knottbelievable

new class at St Marks Poetry Project:

Poetry Lab: What Can a Poem Be?— TODD COLBY

Saturday, October 6, 2012
2:00 pm	to	4:00 pm

Saturdays 2-4PM: 10 sessions begin October 6th
What can a poem be? We’ll attempt to answer this question while creating new modes and forms of poetry just outside the dominant culture. In this class we’ll create a safe place to take chances, to openly speculate and participate in the ongoing dialogue that ensues. There will be weekly experiments and assignments and a lot of in-class writing. We’ll tumble together through collaborations and mutual innovations. We’ll explore poetry through play, joy, openness, immediacy, profound ideologies, music, and art. We’ll take risks that allow us to reinvent ourselves as poets every time we sit down to write. We’ll create poems that don’t resemble or sound like poems; all the while being totally committed to the idea of broadening the borders of the possibilities of poetry. We’ll leap off a platform constructed by Henri Michaux, Reggie Watts, Djuna Barnes, Bill Knott, Fernando Pessoa, Hannah Weiner, E.M. Cioran, Ben Marcus, Gertrude Stein, Andy Kaufman, Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Diane Williams, and more. Todd Colby is the author of four books of poetry published by Soft Skull Press.

...

!  Hunh?  

/// 

more of the same (a repost with a thought or two added)

*
Many anthologie­s published by Penguin in England are issued simultaneo­usly here— but the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse wasn't— why? why are there no anthologie­s of Social­ist or Commun­ist poetry published in this country? Every year USA publishers somehow find the money to issue endless anthologie­s of "spiritual­" poetry, but there is not (to my knowledge) ever an anthol of atheist verse— why? Who puts up the money for all these religious anthols? Who funds this vicious christer crapaganda?


The CIA promoted the New York School of artists in the 1950s and reportedly helped finance The Paris Review and Encounter and who knows how many other literary magazines. . . and if there is one characteristic shared by all secret intelligen­ce agencies since WWII, isn't it the imperative to expand, to increase both their budget and their number of personnel (the size of which are always classified), to grow, to gain ever greater power and prestige, and to continue to impose their ideological agendas and to spread their influence and domination into every aspect of society . . .


So why would the CIA (or the NSA or how many other acronymic bureaus of faceless conspirators) not continue funding cultural entities from the 1950s right up to the present?  I mean: Why would they stop? Have they ever stopped intervening in any other domain?  Have they ever stopped for one second their constant efforts to manipulate and control every sociopolitical / economic arena around the globe? Does anybody believe they don't expend billions to coerce every aspect of the media? And if the media, why not the arts? —Really: why wouldn't they?  What's stopping them?  Having once created an extensive program and set in motion departmental protocols to interfere in the realm of the arts, and having established significant inroads there, why on earth would they cease and desist?  Given the historical trajectories of most such clandestine bureaucracies, does that seem likely?

And, given the CIA's choice in the 1950s to promote and fund the New York School of Painters, wouldn't you expect it to continue supporting similar offshoots of the Avant-Garde?  Remember that the Agency's chief James Angleton was a disciple of Ezra Pound (and probably ran the Op that saved Pound from being prosecuted for war crimes).  Therefore, assuming the CIA had continued its involvement in the Arts (and I repeat: why wouldn't it?), wouldn't it also continue its investment in the Avant-garde?  Imagine which poets it would have favored (Pound . . . Avant-garde . . . any names come to mind?)



USA poets know that writing innocuous 'spiritual­' or 'psycholog­ical' or 'existenti­al' or 'elliptical' or 'aleatory' or 'memoiristic' or 'postmod' or 'flarf' or 'newthingist' or massmedia-dictated 'pop' verse and other inoffensive brands of poetry will be beneficial to their careers.  Out of fear of persecution or censorship, most USAPO suppress any wayward urge to write political poetry or 'protest' verse.


They know where their bread is buttered, who pays their bills, and indeed how the State sponsors and supports them with its agencies—


of which the CIA is not the least beneficial:


because not only is Langley rumored to have founded and funded litmags like the Paris Review, it also and perhaps more importantly takes on the onerous task of going into foreign countries and eliminatin­g the potential competitor­s of USA poets . . . For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or impoverish­ed or exiled by the CIA-instal­led Pinochet regime? Think of the chagrin and embarrassm­ent USA poets suffered some decades ago when they compared their work to the great Chilean poets like Neruda and Parra, how solipsisti­cally small and provincial and futile their poems seemed in contrast to those Latin American masters. . . but now, in the succeeding years, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA?


It's not just Chile, of course.  Imagine how many other South American poets have been killed or quashed and quelled by CIA black-ops.  Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.


Think of it: all those foreign poets who right this minute might be writing better poetry than our native versifiers­: thankfully that ongoing threat is being countered daily by the CIA.


USA poets know (though they rarely if ever acknowledge it) how much the CIA and other government agencies help promote the health and prosperity of AmeriPoBiz Inc!


They know that the majority of their publications, most of the magazines and books their exciting breakthrough verse appears in, are largely funded by the CIA or, if not directly by the CIA, then through the distributive channels of other indirect pipeline organizations via the standard "cut-out" methods,

funding which then is managed and administered by the executives of AmeriPoBiz Inc—


which USA poets are for the most part devoted or subservient employees of.


And most USAPO are grateful to be subsidized and supported thus.


And to show their gratitude they write all these poems about how their mom and dad were only human but they love them anyway, or how mystically moved they are by the apparition­s of tangency as it transpires in the treetops or their laptops.


Everybody knows that USAPO who write apolitical verse are rewarded for it, they win the top prizes and grants, their books are foisted into libraries everywhere and their careers are glide-path­ed. Louise Gluck and Charles Wright are two egregious examples of what I mean, but really most of this country's "leading poets" are similarly components in the con.  The construct.


Bought-off, co-opted by endowment patronage from the state's cultural authoritie­s, USA poets know it doesn't pay to write political poems, and ergo most of them don't—


///

two very good poems—

*
—two poems by a poet I haven't read before, to me they seem very well-written, impressively imaginative, worthy of rereading:


http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Paula-Bohince-Two-Poems/


/


of course poets whose work I praise are embarrassed and hate being lauded by me—they wish I had kept my keyboard shut—no poet wants a blurb from me—a good word from me can only harm their career, not help it . . .

in fact, if I were conniving enough, if I had the guile-style to do it, I would write posts praising the poets I loathe—Charles Wright, for example—knowing that my approbation would taint and undermine their reputations—

///