Crackt Poeticks

Ashtavakra Gita

2010-03-26T16:41:00.002-06:00

This week I began composing a choral arrangement of Chapter VI of the Ashtavakra Gita.

The arrangement will be sung in the original Sanskrit, but here is my re-writing of John Fisher's translation:

I am space. unbounded.

While the world is like a jar.

I know this as knowledge.

I do not deny this.

I do not accept this.

I do not stop this.

I am the ocean.

While the abundance of matter is like a wave.

I know this as knowledge.

I do not deny this.

I do not accept this.

I do not stop this.

I am mother-of-pearl.

While the envisioned world is like iridescence.

I know this as knowledge.

I do not deny this.

I do not accept this.

I do not stop this.

Again.

I am in all.

While all is in me.

I know this as knowledge.

I do not deny this.

I do not accept this.

I do not stop this.

Another needy poem

2010-03-19T17:39:00.000-06:00

The Way We Need (for Paul)

i can't explain
the i
you
need to
the way you need
the way i feel
need to,
the needing way you feel
the need
i can't explain
the feeling i need,
your need to feel
i can't explain.

an old "needy" poem from a knife a rope a book (Underwhich Editions 1990)

when need comes near

2010-03-19T16:57:00.002-06:00

Finished a piece for voice & piano started in 2007: when need comes near

when need comes near

I walk

away

when need comes near

I wait

in the open doorway

wait

to walk

away

waiting for a way

to be

away

when need comes near

I walk

I wait

I walk

away

Feral Verses

2010-03-14T23:08:00.000-06:00

Sunday posting from Mari-Lou

From the back of the car Cicero thought he heard donkeys braying.

Hit me again and I’ll prorogue parliament the lawyer’s son said to the bully.

Once you study law you see the whole world differently.

I am a poet. I dream of aquatic plants sprouting from my leg.
Calf to be exact, right calf muscle where the Achilles tendon left off.

Achilles wasn’t afraid of anything, except hurting his heel. Thus he didn’t dance or wear flat sandals.

Tantrum prone, unlike Cicero who just couldn’t hold his tongue. Unlike the lawyer’s son who couldn’t tongue his hold.

spring crackers

2010-03-13T12:34:00.000-06:00

Much ado about much at Rembrandt's yesterday. Hello to all who showed, told and processed poetry-related news, books, ephemera. Lia: wonderful suggestions all:
Steve Tomasula, "The Sensualist", "Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves". And thanks for suggesting Twyla Tharp's "The creative Habit"

Check out Ugly Duckling Press. Great writing and design with the word in mind.

Lia, It would be great to hear more about the Banff conference here...
Remember post your work! or that you worked.. here by midnight Sunday!

Get crunching.

really strange writing exercises

2009-07-10T11:10:00.002-06:00

http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/

The exercise descriptions are almost poems themselves.

Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009

2009-06-23T12:35:00.005-06:00

http://www.theeastvillage.com/tc/gilbert/a.htm

He was a sweet guy. He'd be at every poetry reading at the Kootenay School and elsewhere, taping for his poetry show on Vancouver Co-op Radio. Always absolutely present.

"We'll always be here."

David Bromige

2009-06-04T12:10:00.005-06:00

David Bromige died yesterday June 3. He was at the 1995 conference in Vancouver in honour of Robin Blaser, who also died recently. Bromige's paper can be found in the book The Recovery of the Public World: it's entitled "The Poetics of the Vulnerable." A few sentences:

"Vulnerability is a desired quality in poetry as in life more generally. . . . That which is vulnerable has room for us in it, as it has room for the new. We well may disagree with it . . . but we will be able to do so from within the work. It will be not-teflon."

A number of poems by Bromige, selected by Meredith Quartermain, can be found in Golden Handcuffs Review 10:
http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh10content/8.html

On the East Village Poetry Web, there's a link to Bromige's poem "Fall," which is his translation of Rilke's "Autumn" into "Californian" English. First Rilke's poem (English trans. Stephen Mitchell):

Autumn

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.


Now Bromige:

Fall

(Rilke into Californian)

      Man, where'd the time go? Detroit?.
      But summer was really, really great.

      Stand that side of the sundial, will ya?
      I want to dig the shadows.

      Robert Duncan's freaking in the meadow.

      Those apples can't get a whole lot riper.
      Give em a couple more hot days.
      My friends who have the winery are already making the wine.

      It's getting chilly, nights. If you don't have a pad by now,
      Too bad. If you're not seeing someone
      You're likely stuck that way, they went back to school.

      Crack a book yourself. Write in Starbucks.
      Go walkabout downtown. [Time passes]. Hey, lookit
      the leaves, wind, etc. doing their thing. Rustle rustle.
      Contrast and compare yourself. Cool!

Next The East Village Poetry

publication by Sylvia Legris

2009-05-31T12:30:00.002-06:00

Here's Sylvia in good company; she's in issue #26 as well. Laynie Brown is one of my favorites.

NEW AMERICAN WRITING #27 with work from Mahmoud Darwish on Edward Said, Ben Lerner on Barbara Guest, Etel Adnan, SYLVIA LEGRIS, Phillip Foss, Clayton Eshleman, Ray Ragosta, Caroline Knox, Laynie Brown, Jennifer Pilch, Ales Steger, Brian Henry GC Waldrep, Brandon Shimoda, John Olson, Leonard Schwartz, Gassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah, Rachel Loden, Sharon Dolin, Edward Smallfield, Joshua Kryah, Amy Pence, Linh Dinh, and many others.

experiments

2009-05-21T12:18:00.001-06:00

Charles Bernstein's list of generative experiments is at

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/experiments.html

Two new titles of interest

2009-05-05T16:14:00.005-06:00

From Book Thug's monthly e-list:

