Kevin Killian, 'Is It All over My Face?'
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Al Filreis convened Eric Sneathen, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, and Trisha Low to talk about a poem by the late and much-missed Kevin Killian. The poem is “Is It All Over My Face?,” and it was published in the book Action Kylie. Kevin performed this poem several times; at a certain point in his readings, it was a favorite poem to share with his audiences. Our recording comes from his reading at the Queering Language launch reading, March 24, 2007, and can be found, with many other great Killian performances, at PennSound’s Killian author page. The text of the poem is here.
February 17, 2021
Music for the ecoelegaic
Cecily Nicholson's 'Wayside Sang'
Cecily Nicholson’s poetry expresses a deep solidarity extended across time and space, and across divisions between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. As I try to prise apart what the term “biotariat” might be made to mean, I find poetry instructive because of its willingness to attend to just such “crossings” and movements amongst and between language’s subjects and objects — to, literally, lay them out on the paratactic page. For a diasporic poet like Nicholson this has something to do with “blackness” — I have in mind Fred Moten’s comment (from In the Break) that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” Everywhere in her poetry Nicholson is concerned with the resistance of “objects” — of those who have been rendered (reduced to) “objects” through regimes of racialized violence and colonization, and the fluid affinities the variously objectified find and found.
Cecily Nicholson’s poetry expresses a deep solidarity extended across time and space, and across divisions between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. As I try to prise apart what the term “biotariat” might be made to mean, I find poetry instructive because of its willingness to attend to just such “crossings” and movements amongst and between language’s subjects and objects — to, literally, lay them out on the paratactic page.