Davy Knittle

Discussion of Joan Retallack's "Not a Cage"

From a 2021 ModPo webcast

Joan Retallack's poem “Not a Cage” has been discussed often by the ModPo community over the years. By now there are ten different resources relating to this poem: text, audio, video; recitation, analysis, discussion. Click HERE to see all ten in one view. Here, below, we feature an 8-minute video made in 2021 in which we discuss Retallack's procedure and strategy further.

'deer flesh to human flesh'

On C. R. Grimmer's 'The Lyme Letters'

Left: Grimmer outdoors smiling with closed lips. Right: cover of Lyme Letters

C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease. R., Grimmer’s brave and thoughtful nonbinary femme protagonist, addresses the poems to their doctor, their therapist, their dog and cat, and to a series of intimate composite beings whose appellations each repeat as the title of multiple poems.

C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease.

Perilous bodies (PoemTalk #163)

Daphne Marlatt, 'Steveston, B.C.'

Ships loading canned salmon at Steveston, Fraser River, British Columbia, circa 1898; photograph by Stephen Joseph Thompson.

This episode of PoemTalk features a poem by Daphne Marlatt called “Steveston, B.C.” We were joined by Davy Knittle, Jane Robbins Mize, and Karis Shearer. The poem is in a sense — although not quite exactly — the title poem in a much-admired book published in 1974. Steveston sits at the mouth of the South Arm of the Fraser River, near Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2001 Ronsdale Press published a new edition of the book, with a new poem and photographs by Robert Minden. That volume is an easily accessible source for our poem. Another is Intertidal, The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008 (Talonbooks), a volume of 560 pages of Marlatt’s poems, including, of course, all of Steveston. “Steveston, B.C.” raises vital, interconnected concerns: industrial devastation of waterways, migrations of exploited immigrant labor, the human concept of home, the malignant politics of settlement and resettlement, and commercial and technological abuse of the intreprid instinct of aquatic life.

Davy Knittle with Jill Magi

PennSound podcast #72

Photo of Davy Knittle (left) by Al Filreis; photo of Jill Magi (right) by Jennifer Firestone.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

In October 2020, Davy Knittle and Jill Magi spoke over Zoom about Magi’s book Speech (Nightboat Books, 2019). 

'Reader, we were meant to touch'

On Erica Hunt's 'Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems'

Photo of Erica Hunt by <a href=https://flic.kr/p/2hKTJQ4>Kelly Writers House</a>
Photo of Erica Hunt by Kelly Writers House staff, 2019.

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2020) gathers six revised full-length collections and chapbooks. Across their nearly thirty years of publication, edited in and with the present, they propose ways of reconceptualizing time that work against a ground of racial capitalist marginalization to generate radiant clarity about the conditions of our living. 

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2020) gathers six revised full-length collections and chapbooks. Across their nearly thirty years of publication, edited in and with the present, they propose ways of reconceptualizing time that work against a ground of racial capitalist marginalization to generate radiant clarity about the conditions of our living. They are specific, often, about how time feels — how various pasts feel in the present, and how language makes evident the variability of what time is and how it behaves.

Davy Knittle with Rodney Koeneke

PennSound podcast #69

Photo of Davy Knittle (left) by Kelly Writers House staff; photo of Rodney Koeneke (right) by Anna Daedalus.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

In September 2018 Davy Knittle hosted poet Rodney Koeneke in the Wexler Studio to discuss his book, Body & Glass (Wave Books, 2018). Their conversation touches on Koeneke’s writing process and use of pronouns as a “distancing technique,” the role of poetry — particularly experimental forms — in America today, and how joy might emerge from work about loss. The two also examine the traditions that poetry assembles for itself, drawing comparisons between modernists like Joyce and contemporary poets. 

Not-me-ness: Eileen Myles and Davy Knittle

PennSound podcast #68

Photos by Kelly Writers House staff.
 
Davy Knittle and Eileen Myles had a conversation at Myles’s home in the East Village in New York City in August, 2018, for this PennSound podcast. Their discussion began in the midst of an exchange about Myles’s 1991 collection Not Me and changes in their neighborhood at the time. Conversation topics spanned “not-me-ness,” gender, capitalism, sexuality, perception, and observation, among others.

Beside the mind (PoemTalk #143)

Hannah Weiner, 'Clairvoyant Journal'

Photograph of Hannah Weiner by Ira Joel Haber, 1969, country house (probably Woodstock, New York), available with other photos at EPC.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Kate Colby, Davy Knittle, and Charles Bernstein convened with Al Filreis, PoemTalk’s producer and host, to talk about Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal and to focus in particular on two pages (or prose poems, or journal entries). The two entries are those composed on April 1 and April 4. The version of the two poems available online at Eclipse (based on the 1978 Angel Hair edition) has also been reproduced here for the convenience of Jacket2 readers. A new edition of Clairvoyant Journal published in 2014, discussed toward the end of the podcast, is described here by Patrick Durgin.

William Corbett and Davy Knittle on James Schuyler

PennSound podcast #64

Left to right: William Corbett, Davy Knittle, and Stan Mir. Photo by Kelly Writers House staff, from the Michael Gizzi retrospective in October 2017.

William Corbett visited the Kelly Writers House in October 2017 for a retrospective reading and conversation with Stan Mir in honor of the poet Michael Gizzi. During his visit, Corbett and I had a conversation in the Wexler Studio about the work of New York School poet James Schuyler, whose Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler Corbett edited (Turtle Point Press, 2009). In our conversation, we discussed Schuyler’s early poems, his methods of perception, his fondness for children, his attention to New York and its qualities of light from his apartment window, and Corbett’s long career of teaching Schuyler’s poetry to undergraduate students.

Not detainable (PoemTalk #130)

Gwendolyn Brooks, 'Riot'

From left: Amber Rose Johnson, Tonya Foster, and Davy Knittle.

Amber Rose Johnson, Davy Knittle, and Tonya Foster joined Al Filreis to discuss the poem “Riot” by Gwendolyn Brooks. “Riot” is the title poem in the (now rare) chapbook published by Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based Broadside Press in 1969, and has been collected variously, including in the book Blacks (1994). The Eclipse site offers a PDF copy of the original Riot chapbook. The recording used as the basis of this PoemTalk conversation comes from a reading Brooks gave at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on May 3, 1983. 

Syndicate content