Wanderkammer

A walk through texts

J. R. Carpenter

(click image or here to be taken to WANDERKAMMER)

November 1, 2011

Louis Bury and Corey Frost have curated this Jacket2 feature devoted to poetry and walking: taking up texts that approach walking as inspiration and technique for writing, the pieces in this feature are also themselves peripatetic in their approach to what it means to engage with a work. As a collection of book reviews that detour, wander, and map their central concerns, Bury and Frost’s feature uses walking not just as topic but as “integral condition of its saying: to move is to be moved, by a poem, a person, or our surroundings.”

Preface

Louis Bury

Corey Frost

Wanderkammer J. R. Carpenter

A detour from more traditional paths of composition Eugene Lim

The longing, in language, for a connection Gail Scott

Allowing oneself to 'be the city' erica kaufman

Notes on a phenomenological poetics Leah Souffrant

A literary walking uphill Nikhil Bilwakesh

To get you out walking Taien Ng-Chan

A talk review of 'Ten Walks/Two Talks' Louis Bury

A website for one shoe Yvette Poorter

We can't do it without the rose Rebekah Rutkoff

Listen along with the feature

On PennSound you’ll find a recording of the 2010 launch event for CAConrad and Frank Sherlock’s The City Real and Imagined: Philadelphia Poems at the Institute of Contemporary Art (additional recordings are available on Sherlock’s author page). Kevin Varrone reads from his work as part of the Whenever We Feel Like It series. Finally, issue #9 of the audiopoetics journal textsound is dedicated to the collaborative work of Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch.

By this author

Wanderkammer

Prosody and pain in 'Scherzos Benjyosos'

Phil Baber

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]

June 14, 2023

The poetics of the ostrakon

N. H. Pritchard's 'Mundus' at the Whitney Museum

Claudio Sansone

Portion of ‘Sappho 2’ ostracon. Image adapted from a photo via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ostrakon_PSI_XIII_1300,_II_sec._ac,_frammento_di_un%27ode_di_saffo_sul_culto_di_afrodite.JPG>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — 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.

March 9, 2023