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

January 2021 open reading period

Call for submissions

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds: reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles, reviews, and features that engage with multilingual poetry and/or criticism, and/or poetry in and theories of translation; etc.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:

— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory

— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US

— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation

— Coauthored reviews or essays

— Articles, essays, or features that engage with poetics during the COVID-19 pandemic

What is poetry?

A response to a request for 500 words on this small topic

Al Filreis

Whenever poetry becomes a topic movingly discussed by many people for whom it is not a daily—indeed, not even a monthly—thing, I realize once again what draws me to it ever and always. In a poem, how you say what you say is as important as, sometimes more important than, what you say. Is that a radical view? After all, content is central to communicating. But what about times when communication has broken down? If Allen Ginsberg in writing and performing “Howl” did not in the poem itself emit such a howl—if he did not himself evince the “mad” non-conformity he saw in the best minds of his generation—we would no more remember his poem today than we do the many smart and interesting books of sociological nonfiction written during the 1950s about the supposedly disaffected (but actually, hyper-affective) postwar generation. PennSound (the archive of recordings of poets, the largest in the world) includes the riveting performance Ginsberg gave before a huge, engaged, at times ecstatic audience in Chicago in 1959. How Ginsberg says “Howl” is as important as what he says, for sure. Words about crying out can themselves cry out.

Someone at my university who edits and publishes a newsletter asked me if I would write 500 words on what makes poetry distinctive I balked at such a task. But then decided to produce the statement. For better or worse, here it is.

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Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (30)

'That Da Da Strain'

Jerome Rothenberg

Mamie Medina (lyrics)

THAT DA DA STRAIN