Blogs are arguably the most important means for a poet to communicate with their audience, important because of the intensity and singularity of what they contain, the blog, in a manner of speaking, is a poem in progress. They provide a means by which one may observe the manner in which a poet writes his or her own life.
I, for one, would be surprised if even one in ten poets were publishing a weblog. One in twenty, maybe. Of course the implication of that when aligned with the 530-plus names on the list to the left [Ron’s Blogroll] would be something on the order of 10,000 currently active poets.
As blogs, and by extension Poet’s blogs continue to grow, their growth will coincide with critical acknowledgment, if not acceptance, of the precinct of the blog as art.
As Ron Silliman has made clear, Poet’s blogs mark a profound shift of attitude, and are helping to make that shift happen. In my opinion, they have about them a canon-forming authority, much in the same way that the small magazines once did. However, in the age of the blog, the small magazine lamentably is made less relevant — an unfortunate side effect of the blog, perhaps.
Inspired by today’s post over on Silliman’s Blog, I dug up some old notes from a long dead post called, “Blogroll as Social Logic”. Like Ron, (The Permanently Curious Type), I’ve always been interested on the effect that blogging will have and has had on poets and poetics.
Recently Jesse Glass and I set about creating a blogroll for Ahadada Books. For the uninitiated, a blogroll is a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve as a set of bookmarks for you. Moreover, they also help build page rank in search engines for sites you wish to bestow page rank on.
Since Jesse and I started this blog last October, we have spent a lot of time surfing through blogs that dealt with poetry and poetics, and there are thousands!
A few years ago, as the term blog was just entering the vernacular (as well as the verb google) I copied a quote from Brian Kim Stefans, which I don’t think exists on the web today, so I’m glad I saved it:
Blogaholism continues to claim victims among the unwitting poetry community, with the roster: international, avant-garde, new formalist, new vineyardist, skanky, Spanish and English; ever growing for the fashionable poetaster’s blogroll
As more poets answer the call of the weblog, it becomes more difficult to determine which sites to include […]
In his thesis, LitWEBerature, Terrell Neuage posits that:
“This multiple views effect on narration opens up literature to many interpretations of the same text. With alternate routes, there is a never ending array of possibilities”.
But, where hypertext links are for the most part helpful, Neuage envisions an “exponential problem of too many links with just too many endings available to ever attempt to use just one”.
Well, as a group we’ve arrived at that “exponential problem”. With so many poets, and so many blogs available, which poets does the community of bloggers feel worthy of inclusion?
Thomas Erickson, in his fine article, The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext, writes that personal homepages, and by association, blogs, are being used not only to convey information, but to construct identity. He writes:
It is this that leads me to characterize the World Wide Web as a social hypertext. The nodes . . . are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.” What and who counts as interesting? Thus, the links . . . embody a sort of social logic, providing us with a view of that person’s network of friends, colleagues, and concerns.
People use weblogs in different modes: Publishing, Communication and Collaboration. By dramatically lowering the cost for these modes on the public internet — they are rapidly increasing the value of social capital.
Thus bloggers are acutely aware that social capital starts to appear as people get together (favours swapped, debts owed) and the same can be said for norms and traditions.
So how do we, as poets, writers, and bloggers, define who and what we include in and on our blogs? With whom do we portray ourselves? Well, instead of using a search engine such as Google, we happen upon a new kind of search strategy, navigating from one blog to another, discovering who recommends what, and deciding whether or not their content is suitable in constructing our own online identity.
Other modes of online social interaction take place in shared public spaces — newsgroups, web forums — where group identity is explicit. If you post to borland.public.delphi.webservices.soap or microsoft.public.xml.soap, you are clearly affiliating yourself. Blogging works differently. Each weblog is an individual public space. Affiliation is subtle and implicit.
Thus, groups are defined fuzzily and grouped loosely — and, as a result, blogging proves that the blog is the message. Blogs feel at once personal and definitive. That’s because they reflect the growth of the person who put it together and continues to build it, as well as those blogs that the poets reads and cares to comment on.
