London Open Mic Poetry Archive
  • Home
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Stan Burfield Blog
    • Fred Burfield's Homestead Memoirs
  • Our Events
  • News
  • PHOTOS & SUMMARIES
    • Season 5: 2016-2017 >
      • June 7th, 2017: Summary & Photos featuring Stan Burfield
      • May 3rd, 2017, Summary & Photos featuring Jason Dickson
      • April 5th, 2017 Summary & Photos, feeaturing James Deahl & Norma West Linder
      • Mar. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Andy Verboom
      • Feb. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Ron Stewart
      • Dec. 7th, 2016: Photos & Summary featuring David Stones
      • Nov. 2th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring Don Gutteridge
      • Oct. 5th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring David Huebert
    • Season 4: 2015-2016 >
      • June 1st, 2016: Photos and summaries: featuring Lynn Tait
      • May 4th, 2016 Photos and Summary: featuring indigenous poetry
      • April 6, 2016 Photos & Summary, featuring Steven McCabe
      • Mar. 2nd, 2016 photos, summary: featuring Andreas Gripp
      • Feb. 3rd, 2016 photos: 3 Western students.
      • Dec. 2, 2015 photos: featured reader Peggy Roffey
      • Nov. 7, 2015 photos: Our Words Fest open mic
      • Nov. 4, 2015 photos: featured reader Charles Mountford
      • Oct. 7th, 2015 photos: Madeline Bassnett featured
    • Season 3, 2014-15 >
      • Aug. 16, 2015 photos: The Ontario Poetry Society's "Sultry Summer Gathering"
      • June 3rd, 2015 photos: John B. Lee featured
      • May 6th, 2015 photos: Laurie D Graham featured
      • Apr. 1st, 2015 photos: John Nyman & Penn Kemp featured
      • Mar. 4th, 2015 photos: Patricia Black featured.
      • Feb. 4th, 2015 photos: feature Gary Barwin
      • Dec. 3rd, 2014 photos: Feature Debbie Okun Hill
      • Nov. 5th, 2014 photos: feature Julie Berry
      • Oct. 1st, 2014 photos: feature Roy MacDonald
    • Season 2, Sept. 2013 to June 2014. >
      • June 4th, 20114, featuring Monika Lee
      • May 7th 2014, featuring Susan McCaslin and Lee Johnson
      • Sept. 4th, 2013 featuring Frank Beltrano
      • April 16th, 2014, featuring Penn Kemp and Laurence Hutchman
      • March 5th, 2014, featuring Jacob Scheier
      • Feb. 5th, 2014: featuring four UWO students of poetry; music by Tim Woodcock
      • Jan. 2nd, 2014: featuring Carrie Lee Connel
      • Dec. 4th, 2013, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip
      • Nov. 6, 2013 , featuring Susan Downe
      • Oct. 2nd, 2013, featuring Jan Figurski
    • Season 1: Oct. 2012 to June 2013 >
      • June 4th, 2013 featuring David J. paul and the best-ever open mic
      • May 1st, 2013, featuring Sonia Halpern
      • Apr. 24, 2013 featuring Frank Davey & Tom Cull
      • Mar. 6th, 2013, featuring Christine Thorpe
      • Feb. 6th, 2013, featuring D'vorah Elias
      • Jan. 3rd. 2013: John Tyndall featured.
      • Dec. 5, 2012: RL Raymond featured
    • Dig These Hip Cats ... The Beats
  • Poet VIDEOS (open mic & featured readers)
    • 5th Season Videos (2016-2017)
    • 4th Season Videos (2015-16)
    • 3rd Season Videos (2014-2015)
    • 2nd Season (2013-2014) videos
  • BIOGRAPHIES - Featured poets & musicians
  • INTERVIEWS & POEMS (featured poets)
    • SEASON 6 - Interviews & Poems >
      • Kevin Shaw: Poem & Interview
      • David Janzen - Interview
    • SEASON 5 INTERVIEWS & POEMS
    • SEASON 4 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 3 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 2 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (only from Dec. 4th, 2013)
    • Season 1 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (& 1st half of Season 2) >
      • INTERVIEWS of Featured Poets
      • POEMS by Featured Poets (1st Season & to Nov. 2013)
  • Couplets: Poets in Dialogue
  • Future Events
  • Past Events
    • 5th Season: 2016-2017
    • Season 4: 2015-2016
    • Season 3: 2014-2015
    • Season Two: 2013-2014
    • Season One: 2012-2013
  • Who we Are
  • Testimonial
  • Our Mission
  • Links
  • Contact us

