Al Filreis, with help from Zach Carduner in our virtual Kelly Writers House control room, convened Bonny Finberg, Julien Poirier, and Jake Marmer to talk about a poem by Steve Dalachinsky. The poem is titled “with shelter gone,” and our recording of Dalachinsky performing it is clipped from a video documenting a reading that took place at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City in 2008. The reading was hosted by Jake Marmer.
Editorial assistant Kendall Owens reviews three strange, experimental poetry titles in this set of capsule reviews: Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe, Daybreak by William Fuller, and Cosmic Diaspora by Jake Marmer. On Marmer’s book, Kendall writes: Reading Cosmic Diaspora is reading music, as it takes on all of the qualities of improvisational jazz found in its accompanying album, Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire. Speaking from experience as an immigrant from “the outskirts of the universe — provincial Ukrainian steppes,” Marmer describes how immigrants are stripped of their culture and molded into less “alien” beings: “they lawyered me out of my alien appearance / though couldn’t fix the accent.”
Norman Finkelstein has published an excellent review of Jake Marmer’s new book of poems, Cosmic Diaspora. Here’s an excerpt: “Marmer comes by his diasporism honestly, and not only because he is Jewish. ‘Born in the provincial steppes of Ukraine, in a city which was renamed four times in the past hundred years [it was Kirovograd while Marmer was growing up; it is now Kropyvnytskyi]’ (119), Marmer came to the United States at the age of fifteen. ‘Growing up on the outskirts of the universe,’ he tells us, ‘I sought out the language of the cosmos, its imagery and terminology’ (15). A devoted reader of Eastern European science fiction and ‘coveted translations of American sci-fi classics,’ Marmer put this youthful love aside when he became an immigrant — an ‘alien,’ a term to which he became rightfully sensitive.”
Norman Finkelstein has published an excellent review of Jake Marmer’s new book of poems, Cosmic Diaspora. Here’s a paragraph:
Marmer comes by his diasporism honestly, and not only because he is Jewish. “Born in the provincial steppes of Ukraine, in a city which was renamed four times in the past hundred years [it was Kirovograd while Marmer was growing up; it is now Kropyvnytskyi]” (119), Marmer came to the United States at the age of fifteen. “Growing up on the outskirts of the universe,” he tells us, “I sought out the language of the cosmos, its imagery and terminology” (15). A devoted reader of Eastern European science fiction and “coveted translations of American sci-fi classics,” Marmer put this youthful love aside when he became an immigrant — an “alien,” a term to which he became rightfully sensitive. His passion was “just too bound up with my old-country self, which I was trying to erase.” His rediscovery of the genre via “Samuel Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Sun Ra,” led to a renewed vision of “the deep future of the myth, spirit, language, otherness, desire, and the epic.”
Jake Marmer (in his new book, Cosmic Diaspora) tells us a story about his realization that art in performance must permit and include intrusions. This statement is a preface to a section of poems that are verbal score-like “transcriptions” of music he’s never heard but imagines, in some cases. In others, the poems are the effects of writings made while the writer listened to live improvised music. But again, also while he was “thinking about music’s reverberations.” And what, we might ask, is the distinction between those states? That’s the point. Marmer quotes Baraka in this prefatory statement: “Thought has a self. That self is music.”One bit of such self-expression is in Transcription #22 (p. 65): “not sound but sound’s / peel / a vector / trumpet’s footprint.” On the bottom of that printed page in the new book, one finds a QR code. Hold up the phone’s camera to it and get taken to a YouTube clip recording one of Marmer’s performances of the poem. Now back to the “holler” from outside.
Jake Marmer (in his new book, Cosmic Diaspora) tells us a story about his realization that art in performance must permit and include intrusions. This statement is a preface to a section of poems that are verbal score-like “transcriptions” of music he’s never heard but imagines, in some cases. In others, the poems are the effects of writings made while the writer listened to live improvised music. But again, also while he was “thinking about music's reverberations.” And what, we might ask, is the distinction between those states? That’s the point.
