Jacob's Ladder: Information Technology Archives

Whole Hog...
July 14, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Self-promotion

July 10, 2007 File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake

And again...

The Erotic Life of Property
July 6, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

A few days ago, I ran across this image, which I originally posted here over a year ago, on Nicholas Manning's blog, where it had a new title, one much better, or at least more powerful, more capable, than any title I'd have ever given it.

I wrote Nicholas, to wit:

*First*

As a regular but perhaps infrequent reader of your blog, I just saw
this post:

http://thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com/2007/05/blog-post.html

And therein saw a photograph I took and posted on my blog some months
back.

I very much enjoy the title you've given it, and I am indeed quite
flattered you think enough of it to post it.

I'm working on an essay about quotation and what Lewis Hyde called
the "erotic life of property," and I was wondering if you could tell
me more about how the image came to you. I'd like to trace its
transit if possible.

All my best, and thank you for your blog,

Jake Adam York

*Second: A Reply*

Jake,

I'm really delighted to have found out where this came from, and to be
able to give you proper credit for your wonderful photo. I'd love to call
it a collaborative effort, though you deserve much more kudos than me.

Firstly, it is indeed a fascinating incarnation of the erotic life of
property: property's fluidity conferred by simple ignoring of borders of
attribution! Was your photo thus unfaithful to you? The erotics of
appropriation, perhaps. The story of this particular attribution is, I
suppose, not atypical of the flux-like, largely untraceable dynamics of
such things. I was having a conversation by letter with another friend and
poet about the hoary but still strangely pressing idea of emotionality in
poetry being justified by mirage-like "non-linguistic" or "non-rhetorical"
or "authentic" displays and mises en scene of Self. Your photo, in this
context, hit me like a gorgeous breath: it was personality's helplessness
in such justifications, a helplessness which was not, for all that,
malevolent, simply, after this century, sad and exhausted, burnt-out.
Being situated in the context of consumption was also extremely important,
for the idea of Personality somehow authentifying language was like the
commodity exchange: a stamp of garantee on the dubious product.

As you saw, Susanna Gardner said it would make a beautiful cover for an
anthology or critical book. But I'm sure it works as a stand-alone piece
as well. Maybe we can do something with it. I'll post it again Jake on the
blog this week and give you your attribution you so richly deserve.

All my best,

Nicholas

*Third: A Continuation*

Nicholas,

Thanks for your reply and your thoughts.

I wasn't concerned at all that my photograph was unfaithful to me. I always expected it to travel beyond whatever gallery I could construct for it, and I'm glad it has: for me a large part of the joy in writing and in photographing lies in knowing the work will always exceed whatever story we tell about ourselves to ourselves and whatever berth we construct for the genesis or the survival of the work. I think this is the test of work, so I'm interested, not because I feel betrayed but because something that was supposed to happen did, and I'm simply interested in the mechanics, the dynamics of conversation and community that transmit work.

I'm particularly interested in this transit because, though the photograph lost its attribution, it nevertheless never went very far afield, or at least it returned somewhat close to home: though you and I have not exchanged before, the ecosystem of poetry blogs is fairly well interconnected, so to see the photograph inside that ecosystem does not represent a radical relocation. I'm asking myself whether circulation (erotism in the etymological sense, always tending toward the other, though not necessarily sexually) within a community, however internally heterogenous, is somehow easier to accept because its easier to understand or because the traces or residues of transit are never completely dissolved.

The new question that comes to me here is why was the photograph e-mailed, rather than being linked? The internet provides for the most durable trace or residue in the link (which indexes all sorts of information), but the photograph is clearly more powerful, more capable, once it's alienated from its origin, and I wonder if the e-mailer knew this or if he/she had received it in turn from someone else.... And that's why I wrote you.

Your reading of the photograph is powerful. I would press many of the same complaints you're pressing in your reading, though I doubt many of those who know me or even read my poems would suspect me of such discomfort. And so, the query is also, as it tries to identify the moment when the photograph left my blog and its attribution, a search for the value of my name and my blog in this ecosystem, not as a narcissism, but rather as a study in rhetoric.

As for the photograph itself, I've no plans for it---indeed, almost
all my photographs just sit around (I did a few gallery shows and got
somewhat tired of them)---so the idea that someone could title it and
give it new life is very welcome. Anyone is welcome to it for a cover
&c.

Thank you, Nicholas,

Jake

***

A lot to digest here, both due to my rather lackluster blogging of late, and because of the recent adventures in the land of licensing, on which more later, as well as the discussion of posting poems on blogs....

Anyone have any ideas here?

In the Wild
June 10, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Found this in the wild:

Just a matter of time, now.

***

Also, congrats to Joshua.

And, go get this already...

Indexing Science
June 7, 2007 File under: Information Technology

I love this sort of thing, a visual representation of the density of papers in various fields of science. The little filaments are actually sentences from the papers.

Give Us the Man Suit, Carlos
May 29, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Read Zachary Schomburg on his completely killer first book.

Mixed Tastes
May 24, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology

This summer's MIXED TASTE schedule is out now. Clear off your Thursdays, once again:

Swiss Typography & TV Theme Songs
Thursday June 7, 2007
with Joel Swanson & Scott Kinnamon

Kurt Cobain & Solar Eclipses
Thursday June 14, 2007
with Patrick Brown & Jim Downing

Practical Democracy & Deadly Jellyfish
Thursday June 21, 2007
with David Hildebrand & Alyce Todd

Carnivorous Plants & Color-Field Painting
Thursday June 28, 2007
with John Bayard & Dean Sobel

Earth Art & Goat Cheese
Thursday July 5, 2007
with Elissa Auther & Michele Wells

Capoeira & Le Corbusier
Thursday July 12, 2007
with Canto de Galo & Bob Nauman

Chinese Opera & Alfred Hitchcock
Thursday July 19, 2007
with Joanna Lee & Thomas Delapa

Walt Whitman & Whole Hog Cooking
Thursday July 26, 2007
with Jake Adam York & Joe York

Tequila & Dark Energy in the Universe
Thursday August 2, 2007
with Matt Ortiz & Ka Chun Yu

Soul Food & Existentialism
Thursday, August 9, 2007
with Adrian Miller & Maria Talero

Prairie Dogs & Gertrude Stein
Thursday, August 16, 2007
with Jonathon Proctor & Julie Carr

Japanese Anime & Zora Neale Hurston
Thursday, August 23, 2007
with Alexandre O. Philippe & Philip Joseph

Marxism & Kittens, Kittens, Kittens
Thursday, August 30, 2007
with Gillian Silverman & The Denver Dumb Friends League

More on the platform comparison
May 19, 2007 File under: Information Technology

In the end, it may be that I want something new, a little different, just a change, or it may be that my ongoing quest to clear licenses for very small passages of lyrics quoted in my poems (and my ongoing payments for those licenses) are making me more and more a fan of open source everything, but I'm leaning toward moving from Movable Type to WordPress. At this point, if I can figure out how to manipulate WordPress's category structures a little more effectively, I'm probably there. Probably that would mean leaving all my Movable Type archives in place, closing the posts to comments, and then switching over. Maybe even putting the new blog in the same directory, we'll see....

