Commentaries - October 2020

Mirror the holler

Jake Marmer's new book, 'Cosmic Diaspora'

Jake Marmer (in his new book, Cosmic Diaspora) tells us a story about his realization that art in performance must permit and include intrusions. This statement is a preface to a section of poems that are verbal score-like “transcriptions” of music hes never heard but imagines, in some cases. In others, the poems are the effects of writings made while the writer listened to live improvised music. But again, also while he was “thinking about musics reverberations.” And what, we might ask, is the distinction between those states? Thats the point. Marmer quotes Baraka in this prefatory statement: Thought has a self. That self is music. One bit of such self-expression is in Transcription #22 (p. 65): not sound but sounds / peel / a vector / trumpets footprint. On the bottom of that printed page in the new book, one finds a QR code. Hold up the phones camera to it and get taken to a YouTube clip recording one of Marmers performances of the poem. Now back to the holler from outside.

Jake Marmer (in his new book, Cosmic Diaspora) tells us a story about his realization that art in performance must permit and include intrusions. This statement is a preface to a section of poems that are verbal score-like transcriptions of music hes never heard but imagines, in some cases. In others, the poems are the effects of writings made while the writer listened to live improvised music. But again, also while he was thinking about music's reverberations. And what, we might ask, is the distinction between those states? Thats the point.

Communist poet at Penn in the 1930s

Poet Eve Merriam did her final two years of undergraduate education at Penn in the mid-1930s. Later, someone writing a Masters thesis wrote about her experience at Penn: here is a page from that. Im grateful to Merriams son, Dee Michel, who shared the document with me.

Recencies

Photo by Amit Chaudhuri — at MoMA

 

Speaking beyond the filter

George Quasha

Image by Susan Quasha and George Quasha

And a transformation within language, in the very syntax of thinking, feeling, and acting in an endangered and dangerous world.

Addressing what’s happening at this particular moment in our collective experience is a lot harder than it might seem. Not that “we” don’t tend to agree in broad terms about the extraordinary challenge of the present — we being those who might actually read this series, poets and others interested in poetry with “a certain edge.” Rather because there’s so much agreement, the situation seems in fact to need somewhat less repetitive comment within the “group.” I can’t think of anyone I know, for instance, who isn’t experiencing fear of the terrifying consequences of the Abominable Four: a Trump win, another SCOTUS right-winger, more climate disaster, unending pandemic. 

 

We need a transformation in this country. We need a transformation in the world. We need a transformation of our system, of our values, of our opportunities, towards love and justice and community. That’s why I write. I don’t want to be a writer against Trump.
I want to be a writer for transformation.

— Lina Srivastava, in video for Writers Against Trump[i]

Jake Marmer

New poems from 'COSMIC DIASPORA' with author's note as preface

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