Primitive Information

The UB Poetics Program is pleased to announce:

Poets Theater at the New Burchfield-Penney

1300 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo, NY 14222 716 878 6011

Featuring rarely performed plays by poets from the Poetry Collection at UB and beyond

THURSDAY
MARCH 5
7pm

The Origins of Old Son by Robert Duncan
Some one-acts by Barbara Guest
Excerpts from Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal
Alphabet Man by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz and friends
A brief “Amusement” by Divya Victor and Steve Zultansky

This evening of Poets Theater will feature an important, unpublished work by Robert Duncan, one of the few existing copies of which is housed in the Poetry Collection at UB. The Origins of Old Son, a comic parody of figures at Black Mountain College infused with Duncan’s characteristic wit, has never been produced since its premiere at Black Mountain. With special permission of the Jess Trust, we are pleased to revive this historical piece, which still has much to offer contemporary audiences. Additionally, a number of other short plays will be staged, including rarely seen one-acts by late poet Barbara Guest, a dramatic interpretation of excerpts from Clairvoyant Journal by Hannah Weiner, and an original work—Alphabet Man— fusing music, theater, and animation.

THURSDAY
APRIL 2
7pm

CELEBRITY HOSPITAL
by Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich

Poets Theater is pleased to welcome San Francisco-based poet and playwright Kevin Killian, who will stage one of his original, full-length works (see bio, below).

Play synopsis: Apodyopsis—the act or condition of sexual excitement caused by exposure to medical procedures. To protect the privacy of his clientele at Celebrity Hospital in LA, top surgeon Dr. Tim Baldwin admits only famous people. Even the doctors and nurses are (or were) celebrities of a sort. It’s another typical day at Celebrity Hospital, as everyone from Courtney Love to Kurt Russell and Diana Ross is having work done, and ingenue Scarlett Johansson, avoiding stalker Woody Allen, spends a day in the ward observing and nursing in preparation for her new role in the new Oliver Stone film about nurse politics. Then Dr. Baldwin and his staff are confronted by two grave ills, the eco-terrorists known as the Cult of the Black Feather, who demand universal facelifts for the poor and oppressed, and by a strange apparitions haunting the hallways and linen closets of Celebrity Hospital, that looks like a werewolf and seems to be after Hollywood’s greatest and most ageless stars, most of whom suffer from apodyopsis, they don’t really feel alive unless they’re having unnecessary medical procedures.

PLEASE NOTE: While there is no charge for admission to the Poets Theater, a mandatory entrance fee is charged to enter the Burchfield-Penney Museum. The cost is $7 for adults and $4 for everyone else. Members are free. Individual members are $30 and family/duals are $45. Take advantage and come early to enjoy the galleries.

Poets Theater thanks the following for their support: The David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, SUNY at Buffalo; the McNulty Chair and Poetry Collection at UB; the Graduate Poetics Group at UB; the Burchfield-Penney Art Center.

Tags: Buffalo, Literary by dhadbawnik
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All of our friends in Buffalo rave about Wegman’s, the local supermarket that continues to amaze us with its bakery, salad bars, sub counter, deli, international foods, etc. But it always feels a little weird to get so geeked up about groceries. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a much less pretentious Central Market; you can’t duck upstairs to grab a massage, and there’s no oenologist trying to tempt you with the latest Beaujolais. Partially because of the very odd way Wegman’s is organized — you might find one kind of pasta in the organic food section, another in the international aisle, and another somewhere else — we’re always discovering something new (and then straining to remember where we found it the next time there).

Now comes news that Wegman’s is actually a great place to work, too. This makes a shopping experience we were already inordinately excited about that much better.

Other Buffalo items, while I’m on the subject: One local amateur meteorologist argues that Buffalo winters really aren’t that bad.

Last night, we met some friends at the Adam Mickiewicz Library & Dramatic Circle, which is a fancy name for what’s essentially an old Polish club with a bar. We drank some kind of Polish beer and did shots of slivovitz, a plum brandy that’s really tasty and can really sneak up on you. The best part was that we didn’t stay out too late, so I actually have some energy for homework today.