Test Runs
May 16, 2007 File under: Information Technology

So, for clarity, I'm going to run the blog on both platforms until June 1st, which is two weeks. During that time I should be able to feel out which platform is the right one for me.

Going into this, let me offer the following terms for consideration....

Movable Type pros:

cooler name; reference to Gutenberg really tasty;
my own long familiarity with Movable Type; I know the back end pretty well
I prefer the verbal indexing and category direction in MT (category directories are named by category rather than by number)
I prefer the way MT displays faceted categories
MT's admin seems more robust

Movable Type cons:

MT charging clients
MT back end becoming less accessible
MT mixes Perl and PHP, meaning you need to know two languages to have full access
fewer MT plugins

Wordpress pros:

Link management seems easier: I wish Movable Type had such an application built in
Link categorization
Got the ethics: favorite of open source communities
Admin seems friendlier and also more quickly flexible
PHP only means leaner codes
Cooler slogans

Wordpress cons:

Indexing, category directorization, &c, not verbal
Conflation of tags and categories in core WP
Collapse of nested categories/tags in lists
New to me

Ultimately, I think my decision will be based on the flexibility of category faceting and conditonal (category-based) formatting, though my sense of extensibility will come into play as well. How long will MT's Perl core be practical? How much more flexible will WP's PHP core be?

Thoughts welcome, indeed...

Migration
File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

Migration Patterns
May 15, 2007 File under: Information Technology

For reasons too numerous to list here, I'm toying with WordPress and considering abandoning Movable Type after all this time. So check out the new ladder and let me know what you think....

If it works, I'll work out some migration strategy to redirect all traffic to the new site. All the old entries are already there.

Unlicensed
May 13, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Still working on the licenses, but there aren't more to go.

A few little tidbits to follow up on Friday's post.

First, Friday's Talk of the Nation included a discussion of copyright in the context of the Google Library Project. One respondent said he wouldn't be surprised if a copyright never expired again. It wasn't what he hoped for, but I fear sometimes he may be right.

(Founders' copyright, anyone?)

***

In a completely different direction, Bill Geist's CBS Sunday Morning bit today was a wonderful glimpse into the world of book sales. If he has to work so hard, the rest of us better get our shoes laced tight.

Permalink | Comments (0)

License
May 11, 2007 File under: Information Technology

A few posts back, I mentioned that the new book might even be out in January, but I may have written too soon, because one of the things that has to happen before the book can go into design and production is the clearance of lyrics quoted in one of the book's sequences, and that is more complicated and time-consuming than I imagined possible.

Maybe I began the wrong way, going to the United States Copyright Registry, thinking a public, government, and supposedly legal document would be the first place. I should have begun at ASCAP's ACE Title Database, but I didn't know about that. As ASCAP's website notes, "ASCAP created the dial-up ACE System in 1993 as a useful tool for music professionals." Not being a music professional, I didn't know about this. Thank goodness ASCAP decided to "make an enhanced World Wide Web version of this Database available." I only wish I'd known sooner.

What makes the ASCAP/ACE system more useful than the Copyright registry is that ASCAP/ACE will separate records for composer and writers from records for performers and performances. The Copyright registry may contain more than 100 records for a single song, maybe three records for writers and composers and another 90+ for each recorded performance of the song. In my case, I only want to quote the lyrics, and I want to do it properly, so I need to find not only who the writers are but who administers the licenses, but, again, it gets even more complicated after the ASCAP/ACE search.

Let's take, for example, "Blueberry Hill." ASCAP's database lists three writers: Al Lewis, Vincent Rose, and Larry Stock. ASCAP also lists three publishers for the song: Warner Chappell, Larry Stock Music Company, and Sovereign Music. Larry Stock Music Company is handled by another company, the Larry Spier Agency, which does business or routes licensing through a company called Memory Lane Music, and Sovereign licenses all its titles through another company called LCL, Licensing Concepts Ltd. Even had I begun at ASCAP, I would still have two other calls to make before I could find the person I needed to contact, and even then things get tangled, as one call netted me a fax number in the wrong division of the licensing company, so, after waiting the obligatory 15 business days for any reply, I had to call only to discover that my fax had disappeared into limbo. As with Stock and Sovereign, Warner Chappell does not handle lyric reprint requests, so you have to go to another company, Alfred Publishing, which handles Warner's print licensing.

Once I got to the right people, things moved pretty quickly, relatively speaking, but it didn't stop there. In trying to clear one line (that's right folks, one line) from the 1926 song "Bye Bye Blackbird," I bounced around from one publisher to another to yet another then to discover the following: the United States rights are held jointly by two publishers, while world rights are administered by a third agency. In contacting the third agency about "Bye Bye Blackbird," I had to reveal the list of songs quoted in my entire manuscript only to be told that this new company also administers two-thirds of the world rights to "Blueberry Hill," something none of the three other publishers had ever mentioned. I guess that's why they ask...

But I'm left to wonder — especially after one phone call ended with the publisher suggesting I hire an industry insider, a specialist, to clear the licenses — how an author, or even a common citizen, could ever be expected to get this right.

Some might think, as I thought a few years back, that presses would have such specialists and that an author wouldn't have to know not only the fine points of the law but as well the labyrinthine course to compliance. But the fact is that many presses don't have such specialists and, even if they did, it's probably not economical to devote any such labor to doing this work: I've already spent nearly 40 hours, about half on the phone, doing this detective work, an expenditure of time that would cost a press probably around $1000, thus increasing the cost of production of my slim volume of poems by maybe 25-35%, a volume that may never make any money, may never turn a profit.

If you are an author, odds are you're going to have to do this yourself. And, I think, odds are you're going to get it wrong somewhere, so you have to become a devotional person and pray that you're not going to get sued. I imagine that somewhere there's a "due dilligence" provision or a "best effort" — has anyone else (?) noticed with intrigue the disclaimer in the colophon of a University of Iowa Press title: "All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of materials used in this book" — but I don't know.

***

Several confidantes have said to me, Well, I guess you won't be using any songs in your next book. They're probably right, but it makes me sad, to think that something so fundamental to my approach to writing poems and suites and sequences and collections of poems, something so fundamental to my Civil Rights project, might be abandoned, that there might be incentives to abandonment.

