1. Introduction by Charles Bernstein (2:25) : mp3
2. Sign Under Test (12:32): mp3
3. Don't Get me Wrong (1:28): mp3
4. Jacob's Ladder (0:43): mp3
5. Castor Oil (1:15): mp3
6. Dialogue with Hölderlin and Benjamin (from Shadowtime) (2:14): mp3
7. Laurel's Eyes (from Shadowtime) (2:12): mp3
8. Hashish in Marseilles (from Shadowtime) (1:49): mp3
9. Der Tod, Das Ist Die Kühle Nacht (from Shadowtime) (4:09): mp3
10. There's Beauty in the Sound ... (2:07): mp3
11. Wherever Angels Go (1:39): mp3
12. Introduction to Let's Just Say (1:04): mp3
13. Let's Just Say (3:33): mp3
14. "every lake . . ." (0:55): mp3
15. The Ballad of the Girly Man (4:15): mp3

2-5, 10-15 from Girly Man
now in paperback
reviews / notes on poems / more audio

The Lenny Paschen Show
reading: Bernstein
Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Yarmolinsky, vocal and guitar

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Blind Witness: Three American Operas
published by Factory School, 2008


order book here

Jane Sprague, Diane Ward, Tina Darragh
at Dixon Place (NYC)
for the Elders Series Belladonna book launch
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Susan  Bee review
by Meredith Mendelsohn
in Art News
(June 2009)

The Kind of Criticism I Want ...

Ming-Qian Ma
Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter Method
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Structural, philosophical, and phenomenological readings of Zukofsky ("Poem Beginning 'The'"), Oppen, Rakosi, Cage, Susan Howe, Hejinian, Andrews, as well as my work. Bracingly rigorous in its formalist analysis, Ma's first book puts him in the company of Gerald Bruns, Herman  Rappaport, and Charles Altieri.

Timothy Yu
Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1975  
Palo Alto: Stanford University  Press, 2009
In Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1975, Timothy Yu explores how conflicts, anxieties, and confusions fuse with aesthetics, ideologies, and social formations in the unsettling project of a syncretic Asian American poetics. In order to fully engage such poetics, Yu looks at roots but also rootlessness, lineages as well as misalignments. Yu takes risks; the welcome result is a provocatively informative excursion into the productive synergy of race and aesthetic innovation.

Carla Billitteri
Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson: The American Cratylus
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Billitteri presents a fundamental rethinking of the nature of realism in American poetry. Using Plato’s Cratylus as a frame of reference, she interrogates three distinct phases within twentieth century American poetry – second-wave modernism in Laura (Riding) Jackson, mid-century “New American poetry” with Charles Olson, and Whitman as a precursor. While Billitteri has much to say about individual poems and poets, the significance of her study goes well beyond her critical and historical scholarship. Billitteri is providing a basis for the epistemological grounding for modernist and contemporary American poetry. She has focusssed on American poets who proclaim the “reality” of their projects – from (Riding) Jackson’s insistence on the natural fit between words and things (the closest to “primary Cratylism” in Billitteri’s scheme), to Olson’s object-focus on stones as emblematic of the real, to the insistence in “language writing” on the “object status” of the entity of language itself. While Billitteri is skeptical about all these manifestations of a desire for the “real” in the poetry she considers, her point is not to discredit the work as “bad” (insufficiently dialectical) philosophy but rather to better confront its terms and so better appreciate its contributions to both philosophy and literature. She elucidates the values of the poetry she studies; as such her work is not a “theory” of literature or meaning but an extrapolation of the philosophical orientations of specific literary works.

Henry Weinfeld
The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Weinfeld makes an unequivocally partisan case for the primary importance of Bronk and Oppen for 20th American century poetry.

Josephine Park
Apparitions of Asia: Modernism, the Orient, and Asian American Poetry
New York Oxford University Press, 2008
Park examines the legacy of high modernist concerns in Asian-American writers, recasting key modernist and postwar works in a trans-Pacific context, while providing a stinging critique of the uses and appropriations of Asian forms and themes by non-Asian U.S. poets, particularly Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder. At the same time, Park argues that some of the Asian-American poets she discusses offer a way to critique and transform these deformations. In her detailed discussion of Pound, Park gives careful attention to the  importance of his poetics for subsequent American poetry, including Asian-American poetry.  She goes on to consider Snyder’s engagement with Zen Buddhism and charts its metamorphosis from a cultural specific East Asian practice to “American Zen.” While Park finds this problematic, her account got me more interested than ever in his cultural project, given the important role of Zen in a wide range of  postwar American innovative/alternative poetry. Park goes on to  review the role of, and conflict between, Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston in the formation of the contemporary canon of Asian-American literature.  This sets the stage for her study of four postwar Asian-American poets: David Hsin-Fu W, a.k.a David Rafael Wang, a one-time far-right follower of Pound who transformed himself into a follower of Snyder, and then Asian-Americanist; Lawson Fusao Inada, the (third-generation) Japanese-American poet from Fresno, California, who has written about his childhood internment in U.S. camps; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the Korean and American multilingual poet and visual artist, an internationally renowned film maker and poet and one of the key figures of the poetry/poetics of the 70s; and a thorough and needed account of the work of  a poet I admire enormously, Myung Mi Kim.

Peter Nicholls
Modernisms: A Litarary Guide
2d edition
(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009)
With the precision of a global positioning system, Peter Nicholls scans the width and breadth of literary modernism. This new edition of his classic study provides a lucid and useful typology for a spectrum of often antithetical tendencies that revolutionized the poetry of Europe and America in the first decades of the 20th century. Nicholls reads literary works not only as social acts but also as social critiques; he is especially sensitive to the ways in which gender and race have played decisive roles in modernist poetics. New maps sweep clean: Modernisms sets the record straight by looking aslant, restoring "tangents" to the main stage of a play that continues to inform most of our present-day literary imaginings.
N.B. Nicholls will be coming to NYU (from Sussex) this Fall.

Yunte Huang
Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)
"Poetic imagination is the ghost of the machine of History, an apparition that haunts ... the house of Historical Being" (p. 144). In Transpacific Imaginations, Huang routes of travel include port stops at the expansionist (imperialist) poetic unconscious (poetics) of Mark Twain and Henry Adams, which sets the stage for his later critique of the cultural imperialism that he finds at the heart of the Yasusada Hoax. In contrast, Melville’s counterpoetics resists the derealizations of the imaginary with the specters of  historical conquests and exploitable space. Melville is the antinomian hero of this book (Huang acknowledges Charles Olson and Susan Howe). Moby Dick's transpacific travels is propelled not by expanding Pacific markets but by Ahab’s monomaniacal/destructive collecting. “… [T]he story Ishmael comes back to tell is not one of the romance but the disaster of imperial conquest: ‘Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.’  … If the Emerson brand of imperial imagination features a poet who is seer, a namer and a self-reliant character overcoming the tyranny of fate, Melville’s addiction to fancy and fate dooms him to a giant stutter that ends Moby Dick” (pp. 96-97). For Huang, exemplary works of counterpoetics include Theresa Cha's Dictee; Lawson Fusao Inada's anti-monumental poetry collection, Legends of the Camp (on the U.S. internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War 2); and the Angel Island poems, which were scratched into the walls by Chinese immigrants at a San Francisco detention facility. Huang offers a powerfully illuminating account of the Angel Island poems the social inscription of these works as uncontainable – and, specifically, unanthologizable – within narrative of “American poetry.” Huang's counterpoetic voyage discovers that even while poetic imagination buoys historical understanding, it is constantly threatening to sink it. Poetics, used to legitimate historical denial and economic and cultural exploitation, brings to mind a saying of Charlie Chan (the subject of Huang’s next book): whale on beach like wolf at wedding, bark is bigger than bite but insulates tree.

Last week I had the pleasure to go on a "hardhat" tour of the  new
Poets House
in Battery Park City (New York), which is opening this Fall:

It's a magnificent space, with spectacular views of the Hudson, majestic library / reading room,
seminar room, children's book library / meeting space.
and a delightful multiform performance space, which opens onto a large garden space.
Poets House will be on the ground and second floors at Ten River Terrace
(a short walk west from the Chambers Street subway stops).
This new space promises to transform poetry life in the city.
Lee Briccetti has done a heroic job putting together this monumental move.
Thanks also to Carlin Wragg (community relations manager) for the tour.

Poesia Ultima / Italian Poetry Now
Istituto Italiano di Cultura, May 26, 2009, New York
photos by Mongibeddu

Marco Giovenale, Giovanna Frene, Carla Billitteri, Milli Graffi,

the organizers: Carla Billitteri and Jennifer Scappettone

here I am with Millli Graffi

Stephen Motika of Poets House

Ken Edwards on Bromige
Reality Street will be publishing a collected Bromige

Mike Hennessey on Bromige
from PennSound Daily

Family’s author page
(including memorial tributes)

Desire: Selected Poems 1963-1987
Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1988.
Desire is a guide for the lovelorn and love‑drenched, a devilish excursion into a psychorealism for which laughter is the exact analogue to human breath and paranoia an antidote (anecdote) for keeping your mind in view.  In Desire, the bottom of everyday life drops through, as land mines are triggered by the reader's darting glances.  Desire is a "blow struck for meaning"‑‑&, boy, do these poems blow.  David Bromige's hour has come‑‑and it begins here.

