John Bloomberg-Rissman and Conrad DiDiodato discuss 'conceptual poetry'

I'd like to thank John Bloomberg-Rissman for agreeing to talk to me about 'conceptual poetry' via Google+ 'hangout'. Below is the YouTube video of our discussion. I would like to post 'hangout' discussions from time to time. If the "medium is the message" there can be no doubt that Net technology conditions the very terms (and tone) of poetry discussion. It's quite remarkable to me that this two-person symposium could never have happened in the "paper" regime where space, means of production and meaning itself are governed by the powerful few.

The YouTube video can also be seen here.

Poll results

A warm thank you to those who took the time to do my poll. I may do one from time to time mostly to gauge opinion on recent events in the world of poetry. For example, it would have been interesting to take a survey on Ron Silliman's decision a few years back to close the comments stream at his blog. Find below the results of my poll, beginning with a sampling of opinion on the poll topic:


(a) "Of those listed here that would probably be Apollinaire. He was there at the beginning of modernism. His ""Zone"" was a huge influence on everybody, as were ""Lundi Rue Christine"" and the Calligrammes ... as were his writings on the cubist painters.
It's interesting that this list does not consist of contemporaries, e.g. Zukofsky and Char came along after modernism was in full swing."

(b)"Walt Whitman - an avant-modernist, so to speak (tongue a little in cheekily), who leads pretty directly to
WC Williams - I suspect that of the early modernists he has had the most influence in North America. He's kind the ""free verse according to speech rhythms"" guy.
HD - the ""imagiste"" queen. Imagism has been incredibly influential on modernism (I should add, thru Pound, too)"

(c)"[Apollinaire's] calligrams paved the way for a new genre - visual poetry, first exemplified in concrete poetry - the perception of a poem as a visual form of poetic expression.
Concrete poetry established the idea of presenting a poem as a ""word-object"" - to be looked at as well as read; from that point on, words on a page were to be considered for their spatial as well as for their semantic function.This led to ""visual poetry"", a genre that integrates text and image on the page, which then led to ""kinetic text"" (my term), a time-based form of presenting a poem as moving text on a screen and, eventually, to film poems or ""videopoetry"" (my term) wherein text is ""juxtaposed with image and sound to produce a poetic experience"" (my definition) as well as the forms of ""e-poetry"" - generative texts for example - which require the user's interactivity to create the poems."

(d) "Ezra Pound, because he championed the movement away from the flowery language of Victorian poetry and its sometimes cumbersome and abstract."
_____________________________

Which one literary figure listed below has, in your opinion, contributed the most towards creating a distinctively modern poetics?

Tristan Tzara	0	0%
Rainer Maria Rilke	2	20%
Guillaume Apollinaire	3	30%
Louis Zukofsky	1	10%
René Char	0	0%
Gertrude Stein	4	40%

Happy Birthday, Frank (for Claudia)

Frank Samperi would have been 80 today...


   "Hapless, I shall take
my little bag of necessities and move closer
toward the ivory gate--"
                (from "Song Book")

Louis Zukofsky's "Bottom: On Shakespeare": a curious case of the almost unreadable book

If there's one thing that can be said of a grotesquely collated (perhaps of any primarily Objectivist) work like Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare it is that it was written in order merely to be written.Zukofsky would only give his papers to Harry Ransom Research Collection (University of Texas) provided the university agree to publish a work that comprises almost entirely of quoted materials. It seems to violate every law of historico-literary logic and yet it does bewitch the eye hungry for empty diversion. The largest of his prose work patches venerable personages from antiquity to his present for the sake of some intellectually dizzying collage effect. And the "eye" is its primary focus: or what he calls the "'compounding' eye-thought of its culture" (p.85) and cultures do intersect clumsily in Zukofsky. In fact, Shakespeare (the work's putative center) finds himself in a kind of continual discourse with Wittgenstein, Spinoza and Aristotle, all unmercifully threaded through quotations into a single preoccupation ("graph of culture", as the author says) with the nature of "seeing". And yet they do anything but that. They all seem to think the "same" or have similar ideas because Zukofsky says so. It's pleasing to the childish eye, perhaps, in the way the eye delights in cartoons. In Zukofsky, however, the cartoon bubbles are full of adult erudition. But in what sense do smart cartoon characters "see" anyways?

There's also something keenly fanatical in Zukofsky's Bottom. He's always struck me as the reformer holding the whip. Here's the writer of manifestos sweating over something new to say to a world stuck to outworn paradigms (like Paul to Ephesians). And treating Shakespeare as an "object"-- or solidified into so many elementary philosophico-lyrical particles--is decidedly new. I've laboured to read it only because Frank Samperi had read it (in the days when he'd struggled equally hard to learn his poetry from Zukofsky and even be a friend) and because I'm presently finishing a work on Samperi. The impressionable young Brooklyn poet, just back from Korea, had shaken author and work off as a kind of gross materialism that never reverences life and certainly doesn't know its "music" from a hole in the ground. Samperi looked to a single author and his De Vulgari Eloquentia for that. The character Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream is the book's putative exemplum: he's one of those 'mechanical' characters in Shakespeare (like those in the opening scene of Julius Caesar who always appear without their apron and rule and aggravate the authorities) that experimental poets like to tinker with. Perhaps Samperi had resented how churlishly Zukofsky had treated him, as if he were another Bottom. The man and his wife could be cruel to young impressionable poets.

Bottom, like every self-indulgently daring exposition, at first tries to be hieratical but can't: in the end it is inherently unreadable and like each of Zukofsky's works from "A" to Prepositions to A Test of Poetry is a case of just plain cruel theorizing. It seems to offend wherever it goes. The Zukofskys' sound translation of Catallus must have been a private joke. His saying in Bottom that "eyes are understood to be so often there in the Works [of Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, Boole, Charles Sander Peirce, etc.]it appears they wish to unite others to them in friendship" is rhetorical gibberish. He was no more a friend to classical authors than he was to Samperi. Zukofsky's penchant for  an "alphabet of subjects" certainly would set all his imitators astir with language activity in the years after his death. But in Silliman's abcediary, to his credit, there's not this tampering with subjects he hasn't really mastered and certainly none of undergraduate's love of quotation-gathering. He's a "jigging fool" and he knows it. Zukofsky chose the "eye" or "seeing" as the work's central idea because it is necessarily vague enough to appear to convince without actually doing so. In Zukofsky you can appear to see and yet remain essentially "witless", and those are his own words.

Of course, I've offered only a few general comments, mainly "off the cuff", because I can't be bothered to look at individual examples for very long. I do dare anyone, however, to read Bottom: On Shakespeare (as Samperi and I have had to) and tell me what's really worth seeing there. I'm open to suggestions.

Let's hangout!

Google+ technology is awesome. As I may have already said, I'm working towards a paperless classroom: no textbooks (just Kindles), no paper (just shared folders, documents and spreadsheets) And one particular feature I find very appealing is the 'hangout'. I use it regularly at work (and at home) to meet with colleagues and administrators. I've also often said that without the Net I would never have travelled along the poetry road as far as I have (even though I've been writing poetry since my early 20s) and nor would I have made a tenth of my publishing contacts as well. To me Vint Cerf is as venerable a name as Jack Spicer, Al Purdy, Frank Samperi, etc.

If anyone'd like to 'hangout' with me to discuss poetry or continue discussions started online, please let me know. As many of my poet-friends hail from distant lands it'd sure save me long distance calls and it'd be nice to see a face and hear a welcoming voice.

May Day or birthday lyrics (for Vassilis)



Of course, the hoary chin
  o Pelion!
  & a fading canadian
                          gull--

  on the same day