Joan Retallack’s poem “Not a Cage” has been discussed often by the ModPo community over the years. By now there are ten different resources relating to this poem: text, audio, video; recitation, analysis, discussion. Click HERE to see all ten in one view. Here, below, we feature an 8-minute video made in 2021 in which we discuss Retallack's procedure and strategy further.
C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease. R., Grimmer’s brave and thoughtful nonbinary femme protagonist, addresses the poems to their doctor, their therapist, their dog and cat, and to a series of intimate composite beings whose appellations each repeat as the title of multiple poems.
C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease.
Ships loading canned salmon at Steveston, Fraser River, British Columbia, circa 1898; photograph by Stephen Joseph Thompson.
This episode of PoemTalk features a poem by Daphne Marlatt called “Steveston, B.C.” We were joined by Davy Knittle, Jane Robbins Mize, and Karis Shearer. The poem is in a sense — although not quite exactly — the title poem in a much-admired book published in 1974. Steveston sits at the mouth of the South Arm of the Fraser River, near Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2001 Ronsdale Press published a new edition of the book, with a new poem and photographs by Robert Minden. That volume is an easily accessible source for our poem. Another is Intertidal, The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008 (Talonbooks), a volume of 560 pages of Marlatt’s poems, including, of course, all of Steveston. “Steveston, B.C.” raises vital, interconnected concerns: industrial devastation of waterways, migrations of exploited immigrant labor, the human concept of home, the malignant politics of settlement and resettlement, and commercial and technological abuse of the intreprid instinct of aquatic life.
Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2020) gathers six revised full-length collections and chapbooks. Across their nearly thirty years of publication, edited in and with the present, they propose ways of reconceptualizing time that work against a ground of racial capitalist marginalization to generate radiant clarity about the conditions of our living.
Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2020) gathers six revised full-length collections and chapbooks. Across their nearly thirty years of publication, edited in and with the present, they propose ways of reconceptualizing time that work against a ground of racial capitalist marginalization to generate radiant clarity about the conditions of our living. They are specific, often, about how time feels — how various pasts feel in the present, and how language makes evident the variability of what time is and how it behaves.
In September 2018 Davy Knittle hosted poet Rodney Koeneke in the Wexler Studio to discuss his book, Body & Glass (Wave Books, 2018). Their conversation touches on Koeneke’s writing process and use of pronouns as a “distancing technique,” the role of poetry — particularly experimental forms — in America today, and how joy might emerge from work about loss. The two also examine the traditions that poetry assembles for itself, drawing comparisons between modernists like Joyce and contemporary poets.
Davy Knittle and Eileen Myles had a conversation at Myles’s home in the East Village in New York City in August, 2018, for this PennSound podcast. Their discussion began in the midst of an exchange about Myles’s 1991 collection Not Me and changes in their neighborhood at the time. Conversation topics spanned “not-me-ness,” gender, capitalism, sexuality, perception, and observation, among others.
Kate Colby, Davy Knittle, and Charles Bernstein convened with Al Filreis, PoemTalk’s producer and host, to talk about Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal and to focus in particular on two pages (or prose poems, or journal entries). The two entries are those composed on April 1 and April 4. The version of the two poems available online at Eclipse (based on the 1978 Angel Hair edition) has also been reproduced here for the convenience of Jacket2 readers. A new edition of Clairvoyant Journal published in 2014, discussed toward the end of the podcast, is described here by Patrick Durgin.
Left to right: William Corbett, Davy Knittle, and Stan Mir. Photo by Kelly Writers House staff, from the Michael Gizzi retrospective in October 2017.
William Corbett visited the Kelly Writers House in October 2017 for a retrospective reading and conversation with Stan Mir in honor of the poet Michael Gizzi. During his visit, Corbett and Knittle had a conversation in the Wexler Studio about the work of New York School poet James Schuyler, whose Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler Corbett edited (Turtle Point Press, 2009). In their conversation, they discussed Schuyler’s early poems, his methods of perception, his fondness for children, his attention to New York and its qualities of light from his apartment window, and Corbett’s long career of teaching Schuyler’s poetry to undergraduate students.
From left: Amber Rose Johnson, Tonya Foster, and Davy Knittle.
Amber Rose Johnson, Davy Knittle, and Tonya Foster joined Al Filreis to discuss the poem “Riot” by Gwendolyn Brooks. “Riot” is the title poem in the (now rare) chapbook published by Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based Broadside Press in 1969, and has been collected variously, including in the book Blacks (1994). The Eclipse site offers a PDF copy of the original Riot chapbook. The recording used as the basis of this PoemTalk conversation comes from a reading Brooks gave at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on May 3, 1983.
Discussion of Joan Retallack’s “Not a Cage”
From a 2021 ModPo webcast
Joan Retallack’s poem “Not a Cage” has been discussed often by the ModPo community over the years. By now there are ten different resources relating to this poem: text, audio, video; recitation, analysis, discussion. Click HERE to see all ten in one view. Here, below, we feature an 8-minute video made in 2021 in which we discuss Retallack's procedure and strategy further.