The Best American Poetry

Alan Bernheimer's "Retroscope": Focus on Robert Louis Stevenson

Turning his back on lawyering and the family business of lighthouse design, the young Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on his literary career as travel writer with An Inland Voyage, his day-dreamy canoe trip through rivers and canals in Belgium and northern France.

 

Check it out in the latest episode of Retroscope, [Alan Bernheimer's] monthly series of literary travel writing from yesteryear in Nowhere magazine! Armchair travelers can binge read the whole series so far.

https://nowheremag.com/2020/02/robert-louis-stevensons-an-inland-voyage/

Mark Scroggins on Poetic Fashion

New from "Dispatches from the Poetry Wars," this sartorially slanted column by Mark Scroggins, under the heading "La Derniere mode poetique." Scroggins reports on the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, which he characterizes as a "poetry flashpoint for thirty years." And here is a link to the column he posted on February 25, 2019 on the subject of poetic fashion as exemplified by Byron's "Albanian revolutionary togs," Marianne Moore's tricorn hat, Hart Crane's pinstripes, Mina Loy's robes.

Hats off to Scroggins for focusing on the way that sartorial choices reflect one's sense of style and literary self-presentation. One cavil. The author is under the impression that the North American poet, male of the species, wears "khakis, Oxford cloth shirts , last decade's blaze." That's a preppy 1980s look, and I'm not sure it ever caught on among campus poets. Today's standard male poet (to coin a phrase) is more likely to wear jeans and expensive fitted t-shirts and sneakers, n'est-ce pas? Scroggins is, however, right that "black is still the default color choice for many poet-types" and that more and more men are abandoning their neckties, to my mind a foolish thing to do, as it dispenses with a key element of style. -- DL

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/commentary/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-1/

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/la-derniere-mode-poetique/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-2/

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/la-derniere-mode-poetique/la-derniere-mode-poetique-numero-3/ 

CALLING ALL TATTOOED POETS!

Triptych of Vinny Valenzuela's Buddha 

Hard to believe that for 12 years we have cheered on Bill Cohen, one of our favorite bloggers, as he has assembled an array of tattooed poets for Tattoosday's annual tribute to National Poetry Month. We are once again happy to spread the word to inked poets everywhere.  Bill would like to post an image of your tattoo on Tattoosday every day during April. Tattoos need not be literary in nature to qualify. If your ink is featured, Bill hopes to give a little history of your tattoo, some background about you and your poetry, and he'll include links to your own website, books, and poems. With your permission, he'll even post a poem. 

You can see who's been cool enough to join the ranks here . 

For more details and to express your interest,please contact Bill at  tattoosday@gmail.com.

-- sdl

SAVE THE DATE ITHACA: February 27, 2020 David Lehman reads from "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir"

Thursday, February 27, 2020 5:30 pm  Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing 215 N Cayuga St, Ithaca, New York 14850 607 273 8246 info@buffalostreetbooks.com

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

"Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain." Publishers Weekly 

"Lehman’s memoir pulses with life and memory." from "Writing In The Face Of Death,"Sandee Brawarsky, New York Jewish Week

David Lehman and Johnny. photo 2020 © Stacey Lehman

Mihaela Moscaliuc, Guest Author February 17-21

photo © Valentin Moscaliuc

This week we welcome Mihaela Moscaliuc as our guest author. Mihaela was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books,2010), translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016). Her scholarship explores issues of representation, appropriation, cultural identity, exophony, and empathy. She has published essays on the works of Agha Shahid Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Shara McCallum, Colum McCann, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, and in the field of Romani Studies. The recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards (in poetry and prose, respectively) from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. Moscaliuc is associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey).
You can find her most recent article, "Accessorizing (with) 'Gypsyness' in the Twenty-first Century" here.
Find out more about Mihaela at her website here and on her faculty page here. 

Welcome, Mihaela. 

-- sdl

"Trickeration" [by David Barber]

TRICKERATION

            Cab Calloway, Cotton Club (1931)

Rhythm, look what you went and done.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.
The sneaky one, the snaky one,
The breakneck one, the hellbent one.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.

Rhythm, you are a loaded gun.
Rhythm, you’ve left me all undone.
Rhythm, you are the slinky one,
The funky one, the freaky one,
The harum one, the scarum one.

