It's AM to MZ now at Minor Americans.
10/26/04
"I don't think it's exciting anymore for customers to come into a printer's shop and just see inkpots, stacks of proofs and books," said Jean Valentine, director of the Center for Book Arts, a radical declaration, given that selling books and raising contest entry fees for poetry competitions are the bases for Ms. Valentine's paycheck. As it turns out, though, she is not alone in detecting among consumers a hankering for what might be called integrated politics with added cultural value when they visit a printer's, to judge by presses like Bloodaxe in London or the much reviled Faux epicenters across the globe.
"Presses, especially the so-called elite small presses, have got to be at the hub of cultural experience, too, now," Ms. Valentine said. And the Center for Book Arts, based in untony uptown, is doing its best to join the charge toward hipness, however much that may clash with its current image as a sort of safe house for otherwise obscure poets and screen writers who rarely venture south of 14th Street.
The press's latest effort is the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry, in which 20 young artists set themselves up on trestle tables and, using glue sticks, X-Acto knives, scissors, fabric, text samplings, sewing machines, scanning equipment, heaps of fliers, Adobe templates, old children's books, vintage National Geographics, Google searches, origami paper and clippings from 1970's smut magazines, proceeded to make their art, placing poetry within a larger political / global awareness context.
The artists involved could not be considered household names, except perhaps in households headed by poem fanatics or connoisseurs of poem fanatics. But anyone from those cohorts will have encountered some of the types assembled, for example, by the curator of St. Mark's Friday "Talk the Walk Series," Prageeta Sharma, people like Michael "Flaming Lips" Cirelli, political analyst and author of Hip-Hop Poetry & The Classics, and current director of Urban Word based in New YorK, and poet, poli-sci scholar, and collagist Michael Magee, whose discussions lionizing Ralph Ellison's engagement with jazz and the philosopher William James have in some ways set the bar for a new generation's art and political savvy.
It is art and politics that draw on what Holland Cotter, a critic for The New York Times, called "path-clearing feminist and gay" work of the not-so-distant past, and that makes liberal use of almost anything that drifts into the slipstream of pop cultural reference: fashion, music, kiddie cartoons, Japanese manga and old-fashioned handicrafts. It is collaborative, homey, extremely jubilant and queer.
"I think we're seeing a moment like the early 1980s, where a generation is defining itself with art and politics that react to mass media saturation with handcrafted, intimate gestures transmitted from one artist to another," said Harryette Mullen, who helped organize the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry, one of two thousand seven hundred and six such undertakings scheduled in the coming year. "It's art that's not about big bucks showing up in far-flung corners such as Cambridge or Tokyo," she added, pointedly referring to the capitalist / artist Xtina Strong's Fauxpress.com/e series.
The collages Ms. Mullen sponsored featured a range of egregious political initiatives: Girl-on-girl liplocking, the Red Hot Chili Peppers making out and more gaytastic moments in sexual rock and roll. An atypically naysaying Fat Boy Slim, on the other hand, calls the artists behind these collages "girlie-boy punk sell-outs," suggesting that they and their fans carry Spongebob lunchboxes. But "shock therapy may help," Slim says, not specifying what he means by help or whom would benefit. A number of the works in the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry were made using poetic materials provided by what might be considered an enemy to serious political praxis, the global phony e-company Faux, which is known for its ethereal, pointedly apolitical texts. All the same, Faux has some following in gay communities because of the dandyish striped cottons, bandanna prints and printed velvets worn by its 'stable' of effeminate writers, like the retro-outfitted Tina Celona (aka Xtina Strong), author of the ultra insincere treatise Urban Politics, now up at the Fauxpress.com/e "beta" site. In a gesture some characterize as commando grudge or others call an ironic twist on self-mutilation, Ms. Celona was spotted defacing a dozen or so collages on display that featured capsules of her own writing, all the while sporting what one viewer called "her bada-bing vibe."
Xtina Strong (or Tina Celona), the antic cross-dresser and director for the family-owned Faux company, whose art-for-art-sake texts are routinely downloaded from the Web and then destroyed by detractors, flew down from the Boston suburbs to get in on the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry. "The beauty of this, for me, is that it's not one artist, it's a fusion, it's collective, almost like tribal art," said Ms. Strong, who often deploys an eccentric approach in her own 'poetry.' (One recent text was a sort of "Holiday on Ice with Miss Subways, 2004.")
"It's a great way to get people together in a very light way and to have fun and make politics relevant," Ms. Strong added, somewhat disingenuously. Truth is Strong came to New York not for any political purpose, but to get in some high-end shopping before continuing to her real destination, fun quarters of Florida. Strolling across South Beach's gay bleached sand, Strong was seen strumming her guitar and singing the Beatles' "Give Peace a Chance." The sight of a wandering minstrel in a striped Dolce and Gabbana suit amused the sunbathers and raised a chuckle in the lifeguard hut.
