Commentaries - June 2013

Kinsella & Milne collaborate on 'Reactor Red Shoes'

Not the building of a megaphone for bardic harmonics, nor the people’s microphone, but a dance of many feet...

John Kinsella (left) and Drew Milne

I'm pleased to present here a statement by John Kinsella and Drew Milne on their forthcoming book-length poem-project, Reactor Red Shoes. The work is being published September, 2013 by Veer: bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books . Below the statement is an excerpt from the poem, reproduced from the typescript.

John Kinsella & Drew Milne, Reactor Red Shoes: A Statement

Here, where two writers sidle up into becoming a third party — a third-party poetics in play and with shared accountability — there is not so much a duet of voices, as a textile of give and take, warp and weft.

Harry Partch videos

Dean Drummond talking about Partch

Dean Drummond narrates this German documentary on Harry Partch:


An earlier BBC documentary on Partch

Cynthia Kraman

Chinas Comidas: Live and studio recordings 1977–80

Chinas Comidas
Chinas Comidas, copyright 2006 Exquisite Corpse Records

One the real perks of living in Austin is the live music, and in April, I was fortunate enough to see Patti Smith in concert— and even though she is 66 years old now, she was spectacular. After a two hour set (including an encore), I was floored that the original punk-poet-goddess could still embody so much of the artistic anti-establishment energy almost forty years after she first came on the scene. But it also made me reflect on the long relationship between poetry and punk music, and what their intertwined history in the 1970's could mean.

Buffalo Poetics: bibliographies of small press publications & very short history of the founding of the Poetics Program

from chloroform: an aesthetics of critical writing, eds. Nick Lawrence & Alisa Messer(1997): annotated bibliographies of UB small press publications:annotated bibliographies of UB small press publications:

Selected Bibliography of Buffalo Publications: 1960-1996 compiled by Kristin Prevallet: pdf
 

•A History of Poetics at Buffalo: 1960-1990 a timeline from Cynthia Kimball & Taylor Brady: pdf

from my essay "A Blow Is Like an Instrument" in Attack of the Difficult Poems

 


At the SUNY-Buffalo, I was the director of the Poetics Program, co-founded in 1991 by Robert Creeley (our first director), Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, Dennis Tedlock, and myself.

From Daichidoron: '32 Ways of Looking at the Buddha,' with '13 Buddhas of My Own'

For Hiromi Ito

(1) When the Buddha walks. his feet are so close to the ground that there is not even a hair’s space between his soles & the earth;

(2) the imprint of a wheel appears on the soles of the Buddha’s feet;

(3) the Buddha’s fingers are exceptionally long & slender;

(4) the Buddha’s heels are broad, round & smooth;

(5) the Buddha has a web-like membrane between his fingers & toes;

(6) the skin of the Buddha’s hands & feet is soft & smooth;

(7) the Buddha’s feet have unusually high insteps;