Abstract: Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue. New York: Nightboat Books, 2015. 109 pp. $15.95Bhanu Kapil's latest book begins with an annotated list of its contents, although some of those contents are only present in the list itself. Even "annotated list" might be misleading-each item appears on its own page, and the annotations are not just glosses but impacted narratives of each component's genesis or eventual excision. Part palinode, part overture, the table of contents for Ban en Banlieue reads like a draft for the work as a whole, with all the striking turns of thought, incident, and phrase that readers of Kapil's work have grown to expect. And yet this section also modulates our expectations, priming us for a series of notes and revisions within the texts that follow: "notes/instructions written into an AWP panel talk" titled "13 Errors for Ban"; "Auto-sacrifice (Notes)," the work's long central section; thirteen pages of acknowledgements labelled "End-Notes"; and a "Butcher's Block Appendix," which extracts one passage at random from the thirty-three notebooks that preceded the published work. This accumulation of notes suggests a kind of palimpsest, and Kapil shares with other contemporary writers an interest in the formal problems that emerge when an individual or collective memory overwhelms its record. But Kapil abandons the palimpsest as a visual form in favor of a practice of addition and emendation in time, translating the visual form of the palimpsest into a book of cyclical, amalgamating prose-a book that can be inventoried even as its contents resist being mapped or contained.Describing the book this way seems necessary, since the proliferation of sections and subsections, and the repetition of ideas, events, titles, and numberings between them, can make these banlieues (the French term for suburbs) feel more like a maze. Still, my initial description risks casting as solipsistic a work that is anything but. The proliferation of "notes" in Ban en Banlieue is not a writer's reflexivity flipping over into myopia, but the product of a conviction that what her book aims to address deserves more attention, more attempts at articulation, than any one writing could convey.Ban en Banlieue describes itself as a failed novel about a real race riot, but Kapil's re-visioning of the novel form, and what it might mean to fail within it, is complex. Her novel takes place on April 23, 1979, the day of a race riot in the west London suburb of Southall. Its action comprises "a brown [black] girl [...] walking home from school. She orients to the sound of breaking glass, and understands the coming violence has begun. Is it coming from the far-off street or is it coming from her home? Knowing that either way she's done for-she lies down to die." Kapil's goal in recounting this story, and expounding it at novel length, is "to write a sentence with content more volatile than what contains it. / So that the page is shiny, wet and hard. / So that sentences are indents not records; the soulful presence of a vibrant man or girl rather than persistence. / Their capacity to touch you in the present time." The proliferation of versions is here, from the outset, a tactic to keep the work from settling. And the novel becomes that mode of articulation that poetry is not: there will be no best words and no best order, but an unending, unfinished list.Listing in Kapil's work recalls the quotidian rhythms of writing, living, and thought, and she remains candid about the literal work of writing as well as the spaces and institutions that support it (MFA and AWP, university cafeterias and cafes). But Kapil's lists also intimate a desire for social change whose urgency is the other side of dailiness. Her earlier books, Incubation (2006) and Humanimal (2009), used the alphabet to index their components, putting in line experiences that were by their very nature out of hand. There, the alphabet became the recitation or refrain with which the child guards against the fear that they are lost; the need for such a refrain was manifest in the crescendo of O's with which Humanimal ends. …

Abstract: I started to write "personally" and ended up writing not exactly for the "public" but with an idea of exfoliating a few points for myself. But then, I found I was again, as had happened often over the years, placing the figure of Oppen before me, submitting to that spirit of the "incalcaluable," the unknowable which so permeates his evey poetic gesture. So let me say that these words are a record of that continuing submission, that inevitably they veer closer to homage than critique. I begin with something Oppen says in his notes: "I do not care for 'systems,' what I read is the philosophy of the astonished." He goes on: "Not an opinion an opinion is a rearrangement of established concepts. The Poem before anything was said" (POA, 203). My aim here is to suggest that it is in this realm of the "astonished" that Oppen resides not only as reader but as poet, and that what astonishes us is how his poetry brings together in one verbal gesture the familiar and the strange. This, at least for me, is the space of Oppen's work. I want to focus on three deeply interwoven elements in his writings that lie at the very heart of his project: his anti-dogmatic position, the uneasiness which permeates his poetry and thought, and his unique 'poetics' of the word.

