This & That

New York City in June Gloom

Nearly a week without a post — rushing between Brooklyn & Albany, getting ready to move from the latter to the first, trying to finish various large projects before having to crate the library, etc. etc., has taken its toll. Was going to put up some photos from my guest appearance on Nicole Peyrafitte’s ever so enjoyable Song & Food show at 5C last Friday (with Mike Bisio on bass, plus fellow poets Steve Dalashinsky & Yuko Otomo) but Nicole will do so shortly, so check it out on her Collectages blog. In the few idle moments left, I’ve been checking out recent posts on Jerome Rothenberg’s Poem and Poetics blog, most recently Heriberto Yépez take on ethnopoetics, an uncollected poem by JR,  the continuation of David Antin’s “Notes for an Ultimate prosody,” and Jerry’s call for an outsider anthology. Not much time for book reading either, though I have been enjoying Hoa Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia from Hot Whiskey Press, and Anselm Berrigan’s latest offering, To Hell with Sleep, with dips into Louis Armand’s essays on criticism and culture, Solicitations. And now back to packing, but not before leaving you with a few sentences from Paul Celan’s copious notes toward his Meridian essay:

Even for the one — before all for the one —  for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness of the self-evident, [that which] makes every encounter with a stranger strange.: “Camarado,  this is no book, who  touches this, touches a human.”
Only from this touch — which is not a “making contact” — comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium. It is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language: (noesis does not suffice; it is a question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the Here and Now, this place and this hour.  /××

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