Let me say some things I don't always say clearly or all together....

First, the more specific representation: the Civil Rights project — the work to write elegies for each of the 41 people whose murders, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, mark important moments in the fight for Civil Rights in America — is a documentary project. I am executing the project in poems, but the core impulse is documentary. In some cases I am building poems around documents or elements of documents. In some cases I am creating documents, recording what is otherwise only verbal. In some cases I am writing poems that set documents in dialogue. And in some cases, in most cases, I am searching for the intersections that form accidental, perhaps unwitting, but significant documents of the times.

Many of the songs I'm trying to clear for A Murmuration of Starlings are in a single sequence, in which song titles and song lyrics help tell the stories of two of Birmingham's citizens: one is Sun Ra, who left Birmingham for outerspace and a life as a jazz musician and futurist; the other is Robert Chambliss, who was convicted of bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church. In the case of Sun Ra, it's his titles, his composition, his language that tell the story. With Chambliss, because he never wrote (to my knowledge) anything, it's what he hears that tells his story and that tells Birmingham's story. In one segment, when Chambliss is supposedly waiting to bomb the home of Fred Shuttlesworth, the poem has him listening to "Some Enchanted Evening," which was #1 on the Bilboard charts that week: my hope is to use those lyrics both to suggest Chambliss's own romanticization of his work as a white-supremecist bomber and to challenge readers to hear the disconnect between the visible or audible culture and the undercurrent that would come to overwhelm Birmingham in the early 1960s. "Some Enchanted Evening" becomes a document, in the right place at the right time, something that helps us measure the world.

I believe the most powerful documentary films work by finding these accidental documents, and I want to achieve some of that in these poems. As a poetic strategy, this is not unique to me: I admire the way David Wojahn has developed a documentary aesthetic over the years and the way he's used songs to create those documents. (I wonder if he's ever had to deal with this business? Time to write a letter.)

And since I'm undertaking this work in order to draw attentions to the (still unfinished, still unfolding) history of Civil Rights in America, since I mean to locate that struggle in our world so it will be more widely indicated, I don't think I can easily say I'll avoid lyrics in the next segment of this series. This work is a responsive work — these poems respond to facts, to texts — and sometimes the song is the text, sometimes it tells the story.

And I don't mind paying at all. I just wish there was an easier way to find out who and how to pay for this.

Second, a larger point: I think there's an important place for responsive work, for work that is by nature intertextual (as much as it is intratextual or "original" or originary), work whose intertextuality is an ethical (as much as an aesthetic) choice. And yet, the difficulty and expense of licensing even extremely short passages of lyrics (I'm using maybe a total of 50 words and it's going to cost me in the neighborhood of $600) makes the publication of certain kinds of work impractical, especially if those works are works of poetry or literary fiction.

I was talking to an editor about my situation and he mentioned to me that he had recently read a manuscript in which the author quotes lyrics in every poem, something that would effectively make the book too expensive to produce. But, of course, it's quite possible the book could be excellent perhaps even important.

(I know people are probably tired of poets talking about the potential importance of poetry books, given the supposition that they're increasingly irrelevant. But even poorly circulated works (Moby-Dick only sold 3,000 copies in Melville's lifetime) can have serious effects (it has been argued that Moby-Dick laid the foundation for post-modern fiction).)

And it's sad to think that a work that might make a serious ethical or artistic contribution might language in manuscript because it could never generate the fiscal resources to establish itself. Though I guess that's true probably of more books than any of us can imagine.

Third, another larger point: there's an important, perhaps invaluable, place for work that hybridizes genres and my current Thesean wandering through the copyright maze makes me wonder if I've entered a zone in which the legal structures in some ways militate against hybridity.

If my book were a work of journalism, not poetry, if it were a work of journalism, not fiction, I wouldn't have to clear license on these quotations. Presuming, however, that fiction is originary work, that poetry is originary work, using another originary work — a song rather than a newspaper report — requires payment, not just acknowledgment.

I had at one time presumed that this payment was to compensate for potential loss of revenue, that such use was assumed to fail the fourth point of a fair-use test, though such a determination was always confusing to me. If I quote the lyrics to "Blueberry Hill," a sound recording, in a poem, I don't duplicate "Blueberry Hill." I translate it. And I would think that my inclusion of the work is, if it does anything, more likely to send someone for that recording, rather than dissuading them from it, rather than replacing it (see the substitution test). But now it seems that such payment is not required against harm to or diminishment of the original recording to make money but against the lyrics themselves, which, because they are already licensed for fee, make money on their own and are therefore legally a separate, licensable entity. I have to pay the money because if I didn't they would have at least lost the money I could have paid them and would therefore fail the fourth point of the fair-use test, regardless, apparently of whether or not I would pass or fail the substitution test. And that, I believe, may enforce a certain conception of poetry on my present work.

Obviously, that is on the edges of things, something far away and almost slippery-slope-ish, but it's something I think about. I wonder what you think about it.

***

All of this has got me thinking again about the Bob Dylan-Henry Timrod blowup from last year (refreshers: #1, #2, #3, #4).

At the time, a local reporter asked me what I thought about it and (echoing #4 above) I said I wished Bob Dylan would rip off one of my lines: it might help me get around.

But since then I had the pleasure of hearing Katrina Vandenberg read (if you haven't heard her, go find her, and do buy her book) the poem "Record," in which eight words from Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" appear, words that cost her $100. The intersection is perfect. Vandenberg's is, too, a responsive poetry, one whose quotations are apt, whose quotations connect the work of the poet to the world beyond her own skin, important work. Amazing.

The reading was stunning, even if too brief, but I left thinking, if she has to pay Dylan for those lines, he ought to have to give something back for the Timrod thing.

The Timrod's all public domain, and I thought at first Dylan was doing his blues thing — there are dozens of blues lines scattered across the Dylan catalogue, most of them "traditional" (i.e., with no fixed author) — but I say if we're going to do the blues thing, and observe communal property, let's do it all the way. Poets sometimes are blues people who sing out of the chorus of forever, and occasionally they let you hear that chorus, they need you to hear that chorus. And I think there should be fewer barriers to that sort of thing. Or at least fair play (if not fair use).

***

And I'd go further to say that at some point there ought to be a test to see if the ethical impulse to brief quotation might be allowed to offset or override some of the other considerations. (In any case, I hope these folks get the proper remedies.) Until then, I've got to get back on the phone and keep my check-book open.

April 30, 2007 File under: Information Technology

Why is Matt Lauer's speaking voice a yell?

Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
April 28, 2007 File under: Alabama , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography

This morning a stranger tells me my digital camera is a sign that the end times are coming. He quotes Daniel: knowledge shall increase, and the people will run to and fro. Knowledge increases. Older women walk to and fro from one end of the pier to the other and back again. Seagulls, purple martins go to and fro. And I am trying to capture one of them before the end times come, before Jesus arrives. The stranger makes it more explicit: Oh yes—this always makes you comfortable doesn't it, the Oh?—Jesus is coming soon. And then: Do you know Jesus? Of course you know Jesus, he continues, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I'm guessing he means that if I hadn't have known Jesus Jesus wouldn't have lead him to me, though my guess would be that it would be better for the mission if Jesus had lead him to someone who didn't know Jesus, or at least it might have made for better conversation, but I would want to be an observer of that, not a participant in it, but about that time he moves on, to the end of the pier and then back toward the shore, and everyone is going to and fro, and the end times may be coming, but now it's time to go to the conference, so my time at the pier is at an end, but the martins and gulls continue to circle while clutches of men, the ones who's names are not yet carved in the benches' wood, are casting their lures deeper into that metallic water.

Soundtrack
April 23, 2007 File under: America , Information Technology , Intake

For a Monday morning, my "War on Terror" mix-in-progress:

"The Gloaming," Radiohead/DJ Shadow
"As We Go Up, We Go Down," Guided By Voices
"Welcome To The Terrordome," Public Enemy
"Nuclear War (version 4)," Yo La Tengo
"The Horror," RJD2
"Sneak Attack," DJ Qbert
"Send Your Man To War," Johnny Shines & Snooky Pryor
"War Begun," My Morning Jacket
"March of the Pigs," Nine Inch Nails
"War Pigs/Luke's Wall," Black Sabbath
"War at 33 1/3," Public Enemy
"War on War," Wilco
"Spanish Bombs," The Clash
"Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me," Charles Mingus
"Calm Like A Bomb," Rage Against the Machine
"The Empty Threats of Little Lord," Sunset Rubdown
"Bomb Yourself," TV On The Radio
"Atoms for Peace," Thom Yorke
"Great Atomic Power," Charlie Louvin
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb," Pilgrim Travelers
"There Is the Bomb," Don Cherry
"Nuclear War," Sun Ra
"Warm Canto," Mal Waldron & Eric Dolphy

Tryin' Hard Not To Lose My Head
April 17, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Lomography / Photography

We finished installing the 15,000 heads that are part of the Fang Lijun exhibition that will open tomorrow at The Lab

I've got a brace of photos up here.

Check them & it out.

Blabbermouth
April 15, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology

The author with a few of the several thousand miniature busts in Fang Lijun's Heads, which I helped install at The Lab all day yesterday.

I've been helping The Lab in several capacities, but I'm most happy to tell you, I've been developing a blog for the institution, which I invite you to visit at www.belmarblab.org, where you'll find more dealings with the tiny heads.

...

Photo by Sarah Skeen

Residual
March 30, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Found on a blog that belongs to someone whose name I cannot uncover just yet:

... Jake Adam York (whose work made my palms sweat at GSU last week) ...

That's a good thing, I hope.

###

Also, among the phrases given to search engines that were eventually recorded by my stats software:

jake adam york is an ass

There it is, whoever you are. The next time you're looking for it, you'll find it, and maybe some proof as well, I don't know.

###

Both blips got me thinking about the residues of our selves, or of ideas of our selves, to which we have increasingly more access.

A few years back, a reporter told me a source claimed to have had an affair with me, and I'm still occasionally accused on the basis of that suggestion.

You never know who says it. And usually the trace is human, a change in the weather that is you in the minds of others.

But sometimes there are these electric residues.

###

Reading Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox, another treatment of such residues. He calls it a "reverse memoir," a collection of all the things in his e-mail inbox on a certain day, what other people were saying to him, and so a reverse portrait as well, a kind of Hockney photo-collage, but in writing, where the pieces of observation imply the lens, the sesne.

Noah's reading tomorrow. You should go.

He's been described as "a handful of fire." He'll make more than your palms sweat.

###

Thank you.

Permalink | Comments (5)

Dear Allison, Dear Joshua,
March 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

You left just in time. This morning we woke to five, maybe six inches of snow. I am told the Farmers Almanac predicted this, but this is the first I've heard of it. Its almanac size to quote Allison.

Perhaps this is the appropriate afterward. Your visit was one of the best I can remember. The time you spent talking to our students was wonderfully instructive, even inspiring, if I may pull the raggedy term from the cedar chest again. Your readings were captivating, and the balance was perfect. What more is there to say? This silence, enforced in ice and water, seems right.

I wasn't as aggressive as Mathias in capturing your visit photographically, but I got a few shots for the record.

Joshua listening:

And Allison, I made the mistake of shooting you in digital. I think analog, or analogue, would have been better.

I'm told the control booth sustained a power failure about 3/4 of the way through your reading, Allison, and so much of the sound recording was lost, though we're combing the computer caches to discover what we can. I'm going to tell those who were hoping to hear it as a podcast that this is testament to the power of the reading. Josh, I've got most of your reading, and I'll be working on a broadcast version in the coming weeks.

Please tell everyone about the broadside. We'll have it up for sell next week on the Copper Nickel site.

And, in the meantime, please rest. I hope your memories of Denver are good ones, and I hope we'll see you both again before too long.

All my best,

Jake

Dear Mathias
File under: Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics

You coveted my camera. Maybe it was the bright LCD screen. I don't know. Maybe it was just the mood at the Apache. Maybe it was the magic of Zach reading from The Man Suit.

It's a Canon SD630. Really a daylight camera. It has a flash, but I always turn it off. I want the digital camera to act more like an analogue device. More like my Lomo, so I get these shots, which I thought you might enjoy.

Thanks so much for coaxing Allison and Joshua out onto the plains. We have a lovely time, about which more later.

I'm looking forward to your visit in October.

All my best,

Jake

You Should Already Know
March 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus are reading tomorrow (Tuesday) on campus (7pm King Center). Think what it would be like it Whitman and Dickinson were married and wrote poems in the same house.

Quit your job and be there.

A special surprise for those with loose bills: Copper Nickel will publish a limited-edition broadside of Allison Titus's poem "The Nineteenth Century" as part of this event. Only 57 copies. A free one to the first person who can tell me why only 57.

Noah Eli Gordon reads from A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of A Sparrow and a selection of his other 24 books this Saturday, 4pm, Cameron Church, corner of S. Pearl and Iowa. Reception to follow.

Renounce all other gods.

