Episode 32: A Passenger on the Bus: Rob Fitterman
In episode #32 poet Rob Fitterman reads from and talks about two of his books: Holocaust Museum (Counterpath 2013), made entirely of captions from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photo archive, and Creve Coeur (Winter Editions 2024), a “translation” of William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson. Following Williams’ form line-by-line, Rob exposes the deep history of anti-Black racism in St. Louis, especially in regards to housing policy. Along the way we discuss his experiences growing up in a lower middle-class Jewish family in suburban St. Louis and his youthful (and continued) fascination with the poetry of “coterie” or group. We revisit the heated conversation around appropriation in poetry and art and consider the “empire-impulse” of some US conceptual poetry. How does “failure hallucinate repair” (Paul Chan’s line)? Why does some art about atrocities elicit a feeling of responsibility and not just empathy? And how might the “I” in a poem be just another “passenger on the bus” and not its driver?
Texts, films, videos and people mentioned and discussed:
Rob Fitterman reading from Holocaust Museum, Counterpath Denver, 2013 (video)
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Jacques Ranciere The Emancipated Spectator
Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law
Andrzej Wajda, Katyn (film)
William Carlos Williams, Paterson
1917 East St. Louis Massacre (video)
Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Rob Fitterman
Robert Fitterman is the author of 16 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem published with Winter Editions (2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (UDP), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). His long poem, Metropolis, was published in 4 volumes between 2000-2010: Sprawl: Metropolis 30A (Make Now Press, 2009), Metropolis 30: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books, 2004), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House, 2002), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Sabine Herrmann, Natalie Czech, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective, Collective Task www.collectivetask.org. Fitterman's poetry has been described as reaching for a new lyricism by composing with found language reconstructed to articulate a subjective, “personal” relationship to social themes. His books are often single book-length poems with broad critiques of institutions: e.g., social media, online forums, museums, reviews, etc. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.
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