Reading Innovative Poetry, Reading READING THE DIFFICULTIES

4/18/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry, ed. Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 230 pp. $34.95.


Reading the Difficulties is another spring 2014 release in the Modern/Contemporary Poetics series co-edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. It is less a book about how to read ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry than one that presents examples of readers doing that. The subtitle, “dialogues with contemporary American innovative poetry,” suggests that “reading” can involve having “dialogues” with poems, and is a fair description of most of the contents. Two of the twelve essays are on Canadian poets, bpNichol and Lisa Robertson, who appear to have become honorary Americans for this occasion. Or perhaps “American” has been unconsciously redefined here as referencing North America – the rapid globalization of literary distribution and creation has complications for everyone. Also frequently cited here is a third Canadian, Steve McCaffery.

Difficult not to notice is the sometimes awkwardly close connection between the book and series co-editor Bernstein, who rather famously linked the word ‘difficulty’ to his own writing in his 2011 collection The Attack of the Difficult Poems. Much of the first third of this book reads like a tribute that important book. The lead-off contribution is his 2006 poem “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem.” The fourth essay is a comparison by Stephen Paul Miller of Bernstein and Walter Benjamin as radical secular Jewish poets. Thirty-three mentions of Bernstein are listed in the index (mostly in the first 50 pages), more than double those of any other writer except for fellow Language poet Ron Silliman who receives 23.   

The arguments of most of the contributors indeed have their roots in Bernstein’s assertions over the years in work such as The Artifice of Absorption (1987) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-84 (2001) against the reduction by readers and teachers of literary works to their “content” – a scandalizing argument that has paralleled in the US poetry scene the one which I introduced to the Canadian Literature criticism scene in 1974 with my (“vastly influential” according to the Oxford Companion [one hopes!]) essay “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Paralleled with rather more panache, disruptive force and literary consequence, I would say. Here is some of Bernstein’s “artifice of absorption” argument against paraphrase, i.e. against throwing away a text’s materiality while “absorbing” its imagined/abstracted “meaning”:


Read More
0 Comments

Laura Riding, Poet from High Modernism

4/4/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Contemporaries and Snobs by Laura Riding. Ed. Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 129 pp. $34.95


Contemporaries and Snobs was first published by Doubleday Doran in 1928, during the period  (1925-30) of Riding’s most influential presence in the international high modernist writing scene. It was a time in which she published poetry and commentary in major modernist journals, was in contact with Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot, lived with Robert Graves and co-wrote with Graves A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), which the editors of this volume describe as the “first formal study to consider the work of E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Conrad Aitken, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, T.S. Eliot, John Crow Ransom, Edith Sitwell, and Allen Tate as a single movement” (xi).

There is no surprise in its being republished: it’s an important document not only of the male dominance of that literary scene but also of the conflicts within it that are often understated in literary histories. There is perhaps some mystery in it being republished within Alabama’s   “Modern/Contemporary” Poetics series edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. Is there a connection being implied between the literary politics of the 1920s and those of recent US poetry? Are Riding’s acid criticisms of Eliot’s self-canonizing essays and her perceptive readings of Stein being reframed in order also to reframe the various works of Language poets?

