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
Borges off Pound
In December of 1921, a 22-year-old Jorge Luis Borges published “Ultraísmo” in the Argentine journal Nosotros. The editors wrote that his short article was the initial entry in a series of studies about the avant-gardes,[1] recognizing perhaps that the moment of the ultraísta movement had already passed (a few months later, the key journal Ultra ceased publication). While the avant-garde principles of ultraísmo would continue to inform the work of many poets both Spanish and Latin American, by 1921 the movement qua movement was drawing still. But for the literary establishment, understanding ultraísmo was just beginning, and thus Borges’s essay was an attempt to assert the new literary ethic through accounting, a manifesto in reverse.