1. Poets die young,
"...Kaufman said poets should not worry, but should perhaps look after their
health...."
Poets Die Young - U.S. Study
2. NEA Announces Writing Program for Troops
3. The New Criterion does a special issue on poetry. Includes . . .
Eric Ormsby, "Of Lapdogs & Loners: American Poetry Today"
The continuing institutionalization of poetry in North America, with its concomitant proliferation of writing workshops, professorial positions, validating agencies, and award-giving bodies, not to mention such pointless offices as that of poet laureate, has had a stultifying effect on the creation of good poetry over the last few decades.
and a few other articles but you need a sub to get at them.
these are at the website
Dana Gioia, Elizabeth Bishop: from coterie to canon
David Yezzi, The morality of Anthony Hecht
and the good news is . . .
Pamela Lu reading last night was excellent. Renee and Chris also excellent but since they've already been around the Mills block I'll just mention Renee read a piece with a sex scene in the middle of it and Chris read translations by other people that his new press will publish.
Pam read a long piece that seemed to be about a group of people who made "ambient licks" and in the middle of it was a long description of what might have been a butoh performance that was about thirty hours long and took place in a car that had been crushed by a concrete pillar and that might have been happening somewhere in the flatlands.
and new books from Arras to cheer you up after worries of early death and youthful ambition
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Spring 2004 Titles
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
This year's titles range from the visually sophisticated Concrete poetry of
Gustave Morin, a native of Windsor who spent 10 years on his "novel" A Penny
Dreadful, to an obscure volume of satirical translations of Baudelaire by
the English poet Nicholas Moore, from the experiments in frame and format
that Caroline Bergvall and designer Marit Meunzberg explore in their daring
resetting of the poet's Eclat, to the equally daring, if entirely
unscrupulous, logorrhea that is the 130 pages of another "novel," Name, by
Toadex Hobogrammathon.
The big news this year might be the introduction of color into the pantheon
of effects being used in our e-books: both Bergvall's Eclat and my own Alpha
Betty's Chronicles rely heavily on it, in ways that would have been
unsuitable to html and impossibly expensive to print in a book. Likewise,
the volumes by Morin and Lytle Shaw - two of his uniquely low-tech Shark
chapbooks - are primarily graphic works, while the titles by Craig Dworkin,
Robert Fitterman and Larry Price attempt to re-conceptualize the page of an
Adobe Acrobat file as a middle-space that ironizes the permanence of type
(Dworkin's use of Courier fonts) or digital flow (Fitterman's box-like
containers) as well as the "writing on the wall" soixante-huitard-style
(Price's poster-style typography).
Of the republications, we are happy to present the final section of Ron
Silliman's The Age of Huts, The Chinese Notebook, probably the most
influential of his early books outside of Kejtak, two small works by the
increasingly-prized Jean Day, whose 1998 Atelos volume, The Literal World,
woke so many up to her understated talents. Robert Kelly's quasi-fiction -
yes, yet another "novel" - called The Cruise of the Pnyx has long been one
of my favorites of his, but has never appeared in another book, nor has the
original Station Hill edition of 1979 been republished.
New writers include the playwright Madelyn Kent, whose Shufu plays - part
Butoh, part Richard Maxwell-like deadpan, with a touch of Clark Coolidge --
are bound to become recognized as innovative theater, and Aaron Kunin, who
is becoming known in New York and elsewhere as a writer of uncommon
intelligence and tremendous technical precision. The English poet Ira
Lightman drops in on the series like a lightning bolt, spreading his art in
a sort of spirit of personal renaissance, while Barbara Cole's Foxy Moron -
a text I see as existing somewhere between poetry and drama if only because
she reads it so well in public - strikes a little lower, not so much toward
"renaissance" as sexual catharsis, over and over again.
Lastly, we are especially happy to have Deanna Ferguson's long-awaited
follow-up collection to her 1993 book The Relative Minor (which appears as a
reprint in last year's series). Several of the poems in Rough Bush have
already played parts in some of the signal poetics statements of the
nineties; it's good to finally have such a stash of Ferguson's recent
writings in one place.
