Commentaries - August 2011

'I'm here to testify about the fangs of militarization ... '

A chronicle of Craig Santos Perez's metaphor

Kaia Sand

Until this spring, I assumed a chronology that was backward. I had thought that it was during his testimony before the United Nations that Craig Santos Perez developed his metaphor connecting the brown tree snake–an invasive species on Guam–to the military presence on Guam.

Workshop, July 1973 mimeo mag (pdf)

Ed. Nick Piombino & Peter Stamos, with Bernadette Mayer

  WORKSHOP
edited by Nick Piombino and Peter Stamos
cover by Ed Bowes
©  July 1973 Bernadette Mayer 

PEPC Digital Edition August 2011
ed. Nick Piombino & Toni Simon
PDF of publication here

‘Ear Loads’: Neologisms and sound poetry in Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace Of Reptiles

by Peter Middleton

 This essay was first published in Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 2, no 1 (2010), ed. Robert Sheppard and Scott Thurston. It was collected in The Salt Companion to Maggie O'Sullivan (2011). Reprinted with the permission of  Peter Middleton.
PDF of full essay here.

EAR LOADS

- I SING –

THEY CAME TO ME –

OCCIPUTAL DISTENTIONS

LINGERED, CHISMERIC, CHISMIC,
SCAR
CUMES,
CON-
CONDY-
CREO-
KAKA-
CATE-
CUA-
COOT-
E-
COB-
OD-
CL-
CR-
SWISH OF

( - WRENS CROSS MY PATH - )

TREMORING BUSTLE & MUTE 

                        Maggie O’Sullivan, from ‘Doubtless’

To read ‘Doubtless’ and the book where it appears, Palace of Reptiles, is to be filled with ‘ear loads’ of clongy, phonempathic language songs, creating whisdomensional rituals cut with the unknown.

Maggie O'Sullivan Salt Companion

The Salt Companion to Maggie O'Sullivan

This is a terrific collection about one of my favorite contemporary British poets. Useful both for detailed studies of O'Sullivan's poetry and poetics and as an opening into U.K. innovative poetry and the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Overall, one of the most illuminating recent compendiums on contemporary poetics.

Maggie O'Sullivan and I will be reading together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's, New York, on Weds.. Oct. 5.

Ken Edwards:  Introduction (pdf)
Charles Bernstein: Colliderings: O’Sullivan’s Medleyed Verse (html)
Peter Middleton: ‘Ear Loads’: Neologisms and Sound (Jacket2 pdf)

Recently received for review


Teresa Carmody, Mario Macias, Emma Williams & Chris Hershey-Van Horn read Myriam Moscona’s   Negro marfil/ Ivory Black (trans. by Jen Hofer) at Les Figues Press.  Image via Wave Books Summer Reading Project

Though the fall semester looms and summer poetry staycations near their ends, the Jacket2 mail bin remains full of the latest publications from international presses.  The list below highlights our most recent aquisitions.  Reviewers: email taransky@writing.upenn.edu to get involved in reviewing for Jacket2.