IEPI

2019-08-18T09:51:00.002-07:00

here are some contents

Huffington Post Review of Postmodern American Poetry

2015-06-27T08:01:00.001-07:00

Anis Shivani has written a great review of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd edition. Here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/where-stands-postmodern-a_b_7641644.html

New American Writing 33 (2015)

2015-06-27T07:55:00.001-07:00

New American Writing 33 (2015) is at the printer. It contains work by David Mutschlecner, Martha Ronk, Elaine Equi, Carolyn Guinzio, Noelle Kocot, Linda Norton, Lance Phillips, Johannes Goransson, Joseph Lease, Joshua Corey, Alejandra Azuero, Richard Greenfield, Andrew Maxwell, rob mclennan, Caroline Knox, Catherine Wagner, HL Hazuka, Ed Smallfield, Valerie Coulton, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Kevin Phan, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Jennifer Givhan, Phillip Barron, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, John Sakkis, Gray Tolhurst, Steve Fujimura, Zoe Meints, Emilie Delcourt, George Life, Justin Robinson, and Alice Jones. Subscriptions available, three issues for $36, single issues for $15, from New American Writing, 369 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941. Distributed to bookstores and newsstands by Ingram Periodicals, also available from http://spdbooks.com.

2015-05-08T00:49:00.001-07:00

My version of "Sacred Hate" a poem from 1898 by the Afro-Barzillian Cruz E Sousa, is in the new issue of The Nation. Here is the original:

Ódio sagrado

O meu ódio, meu ódio majestoso,

Meu ódio santo e puro e benfazejo,

Unge-me a fronte com teu grande beijo,

Torna-me humilde e torna-me orgulhoso.

Humilde, com os humildes generoso,

Orgulhoso com os seres sem Desejo,

Sem Bondade, sem Fé e sem lampejo

De sol fecundador e carinhoso.

O meu ódio, meu lábaro bendito,

De minh'alma agitado no infinito,

Através de outros lábaros sagrados,

Ódio são, ódio bom! sê meu escudo

Contra os vilões do Amor, que infamam tudo,

Das sete torres dos mortais Pecados!

Cruz E Sousa (1862-1898) was born João da Cruz (João da Cruz e Sousa)

from Ultimo Sonetos (1905)

Change of platform

2015-03-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

This poem / Gets up / And does / Something

2015-02-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

Tom Beckett's poem "This poem" is all about the question of who speaks in this poem. It is one of the better poems I know dealing with this subject. Who is the speaker? Beckett? Someone else? The poem itself? It opens as follows:

This poem
Proffers
Its ass.

Well, now you know there's not gonna be an easy answer. Which, thank goodness, didn't put off all people, Thomas Fink for instance -- "Beckett's poem is no primer of poststructuralist theory" -- and Nicholas Manning -- "poems too are unsure of themselves" -- and Steve Tills -- "one needs yards and yards of parentheses to contain and to extrapolate what meaning has become facilitated."

"This Poem" is an intriguing piece of work, in which Beckett pokes fun at one or two theoretical discourses. The poem creates a narrative situation in which the existence of an author is denied and in which it looks like if the text is operating on its own:

This poem
Wants to
Get to
Know you.

This poem
Is expedient.

But in the end, when confirmation of Barthes's "la mort de l'auteur" is almost inevitable, Beckett gets back in by the backdoor as the one and only author. The last stanza reads:

This poem
Pretends not
To know me.

Read the full poem at Otholiths. For sale here.

Revealed patterns

2015-02-27T22:17:00.000-08:00

Is this a blog about poetry? Yes it is. But I like pushing the boundaries now and then. Jazzberry Blue's abstract maps may not consist of words but they do have rhythm and tonality that stimulate me to perceive patterns of life in his kaleidoscopic pictures. The map of Amsterdam above, the city I live in, gives me pleasure, satisfies my yearning for order, completeness, harmony.

Sometimes ...

2015-02-27T09:16:00.001-08:00

What makes something unpublishable?

