Commentaries - July 2011

Video for Stacy Doris's The Cake Part

by Felix Bernstein with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee

Stacy Doris's new book, The Cake Part, is being released with a set of video adaptions, avaialble on Vimeo. Here's the part that Felix made, with Susan Bee and me. Read more about the book via the Poetry Foundation.

Charles & Felix Bernstein, Susan Bee in Discourse on the Guillotine by Stacy Doris from Stacy Doris on Vimeo.

 

Charles & Felix Bernstein, Susan Bee in Discourse on the Guillotine by Stacy Doris from Stacy Doris on Vimeo.

Video By Felix Bernstein

Peter Seaton: biographical sketch

Working with Peter Seaton's brother, Thom, and Nick Piombino, I have put together this bio of Peter. Go to his  EPC page for his complete works.

Of translating the indexical fountain

The corridors in The Rose Concordance by Angela Carr open onto the linguistic fountains of the Roman de la rose. The Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose) was an extremely popular medieval French poem, whose initial variant was attributed to a writer de Lorris. A scholar, named Joseph R. Danos, then used this variant to create a concordance, that is a key word index, to the poem. The keywords are arranged in alphabetical order and under each keyword heading is a list of lines containing that keyword. Throughout the medieval age, the Roman de la rose was also copied many times by many scribes, and with each copy would have been altered, expanded, re-assembled, deleted, etc., bearing the marks of each copyist. The word copy comes from the Latin copia which means abundance, so one might say that the copyist doesn’t create simulacra but writes out of the spirit of abundance.

Affinities, affections and elections, part three

Curated specificities

Rodrigo Araujo: parede, cachoeira, nascente
Rodrigo Araujo, Saõ Paolo artist and member of the collective Grupo BijaRi

What we experience—the information that impacts our consciousness—frames how and what we are able to think. How we frame and understand what we experience influences our approach to the world, opens (or closes) us to new experiences, new frames.

Poetry and activism

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada

A much-photographed, controversial mural by artist Jesse Corcoran at the Crying Room Gallery in Vancouver

Jules Boykoff

 As a youngster I had unequivocally positive feelings about the Olympics. In part this was because I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin where winter sports were bigger than Jesus. During the 1980 Winter Olympics, which took place in Lake Placid, New York, I cheered mightily for fellow Madisonian Eric Heiden as he won five gold medals in speed skating, yelping at the tv screen as he swirled elegantly around the rink. This brought the poet out of ABC’s Keith Jackson who later described him as “a spring breeze off the top of the Rockies.” My parents even got me a stylish Eric-Heiden-esque rainbow hat, which I wore with great pride. (Later I attended Madison West High School where Heiden also went). That same Olympics the US hockey team won the so-called “miracle on ice.” The moment the hockey team won the gold-medal game is etched in the chalk and bones of my then-10-year-old mind. I remember the unbridled exhilaration pumping through my little body.