Carollee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann on Hannah Weiner

Carolee Schneemann (2007) by Emma Bee Bernstein; Hannah Weiner and and Kitella (1967) by Schneemann

In late January of 2016, I phoned Carolee Schneemann and we talked for an hour or so. I had invited her to share her memories and impressions of Hannah Weiner, part of an oral history I have been compiling. What follows is a selective transcript of her remarks, with some clarifications in parentheses and interpellations in brackets. When I learned that Schneemann had passed away last week, I went back to the recording. She was generous, spirited, and finally thankful that I was working to raise awareness about Hannah Weiner’s work. I gathered from the conversation that she felt a strong kinship with Weiner. Those who have studied Weiner’s career know that its continuities are sometimes overlooked and that she dearly sought to be understood, as much as her work was in some sense a process of understanding. I think Carolee understood it. After all, she was there.
— Patrick Durgin, 3/11/19

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

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.

What happened to you?: On what is lost and what is possible in exile

An Interview with Sheila Black

Jessica Suzanne Stokes

Sheila Black, a woman with dark hair and a black top smiles at the camera

In the poem, “What You Mourn,” Sheila Black twists the notion of disability as loss: the assumption that all disabled people were once nondisabled and watched their ability slip away. This assumption is found within questions often asked of disabled people such as: “What happened to you?”

Crippled they called us when I was young
later the word was disabled and then differently abled,
but those were all names given by outsiders,
none of whom could imagine
that the crooked body they spoke of,
the body, which made walking difficult
and running practically impossible,
except as a kind of dance, a sideways looping
like someone about to fall
headlong down and hug the earth, that body
they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine[1]

Review of Ahmad Almallah, 'Bitter English' (Chicago, 2019)

Al Filreis

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us. He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” - not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”? The typical poetic existential “here I am” becomes a matter, always, of forgetting and remembering both. (It’s significant that one of the muses here is the poet’s mother, she who suffers from memory loss.)

Review of Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

Note: This review was given as an introduction to Almallah's reading at the Kelly Writers House on October 15, 2019.