Silliman's Blog

Labels: Personal

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Janine Pommy Vega

1942 – 2010

Labels: passing

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Rob Halpern’s
“Becoming a Patient of History”

Rosmarie Waldrop’s
Driven to Abstraction

Brian Kim Stefans’
Bank of America Online Banking:
A Critical Evaluation

New poems by Rae Armantrout
plus a teaser for an interview

Talking with Laura Moriarty

Lyn Hejinian’s
The Fatalist

Jaimy Gordon’s
Lord of Misrule

2 articles on Dean Young’s health

Labels: links, Passings

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Photo by Abraham Ravett

Charles Reznikoff
reading Holocaust 1975

Get the CD

Photos from the session

Charles Bernstein’s “Reznikoff’s Voices”

Labels: Charles Reznikoff, Objectivism, Readings

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Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw, Pre-Chewed Tapas, P-Queue / Queue, Buffalo, 2010

Jason Bredle, Smiles of the Unstoppable, Magic Helicopter Press, Northampton, MA 2010

Travis Cebula, Under the Sky They Lit Cities, BlazeVOX, Buffalo, 2010

Clark Coolidge, This Time We Are Both, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2010

Joseph Denham, Windstorm, Nightwood Editions, Gibsons, BC, 2010

Marosa Di Giorgio, The History of Violets, translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2010

Norman Dubie, The Volcano, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2010

David Gitin, The Journey Home, Blue Wind Press, Berkeley, 2010

Julie Hanson, Unbeknownst, Iowa University Press, Iowa City, 2011

Emmanuel Hocquard, Conditions of Light, translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, La Presse, Iowa City & Paris, 2010

Labels: Recently Received

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December 21 & 22 in SF
Leslie Scalapino’s
Flow – Winged Crocodile / The Trains

January 1 in New York:
Suzanne Vega, Taylor Mead, Ted Greenwald,
Philip Glass, Rebecca Moore, Robert Fitterman,
Rodrigo Toscano, Samita Sinha, Sara Wintz,
Adeena Karasick, Alan Gilbert,
Bill Kushner, Bill Zavatsky, Bob Rosenthal,
Brenda Coultas, Brenda Iijima, Brendan Lorber,
Brett Price, Charles Bernstein, Christopher Stackhouse,
Citizen Reno, Cliff Fyman, Corina Copp,
Corrine Fitzpatrick, Curtis Jensen,
Dael Orlandersmith, David Freeman, David Kirschenbaum,
Ed Friedman, Eileen Myles, Elliott Sharp,
Alan Licht w/ Angela Jaeger, Albert Mobilio,
Alex Abelson, Emily XYZ,
Eric Bogosian, Erica Kaufman, Evelyn Reilly,
Filip Marinovich, Arlo Quint,
Gillian McCain, Janet Hamill, Jeremy Hoevenaar,
David Shapiro, Dorothea Lasky,
Douglas Piccinnini, Douglas Rothschild, Drew Gardner,
Dustin Williamson, Jeremy Sigler, Jessica Fiorini,
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Joanna Fuhrman, Joe Elliot,
King Missile,  Jonas Mekas,
Josef Kaplan, Julian Brolaski, Julianna Barwick,
Kathleen Miller, Katie Degentesh , Kelly Ginger,
Ken Chen, Kim Lyons, Kristen Kosmas,
Laura Elrick, Lauren Russell, Lenny Kaye,
Leopoldine Core, Lewis Warsh, Marcella Durand,
Merry Fortune, Michael Cirelli,
Michael Lydon, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Nathaniel Siegel,
Nicole Peyrafitte , Nina Freeman, Paolo Javier,
Poez,  Penny Arcade, Secret Orchestra
w/ Joanna Penn Cooper, Shonni Enelow, Stephanie Gray,
Susan Landers, The Church of Betty, Thom Donovan,
Todd Colby, Tom Savage, Tracie Morris,
Valery Oisteanu, Wayne Koestenbaum,
Will Edmiston, Yoshiko Chuma, Kim Rosenfield,
Mike Doughty, Nick Hallett, Elinor Nauen, Jim Behrle,
Karen Weiser, Anselm Berrigan,
Nicole Wallace, Stacy Szymaszek & more

January 2 – 9 in Tulum, Mexico
US Poets in Mexico
with Diane Wakoski, Paul Hoover, Jerry Rothenberg,
Jen Hofer, Mark Weiss, Luis Cortés Bargalló,
Roció Cerón, Carla Faesler,
& Feliciano Sánchez Chan

Labels: Coming Events

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Ben Friedlander, Kevin Killian (visible in doorway), Dan Davidson

Daniel Davidson’s
“What Kind is This?”

As the jacket for Dan Davidson’s Culture says,

Daniel Davidson (1952-1996) came to writing late, emerging from punk music in the late 1980s as a poet of singular talent and originality.

Dan Davidson was, not unlike Jerry Estrin or Kathy Acker, a constant & important presence in the poetry scene of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s & early ‘90s who died right at the moment when the internet was starting to transform the roles of geography & immanence in the world of poetry (like so much else). For those who knew him, he was a crucial, defining writer whose work was never that far from our consciousness in whatever projects we took on. But those who did not know him may never even have heard of him.

Culture was Davidson's own title for his "collected books." The posthumous Krupskaya edition contains four of those books – Product; Bureaucrat, My Love; Image; & Anomie. It is available through SPD. Three other books – An Account; Transit; & Desire – are available gratis as a PDF from Krupskaya, also under the general title Culture.

Right before his death, Dan completed a booklength collaboration with Tom Mandel, Absence Sensorium, which George Lakoff frames as follows:

Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson have done what two poets are not supposed to be able to do: they have jointly written a great long poem that is seamless, where you cannot tell where one leaves off and the other takes up. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts.

While Absence Sensorium remains in the SPD catalog, they have no copies. I don’t know if any cartons are hiding back in the vast Potes & Poets warehouses in Connecticut, but I rather suspect not. If you want one, you will have to use Abebooks.com, which locates a few at widely varying prices in the stocks of used & rare booksellers.

I know of only one other book by Davidson not included among the above, a December 1990 chapbook that he self-published in an edition of 45 as a New Year’s gift to his friends, Notes From IMAGE. The work there is quite different from that gathered in the Zasterle Press edition of Image published in 1992 (and republished in Culture).

Recently Tom Mandel found Dan’s recording of “What Kind is This?” produced in 1980, back when he was still a musician & had not yet begun writing for production, so to speak. I believe it is Dan’s song, and that is him on vocals & guitar. I can’t get it out of my head.

Labels: Dan Davidson, neglectorinos

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