The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog

December 18, 2012

List of Poets with Entries

February 21, 2012

Jorge Santiago Peradnik's death, a short obituary by Charles Bernstein

February 20, 2012

Celebration of Carl Rakosi's 99th birthday at Kelly Wwriters House at the University of Pennsylvania (tapes, biography and introduction)

For tapes, a bio and an introduction to events to celebrate Carl Rakosi’s 99th birthday at Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, click here:

http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/archival/events/2002/rakosi.php

Short orbituary on Christian Ide Hintze by Anne Waldman

For a short obituary on Austrian poet and performer, Christian Ide Hintze, click below:
http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=7780

"Looking for the Real Carl Rakosi: Collecteds and Selecteds," by Marjorie Perloff

For an essay on Carl Rakosi’s poetry by Marjorie Perloff, click below:

http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/carl-rakosi/

Carl Rakosi

Carl Rakosi [Callman Rawley] [USA]

1903-2004

Rakosi was born in Berlin on November 6, 1903. A year after his birth, his parents separated and for the next six years he and his mother lived with her family in Hungary. In the meantime his father had moved to Chicago, where he worked as a watchmaker and was involved in socialist politics with friends such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnicht. In 1910 Rakosi’s step¬mother traveled to Hungary, bringing Carl and his brother back with her to the United States.

Rakosi recounted in a 2001 interview (in the Jewish Bulletin) that there was a sense of panic among the ship’s passengers concerning whether or not they would pass the health examinations, a fear ameliorated in the six-year-old child, perhaps, by his seeing the Statue of Liberty: “It was an unforgettable sight. There was a sense of great exhilaration and joy.” He never saw his mother again, and did not know what happened to her until he returned with his children to Hungary for a visit in the 1970s. On a Budapest memorial wall he found the names of his mother and grandmother, by the word “Auschwitz.”

Eventually the family settled in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and after a brief time at the University of Chicago, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he received a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, Rakosi signed on as a mess boy on a trip to Australia, and later worked with disturbed children in New York, which led him to return to Wisconsin to take a master’s degree in psychology.

He was first attracted to writing in high school, when one of his teachers—“a very sexy looking woman”—responded to a book report he had written on George Meredith. She “wrote back…on what I had written in such a straightforward serious tone,” he recounts in a conver-sation with Tom Devaney and Olivier Brossard, “it gave me for the first time, the idea that maybe I had it in me to be a writer too.” Later at the University of Chicago he befriended two other students, a black student “turning out poems that sounded like Kipling, very robust and vigorous” and a Japanese student writing short, haiku-like poems. Both made an impression on him.

During the three years of his undergraduate work at Wisconsin (1921-1924) Rakosi was able to attend to poetry, affiliating himself through a small literary circle that included Kenneth Fearing, Leon Serabian Herald and Margery Latimer (who would later marry Jean Toomer) with the political left literary avant-garde. As opposed to his small literary circle, Rakosi found his other fellow students to be unbelievably “smug”:
The University had some ten thousand students, mostly from Wisconsin farms and small towns, blond young Babbitts of North European stock, their hair cropped close. It was a place for youth fed on fresh country milk and Iowa corn where time was suspended and they looked each other over and saw that they were comely, and flirted and horsed around, and the big events were foot¬ball and the Big Ten pennant ahead. And standing guard was a smugness hard to imagine these days, though Nancy Reagan comes pretty close to it. (“Scenes from My Life,” in Collected Prose).

Throughout this period and for some years following his graduation, he published in numerous important literary and politically-allied magazines such as The Little Review, Two Worlds, Exile, transition, The Liberator, The Nation and The Masses. The story of his first encounter in New York with The Little Review editor Jane Heap is worth recounting. Through Margery Latimer it had been arranged that he meet with Heap:

Apprehensive, I climbed the circular staircase one afternoon to The Little Review office, which was then in the Village. It was dark in the hallway. At one end on the first landing was a small white name-card, The Little Review, and a push button under it. I rang the bell, there was silence for a moment, then the door opened and a pudgy figure appeared in a red velvet smoking jacket, smoking a small cigar, the face very round, the hair bobbed to look mannish. For a moment there was an aston¬ishing resemblance to Oscar Wilde.

It was Jane Heap. This startling appearance, for some reason, at once put me at ease. I simply gave her my name and she invited me in. It was not an office at all but an apartment she shared with Margaret Anderson. She was pleasant, served tea, and we talked, she as to a fellow writer. I found myself stimulated and was not lacking for words. I remember our conversation as lively and straightforward. At the end, she said, “I suppose you brought something with you,” and I said, “Yes,” and pulled out a batch of poems from my coat pocket. She read them closely, thought for a few moments and then said, “We’ll take these.”

