ThinAir Video

State of the Art: Video of 1990 lecture

from ThinAir video and Mitch Corber

"State of the Art" was presented at the 1990 Poetry Project Symposium, as a keynote along with lectures by Amiri Baraka and others. The essay was collected in A Poetics, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1992.

YouTube direct link

This is the opening of the essay:

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PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

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