200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
'boundary 2' webinar on 'Topsy-Turvy'
On June 15, boundary 2 editor Paul Bové convened Yunte Huang (from California), Runa Bandyopadhyay (from India), Abigail Lang (from France), and me for b2’s webinar on Topsy-Turvy, focusing on non-U.S. perspectives, in anticipation of an issue of boundary 2 coming out in the fall. In the b2 issue, Runa gives a Vedic and Bengali spin to her reading of my poetics, Yunte writes about our ongoing mishmash of American and Chinese encounters, and Abigail continues her exploration of American/French poetry exchanges in an introduction to her translation of my work.