Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics—An Anthology
Dear Layla: “modernist textual montage/collage of a wide-ranging array mixing the personal and the historical”
Dear Layla: “Ezra Pound’s Cantos gave me a way to collage many texts and voices into poems, using material from a range of historical records.”
Dear Layla: “Reznikoff, like many poets, often focuses on the micro to make real the macro.”
Dear Layla: a multitude of voices within the narrative
Cross Worlds: “speaking on what happens both between and across spaces, locations, languages, genres and media.”
Cid Corman: “the main thing is to stay open to others, to listen, that’s the secret, and to look around you.”
“Rap is a black person’s CNN, according to Chuck D.”
“You have to make yourself confident the one project will take its own shape at the proper moment.” —NB
JM reciting Ginsberg’s Moloch in the streets
George Washington on camping against the Iroquois in NY — “The future success of our country relies upon the amount of terror which we can inflict.”
Memory: continuous exercise of that faculty develops it fantastically and the capacity of people to remember is almost unlimited
James Baldwin: “I am as white as you … and you are as black as me.”
Reread Fernando Pessoa—69 personas, four heteronyms
Osip Mandelstam to his wife, Nadezhda: “What are you complaining about? Only in our country is poetry so respected people are even killed because of it.”
“Entertain six impossible ideas before breakfast.”
Upaya: the performance, translation, cross-cultural projects, editing, working in collaboration with projects
Project: a book of the stories I tell over and over about students
“As for the novel, I need my dictionaries, I need my books, I need my references.” —NB
Classics: Truyen Kieu and Ho Xuan Huong—“they are like the Whitman and Dickinson of Vietnam”
Sara Rendell: a white person speaking Navaho — Language does not necessarily belong to a certain people. Language is organic, language flows, language is a source of life.
To read: Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam, al-Rawandi, al-Razi, Adonis, Darwish
The OED defines empathy as “the power of mentally identifying with (and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation.
Tithing: “How many hours a week are you willing to spend in some kind of intervention of cultural reclamation activity?”
–Sunday 7 February 2016
