Chris Stroffolino

Chris Stroffolino has published three full-length collections of poetry. Most recently, Speculative Primitive (the title poem of which appeared in Jacket) (Tougher Disguises Press, 2004), as well as a collection of literary criticism, Spin Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001). He’s currently seeking publishers for his memoir Radio Orphan as well as his book on Shakespeare’s comedies, Making Fun of Tragedy. He’s the lead singer/songwriter for Continuous Peasant, which has been compared to “Tom Waits and Randy Newman reluctantly agreeing to take a ride in a Camper Van Beethoven driven by Jonathan Richman” and currently is living near Lodi, California.

By this author

Unfurling futurity

Three poems

Crowned with laurel

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (20)

Joanna Kitchel, El Niño Fidencio, and Essie Parrish

Jerome Rothenberg

[In putting together a transnational and historical anthology of the Americas north and south (now in progress), Javier Taboada and I are looking also at founders and representatives of new or revived American-based religions, who speak and write in forms of prophetic and visionary language that resembles what we otherwise would think of as open-verse poetry. In the present instance the outsider poets on display are Joanna Kitchel, a follower of Mother Anne Lee and the Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming (a.k.a.

Surplus

Pt. 6

Michael Cross

The poem constitutes (and is constituted by) potential energy resonating from the practically indiscernible event horizon(s) sundering the autonomous contours of discrete operational systems (subject from object from world). As a result, “the poem” is not just language (or, more radically, not even language), but precisely what is left unsaid in the thing itself (and how this excess disrupts the faux placidity of language through readerly engagement). Surplus meaning infloresces between reader, writer, and world in the relational space constituting the poem’s immanent outside, but it’s the poem itself, its words, that allow us to touch this remainder. As such, the poem is not so much cipher (concealing a singularly esoteric content), but an opening, a cut, as Fred Moten has it (after the work of Saidiya Hartman).

For a long time we have divined both order and disorder in the world and projected these as measure and excess. But every poetics led us to believe something that, of course, is not wrong: that excessiveness of order and a measured disorder exist as well. The only discernible stabilities in Relation have to do with the interdependence of the cycles operative there, how their corresponding patterns of movement are in tune.