Articles

Truth in the cage

The poetry of Mohammad Ali Maleki

Poet Mohammad Ali Maleki’s notebook, which was destroyed by immigration authorities on Manus Island.

Hello. im a refugee in the manus. but im not good speak english. im like poetry. I was writing 2 poetry. Are you help me writing poetry? My poetry farsi send australia edit change english come bake in the manus. are you help me to written poetry me?

Anne Tardos in high definition

Polylingualism and extremity in 'Uxudo'

“[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.

The transrealism of Norman Pritchard

“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.

Leav Rupi alone

eXXXtreme #instapoetry

“[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.