Rapscallion Pudding

http://tragedyseries.tumblr.com/

Tip Of A Butterfly Tongue

http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/vote

If Anyone Else Is Stalling Out A Bit...

Here is a letter to Eva Hesse from Sol LeWitt. There is an exhibit of their work that is closing today, but there are some photos on this website, and it is fascinating to see the influence they seemed to have on one another.

UNFINISHED

I just came across this intriguing project. I'm excited to learn about this press in general, and I have begun saving my pennies to buy a copy of Unfinished. I will post a picture when I get it!

And congratulations to graduates, and to everyone else for a completing another semester! I will miss you all terribly, and hope to see you soon!

Erasure Festival at Walker Art Center

Here is a video of the Erasure Poetry Festival that took place in Minneapolis last month. Travis MacDonald reads from The O Mission Repo, Janet Holmes talks about her process of erasing/collaborating with Emily Dickinson, and our own Matthea Harvey reads from her erasure of the biography of Charles Lamb while showing the illustrations paired with it. The erasure becomes a lovely and poignant verse around the words Mary and Lamb. Visually fantastic - Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWecWN5fP0U
---
Saundra

...I'm Chuck Bass.

For those of you willing to indulge my latest insane project, here's ...I'm Chuck Bass.

Her Noise

This film on the making of a sound art exhibit touches on a subject that pops up on that VIDA blog, and one that plagued (plagues) me while working on the poetry festival, that I was a feminist organizer concerned with female representation at the festival, and we still wound up with more men reading (both among featured readers and students- at SLC!). I can tell the story of how this happened, but can't anyone?

There's also some commentary on zines, commerce, and some great music. If anyone wants to start a band after graduation, let me know. I'm serious.

Response Burger: A Story of Rejection : Ada Limón : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Response Burger: A Story of Rejection : Ada Limón : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Ada Limon sheds some inspiring light on rejection here. I've been excited about rejection letters lately. It's a little ridiculous, but it makes me feel like I'm in the game. (Which--for once, since I'm not sporty-- is nicer than just watching from the sidelines and wondering what it would be like to play.)

The Dumpster Project

This almost makes me cry.

http://thedumpsterproject.com/

mending the potholes of Paris: Juliana Santacruz Herrera

This incredible woman fixes the potholes/cracks in the sidewalks of Paris...with yarn.

Wallace Stevens' The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

Upon seeing a quote from this lecture in Don't Let Me Be Lonely I was intrigued, as I remembered the lecture as standing in opposition to works such as Rankine's. Upon rereading it I realized I was not entirely, but mostly, mistaken about that. I like to think about the lecture as a an unexpected starting point for Rankine's work. I will link to the lecture, but here's an excerpt:

"...if a possible poet is left facing life without any categorical exactions upon him, what then? What is his function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their readers to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination become the light in the minds of the others. His role, in short, is to help people live their lives."

Uncanny Valleygirl

Just wanted to post briefly about a new project I started this weekend, Uncanny Valley Girl: an exploration of the uncanny valley via Hannah Montana fanart I found on the internet.

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The name captures the idea that a facsimile which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction [Wikipedia].

Here is an article about it from the late, great Damn Interesting. Some YouTube examples of robots that might evoke the response are here, here, and especially here and here.

--Ryan

Poetry and Labor

I've been listening to some of the presentations from last year's conference on Poetry and Labor, which focused on poetics and politics for poets who work outside of the academy.

Here is a link to their blog. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Joron's thoughts about aversion to labor and the elitism of breaking social expectations.

It all seems particularly relevant as we prepare to graduate and navigate and/or deny the Vocation-Job venn-diagram. If anyone already knows where they stand on any of these issues, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

The McCarty to Bonney Transition.

It is such a pleasure reading a book that takes place where I'm from. It's even better that I adore the book.

I'm pretty sure that both the Mescalero territory, and the Chisum's home are in southern New Mexico. Here are some of my brother's photos from that area. He walked the entire length of the continental divide in the United States and has some amazing photographs. However, keep in mind that is rarely rains. (Average precipitation is less then 10 in/year.) It just happened to rain while he was there and everything looked unusually green afterward.

I'm trying to find my (lesser-in-quality) photos of Fort Sumner and Mr. The Kid's grave, but they are MIA. I used to go there in high school. Anyway, my family has been in NM (southern and eastern) 4-5 generations and just to indulge myself, here's a family photo.

Moving Poems

Feeding into my obsession with moving words, here is a website --- it is an on-going anthology of videopoems, filmpoems, and animated poems appearing at a rate of one every weekday.  

Here is How to Make a Dadaist Poem.  

It demonstrates the process of my experiments with dadaism.

~Saundra

Giest Erasures

I played around with some erasures from the Canadian magazine Giest

Blackout Horoscopes for April: Austin Kleon

For you! All the rest are here: April Horoscopes!

Leigh Stein: a young poet bringin' the lolz

So, I really love Leigh Stein's work. Her blog, "Mythical Creatures," is FULL of goodies.

This poem is especially wonderful:

SECOND DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

I am wearing my librarian costume.
Yes, I saved it from the fires.

In the future, when we say antiquity, we mean
state fairs and musicals. We mean affairs

of state, amusement. You left me a message
to say you were sad but you understood
which state I was coming from and I’m wondering

now which state you meant. West of us?
Or did you mean a state of mind?

I don’t have states of mind, I only have sweater sets.

I get dressed up and then I undress. I’d show you,
but this is a dispatch, I’m the dispatcher.

The calls come into my call center and
it’s my job to say, what’s the future

of your emergency?

Our new state flag is an aurochs,
not to celebrate extinction, but

to celebrate the wild part of us that died
in 1627. They moved her skull to Stockholm.

I wear my state flag like a dress.

____________________________

For National Poetry Month, she writes on her blog, "For National Poetry Month, I will be writing/posting poems using dialogue from reality TV shows. Please to enjoy."

AWESOME. Ryan, I'm lookin' at you to AWESOME this as well!

Photos from break

Spring 2011, a set on Flickr.

Here are a few pictures I took over break...I wish the weather hadn't gone in reverse.

The Botanical Gardens have an incredible orchid exhibit right now, I think it's going on for a while longer & recommend it to everyone. Besides being beautiful, there are a lot of strange (downright alien) looking plants in there as well.

Robert Grenier

I promised a while ago I would post about Robert Grenier (specifically, a link to his scrawls, also referred to as his "illuminated poems" or "holographs"), and here I am fulfilling that promise.

Silly as they look at first, I was initially skeptical about the scrawl poems (though having loved for a while Sentences, probably his masterpiece, a series of Saroyan-esque micropoems written on index cards, a digital version of which appears here), though I think one begins to understand in a new and immediate way, if only intuitively, the difficulties of written language seen at its near-ultimate extension.

Silliman sez:

What seems to interest Grenier most [in the scrawl poems] is the making explicit of the “coming to recognition” process of reading. He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word “pops” into consciousness & poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment.

Which feels right to me, although I have maybe a half-sense that there's a fair amount more to it that I can't put my finger on, whether about language as a kind of AI that's become more intelligent or pregnant with possibility than its inventors, or about written language's ability to replace the world, or at least spoken language (after all, Grenier is famous for "I HATE SPEECH", which, me too), or both –– or something.

About the above holograph, Grenier writes:

Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question.

I'd love to hear what you guys think. A correspondence interview between Grenier and Charles Bernstein is here.

--Ryan

Greying Ghost Press

Soooo since I've been blabbering and swooning about this press, I thought I should share it with the class! Greying Ghost is based out of Salem, Ma and publishes bright young poets in delightfully handmade books. I'd highly suggest Sugar Means Yes by Mathias Svalina & Julia Cohen. I can't stop thinking about it.

My new goal is to have some of my work published by them. Someday, someday.

<3 jamie

The Red & White Quilt Show at the Armory

--Matthea 

(can we have full class participation on the blog this week?)

We so excited

Important:

Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black's "Friday" As Radical Text



Also:

Vanessa Place - The Poetics of Radical Evil



--Ryan

[citation needed]

Just found this, one of the best ideas for a tumblr on the internet --

Citation Needed

Collecting Wikipedia's finest ^{[citation needed]} prose

Examples:

Sussudio ("The song was received mostly positively, and has been mentioned in numerous moments in pop culture.[citation needed]")

Islamic toilet etiquette ("When defecating together, two men cannot converse, nor look at each other’s private parts, and especially not handle each other’s private parts.[citation needed]")

Waterbed ("Homes with many occupants may be bothered by noise pollution coming from the bed, due to sexual intercourse.[citation needed]")

Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth ("Some threats for humanity come from humanity itself.[citation needed]")

Also, for the love of god please read the talk page for Unrequited love.

