Entries tagged with memorial

August 11, 2024

Entry 60: The Indexical Present II

The photo registers the scene: it is Ron Silliman reading, Krishna Evans following the text. Or perhaps Krishna is reading and Ron is following the text, as will be the case in a minute or two, as soon as Ron finishes his passage. The vantage point is from where I am sitting, having read my part some time ago and now listening as it continues. To the side are  Eliot D’Silva next to Ivan Sokolov; then to the right are Jen Hofer, leaning against the garage; Claire Marie Stancek is just behind the forked trunk of a tree; Jennifer Scappettone between the branches of the tree, and Jane Gregory, the host of the event, is to the far right. Continuing out of the picture one would encounter Lytle Shaw, whose elbow is just visible, and then next Syd Staiti on the stairs. Everyone is not especially solemn but bent to the task, reading Lyn Hejinian’s just published Fall Creek (Litmus Press), copies and xeroxes of which are out on the table. All of them have taken their turn. There are thirty-three sections, with Ron and Krishna reading the next-to-final two, before the group takes up the last section in unison. This was my proposal to the group at the break, recalling the pleasure of cacophony in our Grand Piano reading of “A”–24, whose plurivocality Lyn internalized and, some decades later, realized in one of her last works.  … More

October 21, 2023

Entry 53: With Etel Adnan at Erquy

In July 2018 I traveled with Carla Harryman to visit Etel Adnan in Erquy, the beach town in Brittany where she kept an apartment with direct access to the beach, weather, and sunset. Simone Fattal was not present, while Etel was staying with a younger companion and gifted painter, Eugenie Paultre. I cannot locate photos from the period but Eugenie’s painting titled Mer, recalling the view from Etel’s balcony, suggests the drama and strangeness of this coast—while Erquy continues as a mid-tier vacation retreat, with small hotels, flea markets, parking, normative uses of the beach, hang gliding in the distance, strong tides.

In 2020 Etel published Shifting the Silence with Nightboat Books; the bio notes state that she continues to live in Paris though the work anticipates her death the next year. In terms of genre, the writing is a hybrid poetic meditation, a sentence-level nonnarrative that records states of being and mind, with the turn to language always present and exact. Time is marked at the level of the sentence, with only the sparest narrative motivation: “My thoughts drip, not unlike the faucet. They don’t let me know what they’re about. Other ones follow, strangers equally. / The daylight is getting dim. We’re not in winter, no, we’re somewhere in early July. The sunset will happen soon. Then it will disappear too” (5–6) Temporality emerges from the writing as a form of roughing out, coloring in, and smoothing over—and along with it rhetoric, perception, memory, affect, comprehension: … More

August 7, 2016

Entry 23: The Last Time I Saw Bill

DREAM

Broken headline column:
“YOU ARE GO
IN TO END”
Allen Ginsberg dives through the space hatch.
I watch him from the rim, hear his voice
trail a statement “MAN ISSSSSSSSSS . . . . . . . . ”
as he disappears into dot-hood.
The Poets—Anne Waldman, me, “all The Poets”—float
in interstellar space—a substance I
can touch, a fine sheen. & then I’m up against the sun,
its soft orange neon glow. “THE SUN,” I say, “IS BIG!”
Pause, a chair sails silent past me & into solar radiance.
“CHAIR INTO SUN!” I remark (a parody of big
poetical remark).
Then I am back on Earth,
speed-skating on the “Power-Cones.”

—from This 8 (1977); see also Portrait and Dream, p. 154

I had come to New York with a purpose—to visit Ted Greenwald, whose health had been failing (see here), and to make contact with people and see art (see here). I was not expecting to see Bill, whom I knew had been living partly in New York but whom I had not seen for some time (not since we read at MOCAD in Detroit, an event so poorly framed and executed—not by Bill, of course, who sounded great—that I only remember it with displeasure). One of my contacts mentioned that Bill would be reading with Kyle Schlesinger at a gallery in Chelsea, and sent an email with time and place, to begin at 5:30. … More