Charles Bernstein Web Log

U.S. incarceration stats

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:31:32 -0800

There is terrorism from without
and then American domestic terrorism
against our own people.

jjjj

from "The Challenge of Mass Incarceration in America"
by Bruce Western
Bulletin of the American Academy, Winter 2010
commentary by Western and Glenn Loury

"Now is the time for your tears ..."

link | 03-10-10

All the Whiskey in Heaven: TimeOut review; launches in NY and Philadelphia

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:56:27 -0800

All the Whiskey in Heaven
Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein
(Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

reviewed today in

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Launch & Signing
Sunday March 28, 2010, 6:30pm
Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd St, New York, NY
Poets & friends read from
All the Whiskey in Heaven

Thom Donovan
Peter Gizzi
Kenneth Goldsmith
Erica Hunt
Dorothea Lasky
Tan Lin
Elizabeth Willis
& Charles Bernstein
hosted by Dorothea Lasky

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A poetry reading and book party
with Charles Bernstein
celebrating the release of
All the Whiskey in Heaven
Thursday, April 8, 6pm
in the Kelly Writers House
Arts Cafe
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)

link | 03-09-10

Larry Ochs in NY

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:12:08 -0800

Larry Ochs
in New York at The Stone in Manhattan on March 20, 21 ,25 as part of two weeks of shows he has curated..
On March 20: Rova - the 33 year old saxophone quartet, not the German tax agency for Turkish immigrants, and not the Finnish outcropping of rock - is coming to the Stone for the first time. (www.rova.org) 8 PM show: we play all original compositions never played in NY. 10 PM show (separate admission) we will perform with special guest John Zorn as well as playing some quartet pieces. Rova will also make available the brand new CD release by Rova and Nels Cline Singers called The Celestial Septet. So new that as of this writing on March 3, I have yet to see it myself. (Currently available online from the CD label called New World Records with wider availability in next 2 weeks.).
On March 21: 10 PM Larry Ochs’ Kihnoua. A New York debut for this band which features Dohee Lee’s gut-wrenching vocalese, Scott Amendola (Larry Ochs Sax + Drumming Core, Nels Cline Singers) on drums and electronics, and special guest Devin Hoff on bass. (The core band is the trio, then I add other musicians, usually a string or two , and we perform compositions composed by Ochs for this band, “new forms” inspired if not exactly “influenced” by the blues of Asia and Eastern Europe. A new CD on Not Two should be out in early April.
On March 25 at 10 PM: ODE, the music collective of Ochs, Trevor Dunn on bass, Lisle Ellis on bass and circuitry, and Michael Sarin on drums; the band’s first appearance in a year in New York. I love playing with these guys.
For a complete listing of all the artists performing at The Stone, during Ochs’ curatorial period (March 16 – 31), and for shows before and after that, visit:
http://thestonenyc.com/calendar.php?month=1
THE STONE is located at the corner of avenue C and 2nd street. Seating is limited; no reservations.
(Each set is a separate admission and all proceeds go to the musicians.)

link | 03-08-10

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:41:24 -0800

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4
Edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier
Stanford University Press
now out!

Robert Grenier's introduction

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

Advance praise from Silliman, Gelpi, Hejnian, Friedlander, Ratcliffe, Creeley, and Robinson.

Eigner at EPC
Eigner at PennSound

link | 03-07-10

Museum Walk: archaic figures, Victorian photocollage, Man Ray

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:38:14 -0800

“The Thinker”: Fired Clay, Hamangia, Cernavodă (Hamangia/Romania) 5000–4600 BCE
Female Figurine, Fired Clay, Cucuteni, Drăguşeni (Hamangia/Romania), 4050–3900 BCE

The Lost World of Old Europe:
The Danube Valley 5000-2500 BC
closes April 25
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 W. 84th Street, NY NY
worth a detour

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Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
closes May 9, 2010

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Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention
closes March 14, 2010
The Jewish Museum, NY

especially notable for the collection of work Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890-1976) , did while living in the New York area (and especially Ridgefield, NJ) before emigrating to Paris in 1921, when he was just past 30. This include early magazine covers and design as well as documenting his engagement with Ferrer's Modern School.
"Tapestry" (1911, from the Pompidou) is made up of fabric swaths from his father's tailor shop:

link | 03-06-10

Fred Wah on Close Listening

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:47:19 -0800

FRED WAH
Close Listening
February 21, 2010
on PennSound
Art International Radio, operating at ARTonAIR.org.
Recorded at The Banff Center as part of "IN(TER)VENTIONS: Literary Practice At The Edge,"
with thanks to Steven Smith and engineer Piper Payne.

