Lila Zemborain

'Not like normal stars'

Amy Catanzano

Image of brown dwarf star 2M1207 and a companion object, 2M1207b. The image may be "the first extrasolar planetary-mass companion to be directly imaged and is the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf." Courtesy of ESO and Wikipedia: http://www.eso.org/public/images/26a_big-vlt/

The impulses that inspire poets to think through science span from investigative, speculative, conceptual, documentary, and more to impulses that use science as a form of address to and from the notion of the other. Lila Zemborain, in Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna, 2007, trs.

July 31, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

A brief history of Detroit experimentalism, by way of the Book Beat

Paul Jaussen

Bordering Detroit to the northeast is the city of Oak Park. In the middle of Oak Park is Lincoln Shopping Center, a nondescript suburban strip mall, the kind that typically houses a Family Dollar, a liquor store, maybe a restaurant. Lincoln Center is also home to the Book Beat, an independent bookshop owned by Cary Loren.

March 6, 2015

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. In evoking the dynamics of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism, Dada and Surrealist counter-maps worked to indict the attentive viewer. Their effect, as Fredric Jameson put it in another context, was “to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” (54).

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