Next week in Denver: Danielle Dutton + Stephanie Young on Monday; Daniel Alarcón on Wednesday.

&&&

And I'm told I can say it now, Southern Illinois University Press will publish A Murmuration of Starlings next Spring as part of its Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. My manuscript was chosen for the second prize in this year's Open Competition. More details to come.

Permalink | Comments (4)

Letter of Recommendation
March 22, 2007 File under: Information Technology

To whom this may concern:

I've been asked to recommend to you as a candidate for consumption my the work of one A. Gadsden, but I have decided I cannot make that recommendation to you at this time, as I would much rather make other recommendations to you.

The first is that you obtain and read and re-read and re-obtain and re-distribute and generally repeatedly speak of and read Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit, just published (lovingly and lovely) by Black Ocean Press. This is the sort of book that you'd want working for you. Its numerous qualifications not only suit it for all manner of endeavor but are also more engaging that almost any novel. As the apparently or semi-dead Carlos ghouls through the book, which is populated like a Hall of Presidents, the most wonderful things happen. I will tell you now, if you hire this book to operate your front-end loader, you will suddenly find that you are the curator of a museum of miniature replicas of Mt. Rushmore carved into grains of corn. If you hire this book to teach your introduction to geography, you will suddenly find that while you were sleeping your entire house was moved by ants to the shores of a lake around which those who hated you in high school are constantly mixing new flavors of margarita for you to try, but you will never get a hangover or want to puke. If you hire this book for a tailor, you will find that everyone covets your clothes, especially the legislators. You will tell them they already own them, but they will be confused and will fall into a stupor in which a true democracy will arise.

Is A. Gadsden capable of such wonderment?

I'm enclosing with this recommendation a copy of Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which I'm calling my favorite album of the year so far. There have been some good ones, ones indeed I love, but this is it, not only a fulfillment of the promise that has been Modest Mouse for so long, but one that is inexpressably more wonderful than any of us, let alone A. Gadsden, could have imagined.

I give each of these works my highest recommendations and hope you will find an important place in your organization for each and I hope you will not hesitate to contact me if I may speak further on their behalfs and I hope you will not hesitate and I hope you will stop reading this now.

Sincerely,

You

Dear
October 12, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Do you get the blahgs sometimes?

I mean, you've got this thing, this space, this input form box which into which you stuff a little language, a pock that sometimes you think you're grouting, at other times a mail slot for a hopeful if shaky delivery. You think sometimes of pulling it out, giving it another dimension, making it maybe more soap-boxy, standing on it to say something. Sometimes the fantasy doesn't seem to require a third dimension and this input form seems like a soapbox already but you're getting maybe a little altitude sickness. Or it's your credit-card company: you know their address, but sometimes you don't want to send the ticket in.

You've got the blahgs, right?

You say, I think I'm tired of blogging. You say Maybe I'll kill my blog. You say You say Maybe I'll leave it up so folks can look at the smolder that used to be my campfire.

Maybe you say, You say Nah, I'll just redesign it, renew my interest, sort of like when I used to get a new haircut so I'd like myself more.

Or maybe you don't say nothin.

***

I'm getting more of these little chaps lately. Anne Boyer's (infra). G. C. Waldrep had a damn fine one from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press earlier in the year, The Batteries which rightly won the Campbell Corner prize. Matt Henriksen's got one, and Adam Clay's got one, and Julia Cohen's got one, and Zach Schomburg has one coming out, and Wendy S. Walters has a very fine one indeed, and Frank Sherlock's is very nice. Sure, these are brief, and maybe it seems not cost-effective in some way, poems per dollar, but in a lot of ways these are nicer than regular books. They're hand-made, so there's a touch in the book that complements that in the poems, and I dig that. I think I want, sometimes, to stop the blog and start making these little books and just send them out as letters of s sort, but I'm not very productive, so it would take me a while to get to everyone.

***

Is blog lazy or efficient?

***

I'm off to Tucson (infra) in the A.M. RMMLA in the afternoon and then reading at Casa Libre Friday night (infra). Some cactus and carne saca, I hope. Some sunburn, I'm sure.

Dead Letter Office, Part 3
September 1, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

This morning, I found two copies of Murder Ballads, also so recently de-contender-ized in the Colorado Book Award consideration, in the bargain books section at The Tattered Cover. I picked them up for $4 each, less than I pay my publisher for copies. Anyone want one? I'll pick this one up.

I also found a $4 copy of David Keplinger's The Clearing, which is a contender for the Colorado Book Award. The book's magnificent and certainly a must-read.

David's book has been out just a little more than a year, mine not even a full year. How quickly do these books get moved to the clearance rack?

Meanwhile, what's allowed to sit indefinitely?

I know a bookstore has to make space, has to move books that persist too long, but it takes a while to move a book of poems. I'm just now starting to see some notice of Murder Ballads here and there. The Blackbird review is just four months out, and the H_NGM_N feature Nathan Pritts kindly edited, with a review of the book, has been up just a month.

And I notice with my compatriots the same. Noah Eli Gordon has recently posted a link to a new review of his book The Area of Sound Called the Subtone that's been out for two years.

It takes a while.

I've taken some advice from Noah: with some grant money, I just bought a bunch of copies and am going to send them out.

So I think, from this blog, I will begin giving away a copy a week for the next ten weeks. I'll pick up the postage and everything. Alls you have to do is leave a comment or send me an e-mail with either the lyrics to an obscure country song or a good idea for a poem that includes a bizarre historical fact. Be sure to give me your address in case you win.

Meanwhile, I remain. Denver's cooling a bit, but still clear and blue. The next issue of Copper Nickel should go to the printer next week. Look for some subscription and pre-order options there soon.

Good weekend, dear reader.

Permalink | Comments (10)

New
August 6, 2006 File under: Editing , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

The new issue of storySouth is up, with some redesign, by me, that I'm still working through.

On Books
August 1, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Kevin asked me to answer the following.

1. One book that changed your life?

Of all, if I had to choose one, I'd say it was the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. When I was 17 and traveling with a school group in England, I was pulled into a bookstore where, among many familiar titles, I found a slim Everyman Edition of Thomas's Collected, which I bought for two reasons: (1) I liked "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night," which I'd read in Senior English, and I thought that if it was the single and this was the album maybe there were more such poems within; (2) it had some strange pictures in the back, including on of William Blake's woodcut of the Jacob's ladder (which has been mutilated into some of the graphics for this site) and a still of Le Chien Andalou showing the straight-razor cutting the eye (tasty). Something of a taste for the odd and the perverse and more of a thirst and a hunger for thick language tastier than a barbecue sandwich brought me to purchase that book, which was, I believe, the first book I purchased of my own interest and volition and with money over which I had sole possession. It turned out to be the first book I read entirely on my own, without tutoring or coersion, and the first book I managed to understand on my own, though I still don't understand every little thing in there. Basically, this was the book that taught me to read. I learned that if you ask the right questions of a text you can get a story out of it no matter how it wrinkles its Celtic nose. This lesson would help me later read more poems and things like Ulysses whatever those are. I would also say this book played a major role in my deciding that I wanted to write poems. Then comes all the rest.

