Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash 2009

celebrated by the Friends and Enemies of Stevens with Jim Finnegan, Marjorie Perloff, John Serio, and many more.
With a recording of Marjorie Perloff's speech.

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Recurrence Is A Voice That Would Otherwise Be Silent by Jeff Harrison

Abyss is amid The Muses, as poetry's recurrences abound without as daylight about a tomb, as darkness about a fire. Is writing prose apart from poetry the abeyance of poetry's recurrences? Abeyance doesn't prevent recurrence. The recurrences within a poem and among an author's poems continue, as do the recurrences of words outside poetry that correspond to words within poetry... correspond and refer, words and sounds and events. Perhaps writing prose apart from poetry is inscribing an obelisk "Abyss Musagetes".

(c) Jeff Harrison


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What Fell Apart, What Came Together

Twenty years ago tomorrow, the Berlin Wall came down. The Op-Ed editors asked nine poets — Eastern European, American, Russian and German — to write new works inspired by that event.

Thanks to Jeff Newberry for the link.

my sink won't work

my sink won't work
my silver is corrupt
my star has smashed
the car sound track
Lulu is tofu
the butter and the fly
Arnaud wants som' more
of no things are left
when I read twenty-two
& remember kangaroo
horizons shrink up
with silent restraint
go golf you girl
the url will curl
your ball hits the frame
the same of your make
Pascal's reed sways
in storms & wakes

in answer to Maria Demon who answers Dirk Vekemans.

///

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Foucault info

Thanks to Bill Lavender.

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Filippino Lippi

Apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard



Allegory of Music, c. 1500

Dennis Barone

The new Poet Laureate of West Hartford.

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Confucious

"When I attained the age of fifteen, I became bent upon study. At thirty, I was a confirmed student. At forty, nought could move me from my course. At fifty, I comprehended the will and decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ears were attuned to them. At seventy, I could follow my heart's desires, without overstepping the lines of rectitude."
"If you observe what things people (usually) take in hand, watch their motives, and note particularly what it is that gives them satisfaction, shall they be able to conceal from you what they are? Conceal themselves, indeed!
To the disciple Tsz-lu the Master said, "Shall I give you a lesson about knowledge? When you know a thing, maintain that you know it; and when you do not, acknowledge your ignorance. This is characteristic of knowledge."

QUIZLET

Treccani.it

Obododimma Oha

in a lively description of the Exodus from the beginning of the Computer Age, enjoy!

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R.I.P.

“Coloro che pensano che la poesia sia disperazione non sanno che la poesia è una donna superba e ha la chioma rossa”

Alda Merini

1931-2009

///

from The New York Times, Our President

History: The Battle of the Bulge

Chalk Editions

new eBooks at http://chalkeditions.co.cc
free to read, download, and print.

Jeff Crouch - furious peddler
Lawrence Upton - water lines
Hugh R. Tribbey - waitinale glasses

also, work by Sheila E. Murphy, John M. Bennett,
zachary count lawrence, Ivan Arguelles, Alan Sondheim,
Jim Leftwich, Peter Ganick, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

we are reading manuscripts at this time.
send electronic file [doc, rtf, pdf only] to:

Peter Ganick pganickz@gmail.com
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen jkervinen@gmx.com


///

John von Neumann

Personality

Von Neumann invariably wore a conservative grey flannel business suit - he was even known to play tennis wearing his business suit - and he enjoyed throwing large parties at his home in Princeton, occasionally twice a week.[21] Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he nonetheless enjoyed driving (frequently while reading a book) - occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. He reported one of his car accidents in this way: "I was proceeding down the road. The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles per hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path."[22] (The von Neumanns would return to Princeton at the beginning of each academic year with a new car.) It was said of him at Princeton that, while he was indeed a demigod, he had made a detailed study of humans and could imitate them perfectly.[23]

Von Neumann liked to eat and drink heavily; his wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks).[9]

___
Indebted to Wikipedia for this lovely description of The Man.

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Contemporary Poetics edited by Louis Armand

CONTEMPORARY POETICS

"Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century"

Edited by Louis Armand

ISBN 0-8101-2359-2 (paperback). 384pp.