That was it. I was in. (“Scenes from My Life,” The Collected Prose).

The poems published by The Little Review—“Sittingroom by Patinka,” “The January of a Gnat,” and “Flora and the Ogre”—represent some of Rakosi’s very best writing. While I usually cannot tolerate American poetry with end-rhymes, Rakosi’s brilliant evocation of a gnat in mid-winter is a testament how a good poet can transform formal elements into something completely original.

In 1929, in a commitment to a literary career, Rakosi legally changed his name to Callman Rawley, which, disguising his immigrant origins, he thought might lead to quicker acceptance in literary circles, particularly in relation to poets Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams (all poets, one observes, who expressed anti-Semitic sentiments). But his move in 1928 to Texas had already resulted in what Andrew Crozier has described as “a willed act of poetic abnegation.”

Rakosi’s poetry, however, was not (yet) forgotten. After years of criticism of Harriet Moore’s “stale and phoney” presentation of American writing in Poetry, Pound was able to convince her in 1930 to allow Louis Zukofsky to edit a special issue. Pound’s only fear, he proclaimed in a letter of October 1930 to Monroe, was that “Mr. Zukofsky will be just and Goddam praewdent.” In January of the next year, he wrote: “Re Zuk: gord knows wot he has done to yr. respected pubctn. At least it will be a different point of view. Let us hope a younger pt. v. than mine” (in Pound, Selected Letters 1907-1941).

According to Rakosi, Zukofsky, prodded by Pound not to include “old masters,” solicited poems “from young poets for whose poetry he had a high regard. What he collected was the best he could find” (Rakosi in interview with Tom Devaney).

Monroe, however, insisted upon a name for the issue. Rakosi recounts:

It seems to me now, that she must have felt that a name would show that the magazine was open to new forms of poetry and that this would benefit the magazine. She never openly approved of our poems, however. As a matter of fact, in the next issue she apologized to her readers.

Zukofsky hated the idea of pinning a name to a collection of diverse talents and protested, but being young and unknown himself at the time, sputtering angrily at how stupid she was.

Anyhow, he came up with the term Objectivist, thinking that was as close as he could come to describing the work of Reznikoff, whom he admired most. In that connection, it is interesting that Pound never could understand what Zukofsky saw in Reznikoff, but he had the good sense not to interfere with Zukofsky’s judgment. Zukofsky wrote me at the time to ask, did I have any objection to the term. I wrote back, “Hell no, just as long as I get into the magazine,” Poetry at that time being only one of two poetry magazines in the country, the other being one that I would not have wanted to appear in” (Rakosi in interview with Tom Devaney).

The February 1931 issue of Poetry contained four of Rakosi’s best poems: “Orphean Lost,” “Fluteplayers from Finmarken,” “Unswerving Marie,” and “Before You,” two of which I chose (unaware at the time of their literary pedigree) for inclusion in my large American anthology.

Rakosi’s work continued to appear in magazines, with lessening frequency, throughout the 1930s. By 1935, however, he had completely given up writing as he worked at the University of Pennsylvania on a Master of Social Work degree. He married Leah Jaffe in 1939, and they began a family. Rakosi was now determined to follow a career in helping others, working for nearly 30 years as a psychotherapist with disturbed children in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Minneapolis.

In 1941 James Laughlin of New Directions—a publishing entity also very influenced by Pound—printed, as the first of its “Poet of the Month” series, Rakosi’s Selected Poems, his first book. For the next twenty-five years Rakosi was silent.

In 1965, a student of Charles Olson’s at the State University of New York-Buffalo, Andrew Crozier contacted Rakosi to discuss his poetry. His interest in the work inspired Rakosi to begin writing again, and in 1967, New Directions brought out a second book—containing mostly poems from his early years,—Amulet. Ere-Voice was published in 1971 and Ex Cranium, Night appeared in 1975. But the poet who emerges at the other end of those two and one-half decades is not the same man. The influences of his social engagement with what he would call the “common man” are everywhere apparent. No longer engaged in sensuous wonderment of a trans-formed universe, he is now more interested in proclaiming aesthetic approaches and satirically observing the excesses of what he describes as prophets and poets. “What we need in this world are workable proposals,” as he argues in his 1998 poem “Odds and Ends.” Excess in anything—particularly when it comes to artistic expression—is now the object of disdain.

His direct narrational approach to language, his new dismissal of anything that is not related to a homespun American use of speech, suddenly puts him at odds with his own past, including his continuing love of music and literature.

