CANNONBALL at Haverford Nov 11th!

MAD MEN & POE

I wrote an article on madmen
& Edgar A. Poe
published in today's Philadelphia Inquirer
(in time for Halloween)

*

For more on Poe
including my essay "The Empty House"
see the POE link on my homepage

Reading for Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s OCT 22nd

Reading for Common Ground at the PMA

In conjunction with Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a reading by Thomas Devaney.

I will read a selection of work including poems composed in response to photographs in the exhibition.

Thursday, October 22, 2009
Perelman Café, Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building
Happy hour 5-6 PM followed by
the reading 6-7 PM

For information (215) 684-7768 or
ascfriends@philamuseum.org

On Cid Corman PoemTalk

"PoemTalk"
a discussion of Cid Corman's "Enuresis"

with Frank Sherlock, Thomas Devaney, and Fran Ryan

<- Cid Corman's poem "Enuresis"

Enuresis

Terror--Ed--is not

Sitting in one's piss.

I know--I've sat there--

I've slept there and did

Most of my childhood.

That was warmth--in fact--

And comfort--in spite

Of the unconsealed

Unconsealable

Smell. Terror? That was

And always will be

Mother cursing Dad

And there there I am

Alone in that night

Hearing that door slam.

Massive POE conference in Philadelphia

The Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference:
The Bicentennial in Philadelphia
October 8 to 11, 2009

New Invisibles Cites: Penn undergrads adapt Calvino for Puppets!

A new video!

NEW INVISIBLE CITIES

A puppet performance

by my Creative Writing students at Penn

for The Institute of Contemporary Art's

THE PUPPET SHOW

March 2008

On Trevor Winkfield & his new book with John Ashbery Faster Than Birds Can Fly

The cover of John Ashbery's Flow Chart has become an icon among contemporary book covers.

In the bottom right corner a tangerine band surrounds an orange wheel within a wheel. Inside that, green wheel spokes provide a sense of internal movement. Inside that, there is a blue bulls-eye, ringed and centered with a red eye, and then, blue inside of that again. The colorful image in the cover's central panel is a banner, or a flag, and there are what appears to be three stalks of wheat, each a ripe node of energy unto itself. The artwork, of course, is by the painter Trevor Winkfield.

Since the groundbreaking “A Special Issue of Collaborations” Locus Solus II, edited by Kenneth Koch in 1961, the writers, artists, and some publishers associated with the New York School have been known for their inspired collaborations.

Winkfield and Ashbery’s new book Faster Than Birds Can Fly (published by Granary Books) takes its place among the most pleasurable and successful collaborations in this poet and painter mode.

The book's most striking feature is the roomy space it supplies for both Winkfield’s compositions and Ashbery's poem. The production values are of the highest grade. The opening stanza of Ashbery’s poem is this:

Faster than birds can fly, realizing
Breath in living out of the extent,
Imagining the strict space to come,
Dressing for the fall in rigid ocean way,

The large format book, designed throughout by Winkfield, highlights two of his most winning characteristics: an inspired color palette, which is one of the most unorthodox in contemporary art; and his exquisite (sometimes orderly, sometimes tangled) rhythmical patterns. Winkfield’s colorful images provide visual echoes, which continually open-up.

Ashbery has described Wikfield's paintings in this way: "It's as though seeing and hearing merged into a single act, and the 'meaning' of the picture were lodged at the intersection of the two senses, where one is pleasurably enmeshed, deliciously hindered."

Publication Release for book:

Artbook @ X
548 W. 22nd Street
(between 10th / 11th)
New York City

Wednesday September 23, 2009 7 - 9 pm

Sparrow, Sirowitz, Devaney - SAT 9/12

A Poetry Reading
with Hal Sirowitz, Sparrow,
& Thomas Devaney

Saturday, September 12, 2009
3:00 PM
Big Blue Marble Bookstore
West Mount Airy
551 Carpenter Lane
Phila, PA 19119

SPARROW's work has appeared in The New Yorker, CL WN W R, Monster Trucks, and The Sun. Three of his books have been published by Soft Skull Press, including America: A Prophecy -- The Sparrow Reader.

HAL SIROWITZ is the author of four books of poems, Mother Said, My Therapist Said, Father Said, and Before, During & After. Sirowitz has performed on MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS’s Poetry Heaven, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Hal has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and he is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He has a poem in Garrison Keillor’s anthology, "Good Poems" and in "Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast" (WW Norton).

