Latta on Reality Street Book of Sonnets

John Latta on Jeff Hilson's Reality Street Book of Sonnets:

The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008), edited by Jeff Hilson, land’d in the new books here and I snatch’d it up, drug it home, thumb’d it up and down, read through Hilson’s bounty-bag of an introduction and am here to say it is terrific, a bigger, woollier beast than I’d imagined, absolutely trophy material.

Latta's blog posts are consistently impressive.

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Amiri Baraka reads Charles Olson

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e3_bZw_poc] via Possum Ego

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Cambridge Readings

Every Wednesday in March, 1.15 - 1.45pm Four contemporary poets read the works of four 20th century poets, each intimately connected with artists exhibited in the house.

• 4 March J.H. Prynne responding to Ezra Pound
• 11 March Leo Mellor responding to David Jones
• 18 March Melanie Challenger responding to Adrian Stokes
• 25 March Ian Patterson responding to W. S. Graham

Kettle's Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge (Black door on the small courtyard opposite the gallery entrance from 1 pm). via Vents

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Toilet

An exhibition which has opened in New York takes the unlikely step of placing fake works of art on display. The Brooklyn Museum, like many others, began buying ancient Coptic and Pagan sculptures after World War II. However, the museum's curators recently discovered that roughly a third of their collection is fake. The resulting exhibition places genuine sculptures from the 4th Century AD alongside a small group of forgeries, probably from the mid-20th Century.

via the BBC

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Gertrude Stein B-Day Playlists, Pt. 3 & 4

Pt. 3 Pt. 4 Courtesy of Paul Baker.

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Happy Birthday Alex, My London Stone.

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Hammer Carefully

Yesterday at high noon I saw a man wielding a hammer in a glass house & screaming how beautiful speed & war are. That was Charles Bernstein reading F.T. Marinetti's The Founding and manifesto of Futurism on the 100th birthday of its publication in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro (see yesterday's post). Charles did smash the pulpit, but refrained from having a go at the glass walls or at the Matisse, and looking around for something that wouldn't upset the host of the event, the Museum of Modern Art, he spotted a pile of copies of Poetry magazine (co-sponsor of the event). Instantly recognizing the economic bull-value (hmmm, I thought I had typed "null-value") of Poetry, poetry, "poetry," no matter how you spell it, he set them flying with a thorish swing of the hammer. The pile had stoically set there for an hour and more by then, with a sign indicating that they were free for the taking, but it was only after Bernstein had liberated them from their stackness and they had achieved their own random orbits on the floor, that the audience scrambled greedily for freebies (there must be a lesson about poetry in this too).

Comments. More at Pierre Joris's blog.

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Diagram Prize

Prize for oddest book title of the year. Contenders include:

• Curbside Consultation of the Colon
• 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
• The Large Sieve and its Applications

Read the rest of the shorlist at The Guardian.

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Perspective

Sometimes the box isn't big enough:

Bök's views did seem contradictory at times. To illustrate the failure of modern poetry, he pointed to the topic of man landing on the moon. "If the Ancient Greeks had accomplished something like that," he said, "they would write a 12 volume epic detailing the story." But Bök's own work, almost completely void of narrative content, is far from a testament to human achievement. It would surely be a stretch to say that his work succeeds in reflecting modern culture compared to the works he derides. As Volk put it, "He isn't exploring the human experience. Poetry is not supposed to be progressive, it's traditional."

via Cahiers de Corey

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Mike Weller's Magical Mystery Tour

Wednesday 4th March Klinker South, Ivy House, 40 Stuart Road, Nunhead SE14 Thursday 5th March XING THE LINE (benefit for Paul Sutton) 15 Leathermarket St., London SE1 3HN Sunday 15th March Sundays at the Oto Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin St., Dalston E8 (TBC) Klinker North, Cross Keys, 126 York Way N1 Tuesday 21st April The Blue Bus (with Jow Lindsay) The Lamb, 94 Lamb's Conduit St., London WC1 Entrance fees vary. All events begin around 8pm, except for Sundays at the Oto, which commences at 3pm.

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