All went well with Roger Williams epic (In RI) at Roger Williams University yesterday. Good turnout, fine acoustics, interesting questions from audience, even sold a book. They made a video - maybe we will air some of it somehow. Peter S. Thompson, RWU faculty, translator of francophone North African poetry, and home beekeeper, hosted reading. Afterward, resorted to local italian restaurant, where they accidentally gave us a $99. bottle of wine, & didn't charge us for mistake.

Winding down from last night's reading with Aleksandr Skidan, held at Brown's Slavic Dept. Good turnout. Forrest Gander brought his translation class. Mairead Byrne was there, too. Various intriguing Slavists listened in.

A. Skidan a serious writer, well-spoken about his aims & interests. (Looks much younger than his 42 yrs. His features bear a striking resemblance to a young (& healthy) Marsden Hartley, if you can imagine that.) Out of the absurdist/avant-garde/activist wing of Russian poetry - Arkadii Dragomoschenko a mentor & influence, the Mandelstam of "Verses on the Unknown Soldier", OBERIU... he mentioned some other figures who are important to him, but I didn't catch the names. He likes to play with "theory", deconstruction, disassemblng & reconfiguring famous works (Pushkin's poem "The Prophet", for ex.). But there is a strong emotional intensity & emotional/dramatic connection with real people & events underneath the games. Ferocious, ironic; awareness of pain & squalor. Hardship edge of life in Russia. Strong antagonism to Putin & oligarchy/mafia - he is politically active, sees need to revive some of the Samizdat spirit & networks, in a new form.

... thinking along these lines in prep for reading with Aleksandr Skidan next week, & also just finished Nabokov's 30s novel, Glory, in English, & trying to read along in it in Russian, now...

- typical Nabokovian elliptic puzzle-writing (sometimes so annoying - his precise description like a snobbish effete 19th-cent. botanist-dilettante, noting everything he sees through his magnifier-monocle - but then Nabokov turns weakness into strength, as all the quaint details & byways cluster around some plot-labyrinth of tragicomic pathos - sparkling vision) - about a dreamy very young "untalented" Russian emigre fellow, star-crossed in love, at loose ends after college, & venturing incognito across the border into Soviet territory (to his doom) - what he & his would-be girlfriend call "Zoorland"... (ie. Rusland, turned upside-down by the Bolsheviks)

Fine time at the Tazza reading last night. Mairead Byrne has a gift for comic, satiric poetry - a good M.C., too. This old buzzard enjawed hisself, along with all them decorous lamb-like collegiate young RISD bohos. & I got to accompany (con harmonica) MB on her heartfelt classic Irish lyric entitled "Oatmeal".

(A late evening downtown. While I was doing my hijinks, Sarah noted there were several real bohos - the solitary homeless ones, consigned to neglect - walking by the club windows. On a (rare) mild winter night.)

... then I'll be reading with Russian poet Alexander Skidan on Feb 11th, at the Brown U. Slavic Dept. Ochin interesne. Bolshoi spasiba, Tom Epstein.

Will be reading poetry tonight (briefly) at Tazza bar, in downtown Providence, with Mairead Byrne, Lisa Samuels & some RISD students. 10 pm. (Yes, I do emerge from den of hibernation now & then.) Also might be playing harmonica with guitarist Mark Milloff.

Attended Meredith & Peter Quartermain reading on Saturday at Bowery Poetry Club (yes, friends, occasionally I do leave the library. It's about an 8-yr cycle). Glad I went. Well-organized, sparsely attended. Charles Bernstein was there, along with Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan, the emcees. Some NYU students.

M. Q. read from Vancouver Walking, a book she said was influenced by Pound's Cantos historical grab-bag, which she was reading at the time. Also Charles Olson's passion for local news, & Zukofsky-Niedecker word-precision. (She is a very good reader. Every word spoken clearly & distinctly, yet without a lot of mannerism. Perfectly matching her style.) Now I'd like to read this book, though the poems were almost too dry and world-ironic for my taste. A long satire on the subliminal influence of Queen Elizabeth II on Canadian culture - seemed a subject not worth attacking, exactly. But that's just me. Overall it was fascinating to hear someone contemporary carrying on a certain vein of 20th-cent. poetry in an honest, authentic way. (Plus I was in Vancouver once. Can't think of a better city for walking.)

