Kristen Gallagher

No truths self-evident (PoemTalk #105)

Michael Magee, 'Morning Constitutional'

from left to right: Kristen Gallagher, Joshua Schuster, Kerry Sherin Wright (photo by Al Filreis).

Kristen Gallagher, Kerry Sherin Wright, and Joshua Schuster converged on Philadelphia to help us celebrate twenty years of the Kelly Writers House. Al Filreis took the opportunity of this reunion of KWH founders to convene a PoemTalk session on the work of a fourth founder — Michael Magee. This was Magee in his pre-Flarf days, the late 1990s. He was finishing a doctoral dissertation on Emerson, pragmatism, Ellison, and jazz; was beginning a relationship with the person, now his partner, who had created the Kensington Needle Exchange; and was taking long, daily morning Emersonian/Whitmanian constitutionals, walking the city incessantly described as the cradle of constitutional democracy. The book of poems resulting from these experiences was Morning Constitutional.

October 14, 2016

Notes toward an anthropological process

Kristen Gallagher

From 'Dossier on the Site of a Shooting.' Image by Paul Soulellis.

Three things I do:

1. Dossier

“Dossier on the Site of a Shooting,”[1] published by GaussPDF in March 2015, presents pieces of evidence I gathered in an attempt to better understand the Trayvon Martin murder, the George Zimmerman acquittal, the lack of protest in Sanford emphasized in the news: notes from the site visit, silent iPhone video recording of the site, written site description, interviews with residents of Sanford, Google Maps screen shots, and other web media such as news accounts.

February 5, 2016

An abductee, in theory (PoemTalk #92)

Bob Perelman, 'Confession'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Kristen Gallagher, Kathy Lou Schultz, and Bruce Andrews for a conversation about a poem by Bob Perelman, “Confession,” which the poet once introduced (jokingly, yes?) as “the inside story of Language writing.” “Confession” was published as the first poem in — indeed, arguably it serves as a proem to — Perelman’s book The Future of Memory. Its speaker satirically imagines that avant-garde poets had been abducted by aliens, in the manner of 1950s science fiction.

September 12, 2015

Strange galvanics (PoemTalk #75)

Will Alexander, 'Compound Hibernation'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Tracie Morris, Kristen Gallagher, and Michael Magee gathered together in PoemTalk’s garrett studio to discuss a poem by Will Alexander: “Compound Hibernation,” published in Zen Monster, then performed at least once at a reading (Alexander’s Segue Series performance at the Bowery Poetry Club in March of 2007), and then collected in the book Compression & Purity (City Lights, 2011).

March 30, 2014

The day pours out space (PoemTalk #65)

Lisa Robertson, 'The Weather' ('Monday')

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

In October of 2000, Lisa Robertson presented along with Steve McCaffery at the seventeenth episode of PhillyTalks. She read from a then-new work, The Weather, just a few months before the book’s publication by New Star in Vancouver (2001). Here are the segments from that 2000 reading: “Monday” (2:10): MP3; “Tuesday” (7:06): MP3; “Wednesday” (2:14): MP3; “Thursday” (6:38): MP3; “Friday” (9:16): MP3; “Saturday” (4:02): MP3. The book-length project, organized as such by days of a/the/every week, was in part stimulated by the poet-researcher’s experience during a six-month Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge University: as a non-local, she found herself listening to late-night weather and shipping reports on the British radio, discerning there and elsewhere a specifically localized language that seemed abstract and was yet radically precise.

April 16, 2013

Feature: Bob Perelman, edited by Kristen Gallagher

300 printed pages, in Jacket 39

John Tranter

I wanted to do this special feature for Jacket on the work of Bob Perelman because I noticed a dearth of writing available on the internet about his work. There is a fair amount written about Language Poetry in general, and more if you have access to the search engines JSTOR, Project Muse, etc., or if you know how to search recent dissertations. But even then, I was surprised to find fewer essays focusing on Perelman alone than I had hoped for.[...] So I decided to edit a collection, and a special issue of Jacket seemed the obvious choice. I knew their editors liked this kind of work and, rather than edit a book, I chose the format of easily accessed online materials to best serve the largest audience. Books take forever and not many people buy them anymore. I wanted people to have access to this as soon as possible and for free. — Kristen Gallagher, from her Introduction

[»»] Kristen Gallagher: Introduction
[»»] Bob Perelman: Biographical Note
[»»] Rae Armantrout: Bob Perelman’s Grammatology
[»»] Charles Bernstein: The Importance of Being Bob
[»»] Louis Cabri: Poems
[»»] Al Filreis: The President of This Sentence: Bob Perelman’s History
[»»] Kristen Gallagher: Teaching Bob Perelman’s “The Story of My Life”