One cannot but recognize that he, like so many others, has confused (and infused) his art with politics in a manner that serves neither. In his Romanization of the “common man” Rakosi misunderstands the fact that a radicalized and intensified use of language can itself serve to effect a change in the polis, that the very fact that art is not life can offer new vision for those who might engage it.

Perhaps no poet since Marianne Moore has done greater harm to her or his own early writing than Carl Rakosi. His Collected Poems, published in 1986—clearly unedited and printed from a manuscript he collected—is a mish-mash of older and new work, organized by gratuitous topics such “Meditations,” “Adventures of the Head,” “L’Chayim,” “The Poet, I and II,” and “Americana.” Some of his best works have been radically revised, others grafted to newer poems. Several of my favorite poems, works such as “Paraguay,” “Good Prose,” and “Sappho,” have been apparently disavowed.

No matter how one might lament Rakosi’s later poetic attitudes, he graciously allowed Crozier and Sun & Moon Press to restore his earlier versions to print, helping the editor in the process. Despite his revisionist presentation of his earlier poetry, it is clear that Rakosi wanted that work also to appear in its original contexts. At the very least the poet recognized, as he writes in his “Cautionary Note” to the Sun & Moon Press volume, that his “atti¬tude toward the poems is not a part” of him. “They stand there as givens.” In his insightful introduction Crozier, moreover, warns us against representing the achievements of the earlier period as having been thwarted by Rakosi’s financial exigencies. It is always unwise to ignore the real social relations, writing blocks, or other inhibitions of any poet, Crozier argues, for they are part of the phenom¬enology of writing. Indeed, the work Rakosi produced when he returned to writing, while less formal and more directly transparent in its satirical focus, had its roots, often, in the earlier poems.

In 1996 won the PEN Center USA Award for Collected Poems: 1923-1941.

On June 25, 2004, Carl Rakosi, the man the San Francisco Chronicle described “the oldest major poet in the United States,” died. The only surprise was, perhaps, that at the age of 100 he was still living!—basically in good health and a good state of mind. He had suffered a series of strokes, but he was, according to the family, listening to Mark Twain and music at the time of his death. A family friend, Jen Hofer, recounts that a few days earlier a hospice worker asked him if he knew what day it was; he didn’t. What month was it? “September?” Did he know the year? “No.” “Who is the president?” the hospice worker queried. He hesitated, and his wife and the worker presumed he’d be unable to answer that question as well. A short while later, he answered: “Bush—that bastard!”

BOOKS OF POETRY

Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1941); Amulet (New York: New Dierctions, 1967); Ere-Voice (1968); Ex Cranium Night (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975); Droles de Journal (West Branch, Iowa: Toothpaste Press, 1981); The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi (Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986); Poems 1923-1941, ed. by Andrew Crozier (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995); The Earth Suite (Buckfastleigh, South Devonshire, England: Etruscan Books, 1997)

Fluteplayers from Finmarken

How keen the nights were,
Svensen.
Not a star out,
not a beat of emotion
in the humming snowhull.
(Now and then an awful swandive.)

It seemed ordained then that
my feet slip on the seal bones
and my head come down suddenly over a simple rock-cisvaen,
grief-stricken and archwise.
Thereon were stamped
the figures of the noble women
I had followed with closed dyes
out to the central blubber
of the waters.

(There is not a pigeon
or a bee in sight.
My eyes are shut now,
and my pulse dead as a rock.)

The Swedish mate says he recalls
this fungoid program of the mind and matter,
where the abstract signals to the abstract,
and the mind directs a final white lens
on the spewing of the waterworm
and the wings of the midsea.

It was not clear what I was after
in this stunted flora
and husky worldcold
until the other flutes arrived:
four master musing
from one polar qualm to another.

The January of a Gnat

Snow panels, ice pipes, house the afternoon
whose poised arms lift prayer with the elm’s antennae.
She has her wind of swift burrs, whose spiel is gruff,
scanning the white mind of the winter moon
with her blank miles. Her voice is lower than
the clovers or the bassviol of seastuff.

So void moons make a chaste anabasis
across the stalks of star and edelweiss,
while Volga nixies and a Munich six
o’clock hear in the diaphane the rise
of one bassoon. So the immense frosts fix
their vacant death, bugs spray the roots like lice.
High blizzards broom the cold for answer to
their ssh of vapors and their vowel ooo

Paraguay

In the early hours the lovebirds
colonized the palm.

We were looking for a totem.
Finding nothing
but the Indian smells,
we booked the next boat to Janeiro.

