[viz. https://soundcloud.com/user-663669178/raw-materials-7]
[It occurs to me to wonder as I sit down to listen again to RW7 and keyboard my responses to it as it goes along that I wonder whether there will ever be a transcript of this or other RM posts. It certainly doesn’t seem desirable or interesting to try to enjoy or learn from a transcript of an RM post, as they are so deliberately concerned with speaking and with writing as that which can be read aloud, as if verbatim (compared to a painting or some other material that can’t literally be read aloud without supplying words that do not appear in the original).]
It begins in the middle of a sentence that doesn’t seem to be important.
I didn’t know about diet coke and gay men. I have been out of the loop. I don’t like the taste of coke so
I don’t like being born on the same day as other people. It actually seems like it hurts. But if only I were born on Benjamin’s birthday.
I love this quotation from Benjamin, and I immediately want to emulate his alleged practice as much as possible, just to hurry just about everything into print. Did he keep track of these himself, where and when what was published?
Did he leave it with someone or have it with him when he died? Did he disappear in death or is his body somewhere?
Displace your own thinking? What does that mean? Did you then do this?
Why should there be a distinction between experimental or avant garde poetry and the rest of poetry? Does it help aside from in academic learned credentialing and pedagogy?
The discipline of encoding, of composing, of amassing material. Let us consider what the discipline consists of and how to practice it. How can we consider this, together, or separately but leaving a record of it.
I am friend and comrade. Yes. Likewise are you to me.
Just trying to keep going was one thing he was able or ready to write just then but he may have been trying to do other things in Biotherm as well.
Do we have recordings of Zukofsky reading his own work? I felt your reading of it sounded like reading your own work, which wasn’t so notable to me when you were reading Benjamin. But and I like how you read this Zukofsky material too. It’s fast enough I don’t know what I am hearing but every word and phrase is clear, and there’s a powerful sense of trajectory and of my difficulty imagining any sort of graphic representation for it.
Orchards and horses. Airs, no birds.
In your reading I feel an urgency I might not sense in reading the original in “A”.
Barry had a big thing always about Zukofsky, and many thoughts and passions, critiques and values for Zuk. So I can hardly think of Zukofsky without thinking of Barry, even more than thinking of A-24 although I rehearsed and performed that repeatedly with Carla and Bob and Lyn and Kit and Barry. It was thrilling and silly and fine to work hard on it and still present it a couple times and not know just how good or bad this result might be.
Horses, manes, words, yeah, fuck that shit. I love the momentum. Would I feel that momentum without this reading? It is a different momentum in A-7 than when you read from your own work, although in the lectures you get up a lot of steam like this too.
Now good Friday, he employed are we back in Zukofsky or on to something else. The goat, what are you saying. Goat, I’m not going to stop the recording to look it up. Goat.
An interesting person to think about in O’Hara brain spasms. Structural similarities? I’m not sure you say a thing about these similarities here. But they both look at the relation between speech and poetry as a problem of interest. Is that structural? Should I question such word use at all? The improvisational then you say is not much in Zukofsky. But a play with words and time that feels very akin to improvisation and may be based in it I suggest, I mean anyone might just start writing or typing and come up with something as good as that individual can write and it might be
DWP self publishing I like this. Does it mean you make a pdf file and let people know that they can download it if they want?
Are you saying the poetry magazines want the lyric so much that your and my own gets harder to publish? Do they admit this? Is it a closeted passion?
Bob Gluck indicates how versatile the term ‘lyric’ can be in its accurate uses as a word rather than just as a genre. He doesn’t seem to hold it down to ‘style,’ does he? You don’t need to answer any of these questions.
Who is maligned within the poetry world, there are so many ways, aside from being torpedoes by the milquetoasters. People avoid gossip blame each other poet to poet to poet among poets.
There are careers though, people have academic careers that keep their poetry careers going and vice versa, interdependently, I think. And there is a wiling continuing to be writing and using and accessing poetry in one’s life which is a career in a meaningful sense whether it’s at all professional or not.
I don’t know what Poetry Foundation publishes. On its website? It doesn’t occur to me that it might be interesting so I don’t find out.
I tend to think the ‘good lyric poetry’ would be a way of understanding and notice something sort of songlike in some respect within any writing that one finds to be really good.
Written on July 4 Independence F+Day but we don’t call it that becaUSE we don’t think of anything as independent or an independence day. And not the whole day anyway but just a part, from midmorning to the time one says Fuck it.
I like it that you read titles. and who wrote it. The epigraph is so hard to hear and think about aside from as every word is perfectly clear and resonant and frastinating. Monarchy. Louis. Hegel’s philosophy in defense. I guess I was.
You don’t have a reading voice, when reading aloud or silently?
Your mind is permanently stuck in busy networkings of transition, on the move, linking, relinking, changing course. This may relate to throwing out legal tender, which seems to establish linkages only according to the principles of exchange of capital.
Desire to throw it out. A passion. Not getting around due to fear to exchanging actual things through the postal services. Not if you know what to expect from me, did you know then what you were writing, did you mean to write something in particular or only to frame a shift, a transition in the thought being framed at the moment. Money. Debt. To make the mind transform the world.
Maybe mind transforms the world to realize how the world actually is rather than to turn it into some magical thing that we think we want.
Coy and self-reflective also predates postmodern, viz. Sterne. Even Catullus.
[At this point I turn off the recording and pause and run spellcheck and decide which typos to leave in and reflect on how demanding and difficult this is after all compared to the fun and easy prospect of my doing this, it’s hard on my fingers, hands, neck, head, and patience with myself. I can’t decide if I missed enough on the recording to make myself back it up again a little, and that sort of difficulty was never something I wanted to entertain in this project, so mostly I just don’t stop the recording or back it up. I sometimes correct typos as I’m going along if I don’t have something I want to respond to at the moment on the recording. The first half hour of it prompted the previous two full pages of reactive and reflective commentary, presumably of no use whatsoever, which thus renders it available for any use one might happen to decide on, including eliminating it permanently in some way but I’m not likely to do that, at least not today. But I don’t know if I can bear to go on, even on another day. There are so many things to do, generally.]