ThoughtMesh: National Poetry Foundation

On VORT by barry s. alpert

http://thoughtmesh.net/ publish/276.php — Published Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Diachronic<>Synchronic Editorial Maneuvers During the Run of VORT Magazine

from "Lecture Notes on Icons and iconoclasts" by Deborah Meadows

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/57. php — Published Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Deborah Meadows will talk from "Lecture Notes on Icons and iconoclasts", a long essay in progress. This selection will touch on a few areas including on Rosalind Kraus in 'Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America' approaches the <continued>

Becoming Literature by Dr. Patrick F. Durgin

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/60. php — Published Friday, January 9th, 2009

This paper reads Jackson Mac Low's work of the 1970s as a hinge between the intermedia and early procedural practices for which he is best known and the work of the 1980s, where a self-consciously literary practice resonates with the ideo-linguistic <continued>

A Pilgrim's Journey in Poetics: Image, Icon and Form in the 1970s Poetry of Charles Wright by Gerry LaFemina

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/239 .php — Published Thursday, December 11th, 2008

The two major movements in American poetry of the 1960s that would influence the poetry of the next decade were, without a doubt, Confessionalism and the Deep Image movement. These two movements would have a deep and lasting impact on the <continued>

Faith, Despair and Hope: Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Toward God by Wendy Galgan

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/224 .php — Published Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Before her death in October 1974, Anne Sexton completed corrections to the galleys of The Awful Rowing Toward God, which would be published posthumously. The poems in this collection are fiercely personal and intensely emotional, surrealistic in <continued>

"Let's say she didn't": Escape and Immobility in Kathryn Stripling Byer's "Blood Mountain" Sequence by Wendy Galgan

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/225 .php — Published Saturday, September 27th, 2008

The Appalachian women in Kathryn Stripling Byer's work are constrained in numerous ways: by geography, by lack of education, by abuse, by poverty. Each seeks to find her own way through the world, and while at times this means a woman is able leave <continued>

"the pure pleasure of simply looking": Objectivist Sincerity in James Schuyler's "Hymn to Life" by Michael Roberson

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/79. php — Published Friday, September 5th, 2008

By 1974 citizens of the United States were well aware that President Nixon had lied to them—had looked them through the eye of their own television sets forthrightly and insistently and spoken: "People have got to know <continued>

Mayer's Walden by Jonathan Skinner

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/184 .php — Published Saturday, July 26th, 2008

This paper examines some of the intriguing parallels between Bernadette Mayer's 1970s writing experiments, with a focus on the book Studying Hunger, and Thoreau's writing projects in Walden and The Journals. I wager that we might locate <continued>

The Erotics of "Being" in the Early Work of Gustaf Sobin by Dawn Michelle Baude

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/190 .php — Published Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Essay for NPF

Contestatory Writing Practices in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Seventies--New Sentence, New Narrative by Robin Tremblay-McGaw

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/162 .php — Published Monday, July 14th, 2008

"Writing itself is a form of action" (Ron Silliman. The New Sentence 4) "My theme probably has most to do with a very strong feeling that telling stories actually has an effect on the world, and that a relation is achieved between <continued>

The Dérive, the 27th Letter of the Alphabet, Poetics and Politics in Language Poetry and the Situationist International by Tim Kreiner

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/189 .php — Published Sunday, July 13th, 2008

In 1977, Steve McCaffery wrote in an early forum on what would soon come to be known as language poetry that "The main thrust of this work is hence political, rather than aesthetic." This paper seeks to understand the stakes of the tendency that <continued>

Toward a Poetics of the Embodied Outside by Malgorzata Myk

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/159 .php — Published Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Since the appearance of L'Écho Bouge Beau (1968), a major collection of poems in Brossard's early writing, her poetry has moved away from its fascination with a rather elusive concept of the neuter, which became a recurring image in some of the <continued>

Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook and the Materialities of Communication by Scott Pound

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/191 .php — Published Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Most of the little that has been written about Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook foregrounds its connection to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical texts—particularly Wittgenstein's use of the numbered proposition and the interrogative voice. <continued>

Bernadette Alphabet by Jonathan Skinner

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/183 .php — Published Saturday, July 5th, 2008

My introduction to Bernadette Mayer, reading with Clark Coolidge at the Colby College Art Museum on 14 June 2008, as part of the National Poetry Foundation Poetry of the 1970s Conference: an ABC of Mayer's literary biography.

