We are all looking forward to the start of ModPo 2014 on September 6. The site will open at 9 AM Philadelphia time. At that moment (and of course any time after) you’ll be able to go here
Meantime, I’m pleased to announce that I will be in Prague, Czech Republic, on Tuesday, October 14, to join a meet-up/gathering of any and all ModPo’ers in the area. We will gather at 7 PM Prague time. We are looking for a place to host the event. If you can help us, or know of a good place, please contact me.
Of course we encourage the formation of ModPo meet-ups – weekly, monthly, one-time, whatever. Once the course starts you can use the “Study Groups” discussion forum for organizing both virtual and face-to-face gatherings.
I’m writing today to announce that ModPo and the New York Public Library are collaborating to host a weekly meet-up every Thursday from 5:30-7 PM during ModPo’s 10-week session, starting on September 11. I myself will convene and moderate the first of the weekly NYC gatherings – September 11 at 5:30 PM. The group will meet every week at the Hudson Park Library located at 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY 10014. If you are in NYC or nearby, please plan to join us for each week or any week.
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Jennifer, I’d like to start by discussing the anthology you co-edited, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. In the preface you explain that a purpose of the anthology was to present non-mainstream views of disability while offering a considerable range of stylistic diversity in poetry by disabled poets, mostly poets with a visible disability. Since the anthology was a collaboration I wanted to ask you what you learned through the process — what benefits did you receive and what hurtles did you need to overcome? What did you learn both from the process of collaboration and from the project as a whole? Also, how would you evaluate the result — do you feel you achieved your aims? What reactions have you received from readers who identify as disabled and from others who don’t? (This is a bunch of questions that we could discuss either separately or all together, depending on how you wish to answer them!)
David Brazil, The Ordinary (Compline, 2013), 230 pp., $15.00—In his unpublished manuscript Residual Synonyms for the Name of God, poet Lewis Freedman makes this typically canny observation: “Thanks… thanks to the naked advancements of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Origen, and Augustine… we cab our way to social functions on paved roads under the Big Scribe. Heathendom and idolatry as weapons… this is a teaching used by a priestly clan to restrain a lower class, assimilated by parable at the manifold points around skin.” This “condition,” a product of history (not human “nature’), summarizes the matrix, or one of the matrices, from which David Brazil’s thought emerges as presented in this collection of (mostly) previously published chapbooks.
George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003), $12.95, 94 pp—One reading of this book’s title suggests momentary hiccups in the otherwise smooth-running machine of capital, glitches that might provide resources for resistance. A more provocative reading suggests that those hiccups have been thoroughly incorporated into capital.
ModPo announces partnership with the New York Public Library
We are all looking forward to the start of ModPo 2014 on September 6. The site will open at 9 AM Philadelphia time. At that moment (and of course any time after) you’ll be able to go here
https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
and click through to the actual ModPo site.
Meantime, I’m pleased to announce that I will be in Prague, Czech Republic, on Tuesday, October 14, to join a meet-up/gathering of any and all ModPo’ers in the area. We will gather at 7 PM Prague time. We are looking for a place to host the event. If you can help us, or know of a good place, please contact me.
Of course we encourage the formation of ModPo meet-ups – weekly, monthly, one-time, whatever. Once the course starts you can use the “Study Groups” discussion forum for organizing both virtual and face-to-face gatherings.
I’m writing today to announce that ModPo and the New York Public Library are collaborating to host a weekly meet-up every Thursday from 5:30-7 PM during ModPo’s 10-week session, starting on September 11. I myself will convene and moderate the first of the weekly NYC gatherings – September 11 at 5:30 PM. The group will meet every week at the Hudson Park Library located at 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY 10014. If you are in NYC or nearby, please plan to join us for each week or any week.
Jennifer Bartlett in conversation with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Jennifer, I’d like to start by discussing the anthology you co-edited, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. In the preface you explain that a purpose of the anthology was to present non-mainstream views of disability while offering a considerable range of stylistic diversity in poetry by disabled poets, mostly poets with a visible disability. Since the anthology was a collaboration I wanted to ask you what you learned through the process — what benefits did you receive and what hurtles did you need to overcome? What did you learn both from the process of collaboration and from the project as a whole? Also, how would you evaluate the result — do you feel you achieved your aims? What reactions have you received from readers who identify as disabled and from others who don’t? (This is a bunch of questions that we could discuss either separately or all together, depending on how you wish to answer them!)
Letters: Steve McCaffery with Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein 1976-1977
from Line #5 (1985)
pdf
What remains as thought
Thinking the mind of David Brazil
David Brazil, The Ordinary (Compline, 2013), 230 pp., $15.00—In his unpublished manuscript Residual Synonyms for the Name of God, poet Lewis Freedman makes this typically canny observation: “Thanks… thanks to the naked advancements of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Origen, and Augustine… we cab our way to social functions on paved roads under the Big Scribe. Heathendom and idolatry as weapons… this is a teaching used by a priestly clan to restrain a lower class, assimilated by parable at the manifold points around skin.” This “condition,” a product of history (not human “nature’), summarizes the matrix, or one of the matrices, from which David Brazil’s thought emerges as presented in this collection of (mostly) previously published chapbooks.
Between the signatures ...
George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003), $12.95, 94 pp—One reading of this book’s title suggests momentary hiccups in the otherwise smooth-running machine of capital, glitches that might provide resources for resistance. A more provocative reading suggests that those hiccups have been thoroughly incorporated into capital.