Distribution Automatique

Saturday, July 7

Vengua's Velvet Voyage

Jean Vengua's excellent new book of poetry will include our blurb on its cover. Check it out on her blog

Okir

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Two Art Shows in Provincetown we visited last night were

Moby Dick, the chapters, Timothy Woodman, which continues at the Albert Merola Gallery, 124 Commercial Street, until July 19. Philip Hoare's new book about Melville *Leviathan* will be published in 2008. Timothy Woodman created the cover which is composed of coloful painted panels, each with a symbol for a chapter from the book.

Our friend Elizabeth Fodaski was there with her children and her husband, the artist Richard Baker. Liz told us she recently completed her MFA, studying with Elaine Equi and David Lehman. Liz is the author of fracas.

and

the Provincetown Art Associationwhich now features an ambitious full retrospective of work by the late artist Jim Hansen.

We were invited to these shows by Mira Schor, who, with Susan Bee, edited M/E/A/N/I/N/G which is now available online at M/E/A/N/I/N/G

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Close Listening

edited by Charles Bernstein was published in 1988. Google has placed the entire book online. One of the essays, mostly about found poetry, is our The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry. You can read it here:
Close Listening

Friday, July 6

The Music of Mallarme

""His aim....is to use words in such a harmonious combination as will suggest to the reader a mood or a condition *which is not mentioned in the text,* but is nevertheless paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of composition." That sums it up. I create music and give that name not to the music one can extract by the euphonious juxtaposition of words, this primary condition is self-evident; but the beyond, which is magically produced by certain dispositions of the word; where the word, moreover, is merely a means of material communication with the reader, like the notes of the piano. Truly, between the lines and above the glance, that communication is achieved in all purity, without the intervention of the catgut strings and the pistons of an orchestra, which is already industrial. Yet it's the same thing as an orchestra, but as literature, meaning silently. Poets throughout the ages have never done anything else, the only thing is that today it's amusing to be aware of it. Use Music in the Greek sense, meaning, basically, Idea or the rhythm between connections; in that case it's more divine than in the public or symphonic expression. This is very poorly expressed, in chatting, but you seize my meaning, or rather you have seized it throughout that fine study which you must keep as it is, intact. The only quibble I have to make is on obscurity; no, my dear poet, except through awkwardness or clumsiness, I'm not obscure, from the moment the reader seeks in my poetry what I ennumerate above, or the manifestation of an art which uses- let us say incidentally, I know the profound reason for this- language; and of course I become obscure if the reader makes the mistake of thinking he's opening a newspaper!"

From the Letters of Mallarme
February, 1893

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Wednesday, July 4

Someone visited fait accompli and translated it into

Chinese

Monday, July 2

The Contrapuntal Conversation

The character of literature is essentially choral. If a voice is lacking, we hear that silence as part of a specific literary texture. New points of view are consistently arriving on the scene, just as familiar characters are making their exit. Our practiced, sensitive listening carefully tracks this contrapuntal conversation, and cannot fail to detect any lacuna. As voices rise and fall, every silence and dissonance makes its statement and is, at least subliminally, eventually recognized and identified.

Sunday, July 1

In honor of Gary Sullivan's Murphy's Laws of Poetry
on Elsewhere

we present the
Seven Ages of Poetry

20-Fanatic
30-Ecstatic
40-Emphatic
50-Erratic
60-Sporadic
70-Bureaucratic
80-ick