Mike Cannell

“How much can you tweak English before it malfunctions?”

QAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: The visual poetry of Mike Cannell

Gary Barwin

Word Malfunction by Mike Cannell — Word Malfunction

What does it mean for a language to malfunction?

What funds its means? What makes it done for?

First we have to ask: What is the function of language? What is it is supposed to do? And who decides—who assesses its function?

Is language a Paul Klee twittering machine? A W. Heath Robinson fantasmallegorical don’t-shut-your-contraption? A speech balloon animal? Does one’s signs fit all?

June 10, 2013

Recently in Jacket2

Inventory of digitized magazines

Danny Snelson

Supplementing the flowing content that characterizes the Jacket2 interface, Reissues offers a stable archive of digitized journals and magazines primarily focused on poetry and poetics.

December 12, 2013

Of fear in abstraction

A review of Fiona Hile’s 'Novelties'

Mathew Abbott

At right, Fiona Hile reading July 3, 2012.

Novelties

“Mondrian Green” is the final poem in Fiona Hile’s Novelties,[1] and one of the most significant in this significant book. It refers to the famous absence of green in the Dutch abstract painter’s mature compositions. Mondrian is said to have hated the color, perhaps as a result of having compromised himself for years while young and struggling, painting floral still-lifes for bread and butter.

December 12, 2013

Poetics List is 20

Charles Bernstein

The Buffalo Poetics list is 20. I started the list in December 1993 with this poem --

Above the world-weary horizons
New obstacles for exchange arise
Or unfold,
O ye postmasters!

December 12, 2013