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‘We’ the people

Collective lyric self in twenty-first-century poetry

Carlos A. Pittella
article
“Either as poets or as readers, we now realize we are entangled, even when we don’t know what do to with this realization, nor what to call it.” Photo of red bryony tendrils intertwined by hedera.baltica via Wikimedia Commons.

1. First-person otherness

Running the risk of asking the most naïve-sounding question in lyric poetry, what do we make of a contemporary poem in English written in the first person? Whether the first person is singular or plural, how does that choice impact our relationship with the speaker in the poem? And has that relationship changed in the twenty-first century, or is it dictated by our inheritance of modernist ideas and the way they have framed our understanding of the lyric self?

Girls in the supply chain (PoemTalk #174)

Sawako Nakayasu, 'Some Girls Walk into the Country Where They Are From'

PoemTalkpodcast
from left: Caroline Bergvall, Henry Steinberg, Bethany Swann

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis brought together Bethany Swann, Henry Steinberg, and Caroline Bergvall (who was then completing her residence as a Kelly Writers House Fellow) to talk about four poems Caroline and Al had selected from Sawako Nakayasu’s book Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From (published in 2020 by Wave Books). The four poems: “Girl A’s Peanuts and Girl D’s Mouthful,” “Gun,” “Girl in a Field of Flowers,” and “Ten Girls in a Bag of Potato Chips.” This last poem — “Ten Girls” — is also presented in the book in a French translation by Geneve Chao and a Japanese translation by Miwako Ozawa. Our recordings were made by Sawako Nakayasu just for PoemTalk, for which we are grateful, and we are also pleased to have recordings of French and Japanese translations by Chao and Ozawa.

'An escape from daily pronouns'

S. Brook Corfman’s journal poems and the domestic life of queer gender

Jess Shollenberger
article
Sliver from a pallasite meteorite from Fukang (Xinjiang, China). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

If the self in everyday life is like a jar without a lid, exposed and vulnerable to impacts, tipping over and spilling out, then S. Brook Corfman’s 2020 book My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, a record of the self in everyday life, endeavors to hold that vessel carefully and watch it overflow: “I traced myself in peppermint oil, for protection. During the storm, each room filled with water, a jar always brimming. An escape from daily pronouns.

'Meeting this strangeness'

Katherine Agyemaa Agard's 'of colour'

Katherine Franco
review
Image adapted from cover art of ‘of colour.’

of colour commences in an apology. Rather, Katherine Agyemaa Agard suggests her text was born out of a failure to make a film about the African diaspora “or simply our diaspora. My mother and father and brother and sister and me.”[1] It’s come to this is the sentiment at the beginning of the text. It’s come to a textual object because another form failed.

The delight of this work

Women of color celebrate second books

Gabrielle Civil
Rosamond S. King
Christina Olivares
Seema Reza
Purvi Shah
interview
Clockwise from top left: Seema Reza, Gabrielle Civil, Christina Olivares, Rosamond S. King, Purvi Shah.

The inception of this work is relationship. 

Publishing is not pretty for women of color poets. Undue expectations. The need to speak on behalf of whole communities. Elusive second books. 

*a linked engagement with:
Future Botanic. Christina Olivares. Get Fresh Books, forthcoming 2022

Paper cuts, or the costs of legibility

A review of Kimberly Alidio's 'why letter ellipses'

Morgan Võ
review
Photo of Kimberly Alidio by Stacy Szymaszek.

why letter ellipses begins for me in the slippery enigma of its title which, through the touch of a gerund to a gerund-esque, yields a kind of aspect perception, where shifts in emphasis can flicker ducks into rabbits. Stressing “letter” as that which can “ellipses,” I hear a desire to explore how speech slides into omission, how text erodes into cracks, gaps, full-blown sinkholes. Conversely, stressing “ellipses” as that which can be “lettered,” I hear a critical question about historiography and its limits: Why write or label what’s been left out?

When we talk about literacy there cannot be / one without concessions. — Simone White

EcoSomatics archive

Field notes from the 2020 EcoSomatics Symposium

Petra Kuppers
Charli Brissey
Catherine Fairfield
andrea haenggi
Stephanie Heit
Megan Kaminski
Madeleine Kerslake
Rania Lee Khalil
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
DJ Lee
Denise Leto
Lori Landau
Michele Minnick
Naomi Ortiz
Bronwyn Preece
Carolyn Roy
Christina Vega-Westhoff
Syrus Marcus Ware
moira williams
article
Montage of shots from ‘Eco Monsters and Somatic Take-Overs,’ a small outdoor EcoSomatics symposium, Ypsilanti, Michigan, September 2021, shots from a workshop led by Marc Arthur, with symposium participants Charli Brissey, moira williams, Petra Kuppers, Cara Hagen, Stephanie K. Dunning, Stephanie Heit, Biba Bell, Christina Seers-Etters, and Kathy Westwater, all playing with monster addenda, crutch lightsabers, and relational objects.

An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lori Landau, Carolyn Roy, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Michele Minnick, Denise Leto, moira williams, Catherine Fairfield, andrea haenggi and bull thistle leaf, DJ Lee, Megan Kaminski, Charli Brissey, Bronwyn Preece, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Rania Lee Khalil, and Madeline Kerslake.

An assemblage montaged by Petra Kuppers, with Syrus Marcus Ware, Naomi Ortiz, Stephanie Heit, Lori Landau, Carolyn Roy, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Michele Minnick, Denise Leto, moira williams, Catherine Fairfield, andrea haenggi and bull thistle leaf, DJ Lee, Megan Kaminski, Charli Brissey, Bronwyn Preece, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Rania Lee Khalil, and Madeline Kerslake.

Introduction by Petra Kuppers

Poetry/painting/history/hermeneutics

On 'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present'

Dean Rader
review
‘Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, To the Shores of Asia Minor)’ (installation view), 1994, oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite on three canvases, 157½ × 624" (400.1 × 1585 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston. Gift of the artist. Photographer: Paul Hester. © Menil Foundation, Inc.

For me, that tension between poetry, writing, and drawing is utterly captivating. So much so that I have spent the last two years writing poems that enter into conversations with Twombly’s work, a project I have found both humbling and transformative. In fact, the last real public outing I engaged in before the pandemic lockdown was a visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. — Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”[1]