Buggeryville

I posted this over at Gary Barwin's blog, but I'll repost it here, with the same sheepishness about how the anecdote is structured as if I'm some kind of sage dispensing wisdom (gag):

Maryrose Larkin told me the other day that she had at long last finished her latest collection of poems, but she still needed to go over them to make sure they work. "Go over them and make sure they play," I told her. "They're your poems, not your slaves."

Over here (especially in the comments) I'm talking about greatness and disposability with Mark Truscott, and over here Rodney Koeneke said some stuff about the Spare Room Centenary and wrote a cento from it (and I'm a fan of his recent use of color-coding), and here Johannes Göransson quotes a nice bit from Lyn Hejinian in an ongoing conversation he's having about translation which I find problematic but provocative, and here Sina Queyras talks about all sorts of interesting things which have led to a commentsplosion that I have not yet put my unequal e-quill onto.

So that's a lot of nice talking.

Unrelatedly:

When I was in Portland people kept asking me if I'd been asked to read in Toronto yet. And I had to explain that, in Canada, I seem to be known more for writing criticism than for writing poetry. Which, all agreed, is insane, but then I think it's insane that I might be known at all. Anyway, outside of the little twitterms on the side of this blog, I haven't written any poetry in Canada yet, which is fine, since they have enough poetry here. You'd think they'd have enough criticism here, too, but perhaps not. Well, on we go, trying to perceive the bigger potholes in the road and to fill them in as best we can.

The ten poems I selected for the Spare Room Centennial, five of which I read:

1. Jackson Mac Low, "3RD DANCE -- MAKING A STRUCTURE WITH A ROOF OR UNDER A ROOF -- 6-7 February 1964", from The Pronouns.

2. Tina Darragh, the first five sections (A-E) of on the corner to off the corner.

3. Thomas A. Clark, Larch Covert.

4. Hannah Weiner, "Silent History", published in Hannah Weiner's Open House.

5. David Melnick, the first five pages of Men in Aïda.

three of which others read:

6. Ted Berrigan, "Ann Arbor Song", from In The Early Morning Rain.

7. Joan Retallack, four pages from Errata 5uite (but not these four pages).

8. Lyn Hejinian, a section captioned "The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically." from My Life.

and two of which were projected instead of read:

9. Aram Saroyan, "REMIEIMBER", from The Rest.

10. Donato Mancini, "The Sorrows Of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", from Æthel.

(For whatever it's worth, people afterwards were asking me most about the Darragh poem. It is one of my favorite chapbooks, and if you read this blog and haven't yet, follow the link and read it. It is dictionarylicious!)

It was nearly seven hours long! Many highlights (at least half of which involve mARK oWEns or the performers he drafted, though of course the sound poetry is going to be more exciting from a performance stand-point) (but needless to say I hope that the recording of mARK and Leo Daedalus's remix version of the Ursonate came out -- zounds!) but mostly a feeling of fullness, and a sense of happiness that such a thing could even happen, and a delight at the connections and threads that emerged (as of course they would). I'm glad I was able to be part of it. More later, perhaps; I'm in an airport right now, heading back to Toronto.

Rodney Koeneke has posted a very sweet note about Spare Room and its upcoming 100th reading, and I am biased in this but I agree completely with his assessment.

I would also like to think that Sunday's 100th reading -- a marathon of 100 poems by 100 poets selected by 10 people connected intimately to Spare Room, which will last for, oh, five hours or so -- is going to be, shall we say, challenging in its content, but made accessible in its form. The diversity of poets, the diversity of voices reading the poems, the ability to move in and out of the event at will -- this should, I think, provide people who are not diehard poetry-reading-goers some sort of entryway (and some sort of emergency exit!) if they are curious but wary of poetry fatigue, worried of being overly bored by poetry that they are, for whatever reason, just not meshing with. But some of the poems read will be long enough to allow some real luxuriating in the bath of a particular poet's syntax. (I believe Lindsay Hill -- spoiler alert! -- is going to read a longer [ten minute?] section from Gerturde Stein's Tender Buttons, which I am particularly looking forward to; I have a similar longish selection from a challenging, ear-wracking work that I hope I can pull off.)

All of which is to say, oh just come to the reading on Sunday. See you there.

Sunday, January 25
starting at 2:00 pm
ending when we finish (6:00? 7:00?)
Free admission

Gallery Homeland (at the Ford Building)
2505 SE 11th Avenue

I am not posting to this blog so much, lately, and little longer than a quotation, because I am plunged in my academic training, and I suspect it will be that way for at least the next few months.

Nevertheless, a quick note. I am working on my selections for Spare Room's 100th reading, which will be a big hoe-down of an event featuring "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets from the Past Hundred Years". Ten people who have been involved with organizing Spare Room have been asked to select ten poems from ten poets, which will then be read on Sunday, January 25th, starting at 2pm, and going on for a few hours.

And I am flying back to Portland for the event!

Picking ten poets is not the tricky part. I quickly picked a few that I wanted to ensure were included (Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Wiener, and others) and saved a few spots to choose after I saw what others had chosen, so I could balance out the dance card. Those will be easy to fill.

But I was trying to pick exactly which Jackson Mac Low poem to read last night, and it was overwhelming. Not only because there were so many options, but also because I wanted something that would "work" read aloud, and something that would work without context (in case people didn't know from Jackson -- something that would be "self-evident", or approximately self-evident). But I also wanted something that would justify his inclusion -- a "show-stopper" -- and something that would point to all the reasons why he's such an important poet to me. But I also also wanted to use this as an opportunity to read one of his texts that I've wanted to work with for ages.

This is almost certainly too much to demand of a few minutes of text, however. Plus if everyone chooses all of their poems with this method, the evening will be impossibly ponderous, unrelentingly so, and it will reinforce the Norton Anthology approach to poetry -- that it is monumental, and that poems should feel complete in themselves in some way. And some poems do, and sometimes that is nice, but of course that's not actually what I'm interested about in Jackson's work, or Ted Berrigan's (outside of the Sonnets), or Hannah Weiner's -- all of them were interested in making a quotidian poetry, a poetry that lived with them. Jackson's processes, Ted's postcards, Hannah's journals, all point to this very unmonumental approach.

So I'm trying to recalibrate with that in mind. I will try to push the event away from "100 monuments of awesomeness" and more towards "100 years of people doing stuff" -- though the urge to show that poetry can be monumental and awesome is great, and not to be completely neglected, and I'm sure the event overall will be a mix of the monumental, the everyday, and the in-between -- and maybe the event itself will be some or all of those things.

[In] the rather frenetic world of literary criticism, theoretical speculation enjoys the same symbolic status as cocaine: one has to try it.

[Franco Moretti, "The Soul and the Harpy", Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 2]