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?

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Jerome Rothenberg: Beyond Babel

Beyond Babel

An omnipoetics project and the role of translation

Jerome Rothenberg

[A talk presented November 16, 2018 as a keynote at “The Fabricant: Symposium on the Figure of the Translator,” University of California, Santa Barbara. Original title: “Toward a Poetry and Poetics of the Americas: A Transnational Assemblage in Progress.”]

Not detainable (PoemTalk #130)

Gwendolyn Brooks, 'Riot'

PoemTalk

From left: Amber Rose Johnson, Tonya Foster, Davy Knittle

Amber Rose Johnson, Davy Knittle, and Tonya Foster joined Al Filreis to discuss the poem “Riot” by Gwendolyn Brooks. “Riot” is the title poem in the (now rare) chapbook published by Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based Broadside Press in 1969, and has been collected variously, including in the book Blacks (1994). The Eclipse site offers a PDF copy of the original Riot chapbook. The recording used as the basis of this PoemTalk conversation comes from a reading Brooks gave at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on May 3, 1983.

November 16, 2018

A conversation between poet-grammarians

Excerpts

Serena Chopra

Aditi Machado

We speak, in this cointerview, of our books — Serena Chopra’s Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017) and Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings (Nightboat Books, 2017) — of epiphany and performance, the sociopolitical import of the line break, of decapitation, autoeroticism, and the sensorium. In so speaking, we discover that we are both, and proudly, grammarians.

I mean the sign
Is fucking full of it[1]

When two matters interact should I hope to keep my skin.[2]

November 16, 2018