Xavier Kalck

First reading of Lorine Niedecker's 'Popcorn-can cover' (4)

Xavier Kalck

The bigger picture obscures the actual one. I have to wonder, am I looking at a product of Imagism? This poem seems concrete, simple and based on direct observation. Is it Objectivist? There is sense of clarity countered by ellipsis as sound abstracts the image from its context, so yes as well. What about Surrealism? A trivial domestic object is endowed with uncanny — pun intended — (possibly sexual) significance. associated with distinct specularity (it seems I am looking at an interiorized interior). The list could go on. Does the sense of rural poverty implied in the makeshift device make it a rural poem?

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
so the cold
can’t mouse in
— Lorine Niedecker

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Spelling for humanity

A review of 'Spells,' edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás

Robert Eric Shoemaker

This is a book of poetry that does magic, that believes in the magic of word-casting and spell-ing. Spells introduces a variety of ways to spell in poems from a diverse cast of poets who echo the ideas of precursors like Ursula K. LeGuin: by naming something, magic is done and change is created.

Language work is a making and remaking of the world around us, a casting of spells: “To be a witch, then, is to know words.”[1] Spells, an anthology edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás, attempts to show the magical side of poetry and “the moment before the word, when everything inside you is broken open” (ix).

Thus I am inwardly my police

A review of Daniel Poppick's 'The Police'

Emily Barton Altman

Photo of Daniel Poppick (left) by Charlotte McCurdy.

“Speech is the fourth wall made permanent,” Daniel Poppick writes in the title poem of his debut collection, The Police.[1] Speech is a performance, he suggests: a performance that cuts us off from others, making them, first, an audience, and then constructing a barrier between speaker and audience.