Commentaries - April 2015

Festival Internacional Poesía en Voz Alta.15 (Mexico City April 2015)

It is my pleasure to be attending this fesitval with Jerome Rothenberg. 

 

1990 Poetry Project Reading (NY): 25 years ago

Mostly from 'Dark City'

"Debris of Shock / Shock of Debris" (Dark City)
"The Ballad of the Blue-Green Plate" (With Strings; text)
"Sunsickness" (Dark City)
"Virtual Reality" (Dark City)
"How I Painted Certain of My Pictures" (for John Ashbery) (Dark City)
Dark City is available as a free PDF from Green Integer

First reading of Cecil Taylor's '#6.56' (5)

Donato Mancini

I have decided to take the “First Reading” framework literally, as “First Hearing.” I’ll take advantage of my ability to pause the MP3 as I go along to type notes about what I’m hearing, in real time.

Lyn Hejinian: Turbulent thinking

Every work of art attests to lived experience and reminds us that another human has been here. Echoes aren’t inherently empty. The emotional encounter — the felt awareness of something other that is essentially a memory, but one emitted, as it were, by another — is crucial for our consciousness of history and a key to the good life. But it is in this way, too, that Death makes its appearance in a work of art. I’ll get to the quandary of the good life later. Inadequately, but that may be for the best. In Goya’s great painting ‘The Third of May 1808,’ we see before us a moment just before an execution.

Bad nationalist

Eavan Boland's global feminism

Much recent poetry registers the modern expansion of citizenship as a practice of exclusion. The provision of rights to some means that others are kept excluded from those rights. So the world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, in The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914, writes that "the more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization" (146).