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, Evanston.

http://nupress.northwestern.edu

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stephane Mallarme in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary.

Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice. The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

"An epoch-defining collection of manifestos and essays: its list of contributors reads as a who's who of current important theorists in the field." --Michael Golston

"Puts a number of excellent essays back in print and makes several others easily available for the first time." --Craig Dworkin

CONTENTS

1. END GAME

Charles Bernstein: How Empty is my Bread Pudding?

Marjorie Perloff: After Language Poetry: Modernity & its Discontents

2. PRECURSORS

Kevin Nolan: Getting Past Odradek

Donald F Theall: The Avant-Garde & the Wake of Radical Modernism

Bob Perelman: Doctor Williams's Position, Updated

Simon Critchley: Wallace Stevens and the Infinite Evasion of As

DJ Huppatz: Corporeal Poetics: Kathy Acker's Writing

Michel Delville & Andrew Norris: Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism

3. CONJUNCTIONS

Ricardo Nirenberg: Metaphor: The Colour of Being

Keston Sutherland: Vagueness

DJ Huppatz, Nicole Tomlinson & Julian Savage: AND &

Bruce Andrews: Readings Notes

Bruce Andrews: Lost and Found

4. CURSORS

Augusto de Campos: Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto

Augusto de Campos: Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium

Darren Tofts: Epigrams, Particle Theory and Hypertext

Gregory L Ulmer: Image Heuretics

J. Hillis Miller: The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life

McKenzie Wark: From Hypertext to Codework

Alan Sondheim: Codeworld

5. TRANSPOSITIONS

Louis Armand: Techno-Poetics in the Vortext

Steve McCaffery: Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap

Allen Fisher: Traps or Tools and Damage

Steve McCaffery: Discontinued Meditations

Marjorie Perloff: Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text

Louis Armand is director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. His books include Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture; Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology; and Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other. www.litterariapragensia.com

Contemporary Poetics

http://nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/0-8101-2360-6/Default.aspx

Northwestern University Press

http://nupress.northwestern.edu

11030 South Langley Avenue

Chicago, IL 60628

(800) 621.2736 or (773) 568.1550 (phone)

(800) 621.8476 or (773) 660.2235 (fax)

Order from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Poetics-Avant-Garde-Modernism-Studies/dp/0810123606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256653745&sr=1-1

