"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
[more inside]
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 21, 2011 -
8 comments
How well do you really know old Arty? It all began with the Welsh: The The Annales Cabriae (inside) and parts of the Welsh oral tradition (later collected into
the Mabinogion) give a very different picture of the popular King Arthur than contemporary readers are familiar with: no Lancelot, three or four different Guens, no love triangles or Holy Grails. A look at the vast scope of the Arthurian legend.
[more inside]
posted by kittenmarlowe
on Dec 19, 2011 -
30 comments
"Almost everything I do is based on other texts anyway. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I'm a rewrite man." The poet Christoper Logue has died, aged 85. Logue had a varied career, at various points serving in the British Army (and being arrested for espionage after a drunken threat to sell secrets), writing pornography under the
nom de plume Count Palmiro de Vicarion, recording
George Martin-produced, "
heroically daft" jazz recitals of the poems of Pablo Neruda (
YT) and regularly contributing to the British satirical magazine
Private Eye, where he edited
Pseuds' Corner, while finding the time to be arrested again, for civil disobedience as part of Bertrand Russell's
Committee of 100.
[more inside]
posted by running order squabble fest
on Dec 4, 2011 -
14 comments
Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 30, 2011 -
10 comments
"It was no accident that arts funding was once again brought to national attention with the exhibit Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Since the 80s, the enemies of the NEA have not been those with differences of opinion about what art should be supported or how. Instead they oppose any support at all for art of any kind."
Hide/Seek, Culture Wars and the History of the NEA (NSFW, art)
posted by The Whelk
on Nov 1, 2011 -
115 comments
In 1977-1978, a public access TV show called
Public Access Poetry featured leading poets from across the country (Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, John Yau, Brad Gooch, just to name a few).
[more inside]
posted by mattbucher
on Sep 23, 2011 -
5 comments
"The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term 'unoriginal genius' to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, 'moving information,' to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." --
Kenneth Goldsmith on why "genius" is an archaic concept, and how literature in English has fallen half-a-century behind advances in visual arts and music
posted by bardic
on Sep 22, 2011 -
44 comments
"I have foresworn desire...I neither lick nor moan...I neither swallow..."
Kim Addonizio's poem,
"The End of It," is on
Poetry Daily. Reminiscent of Yeats' line,
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" and Stephen Dunn's line,
"Precision...is more radical than passion," it demonstrates the fecund nature of
poetic iconoclasm. Or, if you prefer the more hackneyed characterization, the value of questioning everything. In the end, Addonizio may be sitting quietly, like Nanao Sakaki's
"happy, lucky idiot." [NSF asexuals, hedonists, or the majority of non-eccentrics...but I doubt your boss at work will bat an eyelash at a poem--if so, sit quietly you happy, lucky...]
[more inside]
posted by ottimo
on Aug 9, 2011 -
41 comments
July 17th 1959: "Billie Holiday died in a New York City hospital from cirrhosis of the liver after years of alcohol abuse, aged 43 (while under arrest for heroin possession, with police officers stationed at the door to her room). In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank." Still, the world remembers her for her music, her voice that changed lives. Some of her best:
Nice Work If You Can Get It,
Fine and Mellow,
Strange Fruit,
I'll Be Seeing You,
Good Morning Heartache,
Summertime,
I'm A Fool to Want You,
As Time Goes By,
Solitude,
Come Rain or Come Shine and
The Man I Love.
[more inside]
posted by pleasebekind
on Jul 17, 2011 -
30 comments
R.M. Berry on Samuel Beckett's peculiar writing style: "It's as though the narrator's words were almost thoughtless, accidental, written by someone paying no attention to what he or she says." Beckett is best known for his play
Waiting For Godot, in which "nothing happens, twice", but he was also an accomplished writer of prose, ranging from the relatively simple
Three Novels to the extremely minimal
Imagination Dead Imagine. Some of Beckett's more challenging short plays are available on YouTube:
Play (
pt. 2),
Not I (the famous "mouth" play), and
Come and Go, one of the shortest plays in the English language (ranging between 121 and 127 words, depending on translation).
