old man beaver's blessing song

Is this the origin of the line?

"Although there are many versions of this story, the most often repeated alleges that Kansas Senator Joseph Bristow had been made a long-winded speech with the repeated refrain "What this country needs—" causing the vice president to lean over and whisper to one of the Senate clerks: "Bristow hasn't hit it yet. What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Newspapers repeated the quote and cigar makers gratefully showered the vice president with their products. Immortalized in every dictionary of quotations, the "five-cent cigar" quote remains just about the only thing for which Thomas R. Marshall is remembered today. But historian John E. Brown has traced the quotation back to the Indiana newspaper cartoonist Kin Hubbard, who put the words in the mouth of his popular character "Abe Martin." As a fan of the cartoon strip, Marshall simply picked up the phrase, repeated it, and became its surrogate father."

Mara Gordon interviews Jerome Rothenberg

Q. You've said: "The language of poetry — for myself and others — came to be closer and closer to the language that people really use in everyday speech, but different at its best from official language, from authorized language — as we get it in politics, in advertising, in standardized religion — all of that." How close should it come? How close does it come? How do you draw the lines? And most importantly: why is this distinction so important?

JR: I find the language as spoken a much more flexible medium for poetry than other more fancified or poetical expressions, and I take it that poets from the Romantics on have pushed inexorably in that direction. Even so I have found it useful sometimes to slip into the older, specifically poetical language, whatever game or irony may be involved in doing that at present. In Poland/1931, for example, I go into the old second person (thou, thy, thee) both because I want it to have an exaggeratedly poetic and possibly religious sound, and with a nod, maybe, to Martin Buber's I and Thou formulations.

Q: "Getting it." Close reading. Analysis, overanalysis, comprehension, whatever. I've been socialized for the past 19 years to read something, to ponder it alone, to write about it: the normal classroom model. Our Fellows class is a pretty non-traditional one -- closer to the kiva or the coffeeshop than the Economics lecture hall, but still. We read alone, we write a response paper every week. And then your poetry has thrown a bit of a wrench in the whole system. Given that we're students at a mainstream university and we're having a bit of a struggle getting over this deeply ingrained socialization -- how "should" we be reading your poetry? Can you even answer that question?

JR: I have no problem with that really, and I may even be a little flattered by that kind of consideration. Where I get edgy is when that appears to be the only approach or the only context for poetry. In that sense the big books (the ethnopoetic ones in particular) have been a search for ways in which a poetry (even a deeply hermetic one) may be alive at the heart of a culture. I also believe strongly that most poetry comes alive in performance – a face to face encounter with something like an audience – and that there are responses that precede analysis and that are certainly outside "the normal classroom model." During my formative years there was a great desire "to break down the boundaries between art and life" whether in a post-Duchampian context or in a Surreal or Beat push to lay open extremities of experience and dream. There are times, anyway, when poetry dazzles me or others, and
"the rest," as the old rabbis had it, "is only commentary." (Another practice, I should add, in which I frequently indulge.)

Q: We've talked a lot about the spectrum of Holocaust art and literature in this class, having read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" earlier in the semester, and our professor Al being "obsessed" (self-described) with various representations of the Holocaust. You've quoted Adorno's famous line about no poetry being possible after Auschwitz; no metaphor, no language (a metaphor in and of itself) is adequate to describe genocide. At the other end of the spectrum is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- an oft-quoted trope in our class to represent "bad" Holocaust art: art that is too authoritative, too confident, too simple. It's almost silly to refer to Schindler's List and Khurbn in the same sentence, but they have more in common than the idea that no art should exist -- can exist -- that refers to the Holocaust. Where do you fall in this debate? What were some of your concerns writing Khurbn (and to a lesser extent, Poland/1931) and how did you approach them as a writer?

