Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 13

Blog of Ariana Reines

Who says blogs are dead? Not Ariana Reines. If, you know, starting one means you're saying they're not dead.

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Reorientations

Still combing the wreckage of recent enthusiasms for patterns that might pass for a poetics. In the weave so far: Zither & Autobiography, Spy Wednesday, David Young's translations from Petrarch, and Dick Davis's from . Up today: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (ed.), Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry.

This scholarly clutch of "Chicago School" essays on classical Arabic poetry gives the non-specialist a chance to listen in on the stars and peek at their working...

Chris Daniels in Portland, 5/21/10

Chris Daniels gave a front-to-back reading—19 epigraphs-inclusive—of his first collection of original poems, porous, nomadic, last month with David Abel in Portland. It's a slender production with a tellurian reach, "TIERRA DEL FUEGO TO BOOTHIA FELIX AND ON," that moves from birth ("Open Letter Opened") to perception ("In a Treeless Wood") to despoiled innocence ("Paradise Found Encumbered," "ANTIPHON TO SLAVE OWNERS") to wordlessness ("Open Letter Closed") with the history of the Americas a...

Poetic Excursions tonight in PDX

Recent Oregon Laureate Lawson Inada and visiting Berkeley Lusophile Chris Daniels join the parade of local poets kicking off Multnomah Art Center's summer workshops tonight at 6 PM in Portland's sparkling new Director Park. Floats include Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb, Joseph Bradshaw, and David Abel.

6 PM, Art Canopy @ Director Park, 815 SW Park Ave.

Topical Genre Night

"The content is very topical. There's a machine. Then it breaks down (problem of wear and tear on equipment). Then they fix it (problem of amortization), and at the same time they buy a new one. Then everyone dances around the new machine. Apotheosis. All this takes three acts."

—Dmitri Shostakovich to Ivan Sollertinsky, 10 February 1930

Larkin's DARC

Maryrose Larkin read with Bruce Boone earlier this month in Portland, where along with a cross-section from her various books, chaps, and procedural projects, she delivered a live film narration to Carl Dreyer's 1928 "The Passion of Joan of Arc." I wrote a little about her piece the first time around; for the reprise, she created a handsome new objet d'arc for her and Sarah Mangold's FLASH+CARD press.

Larkin's text for Dreyer's silent mashes language from Joan's trial transcripts with pre-reco...

The Word

Jordan Davis just called Redburn Melville's Rubber Soul in a comment box. The Mayan calendar ends the day no one trains kliegs over gems like that.

Deceived Pronunciation

Not really Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but I'm intrigued with aristo Sam Cam's down-class accent being pegged as "Estuarial."

Estuary English was first identified as such in 1984. Am I alone in noticing a distinct under-40 accent that's taken root here? A sort of regionless softened Valley one, ventilated with actuallys, where most clauses swoop up into questions, and the vowels lodge high in the nose? So common that you don't even think of it as accent anymore, just assume when you hear it ...

Bruce Boone in Portland, 5/12/10

I got caught up in the wave of Bruce Boone mania that swept Portland earlier this month, but because I lost my notes, and because so much of the fun was in the table talk, it's been hard to decide what to report on here.

There shouldn't really be a problem; the book he read from is newly available from Nightboat Books, while table talk—with its intimacy, off-the-cuff fluency, elevation of the incidental, and promise of access to circles outside the recipient's ken—is already part of the weave ...

Chris Daniels & David Abel read tonight in Portland

Chris Daniels and David Abel cap a great run of May readings in Portland tonight at 7 PM for Smorg. Chris, an exceptional translator of Lusophone poetry (don't settle for "Portuguese"), will be launching the first ever collection of his own work, porous, nomadic, brought to you by the soulful heteronyms at Airfoil Chapbooks.