Nomadics » Book Review

Jack Foley’s “Big Boke”

Pierre Joris — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:34:20 +0000

Nice big homage last August to Foley & his very large new book — nearly 1300 pages, two volumes — by Evan Karp in SFGate. Opening paras below:

Jack Foley a rich chapter in Bay Area poetry scene

Mathew Sumner / Special to the Chronicle

Jack Foley, 71, took a decade to write his 1,300-page book, “Visions and Affiliations,” covering 65 years of Bay Area poets and poetry.

If Jack Foley were a book, he’d be a 1,300-page chrono-encyclopedia of Bay Area poets and poetry that spans 65 years and is written in the present tense. But that’s just the latest chapter in the rich and ongoing story of the Oakland poet and critic.

Foley, 71, describes both himself and the book, “Visions and Affiliations” (Pantograph Press), which he has spent over a decade composing, with the same statement: “In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality. As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. And the circumstances change in response to those selves.”

In the house in the Maxwell Park neighborhood that he has occupied with his wife, Adelle, since 1974, Foley laughs, “That means I’m crazy, right?”

“The problem with unity,” he continues, “is that in order to achieve it, you leave all these things out that might glitter around it and contradict it. So you don’t want unity, because it simplifies. What you want is to have something like the feeling of the complexity of life as it is.”

He refers to Michel Foucault’s statement in “The Order of Things”: “I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately.” To sustain this, Foley composed “Visions and Affiliations” in bulleted items organized by year, with representative quotations preceding each decade. People, ideas and stories appear, disappear and reappear as poetry is debated, renounced, renewed, asserted as divine and criticized as pornographic – all within the ever-shifting cultural context of the turbulent second half of the 20th century.

(ctd. here)

Jack mentions in an email that there was however one error in the piece, & his wife Adele wrote this letter to the editor:

Editor:

I’m writing to make a correction to “A Lifetime in Poetry,” Evan Karp’s otherwise excellent story about my husband Jack Foley’s book, “Visions and Affiliations” (Datebook, August 20, 2011). The story states that Jack’s book is about Bay Area poetry. In fact, though Bay Area poetry is covered extensively, the book is about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John.

Finding Bayt Across Borders of Stone

Pierre Joris — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:53:15 +0000

A very moving tribute to Anthony Shadid (& simultaneously an excellent review of Shadid’s memoir House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East) by Syrian writer Amal Hanano, published yesterday in Jadaliyya. Below the opening paragraphs. You could read the full article here.

[Cover of House of Stone, by Anthony Shadid.]

No roads, not a single one, lead to the place where we had gotten ourselves.*

I “met” Anthony Shadid the only way someone like me, a mere reader, can meet a journalist she admires: I emailed him a fan letter. I sent him my short note through the New York Times website and didn’t expect an answer. The next day, he emailed me a brief but warm thank you.

Two days later, on May 10th, I read Anthony’s article on Rami Makhlouf—Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and the regime’s crony-in-chief. In the interview, Makhlouf claimed, “If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel.” His confession embarrassed the regime which was forced to distance itself from Makhlouf. Soon after, he resigned from his position as vice chairman of the Cham Holding corporation and stated he was dedicating his life to “charity work.”

Anthony’s interview was a significant blow to the Assad regime. That day he changed in my eyes from a journalist I had admired to a Syrian hero. So I emailed him again. He replied. And the rhythm of our relationship began.

Anthony was the only person I didn’t know in my real life who witnessed my transition to Amal. When I was writing from Aleppo, I sent him the links through my “real” email. I did it without explanation or requests for confidentiality—it never occurred to me that I couldn’t trust him completely. At first, our emails continued the same way: I would send praise for his latest article and attach a link to one of mine. He would respond by thanking me for my kind or sweet words. Then after my fourth journal entry, he sent an email: “Great piece, so nuanced.” I was overjoyed. After my next one about the flag, he emailed: “Your last piece was just gorgeous.” Later, he said he found one of my portraits, “so incredibly moving. Inspiring, in fact,” and told me he was “my biggest fan.” His generous words of encouragement are ones I reread every time I wonder if it’s even worth writing any more in midst of Syria’s endless bloodshed and devastating loss.

