Wanderkammer

A walk through texts

(click image or here to be taken to WANDERKAMMER)

About this feature

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

Crucial poetic imaginations

An introduction to new recordings of classic poetry at PennSound

Toni Bowers

I first encountered PennSound Classics when it already included a significant number of important early titles. I noticed, though, a comparative underrepresentation of the work of poets who identified as women. The dearth was readily explained: early women’s writing, and especially their poetry, tended until very recently to be neglected on college syllabi, in anthologies, and in scholarship. As a result, serious readers have had little opportunity to encounter the work of extraordinary poets like Katherine Phillips, Emily Brontë, and Charlotte Mew.

Read more about Crucial poetic imaginations

April 21, 2025

Difficult bliss

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Here, I thought I’d offer an essayistic narrative — by asking how and why Drafts was shaped as it was. What information could I give as a poet by exploring my primary moments of choice and understanding from the 25-year experience of writing one contemporary long poem?