Commentaries - March 2014

Robert Kelly: 11 poems from EARISH, thirty poems of Paul Celan [redux], with added commentary by Ed Baker

                       for Dick Higgins
                                                       in memor I am

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.  In 2002 I was asked to contribute to Alec Finlay’s edition of translations by several hands of Paul Celan’s poem “Irisch.”  While working on my translation (which duly appeared in the second volume, Irisch (2), Edinburgh 2002), I began to work on other dimensions of the poem, then of other Celan poems.  The present homeophonic translations are one result.

Geomantic riposte: 'Grid'

Brenda Schmidt is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan, and she has lived in northern Saskatchewan for twenty-six years. Schmidt was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, is the winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions.

Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson: From 'An Introduction to Active Romanticism'

Cover drawing (“Ruckenfigur”) for Active Romanticism, by Susan Bee
Cover drawing (“Ruckenfigur”) for Active Romanticism, by Susan Bee

[The excerpt below comes from the introduction to Carr’s and Robinson’s Active Romanticism: Essays on the Continuum of Innovative Poetry and Poetics from the 18th Century to the Present, which University of Alabama Press will be publishing later this year.  Designed as a followup to Poems for the Millennium, volume 3, in which Robinson & I tried to create an assemblage or anthology of romantic & postromantic poetry, this volume will bring together essays & critical work by a number of poets & scholars: Dan Beachy-Quick, Jacques Darras, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Judith Goldman, S.P. Jarvis, Andrew Joron, Nigel Leask, Jennifer Moxley, Bob Perelman, Jerome Rothenberg, Elizabeth Willis, and Heriberto Yépez. (J.R.)]

Geomantic riposte: 'White Piano'

Nicole Brossard is one of Québec’s leading poets, novelists, and literary theorists, and has published more than thirty books since 1965, including These Our MothersLovhers, Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. Brossard also co-founded La Barre du Jour and La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, two important literary journals in Québec.

Physio-digital responses to the digital

Stephen Vincent's haptic drawings of the sound of poets reading

Stephen Vincent, "Haptic: CA Conrad Reading at Nonsite," September 12, 2009 (Ink on paper, 7.25 x 11")

The visualization of the sound of Charles Bernstein’s recording of “1-100” (1969), which I presented in a recent commentary titled “Anti-ordination in the visualization of the poem's sound,” struck artist, poet, maker of books Stephen Vincent as interestingly relevant to “haptic” drawings he has made while listening to various poets reading their work in the Bay Area, and I agree. He has called this activity drawing by sound (rather than of). “I like comparing my ‘physio/digital’ responses to the digital electronic ones,” he has written to me.