Last July, I watched a press conference with Makhlouf, the first since his encounter with Anthony. When asked about the interview, Makhlouf brushed it off as lies and inaccuracies that happened off the record, during adardasheh, a casual chat, in an attempt to insult Anthony’s impeccable journalistic integrity. Even worse —for me at least— he added, “I welcomed him in my office, treated him graciously, and gave him lunch.” By cheaply mentioning a lunch invitation in public, Makhlouf had violated our core principle to always be generous to our guests, without calculation or malice. I was outraged. I asked Anthony, “If this is what you can do with only dardasheh, what would happen if you had a real conversation? I’m dying to know what you had for lunch, since he brought it up in the press conference! Ayeb.” He answered my questions and ended the email with, “We had fish, by the way. ” I told him that when he was back in the States I would invite him to dinner to make up for the Makhlouf fish fiasco, not only because it would be an honor to cook for him but also a matter of restoring national pride. He replied, “It’s a deal. There’s nothing better in this world than Halabi cuisine.”

(…)
ctd. here.

Clément Oudard: from H.D. to Robert Duncan

Pierre Joris — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

After many years, the French are finally adressing Duncan’s work! There had been one smallish “Selected” published by Christian Bourgois in the 80s — a very silly & misleading selection that couldn’t & didn’t work. In fact, when a couple years later Bourgois decided to quit publishing any poetry —American or other — he would always use the Duncan book as exemplar & say: “The Duncan sold all of 82 or 83 copies! How do you want me to go on publishing poetry? I’d go bankrupt.” Now, maybe we can expect a big solid Duncan Selected from someone? (Now that Olson’s Maximus has been out for two years in an excellent edition — though that already seems to be out of stock or at least that is what French amazon says).

Here is how the editors present Oudard’s book (my quick translation):

“What relations does post-war Ameriucan poetry entertain with that of the first Modernism. How to write among the ruins of the great projects of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Williams Carlos Williams ?

Starting from a critique of the rhetoric of rupture, this boook explores the history and functioning of modern American poetry through the angle of the relation. Its trajectoire marks a sinueux line that links H.D. (1886-1961) to Robert Duncan (1919-1988). Far from imagining them as the limit-works of a new canon, this study has as focal point Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, that vast (auto)biographical working space soon to be published [The book has come out meanwhile, from University of California Press]. Utopian and multiple, the relation permits to read modernism in a new way, where an individual conception of invention gives way to an ethics of writing. Based on the published and unpublished poetic and epistolary exchanges, the adventure meets up with Eliot, Pound, Williams, Levertov and Olson, but also Mallarmé, Bergson, James, Deleuze, Meschonnic and Glissant.”

Retrievals Reviewed

Pierre Joris — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:00:42 +0000

This review of JR’s latest book just out in the Jewish Daily Forward; first paras below; you can read the whole essay here.

Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg’s Work
Author and Translator Made Considerable Contribution to Canon
By Jake Marmer

Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010
By Jerome Rothenberg
Junction Press, 178 pages, $21

Author and translator of nearly 100 books of poetry as well as editor of numerous groundbreaking anthologies, poet Jerome Rothenberg is turning 80 this year. A retrospective of his work has long been overdue. Yet Rothenberg, who throughout his literary career has dodged conventions and expectations, stays true to the course with his recently published collection, “Retrievals.” Although billed as a retrospective, the book does not have any of his best-known or most anthologized work, but only poems that have fallen between the cracks: unpublished and newly rediscovered material from over the years. As the author himself puts it in the afterword, this is a “book that charts my life as a poet… if it were arranged without the poems collected here.” It is his literary trajectory, read through the lens of previously unknown work.

Rothenberg’s contribution to the canon of American poetry is considerable — not only in terms of poems but also the poetics: theory, criticism and techniques. Most notable is his involvement with “ethnopoetics,” which has grown to become a full-fledged movement and literary field. A term he coined in the 1960s to describe notions of poetry within cultures other than Western, it attempts, for example, to attain wider understanding of the narratives of Native American mythology through the context of its rituals.