Tags: Buffalo by dhadbawnik
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Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

–Elizabeth Alexander

[NOTE: The following is taken from the letters thread on the poem on Salon.com]

inaugural poetry is a bad idea

Poetry is dead. If you gathered up every person in America capable of naming a living poet, you would have a crowd perhaps a tenth of the size as the one that attended the inauguration. It wasn’t helped by the inaugural poem itself, which was stilted, had no narrative or thematic momentum, and petered out so anticlimactically that the crowd seemed confused as to when it was over. She emphasized meter and reflective pauses in a venue where no one would be thinking about either, and seemed to give no thought as to how to actually get the crowd involved in her words.

Her poem, like a lot of modern poetry, seemed designed to say, “why am I pausing like this? Why have I chosen this meter? These words and images? Come. Examine me. Think about me. Sit. Reflect. Read *closely*. If you don’t do these things and find the poem wanting, this is your deficiency. If you are bored, then shame on you for looking to be entertained. If you are unmoved, then shame on you for demanding that my poem move you, rather than poring over it with a mind to be moved. Grabbing the audience, making them care, entertaining them, considering how best to reach them–these are tasks reserved for lesser arts, for prose and film and narrative. Poetry has the luxury of simply being, of awaiting an audience sophisticated enough to seek it out and appreciate it. Asking for and earning that appreciation is so plebian.”

What hubris. 2 million people have schlepped down to watch the event, ten times that have tuned in via television. If you are writing a poem for them, then *write a poem for them*. Give it narrative, give it momentum. Make it funny, or frightening, or loud, or all of those–but make sure it reaches out of the page and grabs the audience. Think of how long Obama must have spent, crafting just the right words to not only say what he meant but to engage his audience and make them care. And he’s the president. He’s earned the right to expect a captive and respectful audience. The poet who follows him, on the other hand, has never been voted for. None of the millions of viewers tuning in did so to watch her. So doesn’t she then have an even greater responsibility to win her audience over? Why of course not. She’s a poet. The audience should be grateful for the right to spend their valuable time parsing her meter for meaning.
– natethegreat

Tags: Literary by dhadbawnik
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Salon.com has an article about Elizabeth Alexander, a poet I’ve never heard of who’s been tapped to write, and deliver, a poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration next week (hard to believe it’s coming so soon, right?).

The article discusses the odd quandary poets find themselves in when asked to deliver an “occasional poem,” something that frequently happens when friends get married. I’ve been asked to do this a couple times, most recently last fall. This time, I didn’t bother trying to write something myself, instead reading an excerpt from Robert Duncan’s Circulations of the Song, a tribute to Rumi that works quite well for these sorts of things, I’ve found.

This leads to a point the author makes about perhaps the “best” poem ever delivered for an inauguration, Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” which wasn’t, of course, written for the occasion — either because Frost was frustrated in his attempt to write something new, or simply called an audible for some reason (one letter-writer argues that Frost couldn’t read the page of his new poem because of the light, and instead recited one he knew by heart). Here it is:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Ignoring the obviously problematic imperialism of the poem, which is only mildly troubled by the notion of “manifest destiny” — if I’m reading this correctly, i.e., our act of “surrender” to the land was to make war upon its indigenous peoples — the poem works for a couple of reasons. First, it’s short. Nothing kills an “occasion” like endless blathering, and the temptation, I think, in being asked to deliver such a thing is to deliver a speech. To make some sort of profound comment on it, which means piling up more and more words. It simply doesn’t work. (How many words is the Gettsyburg Address?)

Second, it has a few memorable lines. “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” That’s simple, memorable, and at least intriguing enough to keep one listening. “To the land vaguely realizing westward” is the line quoted in the article as being especially appropriate for the hope and optimism at the moment of Kennedy’s inauguration, and I guess I can see that, too; it’s not nearly as rousing as just about anything Whitman might have said, but for Frost, it’s not bad.

