A quick note on "Poetics"

"... in 40 years, nobody will remember cultural studies if we don’t refer to it in our poems. "

One of Ron Silliman's recognitions at the recent MLA conference.

The same's true for our poetics also, of course. They'll become footnotes to the poems that survive the vagaries of time, that remain, for whatever reason, still vital, and essential to read.

Mr. Kimock at work ...

This is actually from long ago 1998, when Kimock (that's Steve Kimock) was playing in Kimock-Vega-Hertz-White, or KVHW (and sometimes KVHHW, if Terry Haggerty was sitting in). The song is "Tangled Hangers", and the video seems to capture most of the initial improvisational section. Keep your eyes peeled, and around three minutes twenty seconds in, you'll see SK demonstrate what it means to play while not-thinking. Tasty.

WWC readings update

1000 Black Lines has the updated schedule of readings for the winter residency of Warren Wilson College's MFA program; they began on the 3th and run through the 12th.

WCW on the web

A recent post over at Ron Silliman's blog contained the news that the complete recordings of William Carlos Williams are now on the web, over at PennSound.

Williams was one of the poets on whose work I grew up, so I headed over and checked them out.

There are a couple of problems with the .mp3 files, though, and a bad link as well; hopefully they'll get these straightened out in time:

- Items #6 (Reading and Commentary at UCLA) and #25 (Reading and Commentary at UCal Berkeley) currently link to 1K file stubs of 0:00 duration;

- Item #18 (Interview on the Mary Margaret McBride Show ... March 25, 1954) actually links to the same .mp3 file as Item #8, an interview with the same host from December 4, 1950.

Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the recordings are a great resource for anyone who wants to literally hear what the man was up to. Roughly half of them were recorded after his first stroke, so you can also hear him in the process of relearning to articulate his work, and to find the voice of the late great poems, such as "Asphodel That Greeny Flower".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The photo of Williams is borrowed from PennSound.