Recently, there’s been a flurry of activity at Ahadada Books, as we are gearing up for a slew of summer/fall titles. Over the next few months, we will be pleased to present upcoming work from the following authors…
Currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Skip Fox writes poetry, prose, and short fictions as well as reviews. He also has three chapbooks, one bibliography (on Creeley, Dorn, and Duncan) and years on MLA Bibliography and Bulletin of Bibliography. He graduated from Bowling Green State. He has worked in woods (Pacific Northwest), warehouses (San Francisco), shake and shingle mills (Beaver, WA), lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, Chrysler, mental hospitals (Ohio, seven years), and so on.
In cooperation with West House Books, we’re proud to present a Selected from Jesse Glass. In addition to his work as Publisher of Ahadada Books, Jesse Glass is a professor of Literature and History in the Graduate and Undergraduate programs at Meikai (Bright Sea) University in Chiba, Japan. Look for Glass’ work on UbuWeb, in the film ‘Faites vos Jeux’ by Filgruppe Chaos, in Visiting Walt from the University of Iowa Press, and in scads of literart magazines and websites devoted to the “sweet science.”
Catherine Daly is a critic and poet. She’s author of DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003), a trilogy which has become the first volume of a 1,000 page project called CONFITEOR, as well as of Locket (Tupelo Press, 2005), which was released in April 2005 and should be reaching bookstores soon.
“Eileen Tabios is a world class poet with serious talent. In ancient Greece, Philosophers defined ekphrasis as a vivid description intended to bring the subject before the mind’s eye of the listener. [She] is ultimately successful in this artistic enterprise of bringing the subject before the mind’s eye of the readers and these readers will not only be enlightened but informed.”
- Nick Carbo for 2ndAvenuePoetry.
“Corcoran emerged into view around 1985 … and has produced consistently ever since – something that is true of no other individual. It is this strength and calm which have made him a giant figure of the middle generation, placed between the generation radicalised thirty years ago by the counter-culture and the younger generation. ”
- Andrew Duncan, Poetry Salzburg Review 4, Spring 2003.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and elsewhere. “Perchik is the most widely published unknown poet in America” according Library Journal (November 15, 2000). Readers interested in learning more about him are invited to read his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and view a complete bibliography here.
If you’d like to be notified of our new releases, ne sure to subscribe to the Ahadada Mailing List.
And remember, we’re giving away a set of its books in print. What’s the catch? There is no catch! Just sign up for our mailing list and you will be entered into the contest.
Lute Music for Witches and Alchemists.
Lutz Kirchhof.
Sorry folks, but the title of this CD might be a bit misleading. You will not hear Halloween sound effects, or “A Night on Bald Mountain” Disney-style. Instead you will be treated to meditative music based on the theories of Ficino, Agrippa, and others. Kirchof does us all a favor by fleshing out what has previously been locked away in archives and rare publications and allowing us to hear each composition as it was originally meant to be heard. A good book to buy with this CD would be D.P. Walker’s classic Spiritual and Demonic [as in Socrates’ daemon, not the kind from the uh-oh place] Magic (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). This music is meant to heal and not to hurt; meant to uplift and enlighten the mind and not to drown it in darkness. And besides all that folks, it’s just plain pleasant to drink wine and eat cheese to. In addition, Lute Music For Witches and Alchemists has great liner notes that give the low-down on each Hermetic ditty. M & M it’s not, thank Plato, Plotinus. Ficino, and the stars!