Abstract: daniil kharms, "i Am a Phenomenon Quite out of the ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms. translated and edited by anthony anemone and peter scotto. boston: academic studies press, 2013. 689pp. $35Daniil Kharms was born in St. Petersburg in 1905. He died in 1942, a patient in a psychiatric clinic, likely of starvation, during the Leningrad Blockade. Although he was known as a children's author during his lifetime-many of his children's books are now classics-he was unable to publish his writing "for adults." Not until long after his death, then, would Kharms earn his reputation as a poet and master of bizarre miniatures. Kharms's antic writing style brought the formal disapproval of the Soviet government, a fact that has led many to regard him as a dissident writer. This view has bolstered the misleading notion that censorship prevented him from reaching full artistic maturity. Like other repressed Soviet authors, Kharms has become something of a symbol-of the brave soul who risks everything to produce "extremely important work," which is then understood as the record of a dissident's struggle (or protest) against the authoritarian state. I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary sets out to restore Kharms to mere human status, or in the editors' words, "to recover the inner life of Daniil Kharms," and collects a wide range of personal and fugitive material, previously unavailable in English, to this end. What emerges is a portrait of an amateur-not a dissident. The selections from Kharms's notebooks, diaries, and letters suggest that his most well regarded works are the expression of an idiosyncratic, implicit aesthetic program-i.e., an amateurist's philosophy-for which life and art are held to be continuous and fluid. Given the coherence and consistency of this tacit program over time, Kharms's miniatures and other well known works appear to constitute the type of writing he would have chosen to produce even under more favorable circumstances.Reading I Am a Phenomenon , one cannot help but notice that Kharms wrote as a part of ordinary life, envisioning only a small readership of friends and family. Everyday pieces of writing, such as letters, display much ingenuity and aesthetic scruple, and they have come to be included in his body of literary works. Yakov Druskin, a friend and colleague, believed that Kharms's life and work were of a piece; the diaries and notebooks go some way in confirming this view. Kharms wrote incessantly as he went about his daily rounds. According to Anemone and Scotto, the volume's editors, the author "would write on the tram, in a sauna, at concerts, while visiting friends, visiting his aunt, or in the middle of a fight with his wife." In I Am a Phenomenon important pieces of Kharms's literary output share notebook pages with grocery lists, schemes, and memoranda of romantic meetings. Although some of the writing is of excellent quality, very little is consciously marked out as serious, planned, or distinct from the ordinary flow of words in the author's daily life. One gets the sense that even Kharms's most important works were composed spontaneously, that their literary merit is the result of a mix of happenstance and skill, perhaps inspiration, and not in general because of some special effort Kharms had made to distance himself from the social world or his practical affairs.This effect is the result of Kharms's amateurist writing practice, and one only perceives it by reading his famous and lesser pieces side-by-side, as they accrued over the days, weeks, months, and years. By allowing readers in English to approach Kharms for the first time in this way, Anemone and Scotto have rendered an important service. One does wish that they had included at least a dozen more of Kharms's classic miniatures and poems-for example, those found in Today I Wrote Nothing-in order to situate the author at the height of his powers even more forcefully in the context of his everyday life. …

Abstract: In The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe provides a description of Neal Cassady that epitomizes the Beat quest for the moment:

Abstract: "Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.... Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. " --Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) In April 1912, the Victor Talking Machine Company sent a recording engineer to the Indianapolis home of the "Hoosier Poet," James Whitcomb Riley. In an era before the adoption of electrical microphones, a homebound Riley read his dialect poems into a recording horn. For a record label like Victor considering the distribution of poetry, Riley's emphasis on the sound of his poems, particularly the phonetic aesthetics of his dialect poems, made him an excellent choice, as did his popularity in the late nineteenth century as a touring performer. Victor later informed Riley that the records were insufficiently commercial due to their sound quality, but at the poet's request, they agreed to arrange another recording session and eventually released some of the records. In many ways, Riley's insistence on creating these records toward the end of his life is an antecedent for the story of Vachel Lindsay's sound recordings, just as Riley's poetics provided a space for the performance-forward poetry that Lindsay would develop in the Chicago of the early twentieth century. About a generation younger than Riley, Vachel Lindsay followed the older poet in using the space between sound and meaning as the primary vehicle of his expressivity. Lindsay's poems are what I might call sonic ekphrases, sounded representations of the people and events that made up his America. (1) Thus, for Lindsay as well as for Riley, it is no wonder that the burgeoning technology of sound recording held such allure. For Lindsay, the potential to have his poems preserved in something so close to their truest form--the performance, rather than (to him) an ersatz libretto in the printed text alone--prompted him to seek out record companies to record his poems. Like Riley, Lindsay was rebuffed by the record companies that he approached in the late 1920s --"by one in a very cruel manner," likely Victor--because his work was not sufficiently commercial. (2) Turning to the academy, Lindsay solicited the assistance of Barnard College professor and lexicologist W. Cabell Greet, who owned a Speak-o-Phone recording device that he used to record samples of American dialects. Greet agreed, and together, in January 1931, they recorded nearly five hours' worth of Lindsay's poetry on thirty-eight aluminum records. Lindsay died eleven months later. Lindsay's appeal to Greet is significant because it marks a key moment in the birth of the poetry audio archive. Increasingly disdainful of the commercial record companies for their rejection of the Lindsay project that he embraced, Greet was inspired to begin an entire series of poetry recordings, which came to include the most eminent modernist poets, including Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and James Weldon Johnson. The practice of recording poetry has blossomed in the age of digital recording through archives such as PennSound, where the Lindsay recordings and others from Greet's series, The Speech Lab Recordings, reside. These modern archives can trace their lineages through this historical moment and to Lindsay and Greet as central participants in the founding of the poetry audio archive. I have previously written about these Lindsay recordings as the inception of and inspiration for The Contemporary Poets Series, a subset of The Speech Lab Recordings dedicated to poetry and eventually distributed to schools on a subscription basis. (3) In that article, I make the argument that a significant detail in the history of these recordings is that Greet was a lexicologist and a scholar of American dialects--an ethnographer. Further, his recording engineer, Walter C. Garwick, invented the portable recording device that he would later sell to John A. Lomax and the Library of Congress for use in creating Lomax's famous ethnographic field recordings, including those of cowboy songs and African American spirituals. …

