Sérgio Vaz

Samba-poesia

Poetry in the streets

Hilary Kaplan

Rio book release party for Sérgio Vaz's _Literatura, Pão e Poesia_

In December, I spent a vibrant night at the Cooperifa spoken word salon on the South Side periphery of São Paulo. The open-mic sessions take place every Wednesday at the bar of Zé Batidão, a neighborhood gathering spot in Jardim Guarujá, where up to 300 people of all ages converge weekly to listen to and perform poems. Over the last eleven years, Cooperifa (the name is a compound of cooperativa and periferia) has become well-known in São Paulo and throughout Brazil for uniting and strengthening, through poetry, a community that is marginalized in both social and geographic senses. Sérgio Vaz, a poet and founder of Cooperifa, is widely recognized as a community leader; in 2009, Época magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in Brazil. Indeed, Cooperifa spoken word is something of a popular movement that has spread beyond São Paulo.

February 20, 2012

Recently in Jacket2

Three meta-poems: Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Harryette Mullen

Al Filreis

We’ve created a three-part mini-course/sampler of metapoems — one proto-modern, one modern, one postmodern. Listen to a brief audio introduction and then watch three video recordings of several of us working through close readings. The readings are meant to be suggestive rather than complete or definitive. Our concern was to teach ourselves something about the metapoem. The metapoem of course is a poem about poetry, a poem that is somehow aware of itself as a thing made of letters and words. We wanted to choose three poems — otherwise different in so many ways — that are each about reading and/or writing. Poems about the reading of poems. Poems about poets reading. Poems about their own inscribing. Poems that use reading as an allegory for loving, and loving as an allegory of understanding. Poems that cannot be understood topically (thematically) unless first one understands the ways in which they are about themselves — about the words they deploy, about the love or loving of words felt as they are being written. About, as Harryette Mullen puts it, “the secret acrostic of a lover’s name” — a name you will discover as you read the very poem encoding that secret in its alphabetical existence — what Wallace Stevens in “Large Red Man Reading” calls “the literal characters.”

1. listen to a brief audio introduction
2. read Emily Dickinson’s “We learned the Whole of Love”
3. watch video discussion of Dickinson's “We learned the Whole of Love”
4. read Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
5. watch video discussion of Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
6. read two pieces from Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary
7. watch video discussion of two pieces from Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary

January 27, 2015

31-minute video of collaborative close reading of "The Snow Man"

Al Filreis

screenshot of video - for link, see text below

Click here to watch me lead a collaborative close reading of Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" at the annual "Mind of Winter" event at the Kelly Writers House.

January 26, 2015

Captions without images

On Robert Fitterman’s ‘Holocaust Museum’

Martin Glaz Serup

Rob Fitterman reads at the Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles, 2008.

As Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag amongst others have told us, when it comes to photographs, the caption is essential in relation to what we think we see: if the contextualizing text is changed, the meaning of the work as such will change significantly. In this light, it might be interesting to ask: what happens to the caption when there is no longer a photograph to contextualize? When the caption is isolated, it now refers to a referent that is no longer there.

January 26, 2015