Beginnings and Plumbing: Function and efficacy in poetry



The Acoustic Prehistory of Poetry, Brunella Antomarini, transl. Derek Gromadzki

Lorine Niedecker: The Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy

additional selected readings from Daisy Hildyard, Claire Louise Bennet, Amy Clampitt, Joanna Field



 I’ve been away from poetry
many months

and now I must rake leaves 
with nothing blowing

between your house
and mine*



Overheard once in a webinar: “we are constantly rehearsing for a show we will never perform.” How does maintenance sustain poetry as plainly as it does living, keeping a house. What are the sounds, and how does one write a vital physical and emotional vulnerability without predetermining it? “Condensery” which makes itself of drying ink or sound, not manufactured. Things that show their function, beauty, strangeness, terror at once.  A video camera attached to a well-driller’s bit and the voices heard from ground level. How to handle a glint of function which carries with it the linked weight of that function. Never really being able to catch up.



Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what’s got away in my life—
Was enough to carry me thru.*



Reading, discussion, and experiments in audio diary on the practice of possibility (of knowing) (through effective pathways) (functional physical) (as in, described) (described as in traced, the pathways of function)



 Weekly meetings for six weeks, dates TBD,  send an email to join


$0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 or skill trade 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000



*Lorine Niedecker, from “For Paul and Other Poems” and “Remember my little granite pail?”