Joan Acocella

St Francis

As the 'inconvenient elder'

John Tranter

When he ceded control of the group, Francis [Saint Francis of Assisi, AD 1181–1226] hoped that he could still lead the men by example, but his influence quickly waned. This enraged him. “Who are these who have ripped my order and my brothers out of my hands?” he shouted. Once, when he saw a new building that he thought the community had erected for itself, in disregard of the rule of poverty, he climbed up to the roof and began prying off the tiles and throwing them to the ground. Breaking with his earlier, gentle practice, he cursed people who opposed his ideas.

Recently in Jacket2

Making the invisible visible

Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster in conversation, 2010

Tonya Foster

Jennifer Scappettone

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted from an Emergency Reading Series event hosted by Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling on January 21, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was transcribed by Michael Nardone and edited for publication; additional commentary by the speakers is included below in brackets. The conversation, between Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster, explores topics ranging from Disneyfication to the Greek chorus.

September 21, 2018

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (14)

Emily Dickinson, 'A Letter to the Master,' lineated

Jerome Rothenberg

[NOTE. I published this earlier in a nonlineated prose rendering in America a Prophecy, coedited with George Quasha in the early 1970s. Well-enough known as one of three Dickinson letters addressed to an unidentified “Master,” this version, following closely her handwritten draft, emerges (for me at least) as a near-projective forerunner to what would become a dominant form of North American experimental composition a century after her own writing. The result anyway is based on the transcription in The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Amherst College Press in 1986. It will likely be the version used by me and Heriberto Yépez in our transnational anthology of North and South American poetry, now in preparation for University of California Press. That the full-blown sense of thwarted intimacy here is both surprising and overwhelming is also to be noted, as is the quirky and volatile language that connects the voice behind the letter to that of her better-known poems. (J.R.)]

Summer 1861

A very serious joke beneath the (relatively soon to be) exploding sun

Review of Joseph Harrington's 'Of Some Sky'

Matt Reeck

“Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_with_crows_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via Wikimedia Commons.

Joseph Harrington’s first book of poetry, Things Come On, was both a memoir about his mother and a documentary of a time in American history. It was documentary in nature, if the document of history were subjected to aesthetic manipulations and personal refashioning. Of Some Sky, his new book, has a differently indeterminate generic structure: it asks the question of whether humor is possible in poetry whose subject is ecological collapse.