hello tiny bird brain
Poetry at the Soho Curzon Wednesday August 31st 2011~ 7pm ~ Entrance free Marcus Slease launches ‘hello tiny bird brain’ Wayne Clements launches ‘western philosophy’ collections published by Knives forks & Spoons press also readings by Tim Atkins – Elizabeth Guthrie- Michael Zand Linus Slug – Patrick Coyle & SJ Fowler the Soho Curzon cinema, […]
Maintenant #72 РJohannes G̦ransson
It seems natural that American poets and poetry readers should become interested in works in translation at a time when – due to various changes in publishing and dissemination mostly – American poetry has become very anarchic. Critics and academics always complain: there is too much of it! How do we know what’s good? They invent hierarchies of “innovative” poetry so they don’t have to dive into the excess, but in so doing they’re not only compromising their academic credibility (how can you be an “expert” on American poetry and have never read any of these wild, small Internet journals or participated in any of its sadistic blog discussions?) but they’re also losing out on a poetry scene that is constantly mutating and getting infected and multiplying and changing. Most of all they’re losing out on some really interesting poetry. But losing is of course what it’s all about.
In the 72nd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Swedish / American poet Johannes Göransson.
Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
The problem with ass-fucking is that someone has to clean the machine afterwards. The problem with insects is not the noise that they make (a sweet noise in which I could survive) but that they will not die in droves large enough to cause a halt. The problem with horse cadaver is not that they bleed or stink but that they can be turned into theater. The problem with my femur is not that it breaks (which it does quite easily, quite gracefully, repeatedly) but that you will not know unless I make a fool out of myself, as I undoubtedly have done here, tonight, in front of a cheering nation of burn-victims.
By Johannes Göransson.
A McCarthy mini-syllabus
These Silences participant Tom McCarthy in conversation with Eric Banks at the Center for Fiction, April 2011 (parts two and three.) See also, McCarthy on Robbe-Grillet.
The Rest is Noise
Stewart Home himself was fictionalised in a passage read from one of Iain Sinclair’s books and later when I asked Stewart about this he said that they had just met accidentally and Iain Sinclair had used the meeting in his book with some added colour to expand a train of thought. I began to wonder if the whole weekend was a self-referencing literary exercise and any one us could become a character in a number of different works. This was when I told Stewart Home I was superimposing grid references over the text of this weekend. Sinclair had me thinking that events could be seen through various literary prisms; as if relating a walking scene to a memorised text. It may be that as Sinclair was intimating, things have been so psychogeographically and psychopolitically circumscribed and redrawn as to be gasping for breath and existence. We have to maybe superimpose new maps.
Raymond Anderson on the These Silences experimental literary symposium.