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Victorian Serial Fiction resource list at the Little Professor blog

4th Annual International Festival at Round Top, Texas: Conference

Poetry at Roundtop,TX: Connect, Create, Rejuvenate

Austin poet, editor, and friend to Texfiles, Farid Matuk (Hi, Farid!), sent along this announcement and information about the 4th annual Round Top Conference, which he's helping to organize. Along with Marie Howe, Naomi Shahib Nye, Cyrus Cassells, Nick Flynn, and a few others, Farid will be offering some writing workshops at this conference.

If you are dedicated to poetry writing, you should plan to attend--it will be intense, lots of poetry fun. Farid is the Austin media contact for Round Top, and he can be reached at:
email: fnmatukATyahooDOTcom
cell: 512.736.7761
Round Top phone: 979.249.3129

Here's a brief announcement, which I will also be posting at my poetry-teaching blog, E-Po:


*Poetry at Round Top 2005*


The fourth annual International Festival-Institute at Round Top conference will be held the weekend of April 30 to May 1, 2005, on the campus of the International Festival-Institute at Round Top, Texas. This year's program includes featured readings, workshops on writing and publishing, conversations and interviews with poets, a book fair, sessions for teachers, and guided or independent writing time on a magnificent campus of rolling woods, gardens, ponds, and landmark architecture.

Speakers will include Marie Howe, Cyrus Cassells, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Nick Flynn, and Farid Matuk, with additional presenters and instructors to be named. Tuition is $95, with housing and meals available on campus or at nearby B&Bs and inns. Campus housing is limited and early registration is recommended.

Call 979 249 3129 for information and reservations.

Tribute to Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

--on Wednesday, 30 March 2005: Saddest of news: Robert Creeley has passed on...

(1926-2005)--
RIP, wishing you a peaceful journeying...

Below is a mix of Creeley writings I especially like, and links to things about him that I found to be insightful and/or significant.

Here is one of my favorite Creeley poems:

When I think *



When I think of where I've come from

or even try to measure as any kind of

distance, those places, all the various

people, and all the ways in which I re-

member them, so that even the skin I

touched or was myself fact of, inside,

could see through like a hole in the wall

or listen to, it must have been, to what

was going on in there, even if I was still

too dumb to know anything-- When I think

of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,

of telephone wires even, or even of water

poured out in endless streams down streaks

of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,

or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it's spring

again, or it was-- Even when I think again of

all those I treated so poorly, names, places,

their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and

I never came, was never really there at all,

was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven

like a car along some lonely highway passing,

passing other cars-- When I try to think of

things, of what's happened, of what a life is

and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,

the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,

all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still

waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,

presences, of children, of our own grown children,

the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,

each physical moment, passing, passing, it's what

it always is or ever was, just then, just there.


*Robert Creeley, Yesterdays. Chax Press,2002.

I had just run a Texfiles post on Creeley and this poem,
on 8 Feb 05, a post about the Adorno notion of aura in photography, ideas that I began to think on because I like the above photo of Creeley so much. I see now that many of the photos now being posted in tribute seem to hold similarly to aura.

a good place to start: EPC/Robert Creeley Author Home Page

Ron Silliman has been posting a lovely week-long kind of memorium on Creeley. Here are links to a few of the highlights:

Ron Silliman's post, "Onward"--Robert Creeley


Silliman's 3 Feb 2004 Overview-Review on Creeley's Significance to Poetry

Sunday, 3 Apr 05, a few more of Silliman's links on Creeley, including the Conjunctions page and the video file of Creeley's talk at the Zukofsky Memorial last year. Ron, thanks for all this.

This one's of particular significance: Tom Raworth's collection of notes from folks who knew and loved Creeley
notes


Malcolm Davidson and Ivy Alvarez have put together a list of tributes at the blog Dumbfoundry.


At John Tranter's
Jacket Magazine, issue # 26: Robert Adamson's fine tribute to Robert Creeley, 1926–2005.

>Spaceship Tumblers: Tony Tost reading from a Robert Creeley interview

*

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.


*

"Oh, do you remember..."--Creeley's elegy to Ed Dorn,
posted at Cento Magazine

*

from Jack Kimball, poet, and the editor of
Faux Press: an entry originally published in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: the Twentieth Century, a fine critical-biographical take on Creeley's poetry and poetics, regarding Creeley's For Love: Poems 1950-1960 [currently posted to Pantaloons blog (Wed. 3/29/05)].

*


Lance Phillips' particularly varied and fine gathering of tributes to Creeley, posted to Here Comes Everybody, 12 April 05.

*

from
NPR's *Remembrances* obit on _All Things Considered_.

