voice and literary possession

Posted by on January 4, 2012 No comments

James Pate has revisited the possibility that Kenneth Koch wrote Frank O’Hara’s last poem, which is the thought experiment of Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery of the Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara. From “Some thoughts on Beckett’s Mouth and Johnson’s Sun” at Montevidayo:

Often, the idea of the writing hinges on various notions of “the private”: I shape my experience, I tell my story, I find my voice, I am part of a community of other people finding their voices.

As well-meaning as this rhetoric might be, it is also short-sighted and exclusionary. Experience becomes another type of private property. The “I” becomes singular and substantial, and the Subject must be fenced off in order for self-coherence to remain in place.

Writing becomes not an act of invention, but an investigation into roots and origins. Writing becomes not a search for new ways of thinking and experiencing, but a search for foundations, for psychological certitudes.

Of course, according to Pate, those psychological certitudes only redirect metaphysics into “the division between fiction and truth, the corporeal and incorporeal.” Also mentioned are Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Three Versions of Judas.” Here’s the poem in question, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.”

Posted by on November 17, 2011 No comments

The NBA website links to interviews with a number of this year’s winners, but here’s a particularly good John Ashbery interview on Bookworm about his translation of Pierre Martory.

Ashbery studied French poetry in Paris on a Fulbright. Incidentally, Kim Liao, Emerson ’09, just returned from a Fulbright in Taiwan.

“Some days I would swear to you that nothing but occupation exists.”

Posted by on October 17, 2011 No comments

What is Kansas City is how to occupy a split and barely-functioning thing, how to occupy a city made from the wild west, racial injustice, emancipatory urges, and off-hand under-hand anti-rule. When I am occupying Kansas City, I am occupying “suspect nostalgia and equally suspect admiration for decay.”

- Anne Boyer at Lana Turner about Occupy Kansas City (via Mike Young at HTMLGIANT)

swarm of clearness and do they amaze you

Posted by on September 16, 2011 No comments

Really the only thing you must read about the MFA programs/Poets & Writers debacle is a thing M. Kitchell posted over at HTMLGIANT. He didn’t get into any of the programs he liked, decided he didn’t need to, struck out on his own, and figures there are things writers ought to do whether or not they’re in school, and those things more than any school determine what kind of writer person they end up being. Go read his other stuff, too, because he’s good and you ought to.

I messed up and forgot to mention this: tonight at 7PM, the only Molly McGillicuddy and Meredith Jordan from Emerson or anywhere will be Breakwater readers at Brookline Booksmith alongside Noreen Cleffi, Bryan Coller, Natasha Hakimi, and Kurt Klopmeier from UMass Boston and BU. Fiction and poetry. Come see.

(Gnosticism IV by Anne Carson)

We’re back, so go do these things

Posted by on September 7, 2011 No comments

The long version: the server we’d been using for years was hacked. I exported the necessary database before the memory wipe, but realized after picking through it that it was so broken that fixing it would be more painful than just starting from scratch on a design level with all our content (including comments) intact. So all of our media files (of which images will be the only ones really missed) are gone, the site is littered with links to the now-defunct domain (tgdn.net), and the present color scheme was scraped out of a smoker’s lung, but we’re back in time for the semester. We will be rolling out updates to the site on a regular basis, so we ask for your patience during our inevitable hiccups. Again, the entire archive is searchable from our main page. An unintended consequence of applying the correct (when you think about it) domain name (vernacularlit.com) to every entry means anyone who has been linking anywhere besides our main page has been using a dead link since the beginning of August. Many of you probably noticed that a while ago. I’ll try to get in touch with as many as I can, but by now, happily, there have been a lot of you, and I hope that word will reach anyone I’m unable to. From here on, every link will be from the vernacularlit.com domain, which is as it should be.

Some September Boston events you should know about—by no means is this an exhaustive list:

9/8—Upstairs on the Square, 5pm—Christopher Lydon in conversation with Andre Dubus III
Dubus hardly needs an introduction (but if you really need one, here, read up), and I’ll do everything in my power to hear him speak. Upstairs on the Square is no slouch of a bar, either (especially if you prefer wine to beer), and if you’re new to the area, it’s as good a place to start an acquaintance with Harvard Square as any. PEN New England will host this event.

9/8—Harvard Book Store, 7pm—William Giraldi
Giraldi will be reading from his new book, Busy Monsters, after an intro from Steve Almond. I haven’t picked up the book yet, but Giraldi is the senior fiction editor at AGNI, and pretty much everyone writing a review in the New York/Washington/Chicago triangle has varied on “What are you waiting for?” The reading starts half an hour after the Dubus event ends, so maybe you can string the two together. Welcome to Boston: this will happen often.

9/13—The Marliave, 7pm—U35 Poetry: Sean Campbell, Sarah Sweeney, and Matt Summers
Of the three I know only Sean personally. He’s an Emerson writer about as obsessed with how words move against and along each other as they come, and what I’ve read of his work absolutely puts me in a seat for this. Matt Summers has a couple very solid poems up at Thieves’ Jargon, and Sarah Sweeney, who got her MFA from Emerson, has published both poetry and nonfiction all over the place, all of which you should read. The Marliave is a great place for drinks and close to the Park Street T stop, and drinking & poems are old friends.

9/20—Harvard Book Store, 7pm—Dewitt Henry and Gail Mazur
Two of Emerson College’s most venerated faculty will discuss Ploughshares and their own work during a celebration of the journal’s 40th anniversary. Henry’s recent memoir, Sweet Dreams: A Family History, received a glowing review in The New York Journal of Books, and Alexis Orgera has written an essay about Mazur and the title poem from her 2011 collection Figures in a Landscape for The Rumpus. Why you wouldn’t go to this, at Harvard Book Store no less, with its basement tables of remaindered oddities and close proximity to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, is the real question.

9/23—Brookline Booksmith, 7pm—Nick Demske, Rebecca Wolff, and Aafa Michael Weaver
The unmatched Jonathan Papas has organized this reading, and his own descriptions of these three are hard to beat:

Nick Demske, author of “Nick Demske” out on Fence Books, which is an amazing, amazing book. He also runs the BONK! reading series, and lives and work in Racine. Also, dude’s a champion.

Rebecca Wolff, author of the new novel “The Beginners,” editor and publisher of Fence Magazine & Fence Books, and author of the poetry collections “Manderlay,” “Figment,” and “The King” which will rearrange shit in you.

Afaa Michael Weaver, journalist, scholar, playwright, teacher, translator, fiction writer, pushcart winner, editor and poet. Author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently an Arabic translation in the United Arab Emirates. A real hero, and he teaches right here in Boston at Simmons.

I’ll add that Booksmith is one of the best bookstores in all of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, and I defy you to leave without any of the above’s work plus at least $20 worth of the ridiculous selection of used and bargain books. Picking up a calendar of their upcoming readers wouldn’t hurt you, either.