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

The art of lyrical commentary

Michael Heller's poetic achievement

Peter O'Leary

“Effacement is the action of shifting desert sands. Time rubs away memory, leaving only its remnants, its shadows. The poem comments on literature even as it makes it.” Above: Photo of a dust storm by NASA, via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dust_storm_over_Libya.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “Effacement is the action of shifting desert sands. Time rubs away memory, leaving only its remnants, its shadows. The poem comments on literature even as it makes it.” Above: Photo of a dust storm by NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary: Notes, memoranda, memoirs, annotations, derivations, slips (of paper, of tongue), and, in the etymological sense of commenta, interpretation of scripture. Michael Heller’s work is replete with commentary, an ongoing lateral additive to the world around him, lyric in intensity, vibrant with life, literary and religious in its concerns.

1. Ozymandias, a commentary

August 29, 2018

Heller's 'Dianoia'

A briefing

Benjamin Goluboff

“The sequence shows glimpses of the scoured alpine landscape outside the hotel’s windows: “the distant plume / of a snowslide / on glacial slopes,” but the would-be Tibetan mountainscapes are only backdrop to the poet’s back-and-forth on ego and emptiness.” Above: Photo of the Canadian Rockies by David Whelan, via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_Rockies_(20354570068).jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “The sequence shows glimpses of the scoured alpine landscape outside the hotel’s windows: “the distant plume / of a snowslide / on glacial slopes,” but the would-be Tibetan mountainscapes are only backdrop to the poet’s back-and-forth on ego and emptiness.” Above: Photo of the Canadian Rockies by David Whelan, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sam Johnson’s line on the Metaphysicals — that in their work “heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”[1] — is one example among many in Anglo-American letters of how a term of reproach, given some time, becomes a term of praise. Since Eliot in 1921 pardoned the Metaphysicals for all that violent yoking, applauded them for their immunity to the dissociated sensibility of his contemporaries, readers of poetry in English have been taught to admire poets who “ransack,” as Johnson said, art and nature for conceits that are misaligned or unevenly yoked.

August 29, 2018