ann Davis (02) 716 6869. FEMINIST & EXPERIMENTAL WRITERS' GROUP meets every second Friday 6.30-9.30pm. Details Margaret Metz (02) 231 8011 or Valerie Williamson for details of venues. For information on Queerlit 95, which is being held at the NSW Writers' Centre, please refer to the conference listing at the end of this document. Unless otherwise stated all NSW Writers' Centre events are held at the Centre in Rozelle Hospital Grounds, Rozelle. Enter from Balmain Road opposite Cecily street and follow the signs. REGIONAL ARMIDALE 1st Wednesday 7.30pm, Rumours Cafe in the Mall. Details phone James Vicars (067) 73 2103. WOLLONGONG 2nd & 4th Tuesday 7.30pm, Here's Cheers Restaurant, 5 Victoria Street, Wollongong. Details phone Ian Ryan (042) 84 0645. LISMORE 3rd Tuesday 8pm. Stand Up Poets, Lismore Club, Club Lane. Details phone David Hallett (066) 891318. NEWCASTLE 1st Sunday... Illuminating Tales at the Commonwealth Hotel, Union/ Bull Streets, Newcastle. Details phone Bill Iden (049) 675 972 3rd Monday... Poetry at the Pub. Newcastle Bowling Club, Watt Street. Details phone Bill Iden (049) 675 972 WAGGA WAGGA 15 August, 7.00 pm, Firenze Restaurant: Literary Dinner with Michael Symons, celebrated food writer, restaurateur and social historian. Michael will speak on the topic "Simplicity and depth". Cost $25 per head for a three-course meal. Bookings via Dymocks, ph. 069 219622 21 August, 7.30 pm, Booranga Writers' Centre, Charles Sturt University: Writing Workshop with Michael Symons: "How do you write about food? Can you write about food?" Cost $12, Members $10. ph (Booranga) 069 332688 General Enquiries: David Gilbey ph 069 332465 Email DGILBEY@whum.riv.csu.edu.au. ************************************************************************* QUEENSLAND Queensland Writers Centre Events Information on Queensland Writers Centre Events will be posted seperately early next week CONFERENCES QUEERLIT 95 QueerLit 95 is the second national (inter- if you count New Zealand) conference of, and on, queer (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, queered, etc.) writing in Australia and it's happening at: the New South Wales Writers' Centre in Rozelle Sat. & Sun. 26th - 27th August It includes presentations, panels and open discussion on everything from journalistic ethics to academic literary criticism, how-to-get-published to erotic writing, poetry to book reviewing. Over 300 participants attended QueerLit 93 and its diversity of content and presenters guarantees at the least an unpredictable, productive time. A short fiction competition with over $900.00 of prizes is being run in conjunction with QueerLit 95, along with the launch of _and that's final_, a short fiction sequence from Dean Kiley, and _ClitLit_, a new lesbian literary journal. Gauche as it is to name names: Dorothy Porter, McKenzie Wark, Gary Dunne, Jill Jones, Christos Tsialkos, Susan Hawthorne Michael Hurley, Jane Palfreyman, Peter Blazey, Mark McLeod, someone channeling Patrick White & several more tempted. For Schedules, Registration Forms or further detail, contact: Ian MacNeill on [02] 358 3686 or fax [02] 351 4179 (attention Dean) or email deank@pub.health.su.oz.au EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR STUDIES ON AUSTRALIA Third conference: Copenhagen, October 6-9, 1995 Conference theme: Inhabiting Australia: The Australian Habitat and Australian Settlement. The conference aims to bring together contributions from a wide range of disciplines, from architecture to zoology. Papers which take up the theme from cultural, historical, social, scientific, literary and other perspectives are invited. Further information available from Conference organisers: * Bruce Clunies Ross (45) 35 32 85 82 internet: bcross@engelsk.ku.dk * Martin Leer (45) 35 32 85 87 internet: leer@engelsk.ku.dk * Merete Borch (45) 35 32 85 84 internet: borch@engelsk.ku.dk Copenhagen University, Department of English Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Kobenhavn S Phone. (45) 35 32 86 00 Fax (45) 35 32 86 15 * Eva Rask KnudsenWiedeweldtsgade 50, st. 2100 Copenhagen O. (45) 35266025 SYMPOSIUM: (POST) COLONIAL FICTIONS: RE-READING ELIZA FRASER AND THE WRECK OF THE STIRLING CASTLE. University of Adelaide, 25-26 Nov., 1995. Contact: Kay Schaffer, Department of Women's Studies, 08 303 5267 direct, 08 303 3345 FAX, e-mail: kschaffe@arts.adelaide.edu.au Post-colonial studies within Australia have attempted to re-evaluate and re- write colonial history to include those people either marginalised or subjugated by the colonial process. This two day symposium will explore a different aspect of post-colonial discourse through the exploration of one of the best known events in Australian colonial history. In 1836 the 'Stirling Castle' was wrecked off the Queensland coast and many of the crew together with the Captain's wife, Eliza, were marooned on Fraser Island. Events surrounding the rescue of the castaways, in particular Mrs. Fraser, received international media attention. In the last 160 years the story of Eliza Fraser has become the subject of popular myth, fiction, opera, art, film and scholarly research in the areas of cultural studies, literature, history, anthropology, archaeology, women's studies, and the visual arts. (Post) Colonial Fictions will examine critically the Eliza Fraser saga by bringing together, for the first time, an interdisciplinary team of academics, authors, artists and members of the Fraser Island community. Discussions will include feminist analyses of the incident, textual and iconographic representations of Aboriginal people, and Eliza Fraser as a creative inspiration for the arts. Speakers on 19th century ethnography, visual arts, and Fraser Island history include: Ian Mc Niven, Lynette Russell, Rod McNeil, Olga Miller, Elaine Brown; on 20th century cultural studies and Batdjala representations include: Kay Schaffer, Sue Kossew, Jim Davidson, Jude