From left to right: Kendra Sullivan, Sullivan’s new book “Reps,” and Louis Bury.
We spoke together on the occasion of her recent Ugly Duckling Presse book, Reps, which uses undisclosed constraints as carrying cases — safe deposit boxes — for the stories humans tell each other to make sense of their many capacities.
Kendra Sullivan operates in the vital tradition of poets who undertake DIY cultural work. She is the Director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Humanities, where she is responsible for initiatives such as Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative and NYC Climate Justice Hub. She co-founded the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Brooklyn, and is a member of Mare Liberum, an eco-arts collective.
Early this spring, I perched on top of a table (it was the only space left) to hear Fred Moten talk about “Blackness and Poetry.” The room was teeming with poets, critics, academics, and students. At the end of the talk, a question about the contemporary “mania” or “fetish for rule-based constraint-based poetry in a lot of poetry circles” was asked. More specifically, Nada Gordon wanted to know what this contemporary mania for rules might be a symptom of.
