Kim Duff

Short Range Poetic Device, 2010

Brian Ang

Short Range Poetic Device was a four episode radio show of discussions with and readings by poets, hosted by Stephen Collis and Roger Farr, as part of the alternative media resistance to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, February 12-28, 2010.

Short Range Poetic Device
Poetry and Poetics Streaming Against the Totality
Vivo Media Arts, Vancouver, British Columbia, February 16-17 and 23-24, 2010

#1, February 16, 2010:

Stephen Collis, “Tactical Propositions, or, Pwn the Odium”
Roger Farr, from “Secure Channels” (Surplus, 2006)
Donato Mancini, “If Violence (Hey You)” (Buffet World, 2011)

Poetry and activism

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

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.

An ethic of poetic hospitality

A conversation with Jared Hayes

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Jules Boykoff

In his book Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Ian Davidson has written that in terms of poets’ response to the “spatial turn” he believes, “The most satisfying responses to spatialization and globalization are from those poets who engage with those processes through both the content of their work and through experimentations in poetic form” (p. 27). One poet whose “experimentations in poetic form” I’ve found consistently thought-provoking is Portland, Oregon-based poet Jared Hayes.

JB: In the mesostic poems posted below how does your methodology emerge in terms of both form and content?

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Readership, responsibility, risk

A bit about Grigori Dashevsky

Timmy Straw

Handing out beauty salon fliers, Krasnoprudnaya Street

It’s February. The shortest month by the calendar, but by the senses’ tally the longest: across Moscow low liverish sky, damp chill. Snow is melting, disclosing the months’ accumulation of trash, giving the passerby a sense of return without the warmth of a homecoming. The worst of the cold gone, lone figures in a motley cast of costumes (mice, medieval European kings, rabbits, comic-book pharmacists being the most popular) take up their posts on the streets — handing out fliers for discount haircuts, free lawyers’ consultations, happy hour pelmeni at rock-bottom prices. Public spaces give off a new whiff of creatureliness, of steam, damp, the stock and store of dailiness.

A poem as a machine?

Margaret Rhee

William Carlos Williams wrote in his introduction to The Wedge (1944) that “[a] poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words”; or “poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”[i] A poet and physician, Williams is most known for plums, the everyday, minimalistic, rhythmic meter and lineation.