Saint of the Negative, Sunday of the Seventies by jane

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/101 .php — Published Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

This essay seeks to understand a structure of feeling which comes of age in the 1970s. This experience is tied to the development of an economic situation — "financialization" — that both colonizes and abstracts the future, while <continued>

Talking Cosmos: Influencing Ronald Johnson, Deriving Robert Duncan by Peter O'Leary

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/181 .php — Published Friday, June 27th, 2008

Fluid moves in Robert Duncan's favored sense of literary derivation, a word whose etymology indicates the channeling of influence into a new flow of water. Both derivation and influence signal a cosmic conception as well: our use of the word <continued>

Hannah Weiner and Basic English by Rodney Koeneke

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/117 .php — Published Friday, June 27th, 2008

In this paper I'd like to suggest a new lens for understanding Weiner's work: the 20th-century fascination with constrained or invented languages. In particular, I'd like to link Weiner's interest in codes, signals, and the <continued>

Becoming Bernadette by Peter Baker

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/132 .php — Published Friday, June 27th, 2008

My operating premise here is that writing/producing texts and being an author are two different, though interrelated, things. The decade of the seventies saw Bernadette Mayer at a height of experimental text production. Beginning with <continued>

The Restoration of 'China' by Rob Halpern

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/173 .php — Published Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Is there anything more to say about Bob Perelman's "China"? "China," of course, is best known for being Fredric Jameson's target poem in "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984); but Jameson found the poem in the second issue of the <continued>

Installing Lev Rubinstein's "Farther and Farther On": From Note Cards to Field Walks, by Philip Metres by Philip Metres

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/176 .php — Published Thursday, June 26th, 2008

In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing <continued>

Baraka's Newark: Performing the Black Arts by Lytle Shaw

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/177 .php — Published Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Baraka's Newark: Performing the Black ArtsThis paper considers Amiri Baraka's writing from the 1970s. The central tension I explore is that between his de- and re-contextualizing intervention in hate speech (in which he re-codes terms directed <continued>

The Feminist Anthology by Ellen Smith

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/61. php — Published Monday, June 23rd, 2008

In 1973, Florence Howe and Ellen Bass published No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women. The anthology has come to signify, in recent literary history, the coalescence of second-wave feminism and mainstream American poetry. In this respect, <continued>

John Ashbery's Optional Apocalypse by Chris Nealon

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/172 .php — Published Monday, June 23rd, 2008

This paper situates Ashbery in a certain New York 1970's, looking at the poems in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror through the lens of the uneasy tail end of the post-World War II Pax Americana. I read the poems in the book as an elaborate staging <continued>

Scratching the '70s: The Uncollected Clark Coolidge by Tom Orange

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/64. php — Published Monday, June 23rd, 2008

In perhaps his most important early statement on poetics (included in his contributor's note to Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets), Clark Coolidge states: "Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive <continued>

A "mosaic of Cosmos": Bricolage in Ronald Johnson's ARK by Ross Hair

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/170 .php — Published Monday, June 23rd, 2008

A "mosaic of Cosmos": Bricolage in Ronald Johnson's ARK I wanted ["The Ramparts] to be constructed in a way so that I could get a source anywhere, from any source whatsoever, a word spoken, a word read, a sight, whatever, <continued>

Bernadette Mayer and the Capitalization of Everyday Life by Jasper Bernes

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/130 .php — Published Friday, June 20th, 2008

Operating at the intersection of conceptual art, performance, documentary and experimental writing, Bernadette Mayer's challenging experiments of the 1970s—particularly Memory, Studying Hunger, and Midwinter Day—come out of her <continued>

Untitled by joe stafura

Clarity, or Late Modernism (A Photological Midrash) by Patrick Pritchett

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/129 .php

Abstract Clarity or, Late Modernism (A Photological Midrash) Patrick Pritchett Harvard University pritchpa@fas.harvard.edu This paper looks at the prominent place Oppen assigns in his late work to clarity. Clarity recurs with <continued>

Coolidgean Ex-cavations by Paul Stephens

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/128 .php

From at least Space (1970) to Smithsonian Depositions (1980), the poetry of Clark Coolidge demonstrates an obsession with landscape and with primal scenes of enclosure. In Own Face (1978), caves, cavers (Floyd Barrow), and cavemen (of the <continued>

Meaning, Method, Motive by Bruce Andrews

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/62. php

A sketch of so-called Language Writing's development in the early 1970s.