JR: I'm writing this in Berlin, where the Holocaust still haunts all of the Germans I've been with – even the younger ones – so that gives us a kind of common ground. For me, although it was far away from me while it was happening, the Jewish disaster was very vivid, and the sense of loss was also unavoidable. I think it was a presence behind the push I was feeling into poetry, but it didn't enter directly for
close to 25 years after the war, while I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own or to tie the question of identity (Jewish or otherwise) to a kind of death cult. In the course of assembling Technicians of the Sacred, however, I began to consider the possibility of writing an ancestral poetry of my own – taking a pass at a form of ethnic writing that I otherwise thought of as degraded. The book that came out of that was Poland/1931, and I wrote it (or thought I did) without a direct reference to "holocaust" but with a sure sense that "holocaust" was the underlying subtext. For this I had to dig pretty deeply – "investigate," to use Ed Sanders' favorite word – to make a fantasy world that had some degree of credibility. I was more interested anyway in the archaeology of the Jewish life than in its destruction, and I wanted not to idealize it it but to construct it with a regard for its dark and dangerous side – "the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen" that I've mentioned elsewhere. (A Big Jewish Book from the mid 1970s is an ethnopoetic extension of the same impulse.) That intention was helped along further by an early meeting with Isaac Bashevis Singer and a later one with Paul Celan. The conversation with Singer raised the issue of cruelty – rhyming at the time with what we were reading in Artaud – and let me push forward a sense of the absurd / comic / demonic that was waiting to come to surface. For this I needed a further range of investigations to bring the reality – the fantasy – to light and to allow other voices to speak or (if that were possible) to drown out my own.

With Khurbn, the sense of cruelty was all the greater, as was
the desire to make room for other voices in so far as I could get to
them by all means then available to me. As I've written in the
introduction to Khurbn, what led me to defy the taboo I had previously
felt toward writing the Holocaust was the experience of entering some
of the places where the murders had taken place – an experience that
set things off and without which I never would have written Khurbn. I
also chose the title word as a sign of the discomfort I had felt
toward the marketing of Holocaust. Once it got started, anyway, it
was something that I couldn't avoid, but I still have some misgivings.

jobs for jerry

Snack for Fellows Class: Cat, Matt

Check-in (6PM at Writers House): Lauren, Jane

Set Up (5:30 PM): Michael Tom, Thomson

Book sales (Monday night 5:45 and Tuesday morning 9:45): Jen, Alex

Assist in Kitchen (5:00-end of reading): Blair, Andy

Assist in Kitchen (end of reading – 10:30ish): Danny, Yumeko, Mara

Set up Tuesday Morning (9:15 AM): Mingo, Sam

Clean up Tuesday Morning (11:00-12:30): Steve, Simone

Wireless Microphone: Ellie

Intro: Matt

Vienna Blood paperback cover

Above: the back cover of Rothenberg's book The Vienna Blood and other poems.

jobs for lynne sharon schwartz visit

Snack for Fellows Class

1) Ellie
2) Whitney

Check-in (6PM at Writers House)
1) Jane
2) Lauren

Set Up (5:30 PM)
1) Mingo
2) Jessica

Book sales (Monday night 5:45 and Tuesday morning 9:45)
1) Jen
2) Alex

Assist in Kitchen (5:00-end of reading)
1) Cat
2) Simone

Assist in Kitchen (end of reading – 10:30ish)
1) Blair
2) Danny
3) Yumeko

Set up Tuesday Morning (9:15 AM)
1) Steve
2) Michael Tom

Clean up Tuesday Morning (11:45-12:15)
1) Sam
2) Matt

Wireless Microphone
1) Ellie

Intro
1) Mara

Spiegelman visits

From the Art Spiegelman visit:

[] photographs
[] recording of interview/conversation

Spiegelman covers

February 15, 1993: Valentine's Day

July 8, 2002: Fears of July, 2002

November 26, 2001: Enduring Freedom

August 24, 1998: Private Lives

February 16, 1998: The Low Road

April 17. 1995: Theology of the Tax Cut

notion of linear time is artifice

Liz Seeley, a sensitive reader of The Writing on the Wall, when asked whether the end of the novel is hopeful, wrote the following:

Earlier, when I thought about Jack, I saw a time line, past, present, future, with Jack trying to stay in the present and Renata spending her energies on the past, while all the time components of the past and future moved, confused, randomly, back and forth along the line influencing the present. When I read the last chapter again I knew why. LSS, in an elegant phrase, says it precisely when she discusses the fall of the twin towers and how it seemed to have happened yesterday..." It refused to assume its proper location in the artifice of linear time - three weeks ago, six weeks ago, eight, demonstrating just how artificial is the notion of linear time."

I interpret the end of the novel as Renata, finally, coming to grips with the artificiality of the "notion of linear time" and all that that implies.

Spiegelman on "Fresh Air"

Here is a link to an interview with Spiegelman conducted by Terry Gross for her radio show Fresh Air. The interview took place in 2004, not long after In the Shadow of No Towers was published. The file is a downloadable mp3 (right-click, save as); you can stream it by clicking on the encircled triangle.