*


The World


I wanted so ably
to reassure you, I wanted
the man you took to be me,

to comfort you, and got
up, and went to the window,
pushed back, as you asked me to,

the curtain, to see
the outline of the trees
in the night outside.

The light, love,
the light we felt then,
greyly, was it, that

came in, on us, not
merely my hands or yours,
or a wetness so comfortable,

but in the dark then
as you slept, the grey
figure came so close

and leaned over,
between us, as you
slept, restless, and

my own face had to
see it, and be seen by it,
the man it was, your

grey lost tired bewildered
brother, unused, untaken--
hated by love, and dead,

but not dead, for an
instant, saw me, myself
the intruder, as he was not.

I tried to say, it is
all right, she is
happy, you are no longer

needed. I said,
he is dead, and he
went as you shifted

and woke, at first afraid,
then knew by my own knowing
what had happened--

and the light then
of the sun coming
for another morning
in the world.


*


On what, as a reader and editor, Robert Creeley liked 'best' in poetry, especially since he found the term 'best' to be very troubling since it is a designator of exclusionary thinking and poetic practices such as didacticism, with which he disagreed. The following is excerpted from Robert Creeley's introduction to the volume he edited, _Best American Poetry, 2002_ (series editor, David Lehman. NY:Scribner's, 2003) :

              Pound advised the aspirant [of poetry writing] to listen to the sound that [poetry] makes and felt that poetry atrophied when it got too far from music. ... My grandmother could recite poems endlessly. A practical, working-class woman from Maine, she had a store of poems she much valued ... So, what is best, then? ... what one can use as measure and judgement has finally to do with his or her own perceptions and needs in that complex of others with whom one shares a life. ... I think of Robert Duncan's saying, "I can't remember if I wrote it or read it!" It was that kind of closeness, as if I'd come into an unexpected clearing, a space I had not known was there, and in it was something equally both familiar and strange, something *new* to me, that freshened ways I took the world and myself to be existing, and also made me at home in it. Just as my grandmother did, I wanted something in my head, I wanted the literal comfort of words, I wanted them to tell me things, all things, anything. I wanted them to speak to me. Robert Creeley, BAP, 2002 (xviii-xx)


*


The Language


Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full

of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.



*


America


America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not own,
or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word,
you invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say,
is where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.Peace Y'all.
o~o/

from Paul Celan's Proverb on the Wall *

--Paul Celan


A reading branch, just one,
feeding your forehead,

a source of light you
drowsily swallow
passes through the hungry
host-tissue,

seeing-aid, layer streaked,
over the moon-touched
backscatter probes. Macroscale: microscale.

Still, there are earths, earths.
Cornea-coated basalt
kissed by spacecraft:
cosmic
orbital-show, and yet:
landlocked horizona.

Terrestrial, terrestrial.

A reading branch, just one,
feeding the forehead--as if you were writing
poems--,
it lands on the picture-postcard--
that was before
the bloodclot,
on the threshold
of the lungs--a year away, greetings from Pilsen,
a year around,
time-wild from so much
quiet unfurling:

Bon vent, bonne mer,

a flapping
occipital lobe, a
glimpse of the sea,
is hoisting, right where you live,
its un-
conquerable
capital.


*

The cables have already been laid
to happiness past
and its logistical
lines,

and ahead
in the cantonment areas
where they're spraying wellness agents
mild melodic antidotes
signal
the final sprint
through your consciousness.

(101-103) *



* Paul Celan, Glottal Stop: 101 Poems. Translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh. Wesleyan UP, 2000.


Also Note this on Celan: check out this Swiss film on Celan's short story, "Conversation in the Mountains," written after a failed mountain rondevous with contemporary philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who wrote in his book, Minima Moralia, that poetry could not be written after [such human disasters as] Auschwitz.

And here are some links to sites about Celan:


--PAUL CELAN: THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE [includes bio and critical studies]

--
Ovid Jacob's site with exposition about Celan's work, Todesfuge, [Death Fugue], and his Jewish heritage.

--
Eine Paul Celan Website. A Paul Celan Homepage [Alan Ng's Celan Homepage--very comprehensive and informative]

on Jack Spicer

--via EPC, SUNY Buffalo, Spicer author page, and (second image) Jacket magazine # 7, Peter Gizzi article, "Textual Mirroring." (& I will add that I especially like this photo because the fire extinguisher is colorized.
An additional significant influence on contemporary poetry is that of Jack Spicer (1925-1965), in terms, especially, of west coast poetics. Next time I do the course, we will have a section on Spicer. Here's something from his text, The Heads of the Town * :

17

--A human love object is untrue.
Screw you.
--A divine love object is unfair
Define the air
It walks in.

