Kaia Sand

Textile practice and the no-audience imaginary

Jill Magi

Last June I sat looking at this “sampler” by Elizabeth Parker in the textile archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum. I put “sampler” in quotes because I do not think this piece really is one and neither do the curators and archivists. What is this object? What might it say toward a textile poetics? Similarly, the stitched works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário are called “outsider art” yet they were exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

I do not want to comment on the high art/craft divide or museum and art world ethics/politics—though textiles are often in the middle of those debates. And I have written about Parker’s sampler before.

Defacing the monument

Rukeyser's innovations in docupoetics

Susan Briante

In 1936, just a year after winning the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, the twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser arrived in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history, to work on her next poetry project.

April 20, 2014

Poetry and activism

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

A much-photographed, controversial mural by artist Jesse Corcoran at the Crying Room Gallery in Vancouver

Jules Boykoff

As a youngster I had unequivocally positive feelings about the Olympics. In part this was because I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin where winter sports were bigger than Jesus. During the 1980 Winter Olympics, which took place in Lake Placid, New York, I cheered mightily for fellow Madisonian Eric Heiden as he won five gold medals in speed skating, yelping at the tv screen as he swirled elegantly around the rink. This brought the poet out of ABC’s Keith Jackson who later described him as “a spring breeze off the top of the Rockies.” My parents even got me a stylish Eric-Heiden-esque rainbow hat, which I wore with great pride. (Later I attended Madison West High School where Heiden also went). That same Olympics the US hockey team won the so-called “miracle on ice.” The moment the hockey team won the gold-medal game is etched in the chalk and bones of my then-10-year-old mind. I remember the unbridled exhilaration pumping through my little body.

Of experts and inexperts

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Jules Boykoff

In her last post, Kaia wrote about inexpertise as a possibly positive interventionary poetry stance.

Many of us have a conflicted relationship with experts and expertise. To be sure, in general, contemporary society demands increased reliance on and deference toward experts and expertise. Pay heed to the news any day of the week—whether it be television or radio or a newspaper—and you’ll find a cavalcade of experts expertly asserting expertise.

On the positive side, experts can provide us with shortcuts, time-savers, insider insights, and thought-provoking analysis. Not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate an expert offering shrewd dissection of a topic I hadn’t quite thought of in that particular way.

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Javier Taboada

'Three visions of Toño,' translated by Cole Heinowitz

Jerome Rothenberg

[In celebration of our work together coediting the transnational assemblage of North and South American poetry “from origins to present,” in progress and scheduled for publication by University of California Press, I’m posting here these three connected poems from Javier Taboada’s most recent gathering.

Joel Newberger

'Bamidbar' (In the Desert) from HEXATEUCH, 2019

Jerome Rothenberg

[What follows is a section of Joel Newberger’s elaboration of the Bible’s first five books (Torah in Hebrew, Pentateuch in Greek-derived English), in what Robert Kelly succinctly calls “Newberger’s imaginative disclosure of the multitudinous meanings of the Five Books so rightly called of Moses.” Presented below, then, is what the English Bible knows as The Book of Numbers, but named in the old book itself as Bamidbar: “In the Desert,” or closer to my own concerns “In the Wilderness.” And Kelly further: “This is a book of recovery, adventure, shock, high comedy, tenderness. The Bible will never seem the same again, thank God. And one privilege of his Hexateuch, is that it does a good job of contributing to the vital revolution in religious studies leading to a fresh and altogether anti-patriarchal awareness of Judaism and Christianity as one religion, not two … and understanding how they are linked by a shared eschaton.” That Newberger’s is a brave and important new poem as well is also to be noted. (J.R.)]