Roberto Manzano

Slippages

Sixteen Ritos, from a photo by Joan Alvarez. K. Dykstra, 2015.

In 2006 Roberto Manzano conducted an interview with his fellow writer Rito Ramón Aroche in Havana. AMNIOS magazine published the interview in 2012, and it was later reprinted at the website Cuba Literaria (overseen by the Cuban Book Institute). Unfortunately their page doesn’t currently load on any of my browsers, only a short line warning of malicious code. Perhaps this replacement is appropriate, since Aroche does something to deconstruct the framework of virtually every question asked by Manzano. Here are excerpts from their conversation, brought into English.

Recently in Jacket2

From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Near/Miss

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Amy Catanzano

Quantum poetics (revised and expanded 2020)

Jerome Rothenberg

Amy Catanzano at CERN under the Big European Bubble Chamber in the garden of decommissioned experiments, 2019. For this second visit, she was sponsored as a research artist and funded by the Outreach office of the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Catanzano has been awarded funding by Wake Forest University and CERN for a third visit to pursue collaborative projects.

2020 EDITOR’S NOTE. Above is how I handled the presentation of Catanzano’s work a decade ago, not realizing the strides she would make in the intervening years — most notably through a series of interventions and residencies at major observatories and scientific research centers: among them, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. From this came a further outflow of work and the composition of poems and poetics that went beyond metaphor to the investigative urgency of Olson’s dictum from Herodotus: “to find out for oneself … instead of depending on hearsay.”

Accordingly, then, along with her own projects, she is collaborating on literary-scientific projects with scientists at CERN and elsewhere and has prepared a revised and expanded edition of all of her essays, and “essay-poems,” on quantum poetics. These include those first published here between 2009 and 2012, accessible now in an updated edition presented by Poems and Poetics. Her author’s note and opening essay of this edition appear below. — Jerome Rothenberg

2009 EDITOR’S NOTE. As is true in many cases, Catanzano’s poetics exists side-by-side with her poems in which the intersection between poetry and science plays itself out in a contemporary, even futuristic, form. The key work at present is her Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), of which Michael Palmer writes by way of introduction: