Stacy Szymaszek

I'm coming up (PoemTalk #76)

Anne Waldman, 'To the Censorious Ones' ('Open Address to Senator Jesse Helms')

Orchid Tierney, Stacy Szymaszek, and Pierre Joris joined Al Filreis to discuss a poem by Anne Waldman sometimes called “To the Censorious Ones” (occasionally with the subtitle “Jesse Helms & Others”) and sometimes in performance called “Open Address to Senator Jesse Helms.” It's been published most prominently in In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems 1985-2003 (Coffee House Press; p. 239).

May 1, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

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

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