“[B]alancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.” Above: detail from page 90 of ‘Uxudo.’
Surprises are adrenalizing. Likewise obsession, movement, risk. I suppose, running the parahermeneutic gamut of the poem, one dilates or, basically, one is asleep.
Uxudo, written by Anne Tardos in English, French, Hungarian, and German in 1999, plainly disincentivizes napping. To the contrary, balancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.
“Pritchard seems to have been profoundly and earnestly committed to a poetics of revelation as much as he was to a nonreferential self-cancelling poetics — and perhaps those two versions of nonsignification are not at odds with one another.” Above: pages from “Hoom, a short story.”
Norman Pritchard may have been the most formally innovative visual poet in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and yet he largely vanished from the literary scene after publishing two exceptional books, and did not publish at all for the last two decades of his life.
“[O]ne ventures to guess that what Kaur is selling is not merely the neat, non-threatening lines of her poems, but her persona itself. In other words, Kaur the poet is Kaur the poetry.” Adaptation of a screenshot of Rupi Kaur’s Instragram feed, @rupikaur_.
A specter is haunting poetry. All the powers of prior poetic generations have entered into a holy alliance against them: lyric and language, conceptual and confessional, page and performance. It is the specter of social media, and the extreme popularity of the individuals who flourish on platforms such as Tumblr and Instagram, as well as off them.
“[P]oetry is full of garbage, which is to say, the textual traces drawn from literature are frequently reinscribed into new formats and configurations that speak to a desire to reorganize rejectamenta.” Detail of page 27 of ‘Graphic Novella’ by Rachel Blau Duplessis.
“[I]n the brick-and-mortar New Day Book Store, and in a half-dozen and more unmentioned projects, Dingane Joe Goncalves sought to determine unrealized territory. And this territory wasn’t just conceptual, or artistic, if you take either to mean immaterial.” Above: cover, book catalogue, ‘New Day Book Store: Books by for & about Black People Everywhere,’ 1970. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In an apartment on Masonic Avenue in San Francisco, the same year Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party across the bay in Oakland, poet and Black Power activist Dingane Joe Goncalves (b. 1937) started the Journal of Black Poetry (1966–1975), “the poetic Bible of the ’60s Black Liberation/Black Arts Movement.”[1] A literary magazine of poetry, essays, art and news, ranging from the West Coast to Africa and the Caribbean, the journal encouraged a “political paradigm” for poetic aesthetics — “an unapologetically Black paradigm,” as Kalamu y