Adams and Fiona Foley. We are hopeful that the symposium will include an exhibition of Fiona Foley's works and a performance by University of Adelaide Conservatorium of Music students of the theatre opera: "Eliza Fraser Sings" (arranged by Peter Sculthorpe/libretto by Barbara Blackman). AUSTRALIAN STUDIES AND THE SHRINKING PERIPHERY: SURFING THE NET FOR AUSTRALIA The Centre for Australian Studies in Wales, University of Wales, Lampeter, is hosting a conference next year entitled "Australian Studies and the Shrinking Periphery: Surfing the Net for Australia." "In recent years the consolidation of Europe into the 15 states of the EU, the integration of east and west within Europe, and the progressive turning of Australia to its own Pacific backyard have furthered the impression of periphery: one world's edge looking distantly at the other." Organisers are calling for papers. The contacts are: Dr Graham Sumner and Dr Andrew Hassam Centre for Australian Studies in Wales University of Wales Lampeter Dyfed, SA48 7ED, Wales, UK. Telephone: Graham Sumner +44 (0) 1570 424760 or 424790 (secretary) Andrew Hassam +44 (0) 1570 424764 (secretary) Fax: Graham Sumner +44 (0) 1570 424714 Andrew Hassam +44 (0) 1570 423634 E-mail: sumner@lamp.ac.uk or alh@www.lamp.ac.uk Offers of papers should reach the organisers by 31 December 1995, and comprise a full title and an abstract of no more than 100 words. Further information will be sent when available, and will appear on the Centre's WWW home-page (htp://www.lamp.ac.uk/oz). **************************************************************************** While AWOL makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of Happenings listing we suggest you confirm dates, times and venue. AWOL would like to thank the following organisation who provided information for this list: NSW Writers Centre, Queensland Writers Centre, AusLit discussion group (internet), WIPround (Women in Publishing) and the other individuals and organisations who supplied information about their events directly to AWOL. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 15:30:12 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Dr. Seuss on computers (fwd) What was that about being elitist? Just wanted to pop _that_ bubble for goodness sake! Gab. Apologies to original sender/composer, whose name has been lost in the shuffle... What if Dr. Seuss Did Technical Training Manuals? Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say: If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! You can't say this? What a shame, sir! We'll find you Another game, sir. If the label on the cable on the table at your house Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM, Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 13:51:50 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wystan Curnow Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland Subject: Re: Free Verse Foot Comments: To: kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU Dear Burt, If we could only pull up our subject positions and coalesce around a warm discourse, make-or fabricate if you must--a few clumsy adjustments to those self-same subject positions then we just might find ourselves lovers of jargon after all. Certainly I'd have to class myself as one such. Jargon? Can't get enuf of the stuff. yrs Wystan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:26:13 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Hello all. Anyone in England know Wendy Mulford? Still trying to track down Madge Herron. Or Helen Kidd, Julia Mishkin or Sandi Russell? How to get in touch with them? Gabrielle ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 23:10:51 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: renga norms another possibility wld be for people to post only one line w/out the text to which they were responding, from which a variety of texts cld be made. i.e. there wld be as many rengas as participants if it went on long enough. this is why I originally posted a line w/out the preceding line-- I thought we were going that way. Seems the easiest way to approximate hypertext in this format. Though what's happening with the other permutations is good as well. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 23:22:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Renga 1 >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar >The book and the oboe on the grass under sun and cloud Go endlessly, an obtuse Prussian blue, it binds ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 03:57:08 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Re: Renga1 > >In the books were dreams and in the dreams were books. > >And flew through windows, lightning green and fine morning > First inverted whistle of a cardinal in the poplar >Solemn air and sabbath retrograde >Why: these dots in the race when dreamt, did birds curl between two bodies / of water, falling awake ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 04:24:53 EDT Reply-To: beard@metdp1.met.co.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: beard@MET.CO.NZ Subject: Eliot & Stein > maria---eliot meant it negatively--but I got it from Riding's essay > on "stein and the new barbarsm"---SHE meant it positively-- but the > recognition of course on Eliot's part (Stein=Saxophone) makes me > wonder whether "eliot was of the devil > 's part without knowing it"--I mean devil positively, btw....chris It's difficult to tell when Eliot's being positive & when he's being negative. I read somewhere that when he first wrote of Stravinsky's music that it was like "horns and motors" he meant it positively (& I know that he was, or at least became, a Stravinsky fan), but my reading of that phrase in _The Waste Land_ is negative, due to the implied comparison with "times winghd chariot". Just a thought, Tom. ______________________________________________________________________________ I/am a