John L. (Jack) Sweeney fist published his Basic English translation of Donne’s “Love Deity” in Reed Whittemore and James Jesus Angleton’s Furioso 2:1 (p. 34) in 1943. Sweeney's note on the experiment included these comments: "It should be noted that in terms of the system of Basic English its use in verse form is unorthodox. It is not a literary language . … In a certain sense the extension printed here is a sport [but] it may suggest to educationists an auxiliary device for the analysis and discussion of language in poetry. As I. A. Richards said in a different connection, 'Most people find that having versions of a passage before them opens up the task of explaining immensely. This is true even when one version of it is clearly very inferior; its presence still throws the implications on the other into relief." The poem was reprinted in Delos 1:4 (1988-89), pp. 138-40.
from Cristanne Miller, Myung Mi Kim, and Judith Goldman.
(I plan to be at the conference.)
*Please find below* a Call for Papers for a University at Buffalo English Department Poetics Program conference. This conference will be preceded by a Friday April 8 Robert Creeley Lecture. This is the inaugural lecture in what will become an annual lectureship in poetry and poetics, and in 2016 will include a community celebration and presenters on Creeley's translation into and reception by the French. More information about these events (free and open to the public) will be forthcoming at a later date. Please feel free to circulate the Call for Papers.
Phil introduced the issue this way: This issue of Tyuonyi, Patterns / Contexts / Time: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetry, exists because of collective desire. Ninety-seven poets from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, England, and Australia felt the desire to respond. Their responses were to a series of questions devised by Charles Bernstein and myself. The questions were designed to be inclusive enough to address the issues which engaged us, but vague enough not to restrict the potential responses of the respondents. We wanted to create a forum wherein the real issues that compelled poets could be addressed without a felt adherence to any presuppositions. The volume of response was very gratifying and the range of response far beyond my expectation.
THE QUESTIONS: •What patterns, if any, do you see developing that are presently influencing habits of reading or readership within poetry? •What are the values or limitations of these developing, or undeveloped, patterns? •What context, if any, do you see your work as part of? •What context, if any, do you see for the work of those contemporary poets whom you find most interesting? •What's the most disturbing (or irritating) thing associated with poetry or your work as a poet? •What sources do you find most useful in keeping informed about contemporary poetry? •Do universities play any role for you in terms of your work as a poet? •Do you ever think about what you will be doing in ten years? What? etc etc.
Collected over the past four or five years, this forum offers a wide, and usefully conflicting, set of short essays, mostly by poets, on how race figures in their work. Max King Cap curates a set of images by visual artists that speak both directly and obliquely, to the issues at hand; Cap provides short commentaries for each image.
