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
'The shuttle of discourse': Chris Tysh on Marjorie Welish's 'Begetting Textile' poems
...and a look at works by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch, Gustaf Sobin, and María Sabina
In weaving—from basic hand weaving to mechanized looms—the direction is back and forth, left to right and right to left and again. Other actions take place between these movements: a stick lifts one set of threads up and down to create a shed through which the shuttle moves across. Heddles—through which various warp fibers are threaded in order to create patterns—lift and fall in various sequences.