"Benito Vergara" <bvergara@sfsu.edu> wrote:
Yeah, I'd recommend that book to any one on the Zorn list for whom the concept of a "non-narrative text" isn't a turn-off.
So who else would you recommend, along the same lines?
Well, there's a lot of ways to go there. Just thinking of North American poets (to get around issues of translation and how that works & doesn't work for non-narrative works), enough different strains of avant garde writing throughout the last hundred years have been functionally "non-narrative" that one could make a case for that being the normative mode of writing by poets. For example, I have a hard time reading most of what, say, Charles Olson or Allen Ginsberg or Jack Spicer wrote as being "narrative." Of course, Billy Collins still sells more books than most other living American poets, so go figure. But if you're looking specifically for things that may be similar to Lyn Hejinian's work, let me suggest a few writers and books: Bruce Andrews: especially I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism); and maybe Lip Service. This first of these is particularly disjunctive on the level of phrase and/or sentence. Rae Armantrout: She doesn't have any long sustained works, but Veil is a recently published volume of collected poems that I think is quite good. Clark Coolidge: ROVA Improvisations; Own Face; Quartz Hearts; The ROVA book has been mentioned - because it includes the second section of re-writes of the first section's more direct responses to the music, it provides some useful insights into some of Coolidge's processes. The other two books are earlier collections of short pieces. Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Drafts 1-38 Again, a book that includes works that fold back onto earlier pieces in the series. For me the process is still rather oblique, but I've enjoyed reading much of this sequence as it's been developing. Barbara Guest: any of the poetry Leslie Scalapino: most anything Ron Silliman: most anything Some writers living in and around Vancouver BC may also be of interest: Deanna Ferguson, Lisa Robertson (especially Debbie: An Epic), Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak. If you're in the Bay area (sfsu.edu IS San Francisco State, right?) a lot of these things will be available in some libraries cause the Bay area was a focal point for and is home to many writers working in this vein. & there's probably at least one writer in the SFSU English Dept who could point you in other related directions. &, since this just showed up in the zorn digest: "Benito Vergara" <bvergara@sfsu.edu> wrote:
I missed everything below the quoted sections...
In a very different mode, Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris
And interested readers can download it here: http://www.ubu.com/ubu/silliman_sunset.html
Let me point out that in general <http://www.ubu.com/ubu/index.html> has several texts that'd probably be of interest. & for anyone still reading this far who has an interest in avant garde writing more generally, the UBU Web <http://www.ubu.com/> is an amazing archive of sound poetry recordings, digital reproductions of visual/concrete poetry, and much more. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com