2. One book you have read more than once?

Like Kevin, I find myself saying One? both because I've read many books more than once and because I do think, like Kevin, books should be for re-reading as well as for reading. Or, we might say, reading isn't just running through the pages front to back and could take years or decades and could go on for much of one's life.

So, two into this questionnaire, I'm going to refuse the question in a different way and say that I actually have a schedule of re-reading. Every Spring I re-read Leaves of Grass and every Fall it's Moby-Dick and somewhere in between I try to re-read Walden and Emerson's essays, and about 300 poems by Emily Dickinson. It keeps me grounded. I also like to re-read Absalom, Absalom! and If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem! about every other year. Other books I have a tendency to return to are Tristram Shandy, Irving's Sketch-Book, A. R. Ammons's Sphere, and Larry Levis's Elegy.

Most recently I re-read on the same day David Wojahn's Mystery Train and Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Probably Moby-Dick as it's a story and an anthology of most of what I love about early 19th-Century America. Otherwise Leaves of Grass.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Moby-Dick. Funniest book every written. Seriously.

5. One book that made you cry?

Without Sanctuary, edited by James Allen.

6. One book you wish had been written?

A Compendium of African-American or Black Comedy from Before the Civil War by Richard Pryor.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Black Beauty, which somewhere along the way lost its subtitle "Torture Device to Be Used in Fifth-Grade Reading Class."

8. One book you are currently reading?

The Singing Fish by Peter Markus. You should, too.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.

10. To whom would you pose these questions?

Adam Clay, Shanna Compton, Gina Franco, Zach Schomburg, Mathias Svalina.

On Community
July 31, 2006 File under: Alabama , Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

For no good reason I looked at my stats for July. The month is ending, but I haven't looked at my stats in maybe five or six months. Probably because I thought I was going to give up the blog. Also because I had much else on my mind, a lot of life changes, a new book, &c. I see today I'm averaging about 120 visitors a day.

I suppose this is good news. At one time, I would have smiled at this. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, but at present I'm mostly confused, because I haven't the faintest idea who reads this.

...

How do you know your community? How do you know what your community is, your place in it, what community to which you belong?

I used to think the answers were fairly straightforward. I used to think direct reciprocity was the best sign. You approach someone. They approach you back. In the face to face lay a recognition in which mutuality could be registered and in which community could begin. But when I think this way, I sometimes get depressed, as I am reminded again and again what gestures I've made that have not been answered, and I'm not sure if that means my gestures failed, if the lack of answer means I'm not welcomed in some conversations, if I am asked to remain apart, if I am persona non grata.

I've been counselled recently against making stuff up, assuming that the reasons are negative, against imagining the motives or the thoughts of others.

And I've entered two conversations lately that have me thinking reciprocity may be a misdirection.

I was reading today another blog, which I found through yet another blog, in which our writer discussed the feeling we can have that we need to have or are supposed to have a spiritual experience after trying to push toward one and how frustrating it is when the experience doesn't happen. We work toward the spiritual but don't arrive. The writer suggested that the sense of work must be abandoned. You can't invest yourself toward the spiritual. But you can make yourself receptive. This struck me as true, recalling how, even in my most serious religious disciplines, I felt not the transforming encounter with spirit I imagined but the structure of discpline, and the comfort a community in which reciprocity situated me. My transforming encounters occurred when I stopped asking, stopped insisting, when I just shut up.

I'm thinking, too, about an exchange I had recently in the context of a salon discussion about writing and the senses.

I was advocating for what I called a transsubstantial writing, in which one commits to putting everything into the poem, all the sensory information that can be gathered, so the poem would become not the report of the experience that might evoke response, but instead the form of the experience, such that it might be replicable in someone else. I said you put your concentration into the poem, and a reader taking the poem for the substance of the world for a moment might enter into that concentration. The poet does not withhold but provides and a serious reader, entering fully into the poem, enters what's provided, what experience. The poem is like messenger RNA, providing the ends to which a reader's knowledge might be joined, allowing for some replication. The poet doesn't endeavor to become immortal, but the poet makes way into places and lives and states neither he nor she could imagine. Through the poem, experience has a wider ken, and it can draw us together in an ethical relationship.

Someone in the audience asked what I meant by a relationship, how I would call it a relationship especially if I never knew who read my poem, if they never wrote me or told me. How is literature a medium for relation?

I was thinking of Whitman, of the seventh and eigth sections of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

7
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach-what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

Whitman was fond of thinking the book, the form he'd chosen for the poems, into his texts. Knowing the reader would hold the book, he imagined the reader holding it, and began using that book, that thing in the reader's hand, as a meeting place. For Whitman, the book was a structure for delay of relational attention, for holding his curiosity and later delivering it to a reader (if anyone's interested, I did the scholarship on this in an article that appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review back in 2001). He knew the relationship would be asymmetrical, that he might never have the return gesture, but he trusted that his hand — his physical hand, yes, but more to the point his writing, his handwriting that then became translated into the type in the book, which was designed for the hand (why he shrunk the 1856 and 1860 editions to better fit the traveling hand)— went out, open, and that it would find some hand.

So, too, I need to enter a renewed trust.

...

I do wonder, however, who reads my ladder, in part because, as a poet, I wonder where I fit, where I operate. My teachers, I would say, were what would be considered conservative, and I believe that I write poems that others would consider conservative. Richard Greenfield once described my work that way, meaning that I still held useful old concepts of line and poetic genre. And I think anyone who'd read Murder Ballads might agree: I wrote the book, most often, in song lines. Yet, I don't feel entirely comfortable understanding my self and my work situated in a community defined by poetic conservatism of one kind or another, for I value the conversation of Richard Greenfield, of Noah Eli Gordon, of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, of Hadara Bar-Nadav, of Major Jackson, of Natasha Tretheway, of Dan Albergotti, of Simmons Buntin, of Zachary Schomburg, of Adam Clay, of Tony Tost, of Joshua Poteat, of Shanna Compton, of Aaron Anstett, of Steve Mueske, of Stephen Schroeder, of Craig Arnold, of Larissa Szporluk, of Diann Blakely, of Gina Franco, and the less direct exchange I find in reading the books and blogs of Joshua Corey, Joshua Clover, Richard Siken, Gabriel Gudding, Elizabeth Robinson, and so many others. I find myself moving between two kinds of communities that have long been thought of as separate, opposed, and I have no idea what this means.

