ZYZZYVASPEAKS (Free subscription) | yesterday
Northwest Review no longer accepts submissions of poetry or fiction. The editors consider nonfiction only. A triquarterly founded in 1957, total circ: 1,400, NWR faced a budget crunch and possible extinction before being adopted by the Creative Writing Dept. Department members, poet Garrett Hongo ( ZYZZYVA Spring '88) and novelist Ehud Havazelet ( ZYZZYVA Spring '96), now solicit all the poetry and...
Jacob Russell's Barking Dog (Free subscription) | 11/29/2009
It would be hard to overstate Ron Silliman's contribution to the legitimizing of poetic diversity. He combines a precise and finely tuned ear in close readings of particular poems, with a sweeping revisionist history of American poetry.No one can do everything, and there's no disrespect in noting the limitations of a project as large as the one he's laid out. While I think he may overstate the
The Wooden Spoon (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
'It makes people happy when the good guys win. And it makes people happy when somebody who is genuinely humble & likewise terrific at what he does gets public acknowledgement for being the great force for good that he is. Giving Keith Waldrop the National Book Award accomplishes all of the above.' — Ron Silliman Keith Waldrop won the National Book Award this year for his collection Transcendental...
fait accompli (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Contradicta Information plus passion=knowledge; information minus passion= document * * * Success consists of 1% holding forth and 99% holding back. * * * * * Contradicta Feelings are the language of experience; words tell us what the world wants-and needs- from us and are maps to what we want and need from the world. * * * Silence in response to biting words helps make thought into a kind of music....
Joe Brainard's Pyjamas (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
I blame it all on Ron Silliman lol. I blame it all on Ron Silliman's omniscience, to me more precise, that he found what I posted on Ray DiPalma at my new blog Cerebral Douchebag and linked to it. I thanked him for linking to it. Ron, you got me in trouble!! Okay, maybe I did it to myself. Just a little bit. ( AFTERTHOUGHT AND CORRECTION: Mr. Silliman did NOT link to the DiPalma piece; he linked to...
Joe Brainard's Pyjamas (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
for linking to my wee appraisal of John Taggart's magnificent Unveil (over at my Cerebral Douchebag blog). And thanks to Devin for sending me the complete book, which is downstairs on my dining room table. I look very much forward. You have a great press/catalogue, Devin. And I like your poetry quite a bit. One of my two or three favorites. WAVE BOOKS is another. If you ever want to see a manuscript,...
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
Ginsberg and Ashbery are post modernists,but they are also many other things. Ginsberg is a romantic, sure, but he was the one in the 20Th century, confronted with mass-media, A bombs, televised unpopular wars, the whole 60s shot, and his response to these accelerated times had to push the hackneyed envelope. If he trusted his sensibilities to make sense of the world, apart from the mind of God guiding...
GIVE A FIG (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
The recently released Sonnet 56 is beginning to be reviewed. See what Sina Queryas says on her blog: Lemon Hound And if you haven't already seen an image of the book, Ron Silliman showed us what it looked like on October 29, 2009.
Unbecoming Regularity (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Um, uh, well, like. . .I guess, um, since there was so much inarticulate anxiety in my last post on the ability to think the "now", Ron Silliman has stepped in to announce it: it's Tao Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel. As in the Jay-Z video , all our pure products are now in place. I've spotted at least four well-placed product names in this video, but I'm sure there are many more,...
vazambam (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
--after Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) Whoever said that Writing could change The intellectual Conditions of human existence Should have thought twice Before writing it. (Written after learning of Claude Lévi-Strauss' death on Ron Silliman's blog.)
Renewable Music (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
What music does a composer respond to? What music does a composer have to be responsible to? Is there repertoire of such importance that response in inescapable? With so much repertoire available that an overview is increasingly impossible, why can't a composer just pick and choose arbitrarily among influences? Or forget influence altogether and you begin from scratch, from first principles, tabula...
Stoning the Devil (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
When a poet falls seriously ill, it is left to his or her fellow poets to “keep the flame lit.” We could all use better circulation, where our work is concerned, and this is especially true when circumstances conspire against us. Todd Swift has, over a period of several years, become one of my favorite poets. A native Canadian currently residing in London, Swift writes poignant poems that...
Nothing to Say & Saying It (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
Well, I’ve not made it very far at all into my pile of books, and yikes, in comes another huge batch. Here’s the second batch below. One more batch, I think, to go, and then I’m going to go back to not having any money for books for a long, long time. For this one moment in time, though, I can pretend to be well-read. As you can see, I’m trying to plug some holes that go back...
NarcissusWorks (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
Thanks to Jeff Harrison who acknowledges Ron Silliman for the following link from The Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-caw-sirens-call11-2009oct11,0,7918498.story Mary Shelley and vitalism [galvanism: reanimating human tissue and the life-force], in Richard Holmes study " The Age of Wonder " (Pantheon: 552 pp., $40) in what he defines a couple's collaboration...
Renewable Music (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
This afternoon, I was sitting on a bench outside the stage entrance to the Frankfurt opera, waiting for my daughter to finish her rehearsal with the childrens' choir. It was about an hour before the evening's performance was to begin, so there was quite a bustle of musicians and singers and technicians and supernumeries coming into and going out of the house, in addition to the street noises behind...
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