Archive for July, 2008
Mark Nowak
Forage
Several weeks ago in my post on the symposium celebrating the work of poet, editor, scholar, and Japanese-Canadian internment activist Roy Miki, I mentioned that a new book by Rita Wong, Forage, had been awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the best book by a writer from British Columbia or the Yukon. Since then I’ve been able to re-read Wong’s book, and as with her previous collections Monkey Puzzle and Sybil Unrest (the latter co-authored with Larissa Lai) I am simultaneously aesthetically astonished and socially energized by the articulation of deft and daring cultural production to the politics of social and environmental injustices within and among (simultaneously) the local, national, and transnational scales.
Forage opens with a circular photograph (notes at the back of the book inform the reader of the photograph’s origin, the interior of the Victoria Rice Mills with packaged rice in mats and a Chinese worker in the foreground). On the facing page is a crescent-shaped visual poem that moves the “r” sound through the terms rice, rise, and riven. So hums the poetic politics, in sound and image and poem, in the opening salvo of the book. On the next page, the poem “Value Chain” opens with the questions “how to turn english from a low-context language into a high-context language?” and “what is the context for ‘you people are hard workers’?”, questions to which the remainder of the book will offer a series of possible and varied (poetic) replies.
Linh Dinh
Elective Affinities
by Eleni Sikelianos, as presented during a panel at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, June 2008:
In this very room, Robin Blaser once quoted from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community: “The coming being is whatever being.” The “whatever,” or latin quodlibet, Agamben notes, means both “it does not matter which,” and, cleaving to its opposite, “being such that it always matters.” Agamben elects the second meaning as the essential one.
Let us be in a place, a community of private thought and collective thinking, as we are now, that reminds us that every thing, whatever it is, “always matters.”
Each cab driver
Each partridge-feather plant
Each plastic bag
Each piece of water
I try to web my private community of thought around that thinking, but my thoughts drift…
I forget and remember and forget. My thoughts drift … among communities; some I have elected and some I have not, and would not, but each contributes to generating my surface and interior life.
Travis Nichols
Laurels
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, has selected Kay Ryan to succeed Charles Simic as the next U.S. poet laureate. The Northern California poet will be the 16th poet to hold the post. Full story here.
Seven responses from around teh internets:
Ron Silliman says Ryan is “the 47th consecutive School of Quietude poet to hold the position in its 71 year history.”
Annie Wagner says not bad.
Vowel Movers say “congratulations Kay Ryan! Your one year of service as PLOTUS entitles you to no power whatsoever!”
Salon
says, “She’s neither folksy and ultra-accessible like the popular Billy Collins nor mandarin and imperious like the critical darling Louise Glück.”
The New Yorker has selected emails.
David Orr is down with Kay.
Daily Kos says being a gay-married Californian is a statement in itself.
Mark Nowak
Canon Fodder
Several people have e-mailed me recently to ask where I come across the poems and poets of social movements and organized labor that I’ve been discussing here during my interlude upon Harriet, as well as why these poems and their presumed dubious “aesthetic quality” should matter. Yesterday, as part of another project I’m working on, I revisited Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and reread (with Harriet in mind) Kelley’s fifth chapter, “‘Afric’s Sons With Banner Red’: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934.” The quote that opens his chapter title comes from J. Thompson’s poem “Exhortation,” a Claude McKay-“If We Must Die”-esque piece that Kelley discovered “buried in a barely readable microfilm edition of the Liberator.” In addition to his expansion of Marxism beyond the (white, male) figures most critics seem delimited to invoking in academic literary criticism (and readers interested in exploring further should begin with Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, though it is still unfortunately overwhelmingly masculinist), Kelley’s chapter on Black radicalism, class struggle, and poetry provides a unique and engaging overview of the social poetics and poetries of the era—much of it dug up from microfilms and archives.
One of the poems in the chapter that interested me on a variety of levels was “Southern Organizer” [Note: The periods represent indents, which I can't seem to figure out on Movabale Type]:
…….Badges gleam; they dump the sack
…….Into the water, turn and go.
