Jacket2

Ear turned toward the emergent

Close Listening with Myung Mi Kim

Myung Mi Kim
Interview
Charles Bernstein
Interview
Myung Mi Kim at the Kelly Writers House. Photo by Arielle Brousse.

Editorial note: Myung Mi Kim (b. 1957) is the author of Penury (2009), Commons (2002), Dura (1999), The Bounty (1996), and Under Flag (1991). She teaches in the poetics program at SUNY–Buffalo. The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded March 15, 2007, at Studio 111 at the University of Pennsylvania with the engineering assistance of Molly Braverman. Listen to the audio program here. Charles Bernstein hosted and produced the show, which includes questions and comments from Pauline Baniqued, Julie Charbonneir, Nicholas Mayer, Heather Gorn, Sarah Yeung, and Jonathan Liebembuk (as well as Adam Tabor and Damien Bright). The interview was transcribed by Michael Nardone. — Katie L. Price

New life writing

Patrick F. Durgin
Article
From Tan Lin’s "Insomnia and the Aunt."

It was a Thursday in 2003 when Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos were giving a reading and conversation at the Buffalo Poetics Program — billed as an eightieth birthday celebration for Mac Low — and someone asked him about his early poem “Sonnet of My Death.” I don’t recall exactly the question, but most of us in the room were disconcerted by it. It wasn’t really about his work, but rather about his views on the afterlife, ostensibly meant to square the content of his poem with his Buddhist devotion to notions of impermanence. Later, alone in a car with Mac Low and Tardos, without thinking it through but with great conviction, I blurted out, “It wasn’t a question about death, it was a question about life,” and that seemed to alleviate lingering frustration.

Ecologies of the margin

A review of "Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics"

Jeroen Nieuwland
Review
Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics

Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, edited by Louis Armand, collects essays by poets about marginal poetries and poets; recalling John Ashbery’s series of lectures on unknown poets, Other Traditions. Hidden Agendas does not purport to be some kind of conclusive collection of marginal poetics; its premise, rather, is refreshingly contingent on personal proclivity: “a number of writers / editors were invited to reflect on a poet, a group of poets, or a poetics from the last half-century, that they deemed of personal significance and which they felt to have been underestimated, neglected, or overlooked. Consequently, each contribution is subjective and critical” (4).

Poet with a steady job

An introduction to Lawrence Joseph

Eric Selinger
Feature

I first met Lawrence Joseph nearly thirty years ago. I was a sophomore in high school, with verses in hand and trouble in mind. He was a young professor at the University of Detroit School of Law, where my father served as dean. A serious poet with a steady job, Joseph struck my father as a good role model for his freshly literary son, so he sent us out for lunch at a diner near campus.

I to eye Thomas DePietro
Ground zero Baudelaire Norman Finkelstein
Notions of poetry and narration Lawrence Joseph
"Why not say what happens?" John Lowney
Shifting stories, codes of violence Frank D. Rashid
Several kinds of chronicler, he’s been Eric Selinger
"Telling the time" Lisa Steinman
Embedded chronicles Lee Upton
Before the laws Tyrone Williams

"Something that stutters sincerely"

Contemporary poetry and the aesthetics of failure

Jennifer Moore
Article

[T]o be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail … all that is required now … is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. — Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues[1]

I.

In a recent essay, Stephen Burt notes a “miniboom” of poets writing sestinas, and claims they are drawn to the strict form as a way “to lament their diminished or foreclosed hopes for their art.”[2] This form in particular is attractive, Burt writes, because its repetitive structure (the same six words appear at the ends of the lines in each of the poem’s six-line stanzas) enables descriptions of “sorts of futility,” “the uselessness of verbal craft” or “art’s failure to find further use.”[3]

Ted Pearson in conversation with Luke Harley

November 25, 2010, to September 6, 2011

Ted Pearson
Interview
Luke Harley
Interview
Ted Pearson with Larry Price at Poet's House, New York City, 2011

The following is the second (and concluding) part of a larger conversation examining Ted Pearson’s An Intermittent Music, a serial work begun in 1975 and completed in 2010. The first half appeared in Jacket2 and can be read here.

Luke Harley: Ron Silliman has resisted attempts to label your work as “minimalist,” instead arguing that it is “all about how much pressure you can exert on a few select words or lines.” Do you agree with Ron?

Ted Pearson: Yes. Resemblance is not identity, though it can lead to mistaken identity. 

As the elevator moves skyward, it reveals a widening horizon

A review of "Elevators"

Julie Joosten
Review
Elevators

Rena Rosenwasser’s latest collection of poems from Kelsey St. Press, Elevators, explores axes of perception that unfold into thought. Elevators engages the intersections of vertical and horizontal perspectives that change as the body and mind move through space, insight, and linguistic form. Rosenwasser’s collection reveals that the “vertical passageway” of elevator travel is also beautifully horizontal:  as the elevator moves skyward, it reveals a widening horizon (37). From this relationship, dimension emerges.