Commentaries - December 2013

Sumarr Reading Series & ENTER>text: A conversation

by Diana Arterian & Henry Hoke

ENTER>text at Human Resources
ENTER>text at Human Resources

Diana Arterian: Maybe we should begin with why we started our respective reading series. Sumarr's humble beginnings are actually due to one of the cardinal sins: envy. You remember watching all the graduating students of CalArts' MFA program reading from their manuscripts to all of us during our first year.

Needless iconoclasm

Notes on an anthology of contemporary American poets in 1957

Ray B. West, editor of The Western Review (published for years out of the University of Iowa), went on a rare leave of absence and left things to an acting editor, Richard Freedman. (Paul Engle, faculty director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, served as the magazine’s advisory editor.) While Freedman was minding the editorial store, the magazine published as its Spring 1957 issue a selection of twenty-one poets who had come of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s – “essentially,” Freedman noted, “the generation which has developed since the Second World War.” Richard Stern chose the poets and poems.

That Dada Strain (continued): Three Dada Poems with Music (Talking Heads, Noise 292, Ethel Waters)

Performance 1984 of Jerome Rothenberg’s That Dada Strain by Luke Morrison & the
Performance 1984 of Jerome Rothenberg’s That Dada Strain by Luke Morrison & the Center for Theater Science & Research, San Diego and New York

Wrote Dada poet Hugo Ball at the moment of discovery (1916): “I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte, (poems without words) or Lautgedichte (sound poems), in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence.  I gave a reading of the first one of these poems this evening. I had made myself a special costume for it.  My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk ...