Myung Mi Kim at the Kelly Writers House. Photo by Arielle Brousse.
Editorial note: Myung Mi Kim (b. 1957) is the author of Penury (2009), Commons (2002), Dura (1999), The Bounty (1996), and Under Flag (1991). She teaches in the poetics program at SUNY–Buffalo. The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded March 15, 2007, at Studio 111 at the University of Pennsylvania with the engineering assistance of Molly Braverman. Listen to the audio program here. Charles Bernstein hosted and produced the show, which includes questions and comments from Pauline Baniqued, Julie Charbonneir, Nicholas Mayer, Heather Gorn, Sarah Yeung, and Jonathan Liebembuk (as well as Adam Tabor and Damien Bright). The interview was transcribed by Michael Nardone. — Katie L. Price
Ted Pearson with Larry Price at Poet's House, New York City, 2011
Note: The following is the second (and concluding) part of a larger conversation examining Ted Pearson’s An Intermittent Music, a serial work begun in 1975 and completed in 2010. The first half appeared in Jacket2 and can be read here.
Luke Harley: Ron Silliman has resisted attempts to label your work as “minimalist,” instead arguing that it is “all about how much pressure you can exert on a few select words or lines.” Do you agree with Ron?
Ted Pearson: Yes. Resemblance is not identity, though it can lead to mistaken identity. As applied to poetry, a “minimalist” tag refers to texts that are formally spare and verbally concise — but those features are common to such a disparate range of works that to remark them is obvious and does little to account for significant aesthetic differences among those works. Yet those differences determine a work’s relation to the “restricted economy” that the label implies. In my work, that relation is essentially oppositional.
Tan Lin (center) and others at Edit: Performing Networked Publishing, April 21, 2010, Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia.
Note: Published in 2010 in the Wesleyan University Press poetry series, Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies defies generic categorization. Lin redefines “the book” for our cultural moment of networked communications, new technologies that threaten — or promise, depending on one’s point of view — to render obsolete many longstanding assumptions about our reading practices. In the following interview, Lin provides extensive commentary that becomes a textual extension of Seven Controlled Vocabularies.
Jerry Rothenberg at the Kelly Writers House, April 29, 2008.
Editorial note: Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931) is the author of more than seventy books of poetry, including Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca JournalKhurbn and Other Poems (1978), (1989), and most recently Concealments and Caprichos and Retrievals: Uncollected and New Poems, 1955–2010 (2011). Rothenberg is also known for championing “ethnopoetics” and curates an ethnopoetics section at UbuWeb and his own blog/magazine, Poems and Poetics.
