Sawako Nakayasu

First reading of Sawako Nakayasu's 'Couch' (2)

K. Silem Mohammad

I try instinctually to fit the poem into the literary contexts I’m familiar with, and to ask questions about those contexts: in this case, domestic fiction and its stylistic markers (why the generic anonymity of the couple?), the dream/vision tradition (am I supposed to view this through the same kind of lens, perhaps a psychoanalytic one, through which I would view a report of an actual dream?), and the inescapable implication of allegory (what is the “something else” I am supposed to arrive at via the poem?

April 9, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

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

Working in and out of labor

Stephanie Gray

From the beginning mesmerizing repetition sequence of Jill Magi’s hybrid poetics-essay-fiction-nonfiction-poem-cycle, Labor is immersed in its title. Opposite of clichéd treatments of the subject, Labor is the real deal in its unconcealed embedding of the subject, so much so that the reader does not even notice such embedding . I thoroughly “got it” and was struck by the title living up to the name. Not because of doubt of the author — but because often a creative work purports to be about work — and it is — and it isn’t.

January 26, 2015

Without burning up the frame

Stan Mir

During glasnost in August 1989, Lyn Hejinian, along with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, attended the first international avant-garde writers’ conference, “Language — Consciousness — Society,” in the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution. One of the main organizers of the event was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, whose book, Endarkenment: Selected Poems, was published by Wesleyan University Press earlier this year.

January 26, 2015