Commentaries - March 2017

Regis Bonvicino, 'Beyond the Wall: Selected Poems'

Régis Bonvicino is to twenty-first-century São Paulo what Charles Baudelaire was to nineteenth-century Paris: the poet as flaneur wandering through the cultural detritus of our time with mordant gaze and dark wit. Bonvicino’s ebullient poems are replete with philosophically searing perceptions and social conscious lament. Not yet elegy, Bonvicino’s unrelenting acknowledgments center on the parasitic relation between those mangled by society and those doin’ the manglin.’

You can get a hard copy of this new book for $12.95 (or $5 for a PDF) at Green Integer

 

 

Régis Bonvicino is to twenty-first century São Paulo what Charles Baudelaire was to nineteenth-century Paris: the poet as flaneur wandering through the cultural detritus of our time with mordant gaze and dark wit. Bonvicino’s ebullient poems are replete with philosophically searing perceptions and socially conscious lament. Not yet elegy, Bonvicino’s unrelenting acknowledgments center on the parasitic relation between those mangled by society and those doin’ the manglin.’

'Planning to Stay'

No Press (2010)

A short talk I gave at Banff, Alberta — at the Centre for the Arts there — in February 2010 was later published by No Press in Calgary, edited and typeset by Derek Beaulieu (a poet, teacher, and Poet Laureate of Calgary 2014-16). I’m grateful to Derek for having made this beautiful chapbook available. I was asked to prepare something of a manifesto for the final panel of the several-day conference called “In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge.”

Click on the images of the chapbook pages below to see larger scans.

Rae Armantrout: Four new poems

Rae Armantrout has emerged in recent years as an essential contributor to a new and evolving American poetry, the force of the work in fulfillment of Lydia Davis’s earlier assessment: “In every line, every stanza of these brief and dense poems, Rae Armantrout’s powerful mix of scientific inquiry and social commentary, wit and strangeness, is profoundly stimulating. She changes the way one sees the world and hears language — every poem an explosion on the page in which her individuality shines through. Is the work funny? Absolutely. Moving? Yes. But beware — after reading Armantrout you will question everything, including what it means to be ‘funny’ and ‘moving.’” Previous postings on Poems & Poetics can be found here and here, as well as Marjorie Perloff’s essay “An Afterword for Rae Armantrout.” Here are four of her new poems.

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      TRUE NORTH

 

Reindeer pull a sleigh

(through early spring thaw)

on the roof

of the True North

nail salon

 

 

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