---

The Discourse on Language by Foucault

I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistribute according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.
[...]
How could one reasonably compare the constraints of truth with those other divisions, arbitrary in origin if not developing out of historical contingency - not merely modifiable but in a state of continual flux, supported by a system of institutions imposing and manipulating them, acting not without constraint, not without an element, at least, of violence?
[...]
It is, undoubtedly, a historically constituted division. For, even with the sixth century Greek poets, true discourse - int he meaningful sense - inspiring respect and terror, to which all were obliged to submit, because it held sway over all and was pronounced by men who spoke as of right, according to ritual, meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share; it prophesied the future, not merely announcing what was going to occur, but contributing to its factual event, carrying men along with it and thus weaving itself into the fabric of fate. And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said. The day dawned when truth moved over from the ritualized act - potent and just - of enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it referred to. A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division for, henceforth, true discourse was no longer considered precious and desirable, since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exrercise of power. And so the Sophists were routed.
[...]
But this will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy - naturally - the booksystem, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today. But it is probbly even more profoundly accompanied by the manner in which knowledge is employed in a society, the way in which it is exploited, divided and, in some ways, attributed. It is worth recalling at this point, if only symbolically, the old Greek adage, that arithmetic should be taught in democracies, for it teaches relations of equality, but that geometry alone should be reserved for oligarchies, as it demonstrates the proportios within inequality.
[...]
Of the three great systems of exclusion governing discourse - prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth - I have spokent at greatest length concerning the third. With good reason: for centuries, the former have continually tended toward the latter; because this last has, gradually, been attempting to assimilate the others in order both to modify them and to provide them with a firm foundation.
[...]
in what we generally refer to as commentary, the difference between primary text and secondary text plays two interdependent roles. On the one hand, it permits us to create new discourses ad infinitum: the top-heaviness of the original text, its permanence, its status as discourse ever capable of being brought up to date, the multiple or hidden meanings with which it is credited, the reticence and wealth it is believed to contain, all this creates an open possibility for discussion. On the other hand, whatever the techniques employed, commentary's only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down.
[...]
Can we see in this narrative [Shogun's story] the expression of one of the great myths of European culture? To the monopolistic, secret knowledge of oriental tyranny, Europe opposed the universal communication of knowledge and the infinitely free exchange of discourse.
[...]
Doctrinal adherence, however, involves both speaker and the spoken, the one through the other. The speaking subject is involved through, and as a result of, the spoken, as is demonstated by the rules of exclusion and the rejection mechanism brought into play when a speaker formulates one, or many, inassimilable utterences; questions of heresy and unorthodoxy in no way arise out of fantical exaggration of doctrinal mechanisms; they are afundamental part of them. But conversely, doctrine involves the utterences of spakers in the sense that doctrine is, permanently, the sign, the manifestation of the instrument of a prior adherence - adherence to a class, to a social or racial status, to a nationality or an interest, to a struggle, a revolt, resistance or acceptance. Doctrine links individuals to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection, that of speaking subjects to discourse, and that of discourse to the group, at least virtually, of speakers.
Finally, on a much broader scale, we have to recognize the great cleavages in what one might call the social appropriation of discourse. Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a sociaty like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battlelines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
[...]
Ever since the exclusion of the activity and the commerce of the sophists, ever since their paradoxes were muzled, more or less securely, it would seem that Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured that to discourse should merely as a certain interjection between speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs and rendered visible by words, or, conversely, that the structures of language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain effect of meaning.
[...] the task of the founding subject is to animate the empty forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond time, he indicates the field of meanings - leaving history to make them explicit - in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find their foundation. In this relationship with meaning, the founding subject has sings, marks, tracks, letter at his disposal. But he does not need to demonstrate these passing through the singular instance of discourse.
[...]
Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of iriginating experience or a philosophy of univesal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier.
[...] I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thining rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to ablish the sovereignty of the signifier.
[...]
Beyond them [the instant and the subject], independent of them, we must conceive - between these discontinuous series of relations which are not in any order of succession (or simultaneity) within any (or several) consciousnesses - and we must elaborate - outside of philosophies of tiem and subject - a theory of dicontinuous systematization. Finally, if it is true that these discursive, discontinuous series have their regularity, within certain limits, it is clearly no longer possible to establish mechanically causal links or an ideal necessity among their contitutive elements. We must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the production of events. There again, we feel the absence of a theory enabling us to conceive the links between chance and thought.
[...]
I will take first of all the age of the Sophists and its beginning with Socrates, or at least with Platonic philosophy, and I shall try to see how effective, ritual discourse, charged with power and peril, gradually arranged itself into a disjunction between rue and false discourse. I shall next take the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the age which, above all in England, saw the emergence of an observational, affirmative science, a certain natural philosophy inseparable, too, from religious ideology - for this certainly constituted a new form of the will to knowledge. In the third place, I shall turn to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the great founding acts of modrn science, as well as the formation of industrial society and the accompanying positivist ideology. Three slices out of the morphology of our will to knowledge; three staging posts in our philistinism.
I would also lie to consider the same qestion from quite another angle. I would like to measure the effect of a discourse claiming to be scientific - medical, psychiatric or sociological - on the ensemble of practices and prescriptive discourse of which the penal code consists. The study of spychiatric skills and their role in the penal system will serve as a point of departure and as basic material for this analysis.
[...]
One could also conceive a study of discourse concerning heredity, such as it can be gleaned, dispersed as it was until the beigniing of the twentieth century, among a variety of disciplines, observations, techniques and formulae; we would be concerned to show the process whereby these series eventually became subsumed under the single system, now recognized as epistemologically coherent, known as genetics. This is the work Francois Jacob has just completed, with unequalled brilliance and scholarship.
[...]
At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation - certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier.
And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension fo theory call all this - if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them - structuralism.

