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Pam Rehm. Gone to Earth. 2001. 50 pp.

This is written in the present day post-avant period style, elliptical and spare. I can't say it's a bad book, but it strikes me as kind of abstract and with a kind of off-putting religiosity. I do like the physical book though; Flood out of Chicago puts out beautiful editions.

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*Jackson Mac Low. The Pronouns. 1979. 65 pp.

I found my copy of this classic book while looking for another book. I bought it at the same bookstore in Columbus Ohio where I bought much of my Clark Coolidge and Ron Silliman books in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember the guy who sold it to me making a disparaging remark about Mac Low.

The poems, writtten in 1964, are designed as "A collection of forty dances for the dancers." Each line consists of an action. They also work fine as poems that you can just read with no reference to dance at all.

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*John Ashbery. Where Shall I Wander?. 2005. 81 pp.

I unpacked my Ashbery box yesterday. I don't care for the title poem that much, or another longer prose poem earlier in the book, but the rest of the book is still great.

I'm closing in on my 4000th post on Bemsha--which makes me realize how ambitious my 9000 book reading project is. I'm almost done with my second percent of that.

To understand Creeley, say, you would have to know about Williams, Pound, Duncan, Olson, Levertov. Also Ginsberg and O'Hara and Lowell--representing directions he didn't take. Maybe also Thomas Hardy and some of Creeley's other favorite British poets. Some medieval lyrics. The understanding of Creeley within his context and tradition entails a very dense and nuanced positioning.

It strikes me (and this is not a new observation with me) that we tend to read "foreign" poets in a quite different way. We never see them against the backdrop of their mediocre contemporaries who never get translated. Usually it is only one or two poets from any given country who are at all known at any given time, so there is rarely a sense of Creeley's "company," the social network of poets. The poet translated stands pretty much alone. Things are a little better with French poetry, where most readers who know Bonnefoy would also know Baudelaire or Reverdy. There is a long tradition of contact between the two linguistic traditions. Even though I have spent hours reading French poetry of the past I couldn't name ten living French poets, so in a sense I am not even close to having that sort of "thick" knowledge. This is qualitatively quite different from knowing the work of dozens of contemporary poets in Spain and the US, plus a healthy number of Latin Americans.

I wanted to test myself by listening to an internet vocal jazz station. It turned out to be a dull game. Who can't identify Ella singing "A Tisket a Tasket," Sarah doing "Lullaby of Birdland," Chet Baker, Dinah Washington, Sinatra, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, the Manhattan Transfer, and Kurt Ellling? I did miss Lou Rawls (twice!), and a girl singer whom I'd never heard of before: Sophie Milman.

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*Ted Pearson. Planetary Gear. 1991. 74 pp.

I never connected this book with Ronald Johnson's Shrubberies before, but on this reading there are some similarities: terse poems with a similar prosody.

something less than what's more
neither spirit enough nor time
the thing itself a contrivance
sanctuarial ebb of the sea

I have often been drawn to Barthes's essay "The Grain of the Voice," which is accessible to the English speaking reader in Image - Music - Text. Most recently, I decided to investigate the vocal style of Charles Panzéra, who is the hero of Barthes's essay. (His foil is Fischer Dieskau.) Curiously, the essay is usually read with no real understanding of Panzéra (who appears as "Panzera" in the translation, minus the accent and the first name.) I bought a cd of him singing and discovered a whole tradition wholly unknown to me, though I had read Barthes on Panzéra innumerable times: the French art song or "mélodie," which usually takes classic French poetry as its basis (Verlaine, Baudelaire, for example.) It's a tradition of setting the poetic text to music with a great deal of respect of the prosody of the French language.

I do like Panzéra quite a bit. I don't know how much by dint of suggestibility: I wanted to like him because of Barthes's description, and I like the idea of looking at setting of Baudelaire. I don't know much about the Lied, which RB uses as his foil to the French genre. I've heard Schubert art songs, of course (no doubt sung by DFD) and I know that it bears some relation to German poetry in much the same way the "mélodie" does to the French. Heine, Goethe, Schiller. Rorem does something similar with English and American poetry. Whether you like any particular composer in this tradition, though, I think it's an interesting way to think about the performance of poetry. That's what I'm trying to start to think about in my Hall Center Paper a week from Monday.

By the way, I have this coming out too in 2009. I didn't realize until now that U of Chicago Press is the US distributor for my Liverpool book.

You probably won't be as interested in this, but I also just realized that I am the second generation to publish with Chicago.

