Erica Hunt reading the Frank O'Hara poem "Music" at The Poetry Project's Fiftieth Anniversary celebration of 'Lunch Poems.'
In Arcade, poet Erica Hunt’s 1996 collection and collaboration with the artist Alison Saar, the speaker describes herself as moving, through her stuckness and frustration, “against bureaucratic seizures of the possible.”[1] The collection articulates a poetics of refusal, sometimes from a woman-identified subject position, sometimes as a woman of color, or as a mother of color. In other moments, as in the book’s title poem, the speaker’s identity is undisclosed.
Stephen Collis speaking to the media outside the BC Supreme Court.
I. Poetry and the mess
The notion that poetry has nothing to do with the “real world” of history and politics is a notion mostly held by a) some poets, and b) some people otherwise invested in poetry (critics/professors). The idea doesn’t come from the “real world” (however that might be artificially constructed), where I have never myself witnessed poetry being dismissed out of hand as an unwanted or alien intrusion.
Writertranslators Omar Pérez (L) and Daniel Borzutzky (R), 2014. KDykstra.
Translator as fulcrum: a point central or essential to an activity, an event, a situation. Clearly the model applies to any bilingual reading that depends on a translator to quarterback the event for an audience with limited or no ability to understand the writer’s original language.
However, this entry takes the notion of the fulcrum differently. Daniel Borzutzky has been developing a fulcrum poetics, one located among the activities & events & situations where poetry and translation balance off, moving against and with each other.
On Erica Hunt’s 'Arcade': control / temporality / the past in the present
In Arcade, poet Erica Hunt’s 1996 collection and collaboration with the artist Alison Saar, the speaker describes herself as moving, through her stuckness and frustration, “against bureaucratic seizures of the possible.”[1] The collection articulates a poetics of refusal, sometimes from a woman-identified subject position, sometimes as a woman of color, or as a mother of color. In other moments, as in the book’s title poem, the speaker’s identity is undisclosed.