Thursday, July 29, 2010

Whupped



I am a less seasoned communicator (aka schmoozer) than I would like to be. It's one reason I write so much, publish so little. On the other hand, I haven't yet built my Watts Towers, or written my Ark.

I think in my hypothetical "li'l list o'fixations," the lead item is that I am predisposed to think I am being misunderstood by everyone. I leave many a conversation thinking I didn't really get my point across, when it seemed so simple to begin with.

Then again, this 'tude may simply be my pretext for wheedling. To wheedle is, pace Woody, to do unto others as you'd loathe they do unto you. Wheedle is power, backassward.

Item: I am not going to Boston this weekend to read for eight minutes in a 90-person poetry lineup called a "Tea Party". I do want to go to Boston, because I love Boston. The Charles River is great. I love the crowds, I love the fact that I once bought a cassette tape in Boston called "Dilka Doctor" and forced Mike Basinski, Eileen and Theresa to listen to it on the car ride all the way from Boston to Buffalo. I kept singing "Dildo Doctor" during the title track, and Mike kept playing rare & hallucinogenic Jimi Hendrix spoken-word pieces. (We went to Boston for William Howe III's SoundVision/VisionSound III art show, where, at one point, we all stole John Bennett's too big pants, and Chris Fritton made a huge mess of things he shot at us with rubber bands).

Okay, if anyone who reads this has a car, and wants to pick me up in Brooklyn, then drive to Boston tonight (Thurs.) or tomorrow (friday) and find a Co-op house or Hostel or otherwise free crash pad, then hang out at some place called "Outpost 186" on Saturday, then call me ASAP. That's the sitch. Otherwise, my Boston trip is too much for me to do in a very full midsummer weekend, which includes writing the most difficult essay I've ever attempted.

Nonetheless, the Boston Poets Tea Party readings will be amazing. I'm certain of it. The lineup is stellar. And I am sad I won't be able to go (unless miracles take place). I envisioned my 8 minutes to be a reading from To Becoming Normal. So, if you'd like, go look at my February postings and read that poem for 8 minutes. Start at any point.

lots.

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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

To Red Hook from Yellow Hook

To Red Hook from Yellow Hook
the wind is very strong, please hold the handle
statue of a doughboy
seathemed jetsam-covered shanty
labyrinthine sparkly store
brick warehouses with black shutters
cranes and ikeas
shorebirds and tugboats
pearlescence of diamonds on the oily harbor waters
twenty-dollar entrees
may you forever sparkle and forever shine
may you dance dance
a black leotard trance
the double canals
Gowanus below Gowanus above
Gowan ‘n’ peddle yuh pehpahs


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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Courses, Workshops and Seminars Offered

The following list incorporates available courses I am prepared to teach, individually or collaboratively, autonomously at free schools & schools of the future, or according to departmental guidelines at schools, colleges, yeshivas, universities and polytechnical institutions. Each course is designed to present a field of inquiry and discovery, and to develop writing, critical thinking and research skills. The courses are priced on a sliding scale, so that a 14 or 15-week university course meeting three times a week will cost $10,000 (or more depending on location and level of study), while a two-week workshop could cost as little as $700 or payment in kind. Please allow 30 days from our initial engagement to the commencement of the first session, in order to allow for course development. Some courses will require an initial payment to facilitate course design, secure course materials and resources, and assist in enrollment. Many of the courses offered have been taught successfully at universities and colleges, while others are critical specialties forming the background of the instructor's own writing practice and research.

There are three basic groupings to my teaching practices: developmental, American Literature, and Poetics and Aesthetics. Please email me at inksaudible at gmail dot com for full course description. Please indicate a course format (semester course, workshop, seminar, number of sessions) for a more detailed description. I am based in the greater New York City area, and all requests for courses outside of this area will require a transportation, lodging or relocation fee.

Developmental Courses:

Writer/Poet in the Schools. Ideally suited for children ages 6-12. Writing models developed through the Writers in Education programs, and more specifically, exercises based on the work of Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett.

Composition/The Art of the Essay. Process-based writing moving from diaristic/journalling, to expository prose, to critical analysis.

