Orchid Tierney

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 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. 

April 28, 2017

Rootless places: Núñez, Queyras, Dunham

Orchid Tierney

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.”

April 6, 2017

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?

June 3, 2015

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

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

PennSound podcasts

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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

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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
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