-------

The Difference is Scale: A Short Note on D.B. 

[ All quotes from the works of David Bromige. Written for the D.B. issue  of  The Difficulties (1990)]

“Cognition requires exaggeration,” writes David Bromige in “Indictable Sobourners”—and the converse would apply equally to explain his method: exaggeration requires cognition. In extremus luminatus ludicrus.

However, it is an ungracious task, as the oxymoron says, to try to explain a joke. You get it or better yet a) it gets you b) you don’t get it. That is, in these works it’s not “subject matter” (shopworn hangnail) but form (allopathic progenitor) that’s made intrinsically funny. “It is easier to see through my little tales than it is to see through the pernicious society we are trapped within. But the difference is merely scale.” And this may begin to account for why each poem is approached (and so apprehended) in a determinately different way. “When you start to doubt your own skepticism, look out!” Bromige has never “fixed” on any one style or mode (there are characteristic reverberations of course) but tackles (targets) new turf (segmentation sections) with each tussle (six of one, couple of half-dozen of other). “It was very dark inside the fish.” “This is among the most poignant: thoughts I know.” This is a good deal different and more humanly refreshing- in the sense that a breath is more refreshing than a cough.—than the idea of form as plastique. For Bromige, the question becomes what color plastic and why not rubber.

As to subject (subsequent) matters, Bromige makes mincemeat of the fashions of the “contemporary” “mind” (“The era had a milky density, tepid and torpid, mildly disgusting like a one-acre homesite; this disgust had spoken of the rebuttal to its final vestige of candid spontaneity, except that the toothache of the times looped a, scarf over everybody's ears,”) and builds from there. An Englishman who came to the U.S. of A. by way of British Columbia (a.k.a. Canada’s grey sunbelt) he has made cultural distance into a prosodic measure that leans on device without being devisive. “There is an intense pleasure of experience in the juxtaposing of the two polysyllabic words with the staccato monosyllables--greift and Spuk particularly spook me. [In this passage from Threads Bromige is referring to a quote from Heidegger; for the present context, hot tub / retotalization would do as well, as in there'll be a hot tub at the totalization tonight (requiring a further introjection into our unconscious episiotomies).]  Doesn't all innovation in knowing happen much as a pun: the thread of likeness enables one to articulate what is in one sense the utterly dissimilar, since new. Or what had been forgotten.” Eternity and paternity become avenues of access; the reader is left to draw the moral after Bromige has provided the tone and tonic.

“And still we hold there are times when we can bear witness to the present condition of absolute things.”

“For language
can take us there—wherever it is.”

—Charles Bernstein

t

David Bromige
1933-2009
Bromige died this moring.
He was with his wife Cecelia and his children Margaret & Chris

My Poetry (5:25)
(NOTE: cut is missing about 10 seconds of the poem)
Dear Charles (1:06)

Bromige Sound Recordings at PennSound
Bromige EPC author page
Family's page

In this work Pendleton gives a thoughtful introduction to Hannah Weiner's work, two actors perform part of the Clairvoyant Journal, Pendleton plays excerpts of the LINEbreak interview (reading the questions himself but playing the tape for Hannah's answers), and ends with a reading of Hannah's 1989 letter to me, which is collected in Hannah Weiner's Open House, edited with an introduction by Patrick Durgin, from Kenning Editions, 2007.

.____________________

Many of my recommended reading lists on this site have included books from Salt.
Here's the perfect opportunity to get some of these books
[including my own The Sophist ]
and support a press that has become part of the infracture of
"the kind of poetry I want"
(to use MacDiarmid's title once again).

SALT PUBLISIHING
JUST ONE BOOK

As a thank you for your support of us this first week of our
Simply use the coupon code G3SRT453 when in the checkout to benefit..
We have now raised £24,000 or our £55,000 target. Do please continue to spread the word about the campaign and this offer. Thank you for everything you're doing to help us save our business and continue publishing.
Best from everyone at Salt

Bay Area trip

On Sunday, June 21, at 6:30pm
I will be reading with Judith Goldman at the
New Reading Series at 21 Grand Gallery
415 25th St @ Broadway, Oakland
*
&, briefly, on Monday, June 22 at 7:30pm
with Scalapino, McClure, Berssenbrugge, Newman, Goldman, & Adnan
at the launch for Scalapino/Goldman War & Peace
at Moe's Books in Berkeley.

Photi Giovanis
has opened a new gallery
Callicoon Fine Arts
in the Catskills (upstate New York)

All Suffering Soon to End! is gallery's first exhibition (closes August 15), with artworks by:
Susan Bee, Paul Brainard, Glen Fogel, Elise Freda, Alicia Gibson, Daniel Gordon, Anitra Haendel, Andrew Hershey, Arnold Kemp, Caroline Koebel, Elissa Levy, Jeff Marlin, Paul McMahon, Forrest Myers, Hunter Reynolds, David Scher, Carolee Schneemann, Joshua Thorson and Dimitris Yeros
{images for each artist on web site}

Class Remasters Now Complete

War Stories
MP3

read with Emma Bee Bernstein

Dec, 20, 2004 at the Charles Morrow Studios

from Girly Man

War is the extension of prose by other means.

War is never having to say you're sorry.

War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.

War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged.

War is a slow boat to heaven and an express train to hell.

War is either a failure to communicate or the most direct expression possible.

War is the first resort of scoundrels.

War is the legitimate right of the powerless to resist the violence of the powerful.

War is delusion just as peace is imaginary.

"War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony."

"War is a thing that decides how it is to be done when it is to be done."

War is not a justification for the self-righteousness of the people who oppose it.

War is other people.

War is a five-mile hike in a one-mile cemetery.

War is nature's way of saying I told you so.

War is a fashioning of opportunity.

War is "a nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el."

War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guarantor of liberty.

War is the broken dream of the patriot.

War is the slow death of idealism.

War is realpolitik for the old and unmitigated realism for the young.

War is pragmatism with an inhuman face.

War is for the state what despair is for the person.

War is the end of the road for those who've lost their bearings.

War is a poem that is afraid of its shadow but furious in its course.

War is men turned into steel and women turned into ash.

War is never a reason for war but seldom a reason for anything else.

War is a casualty of truth just as truth is a casualty of war.

War is the redress of the naked.

War is the opiate of the politicians.

War is to compromise what morbidity is to mortality.

War is poetry without song.

War is the world's betrayal of the earth's plenitude.

War is like a gorilla at a teletype machine: not always the best choice but sometimes the only one you've got.

War is a fever that feeds on blood.

War is never more than an extension of thanatos.

War is the older generation's way of making up for the mistakes of its youth.

War is moral, peace is ethical.

War is the ultimate entertainment.

War is resistance in the flesh.

War is capitalism's way of testing its limits.

War is an inevitable product of class struggle.

War is technology's uncle.

War is an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry.

War is the right of a people who are oppressed.

War is news that stays news.

War is the principal weapon of a revolution that can never be achieved.

War pays for those who have nothing to lose.

War is Surrealism without art.

War is not won but survived.

War is two wrongs obliterating right.

War is the abandonment of reason in the name of principle.

War is sacrifice for an ideal.

War is the desecration of the real.

War is unjust even when it is just.

War is the revenge of the dead on the living.

War is revenge on the wrong person.

War is the cry of the child in black, the woman in red, and the man in blue.

War is powerlessness.

War is raw.

War is the declared struggle of one state against another but it is also the undeclared violence of the state against its own people.

War is no vice in the defense of liberty; appeasement is no virtue in the pursuit of self-protection.

War is tyranny's greatest foe.

War is tyranny's greatest friend.

War is the solution; but what is the problem?

War is a horse that bridles its rider.

War is the inadequate symbol of human society.

War is the best way to stoke the dying embers of ancient enmities.

War is a battle for the hearts and minds of the heartless and mindless.

War is history as told by the victors.

War is the death of civilization in the pursuit of civilization.

War is the end justifying the meanness.

War is an SUV for every soccer Pop and social Mom.

War is made by the rich and paid by the poor.

War is the quality TV alternative to You Still Don't Know Jacko: Cookin' with Michael and Fear Factor: How to Marry a Bachelorette.

War is not a metaphor.

War is not ironic.

War is sincerity in serial motion.

War is a game of chess etched in flesh.

War is tactical violence for strategic dominance.

War is international engagement to cover domestic indifference.

War is the devil in overdrive.

War is our only hope.

War is our inheritance.

War is our patrimony.

War is our right.

War is our obligation.

War is justified only when it stops war.

War isn't over even when it's over.

War is "over here."

War is the answer.

War is here.

War is this.

War is now.

War is us.

New Blog from Douglas Messerli
Introductory Statement

Exploratory fiction, at least in the United States, is arguably near death. Determinedly mediocre American publishing aligned with tepidly written and rapidly disappearing critical commentary has left us instead with a seemingly endless series of dispirited personal narratives, flat-footed fantasies, and sentimentalized social statements.