Program One: reading from Is a door (28:37): MP3
Program Two: conversation with Charles Bernstein (29:23): MP3

Segmented Reading:

Introduction (0:46): MP3
Music at the Heart of Thinking, 108 (1:09): MP3
To the Dogs (0:44): MP3
Is a Door Blue (0:56): MP3
Sheet Music (1:25): MP3
The Marlin Seafood Grill (3:25): MP3
Double Dutch (0:54): MP3
Hey Man (0:38): MP3
I Need to Apply (1:00): MP3
Is a Door (0:33): MP3
Mr. In-between (0:37): MP3
Discount Me In (1:12): MP3
Count (1:15): MP3
Me (0:49): MP3
In (0:42): MP3
Writing (1:12): MP3
Public (1:24): MP3
Betweeen you and Me there Is and I (0:47): MP3
Reverence (0:32): MP3
Selves (0:50): MP3
Naturalized Citizen Peeled (0:24): MP3
Rubble (0:16): MP3
Abdijection (1:32): MP3
Aporia (0:40): MP3
Class (0:40): MP3
Defend the Zero (0:27): MP3
Head Smashed in (0:55): MP3
Household (0:49): MP3
Loki Sniffs the Floods (0:26): MP3

link | 03-02-10

All the Whiskey youtube & review; UDP show; Waldman & Malina; Emma Bernstein installation shots; &&

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:47:19 -0800

David Kaufman, "Sensible Swoons"
review of All the Whiskey in Heaven
Tablet Magaizne

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"Making Minds Whole"
Douglas Messerli on Controlling Interests

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Two poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven
read last week at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago

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‘17 Ugly Years’ / UDP exhibition and events at PS1

Thursday March 4
‘17 Ugly Years’ / UDP exhibition and events at PS1
Exhibition at PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY
17 UGLY YEARS — Exhibition and Events to Celebrate the Life and Times of Ugly Duckling Presse
From March 4 to March 29, 2010, Artbook @ PS1 will be showing “17 Ugly Years,” an exhibition of publications, projects, and historical ephemera from the archives of Ugly Duckling Presse, a Brooklyn-based arts and publishing collective. Organized thematically, the exhibit will examine several aspects of the Presse’s evolving mission and practice: the role of free labor in collective making; the book as gift or as an (anti)commodity; the development of editorial projects; the play of forms and materials in book design; and the problems of distribution and dissemination. Since the days of the xeroxed Ugly Duckling zine of the early 1990s, UDP has produced more than 200 individual titles — ranging from tiny hand-bound chapbook editions to 700-page tomes — of poetry, artists’ projects, and translation, with a focus on emerging, international and “forgotten” authors. From broadsides and letterpress ephemera to magazines, newspapers and perfect-bound books, UDP’s productions contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.
Opening Ceremonies — Sunday, March 7, 4pm — PS1 Cafe
A wine reception with readings by Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Aaron Kiely, Eugene Ostashevksy, and Yuko Otomo; plus a 16mm screening of Joel Schlemowitz’s award-winning documentary, “Loudmouth Collective / Ugly Duckling Presse / Anti-Reading.”

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My views of
Judith Malina & Anne Waldman
at the penultimate performance of
Red Noir at the Living Theater (NY)

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Installation shots from Emma Bee Bernstein, "Masquerade: A Retrospective" at DOVA in Chicago
(click on image for larger view)

Chicago Tribune review of Girldrive

Hinton, Laura. Girldrive, The Poetry Project Newsletter. Feb/Mar 2010, #222, pp. 26-27:
"The Strangeness of Girldrive,"
Chant de la Sirene, Feb. 20, 2010.

Buller, Rachel Epps
"Feminist Threads, or, It's All About the Ladies,"
eReview, Feb. 22, 2010. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Davy Crockett's Hat
(on Marjorie Perloff and her book The Vienna Paradox)
Douglas Messerli ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Granary Books Robert Creeley Library
Click here to see the contents of The Robert Creeley Library List 3 (M-Z)
Click here to see the contents of The Robert Creeley Library (A-Z)
Granary Books website
(with new and recent publications by Kiki Smith & Leslie Scalapino; Trevor Winkfield & John Ashbery; Emily McVarish; Anne Waldman & Donna Dennis; Marjorie Welish & James Siena)

link | 03-01-10

CFP: Contemporary Poetcis ed. Burnham and Stewart

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:23:49 -0800

Contemporary Poetics: Experimental, Avant-Garde, Radical or Conceptual?
Guest Editors Clint Burnham and Christine Stewart

This special issue will explore works of contemporary poetic experiment and the conditions within which they are produced. This can include digital/screen poetics; popular forms like hiphop or other "insurgent" music like punk/indie/heavy metal; spoken word/oral.

We are interested in research and criticism into the relationship between formal innovation and political claims. Should one make political claims at all for formally motivated poetry? Much of this work professes to destabilize naturalized ideological forms, creating previously unarticulated spaces within larger dominant discourses. What can we make of these claims? Does such experimentation merely carry out the brainwork of late capitalism / neoliberalism? That is, do formal innovations in poetics advance the work of capitalism – 1980s disjunction becomes contemporary media streams, the “open” text becomes the digital “hot” link, 1960s poets’ lower-case “i” becomes the iPod/iPhone.

Concerns about the implications of formal experimentation are varied. Narrowing their critique to the term and the concept of the avant-garde, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy argue that the avant-garde privileges young white male artists and "enacts progressive narratives of modernisms / capitalisms (Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (2006)). Leslie Scalapino, in “Letters to Poets,” Jacket 31 (2006), critiques the assumption that “the elimination of expressivity” is a sound definition for contemporary avant-garde work. She argues that such a conclusion excludes “feminist and Black art” and pushes “formalism to the point of a totalitarian construct.” Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr address similar concerns in noulipian Analects (2009), questioning the gender politics of constraint poetics within the experimental Oulipo tradition of Anglophone writers.

