Commentaries - October 2022

Ariel Resnikoff

From raisin in every bite (Furniture Press, 2022)

Author’s Note. raisin in every bite gathers and convenes devotional notebook poems at the threshold of dreams, where sleep meets afterlife in memory. These poems fly in flocks, in fabulous company of so many living and dead writers, in love and care for that great company, a ragtag translingual family of freaks and poets and outriders.

Ahmad Almallah

from ‘Bitter English’ (2019) and ‘The Border Wisdom’ (in progress)

BITTER ENGLISH

 

that I own no one language cuts me through

that I find this english tongue I use day after day

boring, in construction, even in poetry cuts me

in the middle of sentiment and sentence

 

I do not understand this sound, I stumble,

Instress, part 3

I am/immortal diamond

Portraits of Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, Walter Scott, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. English Romantic Shelley is, in many ways historical and poetics-centered, out of place among this crew, including among them a more serious interest in the occult’s manifestation in poetry.

“Poetry … transmutes all that it touches,” wrote Percy Bysse Shelley in “A Defence of Poetry” (698). In 2022, when I’m grasping for really any concrete manner of hoping to influence the courses of destruction human capitalism/patriarchy/genocide has put the world on, I am, maybe paradoxically, drawn to poetic treatises like Shelley’s. He really thought, or at least said, that poetry can create change. We all probably know that he called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (as if we want to be related to politicians), but he also said that poetry is the “most unfailing herald, companion and follower … to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution,” that poets “are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration,” mirrors of the world that is or could be (700–701). Shelley gives me a version of poetry that effects, poetry that does work and does magic.

MoMA Mia: A video conversation with Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri asked me to meet him at New York's Museum of Modern Art on September 22, 2022, to talk about the museum's way of framing  modern art, bouncing off a conversation we had at the museum a few years earlier. A starting point for the conversation is my essay "Disfiguring Abstraction" in Pitch of Poetry. Chaudhuri deepens and enriches my attempts to get outside the "Western Box" (as Olson called it ) when looking at some of my favorite works of art. This is the first in what will be a series of video conversations for Chauhuri's web site Literary Activism, where this video was first posted. Note: ambient sound from IPhone (vertical image).