from left: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William Fuller, Bruce Andrews
Al Filreis hosted Rachel Blau DuPlessis, William Fuller, and Bruce Andrews in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House for a conversation about Ted Pearson's book-length poem Catenary Odes. The book was first published by O Books in 1987. The poem, or perhaps it is a series of couplet-length poems, covers 44 pages in print; the PoemTalk group discussed the first 11 pages, approximately 40 lines. Our section ends with “the body electric in a brownout / the western mind in a jar.” The recording we play in this episode comes from Pearson’s PennSound page, from an audiotaping of a reading given in the Segue Series at the Ear Inn in New York on December 4, 1993.
Author photo (left) courtesy of Keston Sutherland.
In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true). Rather the pressure that prosodic constraints exert on the poet’s language, and therefore upon his thinking, exposes seams of pain and of potential happiness which could not have been anticipated nor, perhaps, discovered in any other way.[1]
In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true).
Photo of Eileen Myles (left) by Kelly Writers House staff, March 2016.
A stingray doesn’t know the word for “pathetic.” A saint does not care if prayer renders her pathetic. Poets are pathetic because they devote themselves to form in the face of formlessness. (Are they? Do they?) These kinds of formulations and queries arise in reading Pathetic Literature, the momentous anthology edited by Eileen Myles and released by Grove Press in November 2022.
At the beginning of chapter 6 of Poetics of Liveliness, titled “Clouds,” author Ada Smailbegović engages in an “experiment of description” aimed at enacting the “vaporous dynamics” of the Blur Building, a temporary media installation that drew up the waters of Lake Neuchâtel to spray into being an architectural structure composed entirely of water vapor and mist.[1] Smailbegović’s experiment is respiratory, a tidal form of positive feedback intensified through a litany of movements, forms, and visuals that partake of the hazy encumbrances and billows of a planetary atmosphere, a “dynamic site of gradual transformation” (198) that affectively embraces the instability and transience of cloud: “The vapor begins rising again from the left corner of the frame, filling and filling the space until no discernment is possible between the shape of the cloud and the sky” (228).
In this interview conducted by Teresa Villa-Ignacio, the poet, translator, filmmaker, and activist Sarah Riggs recalls how, upon moving to Paris in the early 2000s, she began translating French poets including Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Stéphane Bouquet, and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Riggs also discusses how this translation work impacted her own poetry, including the books Waterwork (Chax, 2007) and Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), and describes opportunities for poetic translation exchanges she has facilitated through the organizations Double Change and Tamaas. The interview was recorded on June 8, 2013, in Paris.
Portion of ‘Sappho 2’ ostracon. Image adapted from a photo via Wikimedia Commons.
What is an ostrakon? And what does an ostrakon have to do with the work of N. H. Pritchard? Norman Henry Pritchard was a member of the Umbra poets in the Lower East Side in the 1960s and a self-avowed “transrealist” who blended visual and sound poetry in many of his poems, some of which might be termed quasisurrealist or quasi-imagistic. Several essays about Pritchard have appeared here in Jacket2, and he has received scattered, although usually excellent, scholarly attention.[1] However, very little is known about him or his work as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, which is when, for the most part, he stopped publishing his poems.
Photo of Holly Melgard by Kelly Writers House staff, 2017.
When I was a baby adult and even broker than I am now, I participated for pay in a study at a university that involved lying in a creaky old MRI machine, hooked up to two dozen electrodes that monitored my brain and systematically inflicted pain on my arms. My task was to look, via a tiny mirror, at a screen that displayed a blue square, then a red circle, then a blue circle, then a red square, or whatever, while the scientists applied a particular intensity of punishment as an accompaniment to each.
When I was a baby adult and even broker than I am now, I participated for pay in a study at a university that involved lying in a creaky old MRI machine, hooked up to two dozen electrodes that monitored my brain and systematically inflicted pain on my arms. My task was to look, via a tiny mirror, at a screen that displayed a blue square, then a red circle, then a blue circle, then a red square, or whatever, while the scientists applied a particular intensity of punishment as an accompaniment to each. I lay on my back contentedly and “rated” how much it hurt on a scale of one to ten.
Illustration by Alfred Concanen from ‘Broadstone Hall, and other poems’ (1875) by William Edward Windus, via the British Library.
I tasked myself with saying one or two things I know about grief and loss and why so many people feel the compulsion to write through them. As an essential motivation for writing, especially poetry, loss events appear to make us both speechless and verbose. I’ve been there, I keep being there. I’ve written a “grief book” a few times now and frankly, I can’t say I find that its product is catharsis or repair.