THOMAS DEVANEY is the author of A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007), Letters to Ernesto Neto ( Germ Folios, 2005), and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). Recent poems have been published in A Best of FENCE: The First Nine Years (FENCE Books, 2009), POEM: Poets On (an) Exchange Mission (Fish Drum/Double Change, 2009 bilingual French-English edition).

Big Blue Marble Bookstore
West Mount Airy
551 Carpenter Lane

(R8 & R7 Regional rails stop a few blocks away,
the store is next door to the Weavers Way Food Cooperative)

Lost Oppen Letter & New Oppen Essay

Two new items have been added
to the George Oppen feature I edited for Jacket (36).

One is a lost Oppen letter that was found and has been added to Pat Clifford's essay "George Oppen, Buddhadev Bose and Translation."

The other item is a new essay by Joy Katz "Writing, and Something Other Than Writing: George Oppen’s Silence."

Pat Clifford writes:

Buddhadev Bose’s daughter, Damayanti Basu Singh, recently found one of the lost letters (dated February 19, 1962) written by Oppen to her father. The letter refers to Oppen (and Bose’s) poem “To Memory," which had just appeared in the San Francisco Review and Oppen had forwarded a copy of the issue to Bose in Kolkata. Apparently unbeknownst to them both, the poem was described there as “translated by Buddhadeva Bose and George Oppen.” In the letter, Oppen expressed his concern that the description “translation” might be an embarrassment for Bose because the poem was, in fact, an experimental transcreation based on Bose’s own translation. In previous communications, Bose had confided that this reworking had resulted in a product “more your work than mine.” The awkward and unwarranted byline made the process seem unjustifiably collaborative.

In her essay "Writing, and Something Other Than Writing: George Oppen’s Silence" Joy Katz's asks the following question:

Does George Oppen’s silence say something about an ideal relationship between living life and the life of the imagination?

Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets

I have several entries in the new
Encyclopedia
of the New York School Poets
edited by Terence Diggory

FACTS ON FILE

Covers by Susan Landers

Some hunt like owls. Some hunt like cats. Some come home
early. Some loot. Some feel like someone else. Some sing.
Some whack babies against the wall. Some do not believe in
words. Some cannot find the right words. Some tell others
what to do. Some do what others tell them.

-Susan Landers “Fear Box” from Covers (O-Books, 2007).

On Duchamp's "Etant Donnes" at the PMA: Thomas Devaney speaking with Serge Fauchereau

Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Aug. 15-Nov. 29, 2009
Curator: Michael R. Taylor

Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés is the MONA LISA of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Duchamp’s infamous installation the PMA has assembled 80 related works: known studies, photographs, and objects of note. It is a fascinating and scrupulous exhibition.

Still, with all the assembled ephemera and art historical machinery in motion to put the installation in context Duchamp's resilient work survives the very close unpacking.

Étant donnés is nothing if not an enduring mystery.

About five years ago I had a conversation with the French poet and art historian Serge Fauchereau about Étant donnés . We held forth on the Duchamp for some time.

Then something happened. Fauchereau became reserved. For the moment we stopped talking about the piece, but I've kept thinking about what he said ever since.

At the time I remarked (I believe) something about the lighting on the woman in the installation. At this point Fauchereau seemed confused, as if I was speaking another language, or saying something that was just plain wrong-headed.

After a significant pause Serge simply said this: he wasn't sure that the object I was speaking of was a woman at all.

Incredulous, I protested, "But Serge, it's obviously the figure of a woman!"

He paused, and in a reply that was as sober as it was serious Fauchereau said, "There is nothing obvious, or given about Duchamp's Étant donnés ."

A Gorgeous Semi-Colon

Semi-colons are not pretty. Physically they are unsettling. There's something jarring about their split personality: a mini shock absorber between stopping and going.

What they lack in physical beauty they make up for in raw purpose. The punctuation mark itself, which is typically a pause twice as long as the comma, is less of a problem than its misuse, or distracting overuse.

Still, there are moments when two seemingly independent clauses can perfectly join; or when certain items in a series are captured and released by a single sleight of hand.

