Commentaries

Pierre Joris: from DIS/ASTER [Part 3 of RIGWRECK], with an author's note

Disaster: not thought gone awry

when all this first started
            my body broke out into real bad rashes
                        my eyes my face my neck my chest my back my shoulders
big giant holes on the back of my legs,
            holes the size of a #2 pencil
                        looked just like the holes
                                    in the fish
                                               in the lab
                                                on the slab

Nada Gordon

“I Love Men,” The Flarf Poetry Festival at the Kelly Writers House, February 8, 2007

Nada Gordon at the Kelly Writers House, March 2013
Nada Gordon at the Kelly Writers House, March 2013

There are so many fantastic events catalogued on PennSound, but one that I find myself coming back to time and time again is the 2007 Flarf Poetry Festival at The Kelly Writers House. And I’m not the only one — PennSound Podcasts featured the event in an episode, and PoemTalk featured Sharon Mesmer's “I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I’m in Love with Harry Whittington” back in 2010.

Wise Ys: Stephen Nelson's "Dance of Past Lives"

Metaphors, metaphorms, metavores, letters which reach

Stephen Nelson's Dance of Past Lives
Dance of Past Lives

Y.

Stephen Nelson’s Dance of Past Lives is an array of alphabetic pas de deux. Duets de Y. The letter as body. As body text. An abstract dance, wise metaphorms meta(phor)morpho-singing into stars, trees, other symbols. Y is another. An A. A tittle or jot as ball, sun, rayless star. I-less is another.

Antibodies are y-shaped. Texts are (wh)y-shaped. Y? Not because (Y)YOLO.

An array of past whys. Whysdom. What were our letters in a past life? How did we read?

Dubrava Djuric: "I wonna talk to you"

new at Sibyl

Dubravka Djuric's
"I wonna talk to you"

– just published in Sybyl responds to "Talk to Me" a 1999 work of mine in Recalculating, which is a transcription of an improvised poem I did at the Whitney (see below) that talks about a trip James Sherry and I took to Belgrade twenty years ago and my subsequent emails with Dubravka during the NATO bombings.

One knock for the clown

Roger Ballen, Squawk (2005)

Up until the publication of my first book this spring, I recoiled at the prospect of giving readings and rarely did so — not only out of a universal shyness at public speaking, but also, and moreso, from the acutest sense that reading my poems aloud didn’t represent them rightly and that, without too much conceptual work or production, one could make simple machines of performance that could, as poet David Buuck says through the great thin walls of J2, “activate manifold potentialities in the work, such that each reading is both an interpretation as well as a further investigation into how the poem ‘means’.”