As an anthropologist, translator and folklorist, Rothenberg not only goes to the very roots of poetry, but also follows its hypothetical branchings. His interests in mysticism and linguistics have led Rothenberg to a poetic engagement with gematria, the ancient Rabbinic hermeneutic device. Using the idea that every Hebrew letter has a numeric value, it offers connections between words and phrases otherwise unrelated. In his book “Kabbalah and Criticism,” American literary critic Harold Bloom called it “interpretive freedom gone mad,” but in Rothenberg’s work, gematria is more about a surprisingly natural or, one could say, casually cosmic connection underlying language’s building blocks. Indeed, “Retrievals” features a group of poems, composed using gematria, where gematriabecomes a device akin to rhyme — except in place of the sonic correspondence there is an abstract and mysterious mathematical one.

… (ctd here)

Review of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

Pierre Joris — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:41:39 +0000

A new review of Jerry Rothenberg and my translation of the Selected Picasso has just been published online by David Detrich of Innovative Fiction. The book is available from the publishers here. Opening paras below, the full review available here:

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

AUTHOR: . | POSTED AT: 9:33 AM | FILED UNDER: INNOVATIVE FICTION

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems (2004) by Pablo Picasso is a translation into English of Picasso’s poetic works, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, with an afterword by Michel Leiris. This translation reveals the brilliant far reaching metaphor that defines the esthetic reach of Pablo Picasso as an artistic mind, with the literary visualization of images enlivened by verbal syntax in an unpunctuated style that adds further complexity and richness to a continuous text.For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso’s original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, “Picasso’s entry into our own time.”
Exact Change:
Classics of Experimental Literature

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems exemplifies the decade of the 1930s, when Surrealism had become an international trend with a simple and classical style, and the early Cubism of Picasso had evolved into a more sophisticated poetics of language as an avant garde artform. Pablo Picasso conveys the vision of an oil painter and sculptor working with the concrete images which make up the daily inter(text)uality of the collective art consciousness.

Charles Bernstein Interview in Brooklyn Rail…

Pierre Joris — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:50:51 +0000

… check it out, excellent!

Charles Bernstein by Phong Bui

CHARLES BERNSTEIN with Adam Fitzgerald

by Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is the author of Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011); All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); and Girly Man (Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSoundwriting.upenn.edu/pennsound. See Epc.buffalo.edu for more information.

Adam Fitzgerald (Rail): How long have you been working on the book? Meanwhile, you’re prolifically writing essays, speaking, doing appearances, Interneting.

Charles Bernstein: Interneting? Hmm. I guess so.

Rail: When do you tell yourself these occasional performances, speeches, and texts should assemble into a larger pattern, a “book of essays”?

Bernstein: There’s a different story for each book. The basic unit of writing for me, more than a poem or essay, is the book. The collections are not structured primarily as chronological assemblings: each book has a formal or structural or thematic frame. With All the Whiskey in Heaven, my recent selected poems, even though all but the title poem had been in previous books, I went about making a new book in its own right, selecting works not just as best or representative, but in terms of what worked for the book.

Read on here.

Review of Ken Irby’s Collected

Pierre Joris — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 11:37:59 +0000

Interesting review of Ken Irby’s Collected The Intent On on a blog I hadn’t known of til now. Opening gambit below; read the full piece here:

by Kenneth Irby
North Atlantic Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“the back / calm pasture of the mind”

In 2009, North Atlantic Books published a handsome book finally gathering the work of Kenneth Irby, one of Charles Olson’s lesser known disciples, who has labored in small press obscurity since the early ‘60’s. Irby fans (including myself) have been waiting for a comprehensive collection since Station Hill Press put out Call Steps in 1991. My first reaction was too much like the blurbs on the back, making me feel like, as Stephen King put it in the self-effacing preface to his book on writing, “a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole.” But any review of Irby should emphasize that this work is not necessarily easy to approach.