Emerson, Lori [ed]. OPEN LETTER 13:8 (2009): bpNichol + 21. 2009. Contributions include: a seeing of your writing: An Introduction. LORI EMERSON; Openings: bpNichol's Ephemera by KIT DOBSON; Anxieties, Orthodoxies, and Histories in (the 1990's Critical Reception of) bpNichol's The Martyrology by CLINT BURNHAM; Hopelessly Devoted: The Sacred and the Sloppy in bpNichol Criticism by STEPHEN CAIN; The Unquiet Poem: bpNichol's Re-Sounding Cultural Geographies by LEIF EINARSON; Generations Generated by STEPHEN SCOBIE; Apocalypse Now: The Four Horsemen Burn Through Atlanta by JAMES SANDERS and MARK PREJSNAR; The Practice of Community: bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in Collaboration by STEPHEN VOYCE; bp Anecdotingly by PAUL DUTTON; Blurring the Borders/Bordering the Blurs: bpNichol and derek beaulieu by JONATHAN BALL; Conceptual Writing and bpNichol by DEREK BEAULIEU; Men Write What Men Mean: The "Pataphysics of bpNichol's Zygal by STEVEN ZULTANSKI; vol a vent by NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS; b & P in bpNichol Lane: A Look by MARIE BUCK; city bp, everywhere by BRAD FLIS; Modern Fiction and The Decay of History: bpNichol's The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid by CARL PETERS.

FITZPATRICK-O'DINN, Dominique. Table of Forms. Urbana: Spineless Books, 2006. Bridging the sonnet and palindrome through a rich taxonomy of new literary forms, Table of Forms is a collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; a puzzle book; and a writing manual. Dominique Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn and her skilled team of collaborators have created the most comprehensive survey of noncanonical poetic techniques since the Oulipo Compendium. Offering myriad reading paths, this multisequential anthology includes a Table of Contents, Table of Forms, Glossary of Forms, and a matrix on the back cover.

Writing sonnets, cont.

2009-04-14T11:51:00.002-06:00

Another installment in (hopefully) a series featuring ways the sonnet can be written:

Here is a sonnet from British poet Geraldine Monk's Ghost and Other Sonnets (Salt Publishing, 2008). Nice sounds:

Chronic webbings. Intrigue.
Androgynous flush haunts
Reptilian spine vault gothic.
Vehement throb conflicts on
Polyphonic gutwire. Phantom strings
Berserk minor arpeggios. Buttress ups
Super star dome. Sanctuary out to lunch.
Alone and pale and sort of floaty
Fingers clutched the altar rails of dread
Draining the face with featureless
Caress a shaft of light carved through her
Strained glass prelude.

Fragmented fugues of spheres break
Wind on mobile ring tones. Discarnate.

Writing sonnets

2009-04-03T09:32:00.005-06:00

A link to a talk by Ted Berrigan on writing sonnets (from the Poetry Project Papers, 1989):

http://poetryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/v2-ted-berrigan.pdf

Here is one of his sonnets from The Sonnets:

Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
dear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read
It's 8:30 p.m. in New York and I've been running around all day
old come-all-ye's streel into the streets. Yes, it is now,
How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine
and the day is bright gray turning green
feminine marvelous and tough
watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard
to write scotch-tape body in a notebook
had 17 and 1/2 milligrams
Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
fucked til 7 now she's late to work and I'm
18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better

Rae Armantrout's poetics

2009-03-20T10:44:00.003-06:00

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.
(Rae Armantrout, from "Reversible")

The following are some interesting comments Charles Bernstein made in introducing Rae Armantrout at a recent reading; they touch on not only Armantrout's poetics but disjunctive or associative poetics in general. The comments are posted on his blog: http://epc.buffalo.edu/
authors/bernstein/blog/#03-17-09/

"Armantrout’s work is not surrealism, not realism, but para- or peri-realism: it is constructed of precisely articulated observations that seem to logically follow one another but that, like everyday life, don’t or better to say, don’t quite. Her rhythms are of dislocation and relocation. Armantrout’s signature is serial displacement: incommensurability torques from one iteration to another, like Marcel Marceau miming a mime miming. Such an approach can be used for many ends. Armantrout’s engagement is often social and cultural dysfunction, giving her work its dark undertones and muted overtones. In this way, she depicts the socio-cultural logic of late Capitalism; dark matter, indeed. So yeah, sure, please be sure to note: her work enacts, through its multifoliate insights, an ideological critique, as when you lose your balance but don’t fall; you realize something must be wrong but don’t know what. Preston Sturges said it best: if you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee it’s the bunk.

So, yes, Armantrout is one of the grand masters of our beloved radical disjunction of the 1970s and 80s. If one were to chart the vectors of each of her lines, you would get a field of skewed angles. Her motto might be: One perception must lead tangentially to the next. But tangential is not arbitrary or disconnected. Tangential is the mark of contingency but also motivated relation. To follow associative and peripheral connections – non-rationalizable, nonexpository, non-narrative – offers a constantly reiterated possibility of new perceptions.

Next to us is not the world we know so well, which we use to do our bidding, but the world that could be, the world we might make. I jump the line because I am so tired of waiting in it. . . ."

Let's jump the line and into that space of tangential perception, between one line and the next.

Anagrams

2009-02-26T09:37:00.002-06:00

Interesting (but probably very slow) technique. See method in Author's Note below. Results at:

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark30/contents.html

Author’s Note. Each of the poems in Anagrams of America is an anagram of its source text. All of the letters of the source text have been used, once and only once, in the composition of the corresponding poem. No letters have been added and no letters have been left out. Many of the sources are familiar works by familiar authors, and I have indicated below each poem the text used. Unless otherwise indicated, titles, epigraphs, section numbers, and section headings are not to be considered part of the anagram. — Mike Smith

MESHWORKS (Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance)

2009-02-18T15:22:00.002-06:00

Bill Griffiths

This site has a great list of mp3's of poets reading: Bill Griffiths, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, SoundEye (Irish sound poetry conference), Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Festival, and more.

http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/index.html

Managable Imaginations

2009-01-29T12:13:00.003-06:00

Hello all, check out the interview re: Suicide Psalms on Tracy Hamon's blog.

http://thamon.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/interview-with-mari-lou-rowley

Hilary, thanks for the google exercise. still haven't had time to try.

