Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Wendell Berry Honored
February 6, 2012, 5:51 pm
Wendell Berry to Give 2012 Jefferson Lecture
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
The farmer-writer Wendell Berry will deliver the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday. The lecture, to be given on April 23 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, is considered the federal government’s most prestigious honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities. READ THE NYTimes ARTICLE
Wendell Berry to Give 2012 Jefferson Lecture
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
The farmer-writer Wendell Berry will deliver the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday. The lecture, to be given on April 23 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, is considered the federal government’s most prestigious honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities. READ THE NYTimes ARTICLE
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Dickens
Happy 200th Birthday Charles
My first (and by far the greatest) professor of entomology had a passionate love for the Hemiptera, the music of Johannes Brahms and writings of Charles Dickens. My only contact with Dickens had been in junior high and high school. Though I can't say I hated the reading we did, it left no lasting memory. But when Carl Schaefer many years later convinced me to try Dickens again it was with a sense of wonder that I discovered the many pleasures of his enormous output. I began with Bleak House, loved it, and immediately set about reading all of his novels, in chronological order (with the sole exceptions of the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the, I think, unreadable The Old Curiosity Shoppe). Thus began a few years of memorable delight. This might be a good time for others to take up the challenge. Listen to the piece on Dickens on NPR here.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sakra Boccata
Translation from Spanish by Clayton Eshleman
In his Introduction to the book, Raúl Zurita writes: “These poems display a carnal, erotic version of the never-exhausted Neo-Platonic theme of perfect love achieved by two beings to erase all the physical and mental distance between them ... a merger not only of bodies searching for each other but of language itself ... as if the poems would like to devour themselves in a grand sexual act in which culture, eroticism and nature would once and for all erase their borders.”
Friday, January 20, 2012
On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics
Don't miss this review : On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics by Leonard Schwartz. Stunning.
An excerpt:
Grace of its linguistic and visionary commitment, its capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience, Zurita has written a poetry that surpasses what a more politically committed poetry could have achieved. Zurita’s poems might be figured as an eco-poetry in which the space between nature and history is closed up, once we realize that the work reimagines the entirety of the ocean in such a way as to include those thrown from planes into that ocean. And reimagines the mountains in such a way as to include the Disappeared thrown from planes into their snows until one can only speak of those mountains as containing those people. And renders the desert no longer conceivable except if the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. It was Camille Dungy, the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry who pointed out in her CCP appearance (
#221)
that the poets in her book do not necessarily view a tree as simply a
tree, since it might also be the case that someone was lynched from that
particular tree; they do not look at an agricultural site as an idyl,
since one’s ancestors might have worked that land in slavery. Indeed,
only certain privileged, bourgeois perspectives can divorce “nature”
from “history” in order to yield a “nature poetry” that refreshes us in
its aftermath. I have argued that to view Nature apart from other
discourses and entities (like language for example) is analogous to the
pornographic (without taking any position pro or con on pornography),
where one function (Nature) is fetishized and isolated from other
functions and possibilities (as sex is in pornography). By contrast to a
nature poetry, an eco-poetics seeks out complicated interrelationships
between multiple modes of the sensual. Zurita’s is one of the great
poetries to overcome the artificiality of the nature/history
distinction, to give us the Tree and the invisible histories enacted in
and around the Tree, as Dungy calls for.
An excerpt:
Grace of its linguistic and visionary commitment, its capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience, Zurita has written a poetry that surpasses what a more politically committed poetry could have achieved. Zurita’s poems might be figured as an eco-poetry in which the space between nature and history is closed up, once we realize that the work reimagines the entirety of the ocean in such a way as to include those thrown from planes into that ocean. And reimagines the mountains in such a way as to include the Disappeared thrown from planes into their snows until one can only speak of those mountains as containing those people. And renders the desert no longer conceivable except if the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. It was Camille Dungy, the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry who pointed out in her CCP appearance (
#221)
that the poets in her book do not necessarily view a tree as simply a
tree, since it might also be the case that someone was lynched from that
particular tree; they do not look at an agricultural site as an idyl,
since one’s ancestors might have worked that land in slavery. Indeed,
only certain privileged, bourgeois perspectives can divorce “nature”
from “history” in order to yield a “nature poetry” that refreshes us in
its aftermath. I have argued that to view Nature apart from other
discourses and entities (like language for example) is analogous to the
pornographic (without taking any position pro or con on pornography),
where one function (Nature) is fetishized and isolated from other
functions and possibilities (as sex is in pornography). By contrast to a
nature poetry, an eco-poetics seeks out complicated interrelationships
between multiple modes of the sensual. Zurita’s is one of the great
poetries to overcome the artificiality of the nature/history
distinction, to give us the Tree and the invisible histories enacted in
and around the Tree, as Dungy calls for.Thursday, January 12, 2012
Infidel Poetics
& on google books
this looks potentially exciting - I hope I get a chance to read it.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Silliman on Anthologies
Read Ron Silliman's short post on poetry & anthologies, from which comes this:
"It is interesting to ask what community is represented by the poet who proposes him- or herself as the representative of some transcendent value (the way Jack Gilbert cast himself as the doomed spokesperson of beauty & inner nobility), but mostly it is very sad. The isolato in American literature is little more than a tribune for the most imperial and corporate of impulses, even when – as in Melville, as in Olson, as in Gilbert – he is conflicted & brilliant. If you are responsible to no one, you are in the exact same position that capital and profit play in the world economy." Whole piece here...
"It is interesting to ask what community is represented by the poet who proposes him- or herself as the representative of some transcendent value (the way Jack Gilbert cast himself as the doomed spokesperson of beauty & inner nobility), but mostly it is very sad. The isolato in American literature is little more than a tribune for the most imperial and corporate of impulses, even when – as in Melville, as in Olson, as in Gilbert – he is conflicted & brilliant. If you are responsible to no one, you are in the exact same position that capital and profit play in the world economy." Whole piece here...
Monday, November 28, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Food, again
News from the Leopold Center at Iowa State University as reported in Mother Jones:
Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Duncan Biography due in May 2012
Lisa Jarnot
University of California Press
Hardcover, 481 pages
ISBN: 9780520234161
May 2012
$39.95, £27.95
At long last...
Also don't miss the audio of Jarnot commenting on Duncan & Duncan's lectures at the Harvard Vocarium.
Also don't miss the audio of Jarnot commenting on Duncan & Duncan's lectures at the Harvard Vocarium.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Oh Those Odonates...
Read the article:
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Violence in the Modern World
From the Publisher: We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse....
Reviewed by Peter Singer.
This is an important book.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Saturday, October 1, 2011
LVNG
LVNG 12 (I might suggest "Poetry is a Domestic Art" by John Martone as some measure of the wonders here)
which leads us to
More LVNG
and
Flood Editions
and
more LVNG
and
other wonders
(thanks, indirectly, to Steven Toussaint (and his terrific homage to Tarkovsky))
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
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Some listenings