September 15, 2017 On Poetry On Finding a Lost Ezra Pound Poem in a Castle By Daniel Swift The Schloss Brunnenburg, where Ezra Pound once lived. Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. —Ezra Pound I found this short poem by Ezra Pound as I was researching a book about Pound’s years in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. It appears for the first time in my book The Bughouse and in the Fall issue of The Paris Review. Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg, in the Tyrol, in Northern Italy, which is the fairy-tale castle where Pound lived late in his life, and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost, it just hadn’t been found; and perhaps this is because it doesn’t look quite right. It is too tender, too small. It isn’t hugely complicated. Everyone knows that Pound was the archetypal impossible modernist, austere and difficult. Yet here was a little poem, written on the back of an envelope, about flowers. It lacks, for better and for worse, the grandeur we expect. Read More
August 14, 2017 On Poetry Unlocking the Unconscious Through Poetry By Matthew Zapruder Thiago Rocha Pitta, Heritage, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Thiago Rocha Pitta On the cover of this pocket-size edition of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poet stands in a doorway. He wears the somehow simultaneously ill-advised and completely stylish ensemble of a half-unbuttoned patterned shirt and tight beltless pants. Looking closer, the doorway seems to open not to a room or to the outside but to a closet: on a shelf behind him there is a pot or urn, and the flatness of the photograph makes it seem a bit as if he is wearing it on his head, like a bizarre hat. He is looking straight out of the front of the book, with a direct, slightly furrowed expression. He is about to smile beneath his full mustache. Something strange is just about to happen. When I bought this copy of Self-Portrait, in 1993, I had just begun a doctoral program at UC Berkeley. Full of a desire, secret to everyone including myself, to live a creative life, I was skeptical about, but also attracted to, poetry. Now, holding this same book in my hand, I remember that time, and how Ashbery’s poems at first didn’t seem to make any sense, or go anywhere, or do anything. I felt angry reading them, as if I were in the presence of a giant literary hoax that I had the choice either to sanction or to condemn. The situation felt profoundly ethical to me. The poems offended my sense of what poetry, and art, should do. Read More
August 3, 2017 On Poetry Satellites Are Spinning: Notes on a Sun Ra Poem By Paul Youngquist Sun Ra, taken during the filming of Space Is the Place. Courtesy the collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis. Sun Ra, the visionary leader of the jazz ensemble he called his “Arkestra,” once submitted a manuscript of poems to a commercial publisher, receiving it back with a curt editorial comment: they seemed written in an alien language. He took it as a compliment. Like most readers of his poetry, I encountered it first in a form other than book. I wish I could say I bought those old El Saturn records with poems printed on their jackets—that would make me so cool—but I came to Sun Ra late, after he’d left the planet (in common parlance, died) in 1993. I never saw him perform live, I bought only digital versions of the Arkestra’s recordings, and I confess I never bothered reading their microtype liner notes. Sun Ra’s poetry remained unknown to me until I heard it late one night. I was watching that glorious low-budget science-fiction blaxploitation docudrama, Space Is the Place (1974): The pulsating orange spaceship carrying Sun Ra and the Arkestra to planet Earth has just landed. Wearing a Pharaoh’s headdress, Sun Ra speaks quietly about music as “another kind of language,” not alien but concerned with other worlds. Cut to June Tyson, his favored vocalist, head wrapped in gold netting, eyes shaded by bronze aviators, mouth smiling as she sings, in silver tones, “The Satellites Are Spinning,” by Sun Ra: The satellites are spinning A new day is dawning The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening Oh we sing this song to A brave tomorrow. Oh we sing this song to Abolish sorrow. The satellites are spinning A better day is breaking The galaxies are waiting For planet Earth’s awakening. Read More
July 6, 2017 On Poetry Queer Bubbles By Andrew Ridker How CAConrad turns ritual into poetry. CAConrad in a still from The Book of Conrad, a 2015 documentary by Delinquent Films. Last year, I attended a reading at Over the Eight, the now-defunct Williamsburg bar and performance space. Eileen Myles was headlining. But another poet, CAConrad, a close friend of Myles, captured my attention. He took his place at center stage, a large man draped in billowy clothes and what he calls his “war hair,” which he hasn’t cut since 2006, on the three-year anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Baghdad. He read from a piece entitled “Power Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.” It began with what sounded like a short story or anecdote: “I occupied a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said, “to bless children with bubbles that will make them queer.” He went on to describe the reactions of passersby as he blew bubbles, shouting that they had magical properties to “help rid the world of homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of stupidity.” The audience laughed. Some cheered. Conrad smiled. “Bubbles, of course, do not have such powers,” he acknowledged—but he was serious, serious about the act of standing on a corner blowing bubbles and watching how the world responded. After relating the anecdote, he told us that he’d taken notes on the experience. These notes became a poem, which he read aloud. The poem was completely unexpected—it was not in any way about bubbles, for one thing—but it was funny, angry, shot through with violence and informed by a reverence for nature. The first lines stuck with me: “I was naked / on a mountaintop / kissing someone / who loved me,” and the last: “there is nothing little about the cicada revving up while / we think our car horns / are so impressive.” The audience was rapt. You could hear the uninitiated whispering: Who is this guy? Read More
May 15, 2017 On Poetry Wax Poetic By Carson Vaughan Fonograf Editions brings poets to vinyl. To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl—the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls—is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator. “The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. “The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.” We were discussing Aloha/irish trees, a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions—a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy production process that marks most professional recordings. In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them; they didn’t know they were cutting an album at all. “It was like having your picture taken when you weren’t posing,” Myles says. Reading their poem “Sorry” on the first track, they trip on the line “let me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful”—restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, “Fuck, this is so hard.” They finish, but not well. “I think I’m just gonna read that one again.” Read More