Rhythm, I took you one on one.
Now look at what you’ve gone and done.
Rhythm, you are the righteous one,
The badass one, the brass-balls one.
Rhythm, you are the one who’s won.

Rhythm, I am the broken one,
The token done-in chosen one.
Rhythm, you are the golden one
To everyone, the only one
Who showed me how it should be done.

Rhythm, you call us and we run
To something new under the sun.
Rhythm, you are the dodgy one,
The deadly one, the guilty one.
Rhythm, look what you’ve gone and done.

from Secret History by David Barber (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Photo: Cab Calloway.

Author's note: 

The jive dance song “Trickeration” was recorded by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra in New York in October 1931, the same year Calloway’s band was hired by the Cotton Club as a replacement for the touring Duke Ellington Orchestra. In short order, the Calloway and Ellington ensembles were installed as the club’s two house bands. The poem draws on both the lyrics of “Trickeration” and Calloway’s 1938 book Hepster’s Dictionary: The Language of Jive.

Editor's note:

David Barber is a maestro of the music of poetry, as this poem and others in his new book ("Aria." for instance) demonstrate. His control of the forms and techniques of verse is exemplary and makes Secret History a delight. Barber, who has appeared twice in The Best American Poetry series, is the author of two previous books and is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. He teaches writing at Harvard University. 

The Philosopher in the Brown Shirt [Adam Kirsch on Heidegger]

<<<

Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both.

-- Adam Kirsch

>>>

Excellent piece by Adam Kirsch (in Tablet) on Heidegger's "metaphysical" anti-Semitism and on attempts to reconcile what is valuable in Heidegger's writing with the undeniable fact that he was a Nazi in thought and deed.

The piece is entitled "Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi." It was posted on September 21, 2016.

 -- DL

"Every Atom": Brian Clements' Whitman Project -- 200 Days in Honor of 200 Years

A tip of the fedora to Brian Clements, who, in conjunction with North American Review, initiated "Every Atom" on Walt Whitman's birthday, May 31. On that day and for two hundred days after, poets and lovers of poetry cited, quoted, and commented on select passages from Whitman's oeuvre to honor the bard of democracy's two hundredth birthday.

Martín Espada kicked off the project with a post celebrating the passage beginning:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy and sensual…eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist... no stander above men and women

In Espada's words,

<< Whitman gives the “sign of democracy”—and declares himself the advocate for those excluded from democracy’s embrace. Speaking for “the rights of them the others are down upon” is the poet’s way to electrify and illuminate American democracy with his egalitarian vision, the ideal of democracy as it could be and should be.

<< In so doing, Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to “remove the veil.” If the alternative is silence, then the “long dumb voices” of the despised and the “forbidden voices” of the indecent must speak through him.  The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his “way of being” when we need it most. >>

Kudos to Martín for choosing the 1855 edition of "Song of Myself," to my mind far superior to later editions. The lines he chose exemplify how Whitman, as he aged, tended to revise for the worse. "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is hands down better than "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son."

On November 20, Marie Howe responded to the challenge with a poem of her own, "The Singularity," incorporating line three of "Song of Myself." Ellen Bass (September 3) quoted lines (ending in "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from") that she read when she "was nineteen and on LSD"; Whitman gave her permission to transgress the sexual norms of the time. Richard Deming (Nov. 26) examines the impulse to "loafe" ("I loafe and invite my soul") and speculates on how sloth, one of the seven capital sins, gave rise to one of the greatest poems in the language. Ethelbert Miller (Sept. 7) considers "I am the teacher of athletes. . ." in connection with the "black bodies [of football players] touching the leaves of grass before each kickoff. On June 11, Richard Jackson brought up Whitman’s belief that he had the right to contradict himself because he “contains multitudes.” Does this assertion not amount to an anticipatory defense of personae, masks, and heteronyms? 

I chose the last line of "Song of Myself" -- "I stop somewhere waiting for you" -- arguing that it could serve as the first line of a poem. I did it in verse and have a hunch it will be the 200th in the series.