2015-02-27T05:05:00.001-08:00

In a VICE article my eyes fell on a picture of a page out of Elisabeth S. Clark’s work Between Words (2007). This work is more than, as VICE wants us to believe, “an reimagining of a classic text […] where Clark has gone through page by page in the original and removed everything but the punctuation.” On the artists website you can read:

”Between Words investigates the topography of language, drawing attention to its construction, materiality and choreography. Using Raymond Roussel’s long 1274-line poem Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique as its source, it reflects it back, though void of words, as a mere “landscape of grammar” (a landscape of punctuation).

The artist, in this work, conceals the words of the poem to isolate an exact facsimile of the author’s original notational (punctuational) inscriptions found in his oeuvre. The initial book work is then re-translated into a score, arranged in four movements (four cantos) and devised as a: Piece for 4 instruments. The splayed punctuation is transcribed into a landscape of elaborate symphonic arrangement, ascribed with questions surrounding the duration, instrumentation, articulations and dynamics.”

An online version of the “punctuation facsimile” is available on UbuWeb.

Pure poetry, arousing my sense of life

2015-02-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

Preservation, Blake Little, March 7 - April 18, Kopeikin Gallery, LA.

Steve Roggenbuck at the New Museum

2015-02-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

Steve Roggenbuck: http://www.steveroggenbuck.com
New Musem, NYC: http://www.newmuseum.org

Confronting limitations

2015-02-24T05:28:00.000-08:00

CC BY Ton van 't Hof

He may be a starry-eyed idealist, a wiseacre, a whopper, a worrywart, or a dreamer, but he definitely has a story to tell: Slavoj Žižek in The LA Review of Books about ISIS – "a case of perverted modernization" – and liberalism – "drop the smug self-satisfaction" – and political correctness – "it is a hypocritical game that […] even trivializes racism" – and freedom – "a burden that deprives us of true choice" – and nationalism – "a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding, and Enlightenment values receding" – and World War III – "we don’t believe it can really happen – and that’s why it can happen. That is to say, even if we don’t really believe it can happen, we are all getting ready for it …" et cetera.

The Enose and Beanos

2015-02-23T04:41:00.000-08:00

Antonia Low, The Electric Return, 2010

Covertext, edited by Swantje Lichtenstein & Tom Lingnau, and based in Cologne, Germany, invited artists to answer the following question: Is the artist necessary for making art today? It needs no argument that the answers differ from one another. The most uncomplicated answer comes from Anthony Moore:

"I don’t suppose non-humans would bother with making art. So my conclusion must be, in this case, "YES", we do need humans for pursuing essentially useless pastimes like murder and painting."

Curve continuous

2015-02-23T01:43:00.000-08:00

Last November Charles Bernstein gave a lecture in Warsaw, Poland (American Studies Colloquium Series): "The Pitch of Poetry: Moral Perfectionism, Occupy Wall Street, and the Poetics of Holocaust Representation.”

“The description of an injustice is a poetic problem. There are no neutral descriptions that speak for themselves.” –Charles Bernstein

Homage to the world

2015-02-22T09:05:00.001-08:00

Charles Bernstein and I founded IEPI in 2008 I think. After a successful start we lost focus and energy and IEPI came through a couple of years slowly to a halt. In 2014 only four posts were published. In the past weeks I wondered what to do with IEPI. What can we as "an international point of contact for the exchange of information" still offer in these times of information overload? Not too much, I'm afraid. Not more than a personal story about what it means to be a poet in 2015. But maybe that's enough. I'll give it a try. My reporting on IEPI will be interlarded with personal opinions and anecdotes.

