A week ago, I returned from Germany to find the online poetry community in an uproar over Ron Silliman’s “Je suis Vanessa Place.” There, Silliman triangulates the Charlie Hebdo award controversy with the petition to remove Place from a steering committee at AWP, and her conceptual project to tweet Gone with the Wind in 140-character chunks over several years. Since then, a second letter campaign in part led to the devolution and canceling of the Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015 (BPC), a situation still unresolved. Silliman sees the primary issue as freedom of expression in a climate of projective and even rhetorically violent debate. Unfortunately, whatever the merits of his position—which I agree with on many grounds—his own rhetorical strategy makes analogies and leaps that are at turns defensive and projective to the point of offense to most readers. … More
Entries published during May, 2015
May 29, 2015
Event 52: I Met (BAA 2015)
Bavarian-American Academy
Amerikahaus, Munich
University of Regensburg
10–23 May 2015
(after On Kawara)
Heike Paul
Volker Depkat
Marga Schweiger-Wilhelm
Markus Heide
Silvia Spitta
Florian Tatschner
John Landreville
Mary Catherine Lawler
Jessi Lee Jackson
Barry Shank
… More
May 27, 2015
Document 36: Language Writing
New in 2015:
“Language Writing”
an essay by Barrett Watten
The Cambridge Companion to
Modern American Poetry
ed. Walter Kalaidjian
Table of contents:
1. The emergence of ‘the new poetry’
John Timberman Newcomb
2. Modern American archives and scrapbook
modernism / Bartholomew Brinkman
3. Experimental modernism
Alan Golding
… More
May 1, 2015
Document 35: May Day, 1975
It is forty years since the Fall of Saigon, and the first event I record, in my lead piece in volume 2 of The Grand Piano, recalls my activities on that day. I hope it still means something to put this out there:
Politics
On 1 May 1975, I attended a public meeting of a communist organization. The Fall of Saigon, of course, did not simply coincide with that date; it had been taking place for weeks. The meeting was in a rented hall on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Two million people, according to mass media, had been forced to evacuate Phnom Penh. The speaker interpreted this report in a positive light: Khmer Rouge authorities were only trying to prevent disease and panic. Half the people in the room read revolutionary newspapers as the speaker addressed them, while the other half listened attentively. He went on: now is the time the movement for revolutionary change must commence. There can be no going back. By next year the organization’s size must double. We have a simple choice before us.
… More
Poetics
The Grand Piano
