Shetlandic

Christie Williamson reads and explains a poem in Shetlandic

Al Filreis

During a visit to the Kelly Writers House — on his way from Glasgow to Managua — Shetland poet Christie Williamson took some time to read his poem “Da Burn” and responded to a few of our questions about it and the Shetlandic language. Click on the screenshot below to watch the video. The text of the poem is also below.

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Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Review of Ahmad Almallah, 'Bitter English' (Chicago, 2019)

Al Filreis

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us. He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” - not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”? The typical poetic existential “here I am” becomes a matter, always, of forgetting and remembering both. (It’s significant that one of the muses here is the poet’s mother, she who suffers from memory loss.)

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

Note: This review was given as an introduction to Almallah's reading at the Kelly Writers House on October 15, 2019.

Kit Robinson on Close Listening

Robinson and Uche Nduka at Unnameable Books

Charles Bernstein

Kit Robinson in conversation with me on Close Listening, recorded on October 6, 2019: MP3

We talk about Robinson's early Dolch Stanzas and its vocabulary, based on a list of the most frequently used words English, his use of short lines, changes in his more recent, "late" work, his connection to Tom Raworth, and the relation of his day jobs to his work as a musician and poet.