200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
We at Jacket2 regretfully share the news that beloved poet and critic Tyrone Williams passed away on Monday, March 11, at the age of 70. The author of numerous books, including c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project of the Century (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), Howell (2011), As Iz (2018), and washpark (with Pat Clifford, 2021), Williams had recently joined the SUNY-Buffalo faculty as David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters after a long teaching career at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
We at Jacket2 regretfully share the news that beloved poet and critic Tyrone Williams passed away on Monday, March 11, at the age of 70.
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.
As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”
As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”[1] Though sometimes cited as a rallying call for Language writing, the declaration’s context (e.g., the Berkeley Free Speech Movement) and afterlife (Grenier would go on to compose, among other things, drawing poems), however much a “breach,” as Ron Silliman called it, with the voice-centered p
In Seattle, Washington, Al Filreis convened Kate Colby, Tyrone Wiilliams, Mónica de la Torre, and Aldon Nielsen to talk about a late poem of Wallace Stevens, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.” The group collaborates on an enumeration of possibilities for understanding the poet’s current ruminative state as a retrospective view of his previous poems and old ideas about poetry. Past perfect and conditional language — had needed, would be right, would discover, could lie — make us doubt that there is or ever was such a thing as a “there” in “There it was.”
On one level at least, Inciting Poetics would seem to be in dialogue with Donald Allen’s 1960 iconoclastic anthology The New American Poetry. With the majority of this volume’s contributors having come of age in the 1960s and 1970s and now in their sixties and seventies, the essays collected here tell a particular narrative, one that seems acutely linked to the political upheavals and cultural shifts of those formative decades.
When I first learned that the University of New Mexico Press was publishing Inciting Poetics, a collection of essays edited by Jeanne Heuving and Tyrone Williams, I was excited for a number of reasons.
Tyrone Williams, William J. (Billy Joe) Harris, Aldon Nielsen, and Erica Hunt joined Al Filreis — host, producer, and moderator — for a live presentation of a special episode of PoemTalk before an audience gathered in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House back in November 2019. They discussed many of Erica Hunt’s concerns, across her poetry and her work as public intellectual and activist, by way of a single poem called “Should You Find Me.” It is the final poem, and — the group comes to agree — the coda to the book Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, published by Belladonna* in 2006.
Al Young, Tyrone Williams, and William J. Harris joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio to discuss Young and his work. The conversation covered the relationship between Young’s poetry and the Black Arts Movement, the role of music and jazz in his writing, and other figures with whom he was acquainted, such as poets Ishmael Reed and Bob Kaufman. Young spoke of his time at Stanford, where he met Harris; of having resided in various parts of the country; and of the role of writing about lived experiences beyond writing about writing. Young also gave readings of some of his poems: “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes,” “Yes, the Secret Mind Whispers” (which was written in honor of Kaufman), and “January.”
Above: detail from cover art of ‘Letters to the Future.’
The most provocative mark in this anthology may be the virgule or forward slash that separates the last quarter of the title — Radical Writing — from the opening three quarters of the title — Letters to the Future: Black Women. I’ve analyzed elsewhere the function of the colon, a staple in academic article and book titles, so I won’t discuss that here.
“Every poem in the world — written, drawn or uttered, published or not — is a record of the world as experienced by or filtered through its architect (human being or computer algorithm).” Left: artwork by Arnold Kemp, from the cover of ‘Howell’; right: “Pigeonholed Sally’s Oughtn’tmented American History,” excerpt from ‘Howell.’
In his rightfully famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. recounts his confusion, refusal, and eventual acceptance of the label “extremist” from his critics. King notes that there are two tendencies of extremity: extremism for moral good and extremism for moral evil. And as he puts it in “Call to Conscience,” insofar as America is an extremist nation for moral evil per its actions in Vietnam, he and other antiwar protesters are morally compelled to be extremists for good.
In Memoriam: Tyrone Williams (1954–2024)
We at Jacket2 regretfully share the news that beloved poet and critic Tyrone Williams passed away on Monday, March 11, at the age of 70. The author of numerous books, including c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project of the Century (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), Howell (2011), As Iz (2018), and washpark (with Pat Clifford, 2021), Williams had recently joined the SUNY-Buffalo faculty as David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters after a long teaching career at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
We at Jacket2 regretfully share the news that beloved poet and critic Tyrone Williams passed away on Monday, March 11, at the age of 70.