“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 Garcia 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.
Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.
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
After the event, Jose and I chatted briefly, but he had to jet off to class. So we decided to continue our conversation in a slightly more formal context. We corresponded via email on December 31, 2023 and through the first weeks of the new year, first discussing Black Box Syndrome and then Yaguareté White.
In August of 2023, just as the Fall term commenced, poet and scholar Jose-Luis Moctezuma reached out to me about celebrating Latinx Heritage Month at Wilbur Wright College, where he teaches Literature and Composition in the English department. Jose invited me to read from my forthcoming debut poetry collection, Yaguareté White, which was published by University of Arizona Press in February. As a fellow faculty member at the City Colleges of Chicago, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to spend time with a new group of students talking about poetry.
You see, sometime back, I came up with a zippy formula meant to clarify how we might arrive at “political poetry.” It goes like this: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics.
V. Joshua Adams: Let’s start at the beginning. The title of the upcoming 2025 book: WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. It comes from the opening of “Caras y Mascaras,” which juxtaposes the names of poets and literary practices with those of military hardware and politico-historical places and events a total of 14 times, by way of tercets, like this:
