Select Archival Poetry Project Recordings of a California Variety Are Up at Open Space

Open Space has published a selection of recordings from the archives of The Poetry Project, now housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. Chosen and introduced by the Project's Monday Night Series Coordinator, Judah Rubin, with an eye on California, these selections aim to "give us insight into the social and philosophical stories of these writers and of the Poetry Project as an institution." 

Not merely representative of the poets on offer, these specific moments of interconnectedness include "Larry Eigner and Robert Grenier’s 1983 series of readings, talks, and workshops at the Project; Leslie Scalapino’s 1983 reading from Considering How Exaggerated Music Is; and Will Alexander’s 1998 reading, which includes, as a sort of coda, a reading from his book of philosophy Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (published by Scalapino’s O Books that year)."

Of Scalapino and Alexander's readings, Rubin writes:

Another selection from 1983, this one a reading by Bay Area poet and playwright Leslie Scalapino, exemplifies the author’s engagement with what she calls the “autobiographical impulse.” There’s also a textural presence that Alice Notley, introducing Scalapino, calls a “Rubik’s Cube […] except some of the sides are unexpectedly hairy or wooly.” In the poems which Scalapino calls “sequences,” we see how, through accretion, temporal spatialities are synthesized, simultaneously releasing language, sex, and time. Scalapino’s voice turns these thoughts over and again toward each other and, so, to the audience.

In a form complementary to Scalapino, Will Alexander’s pieces, which he terms “rhizomatic” (after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concept) at his 1998 reading with Samuel Delany, seem to encapsulate the fissile nature of language. In reading from Impulse and Nothingness, “these dense geranium surges of thought” loom without “doctrinal image” or “fixed event.” In Alexander’s work, there is a great refusal, a leap into “nothingness” where one is “spat upon by contemporaries.” Alexander reads into the literary space (one that is four or five dimensional, perhaps, as he writes in Towards the Primeval Lightning Field), demanding that we not make writing new, but immediate, present, and incisive. He notes that the subject, then, “remain[s] suspended between light and the imageless arcana of extinction…”

Listen to ear's content at Open Space.