Zeyar Lynn's second show on Close Listening, in which he reads his poems, in both Burmese and English, from Bones Will Crow, ed. James Byrne and ko ko thett (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) -- the new anthology of Burmese poetry. He also discusses his work, the situation for poetry in Myanmar, and his influences with host Charles Bernstein. Zeyar Lynn reads "My History Is Not Mine" (first in Burmese then in English), "The Way of the Beards" (English/Burmese), "Slide Show" (English/Burmese) and "Sling Bag" (English/Burmese).
Ivan Chtcheglov wrote “The Formulary for a New Urbanism” in 1953 when he was nineteen years old, under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain. An abridged version of the essay was published in 1958 in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste. The rest of this post consists of lines drawn from that essay, with lines drifting outward via various links.
On October 5, 2013, Bob Holman hosted a memorial for Taylor Mead at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. He and others then headed over to the East River (and E. 10th St.) to toss Mead’s ashes into the water with a group of attendees that included Mead’s niece Priscilla. Holman’s note in advance of the gathering read as follows: “Join me at Taylor Mead Memorial at St Mark’s Church today, Sat. Oct. 5 at 1:30. Followed by champagne and chocolate cupcake reception. Then we’ll go to the East River and wait for our antihero to float by on his boombox barge.” The photograph here was taken by Lawrence Schwartzwald and is used here in Jacket2 with the photographer’s permission. Further use requires explicit permission.
It’s virtually the centennial of Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo (1912, published 1914). But the poem has gone through hard times. Despite its enormous initial popularity, Lindsay’s poem has become an embarrassment. Its overt racist imagery has put it under erasure: little taught and little anthologized. Still, a recitation of the poem appears, without any indication of the controversy, in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. And Lindsay is surely a precursor to a range of performance poetry. PennSound made available a recording of Lindsay reading the poem on our Lindsay page. The Library of America includes the poem in volume one of their great anthology of modernist American poetry (see my 2000 conversation with LOA editor Geoffrey O’Brien). Al Filreis recorded a Poem Talk on the poem — with A.L. Nielsen, Michelle Taransky, and me. Our interest is not to put a happy spin on the poem but rather to see what the poem can tell us about American racsim, including the racism of a poet of the left like Lindsay, who was far more supportive of the rigths of African-Americans than most of his contemporaries.
[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someone like John Martone, however
Zeyar Lynn reading his poems on Close Listening
Zeyar Lynn's second show on Close Listening, in which he reads his poems, in both Burmese and English, from Bones Will Crow, ed. James Byrne and ko ko thett (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) -- the new anthology of Burmese poetry. He also discusses his work, the situation for poetry in Myanmar, and his influences with host Charles Bernstein. Zeyar Lynn reads "My History Is Not Mine" (first in Burmese then in English), "The Way of the Beards" (English/Burmese), "Slide Show" (English/Burmese) and "Sling Bag" (English/Burmese).
Continuous drift
Quoting from Ivan Chtcheglov
Ivan Chtcheglov wrote “The Formulary for a New Urbanism” in 1953 when he was nineteen years old, under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain. An abridged version of the essay was published in 1958 in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste. The rest of this post consists of lines drawn from that essay, with lines drifting outward via various links.
For example:
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun.
The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years.
We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.
Taylor Mead, the antihero floating by on his boombox barge
On October 5, 2013, Bob Holman hosted a memorial for Taylor Mead at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. He and others then headed over to the East River (and E. 10th St.) to toss Mead’s ashes into the water with a group of attendees that included Mead’s niece Priscilla. Holman’s note in advance of the gathering read as follows: “Join me at Taylor Mead Memorial at St Mark’s Church today, Sat. Oct. 5 at 1:30. Followed by champagne and chocolate cupcake reception. Then we’ll go to the East River and wait for our antihero to float by on his boombox barge.” The photograph here was taken by Lawrence Schwartzwald and is used here in Jacket2 with the photographer’s permission. Further use requires explicit permission.
Richard Hyland on Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo"
It’s virtually the centennial of Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo (1912, published 1914). But the poem has gone through hard times. Despite its enormous initial popularity, Lindsay’s poem has become an embarrassment. Its overt racist imagery has put it under erasure: little taught and little anthologized. Still, a recitation of the poem appears, without any indication of the controversy, in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. And Lindsay is surely a precursor to a range of performance poetry. PennSound made available a recording of Lindsay reading the poem on our Lindsay page. The Library of America includes the poem in volume one of their great anthology of modernist American poetry (see my 2000 conversation with LOA editor Geoffrey O’Brien). Al Filreis recorded a Poem Talk on the poem — with A.L. Nielsen, Michelle Taransky, and me. Our interest is not to put a happy spin on the poem but rather to see what the poem can tell us about American racsim, including the racism of a poet of the left like Lindsay, who was far more supportive of the rigths of African-Americans than most of his contemporaries.
John Martone, two new serial poems: 'Gamma' & 'Juniperus Virginiana'
[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someone like John Martone, however