Jacket2

An Alcheringa sound anthology

PennSound podcastspodcast

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For this 32nd podcast in the PennSound Podcast series, Nick DeFina and Amaris Cuchanski collaborated to present an anthology of seven recordings from among those produced in association with Alcheringa magazine by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg. For Jacket2’s “Reissues” department, Danny Snelson has prepared a digital edition of the EP audio inserts that appeared with the magazine in each issue. Here are the seven recordings chosen for our podcast anthology:

1) Jerome Rothenberg, “The Tenth Horse-Song of Frank Mitchell” (1971)
2) Andrew Peynesta, “Once Long Ago,” in the original Zuni language (1973)
3) Jaime de Angulo, “Story of the Gilak Monster” (1975)
4) Son House, “Conversion Experience Narrative” (1976)
5) Awawo, Ogiepo, Asegieme, “Nigerian Songs of Ritual License” (1976)
6) Reverend W.T. Goodwin, “Easter Sunrise Sermon” (1971)
7) Hotoke-Oroshi, “Manifestations of the Dead” (1953)

Girl head mostly eyes (PoemTalk #67)

Catherine Wagner, 'This Is a Fucking Poem'

PoemTalkpodcast

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Rae Armantrout, Laura Elrick, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis joined PoemTalk’s producer and host Al Filreis to talk about Catherine Wagner’s “This Is a Fucking Poem.” The text of the poem is most readily available in Wagner’s book My New Job (Fence Books, 2011). It was previously collected in a chapbook, Hole in the Ground, published by Slack Buddha Press of Oxford, Ohio, in 2008 (5 1/2" x 8 1/2", 28 pages). The Hole in the Ground poems form a sequence, even beginning with a poem setting out “The Argument.” On their site, the Slack Buddha folks say mildly (but, to be sure, accurately) that these poems “explore [...] the mores of interpersonal relationships.” The PoemTalkers say much the same thing of “This Is a Fucking Poem” in particular, but perhaps, in the spirit of our poem, more bluntly.

Reading 'Iovis' in Bolinas

A review of Anne Waldman's ‘The Iovis Trilogy’

Linda Russo
review
The Iovis Trilogy

In Bolinas, California, on a sunny late spring afternoon, four of us are sitting at a small round table set for tea. The table setting is unquestionably Joanne Kyger’s: woven bamboo mats trimmed smartly in black, small dishes of nuts, seeds, and cookies, a cheese board with a local cambozola, crackers, fruit, a small tray of spicy dried seaweed, delicate china plates and silverware tipped with arabesque, and everyone with their drink — some with chamomile tea in small jade-green cups, sparkling water in translucent blue glasses, white wine in stemware — around a centerpiece of pale purple Hydrangea and a few sprigs with tiny white flowers all fringed in broad, sphere-shaped leaves. We are passing around The Iovis Trilogy, because Joanne — who is always pulling book after book off a shelf or from a small table nearby and putting them into your hands one after the other, so that you place one book on the table to empty your hands to receive another book until the table is full of small heaps of books and in need of clearing — insists that one can not read Iovis alone, that it’s meant to be read aloud: “for it was her song, & / she always wanted to sing it / moving as she did among his waves” (213).

Why the witch-hunt against Gertrude Stein?

Renate Stendhal
article

In 1934, Gertrude Stein was invited to the White House to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt. Stein was on a triumphant lecture tour across the United States, following the success of her bestselling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her fashionable opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The American press proclaimed, “Gertie is Gertie is Gertie!” In the thirties, Gertrude Stein was America’s quirky darling.

How times have changed.

On May 1, 2012, the celebration of Jewish Heritage Month began with an official statement from the White House: “From Aaron Copland to Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein to Justice Louis Brandeis, generations of Jewish Americans have brought to bear some of our country’s greatest achievements and forever enriched our national life.” One day later, Stein’s name was no longer wanted in the celebration because of allegations that she survived the Holocaust in France as a Nazi collaborator. Stein, the supersized lesbian “genius” of Jewish origins, has always been controversial, but now she was considered “unkosher.” The White House staff dropped her on the sly by removing all individual names from the Celebration of Jewish Heritage Month.

Gertrude Stein's war years: Setting the record straight

'Languaging' the third space

Language as activity in the prosody of Myung Mi Kim

Jean Uhm
article
Myung Mi Kim. Photo courtesy of Norma Cole.

A way is open(ed), a hole is made
— Myung Mi Kim, Dura 

In an interview, the poet Myung Mi Kim explains her prosody as a temporal/spatial concept, existing in “the space between time and space”[1] that can be understood only through an experience of the “sensorium” — when “all your senses are involved in understanding.” There is clearly much that needs to be unpacked from such a statement. What does she mean by this inter-temporal/inter-spatial site where her poetry is located? Why is her prosody — her (mis/dis)use of meters, lines, rhythms, beats, sounds, poetic melodies — so “different” and “difficult” (two comments that Kim admits she has received most frequently), and what does this say about her concept of the nature of poetry?

Gertrude Stein's Translations of Speeches by Philippe Petain

Václav Paris
article
Gertrude Stein (left) and Philippe Pétain (right).

Carefully stowed and catalogued among the 173 boxes of the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library are three unremarkable folders containing translations of Philippe Pétain’s Paroles aux Français.[1] Alongside Stein’s introduction,[2] the manuscript notebooks and few typed pages they contain are the corpus delicti of her collaboration with the Vichy regime. Despite their centrality to the controversy over Stein’s war years, however, the contents of these folders (thanks probably, in part, to Stein’s more than usually formidable handwriting) have not been extensively studied or understood.

A response to “Gertrude Stein's Translations of Speeches by Philippe Petain”
Gertrude Stein's war years: Setting the record straight

Stephen Ratcliffe, a view from the writing table

A review of Stephen Ratcliffe's 'Conversation'

Rebecca E. Wenrick
review
Conversation

Stephen Ratcliffe’s book-length poem Conversation (2011) is a sharp and prescient writing that continues the one-hundred-year tradition established by the early Imagists. That there be “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. Regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase …”

In Ratcliffe’s writing, movements are on the page — with their own integrity and ruminative space, not simply for the purpose of character description. And this is an important distinction; the motion within Conversation is alive.