chapbooks

Inverting helplessness

An interview between Christy Davids and Nikki Wallschlaeger

Christy Davids (left) and Nikki Wallschlaeger (right). Photos courtesy of the authors.

Note: Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of two full-length books of poetry: Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017). Wallschlaeger lives in Wisconsin where she collects and propagates violets. She is a mother; she is a poet; she is at once tender, at once piercing. This interview took place in September 2017 shortly before Wallschlaeger arrived in Philadelphia to read at Philalalia, a small press and book arts festival hosted by Temple University.

August 21, 2018

David Abel in conversation

PennSound podcasts

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

David Abel visited the Kelly Writers House recently in order to record his poems for PennSound (his PennSound author page will be available soon), to check with us about our progress in digitizing a box of rare recordings on cassette he has given us for adding to the PennSound archive, and to participate in a recording session of PoemTalk (on a poem by Muriel Rukeyser), to be released later. Among the cassettes are readings by David Rattray and Gene Frumkin.

March 28, 2014

Chapbook

'Round Vienna'

Michael Farrell

Round Vienna is the title of a new chapbook from Vagabond by Kate Lilley, and reminds me that Vienna airport, (my only experience of Vienna) is round. As far as I know, it's the first solo poetry publication from Lilley since her 2002 Salt book, Versary. It is just 4 poems. Yet the elegant production aside - and the splendid (yet understated) sample of images by Melissa Hardie - it does not feel meagre. Titles are important: and if Vienna conjured Freud for you, the first poem title, 'Fraud's Dora' would confirm it. The title is in a sense a balancing of the intellectual weight of the poems: for we are in the realm of psychoanalytic assemblage. There is a similarity here to the poems of Emma Lew in that the lines seem drawn from disparate (if perhaps fictional) sources, yet they present a tonally structured verisimilitude rather than the feel of a field of fragments. Otherwise they are very much their own woman - distinct in terms of rhythm, sensibility and humour:

she did not scruple to appear

in the most frequented streets

she was in fact a feminist

('Sidonie')

Sidonie was a lesbian patient of Freud's, and there is a homoerotic coupling between the poem on the left and Hardie's image on the left. (These images are not just illustrations but poetically apposite in themselves, encouraging a reading of the book as visual poetry.)

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Janky materiality

Artifice and interface

Jeff T. Johnson

We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. — Amiri Baraka

Poetry is heard; it is the heard thing. — Erín Moure

Materiality and embodiment

September 13, 2019

Twenty Theses for (Any Future) Process Poetics

Postscript // Bibliography // Acknowledgments

Michael Cross

T.1 The poem is ontologically dissevering: necessarily fragmenting and framentary.

T.2 Holding concretized, ready-made “significance” and in abeyance, the poem functions as a catch, an apparatus used to observe the manifestations and codeterminations of entangling and unfurling world(s).

T.3 So as to render inoperative those ossified subject-configurations most exploitable by market vampirism, the poem tears back the veil of the “real” (where flesh meets fluorescence: body/world) to point to the rachitic frame-structure bolstering becoming.

In order to celebrate the conclusion of “Prolegomena to (Any Future) Process Poetics,” I’d like to provide a postscript that distills the central concerns of these twelve dense riffs into a series of pointed propositions. The following twenty theses comprise the core of this thinking and will act (I hope) as a lens for future rereading. Thank you, dear readers, for engaging with/in this work.