Naava Smolash

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.

Recently in Jacket2

Pablo Picasso: A translation in progress of 'The Four Little Girls'

A translation in progress of 'The Four Little Girls'

[November 24, 1947–August 13, 1948]

Jerome Rothenberg

“Harpy with Bull’s Head and Four Little Girls on Top of a Tower with Black Flag,” Plate 13 from the Vollard Suite, December 1934

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. While Pierre Joris and I were translating and putting together Picasso’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems (2004), I began a translation of Les Quatre Petites Filles, the second of the two full-length plays Picasso wrote in the 1940s.

Translation from French by Jerome Rothenberg.

The scene — a vegetable garden almost smack in its center a well.

four little girls singing — we’re not gonna go to the woods no more the laurel trees are down on the floor hey the beautiful babe will go pick them up then we’ll come out to dance hey just like they dance oh you sing dance and hug anybody you want

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (16): For the forty-fifth Presidentiad

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (16)

From Whitman, Sousandrade, Darío, and Emerson

Jerome Rothenberg

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?

What deepening twilight — scum floating atop of the waters,

Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?

Walt Whitman

TO THE STATES

To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad.

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?

What deepening twilight — scum floating atop of the waters,

Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?

The beast that therefore I am

Eight recent poetry titles on the beast

Kristin George Bagdanov

“Living within the sacrifice zone, the beast becomes other even to ‘the animal.’” Above: illustration from page 396 of ‘The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile’ (1895), via the <a href=https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11303375056/in/photolist-idQKAQ-idwqoz-hXmNQF-jYYLfV-i6zQhe-hLBsxS-hLBuei-hRJeWB-idCaYT-hMN2Dq-hVDLX8-ie2Xoe-i1TFe6-id63E5-idEAU>British Library</a>. — “Living within the sacrifice zone, the beast becomes other even to ‘the animal.’” Above: illustration from page 396 of ‘The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile’ (1895), via the British Library.

Eight poetry collections published in the past four years turn to the beast as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. This beastly turn has ontological, political, and aesthetic implications for how we theorize the relationship between poetry and personhood (and all of its Enlightenment-era baggage). This review explores both the impetuses and outcomes of these beast-filled encounters but stops short of offering a grand theory of “the beast,” as such a move would undermine the motivating reasons for embodying and embracing beasts as kin.

I have been a made thing & a hunted thing — Cody-Rose Clevidence[1]