24 June 2013

Jeff Davis on Charles Olson

MadHatters’ Review is an annual online multimedia magazine.

Issue 12 of MadHatters Review featured an essay by Jeff Davis on Charles Olson. Olson was an American poet infrequently discused today. Wikipedia's entry proposes that "in Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the poet's breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic."

According to Davis, Olson "thought big," as in Olson's Primordia, with a necessary "shift in human subjectivity itself."  In support of this view, he quotes Primordia:
(1) Man as object is equitable to all other nature, is neutron, is on the one hand thus no more than a tree or pitchblende but is, therefore returned to an abiding place, the primordial, where he can rest again as he did once with less knowledge to confirm his humilitas.
       It is as force that the eye of nature sees man. Seen so, the animal and the bones of him do not disturb the remainder of organic and inorganic creation. As force man has his place, and wonder. It is enough, more than he knows. For instead of his own alone he is in touch with all life, and image and fable come back.
       They come back because the elements are not so dissimilar: season, cello, shield, trio, sphere. When man is reminded of his place in the order of nature, when he finds himself cut down to size, he goes through a franciscan or ovidian revolution, whichever you prefer, and acquires some of his original modesty about force, his own and otherwise. Beasts and angels, devils, witches, trees and stones, cocks and centaurs are necessary items of human phenomenology (and only, and exactly, in that science). They are dangerous outside that moral frame – as we have had recent occasion to know.3 

The Diagram

The Diagram has been around for more than ten years, and during that time has demonstrated a unique editorial bias toward an unusual mix of text and schematic. Sometimes the text edges toward the biological, as in Danielle Aquiline's poem "West Coast Entomology," or the astrophysical, as in Dan Albergotti's untitled "Alone."

The editors' interests are in

. . . art and writing that demonstrates / interaction; the processes / of things, both inner and outer; how certain functions are accomplished; how things become. How they expire. How they move or churn, or stand.
We'll consider anything you see fit to send us.

Kairo

Kairo describes itself as a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. The journal has been online since 1996. From Kairo's About page:
We publish "webtexts," which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. Webtexts are scholarly examinations of topics related to technology in English Studies fields (e.g., rhetoric, composition, technical and professional communication, education, creative writing, language and literature) and related fields such as media studies, informatics, arts technology, and others. Besides scholarly webtexts, Kairos publishes teaching-with-technology narratives, reviews of print and digital media, extended interviews with leading scholars, interactive exchanges, "letters" to the editors, and news and announcements of interest.

MadHatters Review

The MadHatters Review was started by the late Carol Novack, who was both a poet and an attorney. Her past included work in the Criminal Appeals Bureau of the New York Legal Aid Society and later as a solo practitioner, according to this tribute,
. . . championing the causes of artists and the underprivileged.
More from the tribute
From the mid-2000s, she began publishing her gender-bending hybrid metafiction— “her little aliens,” as she called them—in many journals and anthologies, including: American Letters & Commentaries, Exquisite Corpse, La Petite Zine, LIT, Mississippi Review, Notre Dame Review and Caketrain. In 2005 she founded the Mad Hatters’ Review, one of the first online journals with a true multimedia approach, marrying literature, film, art and music in an annual collage of some of the most explosive arts on the web.
Others have since then taken over the cause of her literary project.


RIP: New York Foundation for the Arts Quarterly

The NYFA quarterly and its associated news feed, ArtsWire, ceased publication in 2005. When in operation, it provided a steady stream of arts and literature news.

PoetrySuperHighway

PoetrySuperHighway has been listed on the poetryandscience.com ezine page since the early 2000's. It has an active user base and is energetically curated with regular email communications. It also has a live component.

Cortland Review



Cortland Review first came to the attention of PoetryandScience more than a decade ago (1997) and it's still breathing. Cortland does not feature science content particularly, but has demonstrated a commitment to its web presence from the beginning, with extensive content for past issues still online.