Interviews

Explain thro’ a brief analysis why the reading of any poem of your choice, by yourself or someone else, is enriched by bringing a science-informed interpretive strategy to bear. The poem may or may not be working consciously with scientific allusions; if you think it will help, refer to one poem that is and one that isn’t.

Armantrout:

Dress Up

November 29, 2011

Even when those texts look indistinguishable from the work that is included

An interview with Craig Dworkin

Craig Dworkin

Katie L. Price

Note: Craig Dworkin is a poet, critic, editor, and professor at the University of Utah. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Motes (2011), The Perverse Library (2010), Parse (2008), Strand (2004), and Dure (2004).

November 16, 2011

Insistent memory

Susan Schultz with Leonard Schwartz, 2008

Susan M. Schultz

Leonard Schwartz

Editorial note: Susan M. Schultz (b. 1958) is a poet, author, English professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and founder of Tinfish Press. Her books of poetry include And then something happened (Salt Publishing, 2004) and Aleatory Allegories (Salt Publishing, 2000). The University of Alabama Press published her critical work A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry in 2005. What follows is a transcript of a December 22, 2008, phone conversation between Leonard Schwartz and Susan Schultz about her 2008 book Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press).

November 4, 2011

We listen with our throats and we speak with our ears

An interview with Leevi Lehto

Leevi Lehto

Carmel Purkis

Editorial note: This interview is part of a feature curated by a.rawlings, “Sound, Poetry”; it began with a request for material on sound poetry as it is currently being practiced in northern Europe. “Sound, Poetry,” however, accomplishes much more than reportage. Poets from Iceland, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom converse with a broad array of Canadian interlocutors; some have even created new work together specifically for this feature. Here, a.rawlings explains the project:

A term like “sound poetry” may no longer adequately contextualize or clarify what it is intended to represent. It seems a useful moment in the history of this term to reflect on what it means, conjures, describes, encapsulates, and wishes to hold within its reach. It seems personally useful to reflect on the relationship between gender and sound poetry. It feels politically responsible to consider this term in relation to geography.

October 24, 2011

The poem that marks things

Stephen Ratcliffe with Linda Russo

Linda Russo

Stephen Ratcliffe

Note: on Monday, July 28, 2010, I met up with Stephen Ratcliffe in his home in Bolinas, California, at the suggestion of Joanne Kyger. I’d been in Bolinas for almost two weeks, exploring in my own writing the landscape and the particularities of that place as do both of these poets, who have lived in this coastal community for over forty years. Ocean waves crashing and the ridge beyond, variations of fog — such particles of landscape perception comprise Temporality (Eclipse Editions, 2011), the third installment (of 1,000 pages) in a trilogy (including Portraits & Repetition and Remarks on Color / Sound) that Ratcliffe was then working on, and which he concluded on January 4, 2011.

October 20, 2011