Jonathan Dick

Must it ring true (PoemTalk #167)

Myung Mi Kim, 'And Sing We'

From left: erica kaufman, Jack Giesking, Jonathan Dick. Photo credit: Al Filreis.

Jack Giesking, Jonathan Dick, and erica kaufman joined Al Filreis in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House for a discussion of the first poem — doubtless it is intended as a proem — in Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag (published by Kelsey Street Press in 1991). The poem is “And Sing We,” and the audio recording we use was made by Ross Craig in Berkeley in 2007 and is available, of course, at the poet’s PennSound page.

December 21, 2021

Mammal patriot (PoemTalk #144)

Michael McClure, 'Ghost Tantras'

PoemTalk

From left: Selena Dyer, Jonathan Dick, and Jerome Rothenberg.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Selena Dyer, Jonathan Dick, and Jerome Rothenberg to talk about three poems in Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras. The three poems can be found here. One of them is number 49 in the series, and there is a complicated history of performances. At Birkbeck College in London, McClure, performing some tantras, offered a brief commentary on 49 and then played a famous earlier recording in which he performed the poem (in 1964 and again in 1966) at the San Francisco Zoo in the lions’ house. Each time the lions roared in response.

January 21, 2020

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Teaching Is Listening

on teaching poetry for Guanzhou University

Charles Bernstein

I made this short video for a conference on teaching English language poetry, sponsored by Guangzhou University, July 2, 2022. Li Zhimin has created an online course, partly based on Al Filreis's ModPo. This meeting is an extension of that course. In the video, I mention the Poem Profiler and Wreading Experiments; for more on this topic, see Attack of the Difficult Poems.

Lyric shard as grief's material

A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'

Kelly Hoffer

Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.