Saw Shine A Light, Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones movie, last night. In a theater! (Such things get an exclamation point when you’ve got a one-year-old: We! Went! On! A! Date! And! Saw! A! Movie!) And really this one should be seen in a theater because, I mean, if you want to see Keith Richards sweating, which I realized last night that I do, you might as well see it on a big screen. I realized two other things:

1. Poetry’s great tragedy is that it never has been and never will be as much fun as rock and roll. Until we admit that to ourselves, we, as artists, will be fundamentally unserious.

And

2. All I’ve really ever wanted out of life is to be a backup singer. One of a row of three, maybe a little overweight but game, in a fun sleazy dress, gesturing and harmonizing and moaning and dancing in place, maybe the one with the tambourine.

O’Hara said poetry should be as good as the movies, but really it should be as good as big movies about big rock and roll.

Once more illness has kept me away from the blog for a while, this time due to surgery to kill the tumors on my liver. The surgery was successful, or so I'm told, but I ended up in the hospital for several days due to complications.

It recently occurred to me (I’m not sure why it took so long) that there’s a decidedly disproportionate representation of the self-proclaimed avant-garde in the online poetry world. Bloggers in particular are much more likely to be what poet Ron Slate calls avant-gardeners than to be more “mainstream” poets. (When I first started my own blog a little over a year ago, someone wrote to say that she had been waiting for “a mainstream Ron Silliman” as a counter-balance, an indication of his iconic status in the online poetry world.) There seems to be a high degree of technophilia among “post-avant” bloggers. This is in part due to the fact that most of them are relatively young white men, who tend to be aficionados of all things computer-related: blogging, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which I confess to being too old to know much about and too stodgy to care, computer and video games, text messaging, iPods and iPhones and Blackberries and Bluetooths, etc.

(The “e” at the end, the UDP website explains, comes from Kafka- or K-Presse, a small German publishing house.)

First of all, isn’t this like the best name for a press? This art & publishing collective was founded in 1993 by “a couple of college kids who wanted to put together a zine, without really knowing what that is.” Fifteen years later, this humble do-it-yourself-Xeroxed-project-beginning matured into a reputable and cutting-edge enterprise that publishes poetry by undiscovered voices, lost works, translations and artist’s books. It also produces chapbooks, broadsides, a magazine and a newspaper. And each and every publication contains a “handmade element” that “calls attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.” This is indeed a refreshing approach that answers to the mass market product (and sometimes uninspired content) coming out of the large New York houses.

Occasionally, I like to visit the Asian American Writers' Workshop website and when possible attend one of its literary events in New York City. One of the great joys of the contemporary arts in the United States of the past three decades is the emergence of organizations whose aim is to promote and celebrate the richness of the American experience as represented in the creative visions of its diverse inhabitants, many with great legacies, histories, and needless to say, complex stories of survival, determination, and acculturation.

If anyone can figure out how to send Jane back to 1949 to see MoMA’s exhibition of “Italian pictures,” which gave Wallace Stevens a bad case of ennui, please send instructions care of this comment box. I thought I would take the opportunity to point out that the museum seemed to be in a lull a month before their 20th-anniversary show “Modern Art in Your Life,” and the interregnum of September in New York—“covered with the dust and withering of summer”—seemed at least partly to account for his mood. However, there’s a little bit in his sour-lemon passage that seems worth teasing out…

I’ve been a bit swamped at the end of the semester with a number of academic obligations that it’s been tough to keep up with this one, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. A few years ago I made up my mind that I was going to be what some so pejoratively referred to as “an academic poet.”

Lou Reed was sitting at the table next to mine last night, in a tiny basement cabaret in the theater district. I have no talent for recognizing celebrities, but the few I have have invariably been musicians.

On the banquette right next to me was a man there alone, in beautiful clothes, and we struck up a conversation. (“I’m a jazz vocalist.” “I’m a poet.”) “Because the way people receive music has changed, people hardly ever see live performance,” he rued. “And the training we used to get, which was to come to clubs like this and try things out, see what worked and what didn’t, and get mentored by older guys, that’s gone.” Eventually the lights went down and my friends Bree and Franklin began the show (if you’re in NYC—go see it!).

