Kit Robinson in conversation with me on Close Listening, recorded on October 6, 2019: MP3
We talk about Robinson's early Dolch Stanzas and its vocabulary, based on a list of the most frequently used words English, his use of short lines, changes in his more recent, "late" work, his connection to Tom Raworth, and the relation of his day jobs to his work as a musician and poet.
I very much appreciate Runa Bandyopadhyay's response to Near/Miss together with her translation and commentary on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" and "Thank you for Saying Your're Welcome," in Aparjan.com (Kolkata, W. Bengal). I initially posted a rough Google translation of the Bengali essay, which prompted Bandyopadhyay to do her own quick translation. She writes:
The word Nirvana in the google translation triggers me to translate my Bengali commentaries into English because I feel the word Nirvana doesn’t go along with a poet. A poet always longing to reborn like a Bodhisattva, whose longing was not only for him but also for others, his desire of salvation along with all distressed creatures of the world on his way of enlightenment. A poet’s expansive consciousness puts him from certainty to uncertainty, from comfort to discomfort, from insanity to sanity and only he could see how the actual world revolves. A poet thinks that the interior of the boundary is the exterior and the exterior is the interior - I am free and you are imprisoned and so he always try to give a hand to distressed.
I’ve been thinking for a while on what to write about Burning Deck’s Postcards, published in a series of four sets from 1974–1978, which are part of The Little Magazine in America Collection at DU Libraries.
Where, exactly, does one start when addressing a small piece among nearly sixty years of Burning Deck publications, of Burning Deck publishers Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s presence in American poetry? To briefly revisit the last couple posts in this Commentary series, I’ll point out that Burning Deck published Pam Rehm’s The Garment in Which No One Had Slept in 1993, as well as Barbara Guest’s The Countess from Minneapolis in 1976 and her Biography in 1980. And Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were contributing editors for apex of the M.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2020. Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, movements in conversation; coauthored reviews or essays; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles and features that make use of archival and multimedia materials; articles, reviews, and features by and/or about queer, nonbinary, trans, women, and nonwhite authors; and more.
Lyre is a collection of poems that attempts to translate more-than-human worlds into different kinds of poetry. As much as my encounter with each animal, plant, and landform produced differences of syntax and vocabulary across the poems, I also wanted to allow the subject to unsettle poetic form itself. In other words, it wasn’t enough just to describe the different worlds or unwelten of these different beings; as nonhuman lives were being translated into human poetry, human poetry also needed to undergo some kind of translation into something else.
Kit Robinson on Close Listening
Robinson and Uche Nduka at Unnameable Books
Kit Robinson in conversation with me on Close Listening, recorded on October 6, 2019: MP3
We talk about Robinson's early Dolch Stanzas and its vocabulary, based on a list of the most frequently used words English, his use of short lines, changes in his more recent, "late" work, his connection to Tom Raworth, and the relation of his day jobs to his work as a musician and poet.
Runa Bandyopadhyay: The Bernsteinian paradox
I very much appreciate Runa Bandyopadhyay's response to Near/Miss together with her translation and commentary on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" and "Thank you for Saying Your're Welcome," in Aparjan.com (Kolkata, W. Bengal). I initially posted a rough Google translation of the Bengali essay, which prompted Bandyopadhyay to do her own quick translation. She writes:
The word Nirvana in the google translation triggers me to translate my Bengali commentaries into English because I feel the word Nirvana doesn’t go along with a poet. A poet always longing to reborn like a Bodhisattva, whose longing was not only for him but also for others, his desire of salvation along with all distressed creatures of the world on his way of enlightenment. A poet’s expansive consciousness puts him from certainty to uncertainty, from comfort to discomfort, from insanity to sanity and only he could see how the actual world revolves. A poet thinks that the interior of the boundary is the exterior and the exterior is the interior - I am free and you are imprisoned and so he always try to give a hand to distressed.
Burning Deck Postcards
A detour in forgetting
I’ve been thinking for a while on what to write about Burning Deck’s Postcards, published in a series of four sets from 1974–1978, which are part of The Little Magazine in America Collection at DU Libraries.
Where, exactly, does one start when addressing a small piece among nearly sixty years of Burning Deck publications, of Burning Deck publishers Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s presence in American poetry? To briefly revisit the last couple posts in this Commentary series, I’ll point out that Burning Deck published Pam Rehm’s The Garment in Which No One Had Slept in 1993, as well as Barbara Guest’s The Countess from Minneapolis in 1976 and her Biography in 1980. And Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were contributing editors for apex of the M.
Jacket2's January 2020 reading period
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2020. Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory; reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US; reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, movements in conversation; coauthored reviews or essays; articles, essays, or features on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent; on poetic movements, topics, or groups, rather than single authors; articles and features that make use of archival and multimedia materials; articles, reviews, and features by and/or about queer, nonbinary, trans, women, and nonwhite authors; and more.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited q
Stuart Cooke
A poem with commentary from 'Lyre,' 2019
Lyre is a collection of poems that attempts to translate more-than-human worlds into different kinds of poetry. As much as my encounter with each animal, plant, and landform produced differences of syntax and vocabulary across the poems, I also wanted to allow the subject to unsettle poetic form itself. In other words, it wasn’t enough just to describe the different worlds or unwelten of these different beings; as nonhuman lives were being translated into human poetry, human poetry also needed to undergo some kind of translation into something else.
author’s note