Long poem

I mean only means (PoemTalk #109)

Kate Colby, 'I Mean'

Siobhan Phillips, Emily Harnett, and Joseph Massey joined Al Filreis to discuss a long poem by Kate Colby — the title poem in her book I Mean, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2015. The poem “I Mean” runs for seventy-two pages and nearly every one of its lines begins with the phrase “I mean.” In this episode of PoemTalk we discuss the opening twelve pages of the poem. Colby’s PennSound page includes a complete recording of I Mean, recorded in forty-three minutes by Mary-Kim Arnold in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on July 27, 2016.

February 2, 2017

On reading & teaching the modern long poem, with reference to Williams's 'Paterson' & two passages from Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

PennSound podcasts

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Eric Alan Weinstein and Al Filreis spent some time in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House talking about the problematics of the modern long poem.

January 22, 2015

Short Takes on the Long Poem

Auckland, New Zealand, poetry conference

John Tranter

I left Sydney at dawn on Wednesday 28 March 2012 headed South-east over the Tasman Sea, aiming for New Zealand, on an Emirates A380 Airbus, a massive double-decker airplane that drives like an aircraft carrier full of warm mud.

I had been invited to attend the Short Takes on the Long Poem symposium at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, right at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean. If you look South-west into the setting sun from San Diego and fly at thirty thousand feet for fourteen hours, there it is. From Sydney you do the opposite, more or less, except that is a much shorter trip.
You can read hundreds of pages of poems and commentary and see dozens of sparkling photos on my Main Site here.

Recently in Jacket2

If nothing ever ended

PoemTalk #38: Norman Fischer's 'I’d Like to See It'

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted and edited from episode 38 of PoemTalk, recorded December 9, 2010, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and transcribed by Michael Nardone. The episode discusses the poem “I’d Like to See It” from Norman Fischer’s Turn Left in Order to Turn Right (O Books, 1989).

September 19, 2018

Milton Resnick 1917–2004 / four poems recovered

Jerome Rothenberg

[Milton Resnick was a very visible and dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for ideas and feelings that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter.

Continuing a body

A review of Bhanu Kapil's 'entre-Ban'

Colin Lodewick

Bhanu Kapil (right) with Lucas de Lima at Kelly Writers House, September 27, 2016. Photo by Writers House staff.

“What is Ban?” The poet imagines an answer, asserting (among other things) that Ban “is a warp of smoke.”

Bhanu Kapil’s 2015 book Ban en Banlieue is a novel of meandering lists. The second (and largest) section of the book, titled “Auto-sacrifice (Notes),” is one such list, and it includes other lists within itself. The notes are less notes than collapsed vignettes offering insight into historical trauma and the creative process of articulating harm both physical and emotional. The notes work together to create a ragged narrative, one that seems contingent on a certain character — “Ban” — but also independent in itself.