It was a tweet by Done Share (he has by the way more than 12K followers) that pointed me to Marjorie Perloff's essay about "the deep minimalism" of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). To be honest, the name Finlay didn't ring my bell, but both minimalism (an attractive poetic alternative in my view) and Perloff (always good for some interesting thoughts) did. And, having read it, I can say that if you are interested in concrete poetry you certainly should turn to Perloff's essay. She does a fine job unraveling Finlay's work. About the poem pictured above this post she says:

"One's immediate response to Finlay's text is to read it as an Imagist nature poem: the four-three line stanzas invoke natural phenomena, from "Green Waters" and "Blue Spray" to "Moonlit Waters" and "Drift." "Star," furthermore, appears four times and "waters" twice. But who are "Anna T" and "Karen B," much less "Netta Croan"? And how do these proper names relate to "Constant Star" and "Starwood"? The fact, as the use of capital letters throughout hints, is that Finlay's poem is a catalogue or proper names. If we read it against related texts of the sixties, we soon see that these are indeed the names of particular fishing trawlers from Lowestoft, Aberdeen, and other ports. "These names," Stephen Bann tells us in his commentary, "are a given material, derived intact from the real world ... [they] lose the inertness appropriate to their strictly functional role. The poem restores their intrinsic delicacy." Or rather, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, one might say that the context transforms all the words and phrases, showing how variable the process of naming is, ranging as it does from proper names with initials like Karen B to names that pay homage to the watery world in which the trawlers live. One is even named Drift."

Finlay's work make me as a 2015 poet once again aware that words are the material poems are made of, and that meaning depends above all on the context.

"The Deep Minimalism of Ian Hamilton Finlay", Marjorie Perloff, The Battersea Review.

Datafication

2015-02-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

For poets who are into data mining, personalization, and privacy issues (who isn't?):

"After all, throughout The Formula, Dormehl signals that he wants us to think carefully about what it means to be human in an age where algorithms increasingly tell us who we are, what we want, and how we'll come to behave in the future. Indeed, Dormehl goes so far as to declare that our age is marked by a "crisis of self," where the Enlightenment conception of "autonomous individuals" is challenged by an algorithmic alternative. Individuals have become construed as "one categorizable node in an aggregate mass." --Evan Selinger, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems -- And Create More, Luke Dormehl, Perigee Books, 2014, pp. 288, ISBN 9780399170539

It's too Late for Careful

2015-02-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

I'm looking forward to meeting C.A. Conrad in March, when he's performing in Amsterdam. Since I read A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), I follow his wanderings. Also his new book, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014) is definitely a good read. And shocking sometimes. Or, as Drew Webster is telling us in his review of this book:

"These poems are extreme, it's true. There's no way to, there’s no reason to, deny this. When Conrad explains that he wants to "create" an extreme present, he doesn't mean that the present which he creates is one that is extreme by virtue of the fact that he has bloodied his foot or inserted a plastic tube into his penis, it is extreme by virtue of the fact that we have all made it extreme—"I blame everyone when I blame / myself I'm that good a shot," he says in "Now Only 30% Taphephobic / Feeling Better by Open Holes." But, in his typical all caps approach, C.A. Conrad seems to ask us whether we can think of a more extreme circumstance than the ones we find ourselves in now, and if that's true, don't extreme circumstances require extreme measure to deal with them?" --Drew Webster, Colorado Review

More on Ecodeviance -- samples and reviews -- on this page.

Mayakovsky: A Biography

2015-02-20T22:17:00.000-08:00

I should read this book. I really should read this. God, give me more time!

Mayakovsky: A Biography, Bengt Jangfeldt, translated from the Swedish by Harry D. Watson, University of Chicago Press, pp. 601, ISBN: 9780226056975

"Jangfeldt suggests several possible reasons for Mayakovsky’s suicide: personal turmoil, the establishment’s increasingly hostile attitude, the failure of his play, problems with his vocal cords, the drifting away of his audience Another explanation, less explicit but crucial, is his inevitable disillusion with the new order, a system he could no longer identify with. ‘The word is the C-in-C of human powers,’ was Mayakovsky’s motto. For a poet who put absolute trust in language, the Soviet doublespeak that emerged a decade after the revolution must have been unbearable. ‘Freedom’, a word that rang so true in 1917, was rapidly losing its meaning under bureaucratic collectivism, a more precise term for ‘socialism’. As he watched the language of the future being reduced to hollow slogans, Mayakovsky was bound to see his own position as a dead end." --Anna Aslanyan, in The Spectator

Latest developments in the Netherlands and Flanders

2015-02-20T10:38:00.001-08:00

Also interested in the latest poetical developments in the Netherlands and Flanders? Read Frank Keizer's and Maarten van der Graaff's daring article in two parts - translated into English! - on this matter: "First of all, we do not write as professional scholars, who are required to adopt a systematic approach to literature, but as poets, writing from within and not from a, mostly, external position. But Perhaps more Importantly, the discussion itself is in need of revision." (I'm in the second part!)