The author sort of laments, or at least points out, that poets have simply fallen out of the practice of writing occasional poems — it’s not something we’re usually called on to do (what are we called on to do?). But I don’t know that occasional poems, at least the ones I’ve seen, have ever really been any good, going all the way back to the Greek and Roman odes, etc. –I don’t know; what do you think?

Tags: Literary by dhadbawnik
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This from an interview with Clayton Eshleman on Bookslut:

Do you think the [MFA] programs make poets better writers?

No. I think a poet has to educate himself, or as Artaud put it, has to initiate himself off himself. He has to discover those poets from whom he can learn primary things about the art of poetry and he has to figure out the few poets in his generation that he wants to be in touch with, his “generation,” so to speak. And what to read. … None of the poets that today mean the most to me were even mentioned in the literature classes at Indiana University — possibly Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are exceptions here. And as I mentioned earlier, Jack Hirschman introduced me to 20th century European poetry and my painter friend Bill Paden gave me the New Directions anthology in which I discovered Neruda and Vallejo. Had I depended on the Indiana University English Department for sources I would be a lost soul today.

Some years ago, a graduate student in the University of Michigan MFA program called me up. He had discovered one of my Black Sparrow Press books in an Ann Arbor bookstore, liked what he read in it and found that I was living 6 miles away, in Ypsilanti. So I invited him over. He had been in the Michigan program for two years. I quickly discovered he had never heard of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Jackson Mac Low, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, or people like [Robert] Kelly and [Jerome] Rothenberg in my generation. At a certain point, he was sitting in our living room, madly writing down names and increasingly upset that he had to come to Ypsilanti to hear about them!

*

Effing Press and Skanky Possum announce the publication of Amiri Baraka’s recent talk on Ed Dorn.

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Dale Smith reviews the new collected Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me.

Tags: Literary, Small Press Reviews by dhadbawnik
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I’ve just finished Roberto Bolaño’s looooong novel 2666, a beautiful edition of which my wife gave me for Christmas this year. Weighing in at approximately 900 pages (the original, Spanish-language version is apparently over 1,000, for some reason), it’s broken into five separate “books” of approximately 200 pp each. Each book touches on the same overlapping set of stories, which involve a series of mysterious murders in the north of Mexico, a German author with an assumed Italian name that no one has ever seen, and a constellation of characters who circle around these.

I’m not going to give away any of the story, so don’t worry if you haven’t read it. I just want to gather a few thoughts about Bolaño, his life and writing, and the odd position these have taken in the world of poetry and my own literary sphere.

I first heard about Bolaño through my friend Roger Snell, a poet living in San Francisco. He was nuts about The Savage Detectives, another Bolaño novel that had recently been translated at that time, from which I gathered that the Chilean novelist, who also had a background in poetry, must have become a sort of cult figure among poets in the Bay Area. Roger insisted I read The Savage Detectives, and I went so far as to put it on the reading list for my oral exams at Texas State and special order it through the library, though I never actually finished the book as it turned out.

Flash forward to my arrival here in Buffalo. Back in September, when I drove down to New York with a couple of classmates for my ill-fated reading at the Cake Shop, I met a friend of one of them who was interning at New Directions. Not only that, but he had pursued the gig especially because of his love for Bolaño. So we talked about him a bit at the bar one evening and he told me how New Directions was sort of bitter because Farrar-Strauss had swooped in and gobbled up the rights to his two most lucrative books, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666.

Now, having read it, and having read a bit about Bolaño’s life, I have to confess I understand the strong feelings he’s inspired. The book is brilliant — funny, compelling, mysterious, provocative, whatever’s important to you in literature, it probably has it, and more. I haven’t read a lot of Pynchon, but that’s probably the closest English-language author I can think of. He’s worlds better, in my opinion, than DeLillo, whose books tend to be too conceptual and not human enough for me. And it’s refreshing to find that Bolaño hated Garcia-Marquez (and the facile sort of magic realism that dominated Latin American letters in his wake), revered Borges and Cortazar, and again hated Isabel Allende. That should give you some clue what you’re getting here.

2666 is long, too long — a third of it could have been cut without losing a bit of the story. But the story isn’t the point. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Tags: Literary by dhadbawnik
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