Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
Graça Capinha on Régis Bonvicino's New Utopia
“what to tongues is denied”
a nova utopia [the new utopia]
by Régis Bonvicino (S.Paulo: Quatro Cantos, 2022)
Ezra Pound's name was the first to echo as soon as I started reading this book. Not because of his political options, since the new utopia is at the antipodes of Poundian fascism, but because this is the kind of poetry that the American poet wanted for his modern epic: a poetry that is "hard and dry". And, indeed, later in the book, in a poem about the emerging fascisms of the present day, Pound and his work are the object of reflection by Régis Bonvicino, the Brazilian author of the new utopia. Ironically, instead of the Poundian "make it new", the poem carries the title "Make it old" (101-104).