Podcasts

Gone is the word as word (PoemTalk #72)

Bob Cobbing, 'Portrait of Robin Crozier'

Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) — sound poet, visual and concrete poet, DIY printer, and active member of an alternative socio-poetic community in the UK — insisted that there’s no use in adding to poetry what’s already there. In “Some Statements on Sound Poetry” (1969) he wrote: “Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape.” And he added: “Poetry now resides in other elements.” In this episode, Al Filreis is joined by sound poet Jaap Blonk, phonotextualist Steve McLaughlin, and experimental archivist Danny Snelson as they approach a single work by Cobbing, “Portrait of Robin Crozier,” in an effort to identify generally those “other elements.”

November 19, 2013

Constrained to honor (PoemTalk #71)

Claude McKay, 'If We Must Die'

PoemTalk

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Herman Beavers, Salamishah Tillet, and Kathy Lou Schultz joined PoemTalk producer and host Al Filreis to talk about Claude McKay’s widely anthologized sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919). Its content advocates counterviolence in response to racist violence; its form is the exquisitely constrained Shakespearean sonnet, aligned with English poetic mastery. Does pushing through this formal constraint bring McKay’s speaker toward freedom or fatedness? Does the sonnet as a formal choice befit a cultural inside or an outside?

October 7, 2013

Into the Field: Erín Moure with Chus Pato

Into the Field, hosted by Stephen McLaughlin

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Erín Moure is a poet, translator, and communications specialist living in Montreal. She was born and raised in Calgary, and later spent two decades working for the Canadian passenger rail service Via Rail Canada. Erín’s great-grandfather was born in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, and as an adult Erín began visiting Galicia regularly. She picked up the Galician language, and has since written poetry in Galician and translated the work of Galician poets including Chus Pato and Rosalia de Castro.

September 18, 2013

On the convergence of war and wedding (PoemTalk #70)

Laura Mullen, 'Bride of the New Dawn'

PoemTalk

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Amy Paeth, Michelle Taransky, and Steve McLaughlin met up with PoemTalk’s host Al Filreis to talk about one of the poems in Laura Mullen’s book Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides (Otis Books, 2012). Enduring Freedom is a coherent project; its poems constitute a series — a number of approaches to the problem of war’s strange but also surprisingly obvious and true convergence with weddings (and wedding planning in particular). The poem we chose is “Bride of the New Dawn.” Our recording of Mullen’s performance of the poem comes from a reading she gave in October 2012, in Berkeley, as recorded by Ross Craig; it was a reading in which she read fifteen of the Enduring Freedom poems.

August 26, 2013

Into the Field: Rod Smith

Into the Field, hosted by Stephen McLaughlin

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Rod Smith is a poet, editor, and publisher from Washington, D.C. He’s a co-founder of Aerial Magazine and founder of Edge Books, which has published titles by Joan Retallack, Anselm Berrigan, Robert Fitterman, Benjamin Friedlander, K. Silem Mohammad, and many others. Smith, along with Friedlander and Mohammad, is a member of the Flarf Collective.

August 8, 2013