P.Q. read a chapter from work-in-progress, a memoir. An early passage, relating adventures as the youngest boy (age 7) in parochial British boarding school. Very charming, entertaining. I spoke with him briefly after - asked whether he simply had good recall for those days, or whether it came back to him during the writing. He said the project started when he & a friend decided, as a joke, to write some of each others' autobiography (sounds like a Brit schoolboy thing, to me). Soon after, he was flooded with childhood memories, & started writing it in earnest.

He told me he set some firm rules of style beforehand (in order to avoid memoir-boredom) : ie., no subordinate clauses. I said "the Hemingway approach?" He said he hated Hemingway, but, yes. It worked - became fast-moving, a "page-turner", in his words.

John Ashbery is reading Providence on Wednesday. Last time I heard him read was at an Ivy League College in Northampton Mass. in 1971. The reading was loudly heckled by a member of the jazz-fusion band which had opened for Ashbery, a tall Af-Am sax player in a dashiki, who accused him of escapist effete a-political out-of-touchness. Ashbery responded that he didn't think he was required to write in any particular way. Heckler finally walked out, & I followed him down to the basement cafeteria where he was hanging out with the other band members. Engaged him in some conversation, defended Ashbery etc. in a friendly way. He accused me of being a rich preppy honky who didn't know anything (in a friendly way). We left on good terms. I went back to the reading, & spoke to Ashbery about it, who invited me & a couple friends (who had traveled with me up from Providence) to a party afterward. We went to the party. I remember we sat tongue-tied & in awe at his feet for a while, then he said he had to go make a phone call, & we didn't see him after that.

My Ashbery adventure of 35 yrs ago. That was when he was still The Greatest in my eyes.

Reminder (tomorrow night) :

CORNELIA STREET CAFE 
June 7, Wednesday, 6-8 pm. 

 
INTERCULTURAL POETRY SERIES 
hosted by Andrey Gritsman (www.interpoezia.net)  

 
AN OSIP MANDELSTAM CELEBRATION
Celebrate the release of an anthology of translations of 
Mandelstam edited by Ilya Bernstein for Ugly Duckling Presse.  
 
(http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org) 

 
Come hear translations of the Russian twentieth-century
poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) read by many translators. 

 
Cornelia Street, off Bleecker (in NYC) 
(www.corneliastreetcafe.com) 

Article in Times today on renaissance of lectures & public readings in NYC. With photo of KGB bar (cafe?) poetry reading. I'd like to read there. I have an official KGB t-shirt (from the real KGB) which my wife got inside CIA headquarters (no, she is not a secret spy). I could wear it to the reading.

just got back from Kent Johnson & K. Silem Mohammad reading, downtown. should have hung around to say hello to Kent, at least, but was feeling shy & unsociable. spoke to poet Karen Donovan there, & CD Wright, briefly (we talked about Angola prison, near New Orleans). shook hands with friendly Michael Gizzi.

enjoyed hearing them - maybe write more about it tomorrow.

Kent's poetry projects a lot of heart & emotion - but at a slant, in a game. His clear unaffected writing style is a good vehicle for the larger set of weird rhetorical fun & games. but people miss the heart part, perhaps.

sometimes he does understatement very effectively : other times he could use it more - like when he (unfortunately) hammed up the Jaime Saenz translation he read. that should have been done in understatement.

the broad strokes, the hammer-blows - say in the Abu Graibh poem - might be looked at as coming out of Hispanic rhetorical tradition he's familiar with, but we're not so used to. but it was appropriate to the situation (ie. the prisoner abuse)

Kent has a real inventiveness, a particular scene-setting talent, that blends so well with the directness, the simplicity of his sentences, his style. it makes for dramatic poetry. unusual in the arch atmosphere of post-avantism. he can write political poems.

(nevertheless the recurrent obsessional object - insider po-biz culture - is not really worth the excessive obsessiveness - tho it makes a nice target for satire sometimes, I guess)

I liked Kasey's "Forest Ranger" poem best, tho even in that the comic persona was a bit derivative. It was very funny though, I was laughing away.

Otherwise the poetry didn't interest me too much, the flarf in-your-face too baroque for my taste.