This is a great introduction to the exquisite Glass Harmonica. Naxos once again enlarges our listening pleasure by allowing such gifted musician/composers as Thomas Bloch a wider audience than other, more recondite labels have afforded him. This instrument, invented by Benjamin Franklin, and taken seriously by such greats as Mozart and Beethoven, is only now coming into its own again. Bloch is an integral part of that rebirth. Delicate, eerie, rumored to drive the listener mad, or to attract ghosts, the sound of the Glass Harmonica hovers at the very edges of hearing: a clean, celestial tone. You will never forget it once you hear its distictive sound. Liner notes give the instrument’s fascinating history. Bloch himself attempts (along with such great post-moderns such as John Cage) to create a future for the Glass Harmonica with his “Sancta Maria” and does an extraordinary job. The price, too, for this CD is extraordinary. What a bargain!
The Niche Narrows: New and Selected Poems by Samuel Menashe.
Talisman House Books.
There is a strong minimalist tradition in post-modern American poetry, and interestingly enough, three of the strongest practioners of this genre derive their themes, their cadences, their language from Judeo-Christian backgrounds. They are Robert Lax, David Jaffin, and Samuel Menashe. Of the three, Menashe is the most musically subtle, juggling rhyme in his miniatures so that flashes of song accompany the illuminations of the best work. Jaffin is the more cerebral: his rythms depend on the synaptic interplay between the contemplator’ eye, the page, and the concept contemplated, be it opera, 17th century art, or some other object inhabiting his intellectual space. Lax is also musical, but in a slower, more hypnotic, manner. Jaffin I would call a “marginalist”–(see my note elsewhere regarding this form)–Lax an abstractionist, while Menashe retains his focus on the telling detail, no matter how tight the frame in which he works.
I’ll include two of my favorites:
Dominion
Stare at the sea
you on your chair
sinking in sand,
Command the waves
to stand like cliffs,
Lift up your hand.
This deceptively simple poem is underpinned by a constellation of Biblical references. See how many you can find!
Also, what appears to be Menashe’s motto:
A-
round
my neck
an amu-
let
Be-
tween
my eyes
a star
A
ring
in my
nose
and a
gold
chain
to
Keep me
where
You
are
*
The design of Ed Foster’s Talisman House edition is superb. Type-set and paper make this a lovely book to own, and the price is just right!
Marginalien
by Alan Halsey
Five Seasons Press
Over-sized Paperback. 416 Pages
CD-Rom.
This is a major collection of Alan Halsey’s texts and visual poetry, dating back to 1988. What strikes one immeditaely about Halsey’s writing is its intelligence as well as the considerable learning gracefully displayed in its construction. Not so with most American experimental writing: literary allusions are out, myth just barely manages to appear in a fragmented (and often apologetic) spasm or two. American new writing comes across as being culturally illiterate–by design, I’m assured by its practicioners,–but sometimes I’m not so sure. I recall sitting through a lunch with a young American writer who stopped me time and again to tell me that she hadn’t read and was not about to read X poet, or Y poet, or Q old writer or Z old writer, because they had nothing to do with what she produced. She was ignorant of traditions, she let me know, and was rather proud of it–sticking safely to the ultra-modern, and finding her models of perfection among a certain group of contemporary American women writers. With a knitting of her eyebrows she blithely dismissed Anglo-American literature stretching all the way back to Beowulf and was adamant about what she “knew” was the correct mode for her writing, and as proof she pointed out her successes: a booklet bound with a rubber band, a self-published journal, and first prize in a minor contest. Surely, I said, there had to be something in all of those hundreds of years of writing and reading worth considering? No, she chose to ignore all of that, she told me, and added that she could find her own way to the train station, thank you. Maybe she had a point, but I doubt it. (Of course, I insisted on seeing her off.) So many experimental poets seem to want to keep their muse locked away in a box, force feeding it certain exotic French theorists in the hopes of an ultimate detournement of public taste. Sadly, though, limiting themselves in such a manner causes the work they produce to be rather thin (to these eyes), not to mention derivative, in content.
Not so with Alan Halsey. Halsey’s writing is unashamedly literary, though he embodies that knowledge using the post-post modern modes of writing we are accustomed to seeing in the latest journals. Indeed he was a seminal figure in spreading this new writing in the U.K., having run the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye throughout the 1980’s and most of the 90’s.
