Bruce Andrews, Michael Lally, Ray DiPalma

Al Filreis

This photograph of Bruce Andrews, Michael Lally, and Ray DiPalma was taken by Elizabeth DiPalma in early September 1975, in Michael Lally's then Sullivan Street apartment. The print of the original photo, now among Ray DiPalma's papers at Yale, is 8"x10". We at J2 are grateful to Ray DiPalma for making this reproduction available to us and our readers.

I just now listened (for what must be the third time overall) to a triple reading given by Andrews, Lally, and DiPalma together at the Ear Inn in New York on November 10, 1977. DiPalma read “Exile,” “It makes of nonsense,” and “I am in the mountains,’ and also a 4-minute section from The Birthday Notations. Andrews read mostly from Moebius (published as a chapbook much later, in 1993); one of these Moebius poems became the focus of an episode of PoemTalk ("Center"). As for what Lally read that night, I'm sorry to say that PennSound's Lally page needs work; it's not clear which recording is the November '77 reading (we'll work on fixing it).

Here is Ray DiPalma's further recollection:

We all came to NYC in 1975 — Michael in May and Bruce and I in August-September. Michael and I had become friends in 1967 while at the Iowa Writers Workshop and been in regular touch since. I published Michael's first book What Withers in the Spring of 1970 (along with collections by Merrill Gilfillan and Robert Slater) under my Doones Press imprint. Bruce first wrote to me and sent poems in the summer of 1970. I was teaching in the MFA Poetry Program at Bowling Green University in Ohio at the time and was about to leave for a year in Europe. The arrival of Bruce's work was curiously coincidental. Michael and his family had driven up from Maryland to visit me for a few days and I showed him Bruce's work. At that point Michael hadn't met or heard of Bruce. However, he and Bruce were to meet shortly thereafter in a DC bookshop — as I remember Michael later telling me — they were both reaching for the same book at the time. Bruce and I spoke on the phone once or twice and were in touch through the mail with some regularity between 1971-75 — but didn't meet until 1975 in NYC. This photo marks the first occasion the 3 of us were in the same room together.

More on the DiPalma papers at Yale:

The Yale Collection of American Literature has acquired the papers of poet and visual artist Ray DiPalma. The author of some thirty books of poetry and visual work including Letters, Provocations, and Motion of the Cypher, DiPalma has had a rich and varied career as poet, editor, book artist, and artistic collaborator, beginning in the 1960s. He lives in New York City and teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

DiPalma’s literary archive includes correspondence, manuscripts, printed materials (largely little magazines), one of a kind book works, and documentation of collaborative projects with other writers and artists. Autograph journals and notebooks and heavily edited typescripts as well as many manuscripts of other poets and fiction writers, often with autograph corrections, are also present in the collection. Materials in the archive, such as correspondence with Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, document the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing community of the 1970s and 1980s. The archive has a significant international component, including correspondence with contemporary French poets, editors, and translators.

May 13, 2011

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.