Col. Fawcett's memoir, compiled by his son (Exploration Fawcett, see below), aside from its terrific descriptions of Amazon & Andes environments, shows an odd mixture of racist & humane attitudes. He debunks a lot of the local myths about the native ["savage"] tribes, praises them, befriends them; yet he echoes some of the typical racialist/colonialist biases of time.

There's also the familiar spiritualist/mythological/speculative gumbo (Ignatius Donnelly-like) about Atlantis, lost worlds, etc. Certain theosophical/speculative themes seem to come as a mythological package, you often find them grouped together.

I want to read Eliz. Bishop's old Time-Life country study of Brazil now, & some other writings.

Heard her read at Brown many years ago (early 70s). We stood face-to-face very close for quite a while at the packed after-reading party. She was very short! Friendly, not a bit pretentious - though as usual I was at a loss for anything to say. (Partly, I think, because I had been a little disappointed in the reading. I should have studied up more beforehand. She recited in such a quiet monotone - had trouble following it.)

I was in Hahvahd Squirrel Saturday night, after the reading. There was a 4-pc street band playing 60s music. I had me E harp with me, which is not as useful as you might think, but they started playing "Sympathy for the Devil" so I went up to the mike & joined right in. Of course they were a bit miffed to have the devil actually join them (but what's confusing you, is the nature of my game. . .). We had something of a mini-Altamont moment, though no limbs or instruments were broken. How could they know I was just coming down from a poetry reading. . .

Allen Bramhall seems a little like a solitary miner who's struck a vein, or an old New England water dowser with his birch-twig divining rod, out in the woods. His sentences don't describe anything directly, but you see things; there's nothing programmatic about his "abstraction", instead his poems convey a lot of feeling, without asking the reader to acknowledge anything in particular. He can be ironic, even sardonic, without being sarcastic or edgy in the usual (boring) ways. Much of his humor turns gradually outward and then back at himself. His work is fun to read, but it was good to hear him read: maybe he should get together with Jim Behrle for some audio sessions, & put out some sound blogs.

I have to get Sarah at the train station in a few minutes, a bit rushed here. But feeling warm & happy about Cambridge reading yesterday, courtesy of the mysterious Jim Behrle. Happy to meet Allen Bramhall & Beth, and hear him read his [afraid to use conventional adjective] poetry, which I enjoyed a great deal.

A fine thing today to see Allen had been reading my poems in Stone (written 30 yrs ago) & liking something he read.

About the photo : it was taken on Houston St, in my high school friend Chris Kraemer's loft looking over at the World Trade Center, in 1975. Chris was a promising photographer in NY, who made a living as a builder (he is an archetypal Finn from MN, whose dad ran a hardware store there). He knew some bigshot artists at the time, Vito Acconci, Susan Acolella(? - don't know who I'm talking about). Also a whacky Russian sculptor named Ernst Niesvestny. When Stone was published, Chris arranged a little party at his studio someplace in Williamsburg. I remember sitting on a huge wooden crucifix sculpture he had laid out on the floor, being toasted with vodka. The title Stone, of course, was an imitation of Mandelstam's first book, Kamen ("Stone") - an acronym of akme ("acmeism"). So this party felt appropriate. Chris married a New Zealand clothing designer so she could get a green card, & they ended up staying together & having kids. He lives out in the Bay Area now. That's his typewriter & cot (I use a Sears Constellation myself). I was living with them for a few months in NY, helping Chris on interior painting jobs etc, before going over to London to try to take Mick Taylor's place in the Rolling Stones.


(p.s. Monday morning : through Denny Moers, a former student of Robert Creeley & studio assistant to Aaron Siskind, I was able to get an actual Siskind photo for the cover of Stone - some sections of Inca wall in Cuzco. The Inca/stone/Mandelstam/Vallejo configuration shows up 25 yrs later in the penultimate sections of Forth of July. Yesterday was the traditional anniversary, by the way, not only of the death of John the Baptist, but of the execution of Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler.)

I will be reading so-called poetry with Allen Bramhall at Wordsworth Bookstore, in Cambridge (Harvard Sq.) this Saturday, Aug. 28th, 5 pm. Courtesy of Jim Behrle. Admission is free. Omission? That will be $5. So see you there!