Spiegelman hates Spielberg

"Schindler’s List: Myth, Movie and Memory Discussion, from the Village Voice," a roundtable discussion. The transcript was published in the Voice on March 29, 1994.

Here is a good summary of the discussion written by Jane Sussman:

Participants (as defined by the Village Voice): Wanda Bersnen, director of National Jewish Archives of Broadcasting at the Jewish Museum, Richard Goldstein, from The Village Voice, J. Hoberman, from The Village Voice, Ken Jacobs, filmmaker and professor of film at the University of Binghamton, Gertrud Kock, professor of cinema studies at Columbia University, Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, James Young, professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Annette Insdorf, Chair of the film division of the School of Arts at Columbia University.

The introduction to the roundtable discussion, written by J. Hoberman, is about how Schindler’s List is more than just a movie; it is a momentous work of art that can affect the world and affect change. Hoberman ends with a quote by Stephen Schiff from the New Yorker, that says, “… I don’t want to burden the movie too much, but I think it will bring peace on earth, good will to men. Enough of the right people will see it that it will actually set the course of world affairs.” This sets the scene for the roundtable discussion.

Young: fearful of the accessible thing (Schindler’s List or the Holocaust Museum) becoming the last word on the subject because they are the most predominant. Spielberg’s hero is only good because he is hungry for power, similarly to Spielberg who seems to be hungry to make the great Holocaust film. Jews are often memorialized as children because children are the perfect, blameless victim.

Insdorf: Accessible art spurs and inspires the making of more art on the subject. Schindler’s List must be seen in at least two contexts: the political (she uses the example of a study that had come out right before Schindler’s List was made about how a large percentage of Americans did not believe that the extermination of the Jews ever took place), and the context of Spielberg himself (ie: that it was not Jurassic Park set in Germany). Even though she defends Schindler’s List, Insdorf admits that it is “simplistic” and “emotionally manipulative,” for instance, in the scene where corpses are burned with a soundtrack of schmaltzy music and choral voices. Insdorf believes that it is a strength of the movie that Schindler’s motives are never questioned, and are instead left up to interpretation. Insdorf recounts how his mother, a Holocaust survivor, was grateful that such a popular filmmaker had made this movie.

Jacobs: Nothing can depict the horrors of the Holocaust accurately, and Schindler’s List will become a historical document, much the way we see Gone With the Wind. Spielberg is creating a movie in comprehensible terms and clichés so that it is in the language of the viewers. He is being attacked because he has worked within the system to create something of the system, and then when it smacks of the system it is repugnant. The scene toward the beginning where the Jews desecrate the Church seems to logically justify all that happens after that. Schindler is a romantic, attractive character, and the “Jews function as a background and pawns of this dramatic contest” between the good and evil in the world. Spielberg does not show the true horrors of the Holocaust (like the SS men throwing babies out of windows and shooting them), even in allusion “without attempting to represent.” Jacobs believed that it was a violation to be made to see through Schindler’s eyes, he did not want to be “put through emotional paces in that way.” Jacobs thought that the saving grace of the movie was when the real survivors are shown, and that Spielberg should have had more instances of actual humanity in his film, instead of the figure or idea of a Jew, and that this does a huge disservice.

Hoberman: There is a real horror if Schindler’s List becomes the final word on the Holocaust. “Right from the moment Adorno made his all-purpose pronouncement that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, there has been a problem with representation.” Schindler’s List is pleasing because it circumvents the problem of representation. Spielberg fails to show the connections Schindler had with the Jewish underground movement and Zionist agents, which minimizes the connection he had “with other forces, including Jewish forces, that were in play during the war.”

Bershen: “This critics’ chorus” will make it impossible for moviegoers to make a decision for themselves about whether the movie can stand alone as simply one representation or if it will becomes the final word on the Holocaust. The scene where the young Jewish boy first exposes then saves a Jewish woman is an example of how Spielberg makes it seem as if certain people had control over and could conquer certain events.

Koch: Spielberg wants to have the last word, the most reverberant word on the Holocaust. The rhetoric of the film is that it is the authoritarian voice on the Holocaust; “by using all the quotations from European films, it posits itself at the end of film history.” “This is a problem in the film: he gives us the idea that if you had been smart enough, you could have survived.” Koch brings up an article written in Germany about how Schindler’s List “finally shows that all this bullshit the intellectuals tell about aesthetics after the Holocaust is just not true because one can narrate it. What Spielberg has shown the world is there is nothing that can’t be narrated.” He thinks it is very convenient for German audiences to see this film with a beginning, and ending and “the whole epoch and its horrors” squeezed in the middle.