Consider these discussions and the questions they raise. What constitutes an avant-garde, experimental or radical poetic? Can poetic innovation make any claim toward political activism? Are the terms currently in use (avant-garde, experimental, radical, conceptual) meaningful? Are some more fitting than others and how might these terms work with (or against) postcolonial, aboriginal, feminist, queer, communist, anarchist, or posthuman concerns? If the experimental is so easily plugged into the agendas of late capitalism (from i to iPod), might it be better, as Alan Badiou claims, “to do nothing . . . [rather than] contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which the Empire already recognizes as existent” (“15 theses on contemporary art” Lacanian Ink 23.2004)? Or not?

Note: As this edition is dedicated to the study of structurally innovative texts, submissions that challenge the boundaries of the conventional paper will be considered as well as those taking more standard approaches.

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: www.canlit.ca/submissions.php
Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for this special issue. The deadline for submissions for consideration for publication in this issue is 1 Dec 2010.

link | 02-28-10-x

Tan Lin: 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Snelson's annotated/pdf of Lin's Heath

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:23:49 -0800

TAN LIN

7 Controlled Vocabularies
and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking
Wesleyan University Press

Tan Lin’s poetry is just way too cool. In 7 Controlled Vocabularies, Lin makes language pop, sizzle, melt, careen, dodge, sparkle, and reform[ulate]. Lin’s poems are as chic as they are sharp and ingenious. This new book is a dazzling display of aesthetic élan and as charming as Magritte’s pipe.
—Charles Bernstein

Tan Lin proposes a radical idea for reading: not reading. Words, so prevalent today, are merely elements that constitute fleeting engagements, one amongst many that make up the shape of our rich technological landscape. You get the sense that these words aren't meant to last forever. By setting up a textual ecology—recycling and repurposing language—Lin makes us aware of both the material and ephemeral nature of words. Language is fluid and can be poured into many forms. Skim, dip, drop-in, tune out, click away. For this brief moment, they've come together between the covers of this book; tomorrow they'll be a Facebook meme.
—Kenneth Goldsmith

Tan Lin returns us to the most traditional idea for reading. Words, so transitory today, are fundamental elements that constitute Orphic engagements, singular among the many technologies make up the shape of our rich semiotic landscape. You get the sense that Lin’s words are meant to last forever. By setting up a textual ecology – archiving and rejuvenating language -- Lin makes us aware of something that is beyond both the material and ephemeral nature of words. Language is solid and palpable. Plunge the depths, close read, dwell, savor, project. Today these figments of eternity have come together between the covers of this book; tomorrow they'll be canonical..
—Charles Bernstein
(part of a forthcoming collection of conceptual blurbs for this work)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

D. SNELSON
Tan Lin's HEATH annoted
Danny Snelson’s HTML re-edition of Tan Lin's Heath,
with Autechre and Summer BONUS PAK DISCO DOWNLOADS.
PDF AND .DOC VERSIONS
of the book

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk

link | 02-28-10

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, out March 2

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:23:49 -0800

All the Whiskey in Heaven

Selected Poems of
Charles Bernstein

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
on sale March 2
300 pp.
ISBN 978-0-374-10344-6

new biographical note for the collection

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together some of Charles Bernstein’s best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet, despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein’s characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark, structural invention with buoyant sound play, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry’s sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America’s most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.

“Charles Bernstein’s poems resemble each other only in being unexpected. Simultaneously mad, tragic and hilarious, they seem written to illustrate the truth of his lines: ‘things are / solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine.’ All the Whiskey in Heaven is a vast department store of the imagination.”
—John Ashbery

“Charles Bernstein uses words as a surgeon uses a scalpel. He strips away the skin and cuts to the bone to reveal reality and—ultimately—to heal. This essential collection from 30 years of cutting edge work will confirm Bernstein as our true poet laureate—the voice of a new generation.”
—John Zorn

“For more than thirty years Charles Bernstein has been America’s most ardent literary provocateur. This long-needed selection of his poetry gives us a new perspective on his work, for it shows us that the many forms he has worked in over the years are in fact a single form, the Bernstein form, and it is unique, the product of an imagination unlike that of any other contemporary writer. His poems challenge you to think in unaccustomed ways. They address public matters, private matters, poetic matters—in other words, all that matters most. And, good Lord, can they ever make you laugh”
—Paul Auster

“Charles Bernstein is our ultimate connoisseur of chaos, the chronicler, in poems of devastating satire, chilling and complex irony, exuberant wit, and, above all, profound passion, of the contradictions and absurdities of everyday life in urban America at the turn of the twenty-first century. From such early underground classics as “The Klupzy Girl,” to the mordant verbal play of “The Lives of the Toll Takers,” to the great meditation on 9/11 called “Report from Liberty Street” and the deeply personal ballads and elegies of recent years, Bernstein’s much awaited Selected Poems displays a formal range, performative urgency, and verbal dexterity unmatched by other poets of his generation.”
—Marjorie Perloff

“A perfect introduction to the adventure that is Charles Bernstein’s work. But even for those of us who have known his irrepressible inventiveness and engaged humor from the individual books it is a boon to see here the full range of his exuberant ingenuity in battling sclerosis of word, mind—and poetry.”
—Rosmarie Waldrop

