Commentaries - February 2022

Chronology & notes for Sawako Nakayasu's "Some Girls"

Partial page from Sawako Nakayasu, "Selected Chronology & Notes" to the book "Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From"

When Sawako Nakayasu’s book Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From is acquired, some or perhaps most copies will include a pamphlet-style supplement entitled “Selected Chronology & Notes.” Apparently some copies do not include this extra. Yet the notes can be crucial to understanding individual poems in the book.

A poetics of proximity

Dumpster outside El Paso ICE Detention Center on Mattox Street.
Dumpster outside El Paso ICE Detention Center on Mattox Street.

In the scorched lot, the feral cat cuts through snake grass and candles of sotol toward the Buffalo Soldier gate to Fort Bliss. The corner’s barbed limit abuts Cherbourg Avenue and Sioux Drive, two opposite crosswalks across Airport Road, two cardinal directions of colonial settlement. Boeing Drive commences east from the military reservation gate, tracking down a settled tract: United States Postal Service, NASA, T-intersecting its opposite end like a spike into the sandlot buffering the El Paso Service Processing Center, ICE detention. Boeing Drive is the suspension bridge hung between Fort Bliss and immigration detention, a hammock over dune hummocks, making illusion of sky’s aloof float. What does it mean for this avenue to be one line between military fort and migrant detention? For Atlantic Aviation offices, subcontractors of ICE for deportation flights, to be located off Boeing adjacent to the NASA shuttle take-off? How to make sense of one fence away?

Performed Poetics, London

Announcement and program

A two-day music and poetry event celebrating the work of the late Eric Mottram and the poet, Jerome Rothenberg.

About this event

From King’s College London Archives, home of the Eric Mottram archive, a weekend of poetry, prose and music marking the contribution to literature of Mottram and his circle, and celebrating the career of Jerome Rothenberg, poet, translator, and anthologist.

DAY ONE Saturday, 12th March, 10am to 9pm

Poetry and Sound Poetry with Jerome Rothenberg and Charlie Morrow.

Scott C. Smith

'Mother Forehead Cradle Sky,' a renga poem with a note on procedures

Photo by Jacob Cook: An image of the Milky Way behind Mt. Whitney.
Photo by Jacob Cook: An image of the Milky Way behind Mt. Whitney.

Mother Forehead Cradle Sky

 

A renga “conversation” among Hafez-e Shirazi, José Lezama Lima, Paul Celan, and Jerome Rothenberg.

 

Between two rivers

Shiraz is a city built

on a holy site.