Part One: http://samplekanon.com/?p=3203

Part Two: http://samplekanon.com/?p=3212

First, it’s hard

2015-02-20T01:18:00.000-08:00

Why Nobody Reads William Bronk, by Daniel Wolff: "Okay, so the first reason nobody reads William Bronk’s poetry is that it’s hard. The second reason is: it's hard. [...] To read Bronk is to enlist – no, to be drafted – into an irrelevant army of fools. [...] The crowning reason not to read Bronk is that he appears to be telling you there’s no point to it."

Sor Juana revisitada en una edición crítica de lujo

2014-08-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

https://www.facebook.com/events/550836391712245/

2014-05-24T22:47:00.003-07:00

New Zealand author Iain Britton just launched his latest poetry collection, Photosynthesis: http://kilmogpress.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/iain-britton-photosynthesis-2014/

You can read a recent interview with him in The Missing Slate: http://themissingslate.com/2014/02/23/poet-of-the-month-iain-britton/#.U3sxpK2Sw9s

League of Independent Vietnamese Writers

2014-03-11T17:10:00.001-07:00

The following document should be of great interest to all of us committed to freedom of expression. It is an announcement of the intention of 60 leading Vietnamese writers to found a League of Independent Vietnamese Writers. Why is this of interest? Because decision-making in the publishing world of Vietnam is largely in the hands of the powerful Vietnamese Writers Association, which is state-sponsored. Members of the association are limited in number, and each enjoys a powerful and well-paid patronage, including a car and driver. It is equivalent, I'm told, to the military positions of Major and General, depending on who you are and what seniority you have. One of the signers of the proclamation below, Hoang Hung, was imprisoned from 1978 to 1981 on the suspicion that he possessed a forbidden book of poetry by Hoang Cam. The poetry of both Hoang Hung and Hoang Cam is also included in Black Dog, Black Night (Milkweed Editions, 2008), edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me. I assisted in shaping the English translation of the document below.

The founders of the League are at risk in signing the petition. It is very brave of them to ask for more freedom of expression, because the last time it happened, in the mid-1950s following military victory over the French, poets and writers who made such a request were treated very harshly, including imprisonment, loss of their privileged positions in the Writers Association, and not having their work published for the next 40 years. Hoang Cam was one of those punished, in the so-called Van Nghe incident. This is why Hoang Hung's possession of his poetry book was offensive to authorities.

I have had the pleasure of meeting several of the signers, including Nguyen Duy, Y Nhi, and of course Hoang Hung. Here is the document:

Proclamation of the Committee to Promote
the Founding of the League of Independent Vietnamese Writers

"After 1975, the end of a hundred-year history of war, our country was in need of a substantial cultural renaissance. Unluckily, this grave and urgent rebirth did not happen as expected. On the contrary, Vietnamese culture has evolved from bad to worse, and appears to be in danger of losing the most basic humanistic values. This shortcoming threatens the survival of our nation.

Vietnamese writers must admit that they are partly responsible for this state of affairs. Among literature’s many important functions is to awaken the conscience and to raise the morale of the nation. At this great turning point of history, Vietnamese literature is not realizing its true role.

The weakness of Vietnamese literature is rooted in the indifference of its writers to their social responsibilities, their insensitivity concerning daily events, and, most importantly, their lack of independent thinking, which has also limited their creative capabilities.

In a society like ours, where basic freedoms have been severely limited, it is difficult for writers to speak clearly and forcefully about the conditions of life in society. This limitation blurs and confuses expression; ultimately, it extinguishes art entirely. The freedom to create and publish literary works is a life-or-death necessity, not only for writers as individuals but also for the health of Vietnamese literature. Without minimal rights to free expression, our literary lives will never be adequate.

