Weeks 7–8, Ara Shirinyan's "Your Country Is Great" (2008)

As we reach the semester's midpoint, we're taking a conceptual left-turn with Ara Shirinyan's 2008 collection, Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana. Originating as a diversion during the writing of his previous book, Syria Is in the World (2007), YCIG, took on a life of its own after Shirinyan showed a few sample poems to a friend and received encouragement to continue with the full-blown project.

As his book titles suggest, an international awareness is a key facet of Shirinyan's poetic perspective. Born in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia in 1977, he moved to the cross-cultural nexus of Los Angeles at the age of ten and has been a major player in that city's arts scene, as a publisher (Make Now Press) and promoter of events (through the Poetic Research Bureau). YCIG takes that focus to almost-absurd ends, employing Flarfist techniques to construct eighty-one snapshot portraits of the world through its own eyes. Starting with a list of countries and territories from the CIA-produced The World Factbook, Shirinyan then googled "[country] is great" and mined the search results — using all or almost all of the material in cases where there wasn't an overwhelming amount of search results — to construct each poem.

Clearly, form takes a certain precedence over content, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to say about what we find in YCIG. We might consider the panoply of voices found within the book and their relationship to Shirinyan's authorial voice, the cultural contexts for each poem, differences between the time of the book's composition and the present, and what the book says about the role of online communication (for better or worse) within our modern lives.

Here's our reading schedule for the book:

• Tues., October 7: "Afghanistan Is Great" to "Croatia Is Great"
• Thurs., October 9: No Class — Fall Reading Day
• Tues., October 14: "Cuba Is Great" to "Guyuana Is Great"

And here are a few supplemental links:

• a setting of several poems at Triple Canopy
• my write-up of Your Country is Great as part of 2010s Attention Span survey (it's at the bottom)
• Eric Rettberg writes about YCIG at Jacket2
• an oral history of Poetic Research Bureau at Jacket2
• a number of Shirinyan readings on PennSound's LA-Lit series page

Weeks 5-6: Pam Brown's "Home By Dark" (2013)

From Mexico and Mónica de la Torre we're taking a grand leap across the Pacific for our next poet, Australia's Pam Brown. 

Pam has not only enjoyed a long lifetime as a published poet — releasing her first book in 1971 — but has also played an important role in promoting the work of her fellow Australians through her editorial work with Jacket Magazine (and now Jacket2),  as well as Overland, VLAK, and Fulcrum. Most notably — as I've mentioned in class — Pam edited both the Jacket2 feature "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia," (which rolled out over the better part of a year), and a complementary anthology of recordings from Australian poets for PennSound, both of which are tremendous resources if you'd like to do further reading. That having been said, I'm glad that we're putting the focus on her, and specifically her latest book, Home by Dark (2013).

What you'll find here is poetry that I think sits very well beside our previous readings. Brown shifts gears between subjective expression and more fictional modes, weaves poetry out of pop language and official rhetorics, and writes in a mode that's both energized by and suffused with the traces of music, film, and literature. As Philip Mead observes of her "distinctive poetics," Brown is "a material girl [placing] emphasis on everyday lives inflected via a hyperalert formal and linguistic imagination."

I asked Pam if she'd like to provide an introduction to the book, and she generously replied with something truly stunning:

Home by Dark is a collection of poems assembled from notes, thoughts, images, reactions and feelings over a period of around three years. (2010-13) A poem builds up, in a steady accretion, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis says, 'like plaque on teeth'. My process is to track lines of thought, to collect and record glimpses, to use snatches of language etc and try to place them at a slant to a linear norm. I am conscious of writing poetry in the shadows of the previous century's post-Modernist idea that after the A-bomb, linearity is anachronistic.  

The poems are notational. I sometimes use a montage technique of placing stanzas in short sequences and sometimes I use lines from others' poems or songs or newspapers, or tv commentary and so on, to make an encounter with the world in general. My attitude is skeptical and anti-romantic though not blindly dismissive of lyricism. I think I use a kind of philosophical “I” to examine my place (as a poet) in the culture at large.  

For poetry to exist in corporatised western societies, whose undeniable context is power, it has to be skeptical of the status quo. It has to be questioning, probably experimental, or at least apply an unanticipated use of language and form – that is, be interesting to be poetic. I would hope that the poems in Home by Dark foreground this intention. 

I think irony comes in to play at times as a tool that can cheerfully undermine self-importance or grand statement. I do think that the 'difficulties' of addressing complex political/philosophical or questions like 'how to live?' (& how to live in a wrecked world) are similar in most art or writing forms -  

                    same problems
                    in poems, newspapers,
                    plays, sciences, films -
                    & I’m fuming like dry ice,
                    poetry can do it though,
                    specifically, address problems
                    from the sofa.
                 
                    from 'Dry Ice' - p81 

My topic is local. The poems rarely leave 'whatever street' I’m on. They are as mobile and as mutable as my daily life.  

I used to say that in general, my continuing aim was intelligibility. But I released my poems from that stricture at the end of the C20th. So, although not especially abstract or conceptual, I think the poems in Home by Dark can stray off track and wander elsewhere like the way you might find yourself watching a film in a multiplex picture theatre adjacent to the one that's screening the film you actually meant to watch.

