Amy Catanzano

Wake Forest University Reading, Oct. 25, 2022

audio and video

Charles Bernstein

Reading at Wake Forest, introduced by Amy Catanzano
55 minutes 35 seconds on PennSound

mp3 audio

mov video
(with thanks to Julian Semilian)

Impossible poems at invisible scales

An interview with Amy Catanzano

Amy Catanzano
Jace Brittain
Rachel Zavecz

Note: In May 2015 Jace Brittain and Rachel Zavecz interviewed me about my third book, Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press, 2014). The book combines narrative fiction — in which three characters, two of whom are named for Greek concepts, join forces to stop a war — with lyric poetry, visual poetry, and memoir.We discuss the book’s cross-genre form, ’pataphysics, quantum poetics, fourth-person narration and the fourth dimension, and more. In addition to talking with me about Starlight in Two Million, Jace and Rachel wrote a collaborative review of the novella for the online arts magazine, Queen Mob’s Teahouse. — Amy Catanzano

November 3, 2015

What is at stake in/when defining poetry?

QUICK QUESTION

When new acquaintances ask what I study, I often tell them, “poetry that doesn’t look like poetry.” Though my response might seem glib, the sentiment is sincere: I find myself drawn to poetry that unshackles that same term from its traditional denotation. The field of modern and contemporary poetry is full of language that doesn't behave: fixed forms are abandoned for open fields, words are rendered illegible, standardized grammar is disrupted, letters stray from counterparts that would give them meaning, the page is replaced by the screen, and nonsemantic sounds fill basement bars. So why do we still call it poetry? — Katie L. Price

Respondents: Amy Catanzano, Jacob Edmond, Bob Perelman, Brian M. Reed 

Magical correspondences, part 1 of 6

Amy Catanzano
Image by Andrew Joron of eclipsed sun-images filtered through trees, casting zer
Image by Andrew Joron of eclipsed sun-images filtered through trees, casting zeros and almost-zeros on nearby objects.

What follows is part one of six written exchanges between me and Andrew Joron about poetry and science in 2012. Joron’s creative and critical work have been highly influential to me. When I contacted him after The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog ran an article,“From the Golden Age of San Francisco Science-Fiction Poetry to the New Age of Quantum Poetics,”about our shared interest in poetry and science, he generously responded to my poetry and speculative essays on quantum poetics published on Poems and Poetics. Joron and I have decided to present our conversation here for Jacket2. 

See also parts two, three, four, five, and six.

Symbolic multiplication

Amy Catanzano
Image I made using Alfred Jarry's equation for the "surface of god"
Image I made using Alfred Jarry's equation for the "surface of god" and NASA's latest picture of the known universe

I often think of quantum mechanics as the most conceptually radical of the breakthroughs in theoretical physics to emerge in the last and current century, in part due to its claim that physical reality cannot be definitively observed. The claim challenges Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics and the scientific method, which assumes that physical reality can be measured without ambiguity, and principles of nature can be determined with certainty.

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