Marguerite Duras

A slowing 4: Attentive decentering (1)

Part 1

How do we create poetry with, for, of the unsayable? How can we recognize difficulty, pain – acknowledge and body it forth in art, creating beauty without stripping away the difficulty? We can consider the obvious problem of language’s limitations, even as poetry stammers ahead, through a kind of un-writing. Marguerite Duras explores this in her late work entitled Writing, even enacting the problem as she considers it:

Duras & the cinematic novel

The poet's novel

Laynie Browne

The first thing you might notice about The Malady of Death is the visual components to this book. It is slim, only sixty pages of text, like many volumes of poems. On each page the font size is larger than most large-print editions of books. I measure the opening capitol “Y” beginning “You” at one-half of a centimeter. The page that appears the fullest contains one-hundred and sixteen words. A page appearing one of the sparest contains sixty words. Section breaks appear as multiple paragraph breaks, a multitude of white space, and an occasional asterisk.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.