By exploratory writing I do not merely mean "experimental writing," but works that in their language and structures challenge our thinking, surprising and sometimes even mystifying readers, who are left not with simple comprehension but with wonderment. When I first began publishing in the mid-1970s there were a substantial number of writers of such fictions (Walter Abish, Tom Ahern, David Antin, Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Jaimy Gordon, Marianne Hauser, John Hawkes, Spencer Holst, Fanny Howe, Steve Katz, Tom La Farge, Nathaniel Mackey, Clarence Major, Harry Matthews, Mark Mirsky, Toby Olson, James Purdy, Gilbert Sorrentino, Johnny Stanton, Robert Steiner, Ronald Sukenick, Rosmarie Waldrop, Wendy Walker, Curtis White, and Dallas Wiebe, to name just a few) to chose from. Indeed, my Sun & Moon Press first published several of these figures. But since that time, many of these writers have died or ceased writing, and only a handful of younger writers have joined them. Accordingly, the great tradition of US writing, from Gertrude Stein to William Faulkner, from Flannery O'Connor to Vladimir Nabokov is in danger of disappearing. What to do?

One person or perhaps even a small group cannot resolve the situation. But I can, as I have attempted to do in my activities as a publisher, present and reveal such writing. exploringfictions, my new on-line magazine devoted to narrative writing, is another such attempt. Perhaps by simply standing in the path of the dart (see above) I can deflect those whose attention is centered only on the a single point in time and space and help to refocus their vision upon the wide world about them.

Clearly such a publication will be strongly dependent upon my own contributions, but I hope the entire literary community interested in fiction will join me in presenting (living and dead, US and international) writers, reviews, short essays on (new and older) fictions (in English and translation), interviews, news and other related commentaries.

I must emphasize that the title of this publication is purposely plural, and will be edited with the recognition that fiction is not merely a Gemini (the novel or short story), but is a many-headed beast made up numerous forms including epistolary writing, picaresques, anatomies, fables, pastorals, encyclopedias and other such structures.

exploringfictions will be published daily or weekly, depending upon when I write or receive appropriate new works. Perhaps, if it functions as I hope, Green Integer may collect each year into a single paperbound volume.

—Douglas Messerli, Publisher

I invite new works sent either by e-mail (to douglasmesserli -- at -- gmail.com) or by regular mail (to Green Integer, 6022 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 202C, Los Angeles, CA 90036 USA)

Emma Bee Bernstein Emerging Artists Fellowship
DONATIONS HERE

My reading at
Segue/BPC
March 14, 2009

full reading (42:35):MP3

1. Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links (8:58): MP3
2. Pompeii (1:08): MP3
3. Fold (3:44): MP3
4. The Sixties, with  Apologies (2:01): MP3
5. Stupid Men, Smart Choices (1:25): MP3
6. The Moment Is You (4:59): MP3
7. Won’t You Give Up This Poem to Someone Who Needs It? (1:17): MP3
8. The Honor of Virtue (0:30): MP3
9. Death on a Pale Horse (1:02): MP3
10. On Election Day (4:30): MP3
11. Morality (2:03): MP3
12. If You Say Something, See Something (0:52): MP3
13. Today Is the Last Day of Your Life Until Now (0:54): MP3
14. Time Served (1:42): MP3
15. And Aenigma Was His Name, O! (0:22): MP3
16. Be Drunken (1:57): MP3

photo: ©2008 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

f rom American Poet (vol. 35, Fall 2008)

Tonya’s Place

Charles Bernstein

In Harlem, one can
never get a room dark enough
to lose sight of things.

In Harlem, one can
or can seem to make peace with
a tour bus of eyes.

I first heard Tonya Foster read at St. Mark's of the Vieux Carré church in New Orleans on December 29, 2001. It was one of our annual “off-site” readings during the Modern Language Association convention, this one sponsored by Lit City and coordinated by Camille Martin. About 15 poets read and Foster was the only one entirely new to me. When she read the place lit up, and I lit up with it; the echoing cadences of her voice filled the church space. Her poetry was rooted in New Orleans, where she grew up, but it wasn’t a New Orleans legible from the outside. As she’s shown over the years since, to be a poet of New Orleans is to be a poet of an actual place but also of a place of the imagination. Her work is site-specific but also re-citing, re-splicing, and re-sounding.

The disaster has no single origin, no single moment of birth. Like the wave bruising the shore, it is an unapologetic accretion of uninterrupted motion.

            Foster now lives in New York (where she is a graduate student at CUNY) but some of her recent work revisits New Orleans post-Katrina, in particular a long mixed-genre work called “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At/From,” which, when she presented it at a recent reading (you can hear the audio on PennSound), was accompanied by photographs and a short video. The work comes off as part elegy and part reconnaissance. Reconnaissance turns out to be crucial for Foster: second site, knowing again, diving into a wreck that is not only all-too-real but all-too-imaginary.

Waterlikelanguagelikewaterlikelanguagelikewaterlikelanguage
likeotterslikelanguagelikedaughterslikeotterslikelickinglikelappinglanguagewagonwaters

            Foster’s engagement with repetition and lists in her work is a mark of her continual return not to the same but to the site as reciting. She is a poet of a place that is displaced: the place of her place is its displacement, her emplacement and replacement of it, as she returns and turns away, as she turns. Here / not here, the fundamental rhythm presence and absence, take center stage in Foster’s emerging poetics of emplacement.

My sisters and I could drive each other crazy by mimicking each other, repeating every word and gesture again and again. We took pleasure in making language we all knew strange, pleasure in accentuating the strangeness of words and in holding up that strangeness.

            This is a series devoted to emerging poets and I don’t want simply to be coy in locating Foster’s poetics as emerging; but I take that as a tenet of her approach, as we used to talk about process. There are a number of ways that Foster’s work can be located within a contemporary moment of site-specific poetry, which often focuses on the environmental context of a work, how it situates in terms of its surround. Indeed, Foster’s work is at the intersection of site-specific writing, ecopoetics (poetics read or written as an ecological system), and the poetics of identity. But what distinguishes it from these approaches is its insistence of emergence, which means that site and identity have not yet been actualized and the system not yet realized. Emergence here is a sign of crisis, of emergency, in which the provisional is valued for its register of immediacy. Repetition and lists in Foster’s work is not a legacy of modernist composition so much as a mapping device.

Blackity-black girl
sitting in a dark lit by
t.v and streetlight.

Blackity-black girl,
at play on the court of your skin—
imminent domain.

            The work often leads by ear, by sound, but not primarily because of an aesthetic engagement with the sonic for itself or as an ethnographic grounding in documentary, but rather because sound is a primary locating device, as in a sonogram. The echo is not toward the autonomy of the poem or the reality of the language outside it. The echo is a probe.

Black is black taint
that marks the linoleum tile
she Mop and Glo’s clean

“Black is black”—t’aint
that the color line—
“just cause” as refracted light? 
 
            My comments on Foster are abstract and technical. But Foster’s work doesn’t feel abstruse or conceptual (two qualities I often like in poems). What I am suggesting, in this brief introduction, is that Foster’s work is constructed as a system or environment, and that it explores the emergence and disappearance of identity and place. It’s not a poetry of, or about, fixed points of reference that are described. The sites emerge and submerge in the flickering probes of Foster’s accumulation of voices, her collection of verbal markers and shifting signs. Ain’t taint. In “A Mathematics of Chaos” she writes, “Geography can be transformative—the way a bullet to the body can be transformed.” Words wash over her work like the rain pours down, flooding a city (“water like language”). Speech is collected as tangible evidence of an imaginary home.

a girl who looks like her father is born for luck, alcohol, Algiers, alligator, Amazing Grace, Amelia, Angola, Atchafalaya, Aunt Noni, Aunt Sister, Azerine, back a town, bayou, because her daddy died or left, because the first-born baby died, beignets, bitch, Butsie, café au lait, … Father John’s, file, first-born, first-born done died, fleur de lys, flood, “for true?” front porch, Galvez, Gerttown, “gimme some,” “girl, gimme got shot,” “git up in here,” “God don’t like ugly,” good hair, gran’ma …

The poetics of emplacement must be imagined before it can be real, so that it can be real. We listen and we see what we hear. Or, we hear, and dive into ourselves to avert the brute reality of what we have heard.
           
That is what we mean by going home.
   
         This is the secret place of poetry.
    
        This is the way Tonya Foster matters.

------------------------------------------------           

Extracts from Tonya Foster. The italic extracts are from “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At/From.” The verse extracts from her ms, “A Swarm of Bees in High Court.”

 

Tonya Foster on PennSound

Tan Lin suggested I use Twitter in my English 111 "Experimental Writing" seminar.
All 13 participants signed up to 111-only Twitter feeds
and used the lines generated to create a variety of collaborative poems.
The Twitter poems are here.
The 111 site is here.

************************

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Basil Bunting reading from Briggflatts

This video features four short extracts of Basil Bunting reading from his long poem BRIGGFLATTS, from Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting, included on a DVD issued with the new Bloodaxe edition of the book.

MoMA (New York)
TANGLED ALPHABETS
Mira Schendel (Brazil, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988)
&
León Ferrari (Argentina, b. 1920)
(closes June 15)
is one of the most significant shows of alphabetic/lettrist art
to appear in a major New York museum.
The show focusses too much on the side-by-side comparison
of the two artists, diminishing both in the process, but
it is nonetheless a spectacular presention of both artists' work.


