Reviews

Anarchic inventions: On making poetry present

David Antin and Charles Bernstein

How does (or should) one regard the work of innovative or experimental poets whom one has been reading for nearly forty years? The question is, to be sure, something of a mare’s nest — not one question but several, starting perhaps with the old problem of whether the terms “modernism,” “avant-garde,” or even “art” itself are not inherently defined by term limits. The artist Lawrence Weiner once said: “When my work is assimilated into the art context, it will change something. I hope it won’t be considered viable living art in ten years.

A review of 'Just Kids'

Aram Saroyan

Raised in a poor but loving family in New Jersey, Patti Smith wasn’t happy with the range of opportunities open to her after high school. Artistic and strong-natured — she played the General in her games with her brother and sister — she got into trouble with an unwanted pregnancy, gave the baby up for adoption, quit her factory job, and took a bus to New York.

The trial of Elizabeth Willis's 'Address'

Francisco "Kokoy" Guevara

When asked about the voices that spoke only to Joan of Arc during the second session of her trial for heresy on February 22, 1431, she answered in Middle French a statement transcribed by the English-financed court in Latin that Anne Carson translates to English as follows: “The light comes in the name of the voice.”[1]

'An endless, polyglot failure party'

A review of Robert Fitterman's 'Now We Are Friends'

derek beaulieu

Founded in 2009, Truck Books is “a small press specializing in contemporary experimental writing in the avant-garde tradition” which focuses on “works that focus on a variety of objects from vernacular languages to social and information systems, production systems and capital flows.” They have published five books to date (four of which are listed on their ordering page), each of which is available as a free pdf or as a printed edition sold on a sliding scale.

Scholars to come

A review of Matt Miller's 'Collage of Myself'

Eric Conrad

The image on the cover of Matt Miller’s new book, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass, will look especially familiar to anyone who has googled the good gray poet in the past few years. While the William J. Linton engraving of Walt Whitman, itself based on a photograph by George C. Potter, first appeared within the poet's published work in 1875, the last place many of you may have seen this “rough-cut mask” was on the homepage of the Walt Whitman Archive, an electronic teaching and research tool that makes Whitman’s work — from his earliest extant manuscripts up through the so-called “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass — available free online.