Enjoy!
--Brian Kim Stefans
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
Eclat
Caroline Bergvall
http://ubu.com/ubu/bergvall_eclat.html
Situation Comedies: Foxy Moron
Barbara Cole
http://ubu.com/ubu/cole_foxy.html
Linear C & The I and the You
Jean Day
http://ubu.com/ubu/day_linear.html
Smokes
Craig Dworkin
http://ubu.com/ubu/dworkin_smokes.html
Rough Bush and other poems
Deanna Ferguson
http://ubu.com/ubu/ferguson_bush.html
This Window Makes Me Feel
Robert Fitterman
http://ubu.com/ubu/fitterman_window.html
Name, a novel
Toadex Hobogrammathon
http://ubu.com/ubu/toadex_name.html
Cruise of the Pnyx
Robert Kelly
http://ubu.com/ubu/kelly_pnyx.html
São Paolo
Madelyn Kent
http://ubu.com/ubu/kent_sao.html
The Mauberley Series
Aaron Kunin
http://ubu.com/ubu/kunin_mauberley.html
Trancelated (from Coinsides)
Ira Lightman
http://ubu.com/ubu/lightman_trance.html
Spleen: Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire's Je suis comme le roi...
Nicholas Moore
http://ubu.com/ubu/moore_spleen.html
Spaghetti Dreadful (trailer for A Penny Dreadful)
Gustave Morin
http://ubu.com/ubu/morin_spaghetti.html
Circadium
Larry Price
http://ubu.com/ubu/price_circadium.html
Gulf & Alpha Betty's Chronicles
Brian Kim Stefans
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_alpha.html
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_gulf.html
Low-Level Bureaucratic Structures Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound
Lytle Shaw
http://ubu.com/ubu/shaw_low.html
The Chinese Notebook
Ron Silliman
http://ubu.com/ubu/silliman_chinese.html
"...Kaufman said poets should not worry, but should perhaps look after their
health...."
Poets Die Young - U.S. Study
2. NEA Announces Writing Program for Troops
3. The New Criterion does a special issue on poetry. Includes . . .
Eric Ormsby, "Of Lapdogs & Loners: American Poetry Today"
The continuing institutionalization of poetry in North America, with its concomitant proliferation of writing workshops, professorial positions, validating agencies, and award-giving bodies, not to mention such pointless offices as that of poet laureate, has had a stultifying effect on the creation of good poetry over the last few decades.
and a few other articles but you need a sub to get at them.
these are at the website
Dana Gioia, Elizabeth Bishop: from coterie to canon
David Yezzi, The morality of Anthony Hecht
and the good news is . . .
Pamela Lu reading last night was excellent. Renee and Chris also excellent but since they've already been around the Mills block I'll just mention Renee read a piece with a sex scene in the middle of it and Chris read translations by other people that his new press will publish.
Pam read a long piece that seemed to be about a group of people who made "ambient licks" and in the middle of it was a long description of what might have been a butoh performance that was about thirty hours long and took place in a car that had been crushed by a concrete pillar and that might have been happening somewhere in the flatlands.
and new books from Arras to cheer you up after worries of early death and youthful ambition
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Spring 2004 Titles
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
This year's titles range from the visually sophisticated Concrete poetry of
Gustave Morin, a native of Windsor who spent 10 years on his "novel" A Penny
Dreadful, to an obscure volume of satirical translations of Baudelaire by
the English poet Nicholas Moore, from the experiments in frame and format
that Caroline Bergvall and designer Marit Meunzberg explore in their daring
resetting of the poet's Eclat, to the equally daring, if entirely
unscrupulous, logorrhea that is the 130 pages of another "novel," Name, by
Toadex Hobogrammathon.