“This wonderful book confirms Charles Bernstein’s position as the pre-eminent American poet of mental activity—delineating not simply the mind as it registers stimuli, but the more radical commitment to mind as a machine that constantly invents totally new moves and strategies in the daily battles of perception. All the Whiskey in Heaven captures 30 years of ground breaking and revelatory work.”
—Richard Foreman

cover photo by Emma Bee Bernstein; cover design by Jeff Clark

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

Previews

Bookforum
Feb./March 2010
"... a rousing selection from thirty years of work ... Bernstein deftly shifts moods and tones, but a sense of urgency and a hard-won clarity are in eveidnce throught this volume."
--David O'Neill

Publisher's Weekly
2/20/10

starred review
This gathering of 30 years worth of work by the prominent L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet and essayist offers a rigorous critique of the art of poetry itself, which means, among other things, a thorough investigation of language and the mind. Varied voices and genres are at play, from a colloquial letter of complaint to the manager of a Manhattan subway station to a fragmentary meditation on the forces that underlie the formation of knowledge. Bernstein's attention to the uncertainty surrounding the self as it purports to exist in poetry—“its virtual (or ventriloquized)/ anonymity—opens fresh pathways toward thinking through Rimbaud's dictum that “I is another.” In addition to philosophical depth—which somehow even lurks beneath statements like “There is nothing/ in this poem/ that is in any/ way difficult/ to understand”—a razor-sharp wit ties the book together: “You can't/ watch ice sports with the lights on!” These exhilarating, challenging poems raise countless essential questions about the form and function of poetry. (Mar.)

link | 02-27-10

Antin talk on Freud w/o psychonanalysis

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:59:56 -0800

David Antin
Kelly Writers House Talk
Rethinking Freud--Taking Freud Out of Psychoanalysis

February 16, 2010

Introduction by Charles Bernstein (5:22): MP3
Complete Talk (1:06:09): MP3

link | 02-23-10-x

Erin Moure on Close Listening

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:59:56 -0800

Erín Moure
on
Close Listening

February 21, 2010.

Recorded at The Banf Center as part of "IN(TER)VENTIONS: Literary Practice At The Edge,"
with thanks to Steven Smith and engineer Piper Payne.

Program One: reading from 0 Resplandor (22:54): MP3
Program Two: conversation with Charles Bernstein (25:42): MP3

link | 02-23-10

Chicago Weekly Interview by Daniel Benjamin

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:42:33 -0800

Interview with Charles Bernstein
by: Daniel Benjamin

In last week’s issue I wrote about poet Charles Bernstein,
who gave a reading on the University of Chicago’s campus on February 14.
Here is the interview that I did with Bernstein the previous day.
--D.B.

How has your upbringing and early exposure to poetry shaped your work?

No doubt my upbringing underlies the proclivities and unconscious obsessions and fascinations that I pursue. I’ve lived all my life pretty much in the same neighborhood in the Upper West Side so I think that being from that place, the look and sound, social attitudes, the implicit imaginary of the neighborhood is very important and informative, though I don’t necessarily represent it or much talk about it. I avoided early exposure to poetry. But at some point I did get the infection, which took a viral hold over me that I couldn’t shake despite common sense and against all odds.

I write poetry because I can’t do anything else as well.

In college, I studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell and Rogers Albritton. My undergraduate dissertation, “Three Steins,” focused on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein. (I was a lone “steen” among the Steins.) Sometimes it scares me how little I have strayed from my engagements in that early work; but then, I am easily frightened.

At the time, I wrote a little bit of what might be called poetry, but I would have said I was interested in writing: verbal stuff. The concept of poetry that was in my mind was too narrow. Over the years I’ve gotten much more engaged with the history of the genre and am inclined to think of poetry in the broadest sense, as the language art, as David Antin has so usefully insisted.

Could you talk more about Wittgenstein and his influence on you?

At Harvard, I found an asylum in Emerson Hall, because I couldn’t abide the literature classes: the axiomatic claustrophobia of the professors was intolerable, but far worse was the quick and contemptuous dismissal of modern and contemporary art in all its forms by my overwhelmingly (or so it seemed) prep school or prep school wannabe classmates. I remember a class on Céline’s “Mort à credit” (“Death on the Installment Plan”) … such incredible use of ellipsis, such a dystopian imagination, so grotesque… My classmates had never read anything like this … they didn’t like it. At the time, I was young enough to feel wounded by their responses. So I found my way over to philosophy. While the analytic side of philosophical discussion was of only modest interest to me, I didn’t have that same visceral revulsion, maybe because I didn’t care as much about abstract philosophical arguments as I did about art. So that’s how I drifted into philosophy. I enjoyed especially the history of philosophy—the Greeks; Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; Kant, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche … And then especially Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein’s turn to language had me in its spell. His perception that words are not just a mapped onto “things” in a one-on-one correspondence (slab for slab, slop for slop), but that the texture of language, as we use it in conversation, is a basis for our ways of seeing. Language provides a lens or filter or map or probe with which, and through which, we negotiate the world.
It’s this dimension of aesthetics in terms of poesis that is attractive to many poets, if not through Wittgenstein then through John Dewey or Roman Jakobson or George Lakoff. Wittgenstein encourages intuitions about significance of sound, that metaphors are not expendable (we don’t just see but see as), that syntax is a perceptual system. So even though Wittgenstein is the poet of the everyday and of convention, for me he also provided a foundation for an engagement with the practice of abnormality, aversion as Emerson puts it, or swerving away in the Heraclitean or Alfred Jarryesque sense: the odd or queer turn of phrase that might suggest a way of life.

