Laynie Browne

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

Text in the age of inst@bility

Orchid Tierney

How we preserve material history in a digital ecology is one of the most pressing issues facing archival institutions in the twenty-first century. Material artifacts — as objects of memory — remain highly integral to textual criticism. Yet as emergent information technologies have become ever-present tools of academic scholarship, archives are faced with the challenge to integrate physical records with the digital environment.

July 30, 2014

Sound matters

Jill Magi

“Frequency.” This single-word line begins one of Deborah Meadows’s poems and suggests radio listening as a poetics: an act of receptive agency, tuning in, selecting from a cloth of constant notes, words, thoughts, events, static. Meadows’s Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems is the sounding of consciousness, but not singular, not just her own: these poems are patterns pulled from texts in order to make a new accompaniment, to expose “the syntax of exploratory thought” (9).

July 30, 2014

Code as such

Orchid Tierney

The poetry of Stephanie Strickland demonstrates a poetic intelligence that captures not only the lyrical moment in algorithms but also the pervasive quietness of scientific vocabularies. Her work has, thus far, touched on the systems of distributed knowledge — the variegated institutions of knowing, including the natural and virtual geographies into which we embed our cultural memories; the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and astronomy; visual media; and the technologies of language.

July 30, 2014