The last time I gave a seminar at the Hall Center for the Humanities it became a [soon-to-be] best selling book published by the University of Chicago Press. So you you won't want to miss this one. You can download the paper. The top secret password is "philandlit."

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*James Tate. The Unicorns. 1971. 46 pp.

This book is one I've had for many, many years. I remember I bought it at Serendipity Books when I was a teenager. It's hard to separate my feelings about it now from the emotion I felt reading it for the first time. This is Tate's best period anyway, before he repeated himself 4,000 times and became corny and diffuse.

I'm not exactly sure what's happening to me. I can't seem to turn the stress switch off, to the point of having acute anxiety just short of panic attacks. I feel simultaneously overworked and lazy, since I am working hard, accomplishing quite a bit, but still not really thinking I'm going to get everything done. I worked today about six hours on my index for my book, beginning around 7:30 a.m. Then the rest of the day just trying not to be anxious. I also worry about money, my daughter doing her homework, the university turning down my promotion, my undergrads telling me they don't have the next book we're supposed to be reading, etc... The election was a major source of worry. I thought I could turn off my anxiety today, but no such luck.

I don't feel depressed, per se. it is hard to get through the day, though. The weekends are hard when I'm back in St Louis, but the weeks are hard when I'm alone here in Kansas. I stayed here this weekend to get things done, which was probably a good idea, but now I'm feeling even worse after nine days alone. My life is rather impossible as you can see. When I saw Ralph Nader saying we can now see whether Obama is an Uncle Tom or not, I just about lost it. If you see Ralph Nader please punch him for me. That might make me feel a bit better.

In order to distract myself from this election, which is driving me crazy and will until Obama is actually inaugurated in January, I have been thinking about the "aesthetics of cultural studies." I checked out a book with this title from the library, ed. by Michael Bérubé about 10 years ago. The book seems a defensive move aimed at the "return to aesthetics" movement. Bérubé in the intro and Rita Felski in her essay argue that aesthetics was always part of cultural studies in the first place. Yet other authors in the book point out that the view of aesthetics in CS is mostly "instrumental." Many of the contributors still skirt around aesethetics per se, and rarely consider any aesthetic dimension of any cultural or literary text. It is still a game of positionings. If your main context for responding to particular piece of classical music is Bugs Bunny cartoon you saw as a child, I suppose that's somewhat interesting, but it's still doesn't tell me much about aesthetics, not even about the aesthetics of Warner Brothers cartoons.

The first problem is that CS places two other sorts of values in primary position: political and commercial. Secondly, it is still caught up in categorizing culture as popular and elite, and deriving ideological conclusions from this division. An "aesthetic" approach would be not to care too much whether a particular cultural artifact belongs to the realm of popular, middle-brow, or elite culture, losing the self-congratulation inherent in studying popular (or elite) culture. The "coolness" of studying popular culture is essentially a mirror image of the snobbishness of studying elite culture. Also, the idea of "edification" persists in both enterprises: whether one becomes a more cultivated person by reading Rilke or uses popular culture for empowerment, the basic goal is a kind of personal edification. Culture is still "nutritional." (A few of the essays point in the direction of this critique.)

There seems to be a lack of imagination about what kind of cultural artifacts might be interesting to study. MB points this out in the intro, when he talks about the proliferation of Madonna articles in the 1990s.

If aesthetics is the product of the 18th century, it might be useful to talk about what aesthetics was before it was aesthetics. In other words, what existed in an analogous position before the word aesthetics was invented? We know that literature came into existence, as a concept with that name, in the 18th century (though that concept is not exactly our own either), but that there were other equivalent concepts before, mostly poetry. Cultural Studies still seems caught up in that 18th century dynamic, rather than looking for an approach that goes beyond those kind of conventional ways of looking at things. If there was an aesthetics before "aesthetics," there can be one after "aesthetics" as well.

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David Perry. Range Finder. 2001. 61 pp.

On this reading I was more convinced at the level of the line that of the poem. The individual poems didn't hold together as well as the brilliance of individual passages might lead one to expect.

(159) *Juan Sánchez Pelaez. Un día sea. 1972. 135 pp.


(158) Juan Sánchez Pelaez. Aire sobre el aire. 1989. 33 pp.

Sánchez Pelaez in his early work is in the thrall of a certain surrealist rhetoric. Un día sea is really a collection of 4 books, Elena y los elementos, Animal de costumbre, Filiación oscura, and Lo huidizo y lo permanente.

I still like Gerbasi and Montejo better, among Venezuelan poets.