Avant-Garden Reading Series

A short interview with Liz Howard

rob mclennan

Liz Howard was born and raised in rural Northern Ontario and is currently a poet and cognition research officer in Toronto. She is co-curator of the feminist reading series AvantGarden and graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing from The University of Guelph. Her chapbook Skullambient (Ferno House Press) was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

A short interview with Sachiko Murakami

rob mclennan

Sachiko Murakami : photo credit: Carmel Purkis

Sachiko Murakami is the author of the poetry collections The Invisibility Exhibit (2008), Rebuild (2011), and

Recently in Jacket2

Erin Moure at the Kootenay School of Writing, 2007 — now segmented at PennSound

Al Filreis

Thanks to the careful work of PennSound staffer Luisa Healey, Erin Moure's PennSound page now includes a segmented (by poem and discussion topic) audio recording of Erin's 2007 reading at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Here, for instance, is a 6-minute segment on noise & access.

Introduction to O Cidadan (3:01): MP3
Document 15 [from O Cidadan] (2:55): MP3
Document 16 [from O Cidadan] (1:10): MP3
Hazard Non [from O Cidadan] (0:56): MP3
Georgette [from O Cidadan] (0:31): MP3
Document 17 [from O Cidadan] (1:22): MP3
Discussion of O Cidadan and its relation to the discourse of terrorism (3:38): MP3
Introduction to Little Theatres (1:26):MP3

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas: Two poems by José Asunción Silva

Two poems by José Anunción Silva

Jerome Rothenberg

“Nocturno III” comes from an unusual extension of voice that even visually creates an unseen pattern of lines. One can sense in Silva’s “night” the process of contacting his underworld and the intermittent flow and rupture derived from this contact. It is a chant to the night and to the obscure unity of a mysterious duality that does not lead to death, but is death itself. This poem in particular possesses a structure that would reappear (reinvented) in some of Neruda’s pieces, for example, but most importantly it deals with an alliance to obscurity and a dialect of rhythm and breakage, sound and visual play, that is still haunting.

Translations from Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg

Nocturne III

A night,

A night thick with perfumes, with whispers and music, with wings,

A night

Disambiguating rape culture

Lynn Melnick’s nouns

BK Fischer

Photo of Lynn Melnick (left) by Timothy Donnelly.

Gertrude Stein never trusted nouns. She was wary of their tendency to fossilize meaning, even as she relished their potential to be magnetized: “Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun.”[1] Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence, eighty years later, takes up this ambivalent and vexed embrace of nouns in the space of rape culture, where adoring and wanting cross use and abuse as matters graver than grammatical concern.