Catherine Wagner. Hotel Faust. West House Books & Gratton Street Irregulars. 2001.
This is one of the best collections of Catherine’s work I’ve encountered. I especially like her “white man” poems:
You have to feel sorry for them
You have to feel sorry for them
But I am, I am one.
They don’t know that.
They let me drive their car.
If I was President,
NONSTOP LICKY
I’m afraid I can’t think without licky
White man wrote almost every book in that shelf
Sone nice guys
I sit with them, make healthy sonnet-juice
What are Jews are they all the way white?
The Jews spring to mind
David Rees. The London. West House books & Gratton Street Irregulars. 1997.
A poetic whirl around London with a great blurb by Roy Fisher on the back, and a signed copy too!
Here’s Grub Street:
A themed ride to make each joint leak pale
and bloodless, up the roller-ramp by sky
and cut-and-cover and full 200 to clinch the sale
of the business of the semi-permanent lie.
Philip Davenport. About Everything. Manchester: Apple Pie Editions, 2009. For more information contact philipjohndavenport[at]hotmail.com.
A beautifully produced hard-bound book of found and treated texts from the local newspapers. Each poem features a chasm in the text spanned by an increasing number of noughts. On facing pages color snapshots are montaged to create a similar feeling of disjunction. A stunning book.
Tony Treyhy. Untitled, but the cover sports a circle. Hard-bound and printed in a limited edition printed for Safin, Langavegi 37, 101 Rykavik, Iceland, in 2007.
Beautifully designed. Three lines of text printed on a series of fold-out pages so that each line can be read continuously or as one of four lines framed on the page. Contiguity or linearity, take your pick, but it makes for a fascinating, recombinative read.
The latest issue of the on-line literary magazine The Pedestal Magazine features fine reviews of Age of the Demon Tools by Mark Spitzer and Eye-sensing by David Jaffen. Check the magazine and the reviews out at www.thepedestalmagazine.com. Tom Bradley’s Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me will be reviewed in the next issue.
Poetrywivenhoe. Wivenbooks, 2008. An anthology of poems from the Wivenhoe Poetry Competition selected by Joan Taylor, Pam Job, Peter Kennedy and Mike Harwood. 6 pounds. For more information contact Mike Harwood at mike.j.harwood[at]btinet.com.
My family and I spent a wonderful two days at Wivenhoe, near Colchester, as guests of the Creative Writing Department, the University of Essex. Wivenhoe is a beautiful little town situated on a river in Boudicca country.
Words Count. Mike Harwood. A collection of poems by the poet laureate of the Black Buoy Inn, Wivvenhoe. For more information contact Mike at the above e-address. Jesse
We’re still waiting for photographs of the reading on the 13th. Hope there were some taken. Thanks to Mike Heller, Don Wellman, and Amy King, too, as well as the Straddler gang. Robert Thompson set the double-hitter up for us at the Zinc Bar and moderated.
Still catching up on work here and suffering from jet lag. More soon, Jess.
Ahadada books introduced the editors of The Straddler Magazine to NYC. The reading attracted an audience of 25 people and the poets who read.
The Co-inspirator images are of Douglas Rothchild, the Zinc Bar venue director; Robert Thompson, Ahadada Books NYC reading coordinator and MC (who also read one of his poems). Readers (in order of reading) included Dan Monaco, The Straddler co-editor and fiction writer; Elizabeth Murphy, poet and co-editor at The Straddler; Greg Bennetts, fiction writer and The Stradder writer; and Rich Murphy, Ahadada Books poet.
It being a Saturday night the readers and the audience conspired well into the night and into other venues and bars. Books were sold, and a great time was by all.
