Commentaries - May 2014

In audio practice VI

Notes on Baraka recordings

Chris Funkhouser and Amiri Baraka June 2013 photo by Amy Hufnagel
Chris Funkhouser and Amiri Baraka, June 2013, photo by Amy Hufnagel

My wife and I first met Amiri Baraka in November 1997, standing in line to get our tickets to a Betty Carter, Joshua Redman, and Maria João/Mario Laginha concert at New Jersey Performing Art Center in Newark. Baraka was directly in front of us! Both Amy and I had been readers of his work since college, were aware of his intensity, and struck up conversation with him. I explained I had been a student and friend of Ginsberg’s, and that I was living and working in Newark. He told us about monthly salons he and his wife Amina hosted at their home, Kimako’s Blues People, gave us his card, and invited us to come over — which we did many times during the next few years.

Geomantic riposte: 'Chinese Blue'

Weyman Chan was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1963, to immigrant parents from China. Chan has published poems and short stories in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies. He won the 2003 Alberta Book Award for his first book of poetry, Before a Blue Sky Moon and his second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Chan’s most recent collection Chinese Blue draws on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being in contemporary times.

Writing from the New Coast: the video

March 31 - April 3, 1993

Jena Osman

Kritin Prevallet’s and Gail Brisson’s video of Buffalo poets at the New Coast festival: Peter Gizzi, Juliana Spahr, Bill Tuttle, Pam Rehm, Ben Friedlander, Lew Daly, Mark Wallace and Jena Osman.

Maybe logic

"Matrix Mechanics" by Kim Goldberg first appeared in the Scientific Wonders issu
"Matrix Mechanics" by Kim Goldberg first appeared in the Scientific Wonders issue of Rampike, Vol. 20, No. 2. Image courtesy of Kim Goldberg.

Erwin Schrödinger developed the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat—where a cat, sealed in a box, is both alive and dead at the same time in a quantum entanglement until an observer looks at the cat, at which point the cat is either alive or dead—to criticize quantum mechanics by showing how the theory breaks down at larger scales and cannot logically represent reality.