Literary institutions ruled by bureaucracy and mendacity suffocate the literature they presume to support. The also suppress healthy communication between writers and their ability to offer mutual assistance, both in their private lives and their artistic production.

In response to this longstanding but urgent situation, we, the undersigned writers, resolve to organize a committee for the founding of an independent institution of Vietnamese writers, both inside and outside the country. To be called The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers, this new institution seeks to promote a true, humanistic, and democratic literature, modern and responsive to globalization. As demanded by history, we must act as pioneers in the creation of a national cultural renaissance.

Activities of The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers will focus on following:

1. To improve solidarity and assistance among writers inside and outside the country;
2. To bring forth conditions for professional amelioration, to advance and promote individual creation, and to encourage innovation in creative writing as well as literary criticism and linguistic studies;
3. To defend all legitimate materialistic and spiritual interests of its members, especially the freedom to write and publish, as well as the promotions of easy and complete access to literature by the reading public.

The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers is an organization belonging to civil society. Dedicated to professional solidarity, it is completely independent of any other organizations existing inside and outside the country.

The detailed statutes and program of the League will be set up and made public in the process of establishing of the league. Our email is: nhavandoclap@gmail.com."

Hà Nội, March 3rd, 2014
On behalf of the Promotion Committee Nguyên Ngọc

The Committee to Promote
THE LEAGUE OF INDEPENDENT VIETNAMESE WRITERS

1/ Nguyên Ngọc – writer (Chief of the Committee)
2/ Phạm Xuân Nguyên – literary critic (Secretary)
3/ Bùi Chát – poet
4/ Bùi Minh Quốc – poet
5/ Bùi Ngọc Tấn – writer
6/ Chân Phương – poet, translator (USA)
7/ Châu Diên – writer, translator
8/ Cung Tích Biền – writer
8/ Dạ Ngân – writer
9/ Dư Thị Hoàn – poet
10/ Dương Thuấn – poet
11/ Dương Tường – poet, translator
12/ Đặng Tiến – literary critic and researcher (France)
13/ Đặng Văn Sinh – writer
14/ Đoàn Lê – writer
15/ Đoàn Thị Tảo – poet
16/ Đỗ Lai Thúy – literary critic and researcher
17/ Đỗ Trung Quân – poet
18/ Giáng Vân – poet
19/ Hà Sĩ Phu – writer
20/ Hoàng Dũng – linguistic researcher
21/ Hoàng Hưng – poet, translator
22/ Hoàng Minh Tường – writer
23/ Lê Hoài Nguyên – poet
24/ Lê Minh Hà – writer (Germany)
25/ Lê Phú Khải – writer
26/ Liêu Thái – poet
27/ Lưu Trọng Văn – writer
28/ Lý Đợi – poet
29/ Mai Sơn – writer, translator
30/ Mai Thái Lĩnh – philosophy and culture researcher
31/ Nam Dao – writer (Canada)
32/ Ngô Thị Kim Cúc – writer
33/ Nguyễn Bá Chung – poet (USA)
34/ Nguyễn Duy – poet
35/ Nguyễn Đức Dương – linguistic researcher
36/ Nguyễn Huệ Chi – literature researcher
37/ Nguyễn Quang Lập – writer
38/ Nguyễn Quang Thân – nhà văn
39/ Nguyễn Quốc Thái – poet
40/ Nguyễn Thị Hoàng Bắc – poet (USA)
41/ Nguyễn Thị Thanh Bình – writer (USA)
42/ Phạm Đình Trọng – writer
43/ Phạm Nguyên Trường – translator
44/ Phạm Vĩnh Cư – literature researcher, translator
45/ Phan Đắc Lữ – poet
46/ Phan Tấn Hải – writer (Hoa Kỳ)
47/ Quốc Trọng – cinema play writer
48/ Thùy Linh – writer
49/ Tiêu Dao Bảo Cự – writer
50/ Trang Hạ – writer, translator
51/ Trần Đồng Minh – literature researcher
52/ Trần Huy Quang – writer
53/ Trần Thùy Mai – writer
54/ Trịnh Hoài Giang – poet
55/ Trương Anh Thụy – writer (USA)
56/ Võ Thị Hảo – writer
57/ Vũ Biện Điền – writer (Japan)
58/ Vũ Thế Khôi – literature researcher, translator
59/ Vũ Thư Hiên – writer (France)
60/ Ý Nhi – poet

