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

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles

'GRAFFITE,' three suites after images by Arie Galles, Part Three

Jerome Rothenberg

the more a man’s arms

stretch

to reach the woman’s

& the branches

can no longer bear

their weight

[Continued from previous postings on Poems and Poetics, here and here.]

Part Three

THE PEPPER TREES

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E interview

Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (2015)

Charles Bernstein

Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein for The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters(2019). This interview was part of the University of New Mexico book and is made available here with permission of the press. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters is one of three volume edited by Hofer and Golston and published by University of New Mexico Press. The other two volumes are the complete facsimile edition of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (2020) and the collaborative poem LEGEND (2020) by Andrews, Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, and Steve McCaffery. Each of these editions including extensive notes and commentaries by the editors.