On the east coast,
when the sun deflects the falcons
we found a blessed frère
with no cathedral
but the daisies in May,
living on milk and wafers,
with the cross in one hand
and the anatomy of sorrow in the other.

The Lobster
To W. Carlos Williams

Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms,
green sand, pebbles,
broken shells.

Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms,
gray sand, pebbles,
bubbles rising.

Plasma-bearer
and slow-
motion benthos!

The fishery vessel Ion drops
anchor here collecting
plankton smears and fauna.
Plasma-bearer, visible sea
purge, sponge and kelpleaf,
halicystus the Sea Bottle

resembles emeralds
and is the larges
cell in the world.

Young sea-horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old—

nobody has ever
seen this marine
freak blink.

It radiates on
terminal vertebrae
a comb of twenty

upright spines
and curls
its rocky tail.

Saltflush lobster
bull encrusted swims
backward from the rock.

_______
Copyright ©1995, 1967 by Callman Rawley. Reprinted from Carl Rakosi, Poems 1923-1941 (Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press, 1995).

Mirta Rosenberg

Mirta Rosenberg [Argentina]
1951

Mirta Rosenberg was born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina on October 7, 1951. She now lives in Buenos Aires, where she translates poetry from English and French and writes her own work.

Her poetic debut came in 1984 with the volume Pasajes (Passages), followed by the 1988 work, Madam. Five further books followed before he collected works were published under the title El árbol de palabras (The Tree of Words) in 2006 by the publishing house Bajo la luna. The former publisher had been her son and his girlfriend, but in 1990 Rosenberg took over the job, changing the publishing house name to Bajo la nueva luna (Under the New Moon).

Rosenberg has also translated a wide range of English-language authors from Katherine Mansfield, Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and H. D. to James Laughlin, Seamus Heaney, and Louise Glück. With Daniel Samoilovich, she translated Shakespeare's Henry IV as part of an Argentinian project of translation Shakespeare's plays.

Since 1986 Rosenberg has also been on the editing staff of the poetry journal, Diario de posía.

In 2003 she was awarded a Guggenheim grant for poetry, and in 2004 received the Konex prize for her literary translations.

Writing on the Poetry International Web, critic Bart Vonck has written of Rosenberg's own poetry: "Mirta Rosenberg's poetry has its own independent voice in the highly varied panorama of present-day Argentinean poetry. She sings from the depths of language or from her own personal reading of it and the broadening that language in translation allows to appear. In Rosenberg's (often enigmatic) poems, internal rhymes, rhythm, plays on words and repetitions often occur as components of her own wayward writing. With considerable stylistic distance she sounds the abyss of intimacy."

BOOKS OF POETRY

Pasajes (Buenos Aires: Trocadero, 1984); Madam (Buenos Aires: Libros de Tierra Firma, 1988); Teoría sentimental (Buenos Aires: Libros de Tierra, 1994); El Arte de Perder (Buenos Aires: Bajo la luna nueva, 1998); Poemas (Badajoz, Spain: Asociación de Escritos Extremeños, 2001); El árbol de palabras (Buenos Aires: Bajo la luna, 2006)

For a selection of poems and other materials on Mirta Rosenberg, click below:

http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=11627

Omar Cáceres

Omar Cáceres [Chile]

1904-1943

Omar Cáceres was born in Cauquenes, Chile on July 5, 1904 and became linked with the turbulent poetic and artistic period in South American literature of the 1920s. Primarily he devoted himself to literary criticism that appeared mainly in the Illustrated Journal. Critic Eliot Weinberger describes him also as being a violinist, the only sighted member of a orchestra for the blind. One source also describes him as joining the Communist Party.

Cáceres' poetry appeared in two anthologies, Contemporary Chilean Poetry of 1931 edited by Ruben Azocar, and the controversial Chilean Poetry Anthology edited by Volodia Teitelboim and Eduardo Anguita of 1935. For the most part, however, his poetry remained unpublished until 1934, when his brother self-published a book for Omar, Defensa del ídolo (The Defense of the Idol). Discovering typographical errors in the book, the poet bought up almost all the copies and burned them. According to Weinberger, only two copies of the fifteen-poem publication, remain intact. The introduction to this book was written by the great Chilean poet and writer Vicente Huidobro, although it is unknown whether the two actually met.