Thank you Brian Clements, for curating this extraordinary tribute to Whitman. Here is a link to the index for twenty summer days beginning with June 28.   -- DL

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered [by Clive James, 1939-2019]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Peter Fortunato, Guest Author November 18-22

This week we welcome Peter Fortunato as our guest author. Peter grew up in Wappingers Falls and Poughkeepsie, New York at a family run restaurant and resort much like the one in his novel, Carnevale (Fomite Press, November 2019). Peter's father was a stage magician and singer and his mother an extraordinary seamstress and cook. He is a poet, painter, performer, ceremony maker, and hypnotherapist, recently retired from teaching at Cornell University and Ithaca College.Peter has been a Buddhist for many years, as well as a shaman, Reiki master practitioner, and Tarot mage. His poetry collections include Entering the Mountain (Cayuga Lake Books, 2019) and Late Morning (Cayuga Lake Books, 2013). Find out more about Peter here and follow him on facebook here. 

Welcome, Peter. 

-- sdl

Steven Rea, Guest Author September 9-13

This week we welcome back Steven Rea as our guest author. Steven is the author of The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars, just out from Chronicle Books, and also Hollywood Cafe: Coffee with the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling with the Stars. Formerly the film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he lives and works in Philadelphia and Maine, and keeps a collection of archival Hollywood photographs that now numbers in the thousands. He posts new photos several times a week at Rides a Bike. Follow Steven Rea on Facebook and Twitter, @Steven_Rea.

Welcome, Steven.

In other news: Don't miss the Best American Poetry 2019 launch reading on September 19, 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST) at the New School. (The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011. More information here) 

-- sdl

SAVE THE DATE: September 19, 2019, The Best American Poetry 2019 Launch Reading

7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST).

The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall. 
66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

The celebration to kickoff fall in NYC! Series editor David Lehman and guest editor Major Jackson headline an all-star roster of poets included this year's volume of the celebrated annual anthology. Featuring: Dilruba Ahmed, Catherine Barnett, Joshua Bennett, Chen Chen, Laura Cronk, Thomas Devaney, Martín Espada, Nausheen Eusuf, Camille Guthrie, Edward Hirsch, James Hoch , Bob Holman, Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Deborah Landau, David Lehman, Gail Mazur, Shane McCrae, Jeffrey McDaniel, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Andrew Motion, John Murillo, Sharon Olds, Nicole Santalucia, Philip Schultz, Lloyd Schwartz, Jane Shore, and Kevin Young.

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale and contributors will be available to sign your copy. 

Find more information here. 

--sdl

Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Guest Author August 5-9

This week we welcome Elizabeth A.I. Powell as our guest author. Elizabeth's forthcoming poetry book "Atomizer" is due out in Fall of 2020 from Louisiana State University Press. She is also the author of Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, and The Republic of Self. She teaches at Northern Vermont University, where she also edits Green Mountains Review. 

Welcome, Elizabeth

-- sdl

 

Roger Gilbert speaking on A. R. Ammons's "Speaking"

From August 2-4, Cornell University professor Roger Gilbert is hosting "Archie in the Archives," a symposium devoted to the poetry of A. R. Ammons and to Ammons treasures to be found in the Cornell Library’s Rare and Manuscripts Collection. Ithacans, take note.

<<
For my last post on Ammons, I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.” Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February of 2001. He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America.  Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions. Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need broach the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; lone, ever,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need brook the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; love, even,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.”  (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.)  Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations.  In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in one more like the second.  What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem.  

This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.” After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem. Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love.

The poem’s last line also underwent significant change. In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.” In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice. But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind. The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.
>>

from the archives; originally posted June 21, 2008.

Philip Brady, Guest Author July 15-19

This week we welcome Philip Brady as our guest author. Philip's forthcoming book is The Elsewhere: Selected Poems and Poetics (Broadstone, 2020). His most recent book is a collection of essays, Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City (University of Tennessee Press, 2019) His most recent poetry book is To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet (Broadstone, 2015). He is the author of three previous books of poetry, a previous collection of essays, and a memoir. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and an anthology of contemporary poetry.

Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State.

Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork, and on Semester at Sea. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University. He is Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the low-residency MFA faculty of Wilkes University.

Welcome, Philip. 