///

From THE DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE by Michel Foucault, in Social Science Information (10), trans. Rupert Swyer, used by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., London (c) 1971 International Social Science Council/Le Conseil Internaitonal des Sciences Sociales.

Georgetown University

What is in the Archives?

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The Restoration and the 18th Century

Joel Weishaus and the Gateless Gate

Dear Friends, Family and Colleagues:

Pages 39-40 of "The Gateless Gate":
http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/Gate/Pgs%2039-40.htm

Paragraph headings:

The genre of Electronic Literature tends to neglect...
Perhaps reading began when hunters learned...
In the Spring of 1950, a human body was unearthed...
One theory is that the people were sacrificed...(quote)
Yet they were made of earth and fire...(poem)

In the winter of 1994, three spelunkers unearthed...
I am reminded of Alan Garner's short story...
Next she sees the outline of a hand...
“’I’ve seen,’ said Mary, ‘All of it.’...

New pages and revisions:

There's now a "cover" :
http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/Gate/cover.htm

Introduction has been revised and extended:
http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/Gate/Intro.htm

Thank you, as always, to those of you who have written to me on this project.


-Joel Weishaus

Issue 15 of Otoliths by Mark Young

In a switch on the normal All Hallows' Eve tradition, the someone who's come knocking at your door is bringing you candy. No tricks, just treats. Issue 15, the southern spring 2009 issue, of Otoliths has just gone live, & has in its basket a wondrous variety of text & visuals—sometimes both—from Ray Craig, Crag Hill, Andrew Topel, Jeff Harrison, James Mc Laughlin, Bob Heman, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Philip Byron Oakes, Chris Gordon, Louise Norlie, Donald Dunbar & Andrew Lundwall, Raymond Farr, Márton Koppány, Halvard Johnson, Kathleen Rooney, Rodger Lowenthal, Travis Macdonald, John J. Trause, Kat Dixon, John M. Bennett, Baron & John M. Bennett, Sheila E. Murphy & John M. Bennett, Robert van Vliet, Cecelia Chapman & Jeff Crouch, Yoko Danno, Charles Clifford Brooks III, j/j hastain, Daniel f Bradley, Tim Marcuson, Michael Brandonisio, Lance Newman, Adam Katz, Andy Martrich, Jeff Klooger, Yonah Korngold, John Martone, Bill Drennan, Karri Kokko, David Berridge, Ira Joel Haber, Marcia Arrieta, Martin Edmond, Andrew Topel & John M. Bennett, Felino Soriano, Jal Nicholl, Ed Baker, Tony Rickaby, Sam Schild, Paul Siegell, Tom Beckett, Grzegorz Wróblewski, David-Baptiste Chirot, Jon Curley, sean burn, Tim Kahl, Mara Patricia Hernandez, PD Mallamo, Carlyle Baker, Bobbi Lurie, John Moore Williams, Dominic Amerena, & Spencer Selby.

So turn on the porchlight, & get reading.

Mark Young

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The Witch's Bird by Soleida Rios

The following poem is included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press), edited by Mark Weiss.

THE WITCH’S BIRD
To Joel James

The bird was born of a machete’s blade
It’s nothing like mockingbird
blackbird or mournful dove:
it was born of a machete’s blade
not from some old bird’s white egg.

