Collaboration and the Artist's Book at the University de Caen, April Fools Day 2011. (L to R) Charles Bernstein, Pascal Poyet, Raphael Rubenstein, Françoise Goria, Antoine Coron, Susan Bee, Bill Berkson, and Gervais Jassaud. Photo by Kyle Schlessinger.
Program: Caen & Paris Web site with photos and video clips: note two pages, click on "older" at bottom of page.
Laphroaig - Lagavulin - Margarita Charles Bernstein and Josef Straub Sunday, May 16, 2010, 3:00 PM Sculpture Center, Queens curated by Jay Sanders excerpt from reading for Emma, on her birthday: "In the Middle of the Way," "Be Drunken," "All the Whiskey in Heaven", followed by reading of Joseph Straub: YouTube: from Umbra "In the Middle of the Way," (Drummond), "Be Drunken" (Baudelaire); and"All the Whiskey in Heaven"
Attack of the Difficult Poems launch, A.I.R. Gallery, 6-11-11
Scalapino is always just ahead, inventing the essay anew, as a necessary means for the exploration of consciousness, perception, and meaning in and for language, with full engagement with, and acknowledgement of, the political valences of every poetic act as it falls into, or fails, the social. In the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Scalapino's essays are central: a model not just of possibilities but of "landing sites" to use the term of Madeline Gins and Arakawa.
Tracy Grinnell has done a superb job assembling this collection, which Scalapino was working on at the time of her death about a year ago. As always, Scalapino pushes beyond any easy sense of essay. What unfolds here is the startling unexpectedness of thought, articulated in visual and verbal forms that confound genre categories. In this book, Scalapino creates fields for thinking-as-perception, in which the poem emerges from the essay as counterpoint and newly forming foundation. The complex of disparate parts creates working models for a social formalism. Scalapino introduces the terms "seamless antilandscape" to acknowledge that an aversion to traditionl representation does not produce disjunction but rather a syncretic perceptual experience.
Jeff Nagy and Eric Linsker released today the first issue of the their web magazine, The Claudius App, coinciding with the visit of Kate Middleton to Canada and the Royal Wedding in Monaco, and the collapse of the case against DSK. Coincidence? It’s hard to say, for The Claudius App is billed as the home of a new movement, or moment, as movements are always moments writ large – Fast Poetry. When I first heard the term, I thought at last some young poets were picking up on Hannah Weiner’s iconic work The Fast: a new poetry of spiritual quest and cleansing, purging the toxic poetics that surround us in North America. (And maybe they have.) But I slowly came to what sense I still have command over: this was fast in the sense of rapid or quick, in the sense of not slow, or possibly in the sense of dissipated, unreliable, loose, without scruples; entirely unrelated to Yom Kippur and penitence.
Emma, Susan, and I moved to Buffao in August of 1990. I did these works in the following Spring, when Emma was turning five. Some of these xerox-generated pieces, an extension of Veil, and many of which focussed on my own hand-written mss and notebooks, were collected in Ray DiPalma's Hot Bird Mfg as Language of Bouquetsin 1991 (9 sheets, stapled at top). This set of work involved overpriting, rather thant overwriting, as in Veil. The two images here are quite different that the others in this series: I overlayed a drawing of Emma's over the printout of "Emma's Nursery Rimes." The poems, from July 1990, were published as part of a collaborative book with Bee, Little Orphan Anagram (New York: Granary Books, 1997) and later collected in Girly Man. Emma always said she wrote them.