Goldstein: Creating reality-based art is authoritarian by definition, it is one person’s or one group’s interpretation of an event. The forms are almost always more accessible than the event, which inevitably distorts the event. Many teenagers are forced to watch Schindler’s List and some have an anti-Semitic reaction because the horror in the film is too close so they turn it around on the Jews. Spielberg makes us feel like we are watching a fairy tale, where the Christian savior is Superman to the Jewish Clark Kent. She thinks that this childlike feeling is also the feeling of being a Jew, and compares it to her relationship with a Christian whom she views as her personal Schindler. Even though Goldstein did not believe Schindler’s List was a great movie, she was touched and moved to anger in a way she wasn’t before, mainly because the movie was not realism, and made her experience her own dreams of the Holocaust.

Spiegelman: America confuses film with reality. “After all, Spielberg’s value system was formed by a world that originally brought us Auschwitz. The true moment for weighing the implications and consequences of the genocide was 1945. If the world didn’t slow down then, why should we expect it to be capable of sorting things out after 50 blurring years have past?” In response to Goldstein saying that the Jews in Schindler’s list were the Jews of Europe and not of America, Spiegelman responds that he did not see any Jews in the film at all and that the film is full of stereotypes; “the juiceless Jewish accountant, the Jewish seductress, and, most egregiously, the Jews bargaining and doing business inside a church.” The film is not about Jews, but about the “righteous gentile in a world of Jewish bit players and extras. The Jews function as an occasion for Christian redemption.” Spiegelman also discloses that he has a “Spielberg problem”; Spielberg produced a cartoon about Jewish mice that he saw as a “horrible appropriation” of Maus. In response to Young’s point about children being perfect, blameless victims, Spiegelman says that that is why he had to portray his father in all his imperfections, “enmired in reality, not reducible to being an innocent. Survival musn’t be seen in terms of divine retribution or martyrology.” Spiegelman believes that Spielberg has an odd way of deciding where to draw the line in terms of what to show. Spiegelman goes on to say that Spielberg has never had to worry about “re-creation for the sake of an audience’s recreation,” which implies that that is something Spiegelman certainly worries about. In response to Goldstein’s idea of the movie as a dream, Spiegelman says, “The main dream image the movie evokes for me is an image of 6 million emaciated Oscar award statuettes hovering like angels in the sky, all wearing striped uniforms.” At one point, some of the panelists are discussing how survivors overwhelming liked the film, and Spielgelman says in response that survivors are not critics and are sometimes just so happy that someone is interested in their story and bears the burden of telling it, lifting it from them. Spiegelman thinks that the act of representing the Jews in molds instead of as humans turns the movie’s message one of capitalism: “Capitalism With a Human Face… the Businessman as hero. Capitalism can give us a health care program, and it can give us a Schindler.” Spiegelman continues to give quick witticisms, and says, “We’ve had 15 years to streamline our narratives,” in response to the comments about the movie being too easily digestible. Spiegelman concludes the discussion with another pithy yet incredibly resonant analogy, “In the Passover Haggadah we’re told of four sons, one wise, one wicked, one too young to ask why the Jewish exodus from Egypt is celebrated, and one too simple to ask. The Haggadah says the stupid son is to be told the short simple version of the story so that he can at least grasp something of what happened. Clearly Spielberg has the simple-son market sewn up.”

now the time has come

no more families

"You don't understand...at that time it wasn't anymore families." For more, see this.

snack schedule

Here is the Fellows seminar's snack schedule:

January 28 - Yumeko
February 4 - Michael Tom
February 11- Steve McLaughlin
February 18 (Spiegelman visit) - Mara, Mingo, Jessica
February 25 - Lauren
March 3 - Danny
March 17 - Jane
March 24 (Schwartz visit) - Ellie, Whitney
March 31 - Blair
April 7 - Alex
April 14 - Thomson
April 21 - Simone
April 28 (Rothenberg visit) - Matt, Cat

If you didn't get a snack date, no worry. We'll have you help with something else along the way, or we'll ask you to fill in if someone can't do the date he/she originally signed up for.

love as a language problem

In an email-only discussion with alumni about Schwartz's book The Writing on the Wall, one of the participants, Ann Hostetler, wrote about the connection between love and language. In the novel, Renata's love for her twin sister Claudia is intense. They create a secret language which builds what many twins apparently like to build - a wall of exclusive us-only meaning between themselves and everyone else. For Renata this is the essence of love. When she loses Claudia she loses the chance to develop naturally from exclusive to inclusive language. Here is what Ann wrote about this ("Alberto" is another member of the discussion group):

"I’m still intrigued with Alberto’s mention of love as Renata’s problem. Now that Al has amplified the language dimension of the book, I’m beginning to think about love as a language problem and wondering whether love can be expressed in terms of the relationship between content and form . . .