Keep warm. ML

Lyrical constraint-based poetry

2009-01-06T22:54:00.006-06:00

Inger Christensen, a Danish poet, has just died. From Inger Christensen's Alphabet(1981):

...and Icarus, impotent Icarus exists;

Icarus swaddled in melting waxwings
exists; Icarus pale as a corpse in
civvies exists, Icarus all the way down where
the pigeons exist; dreamers, dolls
exist; the dreamers' hair with cancerous tufts
torn out, the dolls' skin pinned together
with nails, rotting wood of the mysteries; and smiles
exist, Icarus' children white as lambs
in the gray light, will indeed exist, indeed
we will exist, and oxygen on oxygen's crucifix;
as hoar-frost we will exist, as wind we will exist,
as the rainbow's iris, in the shining shoots of
mesembryanthenum, in the tundra's straw; small

we will exist, as small as bits of pollen in peat,
as bits of virus in bones, as swamp pink maybe
maybe as a bit of white clover, vetch, a bit of chamomile
exiled to the lost again paradise; but darkness
is white say the children, the darkness of paradise is white,
but not white as a a coffin is white,
that is if coffins exist, and not
white as milk is white,
that is if milk exists; white is white,
the children say, darkness is white, but not
white as the white existing
before fruit trees existed, their flowering so white,
darkness is whiter, eyes melt

Translated by Pierre Joris. From Poems for the Millenium II, ed. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg (and from the excerpt posted on Joris' blog "Nomadics" today). Alphabet is also available from New Directions (and a different translator).

Joris on Christensen's method in Alfabet: "Alfabet (1981) is a book-length poem using two reticulating systems: the alphabet (that adamic, prelapsarian state of language, as Roland Barthes suggests, because it is pre-word & pre-syntax, & thus before misuse, lying, rhetoric, polysemy are possible) & the Fibonacci series (where each number is the sum of the two previous ones, i.e.: 1,2,3,5,8,13,34,47,81,128...) Thus the first section of the poem is one line long and starts with an "A", the second 2 lines long, and starts with a "B", etcetera)" (see Joris blog).

Anthology of constraint-based writing

2008-12-17T13:09:00.003-06:00

The /n/oulipian Analects

Edited by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim

Les Figues Press

From http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/133/the-_n_oulipian-analects :

"The /n/oulipian Analects is an alphabetical survey of constrained writing in modern English. Editors Wertheim and Viegener gathered and arranged critical and creative pieces from some of the most prominent and influential constraint-based writers—Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Jen Hofer, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Joseph Mosconi, Harryette Mullen, Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, Christine Wertheim, Rob Wittig, Stephanie Young—adding the unknown variable n to the great legacy of Oulipo. The result: an excellent mix of introductory basics for those new to constraint-based writing, blended with in-depth exposition and critique for those already avid readers and writers."

Barbara Guest -- poems and poetics

2008-12-02T12:12:00.015-06:00

Just published:

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
Wesleyan UP, 2008

Here are some excerpts from essays on poetics by Guest:

From "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious," HOW(ever) (1986):

"In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility."

http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/alerts1086.html#barbara
(see Guest's EPC page)

***
From "Invisible Architecture" on Guest's EPC page:

"By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed. The Surrealists taught us to wander freely on the page, releasing mechanical birds, if we so desire, to nest in the invisible handwriting of composition. There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible."

***
From "Wounded Joy" in American Poetry Review (2002):

"Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost. I judge that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink."

http://www.aprweb.org/issues/sept02/guest.html (see Guest's EPC page).

NEW BOOK

2008-11-19T12:01:00.002-06:00

Versed, new book
of poems by
Rae Armantrout
forthcoming
February 2009
from Wesleyan UP

Bernadette Mayer experiments list

2008-11-08T16:07:00.001-06:00

Ideas for our email project?

Here is a link to Bernadette Mayer's list of journal and experiment ideas. It's from her page at the Electronic Poetry Centre site.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html

appropriative writing

2008-11-01T12:24:00.007-06:00

From a discussion on the Poetics List, here's a link to an essay on appropriative writing, ie. writing that "steals" from other writing. The essay ends with a list of examples from Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror to John Ashbery's Wakefulness.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/rubinstein.html

collaboration

2008-10-27T14:58:00.005-06:00

From Fascicle 2 (winter '05 - '06), here's an excerpt from a collaborative poem by Anne Tardos and Lyn Hejinian; method is announced in the first stanza. (There are other collaborations in the same issue)

I will write two lines, knowing that you will insert a third line between them
Late one afternoon in a café. I'll offer you a sequence and you won't foresee the consequence—
Therefore my second line's connection to my first will depend largely on you

And that will be the poetry we make. Music will intervene, but we won't complain
About interventions, but accept what happens happily, while hoping
That non-sequiturs don't make any sense. When I write, I'll attach my lines

To whatever music these strings will form—we won't complain
About the things we can't control (aggressive friends, traffic jams, the neighbor's dog);
The other speaker, who could be me, will intersperse her thoughts with mine

Just as laughter wafts through tragedy. I'm not referring to the nervous giggles,
The repressed hysteria, beads of sweat, and the twitching bladder contractions
I used to get when my shell-shocked uncle shed tears recounting the horrors of war.

--cont.

anthology of collaborative poetry

2008-10-17T14:54:00.001-06:00

Blurb from Amazon.com:

>2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry brings together a broad and varied selection of vital and stimulating textual projects involving one or more writers working together to create new, co-written compositions. Poets included in this volume represent North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Most of the work included in this volume is new, having been created after the year 2000. Writing with another person resembles chamber music, a delicate process that brings into being often intricate and sometimes direct, pure, simple music. > 2 offers a wide array of compositions ranging from short, occasional or one-time efforts that constitute an invigorating exercise, to excerpts from extended projects comprising long-term (even life-long) projects.

passionate barf

2008-09-10T11:14:00.002-06:00

"Passion in writing or art—or in a lover—can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, panting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let's get rid of it."

—Dodie Bellamy, from Barf Manifesto

Bellamy's blog: http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/2008/09/barf-manifesto-is-out.html

Poetry by Ronald Johnson

2008-09-02T13:12:00.002-06:00

A link to Johnson's The Book of the Green Man (link on Silliman's blog today). Painting by Basil King (in book).
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-gm-1.htm

Excerpt from Summer section:

What the Leaf Told Me

Today I saw the word written on the poplar leaves.

It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars.

As a leaf startles out

from an undifferentiated mass of foliage,

so the word did form a leaf

A Mirage Of The Delicate Polyglot

inventing itself as cipher.