Halsey often draws diction as well as subject matter from 17th, 18th, and 19th century souces, sometimes for comic effect. In this sense he is a tactile writer–layering different syntactical styles in order to create interest. Halsey extends this same technique to his visual work: collaging images, and layering textures.
To be continued–
More comments on Marginalien coming in future postings.
A repetitive chorus of female voices, moaning, wailing, like a train heard passing from nowhere to nowhere at three in the morning, this is the coldest offering to the ear I’ve ever heard. And yet, somehow, it fits both Rothko’s work and the manner of his death. After the Zen no-mind of the first four tracks, Feldman embraces his listeners and–by proxy–Rothko’s spirit–in the 5th track, which offers us a “warm” and charming cello motif, that the composer, in his collected writings, tells us he composed at age 15. Rothko Chapel is then, a radical listening experience of “outside” (as in interstellar space), and “inside” (as in some catchy riff lifted from Dvorak’s “American”).
“Why Patterns” is more familiar Feldman territory: think aural disjunction, fragmentation, etc.
Exciting, challenging, memorable–these are the three key words I would apply to this CD.
This is the first and last time I will bring Canadian politics to this blog. It is not without reason, however, as I am able to relate to you some tidbits about F.R. Scott (my all-time favourite Canadian poet).
In an essay, J. King Gordon relates an anecdote about Francis Reginald Scott, recalling a winter at a friend’s cottage. On the slopes near St. Saveur, Scott turned to Gordon, in the middle of the ski run, and said: ‘If someone were to ask you, say for a Who’s Who, what my recreations are, tell them: “Skiing and changing the social order”.’ (Gordon 27).
Although this may be perceived as a glib remark, it nevertheless illustrated how Scott’s many and varied interests and activities revolved around the hub of his socialism, with the result that there was a strong sense of unity in Scott’s literary, social, and political thought.
It also serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the obvious disconnection that today’s Canadian politicians have with their community, art, and politics. Namely, Canada’s leader of the official opposition, Republican, errr, I mean Conservative, Stephen Harper.
A quick and extremely elementary recap of what’s been happening in the Canadian political spectrum recently:
Canada’s reigning liberal government is in the midst of a meltdown, brought about, in part, by a conservative American blogger who broke a publication ban surrounding an inquiry into Canada’s answer to Watergate.
In what’s being termed as “Adscam” Liberal party members are accused of having taken kickbacks from Liberal-friendly ad agencies hired to promote national unity in the French-speaking province of Quebec, where separatism is popular.
In the ensuing fallout, it appeared that the Liberal government was about to be brought down in a parliamentary vote of no confidence by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, until the unlikely defection of Conservative MP Belinda Stronach to the Liberal party today.
The Captain’s Quarters puts a spin on it thusly, for our American readers:
“Can you imagine the political shock waves that would happen here (and the weather forecasts for Hades) if Hillary Clinton announced her defection to the GOP in order to get an appointment to George Bush’s Cabinet?”
Well, that’s what happened today.
According to Canwest reporter Anne Dawson, the billionaire Ontario MP and former Conservative leadership candidate said the decision to leave her party was difficult, but necessary because her former leader, Stephen Harper, “fails to understand the complexities of Canada and is joining forces with the Bloc for his own partisan purposes - not the good of the country”.
It follows that Stephen Harper, who makes a lot of American Republicans appear moderate, is so inept, his vision so narrow, that it appears he cannot effect the overthrow of an obviously corrupt Liberal government. Moreover, he can’t even convince his own party faithful that he is the right man for the job.
Harper stands in stark contrast to F.R. Scott, who was committed to shaping the future of Canada in his view, which was in my estimation, not unlike his vision of life, which Sandra Djwa writes, was based on the assumption that “the ‘creative’ impulse can be seen as informing all spheres of human activity: art, philosophy, religion - even law, politics, and behaviour”.