"Certainly Renata’s love for her twin sister was expressed in an exclusive language, and her sister’s rejection--or bid for independence—took the form of a refusal to use the language. From that point on, Renata becomes intrigued with languages she can’t speak to anyone else, so her love of words seems almost autistic. When she enters into what seems like her first long-term relationship with a man, just before the fall of the towers, she fears the point when he will want her to tell him her story—she fears a language that will open the channels of communication."

And here is what I wrote about Ann's comment:

What Ann wrote here (below) is just beautiful and I hope those of us who read all the messages quickly yesterday (who can blame you for that?!) will re-read this one. I've put boldface on phrases that I think are particularly helpful to us. True deep love does feel (in the Romeo & Juliet sense) like a total exclusive world in which it's necessary to keep everyone out and not "share" it with others. It becomes (in its most intense romantic phase) linguistically exclusive as well as exclusive in other ways. Not sharing language (which after all is meant to mean something, to communicate socially) is Renata's impulse in her intense love for her sister. She suffers the loss of her sister several times - first when the secret language is broken and the exclusivity is shattered; again when her twin experiences sex (incest); again of course when Claudia dies. Loss, loss, loss. Then 9/11...and POW: loss becomes social/communal. But loss for her had been associated with love's asocial quality. This is just one reason why she reacts with such intense hatred to the national rhetoric (Bush on TV, etc.) right after the event.

Eightball sends up Spiegelman

Below are links to a send-up of Art Spiegelman from Daniel Clowes's
Eightball magazine. The rest of this Pussey series is here:

www.mediafire.com/?d2mjjveym1y.

According to Steve McLaughlin, who made all this available to us, it's a comic about comics/x.

Here are the Eightball panels:

[] first page of panels: LINK
[] second page: LINK
[] third page: LINK
[] fourth page: LINK

special projects

test.

