handholding: 5 kinds: sonic, textual engagements
In the preface to her 1998 Soft Skull Press book, Intermission, Tracie Morris writes that the book, her first print publication since her self-published, Chap-T-her Won, is one result of her spoken word performances: “The more ‘stage’ stuff I do, the more the page presents…
litanies said handedly: poetry, collage, & performance
In 2012 Ralph La Charity was one of the poets I wrote about for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet under the heading of the “amateur.” In that short essay, I used the term in both its original meaning—those who do what they do out of love—and…
Silk Poems
Silk Poems, in its small, delicate package, is monumental in scope, in its place as one part of Jen Bervin’s larger research project and also in its wide-ranging suggestiveness. The material book itself has a shiny gray cover, garment-like and silken to the touch, imprinted…
L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems
Neat encapsulation of a book’s central concept or conceit serves every genre well save poetry. The very idea of asking of a book of poetry “What’s it about?” is suspect. Though we can always answer that question in greater or lesser detail, it seems that…
Violet Energy Ingots
Opening transcendent portals outside of culture and time through which the divine might speak, the oracle of antiquity was called upon for advice on urgent matters ranging from the public sphere of politics, war, crime, and duty to the private realm of personal concerns. Delivering…
Correspondences
“Tantra is marked by its difficulty,” Nisha Ramayya states in the opening “Notes on Tantra” section of Correspondences, a twenty-six page pamphlet of poetry, micro-essays, notes, and images. The principle structure of the book follows tantra’s ritual structure: divided into ten sections, with two additional…
Trouble the Water
I’m fascinated by the adjective inhuman. Applied to non-human subjects, it is redundant; applied to human ones, it is false by definition. It’s the tautology of how a thing is never more or less than itself that guarantees the falsehood. Nothing that is human can…
Archeophonics
The poems in Peter Gizzi’s most recent book, Archeophonics, operate as an homage to sounds as in the title poem that celebrates echoes, repetitions, and other poems, “the archive in the mouth”: I’m saying this and it’s saying me That’s how it works, seesaw like…
The Most Foreign Country
In early 2017 Ugly Duckling Presse will release for the first time in English Alejandra Pizarnik’s debut collection, The Most Foreign Country, translated by Yvette Siegert. First published in 1955 when Pizarnik was 19, she was later to renounce the book, which remained all but…
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Garolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All
There is a familiar generosity in the title, in the sentences, the tones and range and heart of it all. One expects such from C.D. Wright’s every move, and here it is again in her posthumous book of essays focused largely on a brief (usually…
A Small Story About the Sky
I cannot remember now where I first heard it or from whom, but as a dismissal of poets and poetry it made an impression: a poet is someone who sees a bird outside their window and makes a big goddamned deal out of it. The…
Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt
Like the astronomer, Dr. Steven Vogt, who, from the spectrometer on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii searches for extrasolar planets, in Matvei Yankelevich’s latest collection the poet becomes a seeker—the occupation of both proving on-going, probing, inconclusive, revelatory. Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt also suggests…