Pam was also kind enough to provide the following advice for you as you make your way through Home by Dark:

There are a few technical points that I didn't include — don't know if anyone needs to know — but here they are:

• I don't always punctuate where punctuation "should" be.
• I don't like colons, I really dislike semi-colons and tend to use dashes instead
• I don't like Italics for title or emphasis in poems - I prefer to underline (sometimes I use Italics, but rarely)
• I don't always use full stops where they might be used conventionally

Armed with that knowledge, here's our reading schedule:

• Thurs., September 25: parts I and II
• Tues., Sept. 30: part III
• Thurs., Oct. 2: parts IV and V, plus "At the End of the World as We Know It Retreat" and "Placeville"

And here are some supplementary links for your enjoyment:

• Pam Brown reads in Sydney, May 21, 2014
• Justin Clements reviews Home by Dark in Cordite
• Philip Mead reviews the book in the Sydney Review of Books
• Michael Farrell reviews the book
• The Deletions, Brown's blog

Weeks 4-5: Mónica de la Torre's "Talk Shows" (2007)

As we move on from Canada, we're still staying in North America with our next poet: Mexico City-born Mónica de la Torre, who's resided in New York City for more than two decades, recently pursuing a doctorate at NYU and serving as a senior editor at the venerable art journal, BOMB.  We'll be reading Talk Shows, her debut volume from 2007.

de la Torre's work is imbued with a transitional and transformative nature: her poetic language exists between Spanish and English, and she freely borrows from the cultural chatter of both traditions, from a wide array of poets to the newspaper and television shows.  One side effect of this orientation is a dialogic tone to much of her work, and a novel experimental spirit (similar to what we've seen with Wah and Brossard) guides her compositional practice.  As will be the case with some of our other collections, you'll want to be sure to keep an eye on the notes in the back of the book, which should be a useful aid to your reading.

Here's our reading schedule for Talk Shows:

• Thurs. September 18: "The Script" to "To And No Fro" (3–30)
• Tues. September 23: "Talk Shows" to "Demolition Derby" (33–63)

And here are some supplemental links on de la Torre:

• de la Torre's PennSound author page: where, in addition to a number of Segue Series readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, you'll also find a wonderful Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein from 2009.
• de la Torre interview and reading on The Progressive's website
• Joyelle McSweeney's review of Talk Shows in Latino Poetry Review
• Craig Santos Perez's review of Talk Shows in The Acentos Review 
• Doug Korb's review of Talk Shows in Barrelhouse

de la Torre reads as part of the "Lunch Poems" series at UC Berkeley, 2007:

Weeks 3-4: Nicole Brossard's "White Piano" (2013)

We're moving on from Fred Wah, but staying in Canada, with the latest collection from another venerable poetic voice from our neighbor to the north: Nicole Brossard's White Piano. 

Brossard is an exception amongst our reading list in that she's our only author who doesn't write in English — instead, the Quebecoise poet writes in French and this volume, along with much of her recently published English-language books, was translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré. A long-established voice in French-Canadian literature (having published her first book in 1966), she's only more recently drawn the attention of English-speaking audiences with the publication of her first translated-volume, Baroque at Dawn, in 1997. She's won the Governor General's Award, a prestigious Canadian literary honor twice (in 1974 and 1984) and has been nominated an additional four times; Majzels and Mouré's translation of Notebook of Roses and Civilization was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2008.

Brossard is as well-known for her fiction as her poetry, and this tension between genres is evident in her work, as the back cover blurb acknowledges, citing the book's "play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions." Another transmutation occurs between literature and music, with the titular object serving as a central concern of the book, and guiding a poetic approach that mimics musical theme and variation. We might also consider how Brossard's perspectives, both as a queer poet and a feminist, shape her authorial perspective. In a 2009 interview with Judith Fitzgerald in The Globe and Mail, Brossard addresses her characterization as both a Language poet and a lesbian poet:

"Well," replies Brossard, "I certainly cannot refuse the term, 'language poet,' because it speaks to a fascination with language and an awareness of the structures and the virtuality of language at the same time. It is about experimenting, questioning and 'making a path' (as the poet Charles Bernstein would say). The expression 'language poet' points to a strong attraction to language which, of course, every poet should have . . . I would like to think I provide a narrative trend without losing any of a poem's concentration.

"Labels are either negative or positive. They are both given by people with whom you do not share values and by people with whom you share an essential dimension of yourself in practice or history. Because they are about visibility, they can be exploited for the best or the worst. But one thing is sure: Every individual is always more complex than the label attributed to him or her even when the label is self-imposed. When I say I am a lesbian it means more that a sexual practice. It is a way of being with women in a dynamic that fulfills and gratifies me. Being a poet makes the lesbian in me exist twice, once for real and once in a symbolic space. I have often said that it is the poet in me that deals with emotion in a way that can be shared with others."

Here's our schedule for White Piano:

• Tues. September. 9th: "Quivering" and "White Piano" (7–45)
• Thurs. September 11th: "Paragraphs of Eternity" (47–74)
• Tues. September 16th: "Piano Prose" and "Streaming" (77–109)

And here are some supplemental links:

• PennSound Nicole Brossard author page
• Brossard's page at the Electronic Poetry Center
• White Piano reviewed in Quill & Quire
• White Piano reviewed by HTMLGiant
• Brossard in conversation with Fitzgerald in The Globe and Mail
• Griffin Prize Commendation for Majzels and Mouré's translation of Brossard's Notebook of Roses and Civilization
• A review of Brossard's Selections at Jacket