Commentaries - March 2017

The vestiges of poetics

Post-ecopoetics is about the art of writing and reading through a damaged ecopoetics. It is the art of writing and reading when we still had summer arctic polar ice and most of the world’s coral colonies. Part of the inspiration for this project comes from Donna Haraway’s new book Staying with the Trouble, where she calls for “arts of living on a damaged planet” as a way to begin to confront the Anthropocene and focus on making its tenure brief.

Tracie Morris, five pieces (video)

Tracie Morris performed five of her poems in honor of William J. (Billy Joe) Harris on March 11, 2017, in Brooklyn, New York. Thanks to the efforts of Dylan Leahy, we are making them available as video segments. In the order in which the videos are presented below, they are: “Blackout, 1977,” “Enclosed” (a response to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons), “Morenita,” “Postcard of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and “Queens.”

Two poems performed by Tyrone Williams (video)

From his recent reading given at the Kelly Writers House, we present two video excerpts (thanks for the video editing of Dylan Leahy of the PennSound staff).

Colin Browne on Close Listening

Photo: Charles Bernstein / PennSound

On Close Listening, Colin Browne and I talked about the founding of the Kootenay School of Writing, the limits of narrative in poetry and film and the possibilities of collage, the trickster figure in the work of Charles Edenshaw, and the overlays of personal history and cultural history in Browne’s new book about Edenshaw, a nineteenth-century indegenous artist from British Columbia.

(30:00): MP3

Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt

Video recording of one poem by each

Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Colin Browne visited Philadelphia on March 15, 2017. They joined me for a recording of an episode of PoemTalk on Larissa Lai’s Nascent Fashion, and then give a triple reading at the Penn Book Center. That reading was recorded on audio and will be available soon at the poets’ PennSound pages. Meantime, I captured performances of two poems as video recordings — Fred Wah reading (his encore poem) from his great book Is a Door, and Daphne Marlatt reading a piece from her Vancouver Poems.