Owing to the precise efforts of Hannah Judd, a member of the PennSound staff, Sawako Nakayasu’s PennSound author page now includes topic-by-topic segmentation of her “LA-Lit” session recorded on December 10, 2006. The direct link to the segments is here:
Linh Dinh has interviewed poet Eirikur Orn Norddahl, and I’m pleased to make the text of the wide-ranging interview available HERE in my J2 commentary series.
Born in Reykjavík in 1978, Norðdahl was raised in Ísafjörður, a fishing village of just 2,623 people in northwest Iceland. Its population has been shrinking for several decades. Norðdahl’s father was a fisherman, and his mother a school teacher. With six books of poems, five novels, two collections of essays and even a cook book with short, meditative essays on food, Norðdahl is in fact one of Iceland’s brightest literary stars. His 2012 novel, Illska, was awarded The Icelandic Literary Prize and The Book Merchant’s Prize, and its French version shortlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Prix Meilleur Livre Étranger. Norðdahl’s translation credits include a selection of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, Michael Moore, crime fiction and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. As an organizer of the ReykjavikInternational Literary Festival, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl brought me to Iceland in 2007, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. This interview was conducted via email over eight days.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, Postcards from the End of America.
Charles Bernstein after reading at the Kelly Writers House on April 12, 2016; photo by Al Filreis
Pitch of Poetry is a book full of important essays. And of course I urge you to read the whole thing. The seven essays under “L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E.” The seventeen pieces about individual writers under the titular heading “Pitch.” The comic deadly serious epilogue under “Bent Studies,” that catalogue of recalcitrances, aphoristic chips from the workbench of a life’s work of radical anti-sectarianism, index-sourcework for what I take to be Charles Bernstein’s most significant contribution: his incessant anti-anti-intellectualism. If you can’t manage all that reading, I recommend starting with the eleven collaboratively written essays under “Echopoetics,” for there is where readers will locate the heart of this poet-critic’s intellectual generosity and aesthetic flexibility.
What follows is the text of an introduction I gave at a book launch event marking the publication of Pitch of Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2016) held at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia on April 12, 2016. — Al Filreis
This is a book full of important essays. And of course I urge you to read the whole thing. The seven essays under “L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E.” The seventeen pieces about individual writers under the titular heading “Pitch.” The comic deadly serious epilogue under “Bent Studies,” that catalogue of recalcitrances, aphoristic chips from the workbench of a life’s work of radical anti-sectarianism, index-sourcework for what I take to be Charles Bernstein’s most significant contribution: his incessant anti-anti-intellectualism. If you can’t manage all that reading, I recommend starting with the eleven collaboratively written essays under “Echopoetics,” for there is where readers will locate the heart of this poet-critic’s intellectual generosity and aesthetic flexibility. “Echopoetics” is a poetry of call and response. Its poetic theory and its frankly affirmed values are discernible variously in these essays, talks, conversations, statements and anti-programmatic programmatic dicta.
Naomi Replansky with the commentrator, 4-1-2016 (photo credit: Charles Bernstein)
Yesterday Charles Bernstein and I interviewed the radical poet Naomi Replansky, now 98 years old. The interview will soon be available as an episode of Charles's "Close Listening" series. Naomi corresponded with Harriet Monroe in 1934 (I have copies of those letters from the POETRY archive) and published 3 poems in POETRY soon after. In the late 1940s and early 50s she published in the communist magazine "Masses & Mainstream." Her book "Ring Song" came out in 1952 and was nominated for a National Book Award. During our talk yesterday she recited the title poem "Ring Song" and several other poems—magnificently. She attended Gertrude Stein's lecture in New York in 1934. She was a friend of Bertolt Brecht in Los Angeles, where she also befriend the group of poets around the magazine "California Quarterly." Her Selected Poems was published in 2012.
Eileen Myles’s recent visit to the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia as a Kelly Writers House Fellow featured, among other public events, an interview-conversation moderated by me. The video recording of the one-hour conversation, which was live-streamed as a webcast, is now available here. Generally these were the works covered in the discussion: Inferno, The Importance of Being Iceland, Chelsea Girls, the essay “Foam,” and some of the poems gathered for I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems. The session concluded with Myles's reading a passage in Inferno in which she contemplates her return to Harvard to give a reading, a dislocated homecoming that leads to painful memories of what Harvard's complaints about her father's drinking signified.