I just returned to Japan from a week-long reading tour in the U.k. and in Prague. Shook a lot of hands and met lots of fine writers. When I came back yesterday I was surprised and saddened to see that our second Ahadada Event at the Zinc Bar, hosted by Robert Thompson and featuring Ahadada author Rich Murphy and his daughter Liz Murphy and the great on-line magazine the Straddler failed to show up on this website and was completely passed over as far as publicity on the Buf. List and other venues. This kind of neglect was not supposed to happen and it will not happen again. Fortunately, some people did show up at the Ahadada/ Straddler event and many thanks to them. The long-promised second issue of Ekleksographia is in the works and hopefully it will transform into a quarterly. We have curatorships from Vivian Shipley, Skip Fox, a special all-Prague issue in the works, and a promise of an all-Brit issue from Alan Halsey. A new addition to our team, Jonathan Penton, has the energy, enthusiasm, and the web skills that we sorely need to off-set Dan Sendecki’s increasingly busy schedule. We’re working the glitches out here, so please stand-by. Many new books and projects in the works. Jesse
Geraldine Monk takes pride of place in this issue of short poem notables with her sequence “Poppy Heads,” one of which includes the line “getting our peckers up,” which I think she lifted from one of our rollocking conversations years back in Sheffield. Philip Terry merits a close second with excerpts from “Homage to Ray-Worth” and “Larkin Paraphrased.”
Noon continues to be a stellar project, even without the plastic slip-case.
For more information contact Philip Rowland at noonpress[at]mac.com
Betraying Spinoza; The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
by Rebecca Goldstein
New York: Schoken, 2006
I have just finished this luminous appreciation of Spinoza. I say “appreciation,” but that does not do justice to Goldstein’s insights into Spinoza’s system of philosophy and to the writing itself, which–in many parts–is extraordinary. What Goldstein does is attempt to enter the private space of Spinoza–that part which lies behind the tapestry of history–as the King in Nachman of Breslov’s famous parable–and attempt to divine the nature of Spinoza’s private self using biography, historical fact, and the shared experience of orthodox Judaism. Her narrative gifts are considerable, imparting warmth to what so many now see as a set of extraordinary exercises in abstract reasoning, which have been relegated (perhaps too quickly) to the museums of Western Thought. In the final section of the book, Goldstein sews the hints, the history, into her own narrative tapestry, and we see Spinoza on his death bed, where we enter the very mind of the philosopher:
“Still there is that which will remain of him. Not the personal self, this cluster of modifications endeavoring to preserve its identity, to prosper and flourish, even now, gasping for breath, unable of itself to keep from desperately trying to persist in its own being. He knows what it is in him that will persist, the view of himself that he gains when out of himself, in the deepest and most blissful grasp of the whole, the intuitive intimation of full infinity by a finite modification that cannot possibly grasp it all. That particular finite modification that he will soon be no more. But the thoughts that he has thought that were most true, that have pointed beyond themselves to the great vast system that entails them, as each of us points, however obscurely we may apprehend it, beyond ourselves to the vastness that entails us: this will remain for eternity.” (Pgs 255-256).
I can’t help but think that Goldstein, like the wise man in Nachman’s parable, through her wide-ranging recitation, coaxes the hidden King to peer out from behind his tapestry, and quickly sketches the true face of this man Spinoza. At least the likeness is close enough that it merits–in this reader’s opinion–the reproducation of Spinoza’s signature at its end.
The Authentic Note Appears to Be Lost in a Lack of Sincerity
To the Editor of the New York Times:
Your editorial, “The Poetry Game,” in this morning’s paper is quite of a piece with articles which have recently appeared in your publication and elsewhere, the purpose of which seems to be to ridicule and belittle the contemporary poetry movement in this country, simply because some of the conspicuous figures are writers to whom the capricious gods have tendered every qualification necessary to the making of poetry except sincerity.
It is true that one may fail to catch the authentic note of poetry when Miss Lowell announces that “My heart is laughing like a fish that is ready to spawn,” or when Mr. Sandburg so far forgets the injunction “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” as to conclude a poem about a man recently dead with the charitable words, “God damn Becker.” But why should such ebullitions be allowed to cast discredit upon a movement that can boast the profound and masterful poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, the haunting music of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lyrics, and the exquisitely spiritualized Hellenism of William Alexander Percy?
It is not vers libre that is to blame. We need not be afraid of any verse-form whatever when it is in the hands of true poets. The trouble lies in the lack of whole-hearted artistic sincerity, the grotesque exaggeration of phrase, the deliberate vagueness of expression; all employed to reveal the absence of clear thinking and that simplicity which is the hand-maiden of beautiful language in all idioms and in all times.
Let us anticipate the example of posterity and forget these sensation-mongers. For what should a nation be proud, if not of its poets?
Lindley Williams Hubbell
Springfield, Mass., Oct. 29, 1922.
Thanks to Yoko Danno for sending sharing this with me! Now I share it with you. Jesse
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