Editorial selections from 'Combo'

Danny Snelson

Culminating in an all-Flarf twelfth issue, Combo is known to have been the first print publication to gather a full collection of Flarf poems. Published in the same year as K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation (poems from which were also first published in Combo) the magazine stands as the original print vehicle for the listserv-generated poetry movement. Magee’s Flarf manifesto “Mainstream Poetry” is first published here, and the editor’s and contributor’s notes are ideally suited to the collection (see Combo no. 12). As Jordan Davis writes in his 2004 Village Voice article “O, You Cosh-Boned Posers!”:

Magee's small-press magazine Combo broke the flarf story first, in early 2003. A significant finding in that issue, currently required reading for Charles Bernstein’s literature students at the University of Pennsylvania, is that Google searches on the phrase "aw yeah" yield more socially acceptable results as the number of w's in "aw" increases.

On LeRoi Jones, 'Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note'

Kristen Gallagher

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, LeRoi Jones’s first book, was composed between 1957 and 1961. [1] Arranged chronologically, the book feels distinct from the work Jones/Baraka is known for. That work, tho suggested here in isolated snatches, is yet to be written. In this sense the book truly is a “preface.”

April 27, 2011

1999 Symposium on WCW's "To Elsie"

The Pure Products of America Go Crazy

Al Filreis

On July 8, 1999, we at the Writers House held our first live interactive webcast. The discussion was all about William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie" (the pure products of America go crazy) from Spring and All. I hosted and was joined by Bob Perelman, Shawn Walker, and Kristen Gallagher. We fielded questions from people watching on the internet, among them Jena Osman and Terrence Diggory.

Williams To Elsie webcast 1999 It was streamed as video in RealVideo format and preserved as a video later in the same format. (Those who have RealPlayers installed still can watch the grainy video.) Later we extracted the audio from the video and now we've segmented that audio into topical segments. Here are the segments:

[] Bob Perelman reading "To Elsie" (2:21)

[] Kristen Gallagher on facing alterity (4:30)

[] Al Filreis on the poem's uncertainty (1:54)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on "the pure products of America" and the issue of control (5:26)

[] Shawn Walker, Al Filreis, Kristen Gallagher and Bob Perelman on Williams' position towards Elsie (6:44)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on imagination (8:26)
audience comments and Bob Perelman on "peasant traditions" (3:17)

[] Bob Perelman on how the open architecture and "unsuccessful" quality of Williams' poems are relevant to poetics today

[] Al Filreis on Williams' attraction to the new "mixed" American culture

Here is the link to the page with links to audio and video.

PennSound's Williams page includes eight recordings of the poet reading this poem.

Can't stop the cars (PoemTalk #13)

Kathleen Fraser, 'The Cars'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

PoemTalk is back after a bit of a holiday hiatus. Happy to be back with episode 13 on Kathleen Fraser’s disorienting prose-poem “The Cars.” The piece appears in two paragraphs on a single page in Fraser’s great book Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. At some point during our discussion we ask ourselves if there are any such mergings going on in “The Cars” and we agree that there are, certainly. For one thing, two categories so literarily basic as subject and object: the poet’s subject position (the p.o.v. of the passenger in a car on an interstate highway) and the object of her gaze — a “dusky”-necked body, a dark or light-darkened man, dangerously crossing the highway at dawn, barely visible to the swiftly passing cars, looking for something he’s lost. The person in the car, the narrative seer, sees him, but then she’s past him. Did he make it? Did others see him? Does one want to see or to help, and are these categories discrete?

The PoemTalkers this time were Kristen Gallagher, CAConrad (both on our program for the first time) and a wonderful regular, Jessica Lowenthal. Conrad identifies strongly with the woman in the car and expresses real doubts about the man crossing the road. Kristen is, in the end, concerned about the gendered poetic ethics of observing danger for the sake of the poem, which, to be sure, is a problem she feels Fraser raises in the writing (and thus it is a poem about this very “journalistic” problem). Jessica, aided by informal commentary from Kathleen Fraser herself (delivered by surprise, somewhat unfairly, by Al), comes to believe that at the center of the poem’s concerns is the disoriented body. Al agrees: it is a body in space, dislocated by interstate highwayness, with no place to stand, no light to define, no there to be there.

PoemTalk #13’s engineer and director was James LaMarre and our editor as always is Steve McLaughlin. We at PoemTalk wish to express thanks to Kathleen Fraser (pictured above) for her generosity and assistance.

January 12, 2009

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.