The Text Festival (Part 2) April 27, 2011: The Text Festival begins on Apr 29 at the Bury Art Gallery, just outside of Manchester. The festival features artworks produced by poets, in an effort to showcase a potential encounter between the use of language in poetic practice and the use of language in visual artistry. (more...) by Christian Bök

Time for some other answers April 27, 2011: My thanks to Erika Meitner, Jennifer Militello, Laurel Snyder, Lisa Olstein, Arielle Greenberg and Mark Bibbins for weighing in on the timely v. timeless question: Erika Meitner Timely!  Timely! But part of this has to do with my current 'project' (whatever that means) about consumerism in all its weird guises.  I mean, life happens at [...] by Rachel Zucker

Anna’s poem April 27, 2011: Is three, or I guess four. I’m thinking of three people approaching a lake. The poems are more like movements than poems. I guess when I say movements I mean a kind of wash of meaning. But not solid like prose – as I like to say going from the west coast to the east coast of the page. Not broken up like poetry or like the prose part of [...] by Eileen Myles

speed chess April 27, 2011: I never saw the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, but twenty years ago I read the book (I had an unhealthy interest in the fate of supposed boy geniuses, at the time) and it made an impression; in particular, I remember the book as a sort of competition between (on the one hand) the mentors who wanted young Josh to succeed in his steep climb up [...] by Stephen Burt

Arthur Echo Echo April 27, 2011: The following is a workshop that I conducted at the "Movement, Somatics, and Writing" symposium at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which took place February 17th-19th, 2011. Participants in the conference included principal organizer, Petra Kuppers, and co-organizers Bhanu Kapil, Eleni Stecopoulos, Amy Sara Carroll, Kate Elswit, Jina Kim, [...] by Thom Donovan

UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview April 26, 2011: It's amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that [...] by Kenneth Goldsmith

Goodbye, Poetry April 26, 2011: A theory of horizontal evolution holds that you are incubated by what lies next to you, in the rusted out pond, as much as you are by a copulative encounter. To incubate: to transfuse. To become something else.  In time.  As you lie there with the others, in the den. A bacterium on your hem, a raw spot beneath the tongue. In this [...] by Bhanu Kapil

Stories I Like To Tell April 26, 2011: There are a few stories that I like to tell about writing. Here is one: I tell the story of the poets who tell me that they don't read other poets because they don't want to be influenced. I ask them what do they want from me. They tell me they want me to read their work. I call them evil. They ask me why I would say that. I ask them if [...] by Kwame Dawes

the buddhist April 26, 2011: A year ago when I was writing for Harriet during National Poetry Month, I blogged about a reading given at White Columns here in New York City by Tim Griffin, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy. In my post I described Bellamy as “among the most significant underrecognized and underappreciated writers working today.” These things are relative, of [...] by Alan Gilbert

Bishop revisited April 26, 2011: When that big collection of Bishop's drafts and scraps came out five years ago, I was unfavorably disposed towards it, though not as unfavorably as some: I didn't like the omnium-gatherum feel, the every-scrap-of-paper-is-as-precious-as-any-other-because-the-Great-Poet-touched-it sense that its reception (not so much the edition as the reception) [...] by Stephen Burt