Commentaries - June 2019

Thirty years of teaching

On April 4, 2019, the Kelly Writers House gave me a great send off for my Penn retirement at the end of this academic year. Thanks to Al Filreis and Jessica Lowenthal, and to Susan Bee, for all the organizing. ’Twas a swell time, with BBQ and whiskey and lots of friends, fellow poets, and current and former students. 

Horizon

Pt. 3

Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.
Cy Twombly, ‘Treatise on the Veil (First Version),’ 1968.

For Leslie Scalapino, the poem’s an apparatus, no mere mimetic catch to reproduce world(s) as a backdrop for the poem’s disclosures. That it can be used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s) is also mere axiom; more crucially, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (in this case, where flesh meets florescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

Metabolic pathways

Poetry and permeability

Test tube filled with blood
A sample of my blood. Photo credit: Jimmy Limit.

Oil is a form of writing. I know this because I can read it in my blood, urine, and shit. As part of research for a recent book, I tested myself for a wide range of chemicals. I also had my microbiome sequenced. I found petrochemical pollution in my blood and urine in the form of pesticides, flame retardants, phthalates, and more. I discovered evidence in my gut of shifted microbial communities associated with aspects of the Western diet. I wrote about what I found in a book called Anatomic, which I will discuss in more detail in the next post.

Peter Valente

Introduction and translation of Nerval's essay 'Le Diable Rouge'

[With the help of Henri Delaage (a well-known figure in the nineteenth century among the “initiated” in Paris) and some illustrators (including the famous Nadar, who was a designer before becoming a photographer), Gerard de Nerval composed the journal Le Diable Rouge, which was meant to be a “Cabalistic Almanac for 1850.” Le Diable Rouge inaugurated Nerval’s “Republican” period, the one that would see him, in 1850, publishing in Le National, the great daily organ of the Left.

Worlding

Pt. 2

Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter, “A Schematic World-Universe Relationship”
Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter, “A Schematic World-Universe Relationship.

Givenness is a veil. As proof, the first words of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity chop and screw Rimbaud’s oft-quoted “The true life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.” For Levinas, it’s a crucial corrective: “‘The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world.”[1] Truer words were never slowed and throwed.