The dark containers (PoemTalk #117)

Larissa Lai, 'Nascent Fashion'

Al Filreis

Left to right: Colin Browne, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah.

Larissa Lai’s poetry here “is on the move between things,” as Fred Wah puts it in this episode of PoemTalk, for which Al Filreis also gathered Daphne Marlatt and Colin Browne to discuss Lai’s long poem Nascent Fashion (published together with several other long poems in Automaton Biographies). Fred, Daphne, and Colin were on tour together as a Western Canadian trio for readings and events along the US east coast. Fortunately for PoemTalk and Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia was one of their stops.

The discussion, following that sense of moving between things, grapples with Larissa Lai’s talent for writing that “pushes borders,” forcing nouns into verbs (thus socializing and even politicizing them), experimenting with the collective pronoun, and reanimating intense (at times despairing) confrontations with a linguistic history of slavery, involuntary emigration, mass killing. Verse here is a racialized discourse that helps assert by strong constant implication that pushing language is indeed pushing borders. “Mastercarding” is a political verb, all four PoemTalkers aver, as they moved from understanding this nascent fashion as “social” to reading it as political in its perception of the way economics supports human dislocation.

Larissa Lai performed parts of work pubished in Automaton Biographies at Banff, Alberta, in February of 2010 — at the “In(ter)ventions” conference co-organized by Fred Wah. (Al Filreis was present at Banff then, too, and attended the reading.) PennSound’s Larissa Lai page includes a ten-minute recording of her reading from Nascent Fashion.

PoemTalk episode #117 was recorded and engineered by Annie Fang and Zach Carduner in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House. PoemTalk’s editor was once again Zach Carduner. PoemTalk is grateful to Elizabeth and Nathan Leight for their ongoing support of this podcast series and of digital poetics projects at Kelly Writers House generally. We also acknowledge our partners at the Poetry Foundation and, of course, PennSound — which is the source of all recordings used in PoemTalk.

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October 12, 2017

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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.”

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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.