Jessica Wilkinson

Mysteries of the speaking body

The Real Through Line symposium, Melbourne, April 2013

Fiona Hile

In an English translation of a French transcription of a lecture delivered in 1973, Jacques Lacan proposes his ground-changing formulation: ‘Mathematization alone reaches a real’. For Lacan, what this means is that what we thought was fantasy and what we thought was knowledge are now entwined.

Magazines #3

Rabbit

Michael Farrell

Rabbit editor Jessica Wilkinson has fusslessly put together some of the best newer writers around in this new print-on-demand poetry journal (based at the University of Melbourne). The poems are generously spaced, each poet has their own title (or name) page; there are photographs, reviews, an interview with American visitor Lesley Wheeler (as well as her cracker poem 'Virginia is for Heterosexual Lovers').

Rabbit 1 includes a couple of long, what I call aformalist poems, such as Tim Wright's 'Suns'. The poem is in dialogue with the form of a list, but Wright counteracts that with different deployments of single lines, enjambed lines, short couplets, such as:

sun on John Ashbery, flipping an LP

at a party in the 1960s

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.