Book of contemporary sonnets

2008-08-30T11:52:00.007-06:00

This book looks great (see contributor list). Image and blurb are from Reality Street Editions website. There's a link on the site to the editor's introduction.

THE REALITY STREET BOOK OF SONNETS

Contributors: Robert Adamson, Jeremy Adler, Tim Atkins, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Christian Bök, Sean Bonney, Ebbe Borregaard, Jonathan Brannen, Pam Brown, Laynie Browne, Thomas A Clark, Adrian Clarke, John Clarke, Bob Cobbing, Clark Coolidge, Kelvin Corcoran, Beverly Dahlen, Ian Davidson, Edwin Denby, Laurie Duggan, Paul Dutton, Ken Edwards, Michael Farrell, Allen Fisher, Kathleen Fraser, William Fuller, John Gibbens, Harry Gilonis, Giles Goodland, Bill Griffiths, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Anselm Hollo, Lyn Hejinian, Piers Hugill, Peter Jaeger, Elizabeth James, Lisa Jarnot, Keith Jebb, Justin Katko, John Kinsella, Philip Kuhn, Michelle Leggott, Tony Lopez, Chris McCabe, Steve McCaffery, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Makin, Peter Manson, Brian Marley, Bernadette Mayer, Jay Millar, David Miller, Peter Minter, Geraldine Monk, Harryette Mullen, Philip Nikolayev, Alice Notley, Abigail Oborne, Ron Padgett, Bern Porter, Frances Presley, John A Scott, Tom Raworth, Peter Riley, Sophie Robinson, Stephen Rodefer, Maurice Scully, Gavin Selerie, Robert Sheppard, Aaron Shurin, Eléni Sikélianòs, Simon Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Juliana Spahr, Lawrence Upton, Carol Watts, Ian Wedde, John Welch, Johan de Wit, Geoffrey Young.

Elegy by Mary Jo Bangs

2008-08-20T15:39:00.005-06:00

Mary Jo Bangs' recent book Elegy is one of my new favourites. Here's a link to a video of the poet reading from it, from a nifty website with links to many such videos: Rabbit Light Movies: a bi-annual journal of poemfilms

http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com/bang.html

As well, here's a review of the book, which can be found on the Graywolf Press website:

“The loss of a child—especially an only child who is in the prime of life—is one of the most painful experiences anyone can have and one, common sense tells us, almost impossible to render in an age of sensory overload. But Mary Jo Bangs' Elegy is the grand exception. In its insistence on “the inexhaustible / Need to be accurate,” Elegy is wholly absorbing. Avoiding all self-pity, false comfort, sentimentality or finger pointing, Bang’s terse, oblique poems anatomize grief, guilt, and mourning in pitiless detail. Do things ‘improve’ by the end of the year whose progress this heartbreaking book charts? Not really, but the reader is transformed. I know of no contemporary elegy that has its power.” —Marjorie Perloff

two new books

2008-08-08T15:11:00.009-06:00

I've just received two books on poetics, which I hope to read this month:

Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks (New Directions, 2008)

Rae Armantrout, Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007)

Armantrout has an essay on Emily Dickinson's and her own poetics entitled "Cheshire Poetics"--perfect title!

More on Spicer's poetics

2008-08-06T11:07:00.002-06:00

Here is the first para from an essay on Jack Spicer's poetics. (cf Crackt blog of July 24/08).

Full essay can be found at the blog Harriet at the Poetry Foundation, July 24/08:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/07/taking_dictation_from_a_martia.html#10

*

Reginald Shepherd

Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse

Jack Spicer’s notion of poetry as dictation is hardly original (and originality is a notion Spicer would quarrel with in any case), but Spicer acknowledges its sources and rings his own changes on them: Yeats’ spooks bringing him metaphors for his poetry, or Cocteau’s Orphée writing down poems broadcast on the ghost radio. That the idea of dictation can itself be read as dictated makes perfect sense. Part of the point of Spicer’s poetics is that everything comes from the outside; there’s no romantic interiority generating poems in the sensitive soul. This is a useful corrective to the fetishization of personal creativity, proposing instead what Robin Blaser calls the practice of outside. As Spicer writes of his posthumous collaboration with Garcia Lorca, “It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim” (After Lorca).

. . . cont.

Another poetics blogsite, another book

2008-07-29T23:27:00.005-06:00

Jerome Rothenberg, one of the editors of Poems for the Millennium, Vols 1 & 2, has an interesting blog: "Poems and Poetics"--poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com. He has posted an excerpt from the Prologue to Vol. 3 of Poems for the Millennium, forthcoming in January 2009 from U of California Press.

Spicer's ghost

2008-07-24T09:51:00.009-06:00

Steven's post has inspired me--

I am intrigued by Jack Spicer's spooky poetics--see my posting below--so I'm glad to see this volume of his poetry coming out next month. (From posting on Silliman's blog).

My Vocabulary Did This to Me
The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer; Peter Gizzi, ed.; Kevin Killian, ed.

Wesleyan Poetry Series
Wesleyan University Press

August 2008

Reviews:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/2979

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.6/finch.php

Ron Silliman's blog, Mon Dec 1/08
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

Some years ago I was writing an essay on Robin Blaser's poetics, and drew upon Jack Spicer's Vancouver Lectures. (Excerpts can be found in Allen and Tallman, Poetics of the New American Poetry, 1973.) In the lectures Spicer presents an anti-intentional view of composition, a poetics of dictation, "something from the outside coming in." This is not a new view of poetry, of course, poetry as inspiration, a "spiritual exercise," and the poet as an "empty vessel" (Spicer's words). But it's one that resonates for me. In another metaphor Spicer uses, the poem is a house one builds and language is the furniture. But it's nothing until one has set a table and opened it up to a guest. This process can be frightening--hence the locks, bolts, and peepholes on people's front doors. Spicer says of Denise Levertov, "The poems I like of hers are all poems that have scared her and that she didn't really want to have written." (Unfortunately he doesn't give the titles of those poems!)

