poetry & prose

“A friend tells me: ‘Any plan to alternate poems with prose is suicide, because poems demand an attitude, a concentration, even an alienation completely different from the mental attunement required for prose, so your readers will have to be switching voltage every other page and that’s how you burn out lightbulbs.’

Could be, but I carry on stubbornly convinced that poetry and prose reciprocally empower each other and that alternating readings won’t do any harm. In my friend’s point of view I detect once again that seriousness that tries to place poetry on a privileged pedestal, which is why most contemporary readers can’t get far enough away from poetry in verse, without on the other hand rejecting what reaches them in novels and stories and songs and movies and plays, a fact which suggest a) that poetry has lost none of its deep power but that b) the formal aristocracy of poetry in verse (and above all the way poets and publishers package and present it) provokes resistance and even rejection on the part of many readers otherwise as sensitive as anyone else to poetry. . . .”

(Julio Cortázar, from Save Twilight: Selected Poems, trans. Stephen Kessler, p. 25.)

noted

Sorry there hasn’t been much content here! Things are busy.

  • Doug Skinner has a fine post on acrostics in Roussel at The Ullage Group.
  • Nice images of the film posters of the Stenberg Brothers at Mubi. Meant to see the show at Tony Shafrazi, didn’t make it.
  • I didn’t know that George Morrow & E. V. Lucas had collaborated past What a Life!; it seems as if they did two other books of collage. Change for a Half-Penny is also up at Google Books.
  • Scans of 291 and 391 (incomplete) are up at Ubu.com.
  • The Charles Ruas audio archives are worth spending time with. He put together the old readings of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which one hopes might turn up here?

august 1–august 10

Books

  • Cozette De Charmoy, The True Life of Sweeney Todd: A Collage Novel

Films

  • The Sign of the Cross, directed by Cecil B. DeMille
  • The Art of the Steal, dir. Don Argott
  • Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • The Merry Widow, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • The Dentist, dir. Leslie Pearce
  • The Fatal Glass of Beer, dir. Clyde Bruckman
  • The Pharmacist, dir. Arthur Ripley
  • The Barber Shop, dir. Arthur Ripley

july 21–july 31

Books

  • Augusto Monterroso, The Black Sheep and Other Fables, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow & Philip Jenkins
  • Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, trans. Vladimir Nabokov & Dmitri Nabokov
  • Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
  • Marie Neurath & Robin Kinross, The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts
  • Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt
  • Julio Cortázar, From the Observatory, trans. Anne McLean
  • Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair, trans. Joseph Green

Films

  • The Bank Dick, directed by Edward F. Kline
  • She, dir. Lansing C. Holden & Irving Pichel
  • It, dir. Clarence G. Badger
  • It’s a Gift, dir. Norman McLeod
  • Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, dir. Edward F. Kline
  • Pool Sharks, dir. Edwin Middleton
  • The Golf Specialist, dir. Monte Brice
  • Tillie and Gus, dir. Francis Martin

Exhibits

  • “Franz Hals,” Met
  • “Paper Trails: Selected Works from the Collection, 1934–2001,” Met