Commentaries - September 2012

Present nostalgia

The treehouse in El Jardin del Paraiso

So we’re moving out of our apartment of 14 years on E. 4th St., and I’m already nostalgic for it. Yesterday, alone in my apartment during the day for the first time in — months? years? — a single ray of sun fell through the window in the kitchen. I had completely forgotten that the apartment does after all get some light for 20 minutes around midday.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Remembering a great writer and friend

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I had already started writing my first commentary for Jacket2. But then I had to begin again.

Earlier today I learnt of the passing of a great poet and a friend: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

I discovered on the weekend that Arkadii was seriously unwell. As a result, I dedicated the launch party for my book A Common Strangeness that we held in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Monday to him. As part of the launch, the New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen read the first part of his long poem “A Nasturtium as Reality” alongside her own poem “Photon.” It was just the latest in a long line of cross-cultural encounters generated by Arkadii’s work.

The MLA does not support the variable foot

Asphodel flowers.
Asphodel flowers.

By the time we got to the long, apologetic love poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower in the Williams class, I was beginning to worry about the relatively short amount of time we had spent on the variable foot.

Amy Catanzano: 'The Imaginary Present,' a poem & a commentary from Quantum Poetics

Nicolas Desprez, Attractor Poisson Saturne
Nicolas Desprez, Attractor Poisson Saturne

contemporary poetry
insert: poem here
insert: essay here call it:
essay-poem insert:
appropriated text
call it: poetry insert:
sound poem call it:
wave score insert:
visual poem call it:
if sound could see
claim: the text is dead
just schrödinger: the text!
insert: tired formatting
like strikethrough
fade: your erasures
use: basic font variations
insert: another footnote
please instead please
insert: some nu-sonnets
inject: the bacterium!

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (1946–2012)

It was with great sadness that I heard this heartbreaking news. From when I first met Arkadii in the 1980s, to his semester-long stay with his wife Xena in Buffalo in the early 1990s, to Susan, Felix and my visit to St. Petersburg in 2001, to his recent visit to New York and to Penn two years ago, I have felt a deep kinship with Arkadii, a poetic and personal affinity that goes beyond any national or linguistic borders. A great companion in life and poetry has left the earth but not the world.

ATD’s death was reported about three hours ago on Facebook by Aleksandr Skidan and Mikhail Iossel.