Alli Warren

On our radar: 'Little Hill' by Alli Warren

Jacket2

During this time of slowed publication, we at J2 want to highlight some books from our (digital) reviews shelf. Today’s poetry title on our radar: Little Hill by Alli Warren (City Lights, 2020). If you’d like to review this title, please let us know: jacket2.org/contact

'Power in all its minor forms'

Two Takes on Alli Warren's 'I Love it Though'

Laura Henriksen

Davy Knittle

Two Takes on Alli Warren's 'I Love it Though'

In I Love It Though Warren thinks about how we manage to live without finding it necessary to lie to ourselves or each other about how we’re living, even after hedges enclosed the commons, even as our bosses email us all the time. She thinks about how we manage to love and care for our friends, have desires, and sometimes see to their satisfaction, how we find pleasure in resisting the scenes and actions where we’ve been told all pleasure waits; in working for and spending money.

I read this quote from a twelfth-century verse chronicle by Wace, Roman de Rou, wherein he paraphrases the displeasure expressed by some local serfs at the neighboring nobility’s incorporation of the noncultivated lands that for these serfs had previously been a collective resource, writing, “We can go to the woods and take what we want, take fish from the fish pond, and game from the forests; we’ll have our will in the woods, the waters, and the meadows.”

Recently in Jacket2

January 2021 open reading period

Call for submissions

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds: reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles, reviews, and features that engage with multilingual poetry and/or criticism, and/or poetry in and theories of translation; etc.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:

— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory

— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US

— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation

— Coauthored reviews or essays

— Articles, essays, or features that engage with poetics during the COVID-19 pandemic

What is poetry?

A response to a request for 500 words on this small topic

Al Filreis

Whenever poetry becomes a topic movingly discussed by many people for whom it is not a daily—indeed, not even a monthly—thing, I realize once again what draws me to it ever and always. In a poem, how you say what you say is as important as, sometimes more important than, what you say. Is that a radical view? After all, content is central to communicating. But what about times when communication has broken down? If Allen Ginsberg in writing and performing “Howl” did not in the poem itself emit such a howl—if he did not himself evince the “mad” non-conformity he saw in the best minds of his generation—we would no more remember his poem today than we do the many smart and interesting books of sociological nonfiction written during the 1950s about the supposedly disaffected (but actually, hyper-affective) postwar generation. PennSound (the archive of recordings of poets, the largest in the world) includes the riveting performance Ginsberg gave before a huge, engaged, at times ecstatic audience in Chicago in 1959. How Ginsberg says “Howl” is as important as what he says, for sure. Words about crying out can themselves cry out.

Someone at my university who edits and publishes a newsletter asked me if I would write 500 words on what makes poetry distinctive I balked at such a task. But then decided to produce the statement. For better or worse, here it is.

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Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (30)

'That Da Da Strain'

Jerome Rothenberg

Mamie Medina (lyrics)

THAT DA DA STRAIN