UPDATED with videos of the performance. In the heart of St. Gallen, a town not far from Zurich, where Dada began, there is a haven for the outlandish and the curiously extravagant. It is a place for the exchange of ideas and information, passionate discussion, chamber music, and for poetry. The American poet Louise Landes Levi, who is based in Japan, performed there on Tuesday, June 7.
Imagine That!
Late Light Verse: Song Lyrics by William Burroughs
Written in 1995, “Pantapon Rose” refers to an uptown prostitute in Manhattan who sometimes sold the opium alkaloid Pantapon to junkies in need of a fix. Burroughs put her in “Naked Lunch.”
‘Dread’ by Florian Vetsch
A poem changes with each reading. This one was not written about the catastrophe in Ukraine. But it could have been. It is translated from the German original and extracted from the book ‘Tanger Trance,’ which was published in 2010 in four languages.
Preview: The Many Ghosts of Ultrazone
William Burroughs is not around anymore. He died in 1997. But his ghost definitely is. It has returned to Tangier in “Ultrazone,” a moody yet drole forthcoming novel.
Annette Gordon-Reed on the Art of Biography
The distiguished historian is slated to give this year’s Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture on Wednesday (May 4 at 6 p.m. ET), in a free, online presentation open to the public. Her investigative, multigenerational biography “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” won both the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award.
Book Review
Free Sonnets That Even Blake Would Favor
“All That Would Ever After Not Be Said” contains a sequence of free sonnets of experience that even Blake himself would favour. These small poems are tears for the tongue They expose existential silence and the pressures of art to countermand it. They are dark diamonds. — David Erdos
TIME TRAVELS: When a Poet Clocks More Than the Hours
If you think the cover design of A. Robert Lee’s TIME TRAVELS recalls the design of City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, you are not wrong. According to its editor, the Cast Iron Poetry Series is intended to emulate that classic line of chapbooks. Lee’s is the 18th title released to date.
Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate
‘I’ve sometimes been asked why he wasn’t as famous as Burroughs and Ginsberg, and the other celebrated Beat writers, and I’ve always said he needed a better press agent or a better strategy. Until he was taken up by San Francisco’s radical gay activists, he was strictly a literary man—which was not enough to vault him to fame. His poems, fine as they were, didn’t make headlines.’ — from the Prologue
A Poet Speaks of the Debacle of Our Lives
When I spoke of a church without a roof over its head
So that the heavens looked down upon it
Rained down upon it
And now of course
If I spoke of a ruin of a church in Odessa
I could be speaking of the future
That will soon be past
As my past will soon be over
The Phenomenon Called AOC
“How did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an unknown bartender and activist, become the youngest woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of its most talked-about figures? And what is her possible future?” Those are the two biggest questions to be posed to Lisa Miller, Rebecca Traister, and Michael Kazin at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Craig Unger: On Trump, Putin, and the GOP
This interview looks at a huge can of worms poisoning American democracy.
He notes that Trump was identified as a potential KGB asset in the Cold War days, details a lavish junket held for powerful former GOP Congressman Tom DeLay, and talks about more than 250 million dollars that poured “without even breaking a sweat” into super-PACs aligned with Russian interests.
What Would Freud Say About Current Conditions?
I have no idea. But you can’t read the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” without believing he had written it only yesterday or without believing he had hope for the future. The fact that the book was written in 1929 does throw his hope into doubt, if it was intended as prognostication, which — to be frank — it was. But it’s still a great read.
Two Writers, Two Legacies
![Nelson Algren, 1962 [Photo: Steve Deutch]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Nelson-Algren-1962-Stephen-Deutch-copy-200x200.jpg)
Nelson Algren, as great a writer as ever came out of Chicago, was born on this day in 1909.
Slaughterhouse 6
‘The crows scream
and fly to town in whirring flight:
soon it will snow —
happy he who now still has a home!’ …
The world — a gate
to a thousand wastelands dumb and cold!
Whoever has lost
what you have lost, rests nowhere. … — Friedrich Nietzsche
That’s the Way to Travel
Jan Heller Levi & Marlies Pekarek
Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
‘A Poem for Patriots’ and ‘Upside the Morning’
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.
World of Trouble
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).