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

'From A to Z'

Forty years later

Johanna Drucker

Pages from the 1977 edition of 'From A to Z.'

From A to Z was published/printed in 1977. The book was a long year in the making, and as a work that was essentially an enormous scrabble game, it required a number of procedural steps for its realization. The most coherent (looking) sections were the ones written and set first. Then the “sorts” had to be used up by making $ubstitution$, f/puns, us!ng punctuation, and abbrev:at:ns, among other tricks.

“Quick, tell me the differences among Olson, Williams, and Pound.” Placed at the bottom of the “Introduction,” this line speaks volumes about the encounter between modern poetry and print publication that is documented in the bibliography-a-clé, From A to Z.

August 11, 2017

Total translation

Navajo song and the story of US modernism

Derek Furr

In her deconstruction of Mary Austin’s ‘The American Rhythm,’ Leah Dilworth argues that modernists held American Indian culture to be fundamentally analogous to that of ancient Africa and China. Above: Austin's 'American Rhythm,' Eda Lou Walton's 'Dawn Boy,' and 'Navajo Songs,’ 1933 and 1940 field recordings from settlements in New Mexico and Arizona courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

American Indian culture attracted many white poets to the Southwest in the early and mid-twentieth century. Educated in Anglo American traditions, but compelled by the modernist urge to develop new poetic forms, poets from Mary Austin to Jerome Rothenberg went to great lengths to represent what they were hearing and feeling. D. H. Lawrence wrote of his experience of Hopi dance, and he and Witter Bynner composed lyrics purportedly inspired by the Taos Pueblo. In American Rhythm, Austin “re-expressed” the music of several peoples, including the Paiute and Shoshone, and in Red Earth, Alice Corbin Henderson claimed to write “from the Indian,” naming the San Ildefonso and Tesuque pueblos.

American Indian[1] culture attracted many white poets to the Southwest in the early and mid-twentieth century. Educated in Anglo American traditions, but compelled by the modernist urge to develop new poetic forms, poets from Mary Austin to Jerome Rothenberg went to great lengths to represent what they were hearing and feeling. D. H. Lawrence wrote of his experience of Hopi dance, and he and Witter Bynner composed lyrics purportedly inspired by the Taos Pueblo.

May 2, 2017