Back in New York fun was certainly being had on the third floor of the Center for Book Arts, where the poet known as The Hives was gluing lacy flowers cut from origami paper onto some raunchy images from gay porn magazines; and where Carol Mirakove, another poet, added chiffon and stuffed birds to a politically motivated sonnet suite; and in the printer's shop window, where the collaborative Lungfull set up shop with its dog.
"We've been in store windows before, in Japan," said Elizabeth Treadwell, as she hit the pedal on her sewing machine, a crowd of onlookers gaping on the sidewalk. "It was at the Marunouchi center," her brother, Brendan Lorber, said. "Everybody called us 'Poet,' " said Sasha Steensen, the group's third member. "They kept tapping on the window and saying, 'Poet, Poet! Peace!'"
"Presses, especially the so-called elite small presses, have got to be at the hub of cultural experience, too, now," Ms. Valentine said. And the Center for Book Arts, based in untony uptown, is doing its best to join the charge toward hipness, however much that may clash with its current image as a sort of safe house for otherwise obscure poets and screen writers who rarely venture south of 14th Street.
The press's latest effort is the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry, in which 20 young artists set themselves up on trestle tables and, using glue sticks, X-Acto knives, scissors, fabric, text samplings, sewing machines, scanning equipment, heaps of fliers, Adobe templates, old children's books, vintage National Geographics, Google searches, origami paper and clippings from 1970's smut magazines, proceeded to make their art, placing poetry within a larger political / global awareness context.
The artists involved could not be considered household names, except perhaps in households headed by poem fanatics or connoisseurs of poem fanatics. But anyone from those cohorts will have encountered some of the types assembled, for example, by the curator of St. Mark's Friday "Talk the Walk Series," Prageeta Sharma, people like Michael "Flaming Lips" Cirelli, political analyst and author of Hip-Hop Poetry & The Classics, and current director of Urban Word based in New YorK, and poet, poli-sci scholar, and collagist Michael Magee, whose discussions lionizing Ralph Ellison's engagement with jazz and the philosopher William James have in some ways set the bar for a new generation's art and political savvy.
It is art and politics that draw on what Holland Cotter, a critic for The New York Times, called "path-clearing feminist and gay" work of the not-so-distant past, and that makes liberal use of almost anything that drifts into the slipstream of pop cultural reference: fashion, music, kiddie cartoons, Japanese manga and old-fashioned handicrafts. It is collaborative, homey, extremely jubilant and queer.
"I think we're seeing a moment like the early 1980s, where a generation is defining itself with art and politics that react to mass media saturation with handcrafted, intimate gestures transmitted from one artist to another," said Harryette Mullen, who helped organize the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry, one of two thousand seven hundred and six such undertakings scheduled in the coming year. "It's art that's not about big bucks showing up in far-flung corners such as Cambridge or Tokyo," she added, pointedly referring to the capitalist / artist Xtina Strong's Fauxpress.com/e series.
The collages Ms. Mullen sponsored featured a range of egregious political initiatives: Girl-on-girl liplocking, the Red Hot Chili Peppers making out and more gaytastic moments in sexual rock and roll. An atypically naysaying Fat Boy Slim, on the other hand, calls the artists behind these collages "girlie-boy punk sell-outs," suggesting that they and their fans carry Spongebob lunchboxes. But "shock therapy may help," Slim says, not specifying what he means by help or whom would benefit. A number of the works in the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry were made using poetic materials provided by what might be considered an enemy to serious political praxis, the global phony e-company Faux, which is known for its ethereal, pointedly apolitical texts. All the same, Faux has some following in gay communities because of the dandyish striped cottons, bandanna prints and printed velvets worn by its 'stable' of effeminate writers, like the retro-outfitted Tina Celona (aka Xtina Strong), author of the ultra insincere treatise Urban Politics, now up at the Fauxpress.com/e "beta" site. In a gesture some characterize as commando grudge or others call an ironic twist on self-mutilation, Ms. Celona was spotted defacing a dozen or so collages on display that featured capsules of her own writing, all the while sporting what one viewer called "her bada-bing vibe."
Xtina Strong (or Tina Celona), the antic cross-dresser and director for the family-owned Faux company, whose art-for-art-sake texts are routinely downloaded from the Web and then destroyed by detractors, flew down from the Boston suburbs to get in on the Collaged Politics Project cum Poetry. "The beauty of this, for me, is that it's not one artist, it's a fusion, it's collective, almost like tribal art," said Ms. Strong, who often deploys an eccentric approach in her own 'poetry.' (One recent text was a sort of "Holiday on Ice with Miss Subways, 2004.")
"It's a great way to get people together in a very light way and to have fun and make politics relevant," Ms. Strong added, somewhat disingenuously. Truth is Strong came to New York not for any political purpose, but to get in some high-end shopping before continuing to her real destination, fun quarters of Florida. Strolling across South Beach's gay bleached sand, Strong was seen strumming her guitar and singing the Beatles' "Give Peace a Chance." The sight of a wandering minstrel in a striped Dolce and Gabbana suit amused the sunbathers and raised a chuckle in the lifeguard hut.
