Commentaries - September 2016

Outside-in / Inside-out schedule

The following is the schedule for the major festival of “outside & subterranean poetry,” which takes as its point of departure Barbaric Vast & Wild, the anthology/assemblage co-edited by Jerome Rothenberg & John Bloomberg-Rissman.  The still larger Outside-in / Inside-out festival, as announced, will take place at venues across the City of Glasgow from September to November 2016.

 

If I told him: Gertrude Stein, the financier, and me

William Louis-Dreyfus (Gérard C. Louis-Dreyfus): June 21, 1932 – September 16, 2016

Around the turn of the century, a poet working at the Poetry Society of America asked me to do her, and PSA, a favor, and meet with the PSA board president, a businessman named William Louis-Dreyfus. The idea was that his taste in poetry was too conservative even for PSA and that perhaps I could open his ears a bit on that score. 

DNA's polar pirouette: A spiral stair orbiting its own anti-axis

Just as bio-poetics (as the paraverbal use of living materials) is a creative genre serving as a materials-research discipline, our DNA’s twisting double-helix is a life-maintaining chemical template frequently recruited to serve as a literary icon. Dense with symbolic possibilities, the ten-step spiral stair of a DNA molecule is like five pairs of couplet rhyme, its floors are figurative “stories” divided by crossbar ribs made of ribose sugars, a geometric trellis supporting (by spelling out) the flesh and foliage of organic Life.