A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).
Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest?
I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement.
From left: Laynie Browne, Julia Bloch, Iain Morrison
Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, and Iain Morrison joined Al Filreis in KWH’s Wexler Studio to talk about a poem — or rather two versions of a poem — by the late Callie Gardner. One version, titled “when will my love return from the culture war?,” is 6-quatrains long. A second, for which we have a recorded performance, is four quatrains; there’s a variation on the second that seems to invite us to call it a sonnet. Callie added a version — organized in the quatrains — to their blog on May 1, 2020. On November 19, 2020, Callie read the shorter version of the poem as part of a live-streamed reading given by eight poets. Callie was the fifth to read. We link the YouTube recording HERE, and PoemTalk listeners are invited to watch and listen to our poem at 53 minutes into the group reading.
“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.
Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.
The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.
From left to right: the cover of “cue,” Siwar Masannat.
Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer, poet, educator, and editor currently based in Milwaukee. cue,Masannat’s second book of poetry, emerges from her engagement with Akram Zaatari’s project Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, which brought El Madani’s compelling photographs of community members in Saida, Lebanon, to a global audience.
cue Siwar Masannat University of Georgia Press 2024, 82 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9780820365978
From left to right: Carlos Soto-Román, Soto-Román's book “11,” and Leanne Tory-Murphy.
I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
From left to right: the cover of “Indigo Angel,” Jeanne Hueving (photo by Marc Studer).
The well-worn apothegm text, texture, textile gets reversed in Jeanne Heuving’s remarkable new book, Indigo Angel, which is comprised of three long poems that, read as one, become something greater, much in the way the ecology of a place gives rise to a human drama, our civilization’s history unfolding within a natural order.
Indigo Angel Jeanne Heuving Black Square Editions, 2023, 220 pages, ISBN 979–8–986036–91–5
The covers of “Further Adventures” and “To Go Into the Words” by Norman Finkelstein.
The lot of the committed poet-critic is a tricky one; the hyphen can be precarious. For some of the greatest dual practitioners in the language — I’m thinking here of Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, William Empson, Laura Riding — prose sooner or later seems to become the “easier” medium, the poetry either slowing down considerably, drying up completely, or being turned away from consciously.
Further Adventures Norman Finkelstein Dos Madres Press 2023, 108 pages, paperback $23 ISBN 9781953252821
To Go Into the Words Norman Finkelstein University of Michigan Press 2023, 222 pages, paperback $34.95 ISBN 9780472039418