Back in New York fun was certainly being had on the third floor of the Center for Book Arts, where the poet known as The Hives was gluing lacy flowers cut from origami paper onto some raunchy images from gay porn magazines; and where Carol Mirakove, another poet, added chiffon and stuffed birds to a politically motivated sonnet suite; and in the printer's shop window, where the collaborative Lungfull set up shop with its dog.
"We've been in store windows before, in Japan," said Elizabeth Treadwell, as she hit the pedal on her sewing machine, a crowd of onlookers gaping on the sidewalk. "It was at the Marunouchi center," her brother, Brendan Lorber, said. "Everybody called us 'Poet,' " said Sasha Steensen, the group's third member. "They kept tapping on the window and saying, 'Poet, Poet! Peace!'"
10/24/04
10/23/04
Suddenly, Maggie Z is writing a blog to check, recheck, take notes to, wait for more! Oct. 22 brings two longer posts that eloquently lay out questions and robust motives regarding text fragments reframing a writer's and readers' understandings. The eloquence is supported by -- roll in two cement trucks -- concrete evidence, Maggie's intake of readings by Lyn Hejinian, for instance, Maggie's pondering the differences between the use of dailiness by NY Gen. One & Two, and Maggie's all-nighter confabs with Ange Mlinko on the distinctive features of 'a real poet.' Maggie makes earnestness sound cool again. Her debate within on how she reads Bernadette Mayer, the poetry and the life, is one for the books. (How about a volume of prose from Maggie Zurawski, I want to shout!)
A coincidence: this Thursday for the first time in almost 20 years I heard Bernadette read at La Tazza in Providence (a new pleasure dome for poetry). Bernadette read with Steve Dickison whom I had not heard before. His poems were bright reflections of the good forces in poetry, maintaining a pitch I can describe as self-sustained and mindful, the sort of craft, filled with skepticism, of course, you would expect from a practitioner of three-to-four decades doing good for other poets and poetry. Bernadette's reading, in contrast, was all over the tonal map, and brilliantly so, in sum. Everyone seemed to agree her piece on "utopianly fucking" was hot, it went on for several minutes, and should never have stopped. But getting back to Maggie Z's concern about Gen. Two's "too easy" use of dailiness, I particularly liked Bernadette's misuse of boilerplate from the I.R.S., exactly as-is, to constitute a poem, as-is. In another form, Bernadette achieved what Maggie describes in listening to Hejinean:
Once she started the reading she went seamlessly in and out of poems and essays so that a portion of My Life was read against a paragraph from an essay etc., never staying with one work very long before parsing it to another fragment from another work. I was blown away by the reading because the DJ-esque sampling gave the reader in a short amount of time a real idea of the breadth [of work.]
When Bernadette moved from a found piece from the I.R.S., to a (well-made) rant on fucking, to a list of what she sees outdoors from windows where she lives, she too blew me away with her breadth of work and experience. And in her own externalized debate Maggie today helped me see this breadth better. So thanks, Ms Z.
A coincidence: this Thursday for the first time in almost 20 years I heard Bernadette read at La Tazza in Providence (a new pleasure dome for poetry). Bernadette read with Steve Dickison whom I had not heard before. His poems were bright reflections of the good forces in poetry, maintaining a pitch I can describe as self-sustained and mindful, the sort of craft, filled with skepticism, of course, you would expect from a practitioner of three-to-four decades doing good for other poets and poetry. Bernadette's reading, in contrast, was all over the tonal map, and brilliantly so, in sum. Everyone seemed to agree her piece on "utopianly fucking" was hot, it went on for several minutes, and should never have stopped. But getting back to Maggie Z's concern about Gen. Two's "too easy" use of dailiness, I particularly liked Bernadette's misuse of boilerplate from the I.R.S., exactly as-is, to constitute a poem, as-is. In another form, Bernadette achieved what Maggie describes in listening to Hejinean:
Once she started the reading she went seamlessly in and out of poems and essays so that a portion of My Life was read against a paragraph from an essay etc., never staying with one work very long before parsing it to another fragment from another work. I was blown away by the reading because the DJ-esque sampling gave the reader in a short amount of time a real idea of the breadth [of work.]
When Bernadette moved from a found piece from the I.R.S., to a (well-made) rant on fucking, to a list of what she sees outdoors from windows where she lives, she too blew me away with her breadth of work and experience. And in her own externalized debate Maggie today helped me see this breadth better. So thanks, Ms Z.
10/21/04
What are too many naves?
Brenda Iijima and I are constructing a very loose (it floats!) collaboration to present for our stint in the Analogous Series at M.I.T. next Saturday, Oct. 30. Like so much other work now, it's about itself, collaboration on how to collaborate. It's also about (a bout) naves, we think. Brenda came up to Boston a couple of weeks ago to make a number of video inquiries, with a focus on me. These videos -- a still from one of them, above -- will be part of what we present, although we haven't yet figured out how to use them, because we're in the middle of collaborating. In the videos and now in this blog entry I attempt to turn lines of questioning back to Brenda. You'll note, below, that I refer to a dream the night before Brenda and I met for the taping. The dream is significant, because it centered totally around an octopus, with Brenda showing up the next morning wearing an octopus ring, a handy coincidence! I also refer, at the end of my note here, to Brenda's stunning new book from O Press, Around Sea. I'm pretty sure I did not write any of this text, but I seem to have dreamed some or a lot of it before I read it, but maybe not before Brenda wrote it. Zomboid or no, I think her book is implicated in the collab, but neither of us has figured this out for real, because we're in the middle things, as noted.
