Orchid Tierney

Fables, selfhood, and affect

Orchid Tierney

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of three timely poetry titles: This Window Makes Me Feel by Rob Fitterman, H & G by Anna Maria Hong, and Echolocation by Evelyn Reilly.

Reviews editor Orchid Tierney returns with capsule reviews of three timely poetry titles.

Outside looking back in: Kiwi calibrate Kiwi poetry from afar.

Kiwi look back at Kiwi poetry

Vaughan Rapatahana (new)

Three New Zealand writers look back at Kiwi poetry

Kia ora ano.

As I strive to spread out any potential ingrained clench as to what makes for Kiwi poetry, any Kiwi poetic, away from ‘mainstream’ clutches that demand ‘appropriate’ ways of writing, presenting and publishing a poem, in this commentary I take into consideration what three expatriate Kiwi (aka Aotearoa New Zealand) writers think/reflect about Kiwi poetry from afar.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Orchid Tierney

Polaroid image of protest
Polaroid image of protest, with sign reading "Peaceful and Pissed"

This is What Democracy Looks Like, November 13, 2016, polaroids taken at Philadelphia’s election result protest.

April 13, 2018

The quotidian

Orchid Tierney

Capsule reviews

J2 reviews editor Orchid Tierney reads three collections interrogating the poetic forms of the everyday — or, “the intimacy possible in the fractures”: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi, Days and Works by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Abandoned Angel: New Poems by Burt Kimmelman.

J2 reviews editor Orchid Tierney reads three collections interrogating the poetic forms of the everyday.

Menacing archives

A review of Jennifer Scappettone's 'The Republic of Exit 43'

Orchid Tierney

Trucks dump garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill, May 1973. Photo by Chester Higgins with the EPA, via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DUMPING_LANDFILL_AT_FRESH_KILLS,_ON_THE_WEST_SHORE_OF_STATEN_ISLAND_-_NARA_-_548348.jpg> Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Trucks dump garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill, May 1973. Photo by Chester Higgins with the EPA, via Wikimedia Commons.

What kind of archive is the landfill? How do disposable technologies haunt — or annul — the imaginaries of urban ecologies? Landfills and wastelands often preserve more than personal and communal memories: narratives of city development, domestic and global economies, cultural infrastructures, and processes that underpin technological innovations.

Rootless places: Núñez, Queyras, Dunham

Orchid Tierney

Capsule reviews

J2 reviews editor and commentator Orchid Tierney reviews tasks by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Barking & Biting by Sina Queyras, and Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham. Of tasks she writes, in part: “Núñez’s poems chronicle the peripheries of a Cuban homecoming while exploring the porousness of identity and nationalism so marked by a feeling of loss. ‘[I]dentity lurks,’ writes Núñez, ‘like a forgotten ring in a public bathroom.’ These poems are lucid, nomadic but not driftless in local memory as they prowl the geographies of migrant return and exile.”

J2 reviews editor and commentator Orchid Tierney writes on three poetry titles from this year and last.

'Experimental' poetry — part one

'Experimental' Poetry - part one

Vaughan Rapatahana

Kia ora ano.

Let’s take a spin and tumble into “experimental” poetry — more specifically within Aotearoa-New Zealand, but not necessarily resticted to that thin locale.

Make it reappear

A review of 'Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound'

Orchid Tierney

Reading Writing Interfaces by Lori Emerson undertakes the ambitious task to demystify the rhetoric of magic surrounding ubiquitous computing. When so-called invisibility, user-friendliness, and seamlessness are touted as integral features of a device, how can everyday users disrupt the imperceptibility of the interface to access its mechanisms?

Conversation with Alan Golding, Orchid Tierney, Bob Perelman & Ron Silliman

On canons, anthologies, Language writing, academia and the long poem

PennSound podcasts

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

For episode #45 of PennSound podcasts, Al Filreis convened an hourlong conversation with Alan Golding, Orchid Tierney, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman. They began by reflecting on Golding’s 1995 book From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry twenty years later, beginning with a discussion about anthologies in the digital era.

November 19, 2014

I'm coming up (PoemTalk #76)

Anne Waldman, 'To the Censorious Ones' ('Open Address to Senator Jesse Helms')

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Orchid Tierney, Stacy Szymaszek, and Pierre Joris joined Al Filreis to discuss a poem by Anne Waldman sometimes called “To the Censorious Ones” (occasionally with the subtitle “Jesse Helms & Others”) and sometimes in performance called “Open Address to Senator Jesse Helms.” It's been published most prominently in In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems 1985-2003 (Coffee House Press; p. 239).

May 1, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

At the opening

Eric Schmaltz

The mouth opens. It burps and yowls, gasps and laughs, mumbles and yawns. The mouth sings —loudly or quietly and can do it with a shimmer. The mouth whispers. The mouth SCREAMS. The mouth speaks, stutters, and stops.

Five questions for Alan Lau

Anna Maria Hong

‘slumber’ by Alan Lau, courtesy of the ArtXchange Gallery

For this week’s commentary, I interviewed the poet, visual artist, and editor Alan Lau. Alan has served as the arts editor for the Seattle-based Asian Pacific Islander American newspaper The International Examiner for over thirty years, curating the paper’s literary, visual, and performing arts coverage and the book review supplement the Pacific Reader.

The best of all possible Audens

A review of 'Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul'

David Pritchard

Poetry makes nothing happen. Since 2008, it’s been pretty common for contemporary poetry and the discourse about it to swirl anxiously around this line from W. H. Auden. Nobody likes it; everybody quotes it. But in quoting it, nobody tries to argue for some distance between poetry and politics. It’s more like the question of whether poetry (and art more broadly) is or is not political has been answered by the movement of history — it is.