Commentaries - July 2014

Will Alexander: From 'The Ganges,' excerpt with glossary

[The following is an excerpt from a long poem, “The Ganges,” which runs around a hundred pages & is itself a third of a giant book entitled The Combustion Cycle. The book contains two other poems, “Concerning The Henbane Bird,” & “On Solar Physiology,” the former in the voice of a hummingbird, the Andean Hillstar, &  the latter spoken in the voice of an Angolan shaman. As for “The Ganges,” Alexander tells us, “it pours from the voice of an untouchable.” Of Alexander himself  I’ve written elsewhere: “Will Alexander, more than any of our other American contemporaries, is the inheritor of an ecstatic surrealism derived from European sources, colored by factual & scientific particulars, & drawing with great intelligence & passion from an international avant-garde & from the negritude writings of Aimé Césaire & others, for whom he acts as a true successor.”  His use here of historical & appropriated materials is also worth noting. (J.R.)]

Hannah Weiner, Joseph Ceravolo, and Bernadette Mayer from Tape Poems, ed. Eduardo Costa and John Perreault (1969)

One of the many treasures at UbuWeb is an MP3 of this pioneering 4-track audio magazine. I've pulled singles of three of the contributions:

Hannah Weinier: 3 Poems: (5:43): MP3

Bernadette Mayer: Complete Music of Webern, A Movie (4:56): MP3

Joseph Ceravolo: Poems and Background (2:46): MP3

Thanks to Patrick Durgin, whose research on Hannah Weiner led me to this recording. 

Ubu gives the presecient liner notes:

Spectacle and ethnicity

Harmony Holiday, The Negro Baseball League (Fence, 2011), 86 pp.—In some of her novels (e.g., Song of Solomon or Paradise), Toni Morrison reconstructs the infra- and super-structures of urban Negro culture after Reconstruction and during Civil Rights legislated integration. The failures of voluntary separatism-cum-Jim Crow segregation which, for Morrison, trump their successes (social and cultural, if not economic or political, independence), are largely, if not exclusively, gender-inflected. Specifically, one can read Morrison’s entire corpus, up to and including A Mercy and Home, as responding to the revamping of masculine, proto-patriarchal tendencies during the dream of black cultural nationalism. So what to make of Harmony Holiday’s dream encapsulated in The Negro Baseball League, a collection of free form (as in free jazz) poems that paint a somber vision of cultural separatism?

After before ...

Joel Felix on possibility, poetry, and hope ...

Joel Felix, Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die (Verge Books, 2013), 90 pp. $15.00—Imagine that Russell Atkins had a child with Charles Olson, midwifed by Laura Riding. That might be Joel Felix.  His first book is a moving meditation on the impossibility and necessity of poetry, on history as “enslavement without end,” and the possibility, however unlikely, that there remains, its brutalities notwithstanding, a truth-telling residue in language.

Towards a total art ...

The poetry, drama, art, music, and musings of Mendi and Keith Obadike

Big House/Disclosure installation

Mendi and Keith Obadike, Four Electric Ghosts (1913 Press, 2009, 2011), 189 pp.; Big House/ Disclosure (1913 Press, 2014), 102 pp.—Despite the first, rather interesting, thirty-four pages of storytelling, Four Electric Ghosts is essentially a catalog of what appears to be an Afro-Futurist-inspired opera, at least in terms of its setting and design (disclosure: I’ve not had the opportunity to see any of the Obadikes' theatrical productions).