Three Announcements and a Question

Today, I thought I’d relax and write a short entry on a few interesting developments in the world of experimental poetry.


Audiatur Festival Ends

Audiatur, a festival of new poetry in Bergen, Norway, ended today—so far as my interpretation of Norwegian can tell—after four days of frenetic activity, but much documentation of the festival remains online. This second Audiatur festival (the first took place in 2003) brought poets and critics together from Scandinavia, France, Germany, and North America, and the festival included a wide range of media and art to “form a picture of contemporary poetry as multi-faceted as possible.” Eight poets and lovers of poetry from Bergen, Oslo, and Stockholm put together this festival with a small budget but enormous energy.

The festival catalog (co-published by Gasspedal and Ny Poesi) is an enormous 512 pages and includes “samples of and essays about Scandinavian and international contemporary poetry.” (You can find a copy of the extensive table of contents for this catalog at the Omsensgate blog.) Included in this catalog is an enquête (literally, an investigation) in which different poets answer this question: “What is the importance and opportunities of small press magazines and webzines for contemporary poetry?” The entirety of the enquête appears on the festival website, so (if your Norwegian is good) you can read what John M. Bennett has to say about his long-running but now-defunct zine, Lost and Found Times; what Susan Schultz has to say about Tinfish, Hawaii, and experimental literature; what I have to say about variety versus ephemerality in the world of contemporary poetry; and what Danish poet Karen Wagner has to say about helping run one of the most vital and exciting blogs anywhere focused on verbo-visual art, Afsnit p’s “plog”. The catalog even includes a translation into Norwegian of the interview Crag Hill and Ron Silliman did with me in July.

Audiatur, p 206
Audiatur also includes an exhibition of visual and digital poetry at the Hordaland Kunstsenter (Hordaland Arts Center). This exhibition, which includes a number of larger visual poems by me, will be open until the October 18th, or so I believe. Among the participants in this show are Monica Aasprong, a wonderful neo-concrete poet I’ve written about in the past, and Bengt Emil Johnson, a well known and long-time sound and other poet.

My main contact for this festival has been Audun Lindholm, one of the proprietors of Gasspedal press, and he continues to tell me that this is a small festival run by only three quarters of a dozen people. But they have put out a huge catalog, brought together people from all over Scandinavia and from other parts of the globe, and run a four-day festival that gives some sense of the outer reaches of poetry. Audiatur is just another example—as if one were needed—of the trailblazing nature of Scandinavian poets, who work without rest to bring poets together and to promote experimental poetry over the globe. And it doesn’t hurt that they are universally multi-lingual poets who put most of us American poets to shame with their command of our own language.


The Poets’ Corner Grows in Size

Anny Ballardini has recently updated her Poets’ Corner, one of the most eclectic poetry sites I’ve ever run across. Where else can you find Jim Andrews, Maxine Chernoff, Linh Dinh (translated into Italian), R.S. Gwynn, Marilyn Hacker, Didi Menendez, Tad Richards, Alan Sondheim, and Dan Waber all in one place? My guess is nowhere.

New to the Corner, Waber contributes poems textual and visual, including a charming set of visual pwoermds and an anti-language-poem. The digital poet Jim Andrews contributes a number of hyper-visual poems, including an almost-hopeful take on the culture wars that led to the Rwandan massacres of a few years back (“Hututsi2”) and even a textual poem. If you have any interest in poetry—textual or visual, traditional or avant-garde, language or not—spend a few hours in the Corner and have fun.


The Discovery of Night

Tonight, I’ve added a link in my sidebar to the Finnish webzine Nokturno, which its proprietor, Marko J. Niemi, describes as a “kind of a Finnish UbuWeb.” Nokturno includes a good selection of digital, visual, and sound poetry from across the planet, but especially from Finland. Foreign artists include Václav Havel (former president of the Czech Republic as well as a onetime concrete poet), Eduardo Kac (Brazilian-born media artist and holopoet), and Ana María Uribe (Argentine concrete and digital poet, who died last year). Finnish artists include Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (text-manipulator, visual poet, and mailartist), Karri Kokko (baseball fanatic, poet, and recent convert to text manipulation), and well known conceptual and other poet Leevi Lehto. Nokturno has lots of interesting material in its pages, though a command of Finnish will help you understand the content.


Where is the Sidebar on This Blog?

A note from Brian Campbell made me realize that some people using Internet Explorer as their browser might not be seeing this weblog correctly (although I regularly check it with IE myself on three different computers). So if you’re running IE (or any other browser), leave a comment telling me if the sidebar for this blog appears just to the right of the main text—or if it appears stuck at the bottom of the page. Thanks.

ecr. l’inf.