When this poem arrived in my mailbox it had a familiar ring, and, sure enough, when I took from the shelf Niedecker’s Collected Works, I saw that the poem was originally published in 1965 in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Serendipity: I had just come home from the opening of my daughter Nancy’s Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty, an exhibit on Finlay and Augusto de Campos. There are all those issues of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse — those tiny ideogrammatic poems where every word counts in the verbivisual construct. Finlay and Niedecker were very close.
[As a follow-up to Barbaric Vast & Wild, the gathering of outside & subterranean poetry that John Bloomberg-Rissman & I assembled several years ago, I’ve been giving further thought to the poetry imbedded in the lyrics of so-called popularsong as manifested in particular in the orbit of contemporary blues- and rock-derived singer-poets from Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen through Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, & Nick Cave, among so many others.
Al Filreis & Anna Strong moderate a collaborative close reading in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House, February 2017.
We at ModPo have added new materials to ModPo pertaining to Naomi Replansky’s poem “About Not Writing.” This, according to Replansky herself (who is ninety-nine years old as of this posting), is the last poem she will ever write, and, as the title suggests, is about that very cessation. The links below will work for you if you are enrolled in ModPo (it’s free — enroll here any time).
[] read Naomi Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO TEXT [] watch Naomi Replansky perform “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO [] watch a discussion of Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO
These are now part of the ModPoPLUS syllabus, chapter 3 (week 5). The discussion was moderated by me and Anna Strong, and we were joined by ModPo’ers near and far: Alonna Shaw, Arif Dalvi, Mandana Chaffa, Nadia Ghent, Raymond Maxwell, and Shoshana Greenberg. Chris Martin and Zach Carduner did the filming, and Zach did the editing.
In new poems Ahmad Almallah seeks not a way that is mapped or directed. Nor does he follow a course. His way — his poetic mode and compositional method — is to be scrappily “on the move” (as he writes in a new work), “the metal collecting / the way on the way.” The metapoetic nonnarrative gesture here is primarily aesthetic, of course (Almallah is a poet first and foremost — in intention, vocation, and desire), but the recalcitrant formal heterodoxy seems to be at the same time never an artist’s choice (I’m guessing he hates that MFA-program cliché) so much as an inexorable expression of obsessive topical urgency.
Reviews of relatively recent works of poetry and poetics, mostly by poets
For the April issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I edited a collection of twenty-seven reviews of recent books of poetry and poetics:
First reading of Lorine Niedecker's 'Popcorn-can cover' (1)
Marjorie Perloff
When this poem arrived in my mailbox it had a familiar ring, and, sure enough, when I took from the shelf Niedecker’s Collected Works, I saw that the poem was originally published in 1965 in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Serendipity: I had just come home from the opening of my daughter Nancy’s Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty, an exhibit on Finlay and Augusto de Campos. There are all those issues of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse — those tiny ideogrammatic poems where every word counts in the verbivisual construct. Finlay and Niedecker were very close.
Nick Cave: Three Poems from Skeleton Tree
[As a follow-up to Barbaric Vast & Wild, the gathering of outside & subterranean poetry that John Bloomberg-Rissman & I assembled several years ago, I’ve been giving further thought to the poetry imbedded in the lyrics of so-called popular song as manifested in particular in the orbit of contemporary blues- and rock-derived singer-poets from Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen through Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, & Nick Cave, among so many others.
On Naomi Replansky's last poem ever (video)
'About Not Writing' collaboratively read
We at ModPo have added new materials to ModPo pertaining to Naomi Replansky’s poem “About Not Writing.” This, according to Replansky herself (who is ninety-nine years old as of this posting), is the last poem she will ever write, and, as the title suggests, is about that very cessation. The links below will work for you if you are enrolled in ModPo (it’s free — enroll here any time).
[] read Naomi Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO TEXT
[] watch Naomi Replansky perform “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO
[] watch a discussion of Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO
These are now part of the ModPoPLUS syllabus, chapter 3 (week 5). The discussion was moderated by me and Anna Strong, and we were joined by ModPo’ers near and far: Alonna Shaw, Arif Dalvi, Mandana Chaffa, Nadia Ghent, Raymond Maxwell, and Shoshana Greenberg. Chris Martin and Zach Carduner did the filming, and Zach did the editing.
Ahmad Almallah: Finding the way between
In new poems Ahmad Almallah seeks not a way that is mapped or directed. Nor does he follow a course. His way — his poetic mode and compositional method — is to be scrappily “on the move” (as he writes in a new work), “the metal collecting / the way on the way.” The metapoetic nonnarrative gesture here is primarily aesthetic, of course (Almallah is a poet first and foremost — in intention, vocation, and desire), but the recalcitrant formal heterodoxy seems to be at the same time never an artist’s choice (I’m guessing he hates that MFA-program cliché) so much as an inexorable expression of obsessive topical urgency.