1. Look at every New Yorker cover drawn by Spiegelman and prepare a report for us that is both a summary and analysis of these. If you can include images of some of the more important covers in your report (either by inserting the actual images or by providing links to images on the web), please do. (DUE 2/04) Simone
2. Prepare a brief history of the graphic novel and describe (and assess) Spiegelman’s influence on the genre. Notice that another project entails working with Raw specifically, so don't spend too much space or time on that, but refer to Raw if you feel you must. (DUE 2/11) Lily
3. Prepare a brief history of Raw and be sure to describe Spiegelman's role in its formation and publication, and be sure also to include summaries of the careers of Chris Ware, Kaz, Gary Panter, and others. How does Maus follow or flow from the work of Raw (to the extent that it does)? (DUE 2/11) Michael Tom
4. Read the transcript (published in the Village Voice) of the symposium about Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, and create a detailed summary of the various panelists' response to it, including especially Spiegelman's. Be sure to give us a complete summary and analysis of Spiegelman on Spielberg. To prepare for this project, you will need to watch or re-watch Schindler's List. (DUE 1/28) Jane
5. Consider the whole range of written/narrative responses to the Holocaust, and attempt to describe how Maus fits (and/or does not fit). What are the ways in which Maus is very much a part of the literature of/about the Holocaust? What are common issues, problems, approaches, and means of dealing with the problem of representation? (DUE 1/28) Lauren
6. Read Little Lit and other children’s stories (e.g. Open Me, I’m a Dog) and write a report that summarizes this genre of his work, keeping in mind that most of the rest of us will never have read this material. Introduce us to it. Summarize, describe and assess. (Is this similar to other writing for children?) How does reading this kind of work by Spiegelman broaden/enhance/change your overall perception of him after having read his work geared toward adult audiences? (DUE 2/4) Jessica
7. Read Art Spiegelman: Conversations in the Conversations With Comic Artists series, edited by Joseph Witek, and report to us on these interviews and discussions. How does what AS says here shed light on the works and topics we're facing in our discussions of him. Write in such a way that will help those of us who will not be reading this book understand its contents. Here's a link to the book. (DUE 2/4) Andy
8. Read Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel Referred Pain and write a summary and analysis of the book of the sort that will help those of us who will not have a chance to read it but will want to know how it relates to the works we are reading. (DUE 2/25) Mingo
9. Read Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel In the Family Way and write a summary and analysis of the book of the sort that will help those of us who will not have a chance to read it but will want to know how it relates to the works we are reading. (DUE 2/25) Ellie
10. Read Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel Balancing Acts and write a summary and analysis of the book of the sort that will help those of us who will not have a chance to read it but will want to know how it relates to the works we are reading. (DUE 3/3) Whitney
11. Read Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel The Fatigue Artist and write a summary and analysis of the book of the sort that will help those of us who will not have a chance to read it but will want to know how it relates to the works we are reading. (DUE 3/3) Thomson
12. Read Schwartz's translation of Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, a memoir of a survivor of Birkenau. Then read the essay about the making of this translation in Face to Face. Write a report that presents Millu's memoir in such a way that those of us who will not read it can make sense of it, especially in the context of Schwartz's struggles with the translation. And answer this: given what you know from reading Schwartz's own work, why do you think this particular Holocaust memoir was the one for her to translate? (DUE 3/17) Danny
13. Arrange to spend at least an hour talking with Max Apple about Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Interview him and find out as much as you can about his friendship with Schwartz, his views on her writing, etc. What kind of person is Schwartz? Does she teach writing? What can you find out from Max about her method of writing? How does she deal with readers who offer interpretations of her work? (DUE 3/3) Sam
14. This project is for two people who have at least a little experience making audio recordings and editing digital audio. Get lots of audio of the Fellows project this semester - classes, informal discussions, the Fellows' visits, etc. - and present to us at the end of the semester: (a) a single edited audio memoir of the course; (b) lots of individual mp3 audio files of discussion, interviews with participants, etc. (Jamie-Lee will help you with the details of this project.) (DUE 4/21) Cat and Steve
15. Look deeply (as it were) into Jerome Rothenberg's brief but perhaps important involvement with the "Deep Image" movement in poetics in the early 1960s. Write a report that summarizes what Deep Image was or is, and who was involved, and how Rothenberg entered and that departed that scene. Was there any connection between that experience and his later involvements in poetic movements? (DUE 4/7) Jen
16. This is a big and important one. What is "ethnopoetics" and what has been Rothenberg's involvement with and championing of it? Read through Technicians of the Sacred (an anthology) and Seneca Journal (a book of his poems deeply affected by his ethnopoetics). Read through the critical book In Search of the Primitive. In your report, describe these books; summarize what ethnopoetics was and is, what Rothenberg's involvement with it has meant to him and others; outline the politics and political ethics of this movement. And at some point answer this question too: Do Rothenberg's "Jewish" poems participate in ethnopoetics? Is a book like Poland 1931 part of the ethnopoetics aesthetic? (DUE 3/31) Yumeko
17. Conduct an extensive (lots of back and forth) interview by email with Jerry Rothenberg himself. Have at least one phone talk with him (if he will permit it) and lots of email. Write a report that describes these topics and any others that seem relevant: (1) his involvements at the University of California at San Diego, where he was a formative figure at a new university; where he was involved with struggles of various kinds in the 1960s; where he was involved more with a visual arts program than with a literature program; where he taught courses (which ones? what was his pedagogy?); where he worked closely with David Antin; (2) his teaching in general (what is his pedagogy?), mentioned already above; (3) his political radicalism in all its forms, directly political but also in the world of art and poetics; and (4) his support of young poets, which is legendary. Al and Jamie-Lee will help you get in touch with JR. (DUE 4/21) Mara
18. Interview Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Marjorie Perloff at least by email, if not by phone and in-person meetings. Find out from each what Jerome Rothenberg's personage and poetry mean to them. What is his reputation? What is their sense of his place and/or importance? What do they feel we should learn from studying and meeting JR? (DUE 4/14) Blair
19. This report fully examines Jerome Rothenberg's understanding of - his preferred version of - modernism. It is not quite the typical main narrative of modernism - akin to it, but also different. It's more international, for one. It's more political, for another. It focuses much more than the usual story of modernism on alternative book art, on alternative typography, on sound (the sound of the poet's voice, chanting, ritual, etc.), on concrete innovation, on the revolution of the word. Read through Revolution of the Word and the two-volume Poems of the Millennium and try to get a sense of JR's modernist canon (and compare it, as you can, to the more typical modernist canon). Also look at JR's own book of poems, Gematria as a good instance of the revolution of the word in his hands. Write a summary of all this for us. (Note: The student who writes this report will be exempt from reading New Selected Poems.) (DUE 4/14) Matt
20. This report focuses on Jerome Rothenberg's interest in the book as a physical object, on book art, on the poetics of the book as a part of the poem, etc. Read around widely in this area (e.g. Johanna Drucker) but be sure to focus on JR's own Book of the Book and The Book, spiritual instrument. (DUE 3/31) Alex

