The PoemTalk team once again went on the road — or, anyway, over the sea — and spent a glorious week in Scotland, talking and filming new discussions of poems with many colleagues. On one of those days we gathered with friends at the Fruitmarket Arts Center in Edinburgh. Poet Iain Morrison, one of the PoemTalkers in this episode and a member of the Fruitmarket staff, helped us coordinate and host this event. The other colloquists are Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown, and Anthony Capildeo.
Al Filreis and three interlocutors — Kristen Gallagher, Lee Ann Brown, and Laynie Browne — met up at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia to talk about Diane di Prima’s collection (and ongoing project) of quasi-epistolary poems, Revolutionary Letters. The group discussed three poems: #16 (“We are eating up the planet”), #19 (“If what you want is jobs”), and #27 (“How much can we afford to lose before we win”). Di Prima began writing the letters in 1968, and they were first gathered and published by City Lights in 1971. A red-covered fiftieth anniversary edition was issued by City Lights in 2021. Our recordings of di Prima performing these three poems come from various sources and are available at the di Prima PennSound page: for #16 we hear a a recording made in 1969, while for #19 we have undated tape (possibly 1982), and for #27we hear a performance given at Naropa in 1978.
This episode presents a remarkable — freewheeling, energetic, yet comprehensive — discussion of a remarkable artist, Tuli Kupferberg. It is our first in-person recording in quite a while. Charles Bernstein, Rachel Levitsky, Lee Ann Brown, Pierre Joris, and Al Filreis gathered at the Brooklyn home of Susan Bee and Charles. We considered two works by Tuli: “Morning, Morning,” among the most famous songs performed by The Fugs; and one of Tuli’s spoken-word pieces or “pop poems,” titled “No Deposit, No Return.” The latter is the title cut on an album produced and released in 1966. The album was subtitled “An Evening of Pop Poetry with Tuli Kupferberg.” “Morning, Morning” first appeared as a track on the album entitled The Fugs in March 1966. This song and the entire album, along with liner notes, are available on our Tuli Kupferberg page at PennSound, reproduced with the kind permission of Samara Kupferberg.
Last Wednesday night, the Poetry Project of St. Mark's Church, NY, presented a tribute to Stacy Doris. Lee Ann Brown and I presented the films from the Cake Part, by Lee Ann And Tony Torn and by Felix Bernstein. In honor of Stacy, I have added to her EPC page the fantastic feature she did on French poetry for an issue of boundary 2 I edited. And below, the two filsm
French poetry feature with Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Katalin Molnár, Christophe Tarkos, EmmanuelHocquard, Christian Prigent, Stacy Doris and Ray Federman in boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium(Spring, 1999), ed. Charles Bernstein: pdf
Note also Doris's first French anthology: The Violence of the White Page, ed. Stacy Doris, Philip Foss, Emmanuel Hocquard; Tyuonyi 9/10, 1991: pdf
Ecopoetics as remaking the household (oikos) may entail moving out of the house altogether, a shift from home-making to camping. For instance, in a remarkable (and painfully ironic) appropriation of refugee architecture, an urban tent city lines the median of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv—middle class Israelis protesting the high cost and scarcity of housing. (There are plans afoot for a similar occupation of Wall Street.)
One of the best “art shows” I saw in recent years was the exhibit Into the Open, the official United States representation at the 2008 Venice Biennale. (I caught it at the New School, in NYC; the Slought Foundation also ran it in Philadelphia.)
This show indicted modernist architecture as “an aesthetic style—an abstract form in a landscape, photographed aerially and devoid of social relations[, whose i]conic buildings, formalism, and myopic obsession with the upper class . . . became the hallmarks of much American architecture.” Into the Open’s installations ask architecture “to mitigate its current celebrity obsessed approach, encouraging instead a new type of collaborative thinking about design and space that highlights local, periphery, and even edge conditions.”
“Stein leaves no doubt…that she’s doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits.” So says Jerome Rothenberg — very helpfully — in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein’s “Christian Bérard.” PennSound’s Stein page includes a recording made in New York during the winter of 1934-35 of the first page of the poem as it appeared in Portraits & Prayers, the Random House volume that had just been published. The portrait of Bérard — a friend of Stein’s, a painter and set designer and frequenter of her salon — had been written in 1928.
But back to Jerry’s statement, meant to get us to talk about non-representational depictions, for (the first line of the poem), “Eating is her subject. / While eating is her subject. / Where eating is her subject” certainly does suggest, emphatically, that neither Bérard nor anyone else is the subject of the poem.
“Stein leaves no doubt…that she’s doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits.” So says Jerome Rothenberg — very helpfully — in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein’s “Christian Bérard.” 
Stacy Doris tribute at the Poetry Project
Last Wednesday night, the Poetry Project of St. Mark's Church, NY, presented a tribute to Stacy Doris. Lee Ann Brown and I presented the films from the Cake Part, by Lee Ann And Tony Torn and by Felix Bernstein. In honor of Stacy, I have added to her EPC page the fantastic feature she did on French poetry for an issue of boundary 2 I edited. And below, the two filsm
French poetry feature with Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Katalin Molnár, Christophe Tarkos, EmmanuelHocquard, Christian Prigent, Stacy Doris and Ray Federman in boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium(Spring, 1999), ed. Charles Bernstein: pdf
Note also Doris's first French anthology:
The Violence of the White Page, ed. Stacy Doris, Philip Foss, Emmanuel Hocquard; Tyuonyi 9/10, 1991: pdf