“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” ― Jorge Luis Borges
If Borges is right, then an archive of books is also a being, albeit a larger one, representing a far more vast “axis of innumerable relationships.” The Black Writers Museum in Germantown, Pennsylvania, bears out this theory, placing books at the center of a community’s identity and its plight. Its founder, poet and activist Supreme Dow, happens to also be something of a human athenaeum; a trove of knowledge of black literature, history, and civil rights. And so this particular archive is not the dusty repository of a distant past, but a being in relationship that breathes and walks among its readers.
National in its scope—the only museum of its kind in the US—but also deeply local in its power and importance, Dow envisioned the museum as a place where he could expose the chasm between the way the media portrays black Americans and the way black Americans have written their own history, their own lives onto the page.
Sign Under Test, a selected poems, tr. into Russian by Ian Probstein, bilingual, published as an Android and IOS app: as you read each poems you listen to a sound recording in English or Russian, made by me and Ian Probstein for this publication.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2017.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2017. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:
— Reviews of recent poetics criticism, theory, and anthologies
— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US
(“games for eleanor” was a set of two-person games composed between 1965 and 1966 as a deck of twenty-three cards intended for reading in subsets of six to thirteen cards selected at random. D. A.)
Richard Tuttle on Sanskrit and Islam — at Naropa University, Summer 2016
New at PennSound
“What Sanskrit Means to Me”
Through the door
An introduction to the Black Writers Museum
“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
If Borges is right, then an archive of books is also a being, albeit a larger one, representing a far more vast “axis of innumerable relationships.” The Black Writers Museum in Germantown, Pennsylvania, bears out this theory, placing books at the center of a community’s identity and its plight. Its founder, poet and activist Supreme Dow, happens to also be something of a human athenaeum; a trove of knowledge of black literature, history, and civil rights. And so this particular archive is not the dusty repository of a distant past, but a being in relationship that breathes and walks among its readers.
National in its scope—the only museum of its kind in the US—but also deeply local in its power and importance, Dow envisioned the museum as a place where he could expose the chasm between the way the media portrays black Americans and the way black Americans have written their own history, their own lives onto the page.
Sign Under Test: Russian/English selected poems as phone app, tr. Ian Probstein
Sign Under Test, a selected poems, tr. into Russian by Ian Probstein, bilingual, published as an Android and IOS app: as you read each poems you listen to a sound recording in English or Russian, made by me and Ian Probstein for this publication.
IOS app
Android app
Jacket2's January 2017 reading period
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2017.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2017. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:
— Reviews of recent poetics criticism, theory, and anthologies
— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US
David Antin
Eleven ‘games for eleanor’ (previously unpublished) with a republished note on David Antin
(“games for eleanor” was a set of two-person games composed between 1965 and 1966 as a deck of twenty-three cards intended for reading in subsets of six to thirteen cards selected at random. D. A.)
***
you come into a strange room
as always you are afraid