#grahhr

Photo of Joseph Beuys' performance piece "I Like America and America Likes Me," 1974.

Graahr! or, Thanks, along the Way

Here’s some footage of Michael McClure reading his “Tantra 49” at the lion cages at the SF Zoo—it’s from Richard O. Moore’s amazing series USA: Poetry, from 1966. I’m looking at it because I’m back in Pittsburgh, at the Cathedral of Learning, working today a bit on my Fall 2013 class-to-be, “Interspecies Communication.” I’m using an image, a screen grab from the YouTube of the film, as the frontispiece of my syllabus: with that 60’s era film, the image has such patina, even pre-Instragram. (If anybody happens to read this and wants to recommend a text for “Interspecies Communication,” I’m very open to it. I’m at cdlegere [at] pitt.edu.)

In the meantime, I’ve just been thinking about how much my admittedly still inchoate thinking for the Houghton/“Tubes”/“‘Uh’” project has been advanced by a few people who I’d like to credit or credit again. First, Chloe Garcia-Roberts and Christina Davis, the librarians at the WPR, who helped guide me through the library’s resources, went out for coffee and sushi with me, and introduced me to… Christina email-introduced me to Karin Roffman, a Professor at West Point, who is writing a much-anticipated biography of John Ashbery’s formative years, and who wrote to me very helpfully describing Ashbery’s attendance at Stevens’ readings, and the class he took on “Twentieth-Century American Poetry” with F.O. Matthiessen. Christina also email-introduced me to the poet Susan Howe, who very generously sent me an email with her personal recollections of “Matty,” Ashbery, and Stevens, and pointed me to Stevens’ letter about Matthiessen’s suicide, which I’ve embedded below.