e·ratio

a noun sing e·ratio 12 · 2009

with poetry by David Chikhladze, Gautam Verma, David Rushmer, Anne Fitzgerald, Mary Ann Sullivan, Ruth Lepson, Virginia Konchan, Sandra Huber, Paige H. Taggart, Marcia Arrieta, Sean Patrick Hill, Travis Macdonald, Mark Lamoureux, Camille Martin, Nathan Thompson, Philip Byron Oakes, Cyril Wong, and Derek Henderson

edited by gregory vincent st. thomasino




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“For the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind.”

—Schopenhauer


In a dispute by correspondence with a young admirer of his named Kugelmann, Marx explains the application of the dialectic to current events. It was 1870 and Kugelmann could not see why Germany should turn her defensive war against France into an aggressive and imperialistic war. Marx replies that the dialectic consists not only in opposing another force but in overcoming it and so fusing the two elements. Then he writes to Engels: “When a man attacks me on the street, according to K., I have only the right to ward off his blows; to strike him in return and knock him down would be, according to him, to become an aggressor. It is clear none of these fellows understand anything about the dialectic.”

—from Darwin, Marx, Wagner by Jacques Barzun





















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May Sullivan doing H.D.

Video Poems by Mary Ann Sullivan

de Campos Tower of Babel Revisited

Adaptive Language

Shaking the Spiders Out



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MYSTERIOUS VISPO DISCOVERED at JAMESTOWN



























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Term as in Aftermath is Alan Halsey's new full-length collection of poetry.

The Dedication reads, in part,
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts is for Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

Wow. Thank you, Alan.







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E·ratio Editions is happy to announce the publication of Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler.


Correspondance (a sketchbook) by Joseph F. Keppler. Digital art.

“What can I call this work? Neither painting nor critique yet informed by art, the following are sketches to me. Rather than executed on paper, they’re drawings designed using the pervasive computer. These graphics approach oeuvre subjectively, not as meticulous copies or art history illustrations, but as some poetic efforts. My laptop simply opens a new capacity for thinking about art and drawing it. As studies these are (a)musing tributes as well as appropriate(d) attributes.” —Joseph F. Keppler, from the introduction.


Pierre Auguste Renoir












Kurt Schwitters












Claude Monet












What the cognoscenti are saying about Correspondance (a sketchbook):

“Readability and meaning construction, as well as the relation between the visual and the literary, have been concerns of Joe’s for many years. In Correspondance we see Joe, who is also an astute critic on both literary and visual art, take an artist’s approach, a visual poet’s approach, a visual artist’s approach. Joe Keppler is very unusual in his deep engagement both with art history and the literary. He’s a poet, a visual poet, a sound poet, a sculptor of steel, a photographer, a painter, a polyartist. Not only in his practice but in his wide reading and viewing of contemporary and historical work. I don’t know anybody else as voracious as he is not only in his own artistic practice but in learning about art and philosophy. He is an incredibly learned man as well as an important poet and artist. He shows us what it now means to be literate.” —Jim Andrews Vispo ~ Langu(im)age

“Correspondance is suffused with correspondence, bright exchanges between artist and subject, playful responses between form, light, color, and art history. Poet and sculptor, Joe Keppler brings both mediums to bear, poetry and sculpture, word and material, hand in hand. Keppler adds a third-dimension to the graceful dance (Joe the humble artist says, ‘bump’) through his lifelong study of painting and sculpture: allusions to significant works, quotations of style, and adaptations that bring old works to new life. In this series of sketches, poet, artist, and art will wheel you across the dance floors of the page.” —Crag Hill Poetry Scorecard



Also available from E·ratio Editions:

#5. Six Comets Are Coming by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Volume I of the collected works including Go and Go Mirrored, with revised introductions, corrected text and restored original font.

#4. The Logoclasody Manifesto. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino on logoclasody, logoclastics, eidetics and pannarrativity. Addenda include the Crash Course in Logoclastics, Concrete to Eidetic (on visual poetry) and On Mathematical Poetry.

