Thanks to Alan Halsey, who forwarded the link and thanks to Wordhoard.
An excerpt:
The ‘journey’ unfolds with a quote from Malcolm Macmillan’s An Odd Kind of Fame, a text Glass acknowledges in the preface as a source of information, before telling us that ‘it is not known if Gage had a wife and family; poetically we say he did.’ Already Glass is blurring the distinction between biography and art, and he goes on to assure us (as if we had any doubts) that what follows ‘is the only long poem to treat of the subject.’ The latter is not just a bit of posturing on Glass’s part – by asking us to consider poetry on a par with biography he wants us to forget the distinction, too, before beginning to read Gage’s story ‘in his own words.’
Click here to read the rest of the review. You can order The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems from Ahadada (click here) and Small Press Distribution (click here).
Note that we had quite a run on copies of The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems in September owing to a couple of classes picking up the text. Additional supply is currently winging its way to California. For whatever reason, it takes poetry longer to clear customs than fiction. Too subversive? They should have copies shortly, regardless.
Yet another message arrived from Candace, who promises to tell us the “true” facts about Swedenborg:
Dear Dan and Jesse,
Thank you both for replying so quickly to my comment that your facts about Swedenborg in your blog are incorrect.
Jesse, I am impressed that you have read so much about and by Swedenborg.
My job as Madam Chair of SILA is to share the true facts about Swedenborg. When I see an error about him in the media, I aim to correct it. I publish a monthly newsletter about Swedenborg that I’ve done since 1988. People from around the world write me with questions about Swedenborg and what he wrote about. I publish the answers.
I will take time to research and discuss the points you brought up Jesse. Suffice it to say, now, that you are misinterpreting Swedenborg.
I knew Wilson Van Dusen (he passed away a few years ago) and I am a third generation Swedenborgian.
I will send you my researched answer in a few months. Currently I am busy working on The 13th Angel Festival which I created because of Swedenborg.
Candace
And my reply:
I’m sorry, Candace, but I haven’t misinterpreted Swedenborg, whatever your job may be. I’m a first generation Swedenborgian, and as I said I’ve read just about everything available in print about him. You are welcome to your interpretation of his writings, and the writings that others have written about him, but Swedenborg was a human being with human foibles, and they were known to many. Yet another of his mistakes, for instance, was Swedenborg’s boast in a letter that he could “read” Egyptian hieroglyphics, when of course he could do nothing of the kind. He saw the hieroglyphs as examples of his “science” of correspondences and that they spoke of spiritual states, etc. Needless to say, he was mistaken. Once again this is documented in the collected letters Vol I (or II), published by the British Swedenborg society.
Perhaps you have a vested interest in presenting Swedenborg as a saint-like figure. This is good for new age workshops and selling how-to books, but it has nothing to do with the historical Swedenborg.
Anyway, every best wish and good luck with that workshop on angels!
Scott is a poet and critic from Manchester who came to my Sheffield reading and sat in the front row. Not only is he a fine fellow, but his Hold (Shearsman Books, 2006) gives us 113 pages of finely crafted, meditative poems that circle around the ideas of Text, Textuality and Intertextuality, with the homing instinct of a wolf wasp returning to its nest even on the cloudiest day at the beach. Here’s a good example:
Ars Moriendi
It is too late to research;
I just don’t have time.
You will have to do that for me,
Afterwards. To check and see
Where I lie up with these tracts.
Historicize me. It seems that to
Confront my worst fear–of facing
A self-infliced death–is what might
Lead to real living with others.
I am not dying yet we are all lying
Still.
A signature is like a handshake at the door: “…Thanks again for/ the Gage in Sheffield–/I hope you enjoy my passion!/’form of glistening/materials’ best Scott.
Still looking: the off-white pages and the rungs of lines, the small ladders of words propped against them. Still looking, and many many thanks returned!
