 |
| the sun rises on the ocean to warm its tender soul. Humanity must sprout, get watered with fresh streams of light. grow my child grow as one, be ye fruitful and multiply, says Genesis two. |
 |
| the sun has arose on this lovely lilly and now it blooms in the same way the heart of faith grows in light. |
 |
| winter has come. All nature rests, as does the black bear in a cave far away. The human machine requires rest just as all nature must rest, in Him! |
Silliman's Blog
A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Evie Shockley
on race & the poetry canon
on race & the poetry canon
Sargon Boulus’ Knife Sharpener
We are all capulchu
James Agee & Walker Evans’
Cotton Tenants
Cotton Tenants
Nada Gordon @ Writers House
Daisy Fried’s Women’s Poetry
Tao Lin’s Taipei
Carol Ann Duffy:
Why you don’t want to be queen
or the poet laureate
Why you don’t want to be queen
or the poet laureate
Natasha Trethewey appointed to a 2nd term
John Ashbery’s The Skaters
Elaine Showalter on captivity narratives
Adichie’s Americanah
Poetry & digital formats
Kent Johnson:
I is another
I is another
Some iambics from bpNichol
Discouragement for young writers
Amazon’s London HQ
makes bold claim
for its role
as the center of all publishing
makes bold claim
for its role
as the center of all publishing
Roll-playing Ulysses
In Dublin,
18 writers bring Leopold Bloom into the present
18 writers bring Leopold Bloom into the present
Kipling plagiarized
parts of The Jungle Book
parts of The Jungle Book
William Demby has died
Tom Beckett:
from Appearances: A Novel in 365 Parts
from Appearances: A Novel in 365 Parts
Ron Slate
on a pair of memoirs
on a pair of memoirs
Machine translation
sans translation
sans translation
An interactive Yeats exhibit
Talking with Samuel R Delany
A taste of Neil Gaiman’s
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Penguin testifies @ Apple trial
Decklegate:
rough-cut edges
halt publication of
Scientology exposé
rough-cut edges
halt publication of
Scientology exposé
10 important stats for authors
Richard Serra’s Shiftgets protected status
in Canada
in Canada
Ai Weiwei’s Dispositionat the Venice Biennale
Tino Sehgal
wins the Golden Lion @ Venice Biennale
for beatbox performance
wins the Golden Lion @ Venice Biennale
for beatbox performance
Joshua Clover on surveillance pop
Otto Muehl has died
Belarus Free Theatre
performs in exile
performs in exile
A good review of Upstream Color
4 Fitzgerald scholars debate Gatsby
Jean Bach has died
The poems for Pussy Riot project
Philosophers need not shun
$$ from the Templeton Foundation
$$ from the Templeton Foundation
Rebecca Solnit, unique flaneuse
Higher Ed: the coming shakeout
Ronald Reagan’s war on Berkeley
What do NSA contractors read
besides your email?
besides your email?
Monday, June 10, 2013
The world of poetry is changing. This has consequences.
Overwhelmed by the absolute number of poets, the omnibus poetry anthology has become impossible in book form – examples can be judged only by the degree to which they fail. It’s a form in which the best intentions of editors simply prove embarrassing, a circumstance that is never aided by the fact that the motives of publishers are far more venal than those of hapless compilers. More sharply defined collections – Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 4: The University of California Book of North African Poetry, Beauty is a Verb, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets – succeed to the degree that the best editors are rigorous in their containment of a given territory and honest with their readers as to what they do (and, more importantly, do not) address.
Like the omnibus anthology, such collections are inherently depictive: they represent the poetry of a terrain, a social category, or a literary form. Their virtue is to be found in their modesty of scope, their sharpness of focus and thus the diligence of their editors. If they attempt any intervention into the social fabric of poetry, it is primarily to indicate that X also is a part of the landscape.
Another type of anthology raises the stakes by adding a second, argumentative dimension, using the anthology form to make the case for some new understanding of the poetic whole. The classic example – for good reason – is Donald M Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945 – 1960 (NAP) which sold over 100,000 copies and is credited with either opening mid-century poetry up to a wealth of new possibilities, or, alternately, triggering the irremediable decline of civilization. Allen’s anthology was not the first such venture in English – that would have been Pound’s Des Imagistes, which appeared as the February 1914 issue of The Glebe, published by Alfred Kreymborg & Man Ray. But, while both Des Imagistes & Louis Zukofsky’s 1932 An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology would have significant long-term implications for poetry¹, neither remotely approached the impact of the Allen.
Neither did Daisy Aldan’s excellent A New Folder: Americans: Poems and Drawings, which appeared one year before the Allen anthology, covering much of the same aesthetic terrain, but with some notable differences. I’m interested in why one anthology becomes a transformative event for a generation of writers and readers, while another, similar in scope, arguably comparable in quality and first to market, essentially sinks out of sight. Less than a dozen copies remain available in used book stores.