“As an exegetical object, Logoclasody documents quite brilliantly an ontological crisis in poetry and is, by design, an exemplar both of the problem and the solution. St.Thomasino conceives the central aporia of writing as one of recovering, from the ruin of a necessarily incomplete knowledge, the deep-structure(s) of representation. And by exploiting the tension between grammatical function and the irruptive energies of text itself, the St. Thomasinian program deploys logos as an expressive motif, through which are diffracted both meaning and its contested relationship to language.” —Scott Wilkerson, Columbus State University

#3. Waves by Márton Koppány. Visual poetry.

“These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions.” —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino on Márton Koppány

#2. Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

#1. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett In the Bennett Tree. Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.






E·ratio Editions, a series of elegantly produced, quick loading e-chaps, is reading for poetry, innovative narrative prose, critical and theoretical essays, and digital art. Please see the Contact page for further guidelines and where to send. Query editor with sample.

taxis de pasa logos

From the book, I Wanted to Write a Poem, by William Carlos Williams (Beacon Press, Beacon Hill, Boston, 1958):

William Carlos Williams:

"The suggestion to collect my poems was a lovely gesture from my own gang and I was deeply moved by it. Louis Zukofsky did most of the work of making the collection. Needless to say, it didn't sell at all. I was pleased when Wallace Stevens agreed to write the Preface but nettled when I read the part where he said I was interested in the anti-poetic. I had never thought consciously of such a thing. As a poet I was using a means of getting an effect. It's all one to me—the anti-poetic is not something to enhance the poetic—it's all one piece. I didn't agree with Stevens that it was a conscious means I was using. I have never been satisfied that the anti-poetic had any validity or even existed."

Wallace Stevens, from the Preface to Collected Poems 1921-1931 (The Objectivist Press, New York, 1934):

"His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit's cure. He needs it as a naked man needs shelter or as an animal needs salt. To a man with a sentimental side the anti-poetic is that truth, that reality to which all of us are forever fleeing."



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A reading list. A Propaedeutic for the Logoclast.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Sonnet No. 124
The Phoenix and Turtle — Shakespeare
To His Coy Mistress
Eyes and Tears — Andrew Marvell
Sea Poppies — H. D.
The Red Wheelbarrow — William Carlos Williams
Mana Aboda — T. E. Hulme
“All in green went my love riding”
“anyone lived in a pretty how town”
“all ignorance toboggans into know” — Cummings
Broad Street Drag '87 — Alan Halsey



Language. A shift in consciousness. Indirect communication. To recover the poetic and to renew its purpose. Indeed — to restore the "poet's eye"!

We find poetry in language, and sometimes in unexpected places. This discovery is for me the thrill, the frisson of being a poet. My influences, my affinities, I have found in trobar clus, in cubism, in minimalism, in imagism, and in grammaticism (my term, for the interior form of logoclasody), the mediaeval grammarians, the entire articulatory movement (the expressibility, the emerging-in-language) that is logoclasody.









































At last Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno is available on region 1 DVD. Oliver Reed is Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Judith Paris is Elizabeth Siddal.

Bocca baciata non perda ventura, anzi rinnuova come fa la luna.





















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OCHO #21 published by CASA MENENDEZ is now available.

With poets Laynie Browne, Abigail Child, Joe Elliot, Laura Elrick, Elizabeth Fodaski, Joanna Fuhrman, Anthony Hawley, Drew Gardner, Jessica Grim, Michael Lally, Douglas Messerli, Bill Marsh, Christina Strong and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Nick Piombino (Editor) Toni Simon (Cover artist)


This edition of OCHO is dedicated to the memory of Emma Bee Bernstein.

I'd like to direct you, dear reader, to this article by Douglas Messerli at his Green Integer Blog.

There are no words.

(I imagined you crying and it made me cry.)



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"A love affair obviously, hints of incest, revelation and even murder (the marginalia is essential).  And yet the whole thing may burn inside that sun in the puddle. Perhaps the strongest aspect of Stephen's Lake is the reoccurring sense that an emotional state is every bit as visible, and valid, as the physical world."