As a title for his collected works, The Intent On is unpromising and not as representative as previous headings such as Orexis, Catalpa, or Relation might be, but it does make the point that Irby is writing in the space “after I,” and suggests two of his main influences, Louis Zukofsky and Ed Dorn, who might be overlooked beneath Olson’s looming presence. The title also points towards his increasing attention to tracking the atomic particles of language. I offer the following quote as an example of Irby’s pacing and form:

or all the high school years again, unslept, reviewing the annual faces over and over
till they run green in the movies after the eyes are closed
and still as distant as they were in person

the society of ordinary
high school days, never left, will it?

Kamau Brathwaite’s Elegguas

Pierre Joris — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:26:39 +0000

Just out from Wesleyan University Press is ELEGGUAS by Kamau Brathwaite. Details & press release below. Here is what I wrote for the book’s quatrième de couverture:

Kamau Brathwaite is the major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the great poets of the second part of the 20C anywhere. While framed by elegiac writings of a personal nature, this volume remains profoundly political through a range of elegies for departed public & political figures, including what I consider one of the greatest and most poignant political poems of the era, namely Brathwaite’s “Poem for Walter Rodney.” The greatness of the work lies in the fact that the poet never falls into political rhetoric, but that his language, breathtakingly innovative & inventive at the formal level, always carries a lyrical and poetic charge of unequalled intensity.

& here the WUP Press release:

Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.” Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems.

********
>down evening sun forever & for ever<
Heartease Which is where she is/in that
Soft distance shining & I”m suddenly & at
Last happy & very very sad & lonely at th
(e) same time because she feelin so lonely
but somehow at peace & there was noth
ing I cd do nothing nothing I cd do any<
more nothing I cd ever do ever & ever a-
gain but to lose her there & that way wh-
ere I cd see her & not see her beyond th
at valley high up here in the
Blue
Mountains

********

For more details on this book, click here.

ORDERING DETAILS:
SAVE 30% if you order from the above web site and use discount code W301 . Use the link above. Or order through your favorite bookseller, or by calling University Press of New England at 1-800-421-1561 (or 603-448-1533, x255 or x256). US Shipping charges are $5.00 for the first book and $1.25 for each additional. In CANADA, order through the University of British Columbia Press at (800) 565-9523 or email mailto:utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca In EUROPE, order through Eurospan at +44 (0) 207 240 0856 or email mailto:orders@edspubs.co.uk
Academic users may order an Examination Copy for potential course adoption. Please request a copy of the book in a letter on your institutional letterhead, and include the course title, estimated enrollment, and $5.00 for shipping (check, MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx). Mail your request to: UPNE, Attn: Exam Copies, 1 Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon, NH 03766-1358, USA or fax to (603) 448-9429.

Allen Fisher’s PROPOSALS

Pierre Joris — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:33:52 +0000

Last week the mailman brought — to my greatest delight — the latest Spanner Editions production: Proposals 1-35 by Allen Fisher. This is a gorgeously produced full color sequence of “poem-image-commentary” ensembles. Not sure what is the best way to acquire this little marvel, but you can always write to Spanner editions at 14 Hopton Road, Hereford HR1 1BE, U.K.

— Addendum: You can now buy the book online using Paypal — click here. —

Below, a video of AF reading from this sequence of poems. You can see a few more in the online magazine Spine. Hopefully AF will read from the sequence on Saturday at Bowery Poetry Club (see yesterday’s post for details).

Cockelbergh’s “Marginalalia”

Pierre Joris — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:49:21 +0000

Peter Cockelbergh has just written what amounts to the first solid review of my book of essays, Justifying the Margins. For the occasion he has done way more: he has put together a feature on my work for Jacket # 40 — you can access it all here — that includes, besides his review, a choice of poems, extracts from the forthcoming Paul Celan Meridian volume, and two essays (one on Paul Celan and one on the New English Poetry) I had originally written in French & that have now been translated by Peter — to whom my thanks are due! (If the screen shot above indicates a total of 21 pages, that’s a mistake — The Cockelbergh review alone is about 40 printed pages).