Elizabeth Alexander, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Allison Knowles at the White House in May 2011. Photograph by Steve McLaughlin.
Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.
Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
The Tolerance Project, what could be the first collaborative MFA in Creative Writing ever,[1] has engendered many defining responses. Poet and scholar Jeff Derksen frames the project “within the history of conceptual art and its two strongest tendencies: institutional critique and the reconfiguration of artist as producer.”[2] One blogger poet wrote that it “actively challeng[es] the stagnating culture of poetry workshops and the dominance of mainstream Romantic ideas propagated within them.”[3] Another blogger poet opined that The Tolerance Project “explore[s] the civility agenda intrinsic to the MFA workshop experience.”[4]
Editorial note: Brian Unger’s “Norman Fischer: A ‘test case for being’” was written in response to a portfolio of eleven new poems by Norman Fischer, which you can read here. Fischer was also the subject of PoemTalk #38, for which host Al Filreis was joined by Linh Dinh, Julia Bloch, and Frank Sherlock. — Michael S. Hennessey
The Precession, Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery’s newest project, redefines literary creation as intertwined acts of writing, composing, and viewing/reading work on the Internet, as well as collaboration and performance. The entire process makes a series of exciting suggestions about how electronic writing in particular can be translated into innovative and significant performances either on your own computer screen, projected into and onto various spaces, or interacted with as a live event.
