digital methods

Clipping the Poetry Series: Selections from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, 1965–1974

Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, and Katherine McLeod

Clipping

The Sir George Williams University Poetry Reading Series ran from 1965 to 1974 in Montreal at what is now Concordia University, featuring live performances by prominent North American poets, including Beat poets, Black Mountain poets, and members of the western Canadian poetry collective TISH. Curated and organized primarily by professors in the English department, the series hosted over sixty poets during its eight-year run, bringing local writers into contact with regional, national, and international contemporaries.

The reading series

Orchid Tierney

Clipping

During my tenure as the 2017–18 Price Lab/PennSound fellow, I have had the opportunity to peruse the many MP3 files in the PennSound archive and to consider what inferences and conclusions can be drawn from the relationships between sound, excess, and discard.[1] Discard may seem an unlikely object when staged in relation to sound and, in particular, to the special sonic registers we associate with an audio recording of poetry.

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From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Reading weed acts

A review of Carol Watts's 'Dockfield'

Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell

Broad-leaved (left) and curled (right) dock. Photos by R. A. Nonenmacher.

In many ways, the structure of this poetry is parabolic. Points of reference are plotted along a curve that eventually returns to the same site of origin — the dockfield — before continuing onward. This is reflected in the release and retraction of words and images within parts of lines as well as in the broader sweep and curve of deep, transhuman time to which the text aspires.

Carol Watts’s Dockfield opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson — “Like Rain it sounded till it curved.” This attention to sound and structure also informs the opening lines of the first poem:

Step through on a curve,
a grand elliptic.

I will find you. Always.

A message sent up from simple frequencies.[1]

Cedar Sigo: 'Stranger in Town' // 2010

His voice is like an ex-husband / knocking at the door

David Brazil

In 2008, Sara Larsen invited Cedar Sigo to read in her apartment on Oak Street. The event was put on as part of her earthworm press & projects series, which was inspired in part by the Artifact reading series. (Thanks to earthworm’s defunct blog, I can report that this reading, at which the above photo “with APPARITIONS” was taken, took place on July 5, 2008.