Maggie Nelson

Written in water (PoemTalk #138)

Maggie Nelson, 'Bluets'

From left: Jennifer Firestone, Adrienne Raphel, and Julia Bloch.

Al Filreis gathered with Adrienne Raphel, Jennifer Firestone, and Julia Bloch to talk about Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. This book of 240 numbered prose-poem propositions was published by Wave Books in 2009. The group focuses on eleven sections, those numbered 222–232; these appear on pages 89–93 in the Wave edition. Maggie Nelson’s PennSound page includes several recordings of readings in which she performs this work. The recording we play at the start of this episode is from a reading she gave at Boise State University in Idaho on April 26, 2013.

July 16, 2019

Segmented audio from performances of Maggie Nelson's 'Bluets'

Al Filreis

Thanks to the efforts of PennSound staff editor Luisa Healey, we are now able to make available segmented audio recordings of the numbered sections (propositions) of Bluets as performaed by Maggie Nelson at two readings.

I. from LA-Lit #21, March 11, 2007:

#52. (1:11): MP3
#53. (0:26): MP3
#54. (1:17): MP3
#55. (0:19): MP3
#56. (0:10): MP3
#57. (0:30): MP3
#58. (0:11): MP3
#59. (1:14): MP3

A slowing 2: Gestures of attention

Leah Souffrant

What can language open when given space? Poetry invites pause, the pause of music, of introspection, of spreading sensitivity. Maggie Nelson reports, in The Art of Cruelty, that John Cage proposed this “exceedingly difficult” advice: “The most, the best, we can do, we / believe (wanting to give evidence of / love), is to get out of the way, leave / space around whomever or whatever it is” (268). What is exceedingly difficult is necessary and important.

Recently in Jacket2

Launch for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

with Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Tan Lin, Felix Bernstein, & Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York, Dec. 5, 2024

My thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petelos at the University of Chicago Press. This is my tenth book with Chicago, going back 25 years. Thanks also to Anthony Huberman and Eli Coplan (sound engineer) of GPS for hosting this event.

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

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Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024