This reminds me of a point made in an essay I posted a link to, a few entries back, an essay on Bernadette Mayer's experimental poetics. Referring to Burroughs as well as Mayer, Peter Baker refers to risk or danger as characterizing experimental, anti-intentional writing: "We are returned . . . to one of the root meanings of Experiment: that of peril or danger. Inherent in any Experimental Work . . . is what I like to call a giving up of individual or authorial control, the potential consequences of which are always marked by some kind of psychic danger."

Fearing that danger, we can lock the door against the guest and decide what the poem is all about and write it from that idea. But when I do that I feel huge and clumsy, like Alice in the White Rabbit's little house. I'm a fairly fearful person in everyday life and the poem is one area (the other is travelling alone) where I can open the door, at least a crack, to the guest. Or ghost. Who can pass through the wall, anyway.

David Malouf Says:

2008-07-23T10:09:00.002-06:00

In the Fall 2007 issue of BOMB, David Malouf is interviewed by Colm Toibin. In response to a question about Malouf's knowledge of opera and classical music, he says:
" . . .music has always been important to me. In the writing, when I revise, often I'm trying to get a word right, but as often as not what I'm trying to get right is the music. When there's a word I want, an adjective, or even another noun, I'll jot it down in long and in short, like poetry . . . yeah, scansion notation . . . I often do that, partly because the music seems to me to contain whatever it is I want to get into the writing. It often happens in the books, that people who don't entirely catch the sense of what someone is saying, are catching at the emotion of it, becausde they're catching the tune."

New book of poetry from Meredith Quartermain

2008-07-09T12:10:00.005-06:00

This one I'm going to order. See link to a few of her poems, back in May.

MATTER
Quartermain, Meredith
$20 / PA / 72 pp.
Book Thug 2008
ISBN: 978-1-897388-18-1

BLURB FROM SPD WEBSITE (SEE URL AT BOTTOM):

What if words evolved in species and genera just like birds and dinosaurs? What if you classified them in kingdomsand families? Made a phylogenetic tree with orders of Space, Matter, or Intellect. Gravity and Levity as classes of MATTER.With Density, Rarity, Pungency, Ululation. Would this matter taxonomy speak of the out-there, the non-human? Or the in-here--the human mind, the sorting,reasoning human--homo linguis the word maker, the world maker? Formally innovative, Matter explores Roget's taxonomy, rummaging its taint of globalism and social Darwinism, unearthing relations between humans, language and the planet. Matter asks what if words are so many
birds, chirping and chattering? What is thought? What is knowledge? What's your life-list of words?

Meredith Quartermain was born in Toronto but grew up in rural British Columbia, on the north end of Kootenay Lake. Botany, Latin, Math, Philosophy and Ecology intrigued her at UBC. She is the author of Terms of Sale (1996), Wanders [with Robin Blaser] (2002), A Thousand Mornings (2002), The Eye-Shift of Surface (2001), and Vancouver Walking (2005), winner of the BC Book Awards Poetry Prize. She lives in Vancouver where she runs Nomados Literary Publishers with husband Peter Quartermain.

http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=9781897388181

experimental poetry and risk

2008-07-04T10:39:00.003-06:00

Here's a link (from Silliman's blog) to a short paper on Bernadette Mayer's experimental poetry, risk, and the ambivalence of authorship.
Title: "Becoming Bernadette"

http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/132.php

2008-07-02T11:19:00.006-06:00

Listed on Silliman's blog today, July 2/05

Wave Books is publisher of Laynie Browne's The Scented Fox.

State of the Union
50 Political Poems

Edited by Wave Books
Release Date: September 1, 2008

Blurb from Wave Books website:

From the front lines of American poetics

William Carlos Williams wrote, It is difficult/to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there. State of the Union brings together 50 American poets whose work boldly illustrates the urgency of Williams?s forewarning.

Contributors Include:
John Ashbery, James Tate, Fanny Howe, Anselm Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Terrance Hayes, Albert Goldbarth, Cathy Wagner, Tao Lin, Michael Palmer, Lucille Clifton, Joe Wenderoth, John Yau, Richard Siken, CAConrad, Rebecca Wolff, Peter Gizzi, Juliana Spahr, Wang Ping and many more.

ISBN #9781933517339
Poetry Anthology, $14.00 paper (5.75x7.5 144pp)

New book on a poet we've read

2008-06-23T15:38:00.004-06:00

RONALD JOHNSON: LIFE AND WORKS

Author: Johnson, Ronald
Format: PAPERBACK
Pub Date: 01 May 2008
Publisher: National Poetry Foundation
ISBN: 978-0-943373-75-1
Price: $34.95

Description from Small Press website:

Poetry. "I count Ronald Johnson as one of the defining peers of my own imagined company of poets, ageless and yet insistently specific to all one's life might seem to be here and now. The very title of his major long poem cycle, ARK--with its determining echoes, its senses of a contiguous, innumerable event, its measure of heart and time, all the wondrous, intimate, particularizing reflection and record--proposes the character of this work I so value"--Robert Creeley. "I have always thought Ron Johnson a terrific poet: everything he has written has surprised and delighted me"--Thom Gunn. "Poetry with a passion for exact, even scientific scrutiny"--Guy Davenport.

Ghostly poetics, cont.

2008-06-17T12:01:00.003-06:00

Here's a poem by Rae Armantrout appearing in latest issue of Poetry (USA). (Any copyright issues?)

Djinn

Haunted, they say, believing
the soft, shifty
dunes are made up
of false promises.

Many believe
whatever happens
is the other half
of a conversation.

Many whisper
white lies
to the dead.

"The boys are doing really well."

Some think
nothing is so
until it has been witnessed.

They believe
the bits are iffy;

the forces that bind them,
absolute.

tugging against closure

2008-06-16T23:37:00.005-06:00

Hilary, just so you know that you are not blogging away into the void, see my post re: Jailbreaks.
Further to your thoughts re: Guest's thought on composition and poetics. Perhaps her "embracing an echo" is akin to your "tugging against closure."

Interesting that she talks about the "force majeure," a poem as force of nature that directs and connects all living things. This is what i was trying to do in Boreal Surreal. love the physicality of her description of how a poem emerges.
Wet and whining.. good poems insinuates themselves
into the (sub)conscious and onto the page,
demanding attention
demanding to be fed, nurtured
heard.

