When a poet asserts she has the voice of no, does that mean she has it - has got that voice down, can do that voice - and wants to know it from the inside in order to get past it, or wants to doubt it, so that she and we can get on to the positive change we seek? Or is, finally, that voice her voice?
"Stein leaves no doubt...that she's doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits." So says Jerome Rothenberg--very helpfully--in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Christian Bérard." PennSound's Stein page includes a recording made in New York during the winter of 1934-35 of the first page of the poem as it appeared in Portraits & Prayers, the Random House
Our PoemTalkers - this time Gregory Djanikian, Tom Devaney and Jessica Lowenthal - gathered to talk about a late poem by John Ashbery, "Crossroads in the Past," from his book Your Name Here (2000). Amid the usual Ashberyean ontological bounty here's a poem that disentangles the crossed lines of narrative middles and ends (and beginnings).
Bob Holman spent a few hours away from the at-times paradisal Bowery Poetry Club to help us (PoemTalk regulars Jessica Lowenthal and Randall Couch) figure out what sort of beloved community Jerome Rothenberg had in mind when he wrote his possibly programmatic poem,
When a poet asserts she has the voice of no, does that mean she has it - has got that voice down, can do that voice - and wants to know it from the inside in order to get past it, or wants to doubt it, so that she and we can get on to the positive change we seek? Or is, finally, that voice her voice?
"Stein leaves no doubt...that she's doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits." So says Jerome Rothenberg--very helpfully--in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Christian Bérard." 
Our PoemTalkers - this time 
