hello all. i never posted on bernstein, which i shall attempt to hereby rectify. i, like others mentioned, really enjoyed MY WAY, a book that asks to be picked up and put down over some meandering weeks. so many forms used in here, so many ways of writing an essay. i love how he pulls you in with a crunchy witty tidbit & then sets sail. and usually ends in a similarly provocative way. cliffhanging poetics! being a reductivist, i most enjoyed the pieces where he takes on big, controversial Poetry War issues, like Official Verse Culture (water images in the NEW YORKER, for example), or multicultural studies & the academic world (in “what’s art got to do with it”), & “frame lock” where he advocates the dissolution of barriers between critical/creative writing. he really can switch tones very quickly, a smartass agitator doing careful close readings a paragraph later.
“pound and the poetry of today” was very interesting. he makes a distinction between collage and montage, the former as pulling together disparate elements with no intention of a unifying theme, and the latter as the opposite. i am not sure if i get the Big Point—was pound making collage or montage? he writes that pound thought he was making montage but ended up with something other than what he intended. but the critics who concentrate on pound’s fascism claim a unifying theme. it seemed like bernstein was arguing that the non-unification in pound’s work was hidden, and it is our job to tease it out, like maclow did in his “from drafts and fragments of cantos cx-cxvii.” but i don’t quite understand if this non-unified reading can be pulled from the text completely, or if it needs outside help to stand.
the reading itself was so listenable, like readable, like a stand-up-comedian. it’s not often i attend a poetry reading & laugh that much, or literally hang on each word for the punchline. how does he do that? i bet william knows. reminds me of how powerful a tool is humor, how it makes readers/audiences TRUST you. makes them slightly permissive. we already discussed the “this-is-a-normal-poem” poem. i’ve looked all over the whole internet & cannot find it, so can someone please let me know the title, or post it here if that’s easy? that was the most memorable part of his whole reading, actually. it was so funny, but then i realized how elitist it was, and actually, how mean it was. i guess we need some people in the world to be mean. but that kind of poem is SO pointed at an audience of fellow experimental poets that i can’t help but ask just what it is we’re doing here, talking to ourselves, writing poems about talking to ourselves.
hey, guess what? i never posted on our “reading/writing” second ring circus either. i didn’t know we were supposed to, which i am sure is my fault. but now it’s been months & i feel like a jackass because i am trying to remember what happened. WHERE WERE YOU ON THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 29th?
we read an excerpt from maria rosa menocal’s SHARDS OF LOVE: EXILE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LYRIC, called “the inventions of philology.” this piece is on the ereserve if anyone is interested. it begins “the medieval—and thus what we call the modern and the postmodern—lyric is invented in bitter exile,” and goes on to discuss three writers who work in this state of exile: dante, auerbach, and pound (speak of the devil). she discusses at length dante’s love lyrics and the DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, which champions local vernaculars as being worthy of high culture, and both of which were written after he was exiled.
i chose this essay because of her provocative claim that lyric poetry is extremely political, which contrasts w/our generally accepted notion that it is not. she writes: “among the thousands of different answers that have come with the morning, one singular and unexpected one, the love lyric, has been a powerful and charming defense, a form of resistance commonly taken for retreat.”
this takes me back to The Conversation that we’ve been having on-and-off all year, especially in our final workshop w/the poetics statements, regarding art & politics, and especially escapism. these questions have been on my mind for a while, and this essay seduced me into thinking that it would give me some Answers.
i am not sure if we figured it out, though. my group consisted of charles & william. we sat by the 1926 bench (this was before the Age of Powdered Sugar Fish Bugs swarming) and talked about the essay. william, one might be interested to know, is quite knowledgeable on things medieval and secretive/conspiratorial, like the tartars and their relation to the nights templar and their connection to fertility rituals and their connection to the provencal troubadours. we had a great talk, but i think we may have wound up more confused than when we started. the language in the piece is so lush and lyric that i think we got sucked in, only to realize we didn’t know enough about medieval lore (except william) to fully get it.
so i guess the lesson here is, if you want to have a group discussion that is really predictable, go ahead and assign some reading that you’ve already got all figured out. if you want to be slightly confused and tongue-tied and tantalized and exasperated and interested, assign something like this!
and in the end, i just decided i didn’t care if i could prove lyric poetry was important or not. i’m just doing what i’m doing, so there.
and in the end, charles was going to write maria rosa menocal an email with our confusions and questions in it. i don’t think that ever happened. hey group, wanna get together and do it again?
