Commentaries - May 2011

Stein: Call back the dead & sleeping senses

Night of the living linguistic dead. That's the essence of Sherwood Anderson's gone-awry comments on the writing of Gertrude Stein: “Every artist working with words as his medium must at times be profoundly irritated by what seems the limitations of his medium. What things does he not wish to create with words! There is the mind of the reader before him and he would like to create in that reader's mind a whole new world of sensations, or rather one might better say he would like to call back into life all of the dead and sleeping senses.”

'Back of'

Index, bibliography, catalog, list

Image by Noah Saterstrom
Image by Noah Saterstrom

This post explores the poem as index, bibliography, catalog, or otherwise arranged list. I want to consider the ways each piece overflows, suggesting threads that the listener might follow or complicating the idea of order under the guise of an ordering structure. I want to pay attention to the ways these recordings open up into the works of other writers and artists in addition to reflecting back upon the concerns of their respective authors.

High school, haiku, tweet tweet

Devaney, Ashbery, Basho

A while back, in 2009, I tweeted the following:

A poet in a serious discussion yesterday used the example of 140 characters as a constraint-based poetics. He was talking about haiku, natch

The tweet in itself was precisely 140 characters. Here in the relatively spacious J2 textbox, though, it seems so bare, so minimal. In the twitter format I use (the application called “Tweetie”) the full 140-character update fills the space and makes me feel downright loquacious. These new media really are our messages. You'd think I'd have discovered this before now.

E-Poetry [ 2011 ] : International Digital Language | Media | Arts Festival

SUNY-Buffalo

e-poetry poster

TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL
May 18-21, 2011 festival website
program PDF (Draft)participants

poster: Charles Bernstein / Loss Pequeño Glazier, "Two Birds with One Stone"

Duncan: What is today's beauty, c. 1970

These are the opening lines of “Quand le Grand Foyer Descend Dans les Eaux”' a section of Robert Duncan's anti-war Passages. In 1982 Duncan went to Buffalo to read poems mostly from the "Regulators" sequence of Passages, published in Ground Work II: In the Dark. Duncan began with a nearly 18-minute preamble: a talk about the imagination, nationhood, Christendom and Dante's Divine Comedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, being a “poet of the spirit,” being a “Christian non-Christian,” language mysticism, and prayer. He ended with what he called a “sermon” (21 minutes).