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.
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.
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 ...
Rochelle Owens: 'Hermaphropoetics' / 'Longing'
In a dream
of a hermaphrodite
in silhouette
slender and elongated
a hermaphrodite
shimmering in scene after scene
staged and scripted
out of a lost narrative
Sumarr Reading Series & ENTER>text: A conversation
by Diana Arterian & Henry Hoke
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.
Jerome Rothenberg: Eleven new books & publications in 2013
[For the record I will briefly insert the following list of some of my updated book publications, published this year or now awaiting publication.
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)
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 ...