Once he interviewed John Lennon and found out who the eggman really was. Beckett's final creative work was his poem
What Is the Word.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Jun 25, 2011 -
41 comments
She's an animator who loves poetry.
He's a poet who loves animation.
Their collaboration, along with the help of many other animators and poets,
has resulted in a storm of
Motionpoems.
(More on vimeo & youtube.)
posted by carsonb
on May 26, 2011 -
3 comments
One day last year, while working on a biography of the publisher Scofield Thayer, I opened a folder of papers related to his magazine The Dial. The folder contained undated letters from the poet E.E. Cummings to Thayer, early versions of a couple Cummings’ poems and one poem by Cummings I couldn’t remember ever seeing before. It was called "(tonite" and, until I came across it, it was unknown.
James Dempsey discusses Scofield Thayer, E.E. Cummings, their relationship, and a heretofore unknown, unpublished poem.
posted by shakespeherian
on May 26, 2011 -
4 comments
"On November 22, 1997, there was a party at 635 Logan Street, Steubenville, Ohio. Hubbard attended this party. At the party were several members of the gang known as the Crips. It is contested whether Hubbard is a member of the Crips. During that evening, Wise God Allah, a.k.a. Grier Montgomery, was walking down the street outside of the party. Wise God Allah was known to be a member of the rival gang the Bloods. Hubbard and up to nine other men began shooting at Wise God Allah. One of the shots hit Wise God Allah. The gunshot wound was fatal."*
"
On one record I did called 'Wise' that didn't make the album the Supreme Clientele—I couldn't use it, they took it off
**—I cried writing it. I wrote it on the beach. And I cried. And it started raining when I was crying. It was in Miami. I cried writing it, and then when I went to go record it, it had some tears coming to my eyes too, recording it, because I had to zone out, I couldn't really do it in front of everybody. I don't like to record in front of a lot of people especially when I'm writing emotional stuff." - Ghostface Killah [
audio interview]
[more inside]
posted by jng
on Apr 30, 2011 -
12 comments
The Xenotext Experiment is
Christian Bök's [
Previously],"nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space)."
[Via] [more inside]
posted by Fizz
on Apr 4, 2011 -
25 comments
A Cyclops' cave the wanderers brave
And find much milk & cheese
But as they eat, foul death they meet
For them doth Cyclops seize.
From
The Young Folks' Ulysses [PDF], by H. Lovecraft, poet, aged seven. One of the "freely available editions of obscure, outlandish and otherwise outré works of semi-fine literature" from
the electric publishing wing of
kobek.com.
posted by Iridic
on Mar 28, 2011 -
8 comments
Large
audio archive of Wallace Stevens reading from his poems. Other Stevens links: several poem
texts with annotation; many more of the
poems; his
letters on Google Books (full view).
posted by Paquda
on Feb 15, 2011 -
8 comments
Fifteen years after we broke up, my ex-boyfriend published a book of poetry. ... For months, the slim book sat on my shelf like an awkward houseguest. Then, one quiet night, something nudged me out of my inertia, or dread, and I settled into bed with his book. And there I was.
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 10, 2011 -
41 comments
Devadasi are women in southeastern India who were dedicated in their youth to the goddess Yellamma. When they reach puberty they are forced into sex work. Once they were women of high status, but now they've been relegated to the outskirts of society. The devadasi practice goes back a long way in history, and was once celebrated in poetry.
When God Is a Customer, a collection of translated classical Telugu poems about the devadasi, is free to read online. Their modern life is described by
William Dalrymple in The New Yorker and in a
video interview with filmmaker Beeban Kidron which includes clips from her documentary Sex, Death and the Gods. The devadasi have been targeted by exploitative Western media for a long time, but have recently
started to hit back, using
the internet to disseminate their views.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 22, 2011 -
14 comments
Gallica (the digital section of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) has put Charles Baudelaire's heavily annotated proofs of
Les Fleurs du Mal on line.
posted by Lezzles
on Jan 11, 2011 -
10 comments
"What dudes do have for inspiration is
Fuck Yeah Menswear, a new anonymous blog dedicated to the poetry of self aggrandizing and hurting people’s feelings through your personal style."
Via.
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Jan 5, 2011 -
57 comments
