On April 12, 2016, Charles Bernstein gave a reading from his new-new book Pitch of Poetry at the Kelly Writers House. I gave the introduction. Earlier I published a version of that introduction here in my Jacket2 commentary series, titling it “Clumsy, erroneous, freakish, foreign.” Now, thanks to the video editing of Dylan Leahy of the PennSound staff, I am able to make available at video recording, below. And below that is a second video clip from the Pitch event — Bernstein's finale: a selection from the aphorisms that appear toward the end of the book.
So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically. Also, a sense of the origins and ends of our devices has always been present in our devices.
1. So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically.
The poet thalia (miniscule-t) was born in Katerini, Greece, in 1952, migrating to Australia in 1954. As a coeditor of 9.2.5., a worker’s magazine by and for the workers, and a founding member of Australia’s Poet’s Union, thalia’s work is informed closely and in a lived way by radical politics and radical feminism. Her most sustained lifelong project to date has been her visual works (begun 1972) with Shorthand, culminating, magisterially, in an enormous 2015 volume titled A Loose Thread that collects these works, complete with 190 or so plates (twenty-one are rendered in colour as centerfold, as in many Collective Effort Press books) and an introduction by Π.O.
The first chapbook I’m looking at, Break Me Ouch by Michael Farrell (3 Deep Publishing, 2006), is a book of poems arranged as though they are panels in a comic book. Through this I want to observe how illustrations might amend our reading of poems, not just accompanying the poem but, in this case, forming the integral structure of the page itself.
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws.
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws. So what is action?
The clumsy Euro-modernist sources of an anti-anti-intellectual
On Charles Bernstein's 'Pitch'
On April 12, 2016, Charles Bernstein gave a reading from his new-new book Pitch of Poetry at the Kelly Writers House. I gave the introduction. Earlier I published a version of that introduction here in my Jacket2 commentary series, titling it “Clumsy, erroneous, freakish, foreign.” Now, thanks to the video editing of Dylan Leahy of the PennSound staff, I am able to make available at video recording, below. And below that is a second video clip from the Pitch event — Bernstein's finale: a selection from the aphorisms that appear toward the end of the book.
Further notes on post-ecopoetics
So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically. Also, a sense of the origins and ends of our devices has always been present in our devices.
1. So far in these commentaries on “post-ecopoetics” I have been focused on assessing how a number of recent potent poems draw from an environmental aesthetic in distress. There is no one way to envision or respond to the distresses of ecopoetics, and I do not mean to fixate on any declension narratives for culture (i.e. we lost our chance to realize the garden, so now we only get apocalypse). Poets and readers can respond to aesthetics in distress in multiple ways, using any range of approaches and attitudes. We don’t need to read the apocalyptic genre apocalyptically.
The lives of the experimental poets 4-6
thalia, Π.O., Javant Biarujia
4. thalia (1952–)
The poet thalia (miniscule-t) was born in Katerini, Greece, in 1952, migrating to Australia in 1954. As a coeditor of 9.2.5., a worker’s magazine by and for the workers, and a founding member of Australia’s Poet’s Union, thalia’s work is informed closely and in a lived way by radical politics and radical feminism. Her most sustained lifelong project to date has been her visual works (begun 1972) with Shorthand, culminating, magisterially, in an enormous 2015 volume titled A Loose Thread that collects these works, complete with 190 or so plates (twenty-one are rendered in colour as centerfold, as in many Collective Effort Press books) and an introduction by Π.O.
'Break Me Ouch' by Michael Farrell
The first chapbook I’m looking at, Break Me Ouch by Michael Farrell (3 Deep Publishing, 2006), is a book of poems arranged as though they are panels in a comic book. Through this I want to observe how illustrations might amend our reading of poems, not just accompanying the poem but, in this case, forming the integral structure of the page itself.
What is action?
Two collectives: anon and not
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws.
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws. So what is action?