Introduction to Poetry

Introduction to Prose

Thematic Writing Courses:
Readings in Civil Rights
Writing at the Human-Animal Borderlands
Identity and Body-Image
Travel Writing and the Literature of Encounter
Literature of the Ecstatic

American Literature:

Surveys:
American Literature 1490-1864
American Literature 1865-present
Nineteenth-Century American Literature
American Poetry 1950-present
Multicultural American Literature 1900-present

Focused Study:
The Gilded Age
Realism
Naturalism
Modernism
The Beat Generation and the Black Mountain School
American Cultural Studies
Literature and the Working Class
Hispanic American Literature
African American Literature
Asian American Literature
Language Poetries from Stein to Conceptualism
Kenneth Patchen

Poetics and Aesthetics:

Writing Poetry
Writing Prose
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Art and Literature
Poetry and Philosophy
Poetry and Painting
Visual-Verbal Poetry
Poetry and Theater
Prosody and the Poetics of Sound
Visual Literary Genres
Poetry and the Public Sphere
The Practice of Everyday L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Textuality
The History of the Book
Literature and Linguistic Cognitive Models
Poetics and Ethnology (Cross-Cultural Poetics)
Poetry of the Avant-Garde
Small Press Revolutions
Poetry and Documentary
Romanticism
William Blake


Please contact me by phone: 716-240-8792
or by email: inksaudible at gmail dot com

Thank you for visiting. I look forward to working along with you!

Douglas Manson

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Friday, July 16, 2010

The Origin of Baseball, by Kenneth Patchen

Don't forget the big time Douglas Manson poetry reading in Boston, Massachusetts, along with 89, yup, that's Eighty-Nine, other poets. And maybe more??

July 31.
Outpost 186.
2:32 p.m.
Cambridge, Mass.


The Origin of Baseball

Someone had been walking in and out
Of the world without coming
To much decision about anything.
The sun seemed too hot most of the time.
There weren't enough birds around
And the hills had a silly look
When he got on top of one.
The girls in heaven, however, thought
Nothing of asking to see his watch
Like you would want someone to tell
A joke--"Time," they'd say, "what's
That mean--time?", laughing with the edges
Of their white mouths, like a flutter of paper
In a madhouse. And he'd stumble over
General Sherman or Elizabeth B.
Browning, muttering, "Can't you keep
Your big wings out of the aisle?" But down
Again, there'd be millions of people without
Enough to eat and men with guns just
Standing there shooting each other.

So he wanted to throw something
And he picked up a baseball.



This is one of my favorite Patchen poems, and one of the most re-published, too. It first appeared in the book The Teeth of the Lion a pamphlet published in the New Directions "Poet of the Month" series for October 1942. 500 of these were published in boards for $1.00 (by William Candlewood at the George Grady Press in NYC) and 2500 in paper published for 50 cents. It was next published in An Astonished Eye Looks Out Of The Air, a work produced by Kemper Nomland, Jr. at the Untide Press (a conscientious objectors' camp in Oregon, known as The Franklin Press), in 1946. Then in Outlaw of the Lowest Planet, the first book by Patchen to appear in England, in 1946. The Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1946, 1957 and 1964) and the City Lights book Poems of Humor and Protest (1954), The Collected Poems (1968). You can hear him read it on the Folkways Album Kenneth Patchen Reads His Selected Poems recorded in 1959, and I believe now available through the Smithsonian.

As a note, I want to include a passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856):

"Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers
From conjurers? That child, there? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?"
(book 1, lines 772-5)

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Sunday, July 11, 2010

Watching the Boring Colored Paint Drip

Big time Douglas Manson poetry reading: Saturday, July 31 at 2:32 p.m. I will read for 8 minutes.

Where?

OUTPOST 186
186 1/2 Hampshire St., Inman Square, Cambridge (Boston, Mass.)

I guess this video is Rated R. And Jim's my label-mate! C U in Boston! 90 poets, 90 bucks (if you live in NYC).

JIM BEHRLE FOR POETEEVEE from A. Lee Abelson on Vimeo.