Chris Ware on French TV

A French TV spot features Chris Ware talking, in part, about Art Spiegelman's influence on him. Spiegelman himself makes an appearance. Thanks to Steve McLaughlin who found this YouTube piece. Below, a New Yorker cover by Chris Ware.

husbands and knives

Spiegelman made a cameo appearance on The Simpsons. You can view part of the episode, called "Husbands and Knives," here.

illustrated Burning Babe

The third section of Rothenberg's Triptych is The Burning Babe, which was originally published by Granary Press in 2005 as a special edition illustrated by Susan Bee. The Penn Electronic Poetry Center (PEPC) recently secured permission from Bee and Rothenberg to reproduce this book as a PDF file. Here is the link.

portrait of the artist as a young %@?*!

The Fall 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review included a special thematic section titled "The Holocaust: Remembrance and Forgetting." This included Tony Kushner's essay on Hans Krasa's opera for children, Brundibar, Lawrence Wechsler's "A Berlin Epiphany: On Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe," and an except from Michael Chabon's novel in which Israel does not exist. And Art Spiegelman's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!: The Origin of MAUS," which Spiegelman introduces (through a blurb on the contents page): "It all started bakc in '71, when my pal, Justin Green, invited me to do a short strip for an underground comic called Funny Aminals. I had some notion for a story about a cartoon mouse caught in a mouse trap drawn in a 50s horror comic style, but it didn't pan out. I was totally stuck til I sat in one of Ken Jacobs' film classes at Harpur College."

New York in the Fifties

A film was made of Dan Wakefield's book New York in the Fifties, the film (2001) bearing the same title, made by Betsey Blankenbaker who directed it and produced it. These were people who knew that their collective intellect, and their artistic passion, would change the world. The film is dedicated to "James," presumably James Baldwin. Among the people interviewed was Lynn Sharon Schwartz. Others include Gay Talese, Ted Steeg, Helen Weaver, David Amram, Mary Ann Dewees McCoy, Jane Wylie Genth, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Robert Redford, Nat Hentoff, William F. Buckley, Ray Grist, Calvin Trillin, Norman Podhoretz, Harvey Shapiro, Bruce Jay Friedman, Ed Fancher, Steve Allen, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, along with old footage of Jack Kerouac, Mark Van Doren, and C. Wright Mills.

Above, Arthur Leipzig's 1950 photo of the Lower East Side.

a hidden master of our poetry

At a recent benefit, Rothenberg read a short poem by Will Alexander. Alexander (see left) is a poet revered among experimental poets, although not otherwise well known. He has recently become ill and has no insurance--is incurring huge medical costs he can't pay. The Bowery Poetry Club organized the benefit--raising funds that went directly to Alexander in Los Angeles. Among the poets who read, as I say, was Jerry Rothenberg, who had just the day before arrived himself from the west coast. Rothenberg and his wife Diane are taking up several months' re-residence in Brooklyn, R's old haunts - seeing old friends, giving readings, taking in the old neighborhood.

After reading from Alexander's work, Rothenberg read a poem he had, I think, written on the plane ride crossing eastward across the country: it is a "variation," using all the nouns in Alexander's poem (I think the one R had just read) and the writing his own words and lines around these. Here is an mp3 audio recording of Rothenberg's 7-minute presentation.

leaving Brooklyn

Here's a link to Schwartz's own web page on her recent novel, Leaving Brooklyn, a novel with and about double vision: "This is the story of an eye, and how it came into its own," is how it opens. The book travels along the boundaries between the visible and the hidden, between conformity and subversion, between fiction and memoir.

Russell Banks has written: ""I read the book in one sitting, and it has stayed with me... This is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s best-written book and, to me, her most moving. The blend of lyricism and history, of memory and the imagination—-all shot through with the female erotic-—is wonderful."

how we came into performance

Rothenberg on his relationship to performance art. It's his 2005 essay, "How We Came Into Performance: A Personal Accounting," and it's available as a PDF document on Kenny Goldsmith's invaluable archive of concrete, visual, and sound poetry and poetics, UbuWeb. Here's the essay: PDF.