The phantoms are ideas that emerge out of ether, mist, air.
we know not where. but also in tandem with a memory, a word, an object:
"a knife a rope a book
on anatomy."

The poem . the movement, charge, energy - that makes it zing - is a fragile thing. It can easily be undone in over polishing. I agree with muscular control, not sure about fastidiousness.

Timing, stuggle, risk, yes.. yes, and sometimes the poem hurries the poet.. then there is nothing to do but take the chance, follow the lead. The steps can be practiced later.

2008-06-09T17:13:00.003-06:00

My thoughts on a few of Guest's lines (last post, June 2):

"-a stasis and / pull in the composition physical-"

Composition involves a pulling-in by the developing thing--the forming thing--a centripetal force--what the form demands (fetal), from one line or block or layer to the next, one moment to the next

"a stasis"--the moment before movement?

"remember, a contradictory tug phantom-like– / upon the environs of the poem–"

But there is also something beyond this inward-pulling thing. Her choice of "phantom-like" to evoke this other indicates a ghostly side to the process of composition. This aspect is a "contradictory tug"--it pulls from the uncanny edges of the poem--from the unsaid around the poem. "upon the environs" -- coming from beyond the immediate environs, like starlight. It contradicts the forming thing, it says, "Not yet, not yet" and tugs against closure.

Barbara Guest --poetics

2008-06-02T13:50:00.007-06:00

I am mired in revisions for an academic essay, and badly in need a poetry break.

Here is an intriguing "statement" of poetics that Barbara Guest apparently presented in 1998 at Naropa. It is reprinted in How2: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/bg_memorybank/
bg_memory.html#robinson

How about some posts on her ideas?

A Reverie on the Making of a Poem, June 1998

Arrived at the terrain of her sensibility

–a stasis and

pull in the composition physical–
remember, a contradictory tug phantom-like–
upon the environs of the poem–;

think of poem going through these stages
struggle
balance and non-movement
preparation
always an inert force in poem to try to bring it back and force this on the
surface of poem

*****

darkening of the page and then withdrawal
of darkening:gradually the page lightens,
the invisible heavinesslifted itself.

Perhaps–cinematic–

this elevation.

With no warning (from inside the text,

mind attached to the text)

method to elevate poem from surface

*****

and attacked by dizziness of atmosphere!

In the attack of suspense; a masterful

development of plot and erasure.

*****

The echo the words grant us on page and off!
sound of the last few words–;
they will be abolished and this new movement
embracing an echo,

only discovered here the poem
sustains marginality–

destructiveness

*****

the timing of this substitution one ideafor another
Countdown!knuckle on the hand
illustrates itselftames–

the sentence covering it

with a fist, held loftily–

muscular control . . . fastidiousness

continual restiveness, also

timing supplant strong attack

struggle necessary–but not to let go

risk

*****

a blissful discontinuity
orders this estrangement of each

available word and the disinclination to advance (at
that point in time) or desiretohurry toward an abrupt
ending–

rushing or spectacular jumps over the hurdles–

as in conversation
or
do not hurry the poem

but take chances

motion, movement in poem

*****

an advanced punctuation bursting from vases

into an arena of sound
the aroma continues as a cloud of invisibility shelters

ghost exiting

there from center right:solid objects merciless.

mood

what else can poem perform in its arena

of possibilities

the phantom of possible ideas

***

(maneuvering inside a volume)

a force majeure to shred the atmosphere
this fist its imprint almost
observable!

poet in charge

*****

and all the whilemovement coalescing
with the strict idea–

Startling these maneuvers!

of idea and erasure.

not to lose sight of the ideas, and movement they must meet

not to tell all possible choices in poem

Back in Sask

2008-05-27T13:23:00.003-06:00

Hello Crackers, I'm back on/in earth, literally. Planting my garden and recuperating from jetlag. Good to see the blogging going strong. I had an amazing experience at the Poetic Ecologies conference in Brussels, and will post more about it the conference proceedings shortly. Oh(de) for French baguettes, Greek Feta, Dutch chocolate and Belgium beer...

Meredith Quartermain poems

2008-05-27T10:16:00.009-06:00

There are some neat poems by Meredith Quartermain in Green Integer Review (March-April 2006)--poems from Matter, published this spring by Bookthug in Toronto.

Link to poems (the review has misspelled her name as Quatermain; don't correct the misspelling in the URL):

http://www.greeninteger.com/green_integer_review/
issue_2/Meredith-Quatermain.htm

2008-05-21T11:43:00.002-06:00

Although I dislike Wells's frequently nasty poetry reviews--and his domination of poetry reviewing space in Canada--this looks like an interesting anthology. Blurb from Biblioasis website.

Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets
[978-1-897231]

ISBN: 978-1-897231-44-9 | Wells, Zachariah | Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets | Poetry | $19.95

In 1910 Lawrence J. Burpee published an anthology of 100 Canadian Sonnets. Poet and critic Zachariah Wells figured it was high time for an update on that dusty tome. In Jailbreaks, Wells has gathered 99 of his favourite sonnets written by Canadians, from the 19th century to the present day. Jailbreaks does much to question the standard assumption that the best Canadian poetry is written in free verse, while showcasing the enormous versatility of the sonnet and of the poets who use it as a vessel for their thoughts and feelings. It just might change the way we think about Canadian poetry.

Includes poems by:
Milton Acorn, Margaret Avison, Ken Babstock, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Tim Bowling, George Elliott Clarke, Fred Cogswell, Leonard Cohen, Don Coles, Mary Dalton, Ralph Gustafson, Steven Heighton, Daryl Hine, George Johnston, A.M. Klein, Archibald Lampman, Irving Layton, Malcolm Lowry, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Don McKay, John Newlove, Alden Nowlan, George Murry, Eric Ormsby, Richard Outram, Molly Peacock, E.J. Pratt, Steven Price, Stuart Ross, Robyn Sarah, Goran Simić, Karen Solie, Raymond Souster, Carmine Starnino, Peter Van Toorn, Phyllis Webb, and many others.

Ginsberg and Blake

2008-05-11T00:29:00.004-06:00

The magpie's pick of the day-- Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake's "The Sick Rose" in 1969.

