Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 12

Aijaz Ahmad's Ghazals of Ghalib

The search via Goodreads for a sleeping poetics is turning up instead (alongside?) a run of on translations. Apparently the Unconscious wants new air holes poked in the Anglophone. Here's one on the translation experiment set up by Marxist intellectual Aijaz Ahmad in his 1972 Ghazals of Ghalib.

It's tempting to read Aijaz Ahmad's translations of Mirza Ghalib, giant of the modern Urdu-language ghazal, against his later Marxist criticism. Ahmad's intro lays stress on Ghalib's role as...

Bring Me the Head of Richard Taruskin

So I've been following The Taruskin Challenge, wherein "two grad students blog their way through the most monumental musicological work in generations"— Richard Taruskin's 6-volume, 4,154-page Oxford History of Western Music. The grad students behind it, Mark Samples and Zach Wallmark, write engaging, open entries loaded with handy YouTube clips to make points about a work I'm never in this lifetime going to read.

They did get me to read though Taruskin's new On Russian Music, where he says...

The Disinhibitor

School's out, and another blog joins the 'sphere: Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor. Just five days of content and already Leslie Scalapino, Rob Halpern (on In Felt Treeling), Lisa Robertson ("The Etruscan scrotum of clay beneath Perspex") and the Master Musicians of Bukkake.

Town of Gown?

Gifted with two great sets of blog comments last week, both provoked by posts related to the Rethinking Poetics conference, or the little I gleaned from it without being there
or on Facebook. Chris Piuma's went up Monday; here's an exchange with Mark Wallace.

Mark: I appreciate these two excellent thoughts, Rodney.

Here in San Diego County where I live, there's essentially no poetry scene at all that isn't not simply university-related, but literally university-housed. The only regular...

Your Favorite Vegetable?

Chris Piuma and I swapped some comments at my post about Juliana Spahr's post about a Shadow Poetics Program. There's stuff on poetry, the academy, audience, accessibility, cash money, and vegetables that seemed worth parking up here.

Chris: So I saw her giving this talk, and it is nice to read it, rather than have to make it out from the horrible acoustics of Philosophy 301 at Columbia.

I think it's something almost symptomatic of, well, something, something that kept cropping up at the...

Could Be Otherwise

If you haven't flamed out yet on all things Rethinking Poetics, check out this PDF (including the paper she delivered centered on Jon Rubin, the Independent School of Art, and the Conflict Kitchen) by Stephanie Young.

Her "Repoport" sparks at least a couple thoughts. One is that until I left the Bay Area, and came to a place without quite so many programs, I didn't really appreciate how much the robust extramural poetry scene there depends on an audience made up of people who go to a school...

Summer Excursions

David Abel's put together a new literary program for Portland's Multnomah Arts Center designed to get writers out from behind the computer and into the dusk-charged air. It kicks off this Saturday with a series of four one-day workshops led by poets Joseph Bradshaw, Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb & David himself. They'll be leading the troops to:

Sat. 6/19: Portland Art Museum for a day of ekphrasis
Sat. 6/26: Old Town (until 1942, Portland's Japantown) & Vanport
Sat. 7/17: Forest Park (Portland's...

Okay, Morgan Myers, I Guess You Win

I've been waiting too long to say what an awesome, sharp, insightful, down-to-earth blog Morgan Myers has. If I did those Blogger Follower things, I would follow. Where's blogging in all these discussions of community vs. university? Probably on Facebook ...

Solitaria

"Intimacy resembles a cone, or even two cones. From my 'social I' stems one cone, shrinking down to a point. . . . Beyond this point, another cone is located: this is not a shrinking infinity but, on the contrary, an expanding one."

—Vasily Rozanov, Solitaria

Shadow Poetics

I've always sort of thought Juliana Spahr is to academia what Shostakovich was to Soviet music. So when she talks about the weight of grad debt loads and the inadequacy of mismatched community chairs, then proposes an alternative model, I make like those E.F. Hutton commercials and listen.