To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Reconfiguring Romanticism (35) -- McClure, Rothenberg, Scalapino

[An announcement for any in range]

An evening of Romantic Poetry
with Michael McClure, Jerome Rothenberg, Leslie Scalapino

City Lights Books, San Francisco
Thursday, January 14th, 7:00 p.m.

Poetry must have something in itthat is barbaric, vast and wild.
-- D. Diderot

In the spirit of an experimental and visionary romanticism that links closely with the experimental modernisms of where we are right now, McClure, Rothenberg and Scalapino will read from and discuss the works of acknowledged Romantics and postromantics like Blake, Shelley, Goethe, Hugo, Whitman, Dickinson, and Rimbaud, as well as poems of their own in the newest and oldest of romantic traditions. The reading will also include works outside of conventional literatures and national boundaries, sound poems and non-sense poems, prose poems and visual poems, journal poems and fragment poems, outsider poems and aboriginal poems, shouted poems and whispered poems. The evening will let new ideas fly from the poems, the audience, and the readers.

Michael McClure's next two books are Of Indigo and Saffron from UC Press, and Mysteriosos and other poems from New Directions. McClure performed on December 8th with The Charles Lloyd Quartet in Los Angeles at Disney Hall.

Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of his own poetry (thirteen from New Directions) and major assemblages of experimental and traditional poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium, the third volume of which is a no-holds barred anthology of romantic and postromantic poetry.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and poem-plays, the most recent being: Day Ocean State of Stars' Night published by Green Integer; and It's go in horizontal, Selected Poems 1974-2006 published by UC Press, Berkeley, 2007.

1 comment:

Marvin K. Mooney said...

You create the blossoms of futures unseen. We salute you.