I am not obsessed with semi-colons. I was however seduced by one in particular. I discovered it in the second stanza of the handwritten copy of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." The manuscript was on display at Free Library of Philadelphia as part of their bicentennial celebration of Poe, which ran until February 2009. I wrote the essay for the exhibition and commented on Poe's handwriting:

Many of Poe's literary aspirations can be seen in his impeccable penmanship—neat, well proportioned, and impressive on the page. His exquisite manuscript of "The Raven" is typical. His signature Edgar A. Poe appears as if it were branded, itself becoming another example of the Poe brand. …Tellingly, Poe's super legible writing acts as a cover for the more turbulent and disruptive forces occurring both in his life and work.

The clause before Poe's gorgeous semi-colon is this:

Eagerly I wished the morrow;

Both the phrase and the use of the semi-colon here are unremarkable. But it was simply the impetuous mark of Poe's script itself that blew me away. It was an eye and the faded pictograph of a beak that got stuck in my own eye.

I continued to dwell on Poe's semi-colon. I remembered a conversation I had with Hal Sirowitz when he moved to Philadelphia in the spring of 2007. After dinner at his house in the Mt. Airy section of the city, Hal showed me few new poems he had written. I liked them all, but had one suggestion for a possible semi-colon. Hal was clear about not using a semi-colon for the line. He said he never used them.

Hal had read an essay by Richard Hugo that said poets should not use semi-colons because "they look ugly." Hal continued the story: "At first I thought Hugo was crazy—how can you call a punctuation mark pretty or ugly? But then I started taking more notice of semi-colons and saw that they were ugly. I haven't used one yet in a poem. I did sneak one into a prose piece."

I admit that semi-colons are graceless, but I still can't shake the one I saw. At their most startling they can catch you in the throat: an indicative, yet ever-yielding pause; a dotted-line connection, discretely made; an architectural hinge and pivot where all that stays and all that goes assume a terrible balance.

This essay was first published in LUNGFULL Magazine, Issue 17.

The Art of the Box Lunch - Online!

THE ART OF THE BOX LUNCH

The Art of the Box Lunch
was published in the late May 2009.

I edited the book, which
features four student essays
and my introduction.

A PDF of it is now online.

The project grew out of an assignment
for my “Art of Eating” Critical Writing seminar
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Students worked in Penn’s Rare Book
& Manuscript Library researching
Chef Fritz Blank's cookery collection.

Here is the link:

THE ART OF THE BOX LUNCH
PDF File

Penn's food magazine Penn Appetit
published an article about the book
"Thinking Inside the Box Lunch"

BEST OF FENCE: THE FIRST NINE YEARS

I am in volume one of the new A BEST OF FENCE:
THE FIRST NINE YEARS VOLUMES ONE & TWO
Edited by Rebecca Wolff

NJ skylines August 1, 2009

POEM event at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France June 26th & 27th

Reading in Paris on June 18 at Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée

Colloque « La Géographie dans le monde anglophone

(littérature et civilisation) »
Jeudi 18 – Samedi 20 juin 2009 Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée
IMAGER (ANGLES) EA 3958

Jeudi 18 juin

- 18h: Poetry reading. Thomas Devaney (University of Pennsylvania)
Poet, Critic, and Senior Writing Fellow Critical Writing Program, Department of English. Author of A Series of Small Boxes (Fishdrum) ».

The long & short of it: Teaching Ashbery's 37 Haiku

This week Al Filreis invited me to lead
a workshop on a poem with a group of students
visiting Kelly Writers House.
I taught John Ashbery's poem "37 Haiku."

When I reflect upon Ashbery's poems, Haiku
is not my first association. Ashbery may be difficult
to categorize, but he sure as heck isn't a minimalist.

I handed out two translations of Basho's
"Old pond" poem as a jumping-off point
to talk about Ashbery's poem.

Al Filreis wrote about the session --
here is the post: high school, haiku, tweet tweet.

Ernesto Neto at the Park Avenue Armory

Ernesto Neto's Anthropodino

with Tom Eccles and Rebecca Robertson
in Wade Thompson Drill Hall at
Park Avenue Armory

Article in The New York Times
on Neto's Anthropodino

Forthcoming in July 2009:
My book Letters to Ernesto
online. There were originally 300 copies
of the book published with letter press cover
and design by Nicole Michels.
I am working with a designer on an interface
for book for the web. -TD