‘Bluebird’ & ‘The Secret of my Endurance’, videopoems by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski, born in 1920, began writing at a young age and was first published in the 1940s. Then Bukowksi gave up writing for the world of work and bars, not publishing, not writing, so the myth goes, for nearly twenty years. Ten of those years were spent roaming from odd job to odd roominghouse from the East coast to the West. The other ten years, Bukowski worked for the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles, a job that took no effort except for the strength to show up and the patience to perform mindless operations. During that time, his life bordered on insanity and death, two prevalent themes in his writing. According to his own myth making, Bukowski returned to writing the day that he quit the Postal Service, but his bibliography shows that indeed, he had been publishing several years before that.

Lost – Videopoem on a text by David Wagoner

David Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005); The House of Song (2002); Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999); Walt Whitman Bathing (1996); Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems (1987); First Light (1983); Landfall (1981); and In Broken Country (1979).

About Wagoner’s poetry, critic Harold Bloom said, “His study of American nostalgias is as eloquent as that of James Wright, and like Wright’s poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse.”

He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry magazine, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

American poet Charles Bernstein tells us – What makes a poem a poem?

Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. He received his B.A. from Harvard College. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are Girly Man (University of Chicago Press , 2006), With Strings (2001), Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (2000), Dark City (1994), Rough Trades (1991), The Nude Formalism (1989), Stigma (1981), Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, 1980), and Parsing (1976).

Ceea ce e puţin amuzant şi destul de interesant e faptul ca miniconferinţa lui Bernstein despre “ceea ce face un poem să fie un poem” se transformă de fapt într-un POEM (maraton)…

Antony & The Johnsons – My Lady Story / Cripple and the Starfish

În mod cert unul dintre cele mai ilustre grupuri muzicale ale momentului. Antony Hegarty o voce incomparabilă prin delicateţea şi în acelaşi timp amprenta bizară pe care le degajă. După cum s-a spus deja, “o experienţă muzicală inegalabilă prin originalitatea stilului”.  

Antony Hegarty is the leader of Antony and the Johnsons. He was born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971 and moved to Amsterdam in 1977 for a period before settling in San Jose, California in 1981. As a teenager he was enthused by the British synth pop of the time — in particular emotive torch singers such as Marc Almond and Boy George. In 1990 he moved to Manhattan to complete a degree in Experimental Theatre at New York University and founded the performance collective Blacklips Performance Cult with creative partner Johanna Constantine.

Current members include:

• Julia Kent (previously of Rasputina) – first chair cello
• Parker Kindred – drummer
• Jeff Langston – bassist
• Doug Wieselman – horns
• Maxim Moston – violin, arrangement
• Rob Moose – guitar, violin

Their early live shows were often opened by Dr. Julia Yasuda, an intersex person, who performed the welcome in Morse code.

One theme explored in the band’s music is aspects of transgender life. This is expressed in songs such as “For Today I Am A Boy“, in which a young boy dreams of growing up to be a woman.

British experimental musician David Tibet of Current 93 heard a demo and offered to release Antony’s music through his Durtro label. The debut album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000. In 2001, Antony released a short follow-up EP, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, which, in addition to the title track, included a cover of “Mysteries of Love”, a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song and “Soft Black Stars”, a cover of a Current 93 song…

Samurai Song, videopoem by Robert Pinsky

Alături de Charles Bernstein, Charles Wright, Charles Simic, Robert Haas (aceştia fiind în opinia mea cei mai importanţi), Robert Pinsky este unul dintre cei mai de seamă poeţi americani contemporani. Pinsky iese în evidenţă cu un discurs poetic extrem de detaliat, pe alocuri ermetic, confuz, relativ sobru. Autenticismul lui Pinsky este unul eminamente “pre-lucrat”, acesta preferând astfel să împrumute din realitate doar acele elemente “tari” sau constitutive pentru poezie. Autorul foloseşte cele câteva metafore doar pentru a structura şi accentua imaginile şi sensul elementelor realităţii din poezie. “Samurai Song” este “un poem de putere”. Încercaţi să-i priviţi cu atenţie faciesul în timp ce recită, cam ce vă spune…?