Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and raised in the US; she has also lived in France and China along the way. Her most recent books are The Ants (Les Figues Press, 2014), and Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), and recent translations include The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika (Canarium Books, 2015) and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015).
The ModPo team went on the road to Providence, Rhode Island — joined by Laynie Browne — to film some new collaborative readings of poems to add to the ModPoPLUS syllabus. Of course while there they just had to stop at the remarkable home of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, where Laynie, Kate Colby, and Mónica de la Torre (and, in a cameo appearance here, Lee Ann Brown), recorded a special episode of PoemTalk. This episode is presented here as an audio podcast, and as a video too. The poem discussed, “Memory Tree,” is from Rosmarie Waldrop’s book Split Infinites (published by Gil Ott’s Singing Horse Press in 1998). Here is a link to the text of the prose poem.
Above: Hieronymus Bosch, 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (detail), via Wikimedia Commons.
This essay is conjectural and conversational. Conversational with other texts, other minds; but also among the importantly divergent logics of poetry and discourse, discourse and exploratory essay. Decades ago, skeptical about the force of a strictly woman-centered feminist theory whose reactive stance seemed to corroborate the secondary status of the feminine in the age-old M/F binary, I was struck by the realization of a gender and genre transgressive experimental feminine rooted in embodied female experience but integral to all struggles with the cultural coercions of an ubermasculine hegemony.
Antigone: I stand convicted of impiety, the evidence, my pious duty done … Chorus: The same tempest of mind as ever, controls the girl.[1]
Despite the fact that gender identities are in increasingly complex conversation with biology and cultural construction the reductive force of patriarchy, with its sidekick misogyny, remains the catastrophic constant. — S. M. Quant[2]
Keith Waldrop reads at the Kelly Writers House, 2009.
Editorial note: The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded November 5, 2009, at the Kelly Writers House for PennSound and Art International Radio. Keith Waldrop was born in Kansas and attended a fundamentalist high school in South Carolina. His pre-med studies were interrupted when he was drafted to be an army engineer.
Iconic image of Romanesco broccoli, courtesy of Wired.
Before Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal mathematics and Gertrude Stein’s roses, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about a primal plant, “Urpflanze,” which was constructed as a leaf within a leaf within a leaf. I wonder if his Platonic vision for this plant, from which all other plants supposedly derived, was an early imagining of fractal mathematics and response to fractal forms in the natural world (coast lines, human migration patterns, Romanesco broccoli). Visual depictions of fractals have no beginnings or endings in time, no inside or outside in space, and self-similarity and repetition occur at all discernible scales. To my eye, these aspects of visual fractals are pleasing. I am also dissatisfied by the undeviating periodicity of fractals.
THE VERSATORIUM PLAYBOOK: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TRANSLATION Seminar with Charles Bernstein & Peter Waterhouse on the poetics of transduction, substitution, and transformation, as well as the political role that translation can play as a site of activism and engagement. April 9, 2014.
Laynie Browne: Recently a show at the Morgan Library in New York City celebrated the 1913 publication of the first of the seven volumes of Swan’s Way. Here one could see some of Proust’s original handwritten manuscripts and notebooks, some of which have never left Paris. In one notebook, considering his book in progress he writes: “Should it be a novel, a philosophical essay, am I a novelist?”
In your novel The Mandarin, the question is potently raised in various ways, who is a novelist? What is a novel? I wonder if you could comment on this.
Amaris Cuchanski introduces the newest PennSound podcast in the series, now numbering 23 episodes. Nick DeFina created this 20-minute audio selection from the five-volume set of recordings made at Brown University at the May 2001 celebration of (then) forty years of Burning Deck Press publishing of books, chapbooks and pamphlets, by, of course, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop.
Claude Royet-Journoud interviewed by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop (1985)
From 'Lingo'
Claude Royet-Journoud interviewed by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop (c. 1985): pdf
from LINGO #4, 1995.