Saturday, July 28, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Received (not always recently)
Books (Poetry)
Lidija Dimkovska, pH Neutral History, translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, 2012
Peter Filkins, The View We’re Granted, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2012
Jennifer H. Fortin, Mined Muzzle Velocity, Lowbrow Press, no location given (but Minnesota), 2011
Benjamin Friedlander, One Hundred Etudes, Edge Books, Washington, DC, 2012
Tinker Greene, Who I Was, self-published, San Francisco, 2012
Rob Halpern, Music for Porn, Nightboat Books, Callicoon, NY, 2012
Labels: Recently Received
Tweet
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The Life of Alden Van Buskirk
Jordon Davis on Spring and All
The Bowery Poetry Club to close
The influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde
Is Leonard Cohen’s poetry a form of sexual harassment?
Poetry, immigration & the FBI
Here come the Poetry Police
Laura Hinton’s report on the 80’s conference in Orono
Judith Goldman on non-retinal literature
The love letters of Emily Dickinson
Jennifer Chang: How to read a prophecy
Tony Trehy: Curating the Text Festival
Translating Russian poetry
Tweet
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
There is something of the awfulness of an Ed Wood film about James Franco’s Hart Crane biopic, The Broken Tower, except that there’s not, not really. What made Ed Wood everybody’s favorite bad filmmaker was a fundamental joy underlying all of his projects, the thrill of making movies, even if the flying saucer was a paper plate dangling on a string, the dialog wooden, the plot preposterous. The dialog is wooden, the acting atrocious, the narrative movement non-existent in The Broken Tower, but its underlying sense is one of brooding pompousness. You’re cringing at the self-importance of it all from the first frame to the last.
The ultimate crime here is that nothing in this film gives you the sense that Hart Crane was an interesting or an important poet, let alone both. When his texts are presented as voice overs or as text on the screen, they’re too long and rushed – it’s impossible to absorb it all & the passages cited aren’t the ones that inspire an impulse toward further inspection. When Franco as Crane gives a reading, it’s so ponderous & Victorian that both my wife & I nodded off before it was over. Indeed, the impact is so different from Franco’s quite moving reading of Howl in his role as Allen Ginsberg in the Rob Epstein-Jeffrey Friedman film of that name that it’s shocking. The two readings should be studied by film students so that they can understand why an actor is so often better off in the hands of another director, even relative novices to dramatic filmmaking like the documentarians Epstein & Friedman. We’ll get to see Franco try it all a different way when Franco stars as CK Williams (I kid you not) in the forthcoming Tar, a film with nine – count ‘em – directors.
Labels: Film, Hart Crane, School of Quietude
Tweet
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Mónica de la Torre
reading @ the Bowery Poetry Club
May 19, 2012
&
on Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening
Labels: Interviews, Mónica de la Torre, Readings
Tweet
Monday, July 23, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