The most interesting thing about this Japanese magazine of text and visual poetry is that the founder and former editor, Shin Tanabe, usually takes first place for the freshness of his visual pieces. This certainly holds true for the issue under discussion, which includes submissions from John M. Bennett, Scott Helmes, Richard Kostelanetz, Paolo Badini, and the absolute worst piece in the issue–a yawn-inspiring collage made of pornographic images by guy r. beining–the appeal of whose “visual poetry” continues to elude me. A photo of Fernando Aguiar up to his usual alphabetic high-jinks is of a bit more interest, as is work by Shohachiro Takahashi, Julien Blaine and Artemio Iglesias. As the visual poems are presented only in black and white reproductions, it may well be that color would add the extra dimension that is lacking in a great number of these pieces, (except beining’s). The abiding question is: Why do so many visual poets find a particular mannerism and stay with it, when it seems to me that continual experimentation is what is necessary to bring vitality to their work and to vispo in general? Is it a lack of imagination? A lack of boldness? I think Pound’s “Make it New!” certainly needs to be considered in this “poetic” field as well.
But then again, this is only my opinion and I could be wrong. For more information about this magazine e-mail Tanabe at g4shin[at]mac.com.
Just a clarification: Kevin Thurston will be helping us on the Haptic Anthology and on certain special projects as the need arises. He is not involved in the business of running Ahadada Books. We thank Kevin for his humor and his resourcefulness in these interesting times. Jesse Glass
We are pleased to announce the forthcoming launch of Jerome Rothenberg’s China Notes & the Treasures of Dunhuang. The book will be published in October. In anticipation of this launch we present a video file of Rothenberg reading from the book last December 17th at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. More files of Rothenberg, as well as poets Jesse Glass, Catherine Daly, Bruna Mori, Daniel Sendecki, and Judith Skillman reading from their own work and celebrating the life and writing of Cid Corman will be available in the near future.
In the midst of experimenting with perfecting my monotype technique and tinkering with the Wikipedia it’s great to see that Dan has put up Peter Riley’s excellent Greek Passages! We missed Peter on our last visit to the U.K. but hope to see him on the next. Thanks Dan! Thanks Peter!
Call for a poetry of pure touch with text-like elements. This poetry could be sculptural–free standing or relief work–or be flat “page� poetry, but the tactile elements should take precedence over the visual–i.e., this is poetry that does not need to be seen to be experienced. I can imagine that the temperature of the work could become an important element, as well as the dryness or wetness of the surfaces.
I can also imagine “pure� tactile poetry practicioners that do not allow the poem to be seen at all and “soft� practicioners of the art who allow their creations to be seen as well as touched.
Of course, this is not visual poetry, but the elements of visual poetry (in all its liminal glory) translated to another sense.
Perhaps there are already haptic poetry groups in operation? If so, please let me know. If anyone out there has or will experiment with creating haptic poetry, please contact me via this website.
Interesting to try to define this “new” old form of creative activity, especially in the midst of a terrible cold I managed to pick up almost as soon as I returned to Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_Poetry should get you to the page. Or search under the title of the page. Jess
“Where were you when it all happened?” is the question people ask each other. I was up on a mountainside in my wife’s hometown in Nagasaki Prefecture, thinking. My favorite place to go when we return to visit my in-laws is the site of the old castle. I often stay up there with my thoughts. When I came back down the mountain Maya told me about the strange thing that was happening in America. I stood before the television set trying to decipher what the Japanese newscaster was saying while the first tower smoldered.
My friend Robert Lax had already passed on–but the question came back again and again: what would he have said/written about it? Eventually it was as if I were hearing his voice as I wrote the poem “down” about the horror of that day. The poem (which has since been revised) was posted on the internet by Bob Holman and has been used in an elementary school in Texas as a way to explain what happened. Still, how to talk about a horror that almost escapes the power of words to capture it?
I recently worked with a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb on a book of her mother’s stories. The woman herself was only five years old when it happened. She has next to no memories of those horrible days. Her mother, on the other hand, carried with her stories that could only be said to come from hell. The lady with whom I worked believes that the use of “ground zero” to describe the pit where the World Trade Center once stood is a mistake. She believes that those words should be used only when speaking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much in the same way as the names “Auschwitz” and “Belsen” should be used only in connection with the horrors of the German camps. I think she has a point. Why borrow the terminology of one hell to refer to another?
Still, how to begin to talk about this awful tragedy? All of these many terrible mistakes? These excuses to kill and maime and destroy? How to begin?
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