Neither skylark nor quetzal
nor the buzzard that anxiously tracks last footsteps,
it lives in The Witch’s song. It makes its nest there,
and it sings like the birds of sea and forest.
It goads the mules. Implacable, in foul weather
it flies above a hut’s palm thatch
and someone must die.

From March to October it’s the bird’s fault:
if lightning strikes the midst of a palm tree
if the river floods
if a verse comes infinitely slowly
bearing the aroma of the last of the coffee
in every case–from March to October–
it’s the bird’s fault.

2
They say that once a pair of friends
found themselves in the night
near the Witch's song, where they had gathered
for a bout of magic,
and that they brought forth the enormous urn
of amulets and bones that had been till then
the secret they held
in trust for believers.
They say that something came among them
in that place where the bonds of the human
are broken; but no one really knows.
And that machetes were drawn.

3
The bird was born on the last violent rung
of the heart hidden deep within the breast.
No one can see it
though it has flown over all the heights
of the mountains.


(c) Soleida Rios
Translated by Mark Weiss


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Two poems got excellent wings

Peter Ganick kindly accepted my seasonal poem:
http://pganickz.livejournal.com/171804.html

The National Gallery of Writing, i.e. Spidertangle Gallery - Editor Crag Hill, accepted my visual poem:
http://galleryofwriting.org/writing/1371090

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Halloween

In the mirrored image of the mirrored window which of the witches watch the one that yabbers more on witches is the wicked watching witch that widows wide her wigged wiggery wiggling wild at night her whale winkie wrestling like devilish wreckers like bloodshot wildfires swooshing her wens in the wind her wretched wrybill wrinkles all cyberwrest In the mirrored image of the mirrored window which of the witches watch as a wringing wraith she wrecks and wrangles only wrack and wrongo in her whacked track wrapping weaving sucking her whanging wings wry her welked wax eye to terrify westing wyverns wroth we weenchy wait without wharf with wüstite wurtzite and wulfenite _this be writ In the mirrored image of the mirrored window which of the witches watch (painting by Josefa de Obidos, taken from Wikipedia)

Thomas Merton

Thought for the Day

Often in helping someone else we find the best way to bear with our own trouble.

The Road to Joy: 94.

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Ana Božičević

Stars of the Night Commute
by Ana Bozicevic

Ana says, "Dear friends, My debut book of poetry is now out and available. I'm proud of it (that in itself is kind of monumental) & I hope you consider reading it, and if you do, rating or reviewing it here, & helping me spread the word. Here are some thoughts on the book from smart & kind people, followed by a brief book description/author statement from me. You can find excerpts and more at http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/Bozicevic/index.html.

Thank you, again, for giving some of your time to "Stars..."

With love and thanks, Ana ~

Praise: Stars of the Night Commute haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams. Many of the poems carry a shamanistic, elemental quality, as if real matter were articulating out of word-fragments. Božičević writes, "At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote." If this is "the end of poetry," perhaps poetry is, after all, reaching forward back to its beginning. —Annie Finch Ana Božičević's poetry"

Yeats from the Boston Review

Thanks to James Finnegan for the link.

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Halloween by Robert Burns

¹Is thought to be a night when witches, devils, and other mischief-making beings are abroad on their baneful midnight errands; particularly those aerial people, the fairies, are said on that night to hold a grand anniversary. —R. B.

Thanks to About.com: Poetry

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Ron Silliman's blog

and finally Ron Silliman, The Great! His blog is the huge cauldron/receptacle of the literary world!
With my thanks,

///

Amy King

Double Review Of Amy King’s Antidotes For An Alibi and I’m The Man Who Loves You

by

Matthew Rotando

Tom Beckett

METAPOETIC SPECULATION IN/ON TOM BECKETT'S "THIS POEM"

by

Thomas Fink

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Mary de Rachewiltz

interviewed by Paul Vangelisti.

///

Multiple Projections 1978 to 2009 by mIEKAL aND