Interviews

Baraka in 2010

'To understand it as a worker and understand it as an intellectual'

Note: This — as far as I know — is the last scholarly interview with Amiri Baraka before his saddening passing on January 9, 2014. Baraka here tackles subjects such as radical politics and aesthetics, Marxism and class struggle (in music), vanguardism, Black Arts poetry performance and activism, language writing, the modernist epic mode, and responses to “Somebody Blew Up America” as well as anti-colonial and United Front politics.

September 15, 2014

'The passenger syndrome'

An interview with Grzegorz Wróblewski

Grzegorz Wróblewski

Piotr Gwiazda

Note: In early April 2014, Polish writer and painter Grzegorz Wróblewski gave readings from his book Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013) at Columbia University, Cambridge Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

August 28, 2014

Resisting the art of entropy triumphant

An interview with Maxim Amelin

Derek Mong

Anne O. Fisher

Maxim Amelin

Note: “Poetry has enemies,” Maxim Amelin once told us, “both internal and external.” Among the latter he cited “philologists and historians of literature,” a deliberately provocative stance considering that Amelin, trained as a philologist, mines word roots and literary history for poems.[1]

August 6, 2014

Intersecting: Sound and poetry

An interview with angela rawlings and Joshua Liebowitz

Afton Wilky

a.rawlings

Joshua Liebowitz

Note: My inspiration for this interview emerged from a sense that something is missing from conversations about sound and poetry. Sound is not necessarily music. Joshua Liebowitz and angela rawlings (a.rawlings) are two artists I see as deeply engaged with the materiality of sound, and yet their work is extremely different. Joshua’s work uses technology to build and alter sound-structures, while, in angela’s performance-based work, I hear voice and breath sounding the limits of the body.

June 17, 2014

Cyborg voice, collage joy

An interview with Tony Trigilio

Tony Trigilio

Tyler Mills

Note: I first met Tony Trigilio when we read together at the Sunday Salon, at Black Rock Pub in Chicago. The reading was held on a November evening after tornados had swept through the state. I bring this up because Trigilio’s White Noise, a pseudo-Flarf response to DeLillo’s White Noise, transforms the language of search engines — like the kinds we were obsessively checking that afternoon for information about storm systems and tornados — into the language of poetry.

May 30, 2014