Today was one sensuous experience after another. After a NY Knicks basketball game in Madison Square Garden, (my first and they won against the Chicago Bulls!) I visited the Whitney Museum to absorb more of the great Kara Walker, whose 3rd floor exhibit “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” seemed very much a retrospective of her last decade’s work. Kara’s work compellingly revisits (revises?) antebellum narratives of American slavery, desire, freedom, violence, repressed sexual and racial mores and attitudes which underlie conversations and beliefs around black womanhood, race relations, art, representation, and history.

In his introduction to this book by Bill Knott, which includes 16 collages (apart from the one gracing the cover) by poet/artist Star Black, Mark Doty writes: “Knott builds out of fragments; he erases himself. How appropriate that these poems should be accompanied by a suite of collages, in which bits and pieces both make a new whole and remain, distinctly bits and pieces. Star Black’s evocative work here draws upon the vocabulary of surrealism, but like Knott himself she turns those strange juxtapositions and eruptions of dreaming to her own uses.”

At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.” He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!” Steadman figures, “Pure shit.”

During his lifetime he produced dozens of poetry collections, novels, plays, and countless essays on everything ranging from religion to literature. He wrote over 2,000 songs, which include the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. In 1913 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. He was the first laureate in Asia. Have you read his work?

The Biblical phrase “through a glass darkly” is in reference to the human’s inability to achieve enlightenment (or see God’s grace with clarity) until the moment of death. Igmar Bergman’s 1961 film, which uses that phrase as a title, is a twisted portrait of familial alienation, mental illness and the questioning of the existence of God.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL (YAB) is my favorite public art collective based in Chicago.

"Concepts, too, have feelings," Carter Ratcliff says in his afterword to "Arrivederci, Modernismo:"

I am not saying that a concept -- "number," for example, or "constitutionality" -- is literally capable of emotions. What I mean is that there is an emotional tone to the understanding of such things.

An art critic, a writer who specializes in the analysis of mute artworks, who intuits the messages and emotional tenor of physical objects -- perhaps such a writer is more comfortable talking about "emotions" in this broad way. But by 1974, when the poem first appeared, Her Majesty Modernismo had already been deposed by poets who said "I wanted to be more myself," including James Merrill, who went from writing poems such as "The Black Swan" to writing more personal, personable, poems that explored -- among many other things, of course -- his immediate family. I could never really understand this historic shift.

The most extraordinary document came in the mail the other week. It was a reprint of art critic Carter Ratcliff's* poem "Arrivederci, Modernismo" by Libellum, Vincent Katz's press. It was first published in 1974 by Adventures in Poetry, and it comes to us now, 33 years later, with an introduction by Katz and an afterword by Ratcliff himself. The poem bears none of the earmarks of a second-generation New York School poem ca. 1974, but it is unmistakably a product of the regime it claims to be saying goodbye to. "Arrivederci, Modernismo," the narrator keeps repeating, addressing this movement, this era, this regime as though it were a narcissistic lover:

"There were so many good-byes right from the very start that, strange as it is to meet you once again, Modernismo, it isn't strange to be saying, at long last, good-bye, adieu, arrivederci ... to you this time, Modernismo, dear."

It's a lot like revolution: the unintended consequence of deposing the old authority is that one undermines all authority, and ultimately one's own.** "There were so many good-byes right from the start," and so inevitably there must be a good-bye to the good-byer. Or is there?

Of all the carefully designed book objects seen at AWP, the CalArts catalogue was perhaps the most beautiful and elaborate. So wildly designed it was hard to read, but you forgave them for the eye-strain, because it was such a glamorous object to behold, especially when it comes to SCHOOL CATALOGUES fer chrissakes. Reminds one of old nest magazines, or a visit to the Alhambra.

[There are 6 more images in this post.]