"Connectivism": a gift from Irina Moga

I am grateful to poet Irina Moga for sending me a copy of Connectivism: Variety Crossing 13, an anthology of verses "celebrating Canadian identities" in which her own fine poems "The Music Pavilion" and "Island" appear.

Congratulations to Irina for her successful submissions!

From the blognoscenti: 05 January 2011 (4)

(a) Irina Moga, "The Poem in the Mirror" in The Continuous Poem. "This seems pretty straightforward. But what happens when a mirror - or a poem- inserts itself in the equation? How might our vision be altered then?";

(b) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi. "I have waited/for the evil wind".

(c) Geof Huth, "write as you - read as you write" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "It is called the silver book, and it is a book, not more than a chapbook and maybe less than that, by Jen Bervin."

(d) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "David Antin: 11 games for eleanor (previously unpublished)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "It seems to me that for Antin as for others of us, there has been a strong sense that what we do as poets (more simply: as people responsible for keeping language & reality together) is in danger of an inescapable, premature reduction as it’s forced to enter the unique entropy machine of the modern communications nexus."

(e) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press" by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog. "Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work";

(f) Dave Bonta, "Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke" in Moving Poems. "A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice";

(g) Jerome Rothenberg, "John Martone: Presence of All Colors" in Poems and Poetics. "This is the second set of poems by John Martone to appear in Poems and Poetics."

Sentence: If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

From the blognoscenti: 04 January 2011 (3)

(a) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi." I don't think this poem was ever published.It is one of a collection of poems that come from The Room Is My Refuge From Light which was then called SONG BOOK, published 1960"; 

(b) Geof Huth, "1,2,3,ing"in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "I'm still counting (in order to give a recap of my last year in the world of poetry), and I've come to the disturbing realization that I created over 3,000 poems (visual and otherwise) last year";

(c) Irina Moga, "The Annotated Bee & Me" in The Continuous Poem. “The Annotated Bee & Me is carefully architected creation, a series of poems that aggregate around “the large themes of our lives –Birth, Death, Time and Memory” (a quote from the volume’s back cover) and an original poetic topic: beekeeping";

(d) Bob Grumman,  "Entry 334 — One Reason I’m Not a Fan of Emily’s" in POETICKS. "A major problem I have with Emily Dickinson’s pieces is that they seem to me much more rhymed opinions than poems";

(e) William Michaelian, "In the Forum: He comes with words sublimely dull, / In garb superbly silly, / To tell us of the Beautiful, / The sunflower and the lily", in Recently Banned Literature;

(f) Dave Bonta, "Vinyl Poesie by Christoph Bruns" in Moving Poems. "This is a stop motion video i created around summer last year. It is a selfwritten poem created out of my vinyl collection. i looked out for interesting words and formed this little passages";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited  "Clouds Gather and Part: Tanka" by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk (Dennis H. Dutton) in tel let 2004;

(h) William Michaelian, "The Past Recaptured" in Recently Banned Literature. "Some other books I read during that time: Dylan Thomas in America, by John Malcolm Brinnin; Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski; The History of Reading and The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel; Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét; Selected Poems, by Georg Trakl; A Listening Thing, by William Michaelian; parts of three poetry collections by Lawrence Ferlinghetti";

(i) Bob Grumman, "Entry 335 — “Mathemaku in Praise of Taxonomy” in POETICKS. "This is the mathemaku I hoped to finish yesterday evening–and did.   One of my best, it seems to me at the moment (which is around seven, 3 January 2011)";

(j) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "The John Perlman Collection: A Guide and Inventory" by Jeffrey Rudzinski and John M. Bennett in University Libraries: Rare Books and Manuscripts; "Rim: Woodcuts,Stem, Az Two: Words of Travel, Side-Ways and Fist by David Giannini" in amazon.com; "Twelve Poems by John Levy in tel-let 2006.

Sentence: A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.

From the blognoscenti: 03 January 2011 (2)

(a) Irina Moga, "Of Love and the Island" in The Continuous Poem. "In modern poetry the Embarkation for Cythera appears to be a theme of equally luxuriant mythologies." [See discussion of Verlaine, Laforgues Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire, Andrew Lang, David Ferry, John Glassco & Francis Poulenc];

(b) Don Wentworth, "Dandy in the Underworld: Issa's Sundary Service, #84 in Issa's Untidy Hut. "If ever there was a patron saint of poetry (as well as music), Orpheus is certainly a leading candidate";

(c) Vassilis Zambaras, "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City" in vazambam. "No lyric poetry here, just pure Ionian tragedy";

(d) Dan Waber, "this is visual poetry by Jenee Mateer" in this is visual poetry. "Jenee says: 'I see my work as a meditation on issues of gender, desire, identity and the complexities of language (communication)'";

(e) Dave Bonta, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery" in Moving Poems. "Art student Al Belancourt made this film of Ashbery’s poem as an assignment for a poetry class, he tells me, inspired by viewing Moving Poems in class";

(f) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "Uncollected Poems (18): Found Poems from 'The Emergence Notebooks' (for the New Year 2011)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "This sequence of poems from the early 1960s was recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010, to be published early in 2011 by Mark Weiss & Junction Press";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "On & By Blanchot" by Pierre Joris in Nomadics. "Here is my contribution — a brief remembrance of buying my first Blanchot book in Paris & a reading from The Unavowable Community —to the Maurice Blanchot Celebrations at Bard College in November 2007."

Sentence: The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one.

The blognoscenti: what I've learned today arranged by date, author and source, with brief excerpts (1)

I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.

There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.

Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.

I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).

Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).

The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.

(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";

(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";

(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";

(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";

(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."

Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).

The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"

A translation of Irina Moga's poem "Histoires"

Irina Moga is a Canadian poet at whose "Artist's Studio" blog I've been recently reflecting on Bogdan Luca's recent Niagara Peninsula artwork. She is a superb poet whose French poetry appears in her Nouvelle Poésie Canadienne. A more detailed biography of Irina Moga can be found at The Writers' Union of Canada website. The following poem is translated here with permission of the author. I will be posting more translations in the near future.


Histoires

Un inventaire de petites plumes,
des cailloux, insérés dans la chair du sens,
et à peine cousus
dans l’ourlet de lumière

qui fait remuer la poussière dans les corridors
de la maison.

Des histories dans lesquelles notre imagination s’accroche,
dans les fragments du désir,
et la légèreté de ta paume,

musique répétitive,
torrent
d’une harpe.
______________________________

Fables

An inventory of plumelets,
pebbles, stored inside the feeling body,
barely sewn
inside a stitch of light

that stirs up dust in the corridors
of home.

Fables to which imaginations hold fast,
and broken desires,
and the lightness of your palm,

a song without end,
the harp's
stream.

(trans. by C. DiDiodato)