Knar Gavin, our current Fellow in Poetic Practice, reviews Woodrat Flat by Albert Saijo, A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money That Lost Its Puff by Kaia Sand, and A Complex Sentence by Marjorie Welish. From the Sand review: 'The money-puffing magician-financiers who, in “waving wands around” bits of mortgage, engineered the 2008 financial collapse, provide the backdrop for Sand’s deft depiction of this “difficult ecology of now,” which bleats for help — from the “public citizen,” the “citizen intervenor.”'
This image is a screenshot of El Paso zoning maps accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap.
The questions came out of walks — from El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention) to the Bus Route 50 stop, outside USPS on Boeing Ave. On sandstorm nights, the walk was lean and grimace, spit and hack. The wide stretches required it; long blocks zoned postwar. Required wait, corners of dust lots labelled “Property of US Government,” under the airport watch tower and the Super Guppy’s tarmac gleam.
Last June I sat looking at this “sampler” by Elizabeth Parker in the textile archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum. I put “sampler” in quotes because I do not think this piece really is one and neither do the curators and archivists. What is this object? What might it say toward a textile poetics? Similarly, the stitched works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário are called “outsider art” yet they were exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
I do not want to comment on the high art/craft divide or museum and art world ethics/politics—though textiles are often in the middle of those debates. And I have written about Parker’s sampler before.
In 1936, just a year after winning the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, the twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser arrived in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history, to work on her next poetry project.
A much-photographed, controversial mural by artist Jesse Corcoran at the Crying Room Gallery in Vancouver
Jules Boykoff
As a youngster I had unequivocally positive feelings about the Olympics. In part this was because I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin where winter sports were bigger than Jesus. During the 1980 Winter Olympics, which took place in Lake Placid, New York, I cheered mightily for fellow Madisonian Eric Heiden as he won five gold medals in speed skating, yelping at the tv screen as he swirled elegantly around the rink. This brought the poet out of ABC’s Keith Jackson who later described him as “a spring breeze off the top of the Rockies.” My parents even got me a stylish Eric-Heiden-esque rainbow hat, which I wore with great pride. (Later I attended Madison West High School where Heiden also went). That same Olympics the US hockey team won the so-called “miracle on ice.” The moment the hockey team won the gold-medal game is etched in the chalk and bones of my then-10-year-old mind. I remember the unbridled exhilaration pumping through my little body.
In her last post, Kaia wrote about inexpertise as a possibly positive interventionary poetry stance.
Many of us have a conflicted relationship with experts and expertise. To be sure, in general, contemporary society demands increased reliance on and deference toward experts and expertise. Pay heed to the news any day of the week—whether it be television or radio or a newspaper—and you’ll find a cavalcade of experts expertly asserting expertise.
On the positive side, experts can provide us with shortcuts, time-savers, insider insights, and thought-provoking analysis. Not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate an expert offering shrewd dissection of a topic I hadn’t quite thought of in that particular way.
Complex futures
Knar Gavin
Knar Gavin, our current Fellow in Poetic Practice, reviews Woodrat Flat by Albert Saijo, A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money That Lost Its Puff by Kaia Sand, and A Complex Sentence by Marjorie Welish. From the Sand review: 'The money-puffing magician-financiers who, in “waving wands around” bits of mortgage, engineered the 2008 financial collapse, provide the backdrop for Sand’s deft depiction of this “difficult ecology of now,” which bleats for help — from the “public citizen,” the “citizen intervenor.”'