The differences are telling. As Michael Hennessey notes in his Jacket2 essay on the Aldan anthology, the collection included over 30 visual artists. The Allen, by not including the likes of Pollock, de Kooning, Mitchell, Kline, Rivers, Motherwell et al, presents instead an unwavering target.
Second, Aldan’s focus was Eastern, a pre-WW2 commonplace that the Allen anthology would shatter. Of the more-than-two-dozen poets who appeared in the Allen but not the Aldan, just six – Ray Bremser, Edward Marshall, Joel Oppenheimer, Jimmy Schuyler, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Jonathan Williams – were not then significantly associated with the West Coast. Bay Area poets Aldan omitted included Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer & Phil Whalen. Aldan also published poets that the Allen anthology not only omitted, but pretty explicitly opposed as well, such as Richard Eberhart, James Merrill, Arthur Gregor and Jean Garrigue. Yet she also included poets such as Gerrit Lansing, Eve Triem and MC Richards who could easily have appeared in the Allen.
Aldan’s failure (or refusal) to position her book in opposition to an existing Official Verse Culture, whether we think of it as mainstream (tho it was anything but), academic, formalist, “cooked” or quietist, along with Allen’s brilliant notion of organizing The New American Poetry into five ostensible groups or movements (committing some significant acts of fiction in his typology) has much to do with why Aldan’s collection has been relegated to the less expensive reaches of rare book dealerships while the Allen remains in print half a century later. Three of Allen’s five sections have heavy West Coast associations (and Robert Duncan is a key figure in a fourth), which made enormous sense given the degree to which the Howl prosecution and attendant media hoopla had characterized the Beats as a San Francisco treat. In envisioning a literary landscape where the West Coast was at least as important as the East, Allen quite literally proposed a New America, the one that had emerged from the Second Word War, the west having grown up almost overnight in order to support the war effort against Japan. In many ways, The New American Poetry was the first book to fully recognize – and make recognizable to readers – that new United Sates.
It didn’t help that, like both the Imagists and Objectivists before her, Aldan to some degree stepped on her own marketing in giving her collection the same general title – A New Folder – that she had used for a little magazine she’d edited earlier in the 1950s. And somebody – maybe Gerard Malanga, then her high school student – should have asked Aldan what was so special about a folder that it should be the primary noun in her title.
But, if Aldan’s New Folder may seem fuzzy & blurred in all the places where Allen’s New American Poetry offers the razor sharp New American Poetry, the most likely reason her volume didn’t have the impact of Allen’s tome was because she didn’t intend it to have that effect. After all, before NAP, no anthology in the United States had ever anything like the reception of the Allen. The closest prior examples of a wide-scale impact for a single collection of verse would have been the 1956 prosecution of Howl, a PR campaign concocted by the San Francisco Police Department, and the 1922 publication of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, perhaps the most carefully calculated marketing effort ever accorded a volume of verse. Neither of those were anthologies.
But The New American Poetry, alongside Howl, Jack Kerouac’s best-selling novel On the Road, plus some other volumes that were likewise having considerable sales – by the likes of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley & John Ashbery – very quickly reconfigured US poetry’s relationship to an audience, to the academy (finally unmasked for the reactionary institution it had been since the days of Walt Whitman), and to the Manhattan-focused trade publishing industry.
The Allen was not the first anthology that sought to change American poetry and it wasn’t even the first to segment its content for anything other than chronology internally – some of Kreymborg’s anthologies 40 years before divided American poetry into three traditions that we would recognize today as modernist, anti-modernist and hybrid (with Hart Crane heading up that division). But it was the first to use these two aggressive editorial thrusts to align poetry with a sense of the nation that had not previously existed. In this way, The New American Poetry 1945 – 1960 changed the stakes for poetry, and for anthologies, from that day forward.
¹ There are multiple reasons for this in each instance. Des Imagistes appeared first in a journal with minimal circulation and soon found itself in a crowded market alongside three subsequent anthologies on the topic by Amy Lowell. Zukofsky’s anthology was itself a follow-on to the much more well-distributed special issue of Poetry that had appeared a year earlier. The Objectivists, as it happened, didn’t have much impact on poetry for another 30 years.
Labels: anthologies
- Bibliography
- Blogroll
- In Memoriam
- Readings
- Recent Links
- Recently Received
- TalksRon Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot
through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Wharf Hypothesis from Lines Press, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. Among his honors, Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize, from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon)
Support Silliman's Blog
Silliman Events
- silliman AT gmail DOT com
Recurring Themes
NB: This blog receives a steady stream of review copies of books of poetry, fiction, criticism & theory. While less than ten percent of these books are ultimately reviewed here, it should be presumed that any book review on this weblog is of a volume originally obtained as a review copy.
© 2002 - 2013 by Ron Silliman
V
Select a channel to listen online:
FYI
Bookworm
A must for the serious reader, Bookworm showcases writers of fiction and poetry - the established, new or emerging - all interviewed with insight and precision by the show's host and guiding spirit, Michael Silverblatt.
Bookworm listeners are invited to participate in the first ever KCRW BOOKWORM BOOK CLUB, hosted on Facebook. Click here, log in to Facebook, and locate the "Ask to Join Group" link at the top right of the facebook page!
