Chicago Checklist:

I'm going to Chicago (I've never been) on January 22, 2010 until January 26, 2010. I will be compiling a list of things I would like to see while I am there.

I'd like to check this place out, and hopefully have some sort of conversation with someone involved with this. This is the sort of thing I'm interested in pursuing at some point in my life.

As much as I dislike poetry readings, in general, it might be nice to expose myself to a variety of them, demographically. I feel like Chicago might be more engaging? That still will do nothing for my inability to pay attention (unless you're Peter Gizzi) to your poems. Maybe they'll have an overhead projector? I could think of worse things to do, however. I might want to check this out. ***EDIT-Judging by the quick google search of the poets reading, I'm not so sure.***

The Art Institute of Chicago appears to have some interesting exhibitions showing during my time there. This looks interesting, among other things. I don't know much about the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it could prove to be interesting?

I've heard good things about POWELLS, but have never had the opportunity to see what it's all about. If any of you have any book requests, let me know.

This is more of a blog for me to keep track of possibilities. Feel free to offer suggestions as, like I said, I've never been to Chicago.

Update (01/05):

FRI. 1/22/10 (10:00pm; $10)

The Empty Bottle & Polyvinyl present "The Joan of Arc Don't Mind Control Variety Show"

Featuring:
Josh Abrams related: DRMWPN, Town & Country
A Tundra
Disappears
Jeremy Boyle
Lites Alive
Matt Clark
Motel Smell
Owen
Pillars & Tongues
The Zoo Wheel
Tim Kinsella
Vacations
plus a special performance by Slick Conditions and other surprise special guests

Out last month on Polyvinyl, Don’t Mind Control is a collection of 18 exclusive songs curated by JOAN OF ARC front man TIM KINSELLA from bands that all feature members who have played in JOAN OF ARC at one point in the band’s lustrous history. The release features the prowess of over 41 musicians and a 24 page photo book documenting KINSELLA and Co’s history of making music together. Tonight is a celebration of musical friendships and partnerships in the Chicago indie music scene that have changed and flourished over the last fifteen years.

A Poem

can start up or down. It begins in a way that any poet recognizes, and I think this poem by John Berryman actualizes that feeling, for me, in a way that might help you recognize your own feelings about a poem's beginnings.

Dream Song 29
by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Envy

I'm pretty sure this is my good friend Jeff's good friend. Maybe he could be my good friend some day.

"Not can poetry matter but poetry is matter."

A man after my own heart.

On One's Own Writing

March 25, 1969

Dear Miss Batie,

Thank you for your letter. It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing. In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively. Though as for the last, one certainly has to try. However, I liked your letter, and I have a great curiosity about Vancouver, so I'll see if I can think of anything that may be of use to you.

Of the ideas you suggest, the one that seems closest to what I might think is that of "an art where everything is ambiguous until superimposed into an entity." To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity. DeKooning's work, which I greatly admire, has less to do with it than that of Kurt Schwitter, whose collages are made of commercial bits and "found" pieces but which always compose a whole striking completeness.

I had no religious intention, though I see why a poem whose "idea," if we may call it such, is that of an essential harmony, or perhaps congruity is a better word, might suggest one. However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others. In this case, though, I really can't see that purification comes in at all. Part of the point would seem to be that junk like the trucks and the lions, and things that matter, like flowers, the sea, a mother and her baby (in an ascending scale of value) have each its place, and that it is the world in its impurity which is so very beautiful and acceptable, if only because one has so little choice.

As for evocation/communication, I don't find the first separate from the second, though subsidiary to it. The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate. However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. Someone, I believe, has said that "what a poem communicates is itself." This seems to me true.

I am not quite sure what you mean by the "development" of the poem. If you mean in the sense it's used in music, I hope it's there in the poem; anyway I have nothing to add to it. If you mean how I came to write it, well, let's see.

It was late February and I had very recently returned from Europe, where for the first time I had visited Palermo, and made an excursion to see the temples at Agrigento (where there were also wild snap-dragons in bloom among the lion colored drums of fallen columns), a rather dusty and disappointing affair at the time, but which was a pleasure to recollect. The day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out to be laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything. It then occurred to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean) and that it was "a day like any other," which I put down as a title. The rest of the poem popped out of its own accord. Or so it seems now.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem. One tends to write beyond what's needed.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience). Often a poem "happens" to the writer exactly the same way it "happens" to someone who reads it.

As for stimuli, I hope you won't "perceive a similar response" in this instance, since what stimulated me to write was the apathy following on the disappointment of a wasted day. However, what seemed like waste then may have been warming up. Who knows? Not me.

- James Schuyler

A video poem

The Black Hole from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

I met Zach briefly when he attended the University of Nebraska as a graduate student while I was there as an undergraduate. He was carrying around a workman's lunch pail that possibly had a matching thermos inside. I'm sure he does not remember my name, but he might possibly recognize my face if he saw me because of its recognizableness. This, of your poems, really shook me up. Thanks.

Robin Blaser,

one of my favorite poets, has died.

1925-2009



Waiting for Hours

listen, kid,there isn't anything but art
and the effort to turn it into
the same discourse as
everything else is
scientific
anfelism, disguised as
who-dun-it after all
on art, I'm a kind of
Fibber McGee and Molly
talkin' over the horseshoe
found in 1901--and should
I find three more, we
could have a game in
the backyard--close
the closet, undisturbed by
the ten-foot pole we
wouldn't touch anything
by, if offered--oh--
the hours remind me of
thirty robins' dreams,
snowflakes as big as cigarette
papers

the best thing ever said about me
critically was 'alien exotica'
but I looked out of my eyes at
the piano shawl and wondered
how the fringe could move so
ceaselessly over the fat back
and that was supposed to stop me
dead in my tracks--my job--my
heart--and anything I ever told you
that you believed--wow--magic
and disgusting fun people, also

the beginning

I'm going to start a weekely collaborative poem. I will post a line or two or three and you comment on this post adding/deleting as you feel necessary. Seriously. Anybody and everybody. Go:

I would welcome your handshake
however xxxxxx he’s the money

congratulations for the recovery
cheers to you.doc was recently
undeleted

felicitations!

dot.

hats off!

dot.

well done!

dot.

John Ashbery

taken from this

Q. You are still writing poetry and last fall you had an exhibit of your collages at a Manhattan gallery. Could you please share some lessons of a long life?

A. I go back to Harvard and see all the same buildings and streets and rivers. It seems as though this was only a few months ago that I was there. I don't know that I have really accumulated any wisdom in my fourscore years. I feel as unprepared now as I was when I was a student. I guess I'm just an 80-year-old adolescent. Or 81.

I almost wept when I read Ashbery's answer.

An Ashbery collage:

So

I was looking around the interweb today and stumbled upon a site of Aram Saroyan's "minimal poems." http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/03/wow.html It's really interesting stuff. On the back jacket of one of these minimal poem books, Saroyan writes something that I have written about recently. It's great to feel like my mind is working around some of the same things that other respected writers worked around. Validation? I don't know. I do know that I will probably use what he wrote in a book of mine someday. An epigraph, perhaps. A-ram and is A-merica. It's true.