Commentaries - April 2013

Queering ecopoetics: Nonnormativity, (anti)futurity, precarity

by Angela Hume

"I am feeling the words on my skin already, long before the laptop is linked to the projector, my top is off, and the words appear on my bare back," relates Petra Kuppers, in reference to her experience collaborating with the poet Denise Leto. Kuppers described her collaboration during the Conference on Ecopoetics panel "Illness, Landscape, Healing" — one of the conference's most interactive.

In a studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kuppers explained, the poets recorded what she calls their "improvisational assemblage," a performance/process that involved conjuring and composing lines of poetry through trance and touch, or "bodymind" (Kuppers' term). During their two-day session, the poets explored the possibilities of embodied composition, for which "body" was at once the materiality of layered voices; the blood, lymph, and cerebral fluid to which they were attuned, coursing through their circulatory and central nervous systems; the vulnerability and delight of exposed skin, warm under the studio lights; and the metal and rubber of Kuppers' wheelchair, amidst entangled hair and limbs.

S/N: NewWorldPoetics -- pdf of issue 4 now available

 V.I, N.4 (PDF)
August 2012


N. American poetry/poetics translatd into Spanish, Latin American poetry/poetics translated into English.

edited by Charles Bernstein and Eduaro Espina

Mario Arteca, tr. G.J. Racz 
Lila Zemborain, tr. Gabriel Amor
Fransisco Madariaga, tr. Molly Weigel
Esteban Peicovich, tr. G.J. Racz 
Barbara Guest, tr. Arcadio Leos

Poetics / Poeticas
Meanwhile | Daniel Freidemberg
de Ojos del testimonio | Jerome Rothenberg, tr. Heriberto Yépez
Una semana de blogs para la Fundación de Poesía | Kenneth Goldsmith, tr. Néstor Cabrera Quesada
Escritura y experiencia | Nick Piombino, tr. Néstor Cabrera Quesada
Francisco Madariaga, mi padre, el poeta del trino blanco y el oro del amor | Lucio L. Madariaga
Interview w Francisco Madariaga | Silvia Guerra
LINEbreak: Barbara Guest en 1995 | Charles Bernstein, tr. Arcadio Leos 

Note our new website address: now at EPC!

http://epc.buffalo.edu/presses/SN/

the site has pdfs of all back issues.

Letters: Ed Baker and Cid Corman, 1973–1975

'From Here to There'

Ed Baker

Ed Baker writes: “The following letters were written by me to Cid Corman in 1973-1975 while I was working on restoring John Penn's 1723 farm-house and writing Restoration Poems and retrieved/purchased from the William Reese Company via abebooks.com on March 12, 2005. Cid's replies to my letters are in Restoration Letters (tel let, 2003). Cid gave a packet of some of the things that I had sent to him to his brother with instructions to sell. The letters included here were included in that package presented here in a little different form.  Some of Cid’s replies to my letters in RESTORATION LETTERS (1972 – 1978), tel let, 2003. The poems were published as RESTORATION POEMS, Country Valley Press, 2008.  That's 35 or so years AFTER first writings / versions of the poems ! As Cid wrote in 1975: ‘No hurry with the book : it won't improve with haste. And now one riding you. Let it accrete and shape it with care as it comes. And then mull it with even more care when it seems “done”. The way you’re working makes heavy demands on each word ...’” — Ed Baker   9 - 10 - 2010 / 11 - 13 - 2012