Tony Trigilio

Cyborg voice, collage joy

An interview with Tony Trigilio

Note: I first met Tony Trigilio when we read together at the Sunday Salon, at Black Rock Pub in Chicago. The reading was held on a November evening after tornados had swept through the state. I bring this up because Trigilio’s White Noise, a pseudo-Flarf response to DeLillo’s White Noise, transforms the language of search engines — like the kinds we were obsessively checking that afternoon for information about storm systems and tornados — into the language of poetry.

May 30, 2014

Elise Cowen

Sappho-Dickinson Hybrid with a Beat Sensibility

Al Filreis

Tony Trigilio has been working this past year on an edited collection of poems and fragments from Elise Cowen's only surviving notebook. This edition will reproduce the notebook poems themselves, as they were written in Cowen's hand. Cowen's surviving family generously granted the rights to Tony to edit the book. The project, which is still looking for a publisher, will include many never-before-seen Cowen poems and will correct those that had been mis-transcribed in the past. The book is taking shape as an intriguing Sappho-Dickinson hybrid with a Beat sensibility -- an odd mixture, perhaps, but an accurate description of Cowen's varied influences.

For years I've taught Elise Cowen in my modern/contemporary American poetry course (English 88) and once created a modest Cowen web page here. Here's more about Tony.

Recently in Jacket2

Excavating intimacies

A review of Siwar Masannat’s ‘cue’

Georgiana de Rham

From left to right: the cover of “cue,” Siwar Masannat.

Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer, poet, educator, and editor currently based in Milwaukee. cue, Masannat’s second book of poetry, emerges from her engagement with Akram Zaatari’s project Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, which brought El Madani’s compelling photographs of community members in Saida, Lebanon, to a global audience.

cue
Siwar Masannat
University of Georgia Press 2024, 82 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9780820365978

Your voice in my mouth (PoemTalk #201)

Trish Salah, "The Voice" & "Detoured Come Tomorrow"

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Kay Gabriel, Syd Zolf, and Levi Bentley joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House to discuss two poems by Trish Salah. The poems can be found in Lyric Sexology Volume 1: “Interlude 4: The Voice” and “Detoured Come Tomorrow.” Lyric Sexology was published by Metonymy Press in 2017. The poems can be read HERE. Our recordings of Trish Salah performing these poems comes from an interview conducted by Christy Davids in the same Wexler Studio February 10, 2017. You can hear the poems and the entire conversation at Salah’s PennSound page. This episode of PoemTalk was co-curated by Al Filreis and Syd Zolf.

October 22, 2024

Our language is loaded (PoemTalk #200)

PoemTalk

200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.

October 11, 2024