Commentaries - October 2014

Witness Jenny Holzer (with special reference to Bruce Andrews and Eve Fowler)

Idiolect of know-how

Jenny Holzer, Xenon for Bregenz, Truth Before Power, 2004

No one’s a kid for twenty years without a little know-how. I was a child in the 80s and child of the 90s because I kept up with kid stuff instead of going to college. I went to school on post punk music, the Walker Art Center, and the language poetry I read in my local public library. So I know to be true that the following—my opening gambit—is well after the fact. That’s true, but it’s just a caveat. I get the feeling my indefinite childhood is increasingly passé.

Cia Rinne on Close Listening

Cia Rinne was born in Sweden from a Finnish family and raised in Germany. She has studied in Frankfurt/Main, Athens and Helsinki. Rinne is the author of the books zaroum, and notes for soloists, as well as being a collaborator on numerous multimedia and performance works. The program was recorded on September 30, 2014.

Close Listening, with host Charles Bernstein

Poetry, art, and multilingualism

Broadcasting Tlingit

Inert, by Nicholas Galanin. 2009, Collection of the Burke Museum, Seattle
Inert, by Nicholas Galanin

Earlier this summer, I met up with my friend Gregory Laynor at the corner of 14th and Union in Seattle. We walked down to the Frye Art Museum to see the show Your Feast Has Ended, which featured the work of Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The show had been getting a lot of interesting reviews, and the posters advertizing it, which we were seeing all around town, featured a taxidermied wolf. In the picture the wolf looked distressed: its back half was flattened, splayed out as a rug. But its front half was stretching forward and flexing its paws. It looked like it was trying to get up.

On H.D.'s imagism

A 27-minute introductory discussion

Here is a new 27-minute introductory discussion of H.D.’s imagism — with Dee Morris, Julia Bloch, and Annette Debo: MP3.