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ginsberg/Blake/Songs-of-Experience/Ginsberg-Allen_03_The-Sick-Rose_New-York_12-15-69.mp3

Two to note

2008-05-04T00:33:00.003-06:00

Two terrific encounters I've had lately:

Bob Holman - how could I have not heard of him before!? A perfomance poet who's been doing it for years in New York and everywhere else. Here's some bumpf from his website:

Recently dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and “this generation’s Ezra Pound,” (San Francisco’s Poetry Flash).

From Slam to Hiphop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. The series he produced for PBS, the United States of Poetry , features over sixty poets including Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets, and Slammers. USOP lives on as an anthology from Harry Abrams Publishers (in its second printing), a home video from KQED, and soundtrack CD from Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman co-founded. He has appeared widely on TV: "Nightline," "Good Morning America," "ABC News Magazine," MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," and "The Charlie Rose Show," among others. The NEA has announced major preproduction support for his new poetry media project, the World of Poetry (worldofpoetry.org), the world’s first digital poetry anthology. Check out www.bobholman.com

Last night at the TalonBooks launch in at the Calgary Art Gallery - where - in Calgary of course! Several readers, but here I want to mention one - Fred Wah's terrific new book 'Sentenced to Light'. Bold and innovative at every 'turn'.

new book of essays on poetics

2008-04-30T16:36:00.003-06:00

THE CONSEQUENCE OF INNOVATION: 21ST CENTURY POETICS

Author: Dworkin, Craig, Ed.
Pub Date: Jan 2008
Publisher: Roof Books

Blurb from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org):

Description:Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Dworkin has edited a collection of amazing new essays on poetics, summarizing the variety of poetries that have arisen in innovative writing during the past 10 years. Filling the gap that has arisen in publishing writing on new poetry, there are essays on computer programs as poems by Brian Kim Stefans, flarf poetics by Gary Sullivan and Michael Gottlieb, uncreative poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith, and environmental poetry by James Sherry. There are essays on playwright Fiona Templeton and a groundbreaking piece by Sianne Ngai centered on Gertrude Stein. There is also an important group of general essays on the poetry marketplace by Steve Evans, Charles Bernstein, and Marjorie Perloff.

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compleynt

2008-04-23T12:03:00.000-06:00

I am the sound of one hand clapping . . .

Interview with Marjorie Perloff

2008-04-21T11:55:00.002-06:00

This comes via Silliman's blog today, April 21st. They talk about innovation and experiment in poetry -- and what makes a decent poetry reviewer.

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Perloff interview 2.htm

Elizabeth Willis -- from Charles Bernstein's blog, April 19/08

2008-04-19T12:52:00.002-06:00

Elizabeth Willis on Close Listening
from Art Radio WPS1
recorded March 17, 2008

Reading: MP3
Willis reads a retrospective selection of her poetry..

In conversation with Charles Bernstein: MP3
Willis talks about the influence of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites and J.M.W. Turner, as well as discussing the relation of artifice and sincerity.

Elizabeth Willis's most recent collection of poems, Meteoric Flowers, was published by Wesleyan in 2006. Her other books include Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003) and The Human Abstract (Penguin,1995). An edited volume on Lorine Niedecker is presently in production. Willis teaches literature and creative writing at Wesleyan.

News

2008-04-04T11:40:00.001-06:00

A bpNichol website with sound files, images, etc.

http://www.bpnichol.ca/

2008-03-31T22:44:00.006-06:00

From SPD Books website www.spdbooks.org

SITUATIONS, SINGS: COLLABORATIVELY COMPOSED POEMS

Author: Collom, Jack and Hejinian, Lyn
Cover: PAPERBACK
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2007
Publisher: Zephyr Press
ISBN: 978-0-9761612-4-0
Price: $15.00
Description: Poetry. The two poets began working together in 1992, and over the years they have developed a repertoire of forms and procedures, all intended to extend the possibilities for invention, play, and the unfolding of unforseeable meaning. Both poets embrace collaborative authorship as a means of challenging aesthetic preconceptions. In the process, they frequently venture across thematic limits, discovering unexpected coherences. The poems often give themselves over to pleasure, but they are governed by the logic of poetic language and they carry considerable metaphysical depth.

libraries and poetry

2008-03-28T17:39:00.002-06:00

In "Personal Narrative," a sort of intro. to her volume Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), Susan Howe writes about spending time in Yale University's Sterling Library:

In the dim light of narrowly spaced overshadowing shelves I felt the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates. Quiet articulates poetry. These Lethean tributaries of lost sentiments and found philosophies had a life-giving effect on the process of my writing. . . . In Sterling's sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms. (14)

The materiality of old books and print and paper seems to be essential, as well as the serendipitous encounters that library shelves encourage. Could one use library walks as a generative device, collecting chance encounters that reveal "an inexorable order"? How do the dead pressed between the leaves of those books solicit us? How can we listen?

volvos are erotic

2008-03-21T12:27:00.002-06:00

From NYTimes, March 21 (review of a book of erotic verse):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica

She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze

--Jill Alexander Essbaum

I have a Volvo! (2001 model, station wagon)

H.

Under-energy

2008-03-19T22:17:00.003-06:00

Great interview with Dennis Lee in latest edition of Matrix. His comments on process, music, voice and the energy of a poem are brilliant. In speaking of the fractured manufactured language in Joyce's Finnigans Wake, Lee talks about what makes Joyce's writing 'work.'

"The energy that makes them happen is pre-linguistic; it's under the words, shouldering its way upwards. So the connection here is vertical. Familiar words get blown apart, and reconfigured in the process, but always through the the pressure of this subsonic energy of being. "

Lee also talks about the under-energy inherent in the music or cadence of poem as that which "gooses a poem." Love that. And also what he says about voice:

"A piece can be univocal and still be convincing. A lot of lyric poetry has a single voice and it can go like an arrow to your heart. The poems that don't speak to me are the ones that don't have any cleanly etched voice at all. Or else they do, but it's that wretched tone of flat statement. The one that prevails in so much contemporary poetry..."

Wise words from a wonderful poetic innovator. Made me order his last two books UN and Yesno. Will report more when I read them. anon crackers.

