Paula Green on a blog recently somewhere wanted a report on Eileen Myles reading [yesterday evg] becausee she cdnt get to hear it herself.
Eileen Myles Actual Existing Fan-Base Ignored ------- & damn near excluded from her public reading at Auck Uni -- fine reading! ---posters on campus & not a word on website School of Humanities -- not even NZEPC -- [not everyone interested is on Isla Selwyn's email list -- that is a fact -- I wdn't have known about it otherwise, & it was only because Michelle Leggott told her that she listed it with a recommendation from Michelle that the Reader was a good "Performer".
Look out Chris Kraus next time you come to talk/perform here -- this is not how it used to was before the neo-libs took over [wrecked the place]
the man sitting next to me had never heard of Eileen Myles & or / her New York contemporaries or in all probability the so-called Experimental Poets in NZ --- why was he there? -- PhD on behavioural cognition on sexual choices -- I cd tell he wasn't getting the humour [often aimed at social crit] poetry -- no response, seemed a bit annoyed by it --- on the other side was the professional business dressed Professor of whatever Social studies who it seems was the real sponsor. I shd have talked to her before the show, but there wasn't time....lots of applause from the 50 or so mainly young women students. I 'd like to know whether she had ever read anything by the poet-- ever heard of her before this month as a "Feminist,Lesbian" [or by Downtown New York] -- as if that accounts for her way of writing & performing [closely connected with poets & artists of previous recent generation who were of various variable genders -- e.g. John Ashberry, Frank O'Hara -- Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley -- Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine ..... I'm wrong? my next-seat neighbours are familiar with these figures of contemporary culture?
Myles read a poem from "Not Me" [Semiotexte] -- University Libr. copy received 2002. Borrowed twice in 2009, twice in 2012 -- & still stiff to open & read nobody 'teaching' 1970s - 2016 New York poets lately post Ashberry/Schuyler/O'Hara? Let alone Bruce Andrews. "Chelsea Girls, 1997, Novel-Fiction Black Sparrow, has nore obviously been opened & read, but it's still in good enough nic to suppose not much more than half-a-dozen times -- can't see library date-stamps.The introducer thought it was "autobiography" which it isn't.
I've just been reading Roger Horrocks "The Re-Invention of New Zealand" -- a blow by blow account of the struggle to make anything beyond middle-brow mniddle-class entertainment arts in New Zealand for the past 60 years --- This is one more episode in the difficulty, this time in the new technical school version of education in the "Humanities" in which Poetry & Poetics Music & Painting/Sculpture have been central for at least 3000 years --- rapidly being killed off now. Well, look, Sociology was it rather than English the real sponsor it seems & not in the Arts Building but in the effin big steel glass concrete v expensivbe Business School paid for by a big-time NZ entrepreneur Glenn. There was a time when Business Studies was something you did on top of a degree or instead of a degree --- in a Busness School in which teaching was TRAINING -- no questioning the System esp NO discussion of Economics NO discussion of ethics NO discussion of social issues -- like, Labour Laws & Work & Remuneration, Housing, Food, Medicine, Social Welfare -- & NO discussion of process of thought & invention beyond the APPLICATION of existing engineering & mechanical & electronic solutions -- with NO idea how they had been thought up -- neither the theoretical basis nor the experimentation.
Complete Failure to Recognize that there are poets & scholars outside the university who wd have been supportive of the intiative [I'm one, but not the only one] who have known & enjoyed Eileen Myles poetry for maybe 40 years -- I cd name them --- who hadn't heard about the reading -- [Downtown Scene of 1970s onwards] & who would have liked to hear her -- A PISS OFF -- I spread the word as best I cd & actually got 'apologies' as for a meeting from hose who cdn' come --- mind you I only heard about it rather late in the piece.
[Fortunately, there is PennSound & the activities of the Kelly Writer's House. Much better than the time before the Internet, when the only source for contemporary poetry & poetics "overseas" was buying the magazines & books as they came out & recommending them to the Uni Library. But in those days, the sponsors knew who they were getting & for whose benefit. & followed through with their own teaching -- writing. !970s/80s/90s visits from Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Jackson Mac Low -- Chris Kraus when she was visiting on her own accord -- Visits of Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman or of Rachel Blau DuPlessis was more like it.
aaagh! -- [more stupid distracting politics, the whole morning gone by]
Comments