The big news this year might be the introduction of color into the pantheon
of effects being used in our e-books: both Bergvall's Eclat and my own Alpha
Betty's Chronicles rely heavily on it, in ways that would have been
unsuitable to html and impossibly expensive to print in a book. Likewise,
the volumes by Morin and Lytle Shaw - two of his uniquely low-tech Shark
chapbooks - are primarily graphic works, while the titles by Craig Dworkin,
Robert Fitterman and Larry Price attempt to re-conceptualize the page of an
Adobe Acrobat file as a middle-space that ironizes the permanence of type
(Dworkin's use of Courier fonts) or digital flow (Fitterman's box-like
containers) as well as the "writing on the wall" soixante-huitard-style
(Price's poster-style typography).
Of the republications, we are happy to present the final section of Ron
Silliman's The Age of Huts, The Chinese Notebook, probably the most
influential of his early books outside of Kejtak, two small works by the
increasingly-prized Jean Day, whose 1998 Atelos volume, The Literal World,
woke so many up to her understated talents. Robert Kelly's quasi-fiction -
yes, yet another "novel" - called The Cruise of the Pnyx has long been one
of my favorites of his, but has never appeared in another book, nor has the
original Station Hill edition of 1979 been republished.
New writers include the playwright Madelyn Kent, whose Shufu plays - part
Butoh, part Richard Maxwell-like deadpan, with a touch of Clark Coolidge --
are bound to become recognized as innovative theater, and Aaron Kunin, who
is becoming known in New York and elsewhere as a writer of uncommon
intelligence and tremendous technical precision. The English poet Ira
Lightman drops in on the series like a lightning bolt, spreading his art in
a sort of spirit of personal renaissance, while Barbara Cole's Foxy Moron -
a text I see as existing somewhere between poetry and drama if only because
she reads it so well in public - strikes a little lower, not so much toward
"renaissance" as sexual catharsis, over and over again.
Lastly, we are especially happy to have Deanna Ferguson's long-awaited
follow-up collection to her 1993 book The Relative Minor (which appears as a
reprint in last year's series). Several of the poems in Rough Bush have
already played parts in some of the signal poetics statements of the
nineties; it's good to finally have such a stash of Ferguson's recent
writings in one place.
Enjoy!
--Brian Kim Stefans
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------
Eclat
Caroline Bergvall
http://ubu.com/ubu/bergvall_eclat.html
Situation Comedies: Foxy Moron
Barbara Cole
http://ubu.com/ubu/cole_foxy.html
Linear C & The I and the You
Jean Day
http://ubu.com/ubu/day_linear.html
Smokes
Craig Dworkin
http://ubu.com/ubu/dworkin_smokes.html
Rough Bush and other poems
Deanna Ferguson
http://ubu.com/ubu/ferguson_bush.html
This Window Makes Me Feel
Robert Fitterman
http://ubu.com/ubu/fitterman_window.html
Name, a novel
Toadex Hobogrammathon
http://ubu.com/ubu/toadex_name.html
Cruise of the Pnyx
Robert Kelly
http://ubu.com/ubu/kelly_pnyx.html
São Paolo
Madelyn Kent
http://ubu.com/ubu/kent_sao.html
The Mauberley Series
Aaron Kunin
http://ubu.com/ubu/kunin_mauberley.html
Trancelated (from Coinsides)
Ira Lightman
http://ubu.com/ubu/lightman_trance.html
Spleen: Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire's Je suis comme le roi...
Nicholas Moore
http://ubu.com/ubu/moore_spleen.html
Spaghetti Dreadful (trailer for A Penny Dreadful)
Gustave Morin
http://ubu.com/ubu/morin_spaghetti.html
Circadium
Larry Price
http://ubu.com/ubu/price_circadium.html
Gulf & Alpha Betty's Chronicles
Brian Kim Stefans
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_alpha.html
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_gulf.html
Low-Level Bureaucratic Structures Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound
Lytle Shaw
http://ubu.com/ubu/shaw_low.html
The Chinese Notebook
Ron Silliman
http://ubu.com/ubu/silliman_chinese.html
<< Home