Diana Arterian

The resonance continues: From the constellation of Diana Arterian

MARCI VOGEL

Two black holes merge into one. Credit: the SXS Project. Courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory

If you work with words anywhere within a thousand miles of Los Angeles, you're likely familiar with the extraordinary force of literary citizenship that radiates from poet, editor, scholar, and translator, Diana Arterian. Her generous presence here shimmers in a sequence of conversations compelled by the wonders of strangeness. How is it age-old questions spiral into new responses? How is it that from the crashing of steel triangles to supernovas, new resonances arise? From one week to the next, a silent mystery of the universe revealed?

Sumarr Reading Series & ENTER>text: A conversation

by Diana Arterian & Henry Hoke

Harold Abramowitz & Andrea Quaid

Diana Arterian: Maybe we should begin with why we started our respective reading series. Sumarr's humble beginnings are actually due to one of the cardinal sins: envy. You remember watching all the graduating students of CalArts' MFA program reading from their manuscripts to all of us during our first year.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
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••Jeremy Sigler, "The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein," Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, "Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy," Altered States
••Paul Bove on "Echologs" at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: "Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in."

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

Non-object art

From representation to action

Zane Koss

In a recording of a performance from Clemente Padín’s archives described by Jill Kuhnheim, Padín reads a poem to a group of schoolchildren until he reaches the line “‘este verso debe repetirse’ [this line should be repeated].” Taking his own words as instruction, Padín closes the gap between the text of the poem and its performance, repeating the words again and again until one of the children exclaims “‘este verso debe culminar’ [this line should finish].” Rather than an interruption of a prescripted performance, the playful, improvisatory response of the child perfectly completes Padín’s poem.

May 14, 2021

The New Poetry (1969)

Translated by Zane Koss

Clemente Padín

Zane Koss

Syntax, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, syntagma, paramoiosis, redundancy, dictionaries, adjectivization; unifying strophes, determinate semantic groups, the subject, neologisms, verbs, reflexive anomalies, complementarity, versification; paradigms, pronouns, grammar: all in the trash! No more images induced with elements alien to their own nature; enough of metaphors, the indecisive second term of trivial identifications; enough of the elegiac excrement of a man with the face of a duck.

May 14, 2021