Mar 272012
 

 

 

The world is a poem, repetition rules, influence is rhyme. In his self-introduction to his poem Garry Thomas Morse refers to an essay by Robin Blaser. I interviewed Blaser, one of my first radio shows, when I hosted The Book Show on WAMC in Albany, NY, in the mid-90s, just after his amazing collection The Holy Forest came out. Blaser was originally from Idaho, but his poetry evolved out of the San Francisco Renaissance epitomized by Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. But he was also part of a general and often under-acknowledged surge to the north, American writers and artists heading to Canada in the 60s, for political reasons and other. Blaser moved to Vancouver in 1966 where he became an immensely influential figure in Canadian poetry. Black Mountain poetry, the  San Francisco Renaissance, conceptual poetry, surrealism, and even the sound poetry of Ponge have had an amazing second (or third or whatever) incarnation in Canada. Fred Wah, the current Canadian Poet Laureate, is an heir to the movement. He was there in Vancouver, on the scene, when Charles Olson made his famous 1963 visit and read from the Maximus Poems.

Garry Thomas Morse typifies an emergent generation of Canadian poets in the tradition. He’s exciting to read, fun to look at on the page (my son Jonah, 17, discovered a print out of this poem on my desk and charged in saying, “Who wrote this? This is great. He’s got the FONTS talking to each other! Look at this ‘scalar darkness’ line.”). We have here a work that is intimate yet cerebral, aware of itself as typed words on the page, yet exploding into myth. Wonderful to have it, and to have a chance to limn its context.

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Garry Thomas Morse: In his Own Words

My lifelong long poem The Untitled (thus far) approaches personal biotext in terms of compositional method, transmuting (or transmutating) quotidian aspects of life into refractions of poetic form in which the continuous lyric is subject to disjunctive fragmentation, for example, in more than one case into operatic fragments. I think it is fair to agree with what has been said, that my poetry has a “tendency toward epic” and is very much informed by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and Robin Blaser, to name but a few. As for the compositional structures and ideas of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Mahler, hopefully the reader will on some level perceive them.

Poet Sharon Thesen recently sent me a quote from Robin Blaser’s essay on Charles Olson in The Fire that made her think of my project The Untitled, and this caused me to reflect upon the relationship between the individual and rerum natura:

“What I have noticed in the poetry and poetics of the most important poets is that they are arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology. There is no epistemological cut-off in our deepest natures, nor in our engagement with life. Nor is the ambition of what is known short on its desire for cosmos. It is this structuring, large and deep in the nature of things, that still thrills us in Hesiod’s struggle for the sense of it….Repeatedly in the history of poetry we find ourselves returning to epic structures….I suggest that great poetry is always after the world–it is a spiritual chase–and that it has never been, in the old, outworn sense, simply subjective or personal.”

The Untitled (91) is something of a parody of much poetic and conceptual praxis, where the “concept” of a city “narrative” breaks down into interweavings of Artaud and Adorno, who as Leonard Bernstein has pointed out, “didn’t get the joke” where Stravinsky was concerned and thought him a demon. I’d say my lyrical demonry bears comparison with Stravinsky’s methodologies, stacking linguistic constructions like so many tritones on top of one another in order to try and resuscitate the lyric mode. And it’s kinda messy.

To paraphrase the lovely and witty dramaturge Lucia Frangione, perhaps this is the only way to tell the pie you’ve made is homemade and not store bought, ie. tidy, angular, and geometric, pretentious or inedible. Real food is thrown together.

I suppose Gustave Mahler’s heart is giving out somewhere in the poem, and so is my Anglo-Jewish grandmother’s in the hospital. By assuming these fragmentary associations, this jumble of repetitive images may live on, in dare I say, the real world.

—Garry Morse

—Garry Thomas Morse

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Garry Thomas Morse has had two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009), published by Talonbooks, and two books of poetry published by Talonbooks, After Jack (2010) and Discovery Passages (2011), finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry and finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Morse is recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

 

 

 

Jan 252012
 

Adeena Karasick is a one-woman semantic explosion. She writes in the spirit of verbal play and experiment and RIOT out of Gertrude Stein and bpNichol, among others (spoken word, rap, Black Mountain). And how can you NOT like a poem that admits its own “unraveling” and bills itself as an “asterisk taker” and contains lines like “oh, just lick its/ ideological infrastructure” and dances between contemporary cultural filigree and theoretical/philosophical references (“ontic gap”)? See below, a video of Adeena reading from the beginning of the poem. The images scattered through the poem were made in collaboration with Blaine Speigel. The whole poem, called “This Poem,” will be published as a book this fall by the great and storied Vancouver publisher Talonbooks.

Adeena Karasick  is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory: Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems regularly showcased at International Film Festivals. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries.

Her writing has been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak” (Globe and Mail) and “opens up the possibilities of reading” (Vancouver Courier).  She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University in New York.

Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended tweets, This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world we’re enmeshed in. Mashing up the lexicons of Gertrude Stein, Loius Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, the contemporary financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Jacques Derrida and Flickr streams, “This Poem” a self-reflexive romp through the shards, fragments of post-consumerist culture. Both celebrating and poking fun at contradictory trends, threads, webbed networks of information and desire, and the language of the ‘ordinary”, it opens itself with rawness and immediacy to the otherness of daily carnage.

A deeply satiric archive of fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatise, advice, precepts, echoes, questions, erupting in a voluminous luminous text of concomitance. divergence, dis/integration and desire.

A serial poem that textually proceeds in the tradition of such poets as George Oppen, bpNichol,  Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer committed to the shape of a life lived with the lyric irony of textuality; taking on the search for definition punctuated with strong incursions of eros, pleasure, terror and social networking. —AK

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This Poem

By Adeena Karasick

 

Part II

 

And in the rapturous apertures
of perspicacity (purse capacity),

of its bootstrap boobietrap of ear-tickling
hyper-inflated speculative frenzy

This Poem just wants a “happy ending”

like a ring-a-ding swinger
foursquare tech ticker, fecund licker

elbowing its way through a persnickety
kwik-pic sticky dictic,

and wants to lick you immeasurably,
your vesicles and crevasses, lick the lips of your
pixilated proxy, paroxysms of purring tragedy

wants you to smack it
up against its inky-vexed lexis,
mixological excess, slide down
its rumpy pumpy amped-up optates,
jacked clad cock of the walk ecto-flecked vectors

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