After 21 years, Bookworm has a new theme -- two, in fact! Replacing the familiar "You are a Human Animal," is "I Am A Bookworm," an original composition by the idiosyncratic rock-pop group, Sparks, At the end of the show, a second Sparks composition, "Where Would We Be Without Books." Curious? Check out the lyrics!
Photo credit: Marc GoldsteinBookworm listeners are invited to participate in the first ever KCRW BOOKWORM BOOK CLUB, hosted on Facebook. Click here, log in to Facebook, and locate the "Ask to Join Group" link at the top right of the facebook page!
Subscribe to this Podcast: 
UPCOMING SHOWS
Alice Fulton: Cascade Experiment
THU JUN 6, 2013
Alice Fulton wants to "dirty" lyric poetry by making it bear witness to the grievous geo-politics of the present. more >>
Comments (0) 
David Sedaris: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
THU JUN 27, 2013
Reading David Sedaris is like watching an aerialist. His famed humor pieces take escalating risks while never failing to bring off smooth, astonishing landings. more >>
Comments (0) RECENT SHOWS
Rae Armantrout: Just Saying
THU MAY 30, 2013
Rae Armantrout's poems apprehend the world as a place charged by the nonexistent supernatural. For her, the eerie thing is that ghosts don't exist. more >>
Comments (1) 
Pura Lopez-Colome and Forrest Gander: Watchword
THU MAY 23, 2013
Pura Lopez-Colomé's poetry, translated by Forrest Gander, envisions the body as a mystically rich reservoir of experience and language. more >>
Comments (1) 
Aleksandar Hemon: The Book of My Lives
THU MAY 16, 2013
Aleksandar Hemon takes us though his life from his childhood in Sarajevo -- from the public tragedy of warfare to the private catastrophe of the loss of his child. more >>
Comments (4) 
Margaret Atwood on Innovation
THU MAY 9, 2013
Margaret Atwood has embraced the frontiers of online literary culture. She reflects on her exploration of literary innovation and why Hermes is the patron of the new(s). more >>
Comments (7) 
Rachel Kushner: The Flamethrowers
THU MAY 2, 2013
A novel of multiple voices, motorcycles, and swift zigzags between separate times and places. more >>
Comments (2) 
David Shields: How Literature Saved My Life
THU APR 25, 2013
David Shields explores the power of the written word in his new book of essays. more >>
Comments (6) 
Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
THU APR 18, 2013
Mohsin Hamid mocks the self-help genre in his new novel. more >>
Comments (3) 
Sam Lipsyte:The Fun Parts
THU APR 11, 2013
The brazen, satirical stories in Sam Lipsyte's latest book incite reactions that run the gamut from anger to outrage to sheer hilarity. more >>
Comments (1) 
Joyce Carol Oates: The Accursed
THU APR 4, 2013
Set on the Princeton campus in 1905, a penetrating social commentary masquerades as a classic American Gothic. more >>
Comments (2) 
Michael Ondaatje: The Cat's Table
THU MAR 28, 2013
Ondaatje discusses his turn from concealment to revelation and reflects on the magic of youth. more >>
Comments (0) 
Jess Walter: We Live in Water
THU MAR 21, 2013
How did Jess Walter make the leap between his romantic novel, "Beautiful Ruins," and the end-of-the-world sadness of his stories in "We Live in Water?" more >>
Comments (0) 
Eloise Klein Healy: A Wild Surmise
THU MAR 14, 2013
The recently named the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles reads selections from her new collection and reflects on what it means to be a poet of place today. … more >>
Comments (2) 
Luis Alberto Urrea, Part Two
THU MAR 7, 2013
Luis Alberto Urrea ("The Hummingbird's Daughter" and "Queen of America") continues to discuss his saga inspired by the life of Teresita Urrea, "the Mexican Joan of Arc." more >>
Comments (1) 
Luis Alberto Urrea: The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America
THU FEB 28, 2013
Luis Alberto Urrea's "Queen of America," completes the two-volume saga that began with "The Hummingbird's Daughter." Both follow the journey of a Mexican curandera... more >>
Comments (3) 
George Saunders: Tenth of December, Part Two
THU FEB 21, 2013
In this second interview, George Saunders delves further into the dark-comic twists and turns of his recent short story collection. (Part 2 of 2) more >>
Comments (10) Program Details
Host
Michael SilverblattBookworm Michael Silverblatt is the guy authors go to when they want a serious literary conversation about their writing, because Michael reads everything they’ve ever written, often surprising the authors with insights about their work that they themselves hadn’t realized.
-->Find Michael on Facebook
Schedule
LiveTHU 2:30PM-3:00PM
National Syndication:
See complete station listProduced by
Connie Alvarez, Alan HowardTapes & Transcripts
A CD copy of Bookworm is available by calling 888-600-5279.Transcripts of Bookworm are not available.
Click the Full Details link to read an excerpt from the featured book.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
No comments:
Post a Comment