Mari Laaksonen

Finnish vispo: Kokoomateos

Why Finland? Why visual poetry? Why Kokoomateos?

Featuring contributions from: Cia Rinne, J. P. Sipilä, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mari Laaksonen, Mikko Kuorinki, Reijo Valta, Sami Liuhto, Satu Kaikkonen, Tero Hannula, and Tiina Lehikoinen.

February 15, 2016

My interest in visual poetry (or video poetry) began when I started doing performances. I’ve been quite interested in the possibility of writing between picture and text. It is a process of learning how to read this relationship: how text changes the picture and vice versa. I work by taking textual metaphor and breaking it down to its concrete DNA level. — Mari Laaksonen

Heinä

February 15, 2016

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PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

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Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

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Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

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