Anyway, here are some questions for Brenda. How do you this take in? Our current collab -- let's bracket previous co-work -- started in one way the night before you came to Newton, in my (our?) dream of an octopus and an edifice of many naves. Further elements of the dream -- translated into my pictures & notes -- are, the plural for octopus (to be avoided in plain speech to prevent embarrassment); defining / depicting naves (can we have naves in buildings other than churches, for instance -- I'm pretty sure you can, but which buildings?); some kind of emphasis on darkness (lo, Freud!); vague linkages to Around Sea??
I asked this before, and I return to it. Too many naves, what sort of poetry, graphics, assemblages does this remind you of?
Some answers Oct. 30.
10/19/04
10/18/04
You know what. Never going to let John Latta think I'm on his bad side. Never. Tiger poems? Check out his Rattler Roundup, 10/18! Latta peeved is a matzo in the face.
10/17/04
10/16/04
Much to read and agree with under 10/15 at Bemsha. Particularly Jonathan Mayhew's way of reading Creeley -- that is, take it all in rather than the top 10% -- and his perceived de-emphasis of theosophy here on the East Coast (perhaps, tho, Boston is excepted!). Subscribe to J.M.'s East Coast reading list myself. Although, although. Time to absorb O'Hara, our beloved Ashbery and Creeley, time to reconcentrate on practitioners more recently admitted to the sport. Start with a major figure of the new enigma, John Godfrey. He, for one, contains a number of the elements of theosophy that's gone under the scalpel, elements we can trace in NY School Gen. One and in continental surrealism, as well. Let's start with a reading list that researches Godfrey, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Alan Davies, Maggie Zurawski -- I'm picking names as they pop up. I suggest these as they are breathing poets doing the confounding I find material. Find other names as you go along!
10/14/04
Since the dawn of poetics, it has been common practice for writers to send drafts and pitches for books to publishers, editors and academic arbiters. And for almost as long, scores of writers have sued same -- publishers, editors and arbiters -- for stealing their ideas, only to have suits, filed on hard-to-prove copyright infringement grounds, dismissed as mere quotation or quietly settled by more senior forces in the poetry industry.
But a recently published opinion from Steve Evans of the National Poetry Foundation in The Poetry Project Newsletter, "The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation," may soon shift the balance of power in this age-old tug of war.
Poetry arbiter circles have been puzzling over Evans's opinion, which declares that editors and poetics executives enter an implied contract every time they read a draft of a poem or hear a pitch, and they had better watch out -- for even the slightest bit of appropriation could result in their imposing limits on human subjects, that is, they may be negating "the negation...to cancel, undo or transcend the category that repressively defines and delimits an identity." The opinion, if it stands, appears to strengthen the position of writers of original ideas (if there are such things). But industry watchers say it may also put a new chill on the already frosty business of selling ideas, by forcing publishing houses, avant professors and others in the industry to spell out terms or seek legal waivers before they read or listen to a word.
"How bizarre that Steve Evans would allow this matter to enter into public parlance," said John Kinsella a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. "In situations like this historically, it's not worthy of open discussion; you settle outside very, very quietly."
In a telephone tree and op-ed letter campaign initiated in California in 1999, a still-anonymous memo writer for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a high-stakes poker player, contends that poet Kevin Davies had stolen original concepts for dumping high-level spent nuclear byproducts, concepts developed in 1995. The NRC sent an unsolicited copy of a memo of understanding related to toxic fuel rod disposal to a publishing house that had offices in the same TriBeCa building as Kevin Davies's loft, and Mr. Davies had a first-peak deal with the publishing company. Later, the NRC came to believe that many of its ideas had been folded into Mr. Davies's brilliant long poem, "Lateral Argument," which includes the following language: "Hey, let's bury our radioactive garbage in the desert for / several thousand years."
"Radioactive garbage had never been used in a poem before," Dale Smith, a poet and close reader of poetry, said in a telephone interview from his home in Chesterton, Texas. "It was obvious to me that Davies stole the NRC blind. Davies's poem and the NRC memo couldn't be mutually exclusive. Davies realized that the NRC was not powerful in poetry circles, had no connections to poets, that he could rewrite the concept and use it, for free."
But in this new reading, which could have long-term ramifications on future writers submitting their ideas to editors, publishing houses and even other writers, Evans says Davies violated an implied contract with the writer of the memo of understanding at the NRC. Evans comments further, "Even though Davies's poem is stitched together of asymmetrical sequences, it constitutes a contract with the NRC, one of its points of origin, and a contract sometimes may be implied even in the absence of an express promise to pay."