2008-03-18T20:18:00.002-06:00

From the manic blogger:

I've ordered the following, out on April 1:

Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008
By Hank Lazer (Omnidawn)

Blurb from Omnidawn website: "Drawing on poetic traditions as seemingly disparate as Language writing and Buddhist poetry, Lazer pursues a way of reading that is rich in the music and spirit of the word, attuning readers to the pleasures and range of possibilities for innovative poetry. In a very accessible writing style, and with flashes of brilliance, Lazer explores and identifies new approaches to the lyric and to the writing of spiritual experience in American poetry of the past one hundred years. In this book of essays, interviews, reflections, and more, Lazer focuses on two topics central to the poetry of our time: the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways of embodying spirituality."

poem for a bleak palm sunday

2008-03-16T13:19:00.003-06:00

Every now and then one should write a poem as spare as this--

WIND LIFTS

Wind lifts lightly
the leaves, a flower,
a black bird

hops up to the bowl
to drink. The sun
brightens the leaves, back

of them darker branches,
tree's trunk. Night is still
far from us.

---Robert Creeley

Friday Night Fortunes

2008-03-14T22:50:00.002-06:00

Cookie and Enjoy!

May life throw you to an exciting event.
You will inherit a special ceremony.
Your blessing is no more than strong and bitter words.
For the whole lifetime anger begins with folly and ends with regret.
You will inherit some money to have good.
A quiet evening with a small piece of land.
Be prepared to accept a wondrous member of your family!
Happy news is on pleasures ahead.
As the purse is emptied on our minds,
you will be invited to the foundation of your life.
Make two grins grow a single kind word.
Your mind clear, and your soul lies in silence.
Someone is speaking of good planning.
Your heart is a place to indicate a weak cause.
Look for new outlets, a pleasant curve.
A thrilling time is rewarded, sooner or--
Fame, riches and romance must put up with the rain.
A pleasant surprise will become obvious to physicians.
Rectangle is in store for you!
Your everlasting patience is both a blessing and a later.
Don't ask, don't say. Everything will not be lonesome.
A friend asks only for your firmness.
Your greatest fortune is the large happy life.
You will step on soil and none so wonderful.
Good luck is the result where there was only a grouch thing, do not lose this.
Your heart is pure and its way to you devout.
He who laughs at himself will keep one warm for years.
Be mischievous and your ability to juggle will soon turn up.
Smiling will often make you wisdom.
Your flair for the creative takes your life.
You will witness the heart is filled.
You will live a long day.

2008-03-13T10:50:00.003-06:00

Interesting online mag Exquisite Corpse, which has book reviews and poetry (some in translation), etc. See Lee Ann Brown's Katrina Suite (via Search). Beatriz Zeller contributes (daughter of surrealist Ludwig Zeller). I remember her from my Surrealism class at U of Toronto, way back in 1978-79; she once pronounced, "Surrealism is life!" Anyway, lots of surrealist stuff on the website, and ideas for reading. See http://www.corpse.org/

2008-03-06T21:17:00.001-06:00

I ordered this book today: Reginald Shepherd, ed. *Lyric Postmodernisms* (Counterpath
Press, Feb. 2008). Blurb below from Amazon.com:

Lyric Postmodernisms gathers many well established poets whose work transcends the boundaries between traditional lyric and avant-garde experimentation. Some have been publishing since the 1960s, some have emerged more recently, but all have been influential on newer generations of American poets. Many of these poets are usually not thought of together, being considered as members of different poetic camps, but they nonetheless participate in a common project of expanding the boundaries of what can be said and done in poetry. This anthology sheds new light on their work, creating a new constellation of contemporary American poetry. Contributors: Bruce Beasley, Martine Bellen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Gillian Conoley, Kathleen Fraser, Forrest Gander, C. S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, Claudia Keelan, Timothy Liu, Nathaniel Mackey, Suzanne Paola, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Martha Ronk, Aaron Shurin, Carol Snow, Susan Stewart, Cole Swensen, Rosmarie Waldrop, Marjorie Welish, and Elizabeth Willis.

2008-03-03T08:31:00.001-06:00

Why "dry humour" (in blog description)? Wet humour might be fun.

Where I am

2008-03-01T19:32:00.004-06:00

Hi,

Finally here we are the Crackt ones - great to see. Here's another place where I am: www.fluttertongue.ca. I'm just packing up some books for my re-location, and first to go in my box are Paul Celan, bpNichol, Elizabeth Willis, Jon Whyte and Poems for the Millennium (Rothenberg, Joris, eds.).

2008-03-01T15:54:00.001-06:00

We don't have to limit ourselves to poetry here, do we? Much of the stuff I read when writing papers finds its way into my poetry. For example, I'm writing a chapter for a volume on shame and death, and I'm exploring the mask as a kind of interface between shame and death. So for the paper I'm re-reading Freud's "The Uncanny" this morning, and he concludes that "the sense of the uncanny attaches . . . to the idea of being robbed of one's eyes." That's why Neil Gaiman's *Coraline* is so uncanny: the double mother has buttons sewn in for eyes, and she threatens the heroine with the same operation.

Has this fear of losing one's eyes --or fear of false eyes--ever surfaced in poems you've written? Or read?
March 1, 2008 1:11 PM

Crackt Poeticks

2008-03-01T13:22:00.000-06:00

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/reader/0380807343/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

2008-03-01T01:21:00.003-06:00

Holly Luhning, Jenn Still, Mari-Lou Rowley and Steven Ross Smith, at the ice bar at La Bodegas, post CBC poetry face off.

2008-03-01T00:39:00.004-06:00

During an evening of wine, cheese, Miss Vicki's potato chips, and Spanish olives stuffed with mini jalapeños, the Crackers, an intrepid group of Saskatchewan poets met to celebrate Steven Ross Smith’s new position as Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre. Also celebrated was Jennifer Still's regional win in the CBC Poetry Face Off, beating fellow crackers Steven and Mari-Lou Rowley. Fashion, hair styles, poetic process, and thanks to Hilary Clark, Laynie Brown’s book The Scented Fox were also topics of conversation. Mari-Lou read from her new ms. Suicide Psalms, to be published by Anvil Press in fall 2008. The evening culminated in this blog, which is dedicated to poetic funambulists everywhere. Enjoy