NAFTA Superhighway Poetics June 16, 2008: Driving the width of USAmerica from Minnesota to Texas and back as I did the past two weeks (and may again later this summer), I began to imagine somewhere in Kansas or Missouri what a tri-national, social, cultural, and politicized middle North American poetry and poetics would look like, sound like, and read like. It’s a thought I return to [...] by Mark Nowak

“I Hear America Singing” June 12, 2008: More than a decade ago, just after I’d published the first issue of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a sheaf of poems arrived at my office. They were bi-lingual poems (in Khmer & English) from a poet then new to me, U Sam Oeur, whose collection Sacred Vows was scheduled to be published in 1998. I fell in love with the poems, and published two of [...] by Mark Nowak

Like a Rock? June 10, 2008: More notes on the Working Class, Obama, and "the superstructure of poetry" Alan’s excellent post and the excellent running commentary have pushed me to try to clarify a few things in my earlier entry. First off, by my use of “contemporary poetry” (and Alan is right to read a hint of skepticism) I mean the entire realm of the field, [...] by Mark Nowak

Tracing the Lines June 9, 2008: “Tracing the Lines: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetics & Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki” Over the course of the past half decade or so, I’ve been invited to speak at conferences celebrating the retirement of two seminal Canadian writers, Fred Wah (University of Calgary in Alberta) and Roy Miki (Simon Fraser University in BC). [...] by Mark Nowak

Working June 6, 2008: Hello Harrieteers, Although I was hoping to start posting a few days ago, my computer crashed my first day on the road. Thanks to the Oklahoma City Mac Genius Bar (double thanks to Caleb!) I'm back online and set to begin Poetry Foundation summer camp today. In the next day or two, I’ll try to post impressions from last week’s conference in [...] by Mark Nowak