"Steve Evans has imposed a contract on every writer talking to another writer," Jayne Cortez, a poet and sometime appropriationist, said of the decision. "If they use your product, they have to pay for it. Now the poetry playgrounds will have rules," she added, almost wistfully. Evans, however, is not so sure: "If we track the structure of attitude and reference onto Davies's poem we find generalized disobedience albeit it's radicalized." Evans is implying, in other words, that Davies's hair is spiked with a spooky gel.
A spokesman for Mr. Davies declined to discuss details of the new opinion but said that Davies, a Canadian poet, is planning to ask for another hearing from a larger panel of poets based mostly in Vancouver in order to reach a "credible" consensus.
It is common in poetry for similar ideas to arise, from language-ish mock-reality to denatured bio-dramaturgy about one's struggle securing tenure. Despite frequent complaints about material theft, writers who are published by established presses typically engage in relatively freewheeling exchanges with poetics executives, counting on their own influence and industry-wide good manners to protect them from misappropriation.
But some cultural arbiters are predicting that will change if Steve Evans's new reading stands. "The publishing houses have to respond to this opinion in their own backyard," says Stanley Kunitz, a former US poet laureate who has represented writers, publishers and other interests in poetics. "When they have meetings with people receiving pitches, they need to make clear that they have no expectation of doing anything." From his shaded perch in Cambridge, and operating under much stiffer copyright rules in the UK, John Kinsella said Evans's reading could require a written contract even before a pitch is heard. "I fully expect to see contracts put into place stating, 'I am pitching you this poem; I understand I am not seeking protection for these ideas,' " he said.
Any such tightening is likely to make life more difficult for unknowns in poetry, who already find even webloggers wary of unsolicited material that can lead to legal trouble when a volume of 'poetic' work is published. "Every successful poem ever made has had a raft of crazy lawsuits," says Douglas Messerli, a Los Angeles publisher and aesthete. "Most of them are settled the old fashioned way."
As for the memo writer at the NRC, he has abandoned high-stakes gambling of all kinds, including writing memos for his former agency on reactor vessel head degradation and potassium iodide. He moved from Los Alamos to Vermont to live closer to his in-laws, and now buys and sells antique clocks.
But a recently published opinion from Steve Evans of the National Poetry Foundation in The Poetry Project Newsletter, "The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation," may soon shift the balance of power in this age-old tug of war.
Poetry arbiter circles have been puzzling over Evans's opinion, which declares that editors and poetics executives enter an implied contract every time they read a draft of a poem or hear a pitch, and they had better watch out -- for even the slightest bit of appropriation could result in their imposing limits on human subjects, that is, they may be negating "the negation...to cancel, undo or transcend the category that repressively defines and delimits an identity." The opinion, if it stands, appears to strengthen the position of writers of original ideas (if there are such things). But industry watchers say it may also put a new chill on the already frosty business of selling ideas, by forcing publishing houses, avant professors and others in the industry to spell out terms or seek legal waivers before they read or listen to a word.
"How bizarre that Steve Evans would allow this matter to enter into public parlance," said John Kinsella a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. "In situations like this historically, it's not worthy of open discussion; you settle outside very, very quietly."
In a telephone tree and op-ed letter campaign initiated in California in 1999, a still-anonymous memo writer for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a high-stakes poker player, contends that poet Kevin Davies had stolen original concepts for dumping high-level spent nuclear byproducts, concepts developed in 1995. The NRC sent an unsolicited copy of a memo of understanding related to toxic fuel rod disposal to a publishing house that had offices in the same TriBeCa building as Kevin Davies's loft, and Mr. Davies had a first-peak deal with the publishing company. Later, the NRC came to believe that many of its ideas had been folded into Mr. Davies's brilliant long poem, "Lateral Argument," which includes the following language: "Hey, let's bury our radioactive garbage in the desert for / several thousand years."
"Radioactive garbage had never been used in a poem before," Dale Smith, a poet and close reader of poetry, said in a telephone interview from his home in Chesterton, Texas. "It was obvious to me that Davies stole the NRC blind. Davies's poem and the NRC memo couldn't be mutually exclusive. Davies realized that the NRC was not powerful in poetry circles, had no connections to poets, that he could rewrite the concept and use it, for free."
But in this new reading, which could have long-term ramifications on future writers submitting their ideas to editors, publishing houses and even other writers, Evans says Davies violated an implied contract with the writer of the memo of understanding at the NRC. Evans comments further, "Even though Davies's poem is stitched together of asymmetrical sequences, it constitutes a contract with the NRC, one of its points of origin, and a contract sometimes may be implied even in the absence of an express promise to pay."
"Steve Evans has imposed a contract on every writer talking to another writer," Jayne Cortez, a poet and sometime appropriationist, said of the decision. "If they use your product, they have to pay for it. Now the poetry playgrounds will have rules," she added, almost wistfully. Evans, however, is not so sure: "If we track the structure of attitude and reference onto Davies's poem we find generalized disobedience albeit it's radicalized." Evans is implying, in other words, that Davies's hair is spiked with a spooky gel.