—Jake Berry on Stephen's Lake, a novel in parts

















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Cubism To Be Franc
by William Conlon











































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Post_Moot   A Radically Inclusive Inauguration Anthology

Inauguration Peace Poem by Ruth Lepson & Gregory St. Thomasino at Post_Moot


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There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

— A tale told by G. I. Gurdjieff



Any Prayer may be heard by the Higher Powers and a corresponding answer obtained only if uttered thrice:

Firstly, for the welfare or the peace of the souls of one's parents.
Secondly, for the welfare of one's neighbor.
And only thirdly, for oneself personally.

— G. I. Gurdjieff



























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G.,

This is Mariza, from Portugal. She sings Fado, which is a kind of song that carries deep sorrow in it. She is a Fadista.

Genta da Minha Terra:  In this she sings to the people of Portugal, my people I carry this sorrow in me for you. That's because she is carrying on the tradition of being a fadista.... and so she needs to assume much sorrow in her soul to do it properly....to keep the Portuguese Tradition going. Notice how she actually cries at the end...and the Portuguese people applaud her becuase they know she is truly crying.....

Barco Negro:  is about woman who watches her husband leave on a boat and must bear with the taunts of other women who say he will never return (because of bad weather). She tries to shrug them off by saying he will always be with her.

She is my favorite vocalist. Julie Andrews runs a close second.

May

PS: And see this video poem by Caterina Davinio:




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Hallucination
by Márton Koppány


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Sex and Poetry
This episode:  Sex and the Collage Poem

Or you could say poetry is like sex, in which case you want to ask yourself: If this poem is sex, do I want to have sex with it? Well, if it’s a collage poem you don’t know where that poetry’s been, and the poet who wrote it really doesn’t want you to know; or maybe that poet will tell you, but then that’s like that poem saying, Yes, I want you to have sex with me, but just not with me exactly, I mean with these other poems.




Merry Christmas, Everybody.

Alan Halsey
from In White Writing


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e·ratio loves you.

poem, 1

taut, to auto


poem, 2

Chloris chloris (the greenfinch) is a tautonym.


poem, 3

comma, roulette


poem, 4

dobro, fuck



found haiku

merrily, merri-
ly, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream



The Amsterdam Bed-In

"Begin——"
"Stop——"
"Break——"
"Go on——"
"All right——"
"And——"
"Leave that bit out——"
"Finish it——"
"Fine——"
"A bed-in? I don't follow you——"



Still-Life with Bonsai and Mauve Dancing Girl

informal upright
formal upright
slant

rock clasping
root over rock
slant

clump

swimming
cascade
literati

informal upright
formal upright
clump

forest
broom
rock clasping
twin trunk
multi-trunk
slant

clump

David Chikhladze.


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Guillaume Apollinaire's Il Pleut.


























Manuscript, 1916



























Typeset version, 1918





























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a noun sing e·ratio 11 · 2008

with poetry by David Appelbaum, Donald Wellman, Mary Ann Sullivan, Joseph F. Keppler, Patrick Lawler, James Stotts, David Annwn, David Rushmer, Melanie Brazzell, Jennifer Juneau, John M. Bennett, Geof Huth, John Mercuri Dooley, Mark Cunningham, Derek Owens, Gautam Verma, and Clark Lunberry



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Thérèse Dreaming



"I believe deeply in the genius of painting, which parallels that of childhood. I've used painting as a language without really having decided to do so, because it suits me better than writing. Writing tries to be too explicit and go directly to a meaning. . . . For me, writing can only be in the ellipses, where I express myself. . . ."

--Balthus

My prose poem, “Untitled No. 2,” has been translated into français by Éric Dejaeger (and appears in the print ’zine, Microbe, #48, Juillet-Août 2008).


Sans titre n˚2

L’artiste peint sur sa toile deux vieux citoyens grisonnants. Ils sont tous deux perdus et leurs corps bégayent: vers l’est, vers l’ouest, arrêtent le mouvement, repartent, arrêtent le mouvement, repartent. L’un deux, une femme, elle veut l’autoroute. L’autre, un homme, il recherche la place du marché. La femme est maintenant un oiseau—un oiseau brun commun sans marques distinctives—et elle s’envole de la toile. Le vieil homme, vu qu’il a deux pieds gauches, marche en rond dans le sens opposé aux aiguilles d’une montre.


Untitled No. 2

The artist paints upon his canvas two old and graying citizens. Both are lost and their bodies stutter: Eastward, westward, stop movement, start, stop movement, start. One of them, a woman, she wants the highway. The other, a man, he is searching for the marketplace. The woman is now a bird—a common brown bird with no distinctive markings—and she flies off the canvas. The old man, since he has two left feet, walks on into counter-clockwise circles.


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KOPPÁNY WAVES TO E·RATIO EDITIONS

E·ratio Editions is (no, seriously) really happy to announce the publication of Waves, an e-chap by Márton Koppány.

Waves by Márton Koppány. "These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions."

Also available from E·ratio Editions:

#1. In the Bennett Tree. Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett “In the Bennett Tree.” Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.


"Goings On" from In the Bennett Tree.


’Twas a lark, the sheaf in Hamburg
(empty form, “flit-fingered” in a lot);

sepsis-clothes and “high” remember,
glittered dark—

the rank of clouds and GOINGS ON.
“Wet-” parked, clawed sore, flown,

removed and so rainy off your Beth,
I “But, but, but” your flaily “Nein.”



"Eaten" from In the Bennett Tree.


Off your edgy blonde / stiff / “couch” talk—
cure(-ator’s) unsaid (maid) docent, ’er

heaven’s bent-more norm(atic) jerkings (“leg show”)
behind the screen and off the hedge flaunt.

I sought, I mouth’d all through EATEN cank’r
for the curator’s plastic buttocks. Tall & dominant.

(Face it, Miss Sanders, it’s your neotorso.) No
concrete assurance in this “rubberite’s” world, but

diap’r’d elders’ emissions (“commodity”), style
tribes, “tight-lacing,” catsuits, “our master key.”




#2. Mending My Black Sweater by Mary Ann Sullivan. Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

Click here to see Mary Ann Sullivan's digital/interactive poem, Shaking the Spiders Out.

E·ratio Editions

E·ratio Editions, a series of elegantly produced, quick loading e-chaps, is reading for poetry, innovative narrative prose and recollection and critical and theoretical essays. Please see the Contact page for further guidelines and where to send. Query editor with sample and proposal. 

E·ratio is reading for poetry for issue 11.

E·ratio publishes quality poetry in the postmodern idioms with an emphasis on the intransitive.

E·ratio Poetry Journal and E·ratio Editions, edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

E·ratio Poetry Journal

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Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, The Occult, and Poetry and Mysticism, in 1956.  Read the interview: Colin Wilson on poetry and the peak experience.




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"Waves No. 2" by Márton Koppány.





"Waves No. 2" is included in Márton's just-published volume, ENDGAMES


















ENDGAMES is published by Otoliths.



























See Márton Koppány's work online at e·ratio:

IT IS THE SAME

Dedication Poems



And here I append my review of Márton's 2003 volume, Investigations & Other Sequences. . . .


"In a certain sense all my work is an investigation." (From "By Way of Introduction," the interview that prefaces the volume.) Márton Koppány's most important investigations are the ones into the forms (of cummunication) that will express the poetry that is inside him. These communicative forms (not stunts but expressions of feelings and of ideas) are not entirely verbal, for they ask us to see, but as though we could raise (or close) our eyes and behold, and contemplate, the concept! It seems to me Mr. Koppány's poetry, as instanced here, at least, is thoroughly conceptual. But as though to say, I want to put this concept into your mind! I want you to reflect upon this concept and its ramifications! These works are minimalist by design, but should we paraphrase the thought channeled therein, the effect would be encyclopedic, ranging through philosophy, psychology, politics, and the human emotions. I'll reproduce here a sequence (as best I can—as the lines appear on the pages, they are as though on 8.5 x 11 pages with black borders or frames, and to my, hmm, interpretation the set-up is to give the sense of deposition, that it should be understood that this is a sequence of lines spread out over sheets of pages). This is "Immortality and Freedom":



a crumpled hope flattened out

a crumpled hope flattened out
the later variant

a torn hope
stuck together
with underlined traces of tearing

a torn hope
stuck together
with disguised traces of tearing
plus text

an untouched
white hope

a hope
replacing
a destroyed hope

a hope
reminding of
the irreplaceable character
of a destroyed hope

an expectation that something
will happen as one wishes

half-crumpled tearings
half-flattened stickings



And this is "It's Another Way" (which occurs over two pages. The text in parentheses is his. I apologize to Mr. Koppány for doing this.):



(on the sheet:)



is it another way?





(outside the sheet; invisible:)



On the first sheet occurs the text in parentheses, and then the line, is it another way? On the second sheet occurs the text in parentheses, and that is all. There is certainly something Cartesian about this, and one naturally thinks of Samuel Beckett for whom "invisibility" was its own inevitability (for "invisibility" read silence). We have a thinking substance (a sort of non-voice) calling us (by a sign, the silent gesture of the printed word, which is as good as a nod or wink or motion of the hand) to an idea, but to know the idea as it knows it, in the character of an idea—that is, in conceptus, in eidos! This points up the utter inadequacy (and truly pedestrian, "man on the street" nature of) the term "visual poetry," for Mr. Koppány's spacial (really, paginal, page for page) arrangements are, like the sentence, to serve as punctuation, and are not in and of themselves poetry, or poetic, rather this poetry—like "immortality" and like "freedom" and like that thinking substance and the impulsions behind its words—or perhaps I should just speak of ideas, these ideas are to the mind. (The eye reads them, but the mind sees them as concepts, knows them as such, knows the idea as idea, and penetrates, and is penetrated, to their essences.)

Investigations & other Sequences is a sort of "Márton Koppány Reader." There is the interview, there are two short letters, there is a bibliography of works in English, and in between are eleven brief sequences of works. May I suggest, for accompaniment: the music of György Ligeti.

Investigations & Other Sequences
by Márton Koppány
Ahadada Books, 2003
ISBN: 0-973223-1-6


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NEW FROM E·ratio Editions.

Mending My Black Sweater

Mending My Black Sweater and other poems by Mary Ann Sullivan. Poems of making conscious, of acceptance and of self-remembering, and of personal responsibility.

Click here to see Mary Ann Sullivan's digital/interactive poem, Shaking the Spiders Out.

E·ratio Editions, a series of elegantly produced, quick loading e-chaps featuring poetry, innovative narrative prose and recollection and critical and theoretical essays.

Also available: #1. In the Bennett Tree.  Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett “In the Bennett Tree.” Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.


E·ratio Poetry Journal and E·ratio Editions, edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

E·ratio is reading for poetry for issue 11.

E·ratio publishes quality poetry in the postmodern idioms with an emphasis on the intransitive.


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Announcing E·ratio Editions.

E·ratio Editions, a series of elegantly produced, quick loading e-chaps featuring poetry, innovative narrative prose and recollection and critical and theoretical essays.

Just published: #1. In the Bennett Tree.  Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino joins John M. Bennett “In the Bennett Tree.” Collaborative poems, images, an introduction and a full-length critical essay pay homage to American poet John M. Bennett.


"Eaten" from In the Bennett Tree.


Off your edgy blonde / stiff / “couch” talk—
cure(-ator’s) unsaid (maid) docent, ’er

heaven’s bent-more norm(atic) jerkings (“leg show”)
behind the screen and off the hedge flaunt.

I sought, I mouth’d all through EATEN cank’r
for the curator’s plastic buttocks. Tall & dominant.

(Face it, Miss Sanders, it’s your neotorso.) No
concrete assurance in this “rubberite’s” world, but

diap’r’d elders’ emissions (“commodity”), style
tribes, “tight-lacing,” catsuits, “our master key.”



E·ratio Poetry Journal and E·ratio Editions, edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

E·ratio is reading for poetry for issue 11.

E·ratio publishes quality poetry in the postmodern idioms with an emphasis on the intransitive.


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online at Otoliths, edited by Mark Young


Six Haiku Cycle

Hay(na)ku after E. T. *


* A note on the Hay(na)ku form:

The first thing about the hay(na)ku is you can't write just one. Once you begin getting the hang of it you just wanna keep going, finding and then refining your (preferably own) technique (and then the challenge is in knowing which ones to keep). The second thing (I find) is the hay(na)ku is conducive to hyperbole. Now, normally, to pile up hyperbole is to risk committing the ridiculous, or else resulting in what I call "squelch." Unlike the Japanese short forms, the hay(na)ku is a one-two punch. The third, and perhaps most conspicuous, thing about the hay(na)ku is, well, 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. And that brings to mind the “six-word novel” challenge. Remember Hemingway’s famous six-word novel? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Now there are ways of getting around the six-word periphery (I prefer "periphery" to, say, "limit" because periphery derives from "to bear," and so it's just something you should "bear in mind"), such as with the compound word (all hail free morphemes!) and the polite use of the hyphen. . . . Anyhow, given my preoccupation with paideia, I've here attempted an infusion of the Hellenic, and so forth. Thanks for taking these, Mark Young. And thanks to you, Eileen Tabios.

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Some samples from Go Mirrored which is now included in the e-chap Six Comets Are Coming available from E·ratio Editions.












































































The digital traduction is at once a translation and a transmission, a giving over and a return. To the poet, and the poetics of chora, the ultimate success is entirely fortuitous, ah but that is the dominant seventh!

From the introduction:

When you can control what you have no control over, it is no longer a matter of control, but of cooperation, coordination, and receptivity. That is, when assuming a posture (a comportment—a matter of the sensibilities) of "least resistance" ["I have no desire to program you."] towards the technology. [And not unlike "apprehending" a "ready-made."]

The technology doesn't know it is "creating poetry." [Language—or in this case, symbols for signifiers for specific letters, symbols and punctuation marks—doesn't know when it is poetry. But what if it did?]
The technology has no consciousness. The technology doesn't know it is "creating." Stochastic traductions are happening all the time. Are you conscious of this? What is the ambit of your "overall"?


"It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music.  But so is the dominant seventh if it happens to put in an appearance."

--John Cage


"Truth is the revealing of what is concealed."

--Martin Heidegger


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My poem Elegy for Christopher Smart is up at Great Works, issue 10, edited by Peter Philpott.


I became interested in Christopher Smart back in 1978, by way of the composer Benjamin Britten. Britten's "Rejoice in the Lamb" (a Festival Cantata), is a setting of parts from Smart's long poem, Jubilate Agno. Included (in Britten's cantata) are some lines from what is probably Smart's best known lines, "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry." Here Smart takes his beloved cat as an example of nature praising God by being simply what the Creator intended it to be. Probably the popularity of this poem is due to its inclusion in Pound's anthology. (Bucke does not include Smart on his list of instances--lesser, imperfect or otherwise--but I think maybe so.)

And now, Hooting Yard present a complete reading of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno with Frank Key and Germander Speedwell.


Dear Frank,

Once again I thank you for bringing this reading/recording to my attention. It is simply extraordinary. It is excellent, it is historical. And if I may, I think it is remarkable the having a female voice in the response, this makes the listening easier, never monotonous (never wearisome!). The voices compliment and complement each other. Smart is my affinity, my kin. He is encyclopaedic. I sense so deeply his sense of isolation, I am so deeply moved by his sense of isolation and frustration. At the 1:56 time there begins the part "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry" and at that pont I followed along in my text. This complete reading of Jubilate Agno has not only been a pleasure and an education for me, it has been an episode.

Yours sincerely,

Gregory