Allen Ginsberg and Eric Drooker: Illuminated Poems as a Site of Visual, Literary and Cultural Contestation”. Literatura, Artes, Saberes. Eds. Sandra Nitrini, et al. São Paulo: ABRALIC, 2007. E-Book. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lyric Poetry in Pixel: Toward a Postcolonial and Postmodern Poetics of Digital Texts
This paper concerns itself with the merits of poetics in an age where mass media and digital technology reign–specifically, how poetics informs the very theory of the medium of digitally-produced art, and how the poetic medium is constantly evolving and must then find new vehicles of expression in developing forms. It will be this paper’s position that the music video possesses the truest possibility of the marriage of literature and film practice: the language of the poem-turned-song, rendered in key elements of film, will afford a “new” lyricism consonant with postmodern thought. Three texts chosen here for analysis are in fact poetic interpretations, and which seem to make establishing the relationship between poetry and digital film more conspicuous: "End to the Full Moon," "Fragments of the Moon," and "Soft Night." The first was released as a music video (launched through the MTV™ channel) in 2004 to promote Palanca Award-Winning Poet Nerisa del Carmen Guevara's first anthology, Reaching Destination: Poems and the Search for Home, with an accompanying audio CD of songs interpreted from her poetry by some musical artists. The second is also a music video, as declared by the poet Nadia Camit-Upton; she had a collection of poetry released in 2004 by Powerbooks, with a VCD of the videos her friends made of 20 of her poems. Meanwhile, "Soft Night," taking from the title of Abelardo Subido's poem, was meant to be a trailer for filmmaker Khavn dela Cruz's digital feature, The Longest Moment You're Not Here, but it could be considered a stand-alone work and was in fact shown as an experimental short in a Singapore Asian Film Festival. The selection of these texts does not in any way imply that they are meant to depend on their poetic roots to determine their “literariness.” In the analysis of these texts, this paper hopes to posit new considerations of reading “poetically,” looking to other media to cite what could be considered poems or not, first, by enumerating the formalistic equivalences between poetic language and digital language, then arguing that lyricism will eventually take place in the viewer's journey and engagement with the text. As what Christian Metz intones, film lets denotation happen in the reader; it is in him that the processes of interpretation and reading must take place (Metz 1992, 169). This exercise in determining the place of poetry in the digital age accounts for more than the transformative and transitional space of literature in the age of media and digital art; the very form itself seeks to be the embodiment of a counter-consciousness in a non-literary age, for in its transformation of the poetic form it self-referentially proves some of the problems that poetry, printed or recited or performed, undergoes. John Ashberry in his discussion of the avant-garde said it best: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.” In looking at new spaces for poetry, allow the experimental spirit not to tense, but to excite. ***This is an excerpt of a longer paper published in "KRITIK/CRITIQUE: Essays from The J. Elizalde Navarro National Workshop in the Criticism of the Arts and Humanities, 2009-2012" (UST Publishing House, 2014, pp. 6-25).
Allen Ginsberg's Poetry: A Form of Protest, Revolt, and Rebellion
Global Journal of HUMAN-SOCIAL SCIENCE: A Arts & Humanities - Psychology Volume 19 Issue 8 Version 1.0 Year 2019, 2019
Allen Ginsberg, one of the most rebellious poets in the history of American literature, throughout his life as a poet had taken poetry as a form of protest against different issues. These issues range from conventional societal norms, their justification instead of being suppressive and detrimental to the development of one's true self, to the hypocritical and arbitrary role of the contemporary American government. This paper aims to show how Ginsberg's poetry unmasks the true nature of all the oppressive operations of society and authority. Through the historical background and analysis of three of his poems, this paper also aims at showing the ways Ginsberg used poetry as a form of protest and rebellion against those operations that emphasize the arbitrary interest of the capitalistic society over individual selves, even at the cost of destroying them completely.
Becoming Visible—The Struggle to Circulate Radical Poetry
Tears in The Fence, issue 55. To order copies of TITF: http://tearsinthefence.com/, 2012
This article is the result of a presentation reflecting on the results of a series of interviews with contemporary “avant-garde” American and French poets from two generations who also run their own small presses. Issues such as receptivity, invisibility, distribution, collectives, the capacity for their authors to be seriously considered for literary prizes of a national and international stature, and the sense of the avant-garde as further marginalized by limited access to mainstream, recognized works, (those found in Borders/Amazon/Barnes & Noble, for example), were explored. Publisher-authors included Lyn Hejinian (Atelos and Tuumba Press), Julie Carr (Counterpath Press—with Tim Roberts), Jérôme Mauche (Les Petits Matins), Cole Swensen (La Presse—publishing only translations from the French), Pascal Poyet (contrat maint), Charles Alexander (Chax Press), Brenda Iijima (Yo-yo labs), Tracey Grinnell (Litmus Press), Joshua Clover (**), Dan Machlin (Futurepoem Books), Michaël Batalla (éditions du Clou dans le Fer, collection expériences poétiques), Vanesse Place (Les Figues Presse) and Susana Gardner (Dusie Press, based in Switzerland). Supplemental questions were be posed to a handful of poets who have published with these presses and/or other small presses and who have also later had the opportunity (or wish to) to see their work taken by mainstream or wider-distribution presses, such as Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Claude Royet-Journoud, Jacques Sivan, Vannina Maestri, Bhanu Kapil, Virginie Poitrasson, Frédéric Forte, Christophe Marchand-Kiss, Marie-Céline Siffert, Martin Richet, Michelle Noteboom, Laura Mullen and to such publishers who have radicalized the accessibility of avant-garde poetries, such as Al Dante, POL, or Green Integer/Sun & Moon. This article asks and reflects on the question: Have such publishing practices created not only domestic webs of contacts in the USA, thus co-publishing opportunities and readership, but even international ones?
Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture:Time, Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg
Comparative American Studies, 2012
Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank's The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce's 'American Century'.
Booknesses: Artists’ Books from the Jack Ginsberg Collection, 2017
The year 2017 marks the 21st anniversary of the first exhibition of artists’ books from the Jack Ginsberg Collection ever held in South Africa. At the time, it was purportedly the second largest exhibition of artists’ books to have been held in the world. In 2015, Ginsberg was one of the featured collectors on New York’s Center for Book Arts’s Behind the Personal Library: Collectors Creating the Canon. This exhibition and symposium considered the influence of private collectors on critical dialogue in the field of the book arts. Of the 13 invited collectors, Ginsberg was one of only three non-Americans. Given the extraordinary scope and depth of the collection not only in African but also, now, in global terms, it seemed timeous and fitting to hold another exhibition. As a place to start the curatorial process for this exhibition, I consulted Jack’s rare copy of Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France [Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France] (1913). Considered by many to be the first true example of simultaneisme, or ‘simultaneity’ in book form, Prose du Transsibérien, like most of the books in the Ginsberg Collection, is unique on the African continent and is shown to the public on this exhibition for the first time. Prose du Transsibérien has acquired not only the status of a French cultural icon, but also a certain cult status exemplified by its appearance on the cover of Riva Castleman’s controversially titled exhibition catalogue A Century of Artists Books in 1994 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan5 and, more recently, on the cover of The National Art Library’s Word & Image Art, Books and Design (2015). Prose du Transsibérien seemed a provocative and challenging place from which to begin the curatorial project and suggest a process of selecting the books with which it might conduct a set of fascinating dialogues.
Navigating the Poetic-Aesthetic Space of E-Poetry
Navigating the Poetic‐Aesthetic Space of E-Poetry. In: Korecka, M. and Vorrath, W. ed. Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 185-206. , 2023
Que la crítica borre toda mi poesía, si le parece. Pero este poema, que hoy recuerdo, no podrá borrarlo nadie. ("The critics may erase all of my poetry. But this poem, that I today remember, nobody will be able to erase." Pablo Neruda, "Indelible poem"; own translation) These words by Neruda were, as the Winnipeg boat was, about to part from the port of Trompeloup-Pauillac in France to Valparaiso, Chile on August 4, 1939. Neruda in his role as the Chilean Consul Immigration Officer had organised the Winnipeg boat in order to rescue and evacuate around 2,500 Spanish Civil War exiles from concentration camps in France. In his "Indelible poem," charged with the emotional atmosphere of the farewells in the port and of the passengers navigating on the Winnipeg boat into what was the unknown for most of them, expands the notion of poetry to the human experience of the event -that 'poetic moment' in time where feelings of loss, deportation, displacement, exile, and solitude are manifested. This ability to capture a moment in time in the poetic-aesthetic space is explored through e-poetry works like my interactive piece The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic; that moment where feelings are represented in a multimodal way, where the visual and the semantic come together in the digital space (whether text, sound or image) to engage the reader in looking both through the text and at the text (cf. Lanham 1993, 5). I have spent my career exploring this inbetween space in which the experience of the poetic is captured by shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual; from the literal, the legible, the transparent to the abstract language, creating simultaneously a poetic space of readable and visual textualities. It is in this oscillation between text and image or sound and image, and code and image, in the shifting between these ways of expression where I argue the poetic-aesthetic space can be brought to life. The article furthermore examines the influence of experimental poetry and notions of the in-betweenness in and of poetic language (cf. Kristeva 1984). It explores how artistic approaches from experimental avant-garde literary and artistic traditions of the twentieth century, such as the use of typography, words which do not make sense, broken narratives, and calligrammes, can serve to highlight the impact of the intertwining of the visual and the textual. I have used these techniques to underpin my creative practice and its contextualisation in the fields of language media arts, digital art and e-poetry. I also continue to explore the role of electronic literature and e-poetry in culture and society with topics on gender and identity, migration, displacement and exile, linguistic and cultural diversity, historical memory, art and healing practices.
The ideas of Siegfried J. Schmidt (Münster) helped me to understand the relationship between a concept of media (as developed by Schmidt) and history of poetry as a medial artifact.
From Dada to Digital: Experimental Poetry in the Media Age
2013
Author(s): Beals, Kurt | Advisor(s): Kaes, Anton | Abstract: At least since Mallarme, if not before, poets in the Western tradition have responded to changes in media technologies by reflecting on their own relationship to language, and by reassessing the limits and possibilities of poetry. In the German- speaking world, this tendency has been pronounced in a number of experimental movements: Dada, particularly in Zurich and Berlin between 1916 and 1921; Concrete poetry, especially its Swiss and German variants in the 1950s and '60s; and finally, digital or electronic poetry, a genre that is still developing all around the world, but has roots in Germany dating back to the late 1950s. For each of these movements, the increasing dominance of new media technologies contributes to an understanding of language as something material, quantifiable, and external to its human users, and casts doubt on the function of language as a means of subjective expression, particularly in the cont...
CROSSROADS POETICS: TEXT IMAGE MUSIC FILM & BEYOND
This collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry and poetics is written from a wide-ranging perspective, working analytically and comparatively with literature, music, video, film, architecture and performance art. Bringing together readings of Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Louis Feuillade, Rosmarie Waldrop, Frank Zappa, Bill Viola and Pierre Alechinsky, this book attempts to delineate the possibility of a truly transversal poetics, one which creates a space for a reconsideration of contemporary poetics while navigating the complex interactions between the theory and practice.