-- sdl

PoetsArtists: Painting the Figure Now [by Didi Menendez]

 

View in Browser PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW Please join us at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art for the Opening Ceremony July 11, 2019 from 6 to 8 PM PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW   Many of the artworks you will see tonight are available from Artsy and Artnet. View pricing and availability now.     Check out the article in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Check out the July issue of American Art Collector. The inside front over ad of the July-August issue features a painting by Sara Scribner. Check it out on Instagram.   PoetsArtists , 604 Vale Street, Bloomington, Illinois 61701, USA Unsubscribe

Introducing Guest Authors Cassandra Cleghorn and Alec Bernstein

This week we welcome Cassandra Cleghorn as our guest author for the week of July 8-12. Cassandra's Four Weathercocks was published in 2016 by Marick Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Paris Review, Yale Review, Poetry International,Colorado Review, Boston Review, Field and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, regularly reviews poetry for Publishers Weekly and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press. For more about Cassandra Cleghorn see www.cassandracleghorn.com.

 

 

We also welcome Alec Bernstein, who will begin posting periodically from New York City. Alec is an independent consultant in counter-intuitive design. His previous trades were in industrial design, technology, classical and avant-garde music, performance art, and poetry. The first 20 professional years he performed as, in or under Svexner Labs, Aesthetic Research, Co-Accident, Gregg Smith, and Robert Kraft. In his teenage poetry years he co-published Buffalo Stamps (as this is a poetry blog, more later). The second 20 years, he worked for BMW Group in their Los Angeles design studio. He holds patents and has published papers on visual theory.

Welcome Cassandra and Alec. 

-- sdl

Jeffrey Levine, Guest Author June 17-21

This week we welcome Jeffrey Levine as our guest author. Jeffrey is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, and most recently, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, (Salmon Press, 2019). Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize (twice), and the American Literary Review poetry prize. In addition to his own writing, he is principal translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, artistic director and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, and he also serves as director of the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences. Also an accomplished musician, Levine is a concert clarinetist, jazz guitarist and pianist.

Welcome, Jeffrey.

--sdl

Symposium on the Fate of Jewish Refugees from Austria: 6/ 18 / 19

Anne Lehman at the White House, 2003. She narrowly escaped the Nazis but many of her family were murdered by them.

As this category included my mother (Anne Lehman, pictured above), her sister, and her brothers, I wish I could attend this free, one-day symposium at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. on Tuesday June 18:

<<< 
The Jewish population of Austria in 1938 totaled some 192,000, which represented almost four percent of the population. The majority lived in the capital city of Vienna and comprised about nine percent of its residents. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, finding safety abroad was no easy task, and the United States was no exception. The United States government combined the German and Austrian quotas for entry to the United States and waiting lists of desperate Jewish refugees grew as anti-Semitic persecution increased and Nazi Germany began to expand its territorial holdings in Europe. By the end of November 1939, more than 126,000 Austrian Jews had fled Austria, and of them more than 28,000 to the United States.

Join the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and partners the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance and the Austrian Embassy for a one-day symposium featuring current scholarly research on Austrian Jews’ experiences of persecution and forced emigration under the Nazis, with a focus on those who fled to the United States. ​This program is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. For more information, contact Elizabeth Anthony at eanthony@ushmm.org.
>>>

If you check it out, let us know. -- DL

Andrei Codrescu Speaks Dada

<< To celebrate Nr. 13 of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, Peter Carlaftes, the editor of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, asked questions I answered as follows:

Peter: With the passage of time as a gain in technology we can no longer rebel as the Dadaists once rebelled yet Dada retains an important place in the history of rebellion.

