I'm starting this series with a poet currently based in Northern Ireland, Sophie Collins. Sophie edits the journaltender, and she's writing a dissertation on translation at Queen's in Belfast. I wrote to her out of the blue when I read a few of her poems on The Lifeboat, the webpage for a reading series in Belfast.
Sophie, to start, could you tell me a little about your magazine tender, which you edit with Rachael Allen? How it came about, what kinds of poets you hope to feature?
I recently wrote a blurb for tender, so I'll paste this in: tender—'a quarterly journal made by women'—is an online platform promoting work by female-identified writers and artists.
Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4-5
The aesthetic, pedagogical, and political focus of this series of commentaries is a set of documents we call counter-maps. The term comes from critical cartographer Denis Wood, who provides a lineage that includes early twentieth-century map art, the mental maps movement of the 1960s, Indigenous and bioregional mapping, and the traditions of Parish Mapping. For Wood, “[I]t is counter-mapping that shows us where mapping is heading” (111).
Our contention here is that counter-maps also suggest a direction poetry may take in the digitally driven, multimedia information economy that pervades all aspects of 21st-century collective creative life. In this series of commentaries, our examples, both pre- and post-1995, come from a handful of subgenres—tactical, forensic, locative, cognitive, and ecological counter-mapping—that mix the graphic syntax of cartography, the rhythmic patterns of language, and an urgent interrogation of the processes and institutions of global capitalism.
Birds of Metal in Flight with Xu Bing: An Evening of Poetry with 5+5
PennSound video recording of the event
PennSound in 2005 (2)
City Paper (Philadelphia), January 20, 2005.
The subversion of the lyric mode
An interview with Sophie Collins
I'm starting this series with a poet currently based in Northern Ireland, Sophie Collins. Sophie edits the journal tender, and she's writing a dissertation on translation at Queen's in Belfast. I wrote to her out of the blue when I read a few of her poems on The Lifeboat, the webpage for a reading series in Belfast.
Sophie, to start, could you tell me a little about your magazine tender, which you edit with Rachael Allen? How it came about, what kinds of poets you hope to feature?
I recently wrote a blurb for tender, so I'll paste this in: tender—'a quarterly journal made by women'—is an online platform promoting work by female-identified writers and artists.
Introduction: Maps?
Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4-5
The aesthetic, pedagogical, and political focus of this series of commentaries is a set of documents we call counter-maps. The term comes from critical cartographer Denis Wood, who provides a lineage that includes early twentieth-century map art, the mental maps movement of the 1960s, Indigenous and bioregional mapping, and the traditions of Parish Mapping. For Wood, “[I]t is counter-mapping that shows us where mapping is heading” (111).
Our contention here is that counter-maps also suggest a direction poetry may take in the digitally driven, multimedia information economy that pervades all aspects of 21st-century collective creative life. In this series of commentaries, our examples, both pre- and post-1995, come from a handful of subgenres—tactical, forensic, locative, cognitive, and ecological counter-mapping—that mix the graphic syntax of cartography, the rhythmic patterns of language, and an urgent interrogation of the processes and institutions of global capitalism.
lary timewell: Two new poems
In the 1980s, North Vancouver poet, editor and publisher lary timewell (bremner) co-founded and co-edited the late chapbook press Tsunami Editions, publisher of some of the earliest work (and often, first books) by writers such as Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Peter Culle