Of course Rothenberg mentions the performative one-time-only gotta-be-there-art "happenings" of the late Alan Kaprow. As well as Beck and Malina's Living Theatre. Above right: a Kaprow happening.

Spiegelman bibliography

A selection:

| Spiegelman, Art, Signe Wilkinson, Tom Tomorrow, Roz Chast and Diane DiMassa. 1994.

| Mightier than the sorehead [cartoons, stereotypes and politics]. The Nation 258(2; Jan 17):45.

| Spiegelman, Art. 1992. Gloomy Toons [Flood by Eric Drooker review]. New York Times (Dec 27).

|Spiegelman, Art. 1993. 'M' Is for the Many Things She Gave Me. New Yorker (May 10): cover

| Spiegelman, Art. 1993. Valentine's Day [Orthodox Jew kissing black woman]. New Yorker (February 15): cover

| Spiegelman, Art. 1997. Nature vs. Nurture [comic strip]. New Yorker (July 8)

The rest of the bibliography is here.

Swaim interviews Spiegelman

Don Swaim interviewed Spiegelman in 1991 - and there exists RealAudio recording of it (47 minutes long).

Don Swaim has been a journalist, writer, and broadcaster his entire career. He graduated from Ohio University with a degree in broadcast journalism, and worked as an editor, writer, producer, reporter, and anchor at WCBS-AM in New York for many years, and prior to that served at the CBS-TV affiliate in Baltimore. For more than ten years he produced a daily broadcast that focused on books and authors, Book Beat, nationally syndicated by the CBS Radio Stations News Service

you pick up the book and say, "this can't work"

Interview conducted by Stanley Crouch on The Charlie Rose Show in 1996. Watch a video recording of the show. You'll want to know something about the extraordinary Crouch before viewing this.

compression, simplification and devaluation

Robert S. Leventhal's essay "Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust" is available. Here is a passage about the allegorical quality of the characters:

The reduction of the players to cats (the Nazis), mice (the Jews), pigs (the Poles) and other national stereotypes offers a conscious, intentional miniaturization and reduction, pointing up not merely the process of compression, simplification and devaluation not merely of the Nazis' practices before and during the Holocaust, but the reduction and simplification present in many "responses" to the Holocaust as well. In this way, Spiegelman literalizes the call for petits recits so prevalent in postmodern discourse today, especially in the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard. On another level, there are multiple narratives and kinds of texts in Maus: in addition to images, dialogue boxes, and commentary, we find maps of Poland and the Camps, diagrams of hideouts, real photographs from the family archive, detailed plans of the crematoria, an exchange table for goods in Auschwitz, and a manual for shoe-repair.

sacred technician

We underestimate what a big breakthrough it was when Jerome Rothenberg in 1972 (one could say this was the height of the American Indian Movement--just to take that cut on the times) decided to say outright that we can "cross[...] the boundaries that separate people of different races & cultures" and indeed set about not only understand but translate American Indian poetic expressions. This is not mild stuff, given the context of that moment: In the face of whatever objections he would meet, he declared that unfortunately "it has become fashionable today to deny the possibility of crossing the boundaries..." etc. But he did just that.

In putting together Shaking the Pumpkin (above I'm quoting from the preface), Rothenberg knew that as an editor, translator and indeed promoter of ethnopoetics, he was "attempt[ing] to restore what has been torn apart." Presumptuous. He could do the mending.

"Come not thus with your gunnes & swords," he quotes Powhatan (speaking to John Smith) in his epigraph, "to invade as foes... What will availe you to take that perforce you may quietly have with love." (Powhatan serves Rothenberg as a Christ figure here.)

Rothenberg was a peacemaker not just in the whites-Native American colloquy. He was making peace (or maybe it's killing with kindness) also with those who would angrily deny the boundary-crossers. Ethnopoetics in this form might seem moderate and even truistic now, but it mapped out (and then made pacific) a real battleground then.

global, archaic, ethnopoetic, anthropological

David Caddy offers a good background to Rothenberg's career and poetics. Go to Caddy's blog and find the text of one of his "So Here We Are" "letters" (go to "Letter 5" dated 9/3/07). You can also hear the audio version of the same, a MiPoRadio podcast. Caddy gives a good introduction to ethnopoetics.