A Poem of Community: Anne Waldman's "Billy Work Peyote" and the Early Years of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics by Rebecca Weaver

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/97. php

NPF Poetry of the 1970s Conference, 4p.m. Thursday, June 12, 2008Rebecca Weaver, University of Minnesota In 1977, William Burroughs, Jr. lay comatose in a Denver hospital, awaiting a liver transplant. His father, Williams S. <continued>

Funding Verse Versus Phony Affinities: The Apparatuses of Funding Poetry at Minneapolis' The Loft in the 1970s by Rebecca Weaver

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/89. php

NPF Poetry of the 1970s Conference, Friday, June 13, 2008, 2:30p.m.Rebecca Weaver, University of Minnesota Begun above Rusoff's Books in the Dinkytown neighborhood in 1974, The Loft was a community of poets who gathered at the <continued>

The Disability Rights Movement & the Legacy of Poets with Disabilities by Jillian Weise

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/96. php

This essay explores the Disability Rights Movement and searches for a poet affiliated with that movement. The sit-in at the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977 marked a defining point in the movement. The sit-in resulted in the ratification of <continued>

Lyotard's Cage by Tony Brinkley

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/95. php

In the 1970s John Cage was a paradigmatic figure (open, rather than closed, form) for Jean-François Lyotard, both for his engagements with libidinal economies and des dispositifs pulsionnels, and for his later work on minor ruses and their retorts <continued>

Renshi: Poetry "Linking" Cultures by Heidi Smith

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/85. php

In Japan, there has been a long tradition of collaborative forms of poetry, such as renga and renku. These forms were used in the courts, as well as more common, informal situations. <continued>

"A. R. Ammons and the Poetics of the Planet" by Susannah Hollister

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/84. php

"It was inevitable to think about that as the central image of our lives—that sphere," A. R. Ammons said of the earth seen from space. Along with television viewers across the United States and abroad, Ammons had marveled at <continued>

A New Mythology for the 70s: The Book of Nightmares by Matthew Powers

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/80. php

In a decade marked by Watergate disillusionment, glam rock, political activism, civil liberties, hippies, Vietnam, stagflation, and Sonny and Cher, the American 1970's has been referred to, by Tom Wolfe, as the "me decade." Contrary to the decadent <continued>

Seventies prosody: "the tone leading vowels" by Donald Wellman

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/78. php

The phrase is Robert Duncan's from The Truth and Life of Myth, often cited by Burton Hatlen, for whom the phrase was memory matter derived from a treasured conversation with Duncan. Looking at its use in context now, I find the concept of "tone <continued>

"Please take the lid off my galaxy": American Surrealism in the Age of Kayak by Brooks Lampe

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/77. php

Kayak, George Hitchcock's seminal magazine (published between 1964 and 1984), chronicles the sustained exchange during the 1970s between deep-image and surrealist poetics. Kayak's declared interest in "surrealist, imagist, and political poems," <continued>

"I want to be that Tantalus" by Burt Kimmelman

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/76. php

Kenneth Patchen's Last Poem-Paintings by Mark Silverberg

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/68. php

While Kenneth Patchen has nearly disappeared from academic radar in the last few decades, he was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the mid-century. The author of over forty volumes in many forms (concrete and sound poetry, prose poems <continued>

Charles Wright by Henry Hart

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/66. php

The scholar M.H. Abrams once observed that many Romantic writers, having grown disillusioned with their revolutionary idealism after the French "Reign of Terror," retreated "from mass action to individual quietism, and from outer revolution to a <continued>

"Poesy's ravening violent flames" by Bruce Holsapple

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/65. php

Inasmuch as Whalen's poetry can be accurately called a "graph of a mind moving"—that is, accurately described as an interrogation of self and subjectivity—it is likewise the graph of a mind bent on composing poetry, formulating aesthetic <continued>

"The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation" by Kaplan P. Harris

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/63. php

Most writers we knew were reading theory. Later, guided by Bruce, we started a left reading group at Small Press Traffic, attended by Steve Benson, Ron Silliman, Denise Kastan, Steve Abbott, Bruce, myself and others. The personal demolished the <continued>

The Ends of the Earth, the End of the Sixties by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/58. php

"We walked the long late Sunday afternoon / the Bloomfield downs of Sonoma / / David said, did you know / Max Douglas is dead, of an overdose . . . " These lines from Kenneth Irby's long poem To Max Douglas seem to propose as much a periodization of <continued>

William Bronk; or the Ambiguities by Eric Hoffman

http://vectors.usc.edu/ thoughtmesh/publish/54. php

While William Bronk's essays on Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, which comprise the remarkable collection Brother In Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States, were composed during the 1930s <continued>