Of course I also swerved from Wittgenstein, toward more socio-historical and ideological frames of reference and toward making art. I’m more interested in interest, in Habermas’s sense in “Knowledge and Human Interest”; and also in factura, constructing verbal objects for reflection.

With the idea of the “linguistic turn,” one might see Language poetry and Ordinary Language philosophy as two paths that came out of Wittgenstein in very different ways.

One more expected and the other a surprise, the illegitimate child. I associate the linguistic turn with Stein, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin, but behind that Blake, Poe, and Dickinson, among others. I think of philosophy more the way I think of poetry, as a genre like detective fiction, rather than as a truth-seeking activity in and of itself. The truth-seeking activity is the genre.

Could you talk more about editing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine and the beginning of Language poetry and how that related to previous avant-garde movements in poetry?

Language poetry doesn’t exist. It’s a chimera robed in allusion. Imaginary. Or perhaps it’s an oasis: you’re in a desert and there seems to be a pool of water just over there. Something like the enticing, if wintry, Lake Michigan just out the window from Regents Park, where we’re talking. People on different shores are looking at it from different perspectives and seeing different things they want or don’t want from it, and it becomes those things. So it’s plural (a plural that includes those who think it isn’t). Or then again: Language poetry is a social construction; a performance not an essence. Collective and collaborative.

One thing about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which I edited with Bruce Andrews from 1978 to 1982, is that it rejected the modernist avant-garde model. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a bricolage of related poetic, philosophic, and political works; we were exploring a tendency, not defining a set of principles. We were trying to connect disparate groups, individuals, and formations and by so doing advocate approaches to poetry, modernist and contemporary, that we felt were undervalued, or indeed that were stigmatized. In particular, I was scanning for poetry and poetics that were formally eccentric, diverging from literary and linguistic norms, poetry that was weird and queer and extreme and very self-conscious about how its forms were provisional and imaginary and invented.

What we did in the ’70s is specific to what was possible at that moment, building on the work of radical modernist and New American Poetry, but also reflecting the cultural possibilities of the moment, following the anti-war movement and taking some cues from an emerging counter-culture of dissensus. From the point of view of cold war neoliberalism—post history, post ideology—our insistence that poetry was not removed from ideology … well it made some folks see red. We were accused of being dogmatic precisely because we refused the prevailing verse dogmas (PVDs).

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E assembled a compendium of samples, a range of activities that had no natural place of their own, no proper place. Here I would use the term of Michel de Certeau and say we were about tactics because we were not able to have a strategy. Certeau speaks about strategy as being for someone that has the high ground, the proper space; tactics are activities that undermine those controlling interests. Although I’d also say that it’s not just tactical, that what’s needed is a poetics of tactics, so there is of a larger reflection on the nature of how those tactics operate. In that sense, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a constellation of tactics without an underlying principle, except perhaps Joe Hill’s: don’t mourn, organize. The absence of an underlying principle is, I think, what I mean by “imaginary” in my initial reply to you; I think it’s crucial to why the magazine may have resonance now (if it does). Often poetry groupings have more to do with commitments to a specific style or to a particular social milieu. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”, as Seinfeld would say. But either I wasn’t interested in that or maybe it’s just that in New York in the mid-’70s I was too much on the periphery of the art and poetry and performance subcultures that I found most attractive, and I didn’t find any one style that I wanted to marry either. So we made something up! But eclecticism was not our thing either.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was a montage. We were about constellation not juxtaposition. It was all about picking and choosing to create a palpable, compelling even tantalizing sense of the possibilities for poetry, all the time acknowledging the history we felt ourselves extending. And forging friendships and commitments as we went along.

I understand this kind of approach isn’t for all poets, or maybe even for most poets, many of whom would find so much organizing a distraction. But for me—and this takes me through the rest of my life—organizing is a poetic practice. I think of poetry, marginal though it is, as a fundamental activity within our culture. I think of it as historical, cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic work. Because I think that, I try to put things together that might not go together at first—but then, after not too long, it might seem they were—almost—a natural fit. And for me it also means mapping poetic work onto multiple cultural spaces, some expected some not—the internet, universities, reading series, the visual arts, music, film, little magazines, performance, publishing, radio.

With L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, there were a number of poets who were in conversation, engaged in a discussion of the linguistic turn, of the significance of verbal language as a perceptual membrane that changes the way we see the world, of the possibilities of continuing formal invention within poetry and the social implications of such invention, and of the relation of voices to voicing, found materials to made patterns, parts to wholes, standardization to conformity …

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is syncretic. Our conversations melded into an alloy. And there is one more crucial element, maybe most important of all: our commitment to non-expository modes of discursive thinking; to new essays forms engaged with nonlinear thinking. Essays, poetics as a crucial part of the work of poetry …

Your work is formally very varied, spanning poetry, essays, libretti, online placards. And even within the “poetry” your work takes very different form. I’m wondering if you could talk about if you’re conscious of working in form, and whether it’s a mistake to divide your work through that kind of formal lens?

I am interested in poetry as a medium for exploring the possibilities, and resistances, to expression, not as a vehicle to express a message I have already formulated. My poetry doesn’t convey what I know, it explores the conditions of how I know it. A lot of the kicking-up-dust aspects of 1970s discussions about poetry were, not surprisingly, centered around the problems of language and description. The word “poem” doesn’t delimit all that much. It used to drive me crazy when people whose work I thought was terrific would say “poetry does this” and “poetry does that.” I remember writing a letter to Jerome McGann saying I love this essay but I don’t understand why you say poetry in this way; isn’t it some poetry or this particular poem. And then I found myself doing exactly what I was complaining to McGann about, and for the same reason that McGann sometimes does it, as an expression of desire.

