A Enjoyable An Action

"There is something that could be called the prose of cinema and that’s all the movies that we see, all the five different stories that Hollis Frampton says movies can tell. That’s the prose of cinema. I’m putting this in quotes: “It produces novels. It produces all our prosaic information including much of our documentation.” It is really prose, just as it is in the books that we get at the library and read. Then there’s poetry, and poetry is something distinct. And the only problem with making a distinction of poetry is that people tend to think poetry is more important than, or greater than, or more significant than prose, or vice versa. That needn’t be the case at all, and isn’t as far as I’m concerned. I mean it is in the sense that I love poetry very deeply and I’m more involved with and care more about poetry, but otherwise there is a distinction between prose and poetry which is not based upon one being better than the other. One goes to the movies for a certain kind of experience just like one reads a novel for a certain kind of experience. And one would be hard put if you started trying to read a poem in the way in which you read a novel. I mean, it would be very discouraging in fact. Poetry would come to seem to be hard rather than, which it truly is, different. And I think those people who regard my films as hard are simply disregarding the fact that they’re poems, that they’re little cine-poems. They’re to be looked at completely differently. You’re not trying to find out who’s going to ride off into the sunset with whom. Is this beautiful yellow shape going to ride off into the sunset with the purple phallic shape or what? No, it’s absurd. A poem is a poem." More of the interview with Stan Brakhage.

Hugh Kenner on Stevens: "[He] did not aspire toward specialties of feeling but toward a working grasp of what teased Lewis Carroll, the world-view a dictionary seems always nearly to enunciate . . . you have made sense or so made it that the words make sense . . . . [T]o reflect that sense can look strangely like nonsense when words do not look as if they meant what they do . . . . Words make a world of words . . . the poem enacts the creation of a necessary fiction."

An interview with Matthea Harvey.

Cystic Fibrosis Fact: It is most common among Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews; one in twenty-two people of European descent carry one gene for CF, making it the most common genetic disease in these populations.

A new POP piece is up.