One Sunday afternoon at Kelly Writers House, Jake Marmer, Frank London, Al Filreis, and Maria Damon ducked into the Wexler Studio to talk about Jerome Rothenberg's Poland/1931. The group chose to focus on the section of that book entitled “Galician Nights, or a Novel in Progress” — on, in particular, a 2002 performance in which Rothenberg chanted the text while backed by the Klezmatics (the band including one of our interlocutors, the Hasidic New Wave eminence Frank London, on trumpet). The recording — which lasts six minutes and twenty-six seconds — can be found at Rothenberg’s extensive PennSound page.
On December 23, 2015, in San Diego, Jake Marmer interviewed David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg. Today the recording of the interview has been added to the Marmer, Antin, and Rothenberg author pages at PennSound. Here is a direct link to it: MP3 (1:35:55). Here is Jake Marmer's introduction to the interview:
Imagining a Poetry That We Might Find: Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin
Jake Marmer, improv klezmer poet and teacher, performs Frank Lima’s “Plena” in front of Palo Alto Creamery in Palo Alto, CA, January 16, 2016. Here is a link to the text of Lima's poem.
The “First Readings” series continues with five initial takes on Cecil Taylor’s poem “#6.56” from his album Chinampas (1987). Each entry in the series consists of five such short first readings; we have asked Michael Farrell, Gillian White, Tsitsi Jaji, Donato Mancini, and Jake Marmer to respond to the Taylor piece. First Readings coeditors Brian Reed, Al Filreis, and Craig Dworkin are pleased now to present short essays by Michael Farrell and Jake Marmer, with three others to follow.
1. Fred Moten had it: “I’ve been preparing myself to improvise with Cecil Taylor.” Or something like that. I’m not looking it up. Have I been preparing, and with what? That, perhaps, is the quintessential question that comes up when one listens to Cecil Taylor, kids are climbing walls downstairs and I need the question, that comes up, is who you be, listening — not so much, as Baraka had it, “how you sound” but who you be, or more precisely, pass/assist how, listening, to INCARNATE THYSELF.
2. Overdub is palimpsest in heat. My headphones are not blocking out the noise enough. I am having a good time. I am easy.
3. There’re two voices in this poem, one is melancholy, musing, marveling, fingering some dictionary, the other is more demonic easy more detonated, more disintegrated. Are they talking to each other absolutely not but TO INTERSECTwell then if that’s the case, it’s something to aspire to.
Here is a video-recording of a performance of “Facts,” performed by Jake Marmer, Frank London, Greg Wall and Uri Sharlin at Cornelia Street Cafe at the release party of the Hermeneutic Stomp CD, October 14, 2013. Watch and you’ll hear the refrain, chanted by the audience: "We’re not of this world." For more about the CD, see this comment at Jewish Currents; the piece includes a link to an audio recording of "Bath House of Dreams." Frank London is of course the Grammy Award-winning trumpeter who performs with the Klezmatics. Marmer’s first book of poems is Jazz Talmud, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2012. He left a small provincial town in the Ukraine at the age of 15. He is co-founder of North America's first Jewish Poetry retreat at KlezKanada Festival.
The human universe
Kendall Owens
Editorial assistant Kendall Owens reviews three strange, experimental poetry titles in this set of capsule reviews: Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe, Daybreak by William Fuller, and Cosmic Diaspora by Jake Marmer. On Marmer’s book, Kendall writes: Reading Cosmic Diaspora is reading music, as it takes on all of the qualities of improvisational jazz found in its accompanying album, Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire. Speaking from experience as an immigrant from “the outskirts of the universe — provincial Ukrainian steppes,” Marmer describes how immigrants are stripped of their culture and molded into less “alien” beings: “they lawyered me out of my alien appearance / though couldn’t fix the accent.”