A spokesman for Mr. Davies declined to discuss details of the new opinion but said that Davies, a Canadian poet, is planning to ask for another hearing from a larger panel of poets based mostly in Vancouver in order to reach a "credible" consensus.
It is common in poetry for similar ideas to arise, from language-ish mock-reality to denatured bio-dramaturgy about one's struggle securing tenure. Despite frequent complaints about material theft, writers who are published by established presses typically engage in relatively freewheeling exchanges with poetics executives, counting on their own influence and industry-wide good manners to protect them from misappropriation.
But some cultural arbiters are predicting that will change if Steve Evans's new reading stands. "The publishing houses have to respond to this opinion in their own backyard," says Stanley Kunitz, a former US poet laureate who has represented writers, publishers and other interests in poetics. "When they have meetings with people receiving pitches, they need to make clear that they have no expectation of doing anything." From his shaded perch in Cambridge, and operating under much stiffer copyright rules in the UK, John Kinsella said Evans's reading could require a written contract even before a pitch is heard. "I fully expect to see contracts put into place stating, 'I am pitching you this poem; I understand I am not seeking protection for these ideas,' " he said.
Any such tightening is likely to make life more difficult for unknowns in poetry, who already find even webloggers wary of unsolicited material that can lead to legal trouble when a volume of 'poetic' work is published. "Every successful poem ever made has had a raft of crazy lawsuits," says Douglas Messerli, a Los Angeles publisher and aesthete. "Most of them are settled the old fashioned way."
As for the memo writer at the NRC, he has abandoned high-stakes gambling of all kinds, including writing memos for his former agency on reactor vessel head degradation and potassium iodide. He moved from Los Alamos to Vermont to live closer to his in-laws, and now buys and sells antique clocks.
10/12/04
10/11/04
10/9/04
10/7/04
Poetry, one sometimes feels, is viral. Randomly invading a host organism, it takes up residence and then quietly goes about replicating and nourishing itself. Maybe this is a good thing: not every virus is lethal. And maybe, too, organic metaphors are inadequate to characterize the forces of poetry. Just the same, it is hard to avoid the sense that once a poetry bug gets into a system it is hard to eradicate.
Ask a New York chauffeur. When international editors, book sellers, and poets who make up the core group of nomads tracking the global poetry cycle descend on a given city, any driver worth his dog-eared AAA Map of NYC is automatically booked. Whether in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris or Iowa City, the scene is pretty much the same: chic, overtired and faintly irritable people are ferried from one event to the next in big Mercedes-Benzes with tinted windows and doors that shut with a reassuringly creative-genius, moneyed thunk.
From a driver's-side vantage, poetry folks should be great for business. They keep the meter running until all hours. Their tips may not be as extravagant as their gossip, but they generally do better than the average grudging 5.5 percent of most other New Yorkers. And they cut a decidedly snappier figure than the attendees at a gathering of global hydrologists or colon cancer specialists who also convene in New York.
Yet New York chauffeurs all complain about poetry folks, or rather about the reasons they exist. What they complain about most is that the richly diverse commercial New York of former times is fast disappearing, and the fact is that they are correct.
The replacement of the numerous evocative and fusty brand name boutiques that Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony evoked so thoroughly in Gotham Diaries by poetry-only bookstores, reading and performance venues, semi-private poetry libraries, and 'poetics labs' is too well known to warrant further remark. Except for a few streets in Vinegar Hill, the whole of downtown Brooklyn is nowadays mostly given over to scented candles and the pervasive aroma of poetry pulp. Likewise, Wooster St. near Prince St. in Manhattan began a permanent conversion from an ordinary neighborhood street of art galleries, shops for painters' supplies, and fashion boutiques when Printed Matter, the pioneering art book and poetry store, opened up there some years back. Now the entire length of Prince St. and Wooster St., and even wide swaths of Broadway are given over to places selling tomes on poetics for $190, rare broadsides hand-lettered by poet/performer sorts for $250, DVDs from Naropa profs for $340 or else limited-edition chapbooks by students of the profs for $60. Those figures are not typos, one might add.
In Brooklyn, kosher butchers and the sex-cum-pedicure places that are a weirdly New York phenomenon gave way to ever hipper and costlier bookstores. And the poetry virus colonized even the unfashionable parts along Water St. straddling the Brooklyn Queens Expressway between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, where an influx of bookstores and poetry performance sites now competes with the entrenched wine bars, Starbucks, and designer shops and formerly invisible neighborhoods for bankers and financiers. Most of these are places where, at one time, no bourgeois poet would have willingly set foot.
"The virus grows because in our society people are concerned only with the exterior qualities of poetry," said Alan Sondheim, a poet and seasoned chauffeur who arrived in New York 30 years ago from his hometown in western Pennsylvania. Mr. Sondheim's observation could probably have been applied to this surface-obsessed city at any time within the last several hundred years. Yet there is no getting around the way the prevalence of poetry and poetics has become a kind of dominance now.