Ferrari, Manos (1964) -- detail


Ferrari, Cuadro Escrita (detail) (1964)


Schendel, Objectos graphicos" (detail) (1967)


Schendel, Objectos graphicos" (detail) (1972)

see also
CALIGRAMAS DE LÉON FERRARI
Poemas de 33 Poemas
Illustrated poems of  Regis Bonvicino

Richard Baker
book covers
at
Tibor de Nagy
(New York)
closes May 22

Steve McCaffery
reading from Carnival, Panel 2,
@ Instal 09, Glasgow. 21.03.09
(excerpt: full reading 40 min.)

from Parkett 84 (2009)


Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?

In Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie1, Lytle Shaw’s ostensive subject is how “coterie” works in the poetry and poetics of Frank O’Hara. The opening chapters provide a cogent discussion of the role of proper names in O’Hara’s poetry within the context of a linguistics-inflected examination of naming and reference. Shaw notes the different levels of proper naming in O’Hara’s work – figures of popular culture, political and social figures, as well as different levels of his personal circle (from identifiable artists and poets to obscure names).

For Shaw, coterie is not a closed world of intimates but an interlocking, open-ended set of associations and affiliations. He links coterie to the socio-historically self-conscious poetics of the local, community, and other collective formations. The poetics of coterie is presented by Shaw as an alternative to universalizing conceptions of poetry. O’Hara’s location of himself not in an homogenous elite but rather in intersecting constellations of persons (real and imagined affiliations), together with his famous time-stamping of his poems (it’s 12:18 in New York as I rewrite this sentence) both work against the Romantic Ideology of timeless poems by great individuals.

Still, no discussion of coterie can completely free itself from the negative connotations of clique and scene. For best effect, the first chapters of Shaw’s book should be read beside Andrew Epstein’s  Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry2. Epstein offers exemplary Emersonian readings of the intricate web connecting individual talent and collective investment in the poetry and poetics of John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, and O’Hara. Averting the Cold War myth of the individual voice in the wilderness of conformity, Epstein gives us voices in conversation and conflict, suggesting that resistance to agreement is at the heart of a pragmatist understanding of literary community. 

 The role of proper names and the nature of O’Hara’s personal circle are not the only concerns of Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. In the book’s final chapters, another theme emerges with equal force: O’Hara’s approach to the visual arts in his poems and criticism. Shaw sees O’Hara’s art writing as a powerful and necessary counter to the monological and hyperprofessional rigidity that descends from Clement Greenberg (who dismissed O’Hara’s art writing) to Michael Fried and, I’d add, extends to the October brand, the epitome of, let’s just say, High Orthodoxical art criticism. For if the luminous rigor and prodigious insights of Greenberg and Fried end in the tragedy of misrecognition, the self-serious vanguardism of the High Orthodoxical ends in the farce of academic gate-keeping and market validation. In other words, Greenberg’s and Fried’s insistence on conviction and agonism morphed into a practice of regulation by exclusion.

For Shaw, the aversion of poetry in both formalist and High Orthodoxical art criticism is a sign of its own aesthetic failure. In contrast to Greenberg’s and Fried’s rebuke of “poetic” art criticism, he suggests that O’Hara was doing an “art-critical” poetry that, for example, has resonances with Robert Smithson’s writing.3 “O’Hara moves toward modes of hybridization and proliferation that are diametrically opposed to the narrowing lexical range Greenberg and Fried imagined as the cure to a threatened art criticism of the 1950s and the 1960s” (p. 171).  Shaw illustrates his point with a  a section  of O’Hara’s poem “Second Avenue” that explicitly addresses DeKooning:

The silence that lasted for a quarter century. All
the babies were born blue. They called him “Al” and “Horseballs”
in kindergarten, he had an autocratic straw face like a dark
in a DeKooing where the torrent has subsided at the very center
classism, it can be many whirlpools in a gun battle
or each individual pang in the “last mile” of electrodes, so
totally unlike xmas tree ornaments that you wonder, uhmmm?
            what the bourgeoisie is thinking of. Trench coat. Broken strap.

O’Hara practiced a complicit4 and promiscuous criticism that stands in stark contrast to the ideologies of formalist criticism of his time and the October-tinged orthodoxicalities of the 1970s and 1980s.  As Shaw puts it, “O’Hara’s painting poems present … a special kind of interdisciplinarity, or what Michael Fried would call ‘theatricality’ … They … initiate almost infinite substitutions among discourses in their rapid, line-to-line attempt to imagine contexts for painting. It is for that reason that they seem, and are, antiprofessional” (p. 179; italics added).

Both formalist and the later October-branded criticism and its many knock-offs preached views of meaning that, while at odds with one another, were sufficiently proscriptive as to void the full range of aesthetic approaches in the art championed and to simply dismiss (as “pernicious,” as Fried called “Dada”5) work that contested the limits of received ideas of meaning-making. This criticism operated not by “negating” or deconstructing meaning (the empty encomium of the High Orthodoxical Art) but by articulating newly emerging constructions of meaning-as-constellations (a poetics of affiliation, association, combine, conglomeration, collage, and coterie). In effect, both formalist and High Orthodoxical criticism see theatrical or allegorical methods, respectively, as emptying meaning. But while the former decries the putative demise of opticality and the latter valorizes it, neither has a sufficiently pliable approach to engage with the new semantic embodiments of the “frail / instant,” as O’Hara’s puts it in his poem “For Bob Rauschenberg.”6 O’Hara’s “frail / instant” could be called the weak absorption of coterie, which, like the “unevenness” of everyday life is both discontinuous and fluid, self-aware and constructive, “semantically various and unstable,” atomized and chaining.7  O’Hara – in his reviled poeticizing – was able to articulate a poetics of adjacency, of queer juxtapositions, to which his critical others remained blind.

Thomas McEvilley makes the point very succinctly in his 1982 essay “Head It’s Form, Tales It’s Not Content,” prefacing his remarks with a quote from O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” –
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them …

Here’s McEvilley:
In the attempt to free art from the plane of content, the formalist tradition denied that elements of the artwork may refer outside the work toward the embracing world. Rather, the elements are to be understood as referring to one another inside the work, in an interior and self-subsistent esthetic code. The claim is imprecisely and incompletely made, however, because the formalists take much too narrow a view of what can constitute “content.” Greenberg, for example, often uses the term “non-representational” to describe “pure” artworks – those purified of the world. But as he uses it, the term seems to rule out only clear representations of physical objects such as chairs, bowls of fruit, or naked figures lying on couches. Similarly, Fried, assumed that only “recognizable objects, persons and places” can provide the content of a painting. But art that is non-representational in this sense may still be representational in others. It may be bound to the surrounding world by its reflection of structures of thought, political tensions, psychological attitudes, and so forth. 8

As Shaw acidly notes, to cast “the poetic” as the last bastion of private insights, or indeed “as a kind of metaphysics of content, of pure meaning,” requires a concerted effort to ignore the formally radical poetries outside the domain of Official Verse Culture and especially those poetries that explore collage, collision, disjunction, overlay, and contradiction.  Mispresented “as such it is no wonder that the poetic has had a long list of detractors – stretching from Greenberg and Fried to Benjamin Buchloh and James Meyer” (p. 220). Indeed, “they”–  both the prophets of a sublime late modernism and the apostates who argued for dystopian postmodernism –  “were all cheated of some marvelous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it,” as O’Hara wryly puts it in the final lines of “Having a Coke with You.”9 O’Hara is not, not nearly, the better critic, and Shaw shows his allegiances as being more to the in between than to any one of his shifting positions – curator, poet, critic, lover, social magnet, arts administrator. But more than “they” he recognized that “form is never more than an extension of content.”10  

This is certainly not to say that the normative, descriptive, fashion- and market-driven modes of art criticism are to be preferred, whether written by poets or not. The problem is not that art criticism is too conceptually complex but, on the contrary, that – – even at its putatively most theoretical – its poetics and aesthetics are too often willfully stunted, marked by a valorized incapacity to respond to how meaning is realized through multiple, incommensurable, or overlaid discourses – kinship, in Shaw’s terms – within a single work. Meaning is not an end but a between.11  

The significance of O’Hara (or McEvilley or Shaw) is not that they are poets who do criticism, which is also true of Fried, but their polymorphous dexterity of their writing; their aversion of simple description (of visual appearance or of ideas) in pursuit of phenomenological unevenness (in Shaw’s terms) or complexity found in the visual art work they address. This is the legacy of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Stein, not the “belle lettristic” approach that is often, and banally, contrasted with orthodoxical criticism.

Shaw’s approach provides a useful historical context for such projects as M/E/A/N/I/N/G.12 In doing so, it helps to explain not only the aversion of radical poetics and poetry in formalist and October-flavored criticism of the 60s to 80s, but also the fear of the taint of poetry by even such apparently poetry-related artists as Lawrence Weiner (who declines to have his work exhibited in poetry-related contexts). Consider, for example, that Meyer, in his introduction to a recent collection of the poetry of Carl Andre, never mentions the word “poetry.”13 The lesson is that linguistic works of Weiner or Andre (Vito Acconci or Jenny Holzer) can only be deemed significant as art if they are purged of any connection to (radically impure, content-concatenating) poetry and poetics.
As Dominique Fourcade noted at the Poetry Plastique symposium, poetry literarily devalues visual art (we were talking about how Philip Guston’s collaborations with Clark Coolidge had a lower economic value than comparable works without words).14 But perhaps this devaluation provides a necessary route for removing visual art from any Aesthetic System that mocks both aesthesis and social aspiration.

