Bruce Andrews

To the goon ictus (PoemTalk #188)

Ted Pearson, “Catenary Odes”

PoemTalk
from left: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William Fuller, Bruce Andrews

Al Filreis hosted Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William Fuller, and Bruce Andrews in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House for a conversation about Ted Pearson's book-length poem Catenary Odes. The book was first published by O Books in 1987. The poem, or perhaps it is a series of couplet-length poems, covers 44 pages in print; the PoemTalk group discussed the first 11 pages, approximately 40 lines. Our section ends with “the body electric in a brownout / the western mind in a jar.” The recording we play in this episode comes from Pearson’s PennSound page, from an audiotaping of a reading given in the Segue Series at the Ear Inn in New York on December 4, 1993.

September 26, 2023

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E interview

Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (2015)

Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein for The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters (2019). This interview was part of the University of New Mexico book and is made available here with permission of the press. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters is one of three volume edited by Hofer and Golston and published by University of New Mexico Press. The other two volumes are the complete facsimile edition of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (2020) and the collaborative poem LEGEND (2020) by Andrews, Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, and Steve McCaffery. Each of these editions including extensive notes and commentaries by the editors. 

June 22, 2022

Legend: The Complete Facsimile in Context

LEGEND was written in the late 1970s by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. This new editition is edited by Matthew Hofer, Michael Golston and includes a new, unpubished  collaboration by all five poets, written especially for this edition, as well an introduction of a selection of correspondence by the authors while they were writing the poems.

May 28, 2020

An abductee, in theory (PoemTalk #92)

Bob Perelman, 'Confession'

PoemTalk

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Al Filreis convened Kristen Gallagher, Kathy Lou Schultz, and Bruce Andrews for a conversation about a poem by Bob Perelman, “Confession,” which the poet once introduced (jokingly, yes?) as “the inside story of Language writing.” “Confession” was published as the first poem in — indeed, arguably it serves as a proem to — Perelman’s book The Future of Memory. Its speaker satirically imagines that avant-garde poets had been abducted by aliens, in the manner of 1950s science fiction.

September 12, 2015

Witness Jenny Holzer (with special reference to Bruce Andrews and Eve Fowler)

Idiolect of know-how

Jenny Holzer, Xenon for Bregenz, Truth Before Power, 2004

No one’s a kid for twenty years without a little know-how. I was a child in the 80s and child of the 90s because I kept up with kid stuff instead of going to college. I went to school on post punk music, the Walker Art Center, and the language poetry I read in my local public library. So I know to be true that the following—my opening gambit—is well after the fact. That’s true, but it’s just a caveat. I get the feeling my indefinite childhood is increasingly passé.

October 4, 2014

Bruce Andrews: 'Debauching the Sine Wave'

Ted Pearson

“tipped / lobes”

Corona was the first book by Bruce Andrews that I read, circa 1976. I was drawn to it for its strict, if oblique, economies, but also because its exclusions reveal as much as its manifest content. I suppose my primary “rubric” for poetry is that it not assume a place for itself, but rather that it construct such a place in fidelity to the contingent logic that requires it to be as it is and not otherwise. For better and worse, as they say.

No less intriguing, however, was the sense that Andrews was building — that is, batching and sorting “mouth signatures” via “all kinds / of robbery” — a scalable vocabulary for the work to come, albeit I had no idea of how capacious that scale would soon become. Was the magisterial mayhem of The Millennium Project already present in nuces in the “tipped / lobes” of Corona?

January 23, 2014
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