"Actually, even though my husband is a poet and satirist, I have no idea what this is all about," Mrs. Gary Sullivan, a Punjabi immigrant newly settled in the Bergen St. district of Cobble Hill overlooking the Brooklyn Academy of Music, said as a throng of poetry exotics swarmed outside the Flying Saucer Cafe. The occasion was a reading by Linh Dinh and Marcella Durand for Pink Pony United, a nonelitist open-mike fest billed as "the best" that nevertheless makes for an extravagant night out for people who like their poetic texts sutured, ripped, and performed by rough and romantic Orwellian down-and-outs.
The crowd for the show by Dinh and Durand was a cross section of the types to be seen at international poetics events and at the proliferating poetry emporiums.
There were the French reading outrageously pricey first editions of the collected Sara Teasdale in both English and French. There were San Francisco folk snapping their fingers, gazing straight ahead. There were Japanese dressed as Jack Kerouac cyborgs and high school girls with lacquered hair displaying their innovative nationalism, porting recent books by Sawako Nakayasu in English, French and Japanese. There were English neopunks like the poet who calls himself Mathew Arnold, whose ratty attire and armloads of self-published books could easily confuse an observer into believing that he lived in a bohemian flophouse. In fact, Arnold was billeted at the Hotel 17, a chic place where basic room rates start at an inflated $17.50 a night.
"These people, you must say, are very interesting to look at," Mrs. Sullivan said in English, referring to the interlopers packed onto a corner near a shop selling Hindi poetry and videos. All the same, she added, "I hope this is just temporary." About the last thing the Academy area of Cobble Hill needs, she suggested, is to find itself growing poetically fashionable.
Ask a New York chauffeur. When international editors, book sellers, and poets who make up the core group of nomads tracking the global poetry cycle descend on a given city, any driver worth his dog-eared AAA Map of NYC is automatically booked. Whether in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris or Iowa City, the scene is pretty much the same: chic, overtired and faintly irritable people are ferried from one event to the next in big Mercedes-Benzes with tinted windows and doors that shut with a reassuringly creative-genius, moneyed thunk.
From a driver's-side vantage, poetry folks should be great for business. They keep the meter running until all hours. Their tips may not be as extravagant as their gossip, but they generally do better than the average grudging 5.5 percent of most other New Yorkers. And they cut a decidedly snappier figure than the attendees at a gathering of global hydrologists or colon cancer specialists who also convene in New York.
Yet New York chauffeurs all complain about poetry folks, or rather about the reasons they exist. What they complain about most is that the richly diverse commercial New York of former times is fast disappearing, and the fact is that they are correct.
The replacement of the numerous evocative and fusty brand name boutiques that Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony evoked so thoroughly in Gotham Diaries by poetry-only bookstores, reading and performance venues, semi-private poetry libraries, and 'poetics labs' is too well known to warrant further remark. Except for a few streets in Vinegar Hill, the whole of downtown Brooklyn is nowadays mostly given over to scented candles and the pervasive aroma of poetry pulp. Likewise, Wooster St. near Prince St. in Manhattan began a permanent conversion from an ordinary neighborhood street of art galleries, shops for painters' supplies, and fashion boutiques when Printed Matter, the pioneering art book and poetry store, opened up there some years back. Now the entire length of Prince St. and Wooster St., and even wide swaths of Broadway are given over to places selling tomes on poetics for $190, rare broadsides hand-lettered by poet/performer sorts for $250, DVDs from Naropa profs for $340 or else limited-edition chapbooks by students of the profs for $60. Those figures are not typos, one might add.
In Brooklyn, kosher butchers and the sex-cum-pedicure places that are a weirdly New York phenomenon gave way to ever hipper and costlier bookstores. And the poetry virus colonized even the unfashionable parts along Water St. straddling the Brooklyn Queens Expressway between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, where an influx of bookstores and poetry performance sites now competes with the entrenched wine bars, Starbucks, and designer shops and formerly invisible neighborhoods for bankers and financiers. Most of these are places where, at one time, no bourgeois poet would have willingly set foot.
"The virus grows because in our society people are concerned only with the exterior qualities of poetry," said Alan Sondheim, a poet and seasoned chauffeur who arrived in New York 30 years ago from his hometown in western Pennsylvania. Mr. Sondheim's observation could probably have been applied to this surface-obsessed city at any time within the last several hundred years. Yet there is no getting around the way the prevalence of poetry and poetics has become a kind of dominance now.
"Actually, even though my husband is a poet and satirist, I have no idea what this is all about," Mrs. Gary Sullivan, a Punjabi immigrant newly settled in the Bergen St. district of Cobble Hill overlooking the Brooklyn Academy of Music, said as a throng of poetry exotics swarmed outside the Flying Saucer Cafe. The occasion was a reading by Linh Dinh and Marcella Durand for Pink Pony United, a nonelitist open-mike fest billed as "the best" that nevertheless makes for an extravagant night out for people who like their poetic texts sutured, ripped, and performed by rough and romantic Orwellian down-and-outs.
The crowd for the show by Dinh and Durand was a cross section of the types to be seen at international poetics events and at the proliferating poetry emporiums.
