John Yau

John Yau talking to Penn students

Just before his Kelly Writers House reading on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, John Yau spoke with the students in my New American Poetry class, English 288 at Penn. He spoke about a wide variety of topics, including discussion of Further Adventures in Monochrome (first question) and other of his works, poetry and identity, white people playing Asians in Hollywood films, the allure of Humphrey Bogart, and recent poetry convtroversies.

John Yau writes through Jackson Pollock

Al Filreis

I introduce and then perform John Yau's “830 Fireplace Road,” a poem based on a sentence uttered by Jackson Pollock to explain his relationship to his painting. http://bit.ly/1EPseRc (audio: 2:39)

Dear PennSound

Listening to letters

Eric Baus

I’ll begin with a playlist of PennSound recordings having to do with letters. While listening to this playlist on repeat, I was interested in the ways the tracks expanded, derailed, parodied, critiqued, or otherwise complicated the idea of intimate address. The addressees include imagined ancestors, public figures, an owl, various abstractions and inanimate objects, as well as the workings of language itself. Recently I’ve been listening to this playlist on random and I keep noticing new connections and contrasts between tracks.

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.

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.

Pieces of Bruce

'Bruce Boone Dismembered'

Rodney Koeneke

Dancing maenad on ancient greek pottery, Python the painter, c. 330–320 BCE. Image via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dancing_maenad_Python_BM_VaseF253.jpg> Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Dancing maenad on ancient greek pottery, Python the painter, c. 330–320 BCE. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I wouldn’t want anyone’s heart to stop beating except that for the first time this might unite us — Bruce Boone[1]