Little else is known about him. He died under strange conditions, his body being found in a rural ditch near Renca in September 1943. His head was cracked open and his pockets were empty.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Denfesa del ídolo (self-published, 1934)

For an article "On Cáceres," which includes a translation of one of his poems by Eliot Weinberger, see below:
http://jacketmagazine.com/03/violinist.html

"On Omar Cáceres," by Eliot Weinberger

For a biography and discusion of the Childean poet Omar Cáceres by Eliot Weinberger, click below
http://jacketmagazine.com/03/violinist.html

February 19, 2012

"The Sciart Origins of Bern Porter’s FOUND POEMS" by Joel Lipman

For an essay on the "Found Poems" of Bern Porter by Joel Lipman, click here:
http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/1948-joel-lipman

Remembrances and essays on Stacey Doris

For a site that contains several essays and remembrances of poet Stacey Doris, click below
https://jacket2.org/commentary/charles-bernstein

"Ronald Firbank as Poet," an essay by Douglas Messerli

For an essay regarding the (usually-described) fiction writer Ronald Firbank as a poet, see below:
https://jacket2.org/commentary/firbank-poet-douglas-messerli

J. Karl Bogartte

J. Karl Bogartte [USA]
1944

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 8, 1944, J. Karl Bogartte began in high school reading a wide range of poets and other writers, from William Butler Yearts to E. E. Cummings, from Thomas DeQuincy to Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. At age 17 he discovered the New Directions edition of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, which, along with reading the City Lights Anthology containing a section devoted to surrealism edited by Franklin Rosemont, completely transformed his thinking, both visually and poetically.

Bogartte took the City Lights book with him to Paris in 1971, when he stayed in the city for almost a year. Without knowing French he assimilated much of French surrealist literature, and a few years later begin to define his writing as surrealist-inspired.

In France he did meet Francis Ponge in Provence. Bogartte remembers: “It was a strange and marvelous meeting, since neither of us knew each other’s language, and we ‘pondered each other.’ We walked, made attempts to communicate. He signed a book of his I had purchased, and well, I was in awe and didn’t want to impose.

Returning to the US, Bogartte studied anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and photography at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He also contacted Rosemont and joined the Chicago Surrealist group.

In 2004, he published a novella, Antibodies (A Surrealist Novella), followed uup his first book of poetry, The Wolf House. Secret Games followed in 2007, along with Luminous Weapons 2009, The Mirror Held Up in Darkness 1976-2003 in 2010, and A Curious Night for a Double Eclipse in 2011.

BOOKS OF POETRY

The Wolf House (Paris: La Belle Inutile Éditions, 2005); Secret Games (Paris: La Belle Inutile Éditions, 2007); Luminous Weapons (Paris: La Belle Inutile Éditions, 2009); The Mirror Held Up in Darkness 1976-2003 (Paris: La Belle Inutile Éditions, 2010); A Curious Night for a Double Eclipse (Paris: La Belle Inutile Éditions, 2011)

from Luminous Weapons

The game that is most intense when the apples come to glow, and the gifted hands of the translator fondle the abacus of distant fixations. A sudden dialectic mirrors the syrup of hallucination between the clothing of bereavement and the stairway that leads to the forest, and ultimately there is a devastating humor in the shadow when it ignites.

•

The spirit of a forceful defiance, a dangerous rapture clinging to the parapets deer-laden with immaculate caressing sensations arriving fully formed, labyrinths of indecent exposures (Medea-roses) inciting curses and other idiosyncrasies, like sparkling lures or shining breastplates of adopted flight-patterns groomed as totems and delicious pets... Your mouth close to her ear, where the word “sinister” enters the mastery of jasmine and arson, like wind gathering the axial stones of consciousness into phantom arcades.

•

Often, there is the delicate cooing, the diabolical inclusions, the ravishing of wishbones... “Dearest Equinox, you must leave before the doors close in the children’s eyes...” precise gesticulation to unsettle the savants in their hidden chambers. The rare infernal flowers of locomotion, whispering amongst themselves... A buzzing drama of dark machines and blonde pianos of a river that captures bells for pleasure and twitching, intimate with a street that follows the scent of your eyes. The magnolia of the wolf’s eyes lit up like wounds seem like the grates of a sudden encounter, in the middle of the night, a flaunting image of pale mysteries torn into premeditated seductions.

•

“Equinox... out of the landscape, out of the forest, spin the fur into gold, into windows through stone, out of shadow spread your eyes into fleece... ”

•

The anthropology of your body lives past the bronze age of those liquids that solarize the face of a woman, whose bell of slumbering shatters the city of elongated sorrows, and whose name in Galicia is venerated by scholars, and despised by children. Her face follows rain and flood. Bones glittering for windows. Shadows cut into perfect squares. Her name is always invisible, her gate covered with whispering, her fluids powering impossible getaways

____
Copyright ©2009 by J. Karl Bogartte. Reprinted by permission.