“pound and the poetry of today” was very interesting. he makes a distinction between collage and montage, the former as pulling together disparate elements with no intention of a unifying theme, and the latter as the opposite. i am not sure if i get the Big Point—was pound making collage or montage? he writes that pound thought he was making montage but ended up with something other than what he intended. but the critics who concentrate on pound’s fascism claim a unifying theme. it seemed like bernstein was arguing that the non-unification in pound’s work was hidden, and it is our job to tease it out, like maclow did in his “from drafts and fragments of cantos cx-cxvii.” but i don’t quite understand if this non-unified reading can be pulled from the text completely, or if it needs outside help to stand.
the reading itself was so listenable, like readable, like a stand-up-comedian. it’s not often i attend a poetry reading & laugh that much, or literally hang on each word for the punchline. how does he do that? i bet william knows. reminds me of how powerful a tool is humor, how it makes readers/audiences TRUST you. makes them slightly permissive. we already discussed the “this-is-a-normal-poem” poem. i’ve looked all over the whole internet & cannot find it, so can someone please let me know the title, or post it here if that’s easy? that was the most memorable part of his whole reading, actually. it was so funny, but then i realized how elitist it was, and actually, how mean it was. i guess we need some people in the world to be mean. but that kind of poem is SO pointed at an audience of fellow experimental poets that i can’t help but ask just what it is we’re doing here, talking to ourselves, writing poems about talking to ourselves.
hey, guess what? i never posted on our “reading/writing” second ring circus either. i didn’t know we were supposed to, which i am sure is my fault. but now it’s been months & i feel like a jackass because i am trying to remember what happened. WHERE WERE YOU ON THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 29th?
we read an excerpt from maria rosa menocal’s SHARDS OF LOVE: EXILE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LYRIC, called “the inventions of philology.” this piece is on the ereserve if anyone is interested. it begins “the medieval—and thus what we call the modern and the postmodern—lyric is invented in bitter exile,” and goes on to discuss three writers who work in this state of exile: dante, auerbach, and pound (speak of the devil). she discusses at length dante’s love lyrics and the DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, which champions local vernaculars as being worthy of high culture, and both of which were written after he was exiled.
i chose this essay because of her provocative claim that lyric poetry is extremely political, which contrasts w/our generally accepted notion that it is not. she writes: “among the thousands of different answers that have come with the morning, one singular and unexpected one, the love lyric, has been a powerful and charming defense, a form of resistance commonly taken for retreat.”
this takes me back to The Conversation that we’ve been having on-and-off all year, especially in our final workshop w/the poetics statements, regarding art & politics, and especially escapism. these questions have been on my mind for a while, and this essay seduced me into thinking that it would give me some Answers.
i am not sure if we figured it out, though. my group consisted of charles & william. we sat by the 1926 bench (this was before the Age of Powdered Sugar Fish Bugs swarming) and talked about the essay. william, one might be interested to know, is quite knowledgeable on things medieval and secretive/conspiratorial, like the tartars and their relation to the nights templar and their connection to fertility rituals and their connection to the provencal troubadours. we had a great talk, but i think we may have wound up more confused than when we started. the language in the piece is so lush and lyric that i think we got sucked in, only to realize we didn’t know enough about medieval lore (except william) to fully get it.
so i guess the lesson here is, if you want to have a group discussion that is really predictable, go ahead and assign some reading that you’ve already got all figured out. if you want to be slightly confused and tongue-tied and tantalized and exasperated and interested, assign something like this!
and in the end, i just decided i didn’t care if i could prove lyric poetry was important or not. i’m just doing what i’m doing, so there.
and in the end, charles was going to write maria rosa menocal an email with our confusions and questions in it. i don’t think that ever happened. hey group, wanna get together and do it again?
