CruelestMonth.com

Much Ado

To relieve my inbox of what ails it, here's a highly incoherent post (My Outlook inbox has become the barometer of my anxiety level.  How terrible is that?  I'm too sensitive for all these e-mails.  What are they really saying!?)

Okay, retournons à nos moutons:

The war of the War & Peace's continues!  We never wanted to pick a fight, but, as these things go, it was picked for us. Newsweek runs a feature this week. Galleycat weights one side with links. And Publishers Weekly reports.

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The 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honors the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year, went to Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (Wesleyan University Press).

Judge Marie Ponsot had this to say, "[Notley's] poems give us thirty-five years of political, personal, death-defying engagement.  The nature Notley most loves is human nature.  That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art.  Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use.  Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success."

The prize is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and carries a $25,000 award.

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Did you know that HC United, HarperCollins 6-time-defending Metro League soccer champions, has a fight song?  I didn't until last week when it was composed by our friend Brock.  As you listen, please note that we're singing about the "Libro League" not about the unfortunate, though reasonably successful, league of another era.  Download h_c_fightsong_rough1.mp3

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I received an e-mail about the launch of Literary Comments, a site run by Daniel E. Levenson, author of the poetry collection Are These My Lions?

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Stephen Burt reviews Time & Materials by Robert Hass for the NY Times: "The Limits of Influence".

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Thomas Fink interviews Noah Eli Gordon at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.  Follow the link to read more thoughtful questions like the one below (there are answers too):

TF: Novel Pictorial Noise (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, consists of fifty prose-poems, each a page or less in length and each followed by a line or two or three or sometimes more of verse. Sheila E. Murphy’s “American Haibun” is a prose-paragraph followed by one line, but your approach is more variable. I like what Ashbery has to say about this in his blurb—that “each prose-bloc” is “modified or modulated by the ghostly fragments that interleave them,” and the ghostliness often has to do with grammatical anomalies, like two prepositions in direct proximity that don’t normally interact. The modifications that Ashbery talks about are mysterious to me; how did you establish a relationship between the paragraphs and the verse, at least in your own mind?

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Finally, stretch your legs and make an event.  The American Academy of Poets offers proof of a busy October.  Academy events, Non-Academy events.

John Ashbery - mtvU's inaugural poet laureate

As reported this morning by the Times, John Ashbery has been selected the first poet laureate for mtvU--a subsidiary of MTV Networks.  The channel, mtvU, runs exclusively on college and university television networks.  From "An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation":

Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide.

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

Some very handsome galleys have arrived for John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which selects from April Galleons (1987) to Where Shall I Wander (2005).  I wish I had an image to share with you, but none are yet available (to me, anyway).  As I have the tendency to do when a quantity of proofs come in, I'm giving some away.  The first three readers to e-mail CruelestMonthPoetry@yahoo.com will receive a galley.  If you've received a book from me recently, your response time shall be staggered by an as-of-now undisclosed amount of time.  This poem happens to fit today:

"Still Life With Stranger"

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon
of the sky is passing over us.
Soon the world will have moved on.
Your love affair, what is it
but a tempest in a teapot?

But such storms exude strange
resonance: the power of the Almighty
reduced to its infinitesimal root
hangs like the chant of bees,
the milky drooping leaves of the birch
on a windless autumn day--

Call these phenomena or pinpoints,
remote as the glittering trash of heaven,
yet the monstrous frame remains,
filling up with regret, with straw,
or on another level with the quick grace
of the singing, falling snow.

You are good at persuading
them to sing with you.
Above you, horses graze forgetting
daylight inside the barn.

Creeper dangles against rock-face.
Pointed roofs bear witness.
The whole cast of characters is imaginary
now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits.

--from Hotel Lautrémont (1992)

*The galleys go to Damion, Steve, and Mary.  Thanks for writing in!

Brand Upon the Brain

May 13th, John Ashbery will guest narrate for Brand Upon the Brain! , a film by Guy Maddin, at Village East Cinemas @ 7pm.  It promises to be "a one-of-a-kind cinematic spectacle...with an 11-piece LIVE orchestra, a 5-piece LIVE Foley (sound effects) team a LIVE celebrity narrator, and Castrato supplementing the filmic image."  I refer you to this description of the event.

NY Times: "Marks Mysterious and Foundlings Sad: O, Tangled Web!"

"The Heroes," "Litany"

Today is that last day of the John Ashbery Festival. I know that we've been covering the heck out of this, but, hey, we're big fans. Unfortunately, I did not attend last night's reading. I believe I put my reasoning most succintly to a co-worker Friday afternoon (after a long, long week), "I have brain worms." What that means? Well, that's anybody's guess, but I feel that it explains itself in a circular way. Today, however, I summoned my resolve and removed myself from the couch. Ashbery's "The Heroes" and "Litany" were performed and read at the Bowery Poetry Club. I'll premise this re-cap by saying it was the best reading I have ever been to.

"The Heroes"--It's a long cast list, so I won't reproduce in its entirety, but the key players were David Lehman (Theseus/Astyanax), Vincent Katz (Patroclus), Patricia Spears Jones (Circe), and the "disembodied voice of God," John Kruth (Narrator). Vicki Hudspith, the director and chorus, informed the audience that no read-throughs or directing had occurred beforehand, so we were left to the spontaneity of poets, which proved to be, as one would expect, rather funny.

The choicest moment was when Circes mused about her enchanted girdle:

Circes: I shall wear this girdle and every man who sees me in it will fall hopelessly in love.

Narrator: She slips on it. Oops. She slips it on.

Despite the merriment, the performance made room for true Ashbery moments:

Ulysses: The only thing we know about each other is that we happen to be in this room.

The play concluded to happy applause, though we didn't realize what unlikely treat we were to experience next. For those familiar with "Litany," you know it exists as two parallel columns of text. Mr. Ashbery chose to read the columns simultaneously, with the help of James Tate, Ann Lauterbach, and Dara Weir, to accurately represent the poem. Initially, I thought that this was going to be a well-intended disaster, but Mr. Ashbery proceeded with confidence and a sly smile, saying that "Maybe in all that gets lost, you'll find something."

So they began; and after subtle adjustments of timing and mood, the audience sat with open hearts. The simultaneous reading produced some stunning effects. Whenever one poet paused, allowing the other's voice to emerge from the din, the singularity of the remaining voice claimed absolute attention. These moments existed not solely from dramatic effect, but also in their impeccable content. "The purring of some donkey," "choreographed intrusions," "not forward into the ring of the other shouting," "waiting is forgotten like thorns in the memory," "cacophony performed its useful function, "parallel tide, related function."

Even when the voices ran together, the language determined where focus was kept. At no point was the audience lost, and I've never before wanted to hear someone speak as much as I did when James Tate was left alone to conclude the reading. I could think of no better conclusion to the entire festival.

So I bid farewell to a weekend of collective interest. I have lots of reading to catch up on.

Pocket of Fog

Billy Collins seen as the people's poet
More than 50 writers and musicians who work in the commercial fishing industry are set to gather in Astoria Feb.24 to 26, 2006 for the ninth annual Fisher Poets Gathering.
Here's a review from Verse on John Ashbery's Selected Prose.