Stuff

Three poems accepted over at Free Verse. Sweet.

~

Why, at the ripe old age of 28, have I just now discovered the films of Stan Brakhage? Something tells me more than one poem will come from watching The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. Avant-autopsy. Nice.

New Pages

A review of the previous issue of CUE over at NewPages. In my humble opinion, a review in search of an opinion.

Ted Hughes

Adam, you probably already read this, but in case you didn't, here's a piece on your boy in The Times Literary Supplement.

Barthes and Berryman

This last passage from Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text seems particularly important to me right now, so I'm sharing it with you, gentle reader:

"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of the messages, the theatre of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the volumptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the "grain" of writing) and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately garnular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss."

Bliss, yes. And torture. The kind of tortured (masochistic?) voices we hear in the best The Dream Songs. Of all people, I think it was Louis Gluck who describes The Dream Songs as one of the great acts of literary ventriloquy in all of American literature. The throwing around of the embodied voice--a basic element of the Gothic. How else to describe Henry (or Berryman, the puppet-master)--granulating (disintegrating), crackling, caressing, grating (gratefully), cutting, coming. The there that's not there at all, but that is plea-sure in breath, in letter, in word.

POG Reading

POETRY IN ACTION
Presents

poets

Sheila Murphy
and
Barbara Henning

Saturday, November 18, 8pm
***(please note the later than usual start time!)***

Dinnerware Gallery
101 W. Sixth Street
(corner 6th St. & 9th Ave., enter on 9th Ave.)

Admission: $5; Students $3

Sheila E. Murphy's most recent collections of poetry are Incessant Seeds (Pavement Saw Press, 2005) and Proof of Silhouettes (Stride Press, 2004). Her book Letters to Unfinished J. was a winner of the 2001 Gertrude Stein Award. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she co-founded and coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series.

Barbara Henning is the author of two novels, six books of poetry and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent book is a novel, You, Me and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). She has a book forthcoming from United Artists Books. In the 90's, Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century. She recently moved to Tucson from New York.

Poetry in Action 2006-07:

Coming Up:

February 24: poet Alice Notley and filmmaker Pablo Toledo

March 17: writer Cristina Rivera Garza and poet Brent Cunningham

March 31: poet Harryette Mullen (this event will begin at 5pm); Harryette Mullen will also present a paper Saturday morning as part of the Arizona Quarterly Annual Symposium)

April 7: poets Cynthia Hogue and Hoa Nguyen

All events take place Saturday evenings, 7pm, at Dinnerware Gallery, 101 W 6th Street, in Tucson's Downtown Arts District, unless otherwise noted.

National Book Award

It's Nathaniel Mackey.

Live and Learn

Snagged this from Lisa's blog--free, webcast courses over at Berkeley.

Thanks

A big thank you to everyone who came out last night for the reading. To Paul and Dawn, especially, for the thankless task of organizing and putting on such a diverse reading series, and to Sarah Vap whose work was stellar. And to all my friends, new and old. You all made it easy to be up there. Rock on Tucson poetry scene.

Shameless Self-Promotion

CUSHING STREET POETRY's Last Reading for 2006

a reading by Sarah Vap and Morgan Lucas Schuldt
8:00 pm, Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

at Cushing Street Bar & Restaurant, on the patio
198 W. Cushing Street
in Tucson, Arizona

just south of Tucson Convention Center
1 block east of Main Street

admission is FREE

The Cushing Street Poetry Series is sponsored by Chax Press, Cushing Street Bar & Restaurant, & POG.

You know about me. Here's who I'm reading with:

Sarah Vap is the author of Dummy Fire (Winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Contest) and American Spikenard (Recipient of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize). Vap grew up in Missoula, Mont. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from Arizona State University in 2005 and currently teaches creative writing at Phoenix College and in the Phoenix public schools for ASU's Young Writers Program. Her work has been published in Field, the Denver Quarterly, the Colorado Review and Natural Bridge. She is currently a poetry editor for the online journal 42opus.

Read some of her work here and here.

Please email Dawn Pendergast (mailto:dawnpen@gmail. com) or Paul Klinger (mailto:lekling@cox. net) if you have any questions.

Oulipo

Thanks to Adam for the heads-up on this Oulipo primer now up over at Drunken Boat.

Poet v. Propagandist

Check out Bruce Andrews taking on Shill O'Reilly. (Click on the pic under "Outrage of the Week!" for the video.)

Crane in a Field

The most recent issue of Field includes a symposium on Hart Crane. In the brief introduction that precedes the reflections (and genuflections) of Charles Wright (on "Voyages II"), Kevin Prufer (on "My Grandmother's Love Letters"), Elton Glaser (on "O Carib Isle") and others, the following assertion is made:

"From the time of Crane's death until the mid-1970's, there seemed to be a concerted effort to promote him as a major poet. That effort, essentially, has failed. There are simply too many problems of diction, syntax, prosody, structure, and vision in Crane's work to validate that kind of claim. But perhaps it was not all that interesting an assertion in the first place. Once we take Crane down from his pedestal and simply begin to reread him as the gifted but inconcsistent poet that he was, with flashes of brilliance and an only partially realized promise and ambition, Crane is more interesting, more touching, and more clearly worth exploring."

Of the poets in my own poetic / aesthetic cannon, Crane is right there at the top of the list, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Hopkins, Celan, Roethke (of The Far Field) and Berryman--all of whom (excluding Celan, maybe?) seem to thrive as influences in poetry circles despite the moniker of "minor" poet; they are poets who got it right in a relatively small body of work and who live on as those few instantiations. Which is probably why I'm underwhelmed by this notion of "too many problems . . ."; every poet has his flaws, and each is the influence he is because (not in spite) of them.

At what point do "problems" demote (or pro-mote) a poet? And whose problems are these, anyway? Among the disparate swath of friends and fellow writers I talk to, Crane is intensely prized, fiercely protected as an influence, so maybe his legacy (anyone's legacy) comes from the continual collective act of identification / appreciation, rather than aethetic coherence of an overall project. For my money, as the pendulum swings back toward earnesty and feeling in poetry, and away from the ironic, the glib, and the willfully absurd, I think we'll find poets like Crane--real visionary poets--even more necessary. And available.