Davy Knittle

Fallout from cooling (PoemTalk #125)

Erica Baum, 'Dog Ear'

Detail of 'Enclosing' in Erica Baum's 'Dog Ear.'

Christine NelsonDavy Knittle and Erica Baum joined Al Filreis to talk about Erica’s Dog Ear, a book of photograph-poems, in which each poem is a meticulous reproduction of a dog-eared page of a mass-market paperback photographed to isolate the small, diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text.

'Power in all its minor forms'

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

Two Takes on Alli Warren's 'I Love it Though'
Photo at left courtesy of All Warren.

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.

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.”

A field of the invisible

A review of Christina Olivares's 'No Map of the Earth Includes Stars'

Images courtesy of Marsh Hawk Press and Christina Olivares.

“Burnt Code,” the opening poem of Christina Olivares’s debut collection, No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, startles in the intimacy of its address: “You devote years to / listening to, interpreting, misinterpreting code.”[1] Here, Olivares’s speaker addresses her father, who is losing himself to schizophrenia. In a long series of poems in the book’s first section, “Petition,” her speaker imparts her memories, recent and long past, and those of her father, to whom the poems adhere in ways he cannot adhere to his own life.

Pretty information

A review of Brandon Brown's 'Top 40'

Brandon Brown’s Top 40 is forty poems of forty sentences, each sequentially titled with the name of a song from America’s Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest, where the first poem’s title is the fortieth song of the countdown on September 14, 2013, and the title of the last poem is number 1.

Pop music is an ecstasy for Brown, and it has both collectivity and isolation in it. He writes:

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