It is peaceful in the Southland; tomorrow
They will hang and shoot some more
Of ours: but tonight, as all true men
…….with southern blood will tell you.
The possum is abroad, the bloodhounds sleep,
And it is beautiful. Comrades.
…….“Let us do this thing together.
Black man, comrade, we must together.
And he is dead. There is work for living
Men to do. We salute him.
We have no tears for him.”
Emily Warn
Talking in Public
A housekeeping post: We realized that unless we highlighted how commenting works on Harriet, she could morph from this….
into this…
Reginald Shepherd
In Memoriam Alvin Feinman, 1929-2008
I am still in the hospital, awaiting surgery on an abdominal fistula that refuses to heal on its own—quite the contrary—but it’s very important to me to have Robert post this piece.
1
The wonderful poet, teacher and friend Alvin Feinman died a few days ago after a long struggle with emphysema and Parkinson’s disease. Alvin was one of the most important people in my poetic life, and I would like to pay him some small homage here.
Alvin Feinman was born in 1929 and raised in New York City. Though he has been named by Harold Bloom as part of the essential canon of Western literature—Bloom has written that “The best of his poems stand with the most achieved work of his generation”—Feinman is not included in any of the standard anthologies of modern or modern American poetry, not even Cary Nelson’s recent Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, which explicitly aims at recovering and rediscovering neglected writers. Nor is he listed in the purportedly comprehensive Contemporary Authors reference series.
Travis Nichols
Summer Jams
While the context of a reading can often mean everything, there is also something to be said for readings ripped free from their spatial/temporal trappings and escorted into the private, headphoned world.
Don Share
The Aspern Papers… Spicer’s, Schwartz’s, Kafka’s – and yours?
“After Jack Spicer’s untimely death at the age of forty in 1965, the contents of his apartment were packed into boxes…” Dunno about you, but I know what would happen to the contents of my place, should it all end up in boxes! Just think how much we owe to the removal and serendipitous rediscovery of what used, not very charmingly, to be called a writer’s “remains.”
D.A. Powell
Greatest American Hero
Jerry Rubin, born 14 July, 1938
Self-described “orphan of Amerika,” outside agitator, leader of the Youth International Party, indicted co-conspirator in the trial against free speech in the streets and parks of Chicago, sports writer, mayoral candidate, and revolutionary, Jerry Rubin once “liberated” the last few copies of the Declaration of Independence from a John Birch Society Bookstore in order to distribute them to members of Congress.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
RECENT COMMENTS
-
>Anyone who’s read even just the section on the fetish character of the commodity is ... MORE »
Kent Johnson | 03.14.10 -
Yes indeedy. Below is the first half of the sonnet. It is one ... MORE »
Mabool | 03.14.10 -
@Sina:
Can a poet be “successful” outside of the academy?
... MORE »
Colin Ward | 03.13.10 -
People want to pretend there's an alternative to careerism. Would it were so. But as ... MORE »
Michael Robbins | 03.13.10 -
That's not a magic box, Joseph. It's called capitalism. What you seem so astonished at ... MORE »
Michael Robbins | 03.13.10
Women’s History Month: A Salute (3)
Teachability, Pedagogy, and Why You Can Easily... (5)
Poetry podcasts, online resources, oh and... (13)
Poetry, Politics, & Why I am Not an Activist (19)
Conference Spotlight: Native American Literature... (4)
RECENT POSTS
- Who or what is a poet critic and why is the academy so up in Poetry’s face?