Reading Shaw’s study of the 50s and 60s, underscores, once again, how, indeed, pernicious is the cliché that poetry is fifty years behind visual art. On the contrary, art criticism, insofar as it succumbs to a paranoiac fear of theatricality that induces frame-lock, lags behind poetry at its peril. Meanwhile, the visual and verbal arts remain complicit with one another 50 years ago and today.

Cambridge University
Tom Raworth photos
slide show

Robin Blaser
May 18, 1925 – May 7, 2009

Robin died this morning.

Blaser on PennSound
Blaser on EPC

Afterword

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
— Dickinson

Robin Blaser’s poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else, but, rather, being where you are and who you are –  where you is always in the plural.

In the plural might be a good motto for Blaser’s courageous and anti-declamatory poetics, his profound continuation, deep into the darkening heart of contemporary North American poetry, of Emily Dickinson’s core value: “I’m nobody … Are you nobody too?” For Blaser, it is not only nobody but also no mind, or “no” mind, for this is a poetics of negation that dwells in pleats and upon folds. Pleating and folding being Blaser’s latter day, Deleuzian, manner of extending his lifelong project of seriality.

One poem must follow instanter on the next, a next always out of reach until in hand, in mouth, in ear.

Blaser celebrated his 80 birthday on May 14, 2005, just as this book was going into final production.

The present edition, an expanded version of the 1993 coach house press publication of the same name – Blaser's first collected poems – features a number of poems from the last decade and also includes several significant works not included in the Coach House publication. Most significantly, Blaser has added a recent long poem for Dante to his Great Companion series. This astounding work provides a bridge between Blaser’s poems and critical writings, marking a direct point of contact to the University of California’s companion volume of Blaser’s collected essays.

Blaser’s work constitutes a fundamental part of the fabric of the North American poetry and poetics of “interrogation,” to use his term. Compared to his most immediate contemporaries, Blaser has pursued a different, distinctly refractory, willfully diffuse, course that has led him to be circumspect about publication.  As a result, it was almost 40 years from his first poems to the time when The Holy Forest began to emerge as one of the key poetic works of the present. Indeed, Blaser’s lyric collage (what he calls “the art of combinations” in a poem of that title, alluding to Leibnitz) seems today to be remarkably fresh, even while his engagement with (I don’t say commitment to) turbulence and turbulent thought seems ever more pressingly exemplary. Blaser’s work seems to me more a part of the future of poetry than the past.

Blaser’s poems and essays insist on the necessity of thinking through analogy and resemblance – that is, thinking serially so as to move beyond the epistemological limits of positivism and self-expression. At the same time, Blaser has committed his work to everywhere affirming the value of human diversity, understood not only as sexual or ethnic difference, but also as the possibility of thinking outside received categories. There are some remarkably powerful and explicit political poems in the volume, notably “Even on Sunday.”  But the most radical politics of this work goes beyond any one poem: it is inscribed in the work’s compositional practice. Even as Blaser questions the stable, lyric, expressive “I,” he never abandons the possibility of poetic agency, through his generative recognition of language as social, as the “outside.”

Blaser’s “Great Companions” have now gone into the world of an ever-present no-longer-of-this-life: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, of his immediate company; Dante, Nerval, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze of his Imaginary. The poems of the Holy Forest are points on a map of a cosmos that does not exist in historical terms, that cannot exist, yet that must exist, if we are to make it to a Century 22 that is more than the name of a clothing store. The points form a constellation that we are not quite ready to apprehend but through which we are already formed. We grope and we stumble, but then, out of the blue or black or ultra suede, something unexpected happens: we are ensnared by the encounter.

Form finds us. Form founds us.

Blaser’s Holy Forestis a blaze of allusion without symbols, quotation without appointment. In the forest of language, every tree is a poem, every leaf a word. The poet sings the songs of night, jumping, from branch to branch, to a syncopated beat; never, ever, finding home. “To wit – to woo – to wound – ,” Blaser writes in “Oh!,”  one of his late, short, I want to call them anti-lyrics.

Citation, citation everywhere: the utter prism of his care.

No other moment exists but this one.

This one.

This one.

The Holy Forest is wholly secular, for only the secular allows the promise of an end to what Blake knew as the Totalizing Oppression of Morality. (“We have paid far too much in terror,” Blaser writes in a note to his Dante poem, “for our totalities.”) Each line of The Holy Forest is a glimpse into the unknown, each poem a new way of entering the holiness of the everyday. The frames are restless: no conclusion nor solution, the only resolution the necessity to go on. “We enter a territory without totalities where poetic practice is our stake and necessity.”

“This World is not conclusion / A sequel stands beyond,” writes Dickinson.

Neither is the poem the end of the poem, nor is the idea of the poem its origin.

The poem is the possibility of possibility.

In his exquisite articulations of the flowers of associational thinking, Blaser has turned knowledge into nowledge, the “wild logos” of the cosmic companionship of the real.

In Res Robin, Nibor Resalb
Inscripsit Mentastrum (XXC)

Matter over mind or anyway
mattering, muttering, sponge
warp, cup, meld, then again
clutched, shred, shrift. Blister
origins (orangutans) in souped-
up monkey-wrench. Prattling
till the itch in pines becomes
gash (sash) in the pluriverses
of weft & muck (wept). Pleat
as you may, fellow traversers
on the rippled road to hear &
however, ne’er so near.

 Charles Bernstein
New  York
October 2, 2005

The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited by Miriam Nichols
University of California Press 2006

photo ©2006 Mark Goldstein

link    |  05-07-09

Ellen Kennedy Michel
reviews
 Belladonna Elders Series #4
 Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein
  also featuring
 Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff,
 and Nona Willis Aronowitz
 Belladonna Books ($15)

In the new issue of Rain Taxi on-line

Belladonna Books information.

New at PEPC Library

Antlers in the Treetops
full text, 132 pp:  pdf (11mb)
lower res pdf files, about 1mb each:
part one, part two, part three

Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch

Coach House Press, 1970 (rpt. 1973)
PEPC Edition 2009

cover: George Schneeman

PEPC Digitial Edition ©2009 Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch

A Note on Antlers in the Treetops

Tom Veitch and I wrote Antlers in the Treetops in the late 1960s. We had already written short stories and a science fiction novel together, taking turns at the same typewriter, but Antlers was something of a departure.

As far back as 1963 Tom and I had been experimenting with artistic appropriation (as it’s now called), inspired by our discovery of Duchamps’ found objects, Schwitters’ collages, Tzara’s cut-ups of newspaper articles, Burroughs’ more developed cut-ups, and the cento. We did not think of our plagiarism as nefarious, though it did seem a bit subversive; in one case I took a poem by Stephen Crane and changed a single word in it.

In writing Antlers we followed a procedure: each of us collected paragraphs that we happened to find in our ordinary reading, snippets from fiction, nonfiction, journalism, letters, whatever. Choosing whatever struck our fancies, we made no distinctions between high and low literature. After one of us had “enough” of these, he mailed them to the other, whose job it was to select and arrange them in a sequence that seemed to make sense and to lightly revise them for continuity. Then this second person would mail that section to the first person, along with a batch of new found material for the first peson to work with to the continue what I will call the narrative (a forward motion not unlike that of de Chirico’s Hebdomeros). We went back and forth like this until we decided that the first draft was finished, then we both lightly revised the entire text.

The main thing I recall about writing Antlers is that it was a lot of fun to get manila envelopes full of paragraphs from Tom (who was in San Francisco) and that my head got amusingly bent out of shape every time I worked on it. Also, throughout the process (and to some degree subsequently) everything I read became heightened, a potential source of grist for our mill. (In fact we called our snippets “grist.”)

Then all we needed was a title—a found title, moreover. I think it was I who, remembering the childish jokes based on imaginary book titles (The Little Golden Stream by I. P. Freely, Under the Grandstand by Seymour Butts, the Tiger’s Revenge by Claude Balls, etc.), chose one of the lesser-known and certainly less clever ones, Antlers in the Treetops (by Who Goosed the Moose).

Not long afterward, Victor Coleman at Coach House Press generously offered to publish the novel. The first edition (1970) bore a black-and-white cover drawing by George Schneeman, taken from an illustration for a pulp fiction crime story. When this printing of 1,000 copies sold out, someone else at Coach House decided to reprint the book (with a different cover), but neglected to alert Tom and me, so the typographical errors of the first printing were perpetuated in the second. The new editor also failed to change the cover design credit on the copyright page, wrongly attributing the new art to Schneeman.

—Ron Padgett

Faculty of English
University of Cambridge

You are invited to The Judith E Wilson Poetry Lecture
by Charles Bernstein
a poetry reading / performance / talk, entitled
On Election Day (for Emma)
7 May 2009, 5.00 pm
Little Hall, Sigdwick Site, Sidgwick Avenue [UK]
Free entry. All welcome.

———————

In conjunction with the lecture the following events will be taking
place in the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English.
Free entry. All welcome.

Thursday 7 May 2009, 2 -4.00 pm.
The poetry of Charles Bernstein: talks and discussion
Allen Fisher, 'Readdressing Constructivism and Conceptual Art: aspects
of work factured by Charles Bernstein'.
David Nowell-Smith, 'Slurring the / unslurrable ; Satire and Subject in
"The Lives Of The Toll Takers"'.
Redell Olsen, 'Absorbing Dysraphism; strings attached: a reading of
Charles Bernstein'.