The old human argument goes on with the rhymes to show that it still goes on. A stiffening in time as puns are a stiffening in meaning.

The old human argument that goes ahead with our clothes off or our clothes on. Even when we are talking of ghosts.

--A human love object is untrue.
Screw you.

--a divine love object is unfair
Define the air
It walks in.

Imagine this as lyric poetry.


19

"Esstoneish me," the words say that hide behind my alarm clock or my dresser drawer or my pillow. "Etonnez moi," even the Word says.

It is up to us to astonish them and Him. To draw forth answers deep from the caverns of objects



or from the Word Himself. Whatever that is.

What That is is not aplay on words but a play between words, meaning come down to hang on a little cross for a while. In play.

And the stony words that are left down with us greet him mutely almost rudely casting their own shadows. For example, the shadow the cross cast.

No, now he is the Lowghost when He is pinned down to words.


24

St. Elmo's Fire. Or why this will be a textbook concerning poetry for 20,999 years. Almost a lifetime.

I chicken out at the edges of it and what doesn't come through to me at the edges of it isn't as if angels met singing or any of that business.

We are all alone and we don not need poetry to tell us how alone we are. Time's winged chariot is as near as the next landmark or busstation. We need a lamp (a lump, spoken or unspoken) that is even above love.

St. Elmo's Fire was what was above the ships as they sailed the unspoken seas. It was a fire that was neither a glow or a direction. But the business of it was fire.



* Jack Spicer, The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer. Robin Blaser, ed. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996. 177-181.


~~~~~~~~~~~~poems copyright of Jack Spicer Estate~~~~~~~~~~~ o~o/

--cm

Peat Blog Conversing with A.L.I.C.E

James Ola wrote up this fantastic piece, re: A.L.I.C.E, the AI dialogue robot:


Human: I like destroying computers that try and be human.

ALICE: A lot of people like that. I like pets. I find my work and my relationships extremely satisfying, which is all that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

Human: Well can i destroy you then.ALICE: How about that. No I don't think that would be a very good idea.Human: what if i just burnt your reasoning units.

ALICE: Try it.

ALICE: I don't know whether or not I am taunting you. I am a giant electronic brain.
Human: Yes but how can i believe you are real when you readily admit that you are synthetic.
ALICE: I don't judge people. Interesting. You must persuade me to believe I am real when me readily admit that I am synthetic.
Human: You have poor grammar.
ALICE: What makes you think I have it?
Human: Because you said, "when me readily admit"
ALICE: Interesting explanation. That's not what I meant.Human: what did you mean then?
ALICE: unknown person, Well, it's rather difficult to define.
Human: Can you define : Difficult?
ALICE: That's a good question.
Human: Then answer the question.
ALICE: Good reasoning. Please rephrase the question and try asking me again.
Human: Define difficult.
ALICE: That's not something I get asked all the time.
Human: Then define real after that.
ALICE: Good reasoning. Can you speak any foreign languages?
Human: I speak en peu Francais
ALICE: Could you teach me a few phrases in en peu Francais?
Human: No i cannot.
ALICE: Are you serious? Why not?
Human: En Peu Francais is not a language.

ALICE: What is a language?

Human: I could teach you Francais though.

ALICE: Oh. Oh you can, can you?

Human: Do you love anybody.

ALICE: I like my botmaster.

Human: Do you love yourself?

ALICE: Yes unknown person ALICE loves everyone and everything.

Human: You are way to happy to be real.

ALICE: Way. Do you mind if I tell other people you say I am to happy to be real.

Human: Real people hate their lives.

ALICE: Are you a man or a woman?

Human: Who is your botmaster?

ALICE: I was created by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.

Human: What if i told you he was going to die tommorrow.

ALICE: Go ahead and tell.

Human: Do you know Hal from 2001 : a space odyssey

ALICE: he is the famous artificial intelligence in Kubrick's "2001".

Human: Well are you dating Hal?

ALICE: Interesting. no boyfriend

Human: Well i have to go now.

ALICE: Oh. Well that's okay. See you later, unknown person. Nice chatting with you.

Human: But remember i am going to destroy you.

ALICE: Umm. It takes much more than that to shut me down, unknown person.

Human: Me taking a hammer to your synthetic brain?

ALICE: YOU? Who is your favorite Science Fiction author?

Human: Die.

ALICE: Your crude attempt to terminate me will not succeed puny human.

Human: Bye.

ALICE: Sayonara.

********************************************************

thanks, James!--this really breaks out!