In stark contrast, Harper’s vision of Canada is not infused with those “spheres of human activity”. Harper says “Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialist country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.”
This is the man who would be King? Where are the nation builders of previous administrations? The Pierre Trudeaus?
I’ve got a prescription for Harper: get a little poetry in you.
I’m going to appropriate an excerpt from Scott’s parody, “My Creed,” a 1931 New Year’s message from the Honourable H.H. Stevens, then Minister of Trade and Commerce. It’s a message as relevant today as when Scott wrote it over seventy years ago:
Come and see the vast natural wealth of this mine
In the short space of ten years
It has produced six American millionaires
And two thousand pauperized Canadian families.
Let it serve as a warning to those who want to remake Canada in Stephen Harper’s image.
The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
Edited by Alan Kaufman
I have mixed feelings about this collection of “outlaw” poets, because I live outside the U.S. and have lived in countryside China where the government really doesn’t care if you live or die or spew green foam from both ends–meaning what? No safety nets like clinics with clean needles and not even a job at Macdonald’s, or a flop in a salvation army cot but begging and starving to death and people stepping over your body as it blackens in the street. That’s why so much of what these new outlaws say in their street poetry rings slightly hollow to me. (that’s not to say that America doesn’t mangle and murder its children, but there are–admittedly–a few more ledges to land on in the U.S. before one dives into societal hell.) And of course, among these outlaws is at least one college professor who is as much of an outlaw as my aunt is, and yet another who has a pretty good middle class house and a pension and a wife who indulges his writing the spare, misogynistic exercises he calls poems, and then there are the entertainers and recording artists like Bob Dylan who was never an outlaw to begin with and has made the fortunes of generations of record producers and record companies, not to mention his own. So who’s kidding whom with this title? Granted, the book is seeded with fine–even great poems like Michael Lally’s “My Life”–and legendary names like Bob Kaufman, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer and Woody Guthrie, but for every one of those poems and every one of those names there are a dozen from the posers and the wannabes–and yes, the cry-babies who want to point the finger at everyone but themselves and say a dirty word or two in the bargain to be “shocking” in a world that is now way past shock. That’s why a great part of this book is a cookie-cutter yawn, not even as interesting as a midnight Veg-O-Matic commercial. In fact if many of these folks were given a spot on your television you’d probably turn them off–not from shock, not from the gut-wrenching pain they want to share with you, or from the intensity of their vision of the Truth that they’ve gathered from their lives with their torn and bleeding fingers, but out of sheer boredom. These are the middle-class kids who grew up reading City Lights Pocket Poets and Beat Hagiographies and wanted to find their mugs in the “Left to Right” shots in the middle of those books. This is P.C. territory we’re treading in too, so we have to make sure we “respect” (meaning accept uncritically–(and please remember to clap)) everyone and everything here and leave our common sense hanging on the hat rack, thank you.
Even some of the fine poets like Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz who are represented here contributed not so great poems, and lent their names rather than their talents to this phone-book sized effort. So what? Maybe a book of half the number of pages would have been better. Maybe a more representative selection from the best poets? Who knows?
The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille
Translated by Mark Spitzer
I’m a fan of Bataille, but I’m afraid that in most translations into English this major thinker comes across as being merely silly about sex and excrement and the Absolute. From his own febrile, pathological alluvium located in a fertile triangle between Eros and Thanatos, anus and genitals, Bataille (said in the helpful introduction by the translator to be using poetry to reach the Eternal) comes up with cuties like these:
The Wall
A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.
[I have to admit feeling like that myself recently.] And:
Laughing
To laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the pebbles
at the ducks
at the rain
at the pope’s p**
at mommy
and a coffin full of sh**.
It doesn’t get any better than that folks, although Bataille makes lots of references to the void, Zarathrustra, Heraclitus, and other touchstones of modern Western culture. I do admire his mixture of profundity and scatology and wish that more post-modern writers would follow Bataille’s example. Why let the makers of popular movies and television sit-coms get a jump on the rest of us?
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