--Ryan

Maira Kalman

"As if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make the bears dance when we long to move the stars." – Flaubert, Madame Bovary

That is one of the quotes Maira Kalman has painted on the wall of her auto-curated exhibit at The Jewish Museum. You should go see it. Or at least read this. It's like walking around in her attentive, associative brain and it's lovely. I wonder if she knows Mary Ruefle?

Here is one my favorite Kalman paintings. Sorry it is so small.
It's called Man Leaping While Man Talks On Phone.


There is also an exhibit on Houdini.

happy world poetry day!

...and a NYT article about Twitter poetry:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20twitterature.html?_r=2

Against Bullshit (2)

Copyright law: getting stupider and more outdated every day.

Craig Venter, whose research team created the first synthetic life form last year by replacing the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum with one composed on a computer, just gave a talk at SXSW where he related the mind-boggling story of being sent a cease and desist and threat of lawsuit by the estate of James Joyce, for encoding the line "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” (from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in said bacteria. Venter claims fair use.

--Ryan

François-Marie Banier

inspired assignment

Hi all,

Here's a picture of the pictures I drew for our post-gallery visit assignment.  At the Tibor de Nagy, there were two really beautiful pastels by Joan Mitchell with text from James Schuyler poems.  My own attempt to recreate began with some of my favorite Jane Kenyon poems, and a box of crayons.  Quite elementary drawing skills, but hey, I tried!  Hope you're having great breaks :)

Oh, English

I stumbled upon this list of "Awesomely Untranslatable Words" and find it fascinating. Maybe we can invent some English translations.

Here are a few examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless.

1. Toska

Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

2. Mamihlapinatapei

Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” 

3. Jayus

Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh” 

4. Iktsuarpok

Inuit – “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” 

5. Litost

Czech – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

6. Kyoikumama

Japanese – “A mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement” 

7. Tartle

Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. 

8. Ilunga

Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional translators pinpoint it as the stature of a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.” 

9. Prozvonit

Czech – This word means to call a mobile phone and let it ring once so that the other person will call back, saving the first caller money. In Spanish, the phrase for this is “Dar un toque,” or, “To give a touch.” 

10. Cafuné

Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.” 

11. Schadenfreude

German – Quite famous for its meaning that somehow other languages neglected to recognize, this refers to the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune. I guess “America’s Funniest Moments of Schadenfreude” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

12. Torschlusspanik

German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.” 

13. Wabi-Sabi

Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”

14. Dépaysement

French – The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country.

15. Tingo

Pascuense (Easter Island) – Hopefully this isn’t a word you’d need often: “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.” 

16. Hyggelig

Danish – Its “literal” translation into English gives connotations of a warm, friendly, cozy demeanor, but it’s unlikely that these words truly capture the essence of a hyggelig; it’s likely something that must be experienced to be known. I think of good friends, cold beer, and a warm fire. 

17. L’appel du vide

French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

18. Ya’aburnee

Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

19. Duende

Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.” There’s actually a nightclub in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion, where I teach, named after this word.

20. Saudade

Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade. Altalang.com

Plants You Should Hate

Gentiana brevidens is a floppet of the worst—a vast leafy great weakly rubbish with tight heads of little and insignificant bluish stars in August, ridiculous at the end of those stalwart stems and wide wrappings of oval slack-textured foliage.

Cypripedium tibeticum is a small squat thing, rather like a malignant Tibetan toad in appearance (no less than in character) when it produces its single stumpy stolid flower of immense size, on a stem of some 3 or 4 inches. For this is an evil-looking, hoody sullenness, with broad straight segments and bulging lip, the whole being of a whitish tone, but densely striped all over with lines of purple-black, while the bag is almost entirely of the same lurid tone. In cultivation, however, it avoids this condemnation by very rarely growing well enough to show those flowers at all.

Veronica alpina deserves prosecution for its false pretences. Under this name we expect something better than this particularly dingy small weed with its large hairy pairs of oval leaves on the weak creeping stems of 2 or 3 inches, that end in a parsimonious little parcel of diminutive flowers in a pale lymphatic shade of slaty-blue. V. nivalis is another of the valueless little dirty sad-blue Squinnies.

Engravings by Abigail Rorer for Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer's Short Guide to Worthless Plants (Lone Oak Press, 2007). Descriptions by Reginald Farrer (1919).