At times I'm a ghost, at others a distant greeting. Most often an open hand that, I hope, doesn't look like a slap about to happen.

...

Reader, who are you?

Where are you, so I might know, between you, where I am today?

Permalink | Comments (4)

Industry
July 13, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics

If poets, like musicians, could be assured of multi-book contracts if they had any manifest talent, if there was an industry to promote poets of all ilks and to drive consumer interest in poetry and to continually massage mass consumption, and if there was an industry that took poets on tour ("Monsters of Poetry" (yes, I know it was on The Simpsons)), would we complain as much as muscians do about their apparently execrable music industry?

Real Enough for Me
July 9, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology

Thanks, Jeff, for your comment on my last. Just to be clear, for me the question of sincerity and how it's construed becomes most thorny when the history of the music comes into play, so to speak. When I listen to Cash, it's hard for me, especially in the American recordings, not to think about the songs, where they come from, who did them before, what the songs meant in their earlier contexts. After all, though creepy per se, a song like "Thirteen" is at its creepiest and its coolest when Cash's rendition evokes and silences Danzig's original at once.

I'm no longer a very good guitarist, so I can't exactly share Jeff's experience of playing along with the records, in which case, I suppose I'd prefer some of the earliest, most unadorened versions of songs I love, though there would always be versions of songs, like some of live recordings of "Mannish Boy" in which the guitar parts are both more expressive and more clearly audible.

Still, after having been blown away by a sneak listen to Thom Yorke's forthcoming The Eraser, I find myself, though admiring the album's third track, "The Clock," preferring Thom Yorke's live acoustic version, performed recently on the Henry Rollins show where, though we miss the density of Thom Yorke's production, we hear the song's emotional rhythm more clearly.

Certainly there's value and joy in having many versions of each song. My interest, in my lecture, is in how a particular style gains a kind of cultural preference not necessarily because it's easier to hear, but because it's easier to consume, because it abets a specific political relationship to the music and, more importantly, to its makers.

...

Membra disjecta:

I discovered this week that the ascendency of the 33.3rpm 12" record lasted approximately 33.3 years.
Does anyone know what to call unpopped popcorn kernels left in the bag post-microwave?

The Sound of Real
July 6, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology , The South

Yesterday, I picked up the latest Cash CD which I am enjoying, though more than ever I am thinking about the sound of his oldness, which seems more and more important to the experience of Cash in recent years. In the most immediate frame, it's impressive in its expressiveness, not of anything in particular beyond hurt or pain, an audible measure not simply of age but of pathos and thereby of artistry. But, of course, it's also a measure of his venerability, his longevity, even of his particular biographical difficulties, his long abuse of alcohol and drugs and, more recently, the loss of June Carter Cash. And in this disc, the sound is here, the slight tired that has become the timbre of the last few volumes of the American recordings and even the interesting hiccups in the tempos of the songs, Cash's variance with the traditions he continues to engage, something you can hear precisely because so many of the songs are covers.

Like Paul, I'm taken with "God's Gonna Cut You Down," which seems to address the not-too-old performance of it (under the title "Run On For A Long Time") by the Blind Boys of Alabama. In Cash's version, drums and hand-claps help build the country-church feel that's important to the song while an acoustic guitar, played with a slide, connects the performance to the blues tradition; in the Blind Boys' version, an upright bass carried both melody and rhythm under the gospel harmonies that made me forget that even Elvis recorded this tune.

There's a wonderful feeling in the Cash album, all the way through, and it's especially audible in this song when Cash sings about God's calling him by name, by his first name. Against the background of the Cash legend, we are invited to read the song as a miniature narrative of his conversion from his hard-drinking years, a turn back to gospel roots, which is exactly what the song calls for. There's something anamnestic about it. Strongly so.

Powerful as it is in its narrative and in its self-reading, it wouldn't be nearly as affecting, I think, if it weren't so heavily acoustic. Everything here is acoustic, from the percussion to the accompaniment, to the voice. This is, again, part of the second or third coming of Cash, the unadorned, the stripped down, the bare to the barren. But in moments like these when Cash addresses a blues tradition, the acoustic—the aggressively acoustic qualities capture me particularly.

I'm now working on a lecture about the electrification of the blues and the ways in which, historically, acoustic and electric sounds have connoted sincerity (or the lack of it), with deeping interest in the racial complexity of blues diasporas, and my time with this latest Cash record is helping me bring it, somewhat, into focus.

Blues, guitar-based blues, is rooted in the Mississippi Delta. The recordings of Delta musicians in the Delta itself are often referred to as country blues, though this must be a retronym, something applied to the music after it had, in some obvious persons, moved to the city, most notably to Chicago, for what distinguishes country blues from the Chicago-based blues of, say, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf (both of whom recorded some early work in the Delta, is electricity. The tonality is the same, the scales are the same, the rhythm is the same, even the songs are the same, in some cases. Once blues moves to the city, it is louder, and it gains some new timbres—Muddy's guitar, for example, gets a little cleaner in its high-note slide solos, Hubert Sumlin's work on Wolf's records can also organize around various single-note lines rather than voluminous chords that mark the work of someone like Mississippi Fred McDowell—but in many ways, it's the same music. As Muddy Waters once explained, they just plugged in to be heard.

Ironically, however, despite a relatively strong increase in audience through the agency of modern record companies and radio stations and an importantly influential hold on American music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in some ways the electrification of the blues ensured the gradual silencing of the blues. Electrified and citified, the blues seemed to become more accessible to white listeners and, more importantly, to white musicians, who adopted blues forms, especially blues solo guitar, and by the mid-1960s the most popular blues musicians in the world may have been the Rolling Stones.

To the Stones' credit, they did a lot to recognize the influence and the importance of black blues musicians. As Muddy Waters would say: "Before the Rolling Stones, people didn't know anything about me and didn't want to know anything. I was making records that were called 'race records'. Then the Rolling Stones and other English bands came along, playing this music, and now the kids are buying my records and listening to them."

But at the same time that the rise of blues-inflected British rock was becoming more and more popular and drawing attention to blues music, the interest of many white consumers turned to the country blues, and musicologists and afficianados scoured the country in search of new talents and lost musicians, like Son House, who was "re-discovered" in Rochester, New York, in 1964 (or so), and brought to public attention as a solo acoustic guitar player and singer. More and more, authenticity of black blues music was measured by the lack of electricity. More largely, sincerity itself, in the cultural imagination, seems to have been tied to lack of electricity, as is witnessed in the uproar over Dylan's acoustic set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (or in the story of this uproar, which some dismiss as legend).