Friday 8 May, 2009
The Politics of Poetic Form: a symposium
Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English
10.am. - 12.00 noon:
Drew Milne, 'The persistence of poetic forms: from  lyric to text'
Ian Patterson, 'Containers, pulses, lentil: Tel Quel, and Veronica  Forrest-Thomson'
12.00:
Poetry readings / performances by Allen Fisher & Redell Olsen
2.00-4.00 pm:
Peter Middleton, 'Dynamical Analogies: Charles Olson's
poetics of energy'
David Ayers, 'Literature and Revolution: The Politics of the Politics of
Poetic Form.'
4.00:
Charles Bernstein: Response: The Attack of the Difficult Poems
5.00:
Poetry readings / performances by Maggie O'Sullivan & Tom Raworth

All events funded by the Judith E Wilson Fund:
Enquries to: Drew Milne <agm3 -- at -- cam.ac.uk>

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Also in the UK

Geof Huth
Friday May 1
Ron Silliman
Saturday, May 2, 7:30 PM
The Text Festival
The Met Arts Centre
Market St, Bury
Tuesday, May 5, 7:00 PM
Ron Silliman
Universty of London, Birkbeck, Room 101
30 Russell Square, London WC1
(reading & conversation)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Marjorie Perloff
at Oxford University
Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature

Unoriginal genius: constraint, concretism, citation

The lectures will be given in the Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, except the first lecture (5 May), which will be given in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre.

Lecture 1 -- Tue. 5 May: 'Unoriginal genius and déjà dit: an introduction.'
Lecture 2 -- Thur. 7 May: 'Phantasmagorias of the marketplace: citational poetics in Benjamin's Arcades Project.'
Lecture 3 --Tue. 12 May: 'From avant-garde to digital: the legacy of Brazilian concrete poetry.'
Lecture 4 -- Thur. 14 May: 'Oulipian ideogrammatics: Charles Bernstein's Poem Including History.'
Lecture 5 --Tue. 19 May: ' "The rattle of statistical traffic": citation and found text in Susan Howe's The Midnight.'
Lecture 6 --Thur. 21 May: Language in Migration: The Translational Poetics of Caroline Bergvall and Yoko Tawada
Lecture 7 -- (time not yet schedule):  The Return of the Repressed:  Appropriation and the Individual Talent
    (Goldsmith, Dworkin, Baetens)

photo ©2007 by Emma Bee Bernstein


Eileen Myles on
Close Listening, March 24, 2009
Art International Radio

Program One: Reading: MP3
Program Two: Our conversation: MP3

Close Listening
my conversation with
Jean-Michel Rabaté

Rabaté explains what literary theory is, how he came to teach  it, and how he thinks of it as a kind of conceptual or performance art. He also discusses Duchamp and  Pound, the differences between U.S. and Frecnh intellectual culture, and how lies are not necessarily bullshit..

Rabaté has written about Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Jacques Lacan. His recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan. (2002) and The Future of Theory (Blackwell, 2002), William Anastasi’s Pataphysical Society,  Helene Cixous--On Cities, The cradle of modernism and The Ethic of the Lie.  He is a professor English and Comparative Literature at  the University  of Pennsylvania.
(26:55)

MP3

Ron Silliman Wins Pulizer Prize

by Mike Freakman

New York, April 21 (AHP2 News) – Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet is the winner of the 2009 Pulizer Prize for Poetry.

            The Pulizer jury wrote, “Regardless of one’s position on the various strains of American poetry, no one can doubt that this work is one of the most ambitious books of poetry published in our time. But not only that, the work affords great pleasure to the new reader of poetry as much as to the old hand.”

            This is Silliman’s second Pulizer. Tjanting won the Pulizer Prize for poetry in 1981.

            Darien Credenza, Executive Muckamuck of the Amalgamated Writing Programs, told AHP2 news, “This should establish once and for all that the prize system is working and there has not now, nor has there ever been, discrimination against any approach to poetry. We are all together in one big tent.” Credenza went on to blast “those who make divisions where there is unity,” adding that “Silliman’s work is of the highest quality: that’s all that counts.” He noted that Silliman would be a featured reader at the next Amalgamated annual convention.

            Web comments section were buzzing in reaction. “This just shows Silliman’s hypocrisy,” said Spent Ronson, on Nowhere.Com. “If his work had any integrity it would not have won this prize.”

Futurism and the New Manifesto program
Museum of Modern Art / New York
February 20, 2009.

On the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joshua Mehigan, Alicia Stallings, and I read historical works, as well as our own contemporary manifestos, in the public space of the MoMA's Garden Lobby.
This program is a collaboration with Poetry magazine.

full audio program

program handout (pdf)

& here are my three performances:

F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)
MP3

Mina Loy, "Aphorisms on Futurism" (1914)
MP3

(& my own)
"Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums & Implausibly Deniable Links" (2008)
MP3

Thursday, April 23

David Antin
Charles Bernstein
Lynne Tillman

7:30pm
Writing in the Dark Series
curated by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch
Amie and Tony James Gallery
CUNY Graduate Center
(365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th Streets)
NYC
.

Adeena Karasick's new video
"I Got a Crush on Osama"

is a parody of
"I Got a Crush on Obama"

from the Press Release --

Satire of Obama Girl Video Released on YouTube to Promote New book Amuse Bouche
“Today’s politics have reached such a completely absurd level, I felt compelled to comment,” said Adeena Karasick of her new video I Got a Crush on Osamareleased today on YouTube to help promote her new book from Talonbooks, Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth. ... “When being tortured, it has always been recommended that the victim think of the torturer with their clothes off or in some humorous posture in order to get through the ordeal, and I think that is true of being alive today. We need some humour to get us through life amidst economic meltdowns, terrorist threat levels, multi-billion dollar frauds and the pervasive politics of fear. Why shouldn’t poking some gentle fun at Osama bin Laden be a part of that therapy?”

Close Listening
Wystan Curnow
Dominique Fourcade

Program 2
Conversation with Charles Bernstein (26:14)
MP3

---

also new on  PennSound
reading at SUNY Buffalo, November 15, 2000
complete reading (1:04:18):
MP3

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Photo © 2006 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Wystan Curnow

Close Listening Reading and Conversation with Charles Bernstein
April 7, 2009

Program One Reading (27:42)
Complete Show: MP3
1. On Volcanoes (8:05): MP3  text here
2. The Western (9:05):  MP3    text here
3. from "The Astronauts: An Autobiography" (8:14): MP3   text here

Program Two
Conversation with Charles Bernstein (28:30)
MP3

++++++++++++++++++++


Thomas McEvilley
reads Sappho
fragments 1, 2, 16, 31, 94 and 96 (in English and Greek)
March 25, 2009
(note: texts of translation from this book will be posted shortly)
complete reading (13:20)
MP3

This central work in the Guggenheim Museum’s “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (January 30–April 19, 2009) is hidden from the view of many museum goers on the staircase at the second floor. The unmarked and anonymous piece epitomizes the Eastern influences on postwar American art. The curators have placed the work out of the main current of museum traffic as a sly way of suggesting how Oriental art emphasizes indirectness, hiddenness, and avoids the direct confrontation of spectacle typically found in Western art. Deeply imbued with an Emersonian aestheticism, the work suggests a transcendence of the figure and ground relation through its subtle, sometimes translucent composition as well as its palette of grey and white. Perhaps the door on the lower left suggests an Eastern opening of the perceptual field. The whole work exudes a spirit of meditative openness to the space outside it. The influence of Chinese calligraphy is apparent – both in the vertical columns (the heavier white lines creating the impression of two scrolls) and the fluidity of the brush strokes. At the same time, the work – an unfinished wall with plaster – marks the breakdown of art and everyday life as written about by John Cage, who was influenced by the lectures  of D.T. Suzuki in the early 1950s. The artist’s anonymity marks a Zen-like remove from the ego of the Western artist. We can only assume that this anonymous artist experienced a direct exposure to the Orient, perhaps by visiting, at an early age, a restaurant (perhaps undergoing renovation) in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Portraits Series 5
(corrected link)

Bob's Theory of the (Aging) Avant-Garde

Go to blog to see this player.

Portraits Series 5
Myung Mi Kim
Charles Alexander
P. Inman
Alan Davies
Phong Bui
Bob Perelamn

Jacques Roubaud at the French Consulate yesterday
just before the final event of the OuLiPo festival in NY
organized with great verve by Jean-Jacques Poucell

Roubaud gave a reading on Thursday, at Idlewild books in Manhattan, from Jeff Fort's new translation,
The Loop (from Dalkey Acrhive). Roubaud read entirely in English and answered many questions after the reading with his characteristic mix of charm, eccentricity, brilliance, and maximum connection to poesis. He noted, wryly, that people have often written to him to correct facts in the prose series (of which The Loop is the second published in English, after The Great Fire of London). But, Roubaud noted, these works were about memory not facts and that he never used external sources as a check against his memory. (I'd say Idlewild book was on 19th street just West of Fifth, give or take a block or two.) (I may use this approach to explain my frequent spelling errors, but then again I have.) Later, Roubaud insisted he had no theory of history, or of memory (maybe he said memory too at least that's what I recall), but on questioning from a very distinguished voice in the crowd (I was sitting all the way back, the reading was packed by t he time I arrived just minutes past the appointed hour), Roubaud noted that of course, as younger man, he already accepted that the absence of a theory is also a theory. But then he added that this was not of interest to him now — and that indeed he had no theory of history (or maybe memory either), only a writing practice (well he said something along those lines). Roubaud's English reading was fine, but he complained that he was no longer was able to read with an adequate English intonation. I suspect that's because he was reading Fort's translation; as he continued to speak during the question period, his intonation seemed pretty good to me. I wouldn't mind having an English intonation as good as Jacques Roubaud.