I've added Allen Bramhall's tributary to my blog links.  I've been told we may be giving a reading together next month, up in the Hill-uv-Beans to the north (otherwise known as The HuB).  I haven't given a reading in 700 years, to be precise.

Emerged from my musty cave last night to attend reading downtown (at new spare restaurant-bar, Tazza) by visiting Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan. Funny, exuberant, bawdy, silly. Politics, art, sex, religion - all the serious stuff - are fodder for satire. Enjoy life, be free. Great singing (a complex aria set to some industrial engineering magazine?) by the startlingly pale Nada. Poe would have approved. High points for me were their version of the Book of Revelation (set to an antique novelty-items catalog), Gordon's take-off on Whitman (Song of My OwnSelf), Sullivan's long Kerouacky epistolary piece. Their performance style reminded me, oddly, of the atmosphere at the coffeehouse sketched in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

The evening was hosted by two Mikes w/microphone (Gizzi & Magee). Mairead Byrne was there too. This is Providence, reporting.

I met Joseph Brodsky once back in the early 80s, after a reading. I spoke to him about my interest in the Russians, and my tepid feeling about American poetry. His advice was, "Read Auden."

Now one can judge this the typical comment of a literary conservative. But I'm using it simply to underline (for emphasis) my previous post. In Auden, I think Brodsky recognized a literary professional in the Pushkinian/Petersburg mode.

On Saturday, thanks to Tom Epstein, I was able to get a ticket for the 2nd night of Russian poetry at Alice Tully, in the Rose reading room (a beautiful auditorium at night - 2 walls of windows, low lighting on stage, high ceilings - you felt like you were in a planetarium or outside).

Had dinner at Poona on 72nd St beforehand with Tom & Elena Shvarts. Telling them about the lecture on Russian "underground" poetry of 70s-90s given earlier in the day by Mikhaill Iampolski. Very clear well-organized presentation; he talked about the Petersburg poets, the Moscow poets; the "keepers of the (high culture poetry) flame" and the egalitarian, anti-tradition, anti-"art" postmodernist conceptualists, the "idiot school" of poetry. Very interesting, & he confessed his bias toward the latter end of the spectrum.

Told Elena what he had said about her reading Fri. night (which I missed) & her poem "Cardinal Points", where she maps out the cosmos on/through her body. She said (all in Russian, Tom patiently translating) that she had a new understanding of that poem while she read it Friday. Said something about how in this life we are destined to be torn to pieces in the "4 directions" leaving only one direction of access, straight up...
which was strange, since none of us at the point had heard about the Challenger crash - we went from dinner to the reading, & Joseph Brodsky's widow (Maria Brodsky) opened the program with a brief eulogy - quoted some apropos lines from Dante (Inferno XXVI l. 112):

Brothers, I said, o you who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.

During the reading they played recordings of Pasternak, mandelstam & Tsvetaeva (? or a reader) reciting. Never heard Mandelstam's voice before. Like a brave piping little bird - sort of a comic-brave intonation - Chaplinesque, it seemed! But similar to Pasternak in that the grid of meter & rhyme like a cage for this really wild musical recitation - inherent in the language but so different from the flat intonation of American poets - more like old recordings I've heard of Pound & yeats, but more varied pitch.

The quality of the poems - I mean the three old recordings - you understand M's notion that poetry is a visceral healing force - what Whitman must have sounded like sometimes. Hard to explain : it's the voice of poetry HUMANIZING reality - through shared/transcended suffering & happiness - turning it into song & art. The notion that a person personalizes reality - a Proust-world, a Whitman-world, an Akhmatova-world - & this personal cosmos comes through in the voice - but as it becomes Everyperson, universal - not one or the other but both.

This universalizing of the poetry image or statement must have a name - Aristotle I guess thought it was what differentiated poetry from history - the universal in the particular. But it's not an abstract thing - it's the universal through the personal human voice achieving a particular poetic statment like a victory against inimical forces. & people understand it immediately, share it as an experience known. It is an EVENT, not chit-chat; it is selfless experience, or an emptying, not "motivated". Dante's notion that poetry is renunciation.

The distance necessary to evoke/imagine/invent/be inspired this kind of special speech. Silence & inwardness.

Talking & thinking are not the same. Poetry & club talk are 2 different things. It was good to go to Russia for an evening.