Phil Ochs

when Elvis became Che

Al Filreis

Phil Ochs, from the liner notes of The Broadside Tapes:

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

Leaving America is like losing twenty pounds and finding a new girlfriend.

A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper & ebook (audiobook info soon)

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

January 2021 open reading period

Call for submissions

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds: reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles, reviews, and features that engage with multilingual poetry and/or criticism, and/or poetry in and theories of translation; etc.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:

— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory

— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US

— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation

— Coauthored reviews or essays

— Articles, essays, or features that engage with poetics during the COVID-19 pandemic

Jerome Rothenberg, with Javier Taboada

From 'The Book of Voices,' 'I Heard the Voices of the Dead'

Jerome Rothenberg

Cover of the Lithuanian edition of Khurbn by Algimantas Černiauskas

[The following continues an interview and conversation with Javier Taboada in El Libro de las Voces, just published in Mexico by Mangos de Hacha. The publication of course is in Spanish and includes a selection of poems and essays along with the extensive series of interviews. Still in my possession and unpublished is the entire book in English, from which the following excerpt is taken. (j.r.)]