Commentaries - June 2011

Radical poetics and secular jewish practice

Daniel Morris's introduction to Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture is now on-line at the website Secular Culture and Ideas: Rething Jewish. Meanwhile, PennSound has recently upgraded it's vide0 of the "Secular Jewish Culture/ Radical Poetic Practice," which took place at  the Center for Jewish History on September 21, 2004 (with Marjorie Perloff, Paul Auster, Stephen Paul Miller, Kathryne Hellerstein, Jerome Rothenberb, and me).

Collection américaine

éditions joca seria

Parties du corps
Bill Berkson

Anne Waldman on Lewis Warsh and the Angel Hair Anthology

From Jacket #16 (March 2002)

I met Lewis Warsh at the Berkeley Poetry Conference [in 1965] and will always forever after think we founded Angel Hair within that auspicious moment. Conflation of time triggered by romance adjacent to the glamorous history-making events of the conference seems a reasonable explanation. Perhaps Angel Hair was what we made together in our brief substantive marriage that lasted and had repercussions. And sped us on our way as writers. Aspirations to be a poet were rising, the ante grew higher at Berkeley surrounded by heroic figures of the New American Poetry. Here was a fellow New Yorker, same age, who had also written novels, was resolute, erudite about contemporary poetry. Mutual recognition lit us up. Don’t I know you?

Of experts and inexperts

Jules Boykoff

In her last post, Kaia wrote about inexpertise as a possibly positive interventionary poetry stance.

Many of us have a conflicted relationship with experts and expertise. To be sure, in general, contemporary society demands increased reliance on and deference toward experts and expertise. Pay heed to the news any day of the week—whether it be television or radio or a newspaper—and you’ll find a cavalcade of experts expertly asserting expertise. 

On the positive side, experts can provide us with shortcuts, time-savers, insider insights, and thought-provoking analysis. Not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate an expert offering shrewd dissection of a topic I hadn’t quite thought of in that particular way.