Commentaries - August 2007

Moe Fishman is dead

The New York Times reported the death of Moe Fishman recently.

That impossible object, New Jersey

I'm a reader of Joe Milutis' blog called "New Jersey as an Impossible Object", which roughly works in and around William Carlos Williams's Paterson and his sense of the postindustrial city.

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  • Bob Cobbing

    'gone is the word as word'

    Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) was so cool that he embodied a post-word-as-such aesthetic, which enabled him to reach through language to sound and material (concreteness) and also an alphabeticality (the letter as letter). Ruth & Marvin Sackner's amazing archive in Miami includes a good deal of Cobbing's work, and our Matt Abess spent the summer of '06 and a good bit of time since then digitizing some of it and preparing for an exhibit that is opening now at the University of Pennsylvania library's gallery. This activity culminates in an event at the Kelly Writers House on October 11. For more: 1 2 3 4.

    'Modernism from right to left'

    Below is an excerpt from a review Michael Coyle (author of Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture) wrote several years ago about my book Modernism from Right to Left.Below is an excerpt from a review Michael Coyle (author of

    Courses using PennSound

    University of Pennsylvania: PENNsound, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound and Kelly Writers House webcasts. A stellar project at Penn, PENNsound is “committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives.” Here you can listen to readings from 1950s to today and often find great extras and links to other exciting websites.