William Carlos Williams Part III
At the spur off 71 to 271 up to Erie there’s an old billboard sort of faded for something called Ashbury Estates, with a U, but still. So, thought experiment. What would modern poetry look like without William Carlos Williams. Let’s just put our thumb…
William Carlos Williams Part II
There ought to be a terminology for writing that describes without making the scene intelligible to the reader. It’s not that Williams decontextualizes it, he just talks about the experience of it. He doesn’t say, “Here I am at…” That’s a depletion of energy. The…
William Carlos Williams Part I
Editor’s Note: The following text, written mostly via dictation on Routes 84, 80, 76, 71 and 70 as they carve through Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio, responds to the New Directions 2011 facsimile edition of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 Spring and All and “Something Urgent I…
Motes
Motes is a perfect little book of poetry. “Little” book, not by way of diminution, but as large praise, for Dworkin’s work here is of a piece, and each small piece is prism-pure in its exactitude. And exactitude, as is its way, is a matter…
All the Garbage of the World, Unite!
Action Books recently released a new collection of work by South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. Titled All the Garbage of the World, Unite! the collection is indeed a cry for us to struggle against—while also dwelling and finding glory in—the…
Threshold Songs
One of the great pleasures of editing the Constant Critic is that my fellow critics consistently bother me with what they say in their reviews—providing the good kind of discomfort that causes me to revisit, revise, abandon, or sometimes (admittedly) re-entrench some of my previously…
Open Winter
It’s easy to be silent; it’s hard to be quiet. If you want the former, just don’t say anything. But if you want the latter, you will have to figure out how to control for how we register sound. It isn’t simply a matter of…
Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals
One of the things that you don’t know about me (will this make us closer or drive us further apart?) is my love of Dante in translation. But only in translation. I can’t read Italian, so I can’t say that I love Dante, any more…
(made)
“the locus of agency is always an assemblage” —Jane Bennett It’s been 468 years since the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, and just over 400 years since Galileo first observed that Jupiter had its own moons. These two discoveries not…
Whorled
Allegedly, the earliest forms of writing were actuarial: lists, of inventory, accounts, transactions, rules, laws. If so, the lists should be as familiar to us as any form of text could be. And they are, of course, but that doesn’t prohibit them from being strange…
Some Math
There were a few years in the mid-nineties when it looked like the poets gathering in New York might fuse a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity…
Inheritance: Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene and Cyrus Console’s The Odicy
The space where authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness collide continues to be fraught—particularly when this space occupies the experimental sector of the poetic landscape. Take two of the strongest contemporary trends, documentary poetics and Conceptual Writing, both of which occupy strong positions on…