On airplane to Vermont . . .

Eleni Stecopoulos's "Visceral Poetics: Language, Energy and the Chronic Syndrome of the West." Really great dissertation.

Some quotes from it . . .

from Paul Metcalf used 2x in book: "Because, if you drown, who cares? And if you don't plunge, who cares?"

from Novalis: Poet, inventor of symptoms.

from Glissant (the Poetics of Relation): It is possible to build the tower--in every language

She takes from Grossman "xylophone" or "xylophenie" for Artaud's idiolect.

Two books to read: Andresen, Linguistics in America, 1769-1924 and Carr, Inventing The American Primitive.

Also, to blurb for Tinfish, Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco. Blurb as of now goes:

The US has been at war since its beginnings. And it has taken this to new levels in the last fifty or so years. In response, US poetry that matters has become one long, necessary lament. One could dismiss this as poets rhyming while Rome falls. But it makes more sense to see poetry as one of the places where the ravages of war--on the psyche, on the land, on the culture—are called out and called into question. Barbara Jane Reyes's *poeta en san francsico* is a necessary part of this emerging tradition of poetry. This book looks at what wars in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq have done to the home front, to the city streets. It is a multilingual litany that forcefully articulates what it means to be living as a woman in a nation of veterans, virgins, and dark angels.

Damon and Livingston, intro to Poetry & Cultural Studies.

Before I left . . . Etal Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. Will post blurb when I get back to Oakland.

Cindy Franklin's "Rethinking Intelligence, Revisioning Social Norms: Memoir and Disability Studies." -- focus on how memoirs might or might not turn from independence (self-absorption?) to reciprocity. Made me want to go out and get Berube's Life as We Know It. Always lots to learn from her insistence on structural all the time.

Also on airplane to and from LA for CIRA conference, did a quick skimming read of Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Distintegration. On language splinter, not language expansion. Learned the terms abstand, languages that drifted apart naturally such as english and german, and ausbrau, languages that are separated by active intervention of language planners, linguists, etc., such as hindi and urdu. Also interested in the Literary Agreement of 1850 and the Novi Sad Agreement of 1954.

While in San Diego and Baja with Bill, read Juan Gonzalez, Fallout: the Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse.

And two essays in most recent New Left Review. Pascale Casanova's "Literature as a World" is hugely helpful. Must buy and read the World Republic of Letters immediately.

Darko Suvin's "Border Crossings" somewhat helpful; a complicating of various diffences in position between exiles, emigres, expatriots, and refugees. Comes with charts.

Spent last week preparing paper for CIRA conference that Walter Lew organized on Poetry, Pedagogies, and Internationalisms and reading other participants papers. A number of which were really great. Heriberto Yepez had great lengthy paper on Latin American responses to modernism.

Walter also passed on Daniel Won-gu Kim's "In the Tradition: Amiri Baraka, Black Liberation, and Avant Garde Praxis in the US." Insistent that Baraka's politics not be absorbed into avant garde frame. Really smart article.

Ku'ualoha Ho'omanawanui's "He Lei Ho'oheno no na Kau a Kau: Language, Performance, and Form in Hawaiian Poetry." The Contemporary Pacific, 2005.