Hugh Kenner

'a few 'strong wrinkles' puckering the / skin between the ears'

I suggested in my previous post that poetic irritation, or maybe irritability (who, after all, is being irritated here?) has something to do with a tediously citational female word-labor, antithetical to poetry in the case of Nella Larsen’s constantly irritated fictional character Helga Crane, and the very “raw material of poetry in all its rawness” in the case of Marianne Moore. “[W]e discern Miss Moore being a librarian, an editor, a teacher of typewriting: locating fragments already printed; picking and choosing; making, letter by letter, neat pages” (Kenner 98).

Which era is the era of 'The Pound Era'?

Al Filreis

fragment of a letter written by Hugh Kenner in 1960

Hugh Kenner's huge (and hugely important) book on Pound was published in 1971. A book of its time? Well, considering the social and politcal context of 1971: maybe The Pound Era is a book running counter to the trend of its time. But never mind those assumptions. The book was first planned in....1960. Eleven years earlier. This startling fact I learned a lttle while ago when I read some unpublished Kenner correspondence in Chicago. Check out my 1960 blog for more.

Recently in Jacket2

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A reflection from Amish Trivedi

Jerome Rothenberg

Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3 a.m., that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.

Also I don't suffer (PoemTalk #195)

Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis brought together James Berger and Richard Deming (who traveled together from Yale) and Sophia DuRose to talk about two poems by Ron Padgett. The poems are “The Austrian Maiden” and “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo.” Our recording of “The Austrian Maiden” comes from a February 26, 2003, reading Padgett gave at the Kelly Writers House; the poem had just recently been published in Padgett’s book You Never Know (2002). The recording of “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo” — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown. That reading in its entirety is available at Padgett’s PennSound page; the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

April 17, 2024

Digital Poetics 1

The Self Does Not Exist

William Lessard

When I look for a place to start our discussion, I am reminded of a website from a few years ago. With the ominous address “thispersondoenotexist.com,” the site presents a single face filling the screen, with another face replacing it every time the user presses “ENTER.” No commentary or introductory text is offered, but a quick search returns cautionary news articles written when the site launched in 2019. The site is the work of a former NVIDIA engineer who created a custom A.I. that generates faces in real time from images scraped from social media platforms.