Alyosha (Alexi) Parshchikov
March 25, 1954 - April 3, 2009

Word just in from Eugene Ostashevsky,  who also sent this photo, from Eugene's wedding last year.

Probably best know in the U.S. for
Blue Vitriol
tr. Michael Palmer, Michael Molnar, and John High
introduction by Marjorie Perloff
Avec Books, 1994.

Akilah Oliver
A Toast in the House of Friends
Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2009
The ceremony of sorrow is performed with a measured, defiant acknowledgement that makes words charms, talismans of the fallen world. This poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear to be reborn as radiant moments of memory’s forgiving home.

Robert Fitterman
Rob the Plagiarist
Roof, 2009
I had a suspicion about this work. I mistrust all frank and simple poetry. This book makes me feel like my trust was wasted. I finally had somebody verify the story. I thought it was accidental. I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. This book makes me feel like I end up with nothing, but somehow it makes me feel better. I rather liked it. The soft, brushed covering is removable and easy to clean. Adjustable strap holds poems in desired position. New bolder and larger print is easier to see and read. Casing made of 50% post-consumer content. PMA certified nontoxic.. Featuring an outstanding one-of-a-kind circle design, this eye-catching creation is certain to become a topic of conversation.

Alicia Cohen
Debts and Obligations
O Books, 2009
The promise of ecopoetics echoes here, strewn with hope, at the edge of a wild continent. The poet sings to stave off regret. Alicia Cohen’s Debts and Obligations is a linguistically sentient excursion into the woven core of animalady.

BRUCE PEARSON
Ronald Feldman Gallery (NYC)

stretching the alphabet beyond recognition
or into new recognitions
*a beautiful show*

Art Walk
art that walks the walk, talks the talk

Mira Schor
Momenta Art (Brooklyn)
(closes April 20)


Suddenly
(view image for wider view)
(review at NewsGrist includes comment on this work)


Night Driver

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Simon Evans
at James Cohan (NY)
through April 4

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Martin Kippenberger
MoMA (NY)
closes May 11, 2009
With the exception of the two "Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich" figures, the installations, conceptual works, and sculptures are a distraction from
the astounding paintings.


Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm, 1988

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Richard Tuttle
PaceWildenstein (NY) (closes April 25)
my slant view of one of Tuttle's new works

Reading Pierre Joris's Nomadics blog this morning
was reminded to post this announcemnent:

"Like its two twentieth-century predecessors, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1 and 2, this gathering sets forth a globally decentered approach to the poetry of the preceding century from an experimental and visionary perspective."

Joining Rothenberg and Robinson in the reading and performance are
Charles Bernstein, Bob Holman, Pierre Joris, Cecilia Vicuna, and Anne Waldman.

Here's what I plan to read :
Old Man of Whitehave / Edward Lear
Be Drunken / Charles Baudelaire  (my new translation)
from Respondez / Walt Whitman
& three for Emma:
Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht / Heine (my translation from Shadowtme)
The Ballad of Burdens / Swinburne (last two stanzas and envoi)
The Sick Rose / Blake

Ron Silliman on
Emma's Belladonna book

Ron writes about this photo by Emma of Marjorie Perloff
from the book


© Emma Bee Bernstein, October 2007


& he posts this picture:

Emma with Lyn Hejinian, Ron, Susan Bee, Bruce Andrews, & Susan Howe.
I took this in 1988 when we were all together in Tarascon,  France
for a poetry festival.

also from the Belladonna book
a picture I took of Emma and Susan
in June 2007 at her senior Thesis show at the University of Chicago

more on the Belladonna book

here

Hank Lazer on Close Listening

Close Listening
March 18, 2009
with Charles Bernstein on Art International  Radio (ArtonAir.org)
taped at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania

Program One:
Full Reading: MP3 (27:38)
1. From Lyric & Spirit, p. 324 – on poetry and entering a space …
From Portions
2. Portal
3. Fluorescence
4. Surge
5. Robert Duncan
6. Container
7. Horizon
8. Sense
9. Location
10. Figure (for Louis Zukofsky)
11. Thud
12. Shem
13. Adjust
14. Breath (for Norman Fischer)
15. Way
16. From Lyric & Spirit, p. 302-303 – on Jabès, Derrida, a-theism, and a relation to the divine
17. From The New Spirit: Leaning Toward (the final poem)
18. Brief intro to The Notebooks (of Being & Time:
19. The funnel poem  (“you/ mean like/ this …”  2/3/07 – Notebook II, p. 29) – 2 voice piece, with Charles Bernstein
20. “we pray to pray/ to be able to” (1/7/07 – Notebook II, p. 21)
21. “hacking kaballah” (6/13/07-6/14/07 – Notebook IV, pages 21-24)

Program two
Conversation with Charles Bernstein: MP3 (27:20)
Lazer talks about the confluences of his identities; about Southen poetry; about the poetics of jazz and transition; about the forms of his work; about the purported conflict between creativity and critical thinking; and about his poem “Figure.”

Photo ©2008 Bernstein/PennSound
link    |  03-20-09

Doug Lang
posted this on Facebook

from right: Doug Lang, Douglas Messerli, Charles Bernstein, Howard Fox, unknown
after Folio Books reading, DC in 1977

Rae Armantrout Introduction
The 92nd Street Y  / March 12, 2009

I first met Rae Armantrout in 1977 in San Francisco, or maybe 1975, or  maybe it was San Diego or New York. It must have been somewhere. I really can’t be sure. I know I know her and met her. But my recollection is no match for my desire to extemporize and I’ve learned not to trust anyone who does that.

            Well, I do remember that in 1977, Bruce Andrews and I wanted to have an essay on gender issues in the first issue of the magazine we were planning. Thinking of Rae as a primary practitioner of the work that was our magazine’s subject, I asked Rae, I thought ironically, “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Centered Writing?,” which became the title of her influential essay. Thirty years later I think it would have been better to ask the less ironic question, “Why Don’t Men Do Language-Centered Writing?”  This has been one of the main issues I have tried to tackle in my work and is central to the collection of essays I am working on now, to be called The Attack of the Difficult Poems.

            Which reminds me … As we speak now, the audience for Richard Foreman’s Astronome at the Ontolgical Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church is being given ear plugs in case John Zorn’s music is too loud. I want to suggest to you at the outset that for those who find severe dislocation disturbing, please put on your blindfolds immediately following this introduction. For those comfortable with the dissonance of contemporary poetry, the blindfolds won’t be necessary. But if you are unsure, I suggest you use the blindfolds as a prophylactic.

            Well perhaps I have jumped too fast to Armantout’s work. I first want to say something about Rae herself.

            Rae is frank, straightforward, even blunt in her honesty and directness. She always gives you a straight answer. Yet her work is wry, sly, and spry; indirect; slant, in an Emily Dickinson kind of way. You read a poem and you sort of get it, but then realize you didn’t, then re-read and are sure you didn’t. That’s when you got it, or it got you.

            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 belovéd 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. I am not me if my little pigeon ignores me. And in not being me I become I, the maker of my perceptions, as the morning follows the night only once in a while, and even that is imaginary.

            A couple of years ago death came calling for Rae. She wouldn’t listen and just went about her business. That business is what we call poetry and you are about to see her do her business tonight. The state of the art is in for a thorough interrogation. Who’s minding the store? Where are the stairs? If I say it do I have to buy it? Are those words she is reading or are you just the kind of people that admire her sensibility?

            Join me in welcoming Rae Armantrout to the stage of this old house, this old city, this old art …

Armantrout on Close Listening
reading and in conversation

Photo: Bernstein/PennSound ©2007

link    |  03-17-09

Alan Loney

photo ©2009 Charles Bernstein/PennSound

Close Listening

Alan Loney is a poet and printer from New Zealand who currently lives in Australia. Loney had his first book of poems published in 1971 and began work as a printer in 1974. He was co-winner of the poetry prize in the New Zealand Book Awards in 1977, Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland in 1992, and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne 2002-2006. Loney has published 11 books of poetry, and 8 books of prose. Some of his recent work has focused on the nature of the book. Fine editions of his work have been issued by Granary Books, The Janus Press, Barbarian Press, Red Dragonfly Press, Pear Tree Press and The Holloway Press.

Program One
Alan Loney Reading. Loney reads Rise and Day's Eye.
    MP3

Program Two
Alan Loney in conversation with Charles Bernstein.
Loney talks about his journey from a bookless childhood to a life as a book maker and printer, about the influence of American poetry on his work, and about his place in New Zealand postwar poetry.
MP3

Magnificent installation of Paul Sharits's
four-projector "locational" film installation
Shutter Interface (1975)
plus drawings for the installation and a wide assortment of Sharits's works on paper>
through March 21
Greene Naftali Gallery (New York)
(lots of images in flash presentation)

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Richard Foreman props, including this eyeball, now on sale
to benefit the Ontological Hysteric Theater.

