Endi Bogue Hartigan on fields and crowds and more
It was a brisk spring night when I went to hear Endi Bogue Hartigan read as part of the Loggernaut Reading Series in Portland. What struck me about her person was a quiet intensity; her work, with its eerie incantatory power, unsettled me.
Note: It was a brisk spring night when I went to hear Endi Bogue Hartigan read as part of the Loggernaut Reading Series in Portland. What struck me about her person was a quiet intensity; her work, with its eerie incantatory power, unsettled me. I admired this, found it refreshing in a time when a lot of poetry readings have a light or casual tone — with poets starting out with jokes or stories, or if they are from out of town, something they like about Portland. While I enjoy those readings, too, I was drawn to her work partly because the way she read aligned brilliantly with the collection’s strong aesthetics of muscular repetition and urgent complexity. I decided to approach her about an interview because I wanted to know more about how this collection came into being. What follows is an interview conducted over email, stringing out over several months as we slowly found an afternoon here, an evening there, to keep the conversation going. — Eliza Rotterman
Back in mid-March 2010, I traveled to Manhattan and met Charles Bernstein and Robert Grenier at the East Side apartment of Michael Waltuch, Grenier's old friend and collaborator. We recorded part 2 of what is now a long 2-part interview with Grenier about his early years. Part 1 focused on 1959-64, with a bit of a look back to Grenier's high-school years just before that period. Part 2 goes back a bit into the early 60s but then moves forward, covering 1965 to the early and mid 1970s. If last time the central topic was Harvard, this time the central topic, as it emerged, was New England: New England in the specific biographical sense (Bob G.'s wanderings there, especially on trips shooting outward from Harvard) but also in the meta-geographical sense--New England as a haunt, a crucial (it would seem now, in Grenier's way of thinking) ghostly presence in his thinking and in his writerly development.
Coolitude poetics interview with Sudesh Mishra
Sudesh Mishra is the author of five books of poetry, including Tandava (Meanjin Press), Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (Otago University Press), and The Lives of Coat Hangers (Otago University Press); two critical monographs, Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English (Flinders University) and Diaspora Criticism (Edinburgh University Press); two plays, Ferringhi and The International Dateline (Institute of Pacific Studies, Suva); and several short stories.