Claire Harris

Fuck poems

In extremis

M. NourbeSe Philip

Poems are bullshit unless they are / Teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.

… Fuck poems / And they are useful, would they shoot / come at you, love what you are …— Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are / Teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.

… Fuck poems / And they are useful, would they shoot / come at you, love what you are …— Amiri Baraka

handwritten portion of a note from M. NourbeSe Philip to Claire Harris, incl. the phrase "I cannot write"

Death's great black wing

'Mi say mi cyant believe it'

M. NourbeSe Philip

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scraped the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
— Anna Akhmatova

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook
(audibook available from the press and soon to be avaialbe from Amazon/Audible)

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
•
••Jeremy Sigler, "The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein," Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, "Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy," Altered States
••Paul Bove on "Echologs" at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: "Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in."

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

Rochelle Owens

'Patterns of Animus,' Part Three, 'The Ludwig Skulls'

Jerome Rothenberg

[A continuation from earlier postings on Poems and Poetics of Rochelle Owens’s new masterwork, Patterns of Animus. (J.R.)]

In 1863 Beethoven’s body was exhumed for autopsy, the head

removed and the skull studied for medical research.

Radical reclamations

Queer feminist collaborative acts by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo

Margaret Rhee

Photos courtesy of Sophie Seita.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “reclamation” in the past few days.