'the inner fragmentation/destruction triumphs over lives which end up in rooms to die more so than heal, especially at the back wings, a mock freedom of soul, where "nothing/ will grow" and "cinders lie" -- ashes to ashes dust to dust -- a mirror of industrial us, perhaps -- a snapshot of the imagination'
'I liked the almost petulant flavor of his home-recorded reading: he projects the word “nothing” as if he wanted it to be an object . . . a "something" beyond him. “Broken” and “bottle” are flung far enough from the body so they could stand off and judge it; or rather, not even that far—it’s more like spit in the wind. (Cf. Marinetti, whose flung words transform the provincially trapped poet, merging into an international technosphere.) The poets had a good laugh at the improbability of doing a podcast devoted to Paterson: Do it!'
If TV ads for presidential campaigns today were as simple and as silly as those put on by Dwight Eisenhower's people in 1956, I wonder if we would all think the politicians had gone insane, or if we would be relieved. Has this business (marketing, really, is what it is) changed so much since '56? Our first and possibly second answers will be yes, but then watch this Ike ad a third time and think about it. Maybe only the quality of the production (and of animation) has improved.
Here's that ad (a .MOV file). Don't those marching figures, stepping to the repetitive intoning of the man with the open-vowel-starting one-syllable nickname just make you want to get up out of your chair and march along too?
Paal Bjelke Andersen this past summer organized a poetry/poetics festival associated with nypoesi. Paal wanted to feature various projects in digital poetry, sound poetry and digital archiving - and asked that PennSound be represented in the catalogue or proceedings. I wrote a piece which was translated into Norwegian. Here you can get a sense of the contributors. In January the nypoesi people will put up a sound archive of Scandinavian poets reading their work, using PennSound as a model. Eventually both sound files and many of the essays will be published and presented in a book/CD set. Here is a link to the essay in English.
I look at Beth Kephart's blog because every entry includes a photograph that is placid or tentatively terrestrial or fragmented yet spiritually whole or purely tonal (and often moody) or mildly ominous or lonely yet sanguine about it or artifactual (is that a word?) or having a quality of being a piece of this world or natural yet slightly obscure or still-lifeish - and sometimes indeed all of the above. Beth's sentences (in her books and on her blog) cast a dream over the page. Typical (of the blog): "I have been thinking about how long people live, even after they're gone. In the songs that bring them back. In the gifts they'd given, long ago. In the emails that still sit in your bin, all full of nobody but them." Notice how the word "nobody" feels empty and negative and yet in the meaning of the line becomes the sign of somebody, of presence.
Anyway, it's such a darned I-centered world: on the day I'm plugging Beth's blog, she's already plugged me. Her entry today is about me and PoemTalk. I cherish especially this outrageous compliment: "[H]e's so ridiculously inventive and innovative that it is frankly difficult to keep up with all that he gives straight back to the world."
PoemTalk in top 25
a mirror of industrial us
'the inner fragmentation/destruction triumphs over lives which end up in rooms to die more so than heal, especially at the back wings, a mock freedom of soul, where "nothing/ will grow" and "cinders lie" -- ashes to ashes dust to dust -- a mirror of industrial us, perhaps -- a snapshot of the imagination'
Joe Milutis, over at New Jersey As an Impossible Object, had this to say, in part:
'I liked the almost petulant flavor of his home-recorded reading: he projects the word “nothing” as if he wanted it to be an object . . . a "something" beyond him. “Broken” and “bottle” are flung far enough from the body so they could stand off and judge it; or rather, not even that far—it’s more like spit in the wind. (Cf. Marinetti, whose flung words transform the provincially trapped poet, merging into an international technosphere.) The poets had a good laugh at the improbability of doing a podcast devoted to Paterson: Do it!'
For more of Joe, go here.
Ike ad 1956
Here's that ad (a .MOV file). Don't those marching figures, stepping to the repetitive intoning of the man with the open-vowel-starting one-syllable nickname just make you want to get up out of your chair and march along too?
PennSound in Scandinavia
the emails that still sit in your bin
Anyway, it's such a darned I-centered world: on the day I'm plugging Beth's blog, she's already plugged me. Her entry today is about me and PoemTalk. I cherish especially this outrageous compliment: "[H]e's so ridiculously inventive and innovative that it is frankly difficult to keep up with all that he gives straight back to the world."