Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land “Seen” was published in 1999 — a modernist hermeneutic detective story (hard-boiled) in comix form. Now Rowson and Michael Barsanti are bringing it back as an iPad app, which is to say, more simply, an e-version for easy tablet reading. “It takes a lot of detective work to decipher modernist literature. Trying to figure how grail legends, the Upanishads, and vegetation myths all link up has left scholars chasing their tails for nearly a century, and has left us ordinary palookas in the dust. Lucky for us we have private eye Chris Marlowe, cartoonist Martin Rowson, and scholar Michael Barsanti to help shake out some of the clues and make some hasty repairs to a heap of otherwise broken images.” There's more here and also, naturally, a link to iTunes where you can download the app. The image above gives you a sense of where I am in the “story” as I write this: section II, “A Game of Chess.” “I lost Idaho Ez,” it begins, “so I decided to look up the only other person I knew in these parts. I remembered the first time we'd met. She'd looked like a million dollars....”
This book is not an attempt to grasp the “essence” of Chinese poetry, nor is it an endeavor to produce an over-polished version of English that claims aesthetic superiority over other works in the same field. It grapples rather with the nature of translation and poetry, and explores poetic issues from the perspective of translation and translation issues from the perspective of poetry. Looking from such a vantage point, translation is no longer able to hide itself in our blind spot; instead, the often-invisible face of translation is being brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work are being exposed to the reader’s view. With its agenda hidden, translation is too often a handyman for the metaphysical, mystical, or universal notion of poetry. When emerging from obscurity, translation becomes an ally with poetic material and enacts the wordness of the words. And this book strives to strengthen the alliance between translation and poetry through various textual and conceptual means that I will discuss now.
Trying to write again about Rob Halpern's work, for a festschrift being put together by Richard Owens in celebration of Rob's forthcoming book Music for Porn, here are a couple paragraphs that may relate to this commentary:
Poetic and aesthetic techniques are neither progressive or retrograde, though I can certainly think of certain poets I would prefer to attend than others, and certain art that I think of as offering more to an existing conversation. Rather, poetic techniques — whether lyrical or not — have a particular application within different historical and cultural contexts, and the poet may be judged to some extent on how they choose to apply these techniques, how they take them up strategically or practically. Beyond “movements” and “coterie,” I want to look at practices and projects uniquely inasmuch as they may be misapplied, or find their application more effective in a different social context. We might also conceive of how particular techniques of writing or art offer more or less resistance to an existing matrix of power and domination. [...]
Begin anywhere
The Short Takes on Long Poems symposium
I'm taking the beach-poem at its word, and beginning anywhere.
In my case, since I’m just back from the Short Takes on Long Poems symposium at the University of Auckland, I thought I might start there.
'The Waste Land 'Seen'' (1999) comes to the iPad (2012)
Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land “Seen” was published in 1999 — a modernist hermeneutic detective story (hard-boiled) in comix form. Now Rowson and Michael Barsanti are bringing it back as an iPad app, which is to say, more simply, an e-version for easy tablet reading. “It takes a lot of detective work to decipher modernist literature. Trying to figure how grail legends, the Upanishads, and vegetation myths all link up has left scholars chasing their tails for nearly a century, and has left us ordinary palookas in the dust. Lucky for us we have private eye Chris Marlowe, cartoonist Martin Rowson, and scholar Michael Barsanti to help shake out some of the clues and make some hasty repairs to a heap of otherwise broken images.” There's more here and also, naturally, a link to iTunes where you can download the app. The image above gives you a sense of where I am in the “story” as I write this: section II, “A Game of Chess.” “I lost Idaho Ez,” it begins, “so I decided to look up the only other person I knew in these parts. I remembered the first time we'd met. She'd looked like a million dollars....”
SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry by Yunte Huang
Introduction and excerpt from the Roof Book (New York, 1997)
An excerpt from SHI: poems by Li Po and Li Yu: PDF
You can purchase the book from SPD.
Introduction
This book is not an attempt to grasp the “essence” of Chinese poetry, nor is it an endeavor to produce an over-polished version of English that claims aesthetic superiority over other works in the same field. It grapples rather with the nature of translation and poetry, and explores poetic issues from the perspective of translation and translation issues from the perspective of poetry. Looking from such a vantage point, translation is no longer able to hide itself in our blind spot; instead, the often-invisible face of translation is being brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work are being exposed to the reader’s view. With its agenda hidden, translation is too often a handyman for the metaphysical, mystical, or universal notion of poetry. When emerging from obscurity, translation becomes an ally with poetic material and enacts the wordness of the words. And this book strives to strengthen the alliance between translation and poetry through various textual and conceptual means that I will discuss now.
PoemTalk commended in the "New York Times"
Jacket2 and “PoemTalk” are recommended in a recent “What We're Reading” section of The New York Times.
Lyric's potential
Trying to write again about Rob Halpern's work, for a festschrift being put together by Richard Owens in celebration of Rob's forthcoming book Music for Porn, here are a couple paragraphs that may relate to this commentary:
Poetic and aesthetic techniques are neither progressive or retrograde, though I can certainly think of certain poets I would prefer to attend than others, and certain art that I think of as offering more to an existing conversation. Rather, poetic techniques — whether lyrical or not — have a particular application within different historical and cultural contexts, and the poet may be judged to some extent on how they choose to apply these techniques, how they take them up strategically or practically. Beyond “movements” and “coterie,” I want to look at practices and projects uniquely inasmuch as they may be misapplied, or find their application more effective in a different social context. We might also conceive of how particular techniques of writing or art offer more or less resistance to an existing matrix of power and domination. [...]