Commentaries - December 2014

Experiments with poetry audio: Data as an extension of form and content

Chris Mustazza

It may seem odd that this commentary takes its name from a type of audio distortion, anathema to recording engineers who seek to capture crystalline representations of the human speaking voice. But just as all clear audio recordings must begin by having their levels set, so too must cutting-edge, experimental scholarship, which is what Clipping aims to present: inchoate working ideas on digital analyses of poetry audio. Rather than working to create a polished product off the record, as it were, we aim to publish brief working essays that the community can see and help to refine. As such, we hope to serve as a public platform and an incubator for experimental digital analyses of poetry.

In the coming months we will present a series of exciting posts by scholars working in the field of poetry audio. Ken Sherwood will explore visualizing poetry with special reference to audio versioning.

Olivier Brossard on 'The Last Clean Shirt,' a film by Alfred Leslie & Frank O'Hara

from Jacket 23 (2003)

In 1964, American painter and film maker Alfred Leslie and poet Frank O’Hara completed the movie The Last Clean Shirt. It was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later that year at Lincoln Center in New York, causing an uproar among the audience. The movie shows two characters, a black man and a white woman, driving around Manhattan in a convertible car. The Last Clean Shirt is a true collaboration between a film maker and a poet since Frank O’Hara wrote the subtitles to the dialogue or rather the monologue: the woman is indeed the only character who speaks and she furthermore expresses herself in Finnish gibberish, which demanded that subtitles be added. [read more]

Jerome Rothenberg: New books in translation 2013 – 2015

[As we come into the fifteenth year of the new century, I would like to call attention to the publication, present & forthcoming, of a number of books of mine in the process of translation into a range of foreign languages.  This is of some special importance to me since I’ve been exploring over many years the possibilities as well as the limits of poetry as an international enterprise.  My own entry into poetry coincided with the awakening of a “new American poetry” in the 1950s & 60s, a series of discoveries & recoveries in which I shared, but which sometimes seemed to push back too strongly against the international or global in favor of the regional & local.  

Six books by Hannah Weiner from Eclipse (free digital versions)

Craig Dworkin just posted six Hannah Weiner books on Eclipse.
All free digital versions.

NEW TO THE ARCHIVE:  
in appreciation of the new typographically correct edition of Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal by Bat-editions (France), the editorial and archival work of Patrick Durginand the dedicated stewardship of Charles Bernstein, Weiner's literary executor, Eclipse is proud to present six of Weiner's books: Sun June 9, issued as one of Diana's Bimonthly "Deduction of the Innocents" pamphlets in 1975; the original Angel Hair edition of Clairvoyant Journal; the fourth Potes & Poet's pamphlet, Nijole's House, issued in 1981; SPOKE (Sun & Moon, 1984); the seminal clairvoyant journal work The Fast, published by United Artists Books in 1992; and Sixteen, elegantly hand-set at Awede Press in 1983.