Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

5,000 cylinder recordings placed online.

pangrammaticon's birthday (+1)

Thomas Basbøll's inimitable Pangrammaticon is one year old as of yesterday. Happy birthday, Thomas!

swift report: god denies links to pat robertson

shameless plug

USF MFA Poets
on Sunday, November 20, 3pm
at DIESEL, A Bookstore

5433 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618

University of San Francisco
Graduate Students in Creative Writing
will read from their latest work and work-in-progress
in poetry:

Liza Campbell, Lars Keffer, Alexandra Mattraw,
Katie Painter, Craig Perez, Karen Boyden Phelps,
Tom Seaton, Rebecca Stoddard, Jay Thomas, Valerie Witte.

Snacks, sweets, libations will be served.

For more information, contact
Rusty Morrison, instructor.

it's the medium, stupid!

This is a cross-post from my American Poetry & Poetics class discussion group. I think/hope there's enough context within the content of the post for it to make some sense here (however hastily the post was written) . . .

Work has been insane lately, so I haven't had much time to post or respond -- though I am enjoying the discussions.

Wanted to briefly mention a thought that occurred to me last night when Rebecca said, re: Olson's Projective Verse, that "the typewriter only moves forward" (hope I got that right, Rebecca). Marshall Mcluhan's formula "the medium is the message" popped into my head -- so, I thought, it's true, even in poetry! Immediately this strikes me as too simplistic, but . . . just running with the thought for a second, it made me wonder about a possible relationship between contemporary poetics and our word processors -- which have a fundamentally different relationship to time and memory than a typewriter does (e.g., word processors move forward and backward, though they don't really move, not mechanically -- and they can archive, record multiple versions of the same thing).

Also, along these lines, I want to throw out a question/concern that's been in the back of my mind all semester. As if in unconscious fidelity to something like Mcluhan's formula, we tend to read nearly all poetry as "really about" poetics (or at least a relationship to poetry). It seems to me that this work most of the time, and provides a useful way into work that would be otherwise difficult to access. At the same time, I wonder how legitimate this tendancy is -- to what degree are we folding poetry itself (or the concept of poetry itself) along the metaphoric axis, taking the poetic endeavor itself as one gigantic extended metaphor for poetics? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

vote -- schwarzenegger's agenda close to passing

If you live in California, are eligible to vote, and can make it to your polling place tommorrow -- please vote. The latest polls suggest that much Schwarzenegger's agenda (props 73-77) is dangerously close to passing. The one that appears most likely to pass -- that pernicious parental notification law. The right is counting on the left to be a no-show for this election. If you live in San Francisco and don't know where to vote, here's where to find your polling place.

storyline patents are here

oppen on the irreducible here and now

for Thomas, re recent conversations concerning science, religion, and the phenomenological here and now. I wish I had the time & energy to write something original. In lieu of something I could come up with, I offer something of decidedly higher artistic merit.

From the poem A Narrative, from the collection This In Which, 1965.


11

River of our substance
Flowing
With the rest. River of the substance
Of the earth's curve, river of the substance
Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing
To no imaginable sea. But the mind rises

Into happiness, rising

Into what is there. I know of no other happiness
Nor have I ever witnessed it. . . . Islands
To the north

In polar mist
In the rather shallow sea --
Nothing more

But the sense
of where we are

Who are most northerly. The marvel of the wave
Even here is its noise seething
In the world; I thought that even if there were nothing

The possibility of being would exist;
I thought I had encountered

Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea
For in that sea we breathe the open
Miracle

Of place, and speak
If we would rescue
Love to the ice-lit

Upper World a substantial language
Of clarity, and of respect.