Laynie Browne

Deep descent (PoemTalk #81)

Fanny Howe, 'The Descent' & 'The Source'

Laynie Browne, Rae Armantrout, and Kerry Sherin Wright joined Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House to discuss two short poems by Fanny Howe, “The Descent” and “The Source.” These are, respectively, the first and last poems in a series called “The Descent,” published together with other series in a book titled Gone (California, 2003).

October 2, 2014

Recipients of the Pew Fellowships (For Philadelphia-area artists)

Al Filreis

I am pleased to see that among the 2014 recipients of Pew Fellowships are:

Laynie Browne
Browne explores and reinvents various poetic forms, including sonnets (Daily Sonnets, Counterpath, 2007) tales (The Scented Fox, Wave Books, 2007), and letters (The Desires of Letters, Counterpath, 2010).

Thomas Devaney
A native Philadelphian and author of the newly released Calamity Jane (Furniture Press, 2014), Devaney takes inspiration from music and visual art, writing for the ear as well as the eye.

J.C. Todd
Todd’s work complicates and contemporizes the longstanding tradition of war poetry, and investigates how war permeates human life and language.

June 17, 2014

The straight path gone astray (PoemTalk #64)

Caroline Bergvall, 'VIA'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Amaris Cuchanski, David Wallace, and Laynie Browne converged on the Writers House one day recently to talk about a remarkable performance piece (later text) by Caroline Bergvall, “VIA.” In the piece, Bergvall intones forty-seven English translations of the opening tercet of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1321): “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” She arranges the translations alphabetically according to first word, from “along” to “when,” reciting the translator’s name and date after each. Our PoemTalkers discuss the poem’s pre-textual state as aural performance, the remarkable title which seems to connect every manner of issue and mode, the relative literary value and literary-historical place of individual verse translators, translation itself as inherently open, and, of course, the ur-relevance of Dante’s always-interpretable infernal foray into the experience of being lost in words.

March 26, 2013

Recently in Jacket2

AVANT-GARDE, III: SITUATIONIST MAPS, TAKE ONE

Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce

Debord and Jorn’s Guide Psychogeographique de Paris (1956)

Embedded in the coterie journals, performances, exhibits, and spectacles that provided their contexts, Dada and Surrealist counter-maps were exemplary aesthetic documents, but their bold lettering, torqued scales, and attentiveness to contemporary events made them, at the same time, pedagogical and political.

March 6, 2015

Dead air

Sinéad Morrissey's 'Through the Square Window'

Walt Hunter

Fernand Braudel is a historian of globalization who works within and against a tradition of geography as the science of colonial and state power. Volume 1 of Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, first published in 1949, begins, in a deliberate gesture of departure, not with the eponymous sea and the plains around it but with the snow on the mountains. "Here we are far from the Mediterranean where orange trees blossom" (27), he writes, conjuring the tropes and conventions of "landscapism" in history as much as in poetry. "To tell the truth," Braudel continues, "the historian is not unlike the traveler. He tends to linger over the plain, which is the setting for the leading actors of the day, and does not seem to approach the high mountains near by" (29).

March 5, 2015

A short interview with Fred Wah

rob mclennan

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, but he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. He retired from the University of Calgary in 2003 and now lives in Vancouver. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line.

March 5, 2015