background/process, shrunk to an icon. | Tom Beard I am/a dark place. | beard@metdp1.met.co.nz I am less/than the sum of my parts... | Auckland, New Zealand I am necessary/but not sufficient, | http://metcon.met.co.nz/ and I shall teach the stars to fall | nwfc/beard/www/hallway.html ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 22:46:35 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: the feminine >Steve--yes, this is the question, isn't it? I think your reading is >entirely right; my problem, in the context of this article by Retallack, >is that "the feminine" is defined as/through "silence." While there's >real intuitive truth to this, I'd like to see further distinctions. What >is the difference, for example, between Laura Riding's silence and >Gertrude Stein's? What is the force of that distinction? As for Stein, >she put less fine a point on it in her geographical history of America: >"in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a >woman." Susan Right, which is a statement with a masculine aggressiveness to it, which moves it back toward the other end of the spectrum. Hmm. You're right, it takes quite a bit of rigor to track a lot of these questions through the slippery landscape of gender, and only a few have really successfully negotiated it. And language seems to engender itself, which complicates things that much more. Steve ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 02:20:44 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Stroffolino Subject: Re: beowulf (willa jargon) Dear Burt K.--Well, first I don't BELIEVE you when you say you can't imagine someone saying "subject position" while "making love"-- but as for Caedmon's HYMN--there IS No original, with the music-- I mean MAYBE Caedmon had a great voice and was a Bob Dylan or P.J. Harvey or something. What WE DO KNOW, however, is that the "text" (stripped of its music) has circulated beyond mere medievalist "circles" and has taken on an institutional life of its own as a version of "the thing itself" in vulgar official narratives of HISTORY OF ENGLISH LIT (just as "the ballad" is called a "hybrid form--neither music nor poetry" but this is only true from a certain perspective of what literature is, or has been, only with the advent of the printing press, etc.)---And, because the version we have (whether debased or not) has been accorded a privileged position as if AT THE BEGINNING of a tradition, it is worthwhile perhaps to consider the conception of "the lyric" that is implicitly justified by Caedmon (for instance, "christian"; for instance, "Confessional"-- for instance "poet as rebel-turned-seer; or rudolph the rednosed reindeer). I am not arguing that these "myths" do not have a place in poetry, and even haunt the most radical poetry that inevitably, at one point or another, places itself in some kind of relation to this voice (be it Shakespeare or Stein or O'Hara or L Poets), only to recognize the way the text continues to be used in undergraduate survey courses (if nowhere else) which, to me, seems to matter more than some hypothetical reconstruction of the TRUE SPLENDOURS of the past that may very well be the present in drag. Thanks for taking this seriously, chris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 09:12:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: the feminine In message <199507280546.WAA06311@slip-1.slip.net> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > >Steve--yes, this is the question, isn't it? I think your reading is > >entirely right; my problem, in the context of this article by Retallack, > >is that "the feminine" is defined as/through "silence." While there's > >real intuitive truth to this, I'd like to see further distinctions. What > >is the difference, for example, between Laura Riding's silence and > >Gertrude Stein's? What is the force of that distinction? As for Stein, > >she put less fine a point on it in her geographical history of America: > >"in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a > >woman." Susan > > Right, which is a statement with a masculine aggressiveness to it, which > moves it back toward the other end of the spectrum. Hmm. You're right, it > takes quite a bit of rigor to track a lot of these questions through the > slippery landscape of gender, and only a few have really successfully > negotiated it. And language seems to engender itself, which complicates > things that much more. > > Steve i was trying to stay out of this one, cuz it seemed too volatile, and more complex than i can muster my forces for at those odd itchy moments when i hit the keyboard, but when i read "masculine aggressiveness," i feel compelled to enter. these denominations, "feminine" and "masculine," it seems, are simply ways of noting --or creating --difference. masculinity is associated w/ aggression, femininity with docility or gentleness, without much thoughtful attention to the empirical world. it's just a crude shorthand for perceived opposition. i can be as aggressive as the next guy which doesn't mean i'm invoking a "masculine" side of myself. i can be warm on occasion, even demur, which doesn't mean that i'm being "feminine" in those instances. can we find some other way of referring to affect and behavior without calling on facile gender categories to do our thinking for us? and i'm not sure "language" engenders itself --people do --i think language is smarter than people, and can help us find a way out of this binary impasse. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 10:38:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jordan Davis." Subject: green technologies Chris I'm still unconvinced that ED's "top-of-the-head to you" means anything more than a threshold of feeling a text has to pass to be considered "poetry" by ED. (Tim Davis, also of Amherst, loves to report ED's epitaph: "Called Back"). And I don't know if a Dickinson/Whitman dichotomy for epic/