However what could impress a reader first in Riding’s book is how distant her assumptions are from those in contemporary poetry. While challenging Eliot’s emphasis on ridding poetry of the personal and subjective, his stress on impersonality, she also readily accepts his implication that literature and literary periods can be only classical or romantic, and uses it to construct a history of English literature and Western culture as an oscillation of classical and


Read More
0 Comments

    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
    -Shorter bio/interview
    -Biography, online

    Categories

    All
    Adeena Karasick
    Agnes Threlkeld
    Aka Bpnichol
    Alan Edward McCartney
    Alan Reed
    Alice Munro
    Al Purdy
    Amodern
    Art Deco
    Artist's Homes
    Avant Garde
    Avant-garde
    Barack Obama
    Barbara Godard
    Barnicke Gallery
    Basil Bunting
    Battle
    Beauty
    Bill Bissett
    'Black Mountain'
    Bookthug
    BpNichol
    Buddhist Ecopoetics
    Canada At War
    Canadian Art
    Canadian Literature
    Canadian Pacific Railway
    Canadian War Lit
    CanLit Institution
    CanLit Teaching
    Ceramics
    Charles Bernstein
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Christian Bok
    Christine Miscione
    Christl Verduyn
    Climate Change
    Coach House Press
    Cold War
    Collaboration
    Conceptual Art In Britain
    Conceptual Poetry
    Concrete Poetry
    Creative Writing
    Daphne Marlatt
    Dennis Cooley
    Derek Beaulieu
    Devil's Artisan
    Donato Mancini
    Earle Birney
    Ecopoetry
    Emily Carr
    Epistolary Poems
    Eternal Network
    Eva Zeisel
    Ezra Pound
    Fetish Objects
    First World War
    Flarf
    Fluxus
    Frank Sanderson
    Franz Karl Stanzel
    Fred Wah
    Garry Thomas Morse
    General Idea
    George Bowering
    Gertrude Stein
    Greg Curnoe
    Gwendolyn MacEwen
    Gwynne Dyer
    Hart House
    Identity
    Indigenous Poetics
    Industrial Poetry
    Installation Art
    Irving Layton
    Jackson Mac Low
    Jacqueline Du Pasquier
    James Schuyler
    John Cage
    J.R. Colombo
    Judy Chicago
    Juliana Spahr
    Julian Assange
    Jussi Parikka
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kenneth Goldsmith
    Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
    Kit Dobson
    Language Poetry
    Laura Farina
    Laura Riding
    Lea Hindley-Smith
    Lemon Hound
    Leonard Cohen
    Lionel Kearns
    Lisa Anne Smith
    Lisa Robertson
    Literary Celebrity
    Literary Marketing
    Lola Tostevin
    Louis Dudek
    Louise Bourgeois
    Louis Zukofsky
    Love Letters
    Lyric Poetry
    Lytle Shaw
    Manifestos
    Mansfield Press
    Margaret Atwood
    Marjorie Perloff
    Max Laeuger
    Media Archaeology
    Michael Davidson
    Michael Morris
    Michael Ondaatje
    Mimesis
    Mina Loy
    Minimalism
    Misogyny In Poetry
    Modernism
    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
    National Anthologies
    Nelson Ball
    Norman Yates
    Open Letter
    Pataphysics
    Paul Martin
    Peter Jaeger
    Peter-quartermain
    Philippe Petain
    Phyllis Webb
    Pierre Coupey
    Poetic Community
    Poetics
    Poetry Readings
    Procedural Art
    Public Poetics
    Pussy Riot
    Pussy Riot
    Rachel Blau Duplessis
    Rae Armantrout
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Duncan
    Robert Fitterman
    Robert Kroetsch
    Robert Lallemant
    Robert Lecker
    Ron Silliman
    Second World War
    Sharon Thesen
    Sherrill Grace
    Slavoj Žižek
    Smaro Kamboureli
    Stan Bevington
    Stan Dragland
    Stephen Voyce
    Steve Mccaffery
    Susan Bee
    Swiftcurrent
    Telidon
    Thea Bowering
    The Martyrology
    Theodor Adorno
    Tim Inkster
    TISH
    Tomson Highway
    Toronto Research Group
    Trg
    T.S. Eliot
    U-331
    U-Boat Surrenders
    Us Fiction
    Vimy Ridge
    Vincent Massey
    Visual Poetry
    Walter Benjamin
    Warren Tallman
    W.C. Williams
    Weardale
    Wikileaks

    Archives

    September 2020
    August 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly