David Meltzer

Jerome Rothenberg: On the achievement of David Meltzer, a preface & a memorial

[The word of David Meltzer’s death came to us the morning after & on the threshold of a new & dangerous year in which his friendship & kindly spirit will be greatly missed by the many of us who drew from & treasured his grace of mind & the life of poetry that surrounds it. In the immediate aftermath I thought to reprint the preface I was privileged to write for his selected poems (David’s Copy, Penguin Poets, 2005) & the short poem, composed by gematria, that follows.

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)

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.

January 2021 open reading period

Call for submissions

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds: reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles, reviews, and features that engage with multilingual poetry and/or criticism, and/or poetry in and theories of translation; etc.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2021. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:

— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory

— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US

— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation

— Coauthored reviews or essays

— Articles, essays, or features that engage with poetics during the COVID-19 pandemic

Anselm Hollo

'The Dada Letter,' from 'Collected Poems,' in progress

Jerome Rothenberg

One afternoon in northern Europe, probably in the year 1939, a boychild one now sees wearing a blue velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with lace collar and cuffs, is walking down a chiaroscuro corridor in a haut-bourgeois six-story apartment building —

What Dadaists are still alive are dealing with their life-movies in various ways, suggested by other labels:

Surrealism