Dr. Strangeverb: resources (pt 4)
> See Resources Part 1 for Episode 3: Dr. Strangeverb.
Standard Schaefer
— is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His first book of poetry, Nova, was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and published by Sun & Moon Books. His second book, Water & Power, was published by Agincourt in 2005. His third book, Desert Notebook, was published in Italy and the US in 2008. His poetry has been translated into Italian and anthologized internationally, most recently in Nuova Poesia Americana (Mondadori, 2005).
Standard has co-edited several literary and arts journals including Ribot, New Review of Literature, Rhizome and Or. His work has appeared in journals such as Carolina Quarterly, New American Poetry, Aufgabe, and Slope. He has taught writing and literature at Otis College of Art in Los Angeles and California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
His latest book of poems, The Notebook of False Purgatories, is forthcoming from Chax Press (2011).
I spoke with Standard at length about his poetic interests and influences, and then ribbed him in front of a live audience about how the first time I spoke with him I filled notebook pages with the poets and poems he named in a torrent, and the next time he said that nobody really came to mind. I couldn’t ask for better.
Standard told me about reading John Ashbery on a bus as a kid and becoming fascinated by some unlikely phrase, later encountering Ezra Pound’s Cantos in the throes of a fever, as a friend read them aloud in a cabin.
The books Standard sent me home with included the great anthology Poems for the Millennium, vol 2: From Postwar to Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (I now have my own copies of all three volumes); Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency; Dominique Fourcade’s Xbo (translated by Robert Kocik); and my vocabulary did this to me, the collected poetry of Jack Spicer. This last is a favorite of Standard’s. I was feeling a twinge of urgency to get it back to him until I noticed at recent gathering another copy on his shelves and a third in a good stack on the floor. I think I’ll hang on to this one a little longer (especially since I’m also in the wonderful midst of Stephen Vincent’s After Language — Letters to Jack Spicer, but that’s another story for another post, soon to come.)
While I’m at it, I also borrowed another book of Standard’s over the summer — not directly related to my quest for experimental poetics — which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in this kind of thing: Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity, a semantic and cultural history of ideas of modernity, specifically: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. Good stuff.
> See also David Abel, Allison Cobb, Rodney Koeneke, James Yeary, and Mark Owens.