Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Osman-Goldsmith podcast
Back in December of '04 I was finishing up another semester teaching English 88, my course on modern and contemporary American poetry. In the final "chapter" of the course I ended by having the students read two contemporary poets — Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Then, as it happened, both of these people were in the Writers House at the same time, so I asked my students to come back to the House for a special evening session, and we spent an hour or so talking with Jena and Kenny. We recorded it, and you can find mp3's and a summary of the discussion here.
It will help to know that the person being discussed in the middle of the excerpt is Jackson Mac Low. He gets named after a while but at first it might not be clear. The session took place on the very day that Mac Low died.
Today we released a new episode in our series of PennSound podcasts featuring a 16-minute excerpt from the Osman-Goldsmith. Here is a link directly to the podcast recording.