{"id":437,"date":"2007-09-28T01:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-28T09:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=437"},"modified":"2007-09-28T01:47:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-28T09:47:00","slug":"5-am-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/5-am-readings\/","title":{"rendered":"5 a.m. Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/div>\n
Clayton Eshleman & yours truly folding arms at the New York State’s
Writers Insitute a few years ago.<\/span><\/div>\n

The first thing to come up this morning as I crank up the machina is a snide piece in the newspaper of record (which also holds the record of lousy [non-]reporting on poetry), the, ugh, “liberal” NYT. It sounds like a slightly gentile-ized NY Post piece, and starts: “The cloistered community of American poetry has, in recent months, become a little less like Yeats\u2019s Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, and a little more like Allen Ginsberg<\/a>\u2019s \u201cHowl.\u201d” Oh yeah? Well, the article describes resignations and internal dissent about John Hollander’s Frost Medal at the Poetry Society of America. Read it here<\/a>. I watched the disastrous METS game against the Phillies last night & do not go to the Times Sports page.<\/div>\n

\n
Instead, checking the International Exchange for Poetics Invention<\/a> blog, I come across the anouncement that Linh Dinh is the winner of the 10th Asian American Literary Awards for Borderless Bodies<\/span> (Factory School, 2006). Excellent news! You can catch Linh Dinh reading from the book on this Youtube<\/a> video. And read a fascinating review of the book by Ron Silliman on, where else, Silliman’s blog<\/a>, that interestingly juxtaposes the meat\/flesh imagery and links it back to concerns of other poets and artists of a previous generation such as McClure and Carolee Schneeman, and to the more recent erotic writing by Acker, Harryman and others, but suggests that in contrast, “Linh Dinh views meat with far more of a butcher’s eye.” I would have thought that the missing link here was Clayton Eshleman, whose concern for and investigation of the body & its various functions below the waist is inscribed in some 40 years of forceful writing.<\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, the latest post on IEPI is by Linh Dinh himself, and consists of two quotes from a piece by the just mentioned Clayton Eshleman, “Wind from all Compass Points.” Over my second cup of coffee I click on to savor CE’s essay in Typo 10<\/span>. It is a panoramic piece musing\/meandering through the current landscape of US poetry, with over-the-shoulder glances back to the situation in the sixties when CE came off age in terms of his poetry, but in the main with eyes firmly open & fixed on the vexing problems of writing political and visionary poetry under the current ideological and ecological conditions. (The essay is from 2006, I believe, but I missed it on first publication at Alligator Zine.) You can read it in extenso here<\/a>. The final paragraph reads:<\/div>\n

It would now seem that with the 20th<\/sup> century re-discovery of the Ice Age painted caves in <\/span>Europe<\/span><\/st1:place><\/span>, we have made contact with what could be thought of as the back wall of image-making which, especially in its hybrid aspects, evokes mental travel and thus the roots of poetry. While it is possible that there are even older imaginative materials in <\/span>Africa<\/span><\/st1:place><\/span> and <\/span>Australia<\/span><\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region><\/span>, the chances are that researchers will not uncover on these continents the ancient creative range and quality to be found in such caves as <\/span>Lascaux<\/span><\/span><\/st1:place><\/span> and Chauvet<\/span>. While it is thrilling to know where one is ultimately based as an artist, it is equally horrifying to realize that one may also be witnessing the ecological destruction of the fundament that made art possible in the first place. As these massive vectors shift into place and cross, a disturbance in my mind challenges the convictions that I held as a young man: that the most meaningful way I knew of to deal with myself and with the world was to explore poetry and to write it. This is not a back-handed way of suggesting that poetry or art at large is dead, but a recognition that I may be of the first generation to be witness to one of the recuperations of the roots of culture and<\/i> to the devastations that may make culture as we know it today a thing of the past. Rather than resonating with the magnificent aurochses<\/span> of <\/span>Lascaux<\/span><\/span><\/st1:place><\/span>, the abyss that opens before us today declares itself through the potential extinction of frogs and honey bees, and the accompanying sensations of the empty and lifeless space that humankind has always suspected fueled depth and its analogues of loss.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clayton Eshleman & yours truly folding arms at the New York State’sWriters Insitute a few years ago. The first thing to come up this morning as I crank up the machina is a snide...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}