200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
Not safe for porn
The erotic vs. the pornographic
Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” constitutes pages 53-59 in my edition of Sister Outsider. The paperback is a distinctive blue; it’s the kind of bright, medium blue you see in kindergarten posters or picture books about colors. It’s a color that always gestures: this is “Blue.” This is the color of instruction. I can always immediately locate my Sister Outsider, whether on my bookshelf or among the Jenga-like stacks of books on my floor, because of its blue.
Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” constitutes pages 53-59 in my edition of Sister Outsider. The paperback is a distinctive blue; it’s the kind of bright, medium blue you see in kindergarten posters or picture books about colors. It’s a color that always gestures: this is “Blue.” This is the color of instruction. I can always immediately locate my Sister Outsider, whether on my bookshelf or among the Jenga-like stacks of books on my floor, because of its blue.