Some Summer Noticings

Catching up with accumulated magazines, webpages & sundry readings, here are a few gleanings:

— Good analysis of the BP-disaster & its (very overlooked connections with similar oil-disaster brought about by the naked greed of the Oil Cos in other parts of the world, i.e. far away from what I call the ABS syndrome (American Bellybutton Staring), can be found here, on TomDispatch in a piece by Ellen Cantarow.

—Jennifer Moxley — from Fragments of a Broken Poetics — in the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:2, spring 2010) and also available online at the Poetry Daily site:

“The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. t resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well.”

— Excellent interview with poet, musician (member of the Moors, check video, well, stills-over soundtrack, below) and publisher(of Reality Street editions) Ken Edwards, here.

— On Poetry International  Web, read a page about Moroccan-Israeli poet Mois Benarroch who has some fascinating things to say about poetry and the mother tongue, in an interview with PIW’s Lucy Pijnenburg:

Spanish is my mother tongue and my historic tongue, since this language has been spoken by family for the last thousand years, Hebrew is the language of my oppression, and a fight against this oppression, it’s a father tongue and it’s a male phallic chauvinistic tongue, but it is also the sacred tongue, the tongue of the temple, somewhere deep inside. English is a kind of neutral tongue, and also the tongue of the empire.

I have written poetry in three languages and that’s not something I would recommend to anyone. It was a poetic need. It came out of the poems. I started writing poetry in English when I was 15, and did it for four years. Then I switched to Hebrew, for the next 20 years. Then I moved to Spanish because there were things that could not be written in Hebrew. Language not only describes or represents reality, it also creates it. And the modern Hebrew language is a language that has created a totally different Jewish Moroccan than I know, there are many ways to describe the Moroccan in modern Hebrew and almost all of them are negative.

— Just in from ugly ducking presse, Richard Sieburth‘s translation of Guillevic‘s Geometries. I blurbed the book, thus:

Such delight! Who knew a poet could wrestle such sexy moves from old Euclid’s boxy shapes! That a French poet did so doesn’t come as much of a surprise, Guillevic being a master of the small, perfectly crafted camées. But that Englished by Richard Sieburth these gems have kept all their Gallic ligthness and grace — that’s a true achievement.

Here’s an example:

Cycloid

What would brother sinusoid say
If he had to hit bottom

At the base of every curve
And climb back

Up to the top
After every shock?

— on the Open Culture site, there are links to some twenty “major” authors speaking or reading from their works, some we’ve heard, some not. Here’s the list cum clicks of what they have:

1) William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

2) James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake

3) Vintage Radio: Aldous Huxley Narrates Brave New World

4) Dominic West (aka Jimmy McNulty) Reads Jane Austen

5) Truman Capote Reads from Breakfast at Tiffany’s

6) Joyce Carol Oates Reads Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”

7) Orson Welles Reads Moby Dick

8) Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson

9) Ernest Hemingway Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

10) T.S. Eliot Reading from The Wasteland

11) F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare Out Loud

12) Dennis Hopper Reads Rudyard Kipling on Johnny Cash Show

13) Kurt Vonnegut Reads from Slaughterhouse-Five

14) Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

15) William Carlos Williams Reads His Poetry (1954)

16) Orhan Pamuk Reads Vladimir Nabokov

17) Charles Bukowski “Bluebird”

18) Wallace Stevens Reads His Own Poetry

19) Tobias Wolff Reads From His New Short Story Collection

20) Listening to Famous Poets Reading Their Own Work

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