Poetry itself is a porous term; it means a lot of different things to different people. It’s not an honorific. A work doesn’t become a poem because it’s good and cease to be a poem if it is bad. If somebody chooses to publish the TV listing from this hotel as a poem—and why not?—the problem would not be whether the work is a poem. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in “Poetic Artifice,” lays this out this argument persuasively. She points out that if you can take a newspaper article and break it up into verse lines, you’ll read it as a poem, but not necessarily as an especially good or interesting poem.

For me poetry is a form of sophism and of rhetoric rather than of truth and sincerity.

Our terminology or typology for poetry is inadequate to the proliferating and contradictory range of approaches in the postwar years. I want to talk about hue or tone; about satire versus irony versus sarcasm versus humor; about bumpy versus smooth surfaces; about 13 ways of looking at rhythm in nonmetrical poetry; about the difference between form and its inflections. Narrative, prose poem, lyric, epic, personal, performance, long, short, elliptical, sound, visual, identitarian, disjunctive, projective, formalist, objectivist—just as “language” or “conceptual”—don’t account for the wild divergences within the rubrics and unexpected affinities across them.

Still I count on recognition of genre distinctions, including these sub-genre categorical distinctions, even when I pull the rug out from under them. This was crucial to me in putting together my “All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems,” where a stanza can be a short poem or then again part of a longer serial work; and where the poems, taken from thirty years of work, are repurposed to be part of this new serial work, with the book as organizing principle. For the selected, I wanted to juxtapose very disparate forms, in order to create a rhythm out of the movement among the discrepant parts; the meaning is as much in the space in between as in the poems themselves. Each poem does have its autonomy, but the book as a whole more as an installation than a collection.

In the promotional material for your new book some lines struck me as interesting. You are called “both trickster and charmer.” And your poems “provide equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection.” What are your thoughts on being read as a satirist?

My work has a lot of comic elements. In some way I think of poetry, in its expressive and figurative quests, as comic; if not outright bathetic then the pathos of decorum often strikes me as vaguely ludicrous. Yet, I’ve resisted the terms satire and irony, even though some of my poems most surely do appear to be one or the other, maybe both. One way to say it is that they’re never wholly ironic and they’re not primarily satiric. It’s more that things don’t always mean what they seem to mean on the surface. Nor do they mean the opposite.

One poem in the “Selected,” “Thank You For Saying Thank You,” satirizes the belief that poems should be accessible and understandable. As the poem goes on, it becomes darkly impossible to take seriously the ostensive content because the poem, written in an apparently hyperaccessible style, is so patently undermining what it’s saying. And yet at the same time, the poem is making a relatively straightforward point. But the straightforward point of that poem (the contravention of the ostensive content) isn’t what interests me about it. It’s not that I’m not annoyed about certain kinds of superficial dismissals of difficulty in poetry. For poets of any stripe, or even of no stripe at all, issues of difficulty or “getting it” are unavoidable, because poetry as a genre is difficult. Even poetry that tries to be as user-friendly as possible can’t overcome the problem that it’s a poem … for God’s sake. Poets have a vested interest in either saying, “Oh no it really is accessible, just give it time,” or claiming to want to be inaccessible. The issue can’t go away because—nothing to do with any given poet—poetry is such a socially marginalized activity that even the concept of doing poetry itself is obscure to most people. Puzzling. “What is that, I sort of like that, but do you do that for a living? Can you publish work like that?” So it comes back to this: as social form poetry has a kind of comic and pathetic aspect to it.

What interests me about “Thank You for Saying Thank You” partly is the borderline between the comic and condescension; exploding certain ideas as you’re saying them, so that it appears that you’re saying exactly the opposite, which in that case would not be saying the opposite. I’m interested in it as a kind of odd rhetorical machine, what I’ve been calling bachelor machine (after Duchamp and Kafka): “celibate machines,” non-productive, non-procreative. I think of them as self-cancelling artifacts that just get caught in their own internal logic, are hoisted on their own petards. It’s almost like a short-circuit in the internal logic. In “Recantorium,” which was in Critical Inquiry and excerpted in Harper’s last year, I specifically bring into play the disciplinary apparatus of Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”.

This becomes a motif in “All the Whiskey in Heaven,” starting with the first poem, from 1975, “Asylums,” which considers the language of self-enclosed, self-canceling, self-rending systems. The words we use, and that are used for us, can connect us to the world or cast us adrift, make us voyeurs of (even our own) everyday life or participants. I try to rub up against, and even mess with, the metaphoric or ideological structures we all live inside of, including, especially, my own (the ones that own me); I try to make these disciplinary imaginaries manifest, tangible. What is being satirized? Both “Thank You For Saying Thank You” and “Recantorium” can be described as sarcastic and satiric; sarcasm and satire are their subjects. But neither has a “proper” point of view that replaces the ostensive deformed order. In fact, both poems replace a deformed order with a bent and weird and unstable othering. I’d say they satirize satire, but that’s not right either, since they indulge in it. While, there is a recognition of bad faith in both poems there is also an acknowledgement of being enmired in it, of complicity. They’re quite performative and aggressive: they mean to do something, not do something that means.