Though against these developments the perseverence of musicians like Muddy Waters and the emergence of funk and the continued rise of James Brown as a major music figure are all even more miraculous than they seem at first, there's still something about the association of sincerity with the acoustic sound that is especially tragic for the blues musicians, especially since folks like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf had to move north to gain access to electricity, even at a time when the South was extensively wired for electricity. There's something about the situation in the mid-1960s that requires blues music to return to the Delta, to sound poor, even when the increased prosperity of some of the genre's greatest musicians is largely dependent on their move out of that Delta.

Now the Delta is thoroughly electrified, in its music especially, as the work of greats like Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside show, and the electric North Mississippi sound has made bands like The Black Keys possible. Even the White Stripes betray a strong North Mississippi influence as they cover songs like Son House's "Death Letter." And in many ways, this issue of authenticity seems historical rather than contemporary.

But in Cash, it's all renewed. At least for me.

I remember getting the first American Recordings album and thinking, as Cash alternated between songs of devilment and songs of prayer, that in many ways this was an answer to, if not an out-and-out remake of, Son House's Delta Blues and Spirituals. Of course, the rhythm isn't peculiar to blues, and it's even a bit problematic to separate blues from country or folk music fundamentally, especially since the musics were very closely intertwined in the days of the Mississippi Sheiks and Jimmie Rodgers, before "race records" were introduced as market segmenting devices. But Cash, in the studio with Rick Rubin, manages to evoke the intersections of race in American music since the mid-1930s.

That Cash, as a singer and song-writer, shares gospel roots with musicians like the Blind Boys of Alabama, makes this sort of evocation inevitable. That the present offering sounds so wonderful, so energetic, makes me wonder at the status of the racial dimension in this music and at how long it will continue to be a part of the experience of this music. That Cash also sounds tired in places makes me wonder if this will fade, something I both want and do not want.

Is there a peace that won't forget? And if so, what will it sound like? Will it sound real? And can we sing it together?

Reconstruction
June 8, 2006 File under: Information Technology

Fortified with 9 Vitamins and Iron
March 21, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion

Some shots from the show at Ironton

Entering

A glance at my 32-linear-foot poem (over 90 cubic feet in all).

The actual beginning....

I don't know if you can see it clearly, but the poem rolls in three horizontal columns.

The rolling's interrupted by this collection of photos (which I'll post again later) and a second poem that acts as a kind of a legend.

Some close-ups on the panels.

Shots of Emily's arrangements later.

We had a good opening. Maybe 100 or so folks showed. Most stayed to read some of it. Which was nice, if unexpected. I'm accustomed to folks buzzing in and out of the galleries, maybe deciding to come back later.

And a lot of folks asked for text to take away.

I was planning to turn this into a book, but not for another year or so. I may, however, go ahead and work on it, so I can offer it when the exhibit closes.

Hope you all enjoy these few shots, which partially explain my recent silences, on which more later.

Resolutions
November 21, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics

Catching

Coming back into my body now. Weeks: readings, radio spots, grading, teaching, reading, thinking.

Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fot with linguists and contenders...

I have witnessed and waited, but I have arguments, if few mockings.

Balance

A few weeks back, at the release reading for Murder Ballads, I began to notice things about the book's arrangement as I was reading from it, certain symmetries I can't remember intending though I'm glad are there.

I started thinking, after the reading, how your writing mind, when it's working well, does so many things you're not aware of exactly. You think the poem means a certain thing. You act to preserve that value, to value that meaning. Yet, the poem has other potentialities.

Once alienated from the moment of specific production, you re-enter the poem — again, not so much as a specific statement or a specific value (though this is important, sometimes more than others) but as a process by which meaning is made. And new meanings are made. Some of them are the same as the ones originally intended. Others are new or newly visible.

Walking

Kevin:

I've been thinking a lot about your earlier post, particularly in relation to some of the comments Nick Piombino left at my blog on Hart Crane and my own understanding of the poem as performative utterance, a dialogic exchange, if you will.

Performative utterance.

A performance of meaning.

The meaning of performance.

Notice that all three ideas place as much emphasis on the writer as the reader?

Require the reader to imagine a writer writing this poem, to become interested in those processes by which this text comes to arrive as a text capable of producing, of re-producing meaning, as much as recording it.

Not poems as reliquaries. Poems as prayers.

Prayers

I am praying a lot now.

I go to the reading. A room full of people I do not know.

I take my dark book from my coat pocket (right size) and begin to read. A poem about hate crimes, racist murders, lynchings. Yet, I look like and sound like the kind of person I'm condemning. I have to say the "n" word in one of the poems. Will it seem like I am the kind of person who has this in his idiom? Or the kind of person who needs to enter into certain reticulations necessary to arrive in a certain place?

Or will I be two people, occupying the same column of flesh and breath, a prism through which some intention is refracted into color, some into others. Which colors fall within the visible spectrum?

More importantly, what will they hear?

Love Letters

Roxanne:

What do you think of my current approach to such sympathetic reading--to read text as you would read a love letter?

I love a reader.

As in letters from a lover, we read closely, carefully, repeatedly, and search for clues to how s/he wants us to read it, regardless of the opacity (opaqueness?) of the language/style/form.

Text as a record of desire and what we want is the desiring, the rebirth of desire, the reaching out, the erotic.

How iron reaches out for iron.

Painful or fulfilling.

A connection.

A question asked.

A thousand answers.

Each one containing something you need to hear.

Exactly as Exactitude
November 13, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

In response to my late-night note about teaching poetry, Dee responds:

The word "exactly" however, is not believable. How can the ideal reader, one with the best of skills and sensibilities and sympathies, possibly reenact the process exactly? And why would he/she want an exact replica of the process?

May I say if not believable that we must act, provisionally, as if it is believable, possible?

I've been slowly, fragmentarily, as I have the time and as my mind clears, thinking toward my own articulation of sympathetic reading, and I can say (provisionally) that I think good reading begins with the attempt to read the text as the author meant it to be read. Maybe we won't enter into the writer, per se, by following the bread-crumb trail back into the forest of thought, but we should enter into the writer's productive subjectivity, his or her imagined or created author or authority, the proximate if not ultimate source of the poem. Of course we won't get an exact shit-and-sweat replica of the process, but if we use exactly as a telos then we arrive more closely. Allow me my fiction.

Permalink | Comments (5)

What I Keep Trying To Teach My Students
November 7, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

Poems may not be products of a process that is over as much as records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly, if you read them carefully enough.