Ayukawa Nobuo

On Ayukawa's dark wartime poem 'Man on a Bridge' (1942)

New ModPo video with Yosuke Tanaka

Al Filreis

New ModPo video just posted — in which Anna Strong Safford and I talk with Yosuke Tanaka about a dark, wartime poem by Ayukawa Nobuo called “Man on a Bridge” (1942). Click the link (to view the video you must be logged into ModPo — registering is free and open to all):

https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/resources/nwo33

Here is a link to the text of the poem.

Recently in Jacket2

Erin Moure at the Kootenay School of Writing, 2007 — now segmented at PennSound

Al Filreis

Thanks to the careful work of PennSound staffer Luisa Healey, Erin Moure's PennSound page now includes a segmented (by poem and discussion topic) audio recording of Erin's 2007 reading at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Here, for instance, is a 6-minute segment on noise & access.

Introduction to O Cidadan (3:01): MP3
Document 15 [from O Cidadan] (2:55): MP3
Document 16 [from O Cidadan] (1:10): MP3
Hazard Non [from O Cidadan] (0:56): MP3
Georgette [from O Cidadan] (0:31): MP3
Document 17 [from O Cidadan] (1:22): MP3
Discussion of O Cidadan and its relation to the discourse of terrorism (3:38): MP3
Introduction to Little Theatres (1:26):MP3

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas: Two poems by José Asunción Silva

Two poems by José Anunción Silva

Jerome Rothenberg

“Nocturno III” comes from an unusual extension of voice that even visually creates an unseen pattern of lines. One can sense in Silva’s “night” the process of contacting his underworld and the intermittent flow and rupture derived from this contact. It is a chant to the night and to the obscure unity of a mysterious duality that does not lead to death, but is death itself. This poem in particular possesses a structure that would reappear (reinvented) in some of Neruda’s pieces, for example, but most importantly it deals with an alliance to obscurity and a dialect of rhythm and breakage, sound and visual play, that is still haunting.

Translations from Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg

Nocturne III

A night,

A night thick with perfumes, with whispers and music, with wings,

A night

Disambiguating rape culture

Lynn Melnick’s nouns

BK Fischer

Photo of Lynn Melnick (left) by Timothy Donnelly.

Gertrude Stein never trusted nouns. She was wary of their tendency to fossilize meaning, even as she relished their potential to be magnetized: “Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun.”[1] Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence, eighty years later, takes up this ambivalent and vexed embrace of nouns in the space of rape culture, where adoring and wanting cross use and abuse as matters graver than grammatical concern.