Commentaries - June 2013

Todd Swift on All the Whiskey in Heaven in Poetry London, Summer 2013

Wildly Light on his Feet: Todd Swift on  a poet's bracingly flamboyant disregard for lyric proprieties.

PDF of review

UK Edition from Salt Publishing

John Ashbery's "The Skaters": digital edition and archive

It is my great pleasure to announce Robin Seguy's  genetic edition of John Ashbery's great poem "The Skaters." This is the first in the newly created Text/works series, a digital library that intends to make freely accessible critical editions and analytic tools for an array of 19th to 21st century French and American poetry collections.

'How much can you tweak English before it malfunctions?'

'QAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE': The visual poetry of Mike Cannell

Word Malfunction by Mike Cannell
Word Malfunction

What does it mean for a language to malfunction?

What funds its means? What makes it done for?

First we have to ask: What is the function of language? What is it is supposed to do? And who decides—who assesses its function?

Is language a Paul Klee twittering machine? A W. Heath Robinson fantasmallegorical don’t-shut-your-contraption? A speech balloon animal? Does one’s signs fit all?

Bruce Stater: From ‘The Journey of Metaphor & Remembrance’ in 'Labyrinth of Vision' (redux)

Say the poem is a journey

taken with silent walking sticks

on a path strewn with memories

deaf, dumb,

blind & beyond measure.

Its mouth filled with words

its pockets filled with stale bread.

 

Say it is an elixir derived from chlorophyll

Silliman on the long poems of Zukofsky and DuPlessis

Ron Silliman talks for six minutes about Louis Zukofsky's “A“ as a useful counterpoint to Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts and the crisis of the long poem that is at the heart of its composition: MP3 audio.  Here is a link to the complete talk by Silliman. It was presented as part of a celebration of the poetry and criticism of DuPlessis held at Temple University in 2011.