The photo above is of Hoang Hung (on the left), yours truly, and the Chinese poet Bei Dao on the occasion of Bei Dao's reading with Michael Palmer at University of San Francisco in, I believe, 2003 or 2004. Hoang Hung was on his first visit to the US. In order to make the trip, he was required by the Vietnamese government to resign his position as a journalist for the Labor News.

New Objectivists – Nouveaux Objectivistes – Nuovi oggettivisti

2014-01-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

New Objectivists – Nouveaux Objectivistes – Nuovi oggettivisti
(Loffredo, 2014)

http://goo.gl/x13tSk

Papers and essays from the 2012 symposium

+ prose pieces + poems

Table of contents (and Preface by Cristina Giorcelli) here:

http://www.loffredo.it/ecomm2/file/1387186986-intgio.pdf

[ texts by Cristina Giorcelli, Bob Perelman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Noura Wedell, Maria Anita Stefanelli, Luigi Magno, Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet, Benoît Auclerc, Jean-Marie Gleize, Annalisa Bertoni, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Cecilia BelloMinciacchi, Antonio Loreto, Marco Giovenale, Michele Zaffarano, Massimiliano Manganelli, Alessandro De Francesco, Giulio Marzaioli ]

Signs of life of signs / differx. 2013

2013-12-17T09:57:00.001-08:00

(some notes from an e-mail to Tim Gaze, Sept., 2013)

Maybe (linear or nonlinear) “experimental writing” and “visual poetry” are simply first definitions of the vast living environment of works made by the worldwide community of people involved in asemic (and so pansemic) writing and in the making of abstract stuff.

And: about the words “writing” and “abstract” —maybe they’re narrow definitions of areas of signs. A suitable term could be “sign” indeed.

The life of signs is perhaps the ‘thing’ we try to deal with. A “sign” is an entity which, in itself, does not have an actual “itself”. It absolutely conveys something else. It’s not narrow, it’s an arrow. It’s a non-”quid” referred/referring to some (other) “quid”. And so: the reference or transfer or passage may be somehow / somewhere broken. And this fact is the alpha in “a”/semic.

[And —at the same time— any “alpha” is a “pan”: any limit is also a secondary path or crack, a way for widening the view]

The incomplete or complete rupture or fracture of a (still presumable) transitive line (of the transmission of meaning) makes us call the sign an “intransitive” one. Or a “partially transitive” one.

For example: a signal or warning, on an unknown road and land, telling us something we don’t catch at all. A flashing light. We stare at its colours, but we can’t translate them into some kind of knowledge about an actual situation we ought to react to. By the way, we’re mesmerized by its effort in telling us something (or —better— its clear effort to move an unclear cloud of meaning[s] from A to B). We miss the point; still we go on staring at some vague (say abstract) point.

Shadows show something we don’t catch; still we cannot stop watching, and we don’t.

[This is the “alpha” turning into “pan”].

We’re almost 4 thousand years far from the birth of writing, but the written signs & glyphs & traces in caves are definitely older. So much older. In “Caves of Forgotten Dreams” Werner Herzog shows us the (partially intransitive) signs of men who lived 30,000 years ago. It’s not “writing”, it’s (perhaps) carving / painting signs. Figures.

Now we try to go very far —back into the past: pitch black.

In a time where not only the human race but the very beginning of life itself had not yet appeared on our planet. Fragments/crystals of zircon (here a pic from a documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu16701JhOo) found in West-Australian rocks dating back to 4.4 billion years ago seem to reveal the presence of water on Earth in an incredibly early stage of its history: and we may consider these crystals and fragments as “signs” (of/from the ur-environment): partially transitive ones, made not by human hand, but by nature —Earth— itself. (Signs addressed to no one, to no one’s eye)