- Beyond Careerism? (Redistributing Poetic Effort)
- To Live with Honor is a Journey Without Frontiers
- Teachability, Pedagogy, and Why You Can Easily Find My Book At Used Bookstores
- Women’s History Month: A Salute
MONTHLY ARCHIVE
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
CATEGORY ARCHIVE
- Arts (76)
- Audio (41)
- Awards (25)
- AWP (14)
- Best Sellers (6)
- Books (170)
- Criticism (202)
- Distribution (4)
- Education (38)
- Harriet (17)
- Interviews (15)
- Journals (266)
- Live Readings (34)
- Music (44)
- News (62)
- Obituaries (16)
- Photography (3)
- Poems (241)
- Poetry magazine (55)
- Poetry Out Loud (14)
- poetryfoundation.org (9)
- Politics (121)
- Readings (36)
- Science (12)
- Translation (25)
- Uncategorized (881)
- Video (22)
PREVIOUS WRITERS
- A.E. Stallings (54)
- Abigail Deutsch (17)
- Ada Limón (18)
- Adrian Blevins (3)
- Alan Gilbert (30)
- Amber Tamblyn (6)
- Andrew Feld (3)
- Ange Mlinko (73)
- Annie Finch (47)
- Anselm Berrigan (24)
- April Ossmann (5)
- Barbara Jane Reyes (21)
- Bhanu Kapil (9)
- Bill Zavatsky (5)
- Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (5)
- Brian Turner (5)
- C. Dale Young (4)
- Camille Dungy (31)
- Cate Marvin (2)
- Cathy Halley (21)
- Catherine Wagner (5)
- Cathy Park Hong (14)
- Christian Bök (61)
- Clare Cavanagh (5)
- Craig Santos Perez (20)
- D.A. Powell (24)
- Daisy Fried (46)
- Don Share (58)
- Edwin Torres (17)
- Eileen Myles (40)
- Emily Warn (29)
- Erin Belieu (5)
- Forrest Gander (25)
- Fred Moten (11)
- Fred Sasaki (16)
- Gillian Conoley (5)
- Harriet Monroe (1)
- Janet Holmes (5)
- Jason Guriel (24)
- Javier Huerta (31)
- Jeff Shotts (5)
- Jeffrey McDaniel (46)
- Joel Brouwer (22)
- John S. O'Connor (21)
- Jonathan Galassi (5)
- Joshua Beckman (5)
- Joshua Weiner (5)
- Joy Harjo (5)
- Katie Hartsock (3)
- Kay Ryan (5)
- Kazim Ali (5)
- Kenneth Goldsmith (114)
- Kim Addonizio (5)
- Kwame Dawes (99)
- Lavinia Greenlaw (18)
- Linh Dinh (72)
- Lisa Robertson (5)
- Lorna Dee Cervantes (1)
- Lucia Perillo (13)
- Major Jackson (30)
- Mark Nowak (31)
- Mark Thwaite (5)
- Martin Earl (17)
- Matvei Yankelevich (1)
- Maureen N. McLane (5)
- Mónica de la Torre (5)
- Melissa Friedling (17)
- Michael Dumanis (3)
- Michael Marcinkowski (5)
- Milan Gagnon (1)
- Monica Youn (6)
- Nick Twemlow (8)
- Olena Kalytiak Davis (16)
- Patricia Smith (66)
- Patricia Spears Jones (5)
- Peter Campion (5)
- Pimone Triplett (2)
- Poetry (1)
- Poetry Foundation (26)
- Rachel Zucker (30)
- Rebecca Wolff (20)
- Reginald Shepherd (43)
- Richard Siken (5)
- Rigoberto González (76)
- Robert Hershon (5)
- Rodrigo Toscano (1)
- Sina Queyras (19)
- Sotère Torregian (29)
- Stephen Burt (54)
- Steve Young (5)
- Terrance Hayes (5)
- Thom Donovan (19)
- Tonya Foster (5)
- Tracie Morris (5)
- Travis Nichols (100)
- Tyehimba Jess (5)
- Valerie Johnson (1)
- W.S. Di Piero (5)
- Wanda Coleman (19)
- Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour (40)
- William Logan (5)
IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
Copyright © 2010 Poetry Foundation Contact: mail@poetryfoundation.org Privacy Policy / Terms of Use
Poetryfoundation.org article RSS. Magazine RSS. Blog RSS. Poem of the Day RSS. Glossary Term of the Day RSS.