PennSound stats:
PennSound users downloaded 4 million mp3 sound recordings and related media files in the past month.
At this point, we are projecting 50 million downloads for 2009.

Richard Foreman’s and John Zorn’s Astronome: A Night at the Opera (an initiation)

is an exuberant romp through the noise of time, a carnivalesque phantasmagoria of Foreman’s repertoire of ghoulish masks and veils, alluring Hebrew inscriptions, dangling swords, and ideolectical repetitive motions. The allusion, in the subtitle, to the Marx Brothers’s masterpiece is not incidental; both use the frame of opera as a staging area for the madcap. Zorn’s music – played on recording – is Dada rock, in which every rock gesture, vocal and rhythmic, is overblown and warped in a delightfully reflective blend of dynamic range and dynamic derangement. Music and image don’t so much combine in a Wagnerian totality but rather spar, tango, and riff. Foreman has created a Gothic fun house (mind theater) that enacts an hallucinogenic imaginary hidden in the Kabbalistic folds of Zorn’s music. Foreman’s work has often suggested a supercharged, perpetually ritualizing and de-ritualizing dance theater – where the performers don’t so much dance as move in tightly choreographed expressionist patterns. The introduction of a musical score, overlaid with Foreman’s signature tape-voice placards, intensifies this sensation. The performers do not sing and hardly speak, so that the vocalizations are primarily overlaid in the Zorn music and in the tape-voice segments. The vocalization in Zorn’s music are slurred and exaggerated; words are not audible. Thus, Foreman’s aphoristic intrusions and lettristic décor are Astonome’s primary text. This is Foreman at his classic best. Henry Hills will be filming Astronome all week, for what promises to be the best documentation so far of Foreman’s work.

Atronome continues at the Ontological Hysteric Theater through April 5.
Foreman EPC page
Foreman PennSound page

& now out


Richard Foreman DVD from Tzadik: 
Sophia:The Cliffs/35+ Year Retrospective Compilation

Close Listening
Art International Radio, operating at ARTonAIR.org
March 6, 2009

Program 1: Reading by Michael Davidson of selected poems: (26:31): MP3
from Prose of Fact:  Title, Summer Letters, Untitled
from The Landing of Rochambeau: The Dream Dream, The Landing of Rochambeau, Cloud
from Post Hoc: The Second City, Troth, Century of Hands, The Terror
from The Arcades: 2-12-91, 2-15-91, 2-28-91, Zombies, Translation
new & uncollected: Aninversary, Rebarbative, Bad Modernism: Intertices, Bad Modernism: The White City

Program 2: Michael Davidson in Conversation with Charles Bernstein (29:53): MP3
Davidson talks about his first textual experience, his engagement with the New American Poets (and especially Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser), the poetics of disability, and his work in prose versus poetry.

Rodrigo Toscano
on
MoMA Futurist Manifesto
at the Poetry Foundation

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Art in America on the event

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I will be reading with Adeena Karasick
on Saturday, March 14, at 4pm
Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York
308 Bowery just north of Houston

Some images from this past weekend's Armory Show
at the west side piers in New York


Alice Neel's portrait of Adrienne Rich

Carolee Schneemann's "Parallel Axis" from 1973
A remarkable refusal to write the body out of geometric abstraction.
Also on view at the Schneemann show of 70's performance photos
at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York (closes March 28)

Rona Pondick — a stainless head among the steely branches

Running Tube -- an anonymous artist's large-scale tubing ran above the entire pier. Stunning.

Amy Sillman (detail)

Joe Brainard (detail)

Jess (detail) —I am certain  I shall never ...

Leon Ferrari (detail)

Bob Thompson

Felipe Jesus Consalvos

The Rent Collectors
after
Ye Yushan and Sichuan Academy of Arts
Rent Collection Courtyard

Mary Ann Caws
talks about the MoMA
Futurist Manifesto centennial
on the new Poetry Foundation podcast,
which includes some excerpts from my performances

Vincent Katz
on
Emma's Belladonna book
&
Susan's show

Accused
(1975 audiotape work)
(45:06):
MP3
In 1974, City College’s History Department erupted into a bitter political dispute in which older faculty members Stanley Page, Edward Rosen and others accused their younger colleagues of disruptive leftist agitation. In this work, I perform the 1975 CUNY faculty senate report on the matter.
(This recording has not previsously been published. It is part of a collection of my audiotape works from the mid-70s that I am assembling for PennSound.)

Chris Funkhouser's pictures
from yesterday's tribute to Emma
(March 1, 2009)
and book launch for the new Belladonna collection
at A.I.R. Gallery.


Erica Kaufman and Rachel Levitsky
introducing the event

Lyn Hejinian with a Susan Bee painting. Lyn read a poem for Susan and Emma.

Felix sang "For All We Know"

Susan Bee
reading from her essay in the book.

Quickly: it’s neither fish nor flesh, Falstaff nor Faust. "I became again, I learned to taste." Translation, collage, prose poem, lyric invention, periodic convolute, imploded syntax & discursive veers: Scappettone’s richly textured, multifoliate poetry is an intellectual and aesthetic extravaganza that defies genre in its commitment to structural process and social materiality.

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PennSound on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/PennSound

Photos: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I'll be going to the show next week, but meawhile my son Felix sent me his response.

Felix Bernstein on Richard Foreman / John Zorn
Astronome
(now playing at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in New York)

Foreman shows the way we communicate with the world of symbols and theatricality through props and motions, the corny way we play with it, like magic, the way that we are a part of it, and it a part of us, the audience a part of the show, and the show a part of the audience. It breaks down the crucial implied dualisms of the theatre, and when the glimmers of reality creak through the stained glass, the glass does not shatter, it cracks, and the cracked glass, cracked by the morning sunlight, is only a further part of the experience. The consciousness that there is an audience, the phone is ringing, there is an awkward silence, is a piece of the surreal cake. It doesn’t ruin the experience to know that there are actors.  It was revelatory for me, it showed that the world around me was constantly an extension of this show, that in art one can easily communicate with these symbols, and that these symbols are magical, and they are so bogged down and recycled and filtered by our culture, but in their pure form they are so miraculous, so curative, so godly, so wonderful. It is charitable to share this, because it helps us all break free from the materiality of our existence; it helps us break free from certain bonds of reality that bore us to tears; that fill us with fears. The roles we inhabit are all make believe and real, there are cracks in the stained glass, that is what has bothered me recently, the oh-shit-it’s sobering, oh-shit it’s morning, oh-shit it’s anxiety, yet those cracks add to the whole, and are a part of the whole, they are not separate, they are not downtime and uptime, weekends and weekdays, one mustn’t make Sunday holier then the others days, we are in a constant orbit of days, and weeks, and months, and moments, and none is any better then the other, no experience any richer or any poorer. High art and low art are pals. I guess I’ve always found that in art but now, this has helped me to find it in my reality, that the world full of TV and come-downs and stresses and tests, is all part of the beauty. It mustn’t be chained away some place, it mustn’t be victimized, it mustn’t be labeled as diseased, it mustn’t be cured with a pill. It must be first embraced, as much as it embraces us. My friend asks why the show doesn’t please, doesn’t touch, give in or connect. Foreman’s is not a show for ‘crowd pleasing,’ there aren’t punch lines, [alas,] hanging strings later neatly tied, finales, climaxes, or endings. Foreman’s is not a show to create these fabricated resolves that appease what we so desperately crave. And why should he; why is this expected; why do we demand fabricated untruths, even in our surreal works, which eliminate the uncertainties and awkwardness. What if the climax went on so long that it was boring, and the big finale came first, and the beginning never came? Then we would have truth. My friend expects that the theater be a place of escape. From where to where? He is unsure. Illusions create the idea of an audience sitting in reality watching a show in the world of fantasy. But he doesn’t want his theater to be aware of the illusion, it makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t wish to embrace what is artificial about the theater. Make-believe is fine if constrained to the box of the TV, where the awareness of the artifice is as slighted as possible, where the people don’t know they are inside the box, because if they realized where they were, inside that box, the audience member might have to face his own box, the one in which he too plays roles that are artificially constructed. The watcher might then have to accept that he is a part of the theater and a part of the TV; that there is no separate land from which imagery is born. TV Land does its best to imitate our supposed reality: the one where there is no artifice or acting. Surrealism is given a moment between commercials to come forth from this constructed vision of normal-waking life. However on Foreman’s stage surrealism is not born from realism. It starts with the surreal, the strange, the dreamy, and then reality creeps in. What my friend expects is for reality to be taken for granted, and for surrealism to be a reward and an escape. What Foreman gives is a world where surrealism is the foundation, and reality may show itself for what truly is: a harder pill to swallow. My friend complains: ‘It starts in the middle; it should have paved the way for the strange, made clearer its entrances, its beginnings and ends. This work would be perfectly fine if relegated to a 2-minute dream sequence in a Hitchcock film.’ But what if we embrace that all film, life and art is a dream sequence, and that anything else is an untruth. This is what Foreman does for me, and mid-dream I am awoken.

Felix Bernstein is a junior at Bard High School Early College.



New York Times review (Ben Brantley)

• Saga/Circus by Lyn Hejinian
• Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe
• It’s go in horizontal by Leslie Scalapino
• Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low
• Girly Man by Charles Bernstein
• The Alphabet by Ron Silliman
  

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