Sunny Murray was an American musician, one of the pioneers of the free jazz style of drumming.
His album Sonny’s Time Now (1965) is in the Top Ten Free Jazz Underground.
On that record Amiri Baraka reads his controversial 1965 poem “Black Art” (above) which features the line “we want poems that kill”, an instance of the aestheticization of violence.
RIP Simon Vinkenoog, 80, Dutch poet and writer.
Simon Vinkenoog (1928 – 2009) was a Dutch poet and writer. He was instrumental in launching the Dutch “Fifties Movement“.
In the Anglosphere Vinkenoog’s name is associated with the Albert Hall poetry event (and the film Wholly Communion) and his connection with IT magazine.
He was one of the Néerlandophone beat writers. The same cultural climate that begot the beat writers in the United States engendered European counterparts.
These countercultures must be looked for in two spheres, the sphere of European counterculture and the sphere of European avant-garde.
In France this was the Letterist International, in Germany perhaps Gruppe 47; visually and on a European scale there was COBRA.
Vinkenoog was born in the same year as Andy Warhol, Serge Gainsbourg, Jeanne Moreau, Nicolas Roeg, Guy Bourdin, Luigi Colani, Stanley Kubrick, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, William Klein, Roger Vadim, Yves Klein, Jacques Rivette, Alvin Toffler, Ennio Morricone and Oswalt Kolle.
RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)[1]
via www.tate.org.uk
Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965
Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. His interests included theatre and pataphysics. He was involved with founding the National Theatre of London, was a member of Oulipo of the year 1960, founder of the Outrapo and a member also of the French Collège de ‘Pataphysique, president the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with “admiring stupefaction” by Raymond Queneau.
Fabula rasa (1945) by Gaston Burssens (this edition 1964)
I am not much of a fiction reader, nor have I ever been much of a poetry reader. My favorite literature is books about books. Literary criticism or literary theory.
I make exceptions.
The best work I read last year was Michaux’s Plume[1] which happens to be a work of prose poetry, a genre which can be traced most readily to Baudelaire and Poe. A genre which is plotless but nevertheless more concrete than pure poetry.
Saturday I bought the work above. It is worth its price for the introductory notes alone.
Literary critic Paul de Wispelaere reviewed it in the chapter “De groteske wereld en de wereld van de groteske,” in his collection Het Perzische Tapijt (1966). In this essay de Wispelaere juxtaposes Fabula Rasa with the paraprose of Gust Gils, another Flemish writer who wrote in the tradition of the literary grotesque. Fabula Rasa’s Belgian-French counterpart is Plume by Henri Michaux.
While researching this post I also stumbled upon prose by Flanders’ cult poet par excellence Paul Van Ostaijen: De bende van de stronk (The stump gang, 1932, grotesques). I will want a copy of that.
I went to the city yesterday and bought:
Did not buy Sarenco : le triptyque du cinéma mobile, 1983-1987[4]: Félix Guattari, Eugenio Miccini, Luigi Serravalli and The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy[5] by J. L. Styan, 1968.
The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode
The Romantic Image by Frank Kermode
The Romantic Image (1957) is a book on the “image” in Romantic poetry by Frank Kermode.
In its preface Kermode says he is indebted to Romantic Agony by Italian critic Mario Praz, The Romantic Soul and the Dream by Swiss critic Albert Béguin, The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams and The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895 by A. G. Lehmann.
Robert Duncan @90
Robert Duncan, American poet (1919 – 1988)
Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the New American Poetry and Black Mountain poets. Duncan’s mature work emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture and today he is also identified as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
Robert Duncan also translated Nerval’s Les Chimères, famous for being referenced by Eliot‘s Waste Land. I am very much fascinated these days by poetry and the translation of poetry.
RIP Adrian Mitchell
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMCObgu_jc]
Adrian Mitchell (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright, best-known for his poem To Whom It May Concern[1].
Connecting lemmas for Mitchell include London Oz, Tom Phillips (artist), International Poetry Incarnation, SOMA Research Association, Wholly Communion, To Whom It May Concern (poem), Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain and Penguin Modern Poets.
The poem To Whom It May Concern is known by its iconic phrase: “Tell me lies about Vietnam.” A piece of cult poetry if there ever was one.
In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.
In search of nonspace and unthought thoughts.
I’ve been mulling over French director Chris Marker‘s Sans Soleil for four days now. The key scene for me was the shooting of the giraffe, which gave its origins away as far as genre-theoretics are concerned.
The key phrase was perhaps the “salute to all unposted letters,” but is safe to say that the film is brilliantly written throughout.
I saw the film at MuHKA on last Saturday, introduced by a Belgian scholar (who?). He stated that the film was unclassifiable, because the “film essay is not a genre but a small category”. However, in my opinion, the film fits the mondo film category, and functions as a highbrow counterpart to Mondo Cane. The film also begs a viewing of the masterwork Blood of the Beasts. But Sans Soleil is a different film altogether. It is a philosophical film that raises questions of medium specificity, multimedia, memory and authenticity.
I have a feeling that Sans Soleil can be invoked to clarify Gilles Deleuze‘s any-space-whatever (see B. C. Holmes – “The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil” [1]), but to prove that would need some more studying of Gilles Deleuze on film.
My eye, a couple of minutes ago
A continuation of “ocular eroticism”, ocular eroticism III
Full poem:
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