Jena Osman

Osman-Goldsmith podcast

Al Filreis

Back in December of '04 I was finishing up another semester teaching English 88, my course on modern and contemporary American poetry. In the final "chapter" of the course I ended by having the students read two contemporary poets — Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Then, as it happened, both of these people were in the Writers House at the same time, so I asked my students to come back to the House for a special evening session, and we spent an hour or so talking with Jena and Kenny. We recorded it, and you can find mp3's and a summary of the discussion here.

It will help to know that the person being discussed in the middle of the excerpt is Jackson Mac Low. He gets named after a while but at first it might not be clear. The session took place on the very day that Mac Low died.

Today we released a new episode in our series of PennSound podcasts featuring a 16-minute excerpt from the Osman-Goldsmith. Here is a link directly to the podcast recording.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press
176 pages, paper, ebook, and audiobook

Upcoming: boundary 2 launch, moderated by Paul Bové, with Yunte Huang (US), Abigal Lang (France), and Runa Bandyopadhyay (India). 4pm EST, June 15: registration here.

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, orignally broadcast May 18: YouTube
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray’d Yo, WQXC, radio, archive of April 22 broadcast (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
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••Jeremy Sigler, “The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein,” Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, “Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy,” Altered States
••Paul Bove on “Echologs” at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: “Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in.”

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.

This unwitting monument (PoemTalk #161)

Sarah Dowling, 'Entering Sappho'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Larissa Lai, Maxe Crandall, and Julia Bloch to discuss Sarah Dowling’s book Entering Sappho (Coach House, 2020), in which an abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to vexing questions of history, settlement, translation, violence, “impossible geographies,”* the idea of the “unwitting monument,” and the abusive economics of the s0-called company town. The group focuses on two passages from the book. First there’s “Clip,” the opening poem, a kind of verse preface or prelude to the recurring themes. Then there are the first three paragraphs of a prose statement (or prose poem?) at the end of the book, “White Columns.” The texts of these passages can be found HERE and HERE.

June 14, 2021

Vladimir Feschenko: Charles Bernstein’s Experimental Semiotics

Language Poetry between Russian and American Traditions

Charles Bernstein

The new issue of NLO (New Literary Review, Russia, 168:2, 2021) feature a section on American poetry edited edited by Vladimir Feschenko. Two of the essays, both machine translated, with some modification, are published here. Please consult the Russian original for accuracy.