Abstract: "Who's a better poet, Robert Frost or Edward Arlington Robinson?" "Frost." "I don't think you understood the question." It was a spring day in 1966 in Palo Alto when that exchange took place. The twenty-six-year-old James McMichael was defending his doctoral thesis at Stanford and Yvor Winters, the director of his thesis committee, was asking what should have been an easy question. Any good student of Winters's idiosyncratic view of American poetry knew the right answer was Robinson. Frost, for Winters, was the worst sort of poet, one who failed to provide a proper context for his dark emotions. Poets like Frost, Winters maintained, took us too close to madness, to a paranoid sense of the world as irrationally malevolent. It wasn't that Winters avoided emotional darkness--far from it--but it was his conviction that poetic emotions must be justified by a clear context, and that the poet who failed to provide such a justification was not merely misguided, but a danger to himself and others. A poem, Winters famously said, was "a statement in words," and it was imperative that a poet should not just present emotions or experiences: he should provide, in clear metrical language, a statement about the meaning, value, and sources of those emotions and experiences. These beliefs were at the very core of Winters's well-defined personal poetics, and formed the basis of his neo-classical outlook. By way of contrast, Winters saw Frost as a "spiritual drifter," a poet who was irresponsible and self-indulgent even when writing on matters of great importance. For Winters the self was something to be monitored and contained within a carefully considered understanding of the objective world. McMichael certainly knew what the old man was looking for. In fact, he'd all but provided the answer in the dissertation he was defending, Rhetoric and the Skeptic's Void. The dissertation consisted of a well-articulated restatement of Winters's division of theories of language into warring realist and nominalist camps. The realists, Winters had maintained in The Anatomy of Nonsense, held that language was stable, paraphrasable, and meaningful. This view, said Winters, informed the sane and stable world of Augustan writing. The nominalists, by contrast, were skeptical about language, doubting its ability to connect to the world it purported to depict or to any enduring and stable ideas. Nominalism was, for Winters, the chief vice of Romanticism and of the kind of modernism with which he'd had an early flirtation. In his dissertation McMichael had applied Winters's realist/nominalist dichotomy to Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke, and the profoundly nominalist Hart Crane. McMichael was a favorite of Winters's during his grad-school years at Stanford. He had arrived there with a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose English department had been colonized by Winters's former students, including McMichael's mentors Edgar Bowers and Alan Stephens. While Winters left his stamp on many younger poets--including Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and John Peck--McMichael was among his truest disciples. Winters and McMichael shared a great deal, including roots in southern California and many assumptions about literature. But most importantly they shared a certain wariness of emotional extremes, a disposition that lent itself to similar styles of formal restraint. While McMichael was to rebel against Winters by taking up the Surrealism-inflected poetics popular in the early 1970s, the rebellion would would eventually reverse itself to some extent. In 1967, only a year after defending his dissertation, McMichael published his first book, The Style of the Short Poem, which aimed to popularize Winters's ideas about poetry for an undergraduate audience. While McMichael notes at the outset of this book that he wishes only to "provide a brief but accurate vocabulary for discussing the style of the short poem," the book is subtle yet relentless in its allegiance to Winters's principles. …

Abstract: That mute paysage possesses knowledge; it sees you too. Any language that would heed these facts- that could live up to land or cityscape now, and to its contents encompassed by the presently omnipresent term "site" - has to plot out a hearkening, not an anthropological or aesthetic seizure. That isn't simple; its tantamount to calling for a poetic, a system built out of abeyance. Within an architecture of poetry and vice versa that we could in sincerity call "site-specific," sites grammar comes to occupy description, its nomenclature possesses vigilant trifling consciousness; "Site peers through language to change me". Lately it makes me corporate. An index mixed by Stacy Doris, the author of Conference, archives the effluent introduction to Lisa Robertsons Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture under a couple of apparently nonconverging foci: "I became money" and "return." How does this work? Rummaging back through the pink black and grey pocketbook to its counterpenetrable opener, one is pointed to these essays' genesis in the altering urban texture of Vancouver, from the sale of the Expo '86 site through the province's 2003 acquisition of the 2010 Winter Olympics. A paragraph records the premise of their authorship: