Post-Christmas Bumper Post

It appears that the festive period does not apply to poetry, with feverish blog posting and site updating occurring even on Christmas Day. Below is a summary of the most interesting fings what 'appened between Christmas and New Year.

• Goodbye Harold Pinter
• Playing games (video games?)
• The Other Room (video of December's reading) and some feedback
• Holocaust love
• Happy Birthday JD Salinger
• Cell-phone fiction
• Rumours, rumours, rumours, and more on the rumours
• Al Filreis on David Bunn
• K. Silem Mohammad reads at Columbia University in December 2008
• Source Material
• Visual poetry
• Jean Dubuffet at IBM
• Celan, Celan

Normal service resumes on Openned from today, so expect a flurry of posts in the coming week to catch up with all that's been missed.

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Season's Greetings

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Openned will reconvene on Monday 5th January. image by Tom Raworth

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Malton, England

Eat the meat.

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The Last Christmas in the Whitehouse

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHvwWQIPRbw&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/the-painfully-unwatchable_b_151472.html&feature=player_embedded] Someone got paid to make this. In the Whitehouse.

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Paid to Not Write

Then we'd see who does it because they love it:

Western governments have spent many billions bailing out the banks in these crunched-up-credit days; and the US motor car industry is, even as I blog, begging the US govt for billions more in similar subvention. The next move? Paul Greenberg, writing for the New York Times, thinks that governments should put billions into paying writers not to write.

via RHUL Creative Writers Weblog

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Games

enemy6 Sweet Old Etcetera gamegame6 via Vispo

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Bacteria Man

By Bill Drennan, over at Otoliths.

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GALATEA RESURRECTS

An absolutely massive thing edited by Eileen Tablos:

Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets selected primarily by guest editors, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles.

Index to issues.

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PoemTalk

It's the Al Filreis again:

For each episode of PoemTalk four friends and colleagues in the world of poetry and poetics convene to collaborate on a close (but not tooclose) reading of a single poem. We talk through and around the poem, sometimes beyond it, often disagreeing, always excited by what we discover as we talk, and perhaps after twenty-five minutes we've opened up the verse to a few new possibilities and have gained for a poem that interests us some new readers and listeners.

Episodes so far include Oppen, Stein, Pound, Hejinian, Ginsberg and Perelmen.

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Faits Divers de la Poésie Américain et Britannique

Sometimes you wish you had thought of it first:

Inspired by the anonymous "Faits Divers" which for 6 months in 1906 appeared in the French daily Le Matin, a new anonymous collective has launched its own blog of "Faits Divers," with news briefs from the American and British Poetry Worlds.  ... Since the facts/news stories that Feneon works with are those "hot off the wire," and come in over the "telegraph lines," they are already of necessity brief and dryily "factual" "telegrammatic" style, one which influenced a great many early Modernist poets, fictioneers and artists.

via DBC and Tom Raworth

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