Ross Hair

First reading of Lorine Niedecker's 'Popcorn-can cover' (2)

Ross Hair

Popping with a flurry of consonantal k sounds (“Popcorn-can cover”) that settle down in the poem’s successive lines (“screwed,” “cold” and, finally, “can’t”), “Popcorn-can cover” reminds me that Niedecker’s is a poetry of pressure. Not only the pressure of brevity but also of everyday existence.

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
so the cold
can’t mouse in
— Lorine Niedecker

First reading of Basil Bunting's performance of Thomas Wyatt's 'Blame not my lute' (3)

Ross Hair

First Readings

“Blame Not My Lute” is but one of eleven Thomas Wyatt poems that Basil Bunting read at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1977. Wyatt was keeping good company on that occasion as Bunting, it appears, also read poems by Pound, Spenser, Whitman, and Zukofsky. Here for the "First Readings" series is Ross Hair's take on Bunting's take on Wyatt.

The black screen that greeted me when I opened the PennSound link seemed particularly appropriate for the First Reading assignment. No context, no introduction, no preamble; just a recording of Bunting in the form of a nondescript audio file that, after clicking play, inched its way across the black screen, its bar changing from grey to white in just under three minutes. The URL reveals that the recording dates back to 1977. The PennSound Bunting page yields little extra: “Blame Not My Lute” is but one of eleven Wyatt poems that Bunting read at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1977.

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Jerome Rothenberg

[In celebration of our work together coediting the transnational assemblage of North and South American poetry “from origins to present,” in progress and scheduled for publication by University of California Press, I’m posting here these three connected poems from Javier Taboada’s most recent gathering.

Joel Newberger

'Bamidbar' (In the Desert) from HEXATEUCH, 2019

Jerome Rothenberg

[What follows is a section of Joel Newberger’s elaboration of the Bible’s first five books (Torah in Hebrew, Pentateuch in Greek-derived English), in what Robert Kelly succinctly calls “Newberger’s imaginative disclosure of the multitudinous meanings of the Five Books so rightly called of Moses.” Presented below, then, is what the English Bible knows as The Book of Numbers, but named in the old book itself as Bamidbar: “In the Desert,” or closer to my own concerns “In the Wilderness.” And Kelly further: “This is a book of recovery, adventure, shock, high comedy, tenderness. The Bible will never seem the same again, thank God. And one privilege of his Hexateuch, is that it does a good job of contributing to the vital revolution in religious studies leading to a fresh and altogether anti-patriarchal awareness of Judaism and Christianity as one religion, not two … and understanding how they are linked by a shared eschaton.” That Newberger’s is a brave and important new poem as well is also to be noted. (J.R.)]