Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
The image above is from The Place of Scraps, courtesy of the author.
I begin my consideration of Vancouver poetry and poetics with First Nations poet, Jordan Abel’s Dorothy Livesay Award-winning The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013). Thesource material for the book is anthropologist Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles, an early 20th century two-volume text on Pacific Northwest totems. Totem poles tell the history of a people. Like its source, Scraps deploys linguistic and visual systems of representation to record First Nations history but unlike its source, it reveals anthropology as a colonial weapon in its creative distillation of Barbeau’s ethnography. Images of First Nations peoples and their cultures are layered on dense lines of text; sometimes, as Vancouver poet, educator, and activist, Rita Wong describes, “English litters the sky, its typed letters eventually demolishing into illegible insects that flit above archival photo-testimony to land/people.” Passages of Barbeau’s Totem Poles are erased and interspersed with dated prose sections cataloging Abel's loss and recovery of personal history, resulting in a totem pole of the poet’s history within a history of his ancestral people, the Nisga’a Nation.
When Mandelstam wrote, “I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice,” he was being literal. Here is how Viktor Shklovsky, Mandelstam’s neighbor for a time in the early 1920s, described him: “With his head thrown back, Osip Mandelstam walks around the house. He recites line after line for days on end. The poems are born heavy. Each line separately.” And here is how Sergey Rudakov, a young philologist and poet who visited Mandelstam in exile in Voronezh, described him in 1935: “Mandelstam has a wild way of working… I am standing in front of a working mechanism (or maybe organism, that is more precise) of poetry… The man no longer exists; what exists is – Michelangelo. He sees and remembers nothing. He walks around mumbling: ‘Like a black fern on a green night.’ For four lines, four hundred are uttered, literally… He does not remember his own poems. He repeats himself and, separating out the repetitions, writes what is new.”
[NOTE. The text that follows is a further installment from Bloomberg-Rissman’s epic assemblage, Zeitgeist Spam, a work constructed (almost) entirely, he tells us, from words or sounds appropriated from other writers. In the present instance the over-all source is Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present, which he & I have recently completed as Poems for the Millennium, volume 5, for publication later this year by Black Widow Press. The subsection of Zeitgeist Spam, “In the House of the Hangman,” itself in multiple installments, derives its title from an essay by Theodor Adorno: “In the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose; one might be suspected of harboring resentment.”]
ModPo 2014
Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
ModPo 2014
Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Jordan Abel's 'The Place of Scraps'
I begin my consideration of Vancouver poetry and poetics with First Nations poet, Jordan Abel’s Dorothy Livesay Award-winning The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013). The source material for the book is anthropologist Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles, an early 20th century two-volume text on Pacific Northwest totems. Totem poles tell the history of a people. Like its source, Scraps deploys linguistic and visual systems of representation to record First Nations history but unlike its source, it reveals anthropology as a colonial weapon in its creative distillation of Barbeau’s ethnography. Images of First Nations peoples and their cultures are layered on dense lines of text; sometimes, as Vancouver poet, educator, and activist, Rita Wong describes, “English litters the sky, its typed letters eventually demolishing into illegible insects that flit above archival photo-testimony to land/people.” Passages of Barbeau’s Totem Poles are erased and interspersed with dated prose sections cataloging Abel's loss and recovery of personal history, resulting in a totem pole of the poet’s history within a history of his ancestral people, the Nisga’a Nation.
The Poems of Osip Mandelstam, tr. Ilya Bernstein (free pdf)
EPC Digital Editions
EPC Digital Editions is pleased to present this new book.
pdf of full book.
Here is Ilya Bernstein's introduction:
A Note on Mandelstam’s Poems
When Mandelstam wrote, “I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice,” he was being literal. Here is how Viktor Shklovsky, Mandelstam’s neighbor for a time in the early 1920s, described him: “With his head thrown back, Osip Mandelstam walks around the house. He recites line after line for days on end. The poems are born heavy. Each line separately.” And here is how Sergey Rudakov, a young philologist and poet who visited Mandelstam in exile in Voronezh, described him in 1935: “Mandelstam has a wild way of working… I am standing in front of a working mechanism (or maybe organism, that is more precise) of poetry… The man no longer exists; what exists is – Michelangelo. He sees and remembers nothing. He walks around mumbling: ‘Like a black fern on a green night.’ For four lines, four hundred are uttered, literally… He does not remember his own poems. He repeats himself and, separating out the repetitions, writes what is new.”
John Bloomberg-Rissman: 'In the House of the Hangman' 1731
[NOTE. The text that follows is a further installment from Bloomberg-Rissman’s epic assemblage, Zeitgeist Spam, a work constructed (almost) entirely, he tells us, from words or sounds appropriated from other writers. In the present instance the over-all source is Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present, which he & I have recently completed as Poems for the Millennium, volume 5, for publication later this year by Black Widow Press. The subsection of Zeitgeist Spam, “In the House of the Hangman,” itself in multiple installments, derives its title from an essay by Theodor Adorno: “In the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose; one might be suspected of harboring resentment.”]