Poetry—see here’s that overly abstract usage!—well, my poetry allows me to think through conflicts and agonisms in a space that isn’t directly involved with outcomes or solutions; I can dwell in ambivalence and disability. It’s a truism to say poetic decisions are not necessarily the best ones in non-poetic realms, such as those of the state. But poetry allows us to imagine alternative and even counterfactual or impossible outcomes. It’s a space for thought and for reflection.

You have been a critic of “official verse culture.” What constitutes official verse culture, and would you say it has changed significantly in recent years?

Since it is a successful dynamic process, Official Verse Culture lives by change, much as vampires live by fresh blood. Official Verse Culture in 2010 has adapted to many things that it repudiated 25 or more years ago: it is, after all, at its heart, eclectic, incorporating the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Are the changes in official verse culture legible through an ideological analysis—by which I mean, can we track the changes in official verse culture simply by tracking the changes in the economic and political conditions?

Yes and no. My generation has been riding a wave of significant cultural change and poetry, at all levels, tracks, reflects, foments and impedes those changes. Demographically neither your generation nor mine has the same prejudices or assumptions about gender, race, and sexual orientation, or for that matter about marriage, as did my parents’ generation. At the same time, the question would be: does capitalism still work? Capitalism wasn’t exactly dependent on those cultural issues, which doesn’t mean the changes aren’t of the greatest value, they are. But also we shift our prejudices from one group to another, then the Reds now the terrorists, without coming to terms with the terrorism we create or the class inequities that have increased. And with official verse culture the problem is the systematic evasion of the criteria for judgments and the repression of the cultural and political interests that underlie the hierarchies being created; in other words, the fantasy that poetry is not a field made of competing and agonistic poetics and so the repression of that agonism.

Meanwhile, in poetry, certain styles that were forbidden thirty years ago are now fodder for the creative writing mill; while the Associated Writing Programs is more about containment than ever, partly because it sees neoliberalism and anti-intellectualism as a way to increase its footprint in the university and thus its economic base. As if the AWP is going to save the imagination from the MLA (in which case, God help the imagination). While poetry is, of course, important to AWP, it surely is not important to the New York Times, so it is sometimes hard to understand why the poetry coverage there is so one-sided and just basically clueless; it wouldn’t be tolerated in most other areas the newspaper (though I always do wonder about the real estate section). It just doesn’t seem to matter enough to give poetry … well if not due diligence than any diligence, even some basic reporting.

Official Verse Culture continues to incorporate teaspoon doses of the kind of poetry I want. And when that happens, I am delighted and just want more, more instanter: tablespoons, buckets. I don’t back away from those encroachments into the mainstream, I seek them out. Because I think poetry matters, and I think the recognition poetry receives in the “larger” culture matters too. I think the poetry on the radio, the poetry taught in high schools and colleges, matters. I’d love to see the new multiple volume collected Larry Eigner get a front page review in the Times and a long article in the New Yorker. Every time I hear Garrison Keillor’s “Writers Almanac” do a poetry segment I am acutely disappointed by the timidity of the choices, the lost opportunity. I’m sad that any number of the books I’ve felt most significant have not had greater acknowledgment in the nationally circulated press and major newspapers or by the big awards and prizes; but it doesn’t affect the value of their work and the recognition these poets have among many of us who care about the art of poetry.

The critique is institutional. Poetry is striated by intense aesthetic and ideological conflict. That’s what needs to be acknowledged. Official Verse Culture attempts to neutralize such conflict, often with the pathos of the true believer.

It seems as if there’s been a recent consolidation of many interesting avant-garde poetry groups: the EPC, PennSound, the Poetics List, and Jacket. You have an early essay that is critical of “groupings.” I’m wondering if you’re worried about a new kind of grouping coming out in the poetic academy which might have a specific kind of power and force as a mold to be broken.

I am worried about the consolidation of “intellectual content” in the hands of large corporations. With PennSound, perhaps more important even than the poetry readings we have made available is the fact that we have put this vast archive of poetry in the public domain (for noncommercial use); that is, kept it from being privatized. Everything on PennSound and the EPC is free, downloadable; there are no ads. With PennSound, I’ve been fortunate to work with Al Filries whose commitment to creating and maintaining alternative poetry spaces is extraordinary. The imperative to me is to make the most of the institutional resources available to me. The problem for me is not that we’ve done too much, but that we are not doing enough. And I hope and trust that the models we have created will encourage other people to respond to what we’ve done and especially what we’ve failed to do—and to create their own comparable sites.

Daniel Benjamin on UChicago reading

link | 02-24-10

Fred Wah Digital Archive

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:54:07 -0800

The Fred Wah Digital Archive

Compiled and with an Introduction by
Susan Rudy

link | 02-17-10

Scalapino new book, Chax press, Toronto New School of Writing, poetics v olympics

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:55:02 -0800

Leslie Scalapino

Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows

Miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more - Leslie Scalapino's FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE- FLOWS is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states - an alexia where unknown words create a future - and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's language.

"This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey's Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger - and it blows with the elegance of a horse - or a wolf... Virginia Woolf!" - Michael McClure.