Codrescu: If Dada was history it would just be stories, another chapter in the curriculum of 20th century isms. Happily or not, it’s something else, impossible to pin down, and totally with us, especially now at the hybrid crossroads of human and robot. It is, without resorting to metaphysics, a catch in the throat. A breath of shock, surprise and horror that wells up without warning. Is that man, standing in a field of corpses, about to upchuck his Wienerschnitzel or is he aiming a spitball in four directions at once? Dada, one of the dadaists said at peak Dada in WWI, is a word more potent than God. That is still true, it’s God without metaphysics, God without godliness, without power and without rank. The gasp of Dada, the breath of surprise, is the cry uttered by a human hit by a revelation. The surprised gasp, that’s all. What follows is the effort of the surprised (if they live) to relive the gasp. And later, to figure out what the revelation was. And later yet, to narrate the pre and aftermaths of the gasp. And later yet, to pick at the fine down on the back of the gasp-beast to see if it could be translated as a style. Or translated in any which way, in whatever language, or whatever currency. Putting this in terms of the time-span we all agreed to set our time-pieces to, the first gasp of surprise was the Big Bang, then came a whole lot of still ongoing bang-bangs, birth-bang (or pang), death-bang, electro-bang, e-bang, and badaboom badabang as far as we can imagine. So, take Tzara and the Zurich dadaists, as an arbitrary point in gasping. What were he and his cohorts gasping about? What was revealed to them vividly enough to make “history”? Well, poison gas for one thing. And the bombs ripping up the empires and the people in them. Technology, which does have a history, marks its milestones with big bangs. Nobody expected the empires to blow up, least of all the people living in them. War, schmwar, thought Kafka when he put his money in the safest possible investment: Austro-Hungarian bonds. Everybody in Europe or in colony management knew that technology was capable of killing them. And everybody gasped when it advanced to kill a little more than they thought. By the time Tzara gasped, Europeans were already mostly robotic: they wore shoes, they lived in boxes, they used wires to communicate, they machined killingry. The hierarchical setup of Empire was a human-based engine engaged in advancing technology. Marinetti’s futurists got high on exhaust fumes but they too gasped when the speed they worshipped killed without any regard for their enthusiasm. Or the dadaists gasped for them. Only hermits and luddites rang the alarms, and they probably gasped too when they were pulverized. The bang is always a revelation and “Dada!” is the one word that might get out before the meat chunks into the air. Tzara might as well have said “Fuck!,” like millions of others did, but he said “Dada!” instead. For complex reasons having to do with human psychology and with the survival of art (which is the art of surviving), the translation and exchange that followed came to be known as “Dada!” not “Fuck!” But this is simply because Tzara was Romanian, and “Dada” is a double-yes of helplessness calling for Daddy (who is also busy being blown up and helplessly uttering Fuck! to his own daddy). The Dada! revolution did become the Fuck! Revolution for a minute in the 1960s. 

Peter: How can you envisage the thrust of Dada regaining momentum today through the use of technology?

Codrescu: Your first question had the interesting phrase “as we gain in technology” in it, so I’ll consider that in the context of the question above. In brief, we “gain in technology” a simulacrum of what we lose in flesh. “Flesh” is a technology, too, though a still mysterious one as of this minute. A minute ago, in let’s say 1916, we didn’t know very much. Now we know how to repurpose flesh (the human material) with CRISPR and other technologies. The replacement “simulacrum” is no longer a mystery: we transplant body parts and we 3D print limbs. If an older technology, a landmine let’s say, blows up your legs, it can be replaced by printed prosthetics. (And soon enough by something very much like flesh). There is a game on in science to locate consciousness, which is deadly serious given that we are experiencing two (seemingly) competing technologies simultaneously: one of them is the tech of evaporation of humans and eradication of life on earth, while the other is the rapidly advancing communication tech that links every brain on earth to the hive mind. If we can locate consciousness anywhere (in the Socratic sense of know thyself) we can understand what it’s up to. And then we gasp! Dada! I mean, if consciousness is matter working to know itself, does it want to keep knowing or does it want to self-annihilate? Locating consciousness is the first step. Finding out what it wants is another. Does it want to go on or to blow up? If it wants to go on, we have to invent a new technology (math and physics) to grow it big enough to make the (competing) war tech obsolete. If it wants to self-destruct, then we don’t have to do much. Both you and I and our fellow artists come up mostly on the side of going on — you because optimism is the American religion, and I because I was brainwashed by the communists before I could dream like Baudelaire. 

Peter: And of course Dada erupted from the trenches of The Great War –where 40,000 corpses sometimes piled up daily.

Codrescu: I think I already answered that one. 

Peter: What is the difference of 40,000 corpses then and 40,000 corpses buried in smart phones today?

Codrescu: I can see people wanting to be buried with their smart phones, but I have yet to see anyone buried inside their smart phone, though it’s not a bad idea. If one can be condensed post-mortem into a data chip it’s not a bad testamentary disposition. Just be sure you leave the password with someone alive.

 Peter:And finally–If you really want to upset the balance –Conformity is the new rebellion. Like stacking one side of the deck IS Rebellion. Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Codrescu: I don’t know what conformity or rebellion are. All I know is that if somebody hits you hard with a revelation or an explosive, you gasp. Dada! Fuck!
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originally posted on June 2, 2019 as Dada Reading at Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, NYC, 7 PM June 3 [by Andrei Codrescu]