There were the French reading outrageously pricey first editions of the collected Sara Teasdale in both English and French. There were San Francisco folk snapping their fingers, gazing straight ahead. There were Japanese dressed as Jack Kerouac cyborgs and high school girls with lacquered hair displaying their innovative nationalism, porting recent books by Sawako Nakayasu in English, French and Japanese. There were English neopunks like the poet who calls himself Mathew Arnold, whose ratty attire and armloads of self-published books could easily confuse an observer into believing that he lived in a bohemian flophouse. In fact, Arnold was billeted at the Hotel 17, a chic place where basic room rates start at an inflated $17.50 a night.
"These people, you must say, are very interesting to look at," Mrs. Sullivan said in English, referring to the interlopers packed onto a corner near a shop selling Hindi poetry and videos. All the same, she added, "I hope this is just temporary." About the last thing the Academy area of Cobble Hill needs, she suggested, is to find itself growing poetically fashionable.
10/6/04
This may not surprise you where I'm headed.
Am a fuck-up, a rotten pain. I'm loaded with pockmarks; pointing to them I can own up to an ugly and miserable personality. But it is personalities. A smirk, where do you come from? As voices say, personalities, like voices, are lent to us.
I was going to put in here how nurture (reading) 'n nature (proclivity) are negotiated -- things I'm going to skip -- and how some before us address this loan business allegorically. How allegory prevails in backwaters where great stress and oppression predominate. How Stevens finds it easy to go loony in voices, never finding ways to distance himself from it, from them, but causing no offense. Ashbery shows how you distance self from distancing self, lending us formulae for cartouche and perpetual allegorical play for a love hound. It's that smacked sick love puppy that yelps through the poem-allegories and life-allegories of O'Hara, Wieners and Ted Berrigan, to call up a sad-happy triumvirate of voices lent to us. Voices that I keep reading.
This gets me to the allegory of warmth, the thing I'm missing the most. O'Hara typifies it. Magnifies it. He loves us, including many he disdains. (In comparison, I squeeze disdain out of those I love. How awkward!) Who else radiates puppy warmth. Berrigan, except he doesn't love himself nearly enough. Denby, recursively. We need to feel O'Hara's glow first to understand how loving Denby's poetry is. After that, I think it's parts of us -- or you -- exposed to the glow. But O'Hara is unsurpassed.
Am a fuck-up, a rotten pain. I'm loaded with pockmarks; pointing to them I can own up to an ugly and miserable personality. But it is personalities. A smirk, where do you come from? As voices say, personalities, like voices, are lent to us.
I was going to put in here how nurture (reading) 'n nature (proclivity) are negotiated -- things I'm going to skip -- and how some before us address this loan business allegorically. How allegory prevails in backwaters where great stress and oppression predominate. How Stevens finds it easy to go loony in voices, never finding ways to distance himself from it, from them, but causing no offense. Ashbery shows how you distance self from distancing self, lending us formulae for cartouche and perpetual allegorical play for a love hound. It's that smacked sick love puppy that yelps through the poem-allegories and life-allegories of O'Hara, Wieners and Ted Berrigan, to call up a sad-happy triumvirate of voices lent to us. Voices that I keep reading.
This gets me to the allegory of warmth, the thing I'm missing the most. O'Hara typifies it. Magnifies it. He loves us, including many he disdains. (In comparison, I squeeze disdain out of those I love. How awkward!) Who else radiates puppy warmth. Berrigan, except he doesn't love himself nearly enough. Denby, recursively. We need to feel O'Hara's glow first to understand how loving Denby's poetry is. After that, I think it's parts of us -- or you -- exposed to the glow. But O'Hara is unsurpassed.
10/4/04
Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Rob Fitterman
Edge 2004
Meet the new boss. Same as the old. Commercial discourse has a crummy havoc all its own. Its aftertaste of leaden self-importance needn't be tweaked or tweaked much to set the ear off kilter. Legalistic questionnaires, manufacturer's brochures, consumer product-chat, business consultant pitchery, heavy shit. Dry-eyed Rob Fitterman has been putting these and a thousand other beastly parts together for a few years now. The order and numbering of some texts have changed since their first appearance as a Faux/e offering in 2002. But most of those texts have not changed; rather, they have been added to and reinforced, joined with similar samplings that, as signaled by an epigram from Edward Gibbon, constitute a "register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The detritus of business administration and global fetishism get conflated with icons of imperial decay. Sections about the Goths address items on the Jewelry Network and how to be a Bad Kitty. In a bathetic tribute to the classical god of big bucks, sections titled "The Hermes Effect" rehash self-help truisms ("don't placate badgers") and booster language for some partnership enterprise ("Inter-disciplinary / contract research"). The text is divided into halves (The Decline and The Fall), each with 15 sections, the second half picking up the same themes as the first, but in reverse order. The last section of The Decline, "Senate," is followed directly by "Senate" in The Fall, a formal strategy that reinforces the totalism of the mercantile mindset. The last shall be first, meet the new boss, etc. Rendering that mindset in one hilarious poem after another is the equivalent of plopping the beast inside a display setting for instructional confinement. If Metropolis helps put just one kid off the career path to workaday success, it will have done its job.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)