"Leslie Scalapino's writing reveals how far language — and therefore thought itself — can go beyond what we are accustomed to, and the forms in which she writes delightfully defy our expectations. Yet her work is infused with a seriousness, a passion, a timeliness, and an intelligence with which we profoundly identify. A new book by Leslie Scalapino is — always! — cause for celebration." Lydia Davis, author of Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

"What is an event anyway? This is a question Scalapino has explored before, but never quite as she does here. There is the known world where 'one-box-fits-all-words' make 'even plants indistinguishable from humans.' And then there is the world Scalapino creates, a world of fresh encounters where the 'hartebeest is wandering' and the 'vast shimmying fractionation is heard.' This other world isn't Eden, though it might seem so at first. Like the one we know, this world is filled with disaster and violence. The difference is that here we don't see it coming; we can't hide behind dead verbiage; we can't brace ourselves." Rae Armantrout, author of Versed

In celebration of the book's release, Scalapino will appear at the following upcoming SF/Bay area [California] readings:
Tuesday, 2/23 at Moe's Books, 7:00 pm (w/ Amy Evans McClure)
Wednesday, 3/10 at UC Press Books, 6:00 pm
Saturday, 3/20 at Small Press Traffic, 7:30 pm (w/ Bruce Andrews)

Pre-publication copies now available

Buy direct from Starcherone - this is the method of purchase by which you can support us best. [click image]

$18.00 + shipping

Also available from SMALL PRESS DIST BUTION

STARCHERONE BOOKS is a nonprofit publisher of innovative fiction located in Buffalo, NY. In 2008, our title THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by ZACHARY MASON became one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's YOUNG LIONS AWARD. Previously, JOSHUA HARMON'S QUINNEHTUKQUT was a finalist for the CABELL FIRST NOVELIST PRIZE. Starcherone authors have also won National Endowment for the Arts and Isherwood Fellowships, the Italo Calvino Award, and the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, among other awards. Starcherone publishes four titles a year, and FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS is our 20th book since the press's inception in 2000.

Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows will have its official release on April 1, 2010.

email: starcherone@gmail.com

web: http://www.starcherone.com

Orders from Starcherone in the United States are charged $6 shipping. Outside the US, the charge is $8.

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

A message from Chax Press

Please choose to specifically support one (or more) of these books through a targeted donation.
To do so, please visit the book sponsorship page on the Chax Press web site at

http://chax.org/sponsorship.htm

Robert Mittenthal, Wax World

Barbara Henning, Cities and Memory

Alice Notley, Reason and Other Women

Nico Vassilakis, Diesel Hand

Charles Bernstein, Umbra

Anne Waldman, Matriot Acts

Tenney Nathanson, Ghost Snow Falling in the Void (Globalization)

. Chax Press is supported by government grants, book sale revenue, private foundation grants, and donations from individuals. The largest and most important of these amounts: donations from individuals. We could not publish books without help from people like you.

Please choose to specifically support one (or more) of these books through a targeted donation. To do so, please visit the book sponsorship page on the Chax Press web site at

http://chax.org/sponsorship.htm

You may choose to support the full costs of a book, or various partial costs, or simply to give in any amount you choose.

In addition, on this page you will also find opportunities to support books by Robert Mittenthal, Nico Vassilakis, and Will Alexander. We will also soon be adding more opportunities to lend your important support to other books by Leslie Scalapino, Jonathan Stalling, Andrew Levy, Joe Amato, Alan Loney, Standard Schaeffer, Mark Weiss, and more.

Chax Press is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization, and your contributions are tax deductible.

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

TORONTO NEW SCHOOL of WRITING

a new poetry and poetics center
classes with
Cara Bensin, Angel Carr, Mark Goldstein, Jay MillAr, Jenny Sampirisi, & Mark Truscott

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

During the Vancouver Olympics
Roger Farr and Stephen Collis will be hosting
"Short Range Poetic Device"
a series of readings and discussions about poetry and politics
as part of Vivo Media Arts' "Safe Assembly" project.
Schedule:
Tuesday Feb 16 7pm: Roger Farr, Stephen Collis, Donato Mancini
Wednesday Feb 17 2pm: Reg Johanson, Kim Duff, Jeff Derksen
Tuesday Feb 23 7pm: Clint Burnham and Rita Wong
Wednesday Feb 24 9pm: Cecily Nicholson and Naava Smolash
For details see http://shortrangepoeticdevice.blogspot.com
streamed live from Vancouver at
http://www.videoinstudios.com/radio.php

link | 02-15-10

Charles Bernstein Web Log

U.S. incarceration stats

All the Whiskey in Heaven: TimeOut review; launches in NY and Philadelphia

Larry Ochs in NY

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4

Museum Walk: archaic figures, Victorian photocollage, Man Ray

Fred Wah on Close Listening

All the Whiskey youtube & review; UDP show; Waldman & Malina; Emma Bernstein installation shots; &&

‘17 Ugly Years’ / UDP exhibition and events at PS1

CFP: Contemporary Poetcis ed. Burnham and Stewart

Tan Lin: 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Snelson's annotated/pdf of Lin's Heath

Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, out March 2

Antin talk on Freud w/o psychonanalysis

Erin Moure on Close Listening

Erín Moure on Close Listening February 21, 2010.

Chicago Weekly Interview by Daniel Benjamin

Fred Wah Digital Archive

The Fred Wah Digital Archive

Scalapino new book, Chax press, Toronto New School of Writing, poetics v olympics

Erín Moure
on
Close Listening

February 21, 2010.