Profile avatar
lattaj.bsky.social
Poet, birder. Used to bloviate at Isola di Rifiuti.
276 posts 607 followers 420 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 17 Comments 33

So long, Pierre Joris. Circa 1995, Joris, newly hired at Albany (we students goggled at a recommendation letter signed by Jean-François Lyotard) served on my doctoral committee (with Don Byrd and fictionist Eugene Garber), and though we were never close, I followed what he did later with interest.

submitted 15 hours ago • 1 comment

The refreshments of refusal, avoidance, silence, the no and the not. Out of John Cage’s _A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings_ (1967):

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Rereading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). And dipping into the Michael Hofmann-edited The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters (NYRB, 2007). Out of the latter, a poem rather grimly tender in its funny, self-deprecatory way:

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

A little anniversarial (b. 21 February 1907) Auden, out of “The Orators” (1932). Part of a catalogue—slippery, ranging, fleet, and various:

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Received “Edition No. 1” of a fine new press, Foolscap Poetry: Ed Roberson’s Five Poems for a Quartet. Handsewn chapbooks with letterpress covers. Editors: Tim Erickson and Michael Hansen. Next up: Tom Pickard’s A Walk in Winter.

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments

Out in the world: a new issue of the Cal Bedient and David Lau-edited Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion. Ever lively, jam-packed. Work by Farid Matuk, Brianna Colburn, Keston Sutherland, Lindsay Turner, Karla Kelsey, Ron Silliman, Thibault Raoult, and Rae Armantrout, among plenty of others.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Two films by Rudy Burckhardt, “The Climate of New York” (1948) and “The Apple” (1967), courtesy of Tibor de Nagy, where an exhibit of Burckhardt’s paintings runs through March 8.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Rare tiny victory over the household gods: took my 25 foot pistol grip drum auger to the bathtub drain, snaked it twice, and got it running smoothly. Hosannahs to the auger. Hell, hosannahs to me.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Today's anthem for no reason: some perceived need recklessly to throw my arms around and shout.

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

A few quotidian squibs out of “February Notes,” the second movement of an unpublished manuscript called Notes for General Circulation. Kafka says somewhere: “Inexcusable to travel—or even live—without taking notes.”

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Read: Briefcases from Caracas (Black Square Editions, 2024), Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez’s snappy political thriller of Chávez-era Venezuela. Translated by Suzanne Corley and Barbara D. Riess. A moment (not entirely typical) of literary rumination by Donizetti, protagonist (and journalist of sorts):

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

Just learned that the first citation in the OED for the noun “dooky” is out of A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965). Not in the original manuscript—as seen in the digital reproduction of the poem (written on adding machine tape) available through the Cornell University Library.

submitted 22 days ago • 5 comments

Reread How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion (Pressed Wafer, 2014), in the peculiar limbo of rereading, caught up by teeming misremembrance, irresolute familiarity, and doubt. Liked immensely, as a kind of enactable poetics, Champion’s summing up:

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

Gertrude Stein (b. 3 February 1874), out of “Portraits and Repetition” in Lectures in America (1935): “I was doing what the cinema was doing . . . making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing.” Or doing what cubism does. Contnuing:

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

For Joyce’s birthday, the skitter to an solid ending of Lorine Niedecker’s “Progression,” a poem she sent to Ezra Pound in 1934. Sure sign of that (long) moment when Joyce seized the hinterlands of America, and decked out the lingo of the native surreal. Neologisms thick as bluebottles at a picnic.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

Read Leila Berg’s Flickerbook: An Autobiography (CB editions, 2021). Refuses the usual autobiographical strategy of narrative (its imposition of a seemingly seamless memory). Allows a perseverance of jagged moments (arranged chronologically). Precursor (of sorts) to Brainard’s I Remember. Epigraph:

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

Finished: Evan S. Connell’s The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays (2001). Being, in truth, the earlier books A Long Desire and The White Lantern—read long back—reprinted, with two short new pieces appended. Liked, again, Connell’s skeptical assemblage of sundry philosophers’ stones:

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment