Commentaries - November 2009

free performance at KWH on Tuesday

Ursula Rucker comes to KWH on Tuesday, December 1, at 6:30. Performance is free and open to the public - and that's because it's supported by the Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry project, which has helped us at KWH produce three previous events. Last year's event featured the amazing Tracie Morris and her band.

were lost, now found

The Center for the Humanities invites you to celebrate the publication of The Amiri Baraka/Edward Dorn Correspondence; The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Selections; Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers; Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections: Robert Creeley: Contexts of Poetry, with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals. These comprise the inaugural chapbook series in LOST & FOUND, the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Tuesday December 8th, 2009
6:30 pm, Martin E. Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York City

Introduction
Ammiel Alcalay

Readings and Presentations
Stefania Heim, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Josh Schneiderman, Brian Unger,
special guests David Henderson, Bill Berkson, and others

Lost & Found is a publication project emerging from archival and textual scholarship done by students at The Graduate Center, with the primary focus on writers falling under the rubric of the New American Poetry. Since accessibility to archival material proposes alternative, divergent and enriched versions of literary and cultural history, the Lost & Found initiative takes the New American rubric writ large, including the affiliated and unaffiliated, precursors and followers.

love, Cid

From left to right: Cid Corman, Ed Baker, Ted Enslin, Chuck Sandy, at the Lorine Niedecker 100th, November 2003, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo by Ed Baker...well, taken with Ed's camera by John Martone. More photos here. And here are Cid's letters to Ed, the earliest dated 1972.

on a Dutch roll

We're on a Dutch roll. Now PoemTalk is featured in an article by Erik Lindner in De Groene Amsterdammer (a magazine like The Nation, the smallest of the big magazines in the Netherlands).

"Poem Talk wordt opgenomen in het Writers House in Pennsylvania. Al Filreis nodigt drie dichters uit voor 'a close but not too close reading' van een gedicht waarvan een geluidsopname bestaat, een opname die aan het gesprek voorafgaat en telkens in fragmenten tijdens het gesprek opnieuw herhaald wordt. Het wordt gelukkig geen wedstrijdje interpreteren of etaleren van belezenheid. Door verschillende invalshoeken komt het gedicht niet zozeer 'tot leven' (wat dat betekent zou ik niet weten), wel openbaart het zich. Aan het eind van de uitzending mogen de drie panelleden nog iets leuks aanbevelen."

verspreken, the Dutch PoemTalk

This morning we received a wonderful note from Joost Baars and Matthijs Ponte about a new Dutch version of PoemTalk. Episode number 1 was released on November 23 (yesterday): http://www.versspreken.nl/. They write:

The basic concept is the same, really. Four poets sitting around a table, conveiing a "close but not too close" (a spot on, but for us untranslatable phrase) reading of one single poem. The most important differences are that we focus on new poems, that we do not have any archive (or production budget) and most importantly that the world of Dutch poetry and poetry-critique is so different from the one (or ones) in the USA. The insistence on the act of reading of text, the open way of reading a poem, the diversity of the conversation, the searching, the natural involvement of politics, and the focus on contents instead of reputation - all these things seem to come natural to a lot of poetics in the USA, but they are sometimes hard to come by in the Netherlands.

PoemTalk is I think therefore a kind of an underground hit in the Dutch poetry scene. And it is certainly therefore that we decided the Dutch poetry scene needs something like poemtalk. So that's why we're making VersSpreken right now.