Eleni Stecopoulos’ brilliantly provocative, syncretic manifesto, Visceral Poetics, identifies idiopathic disease with ideolectical poetics, pathology with anomaly – the flesh of the text and the text of the flesh — bringing home the liberatory potential for visceral readings of the unintelligible. For Stecopoulos, diagnosis is a practice of aesthetic translation and poetry a quest for knowledge outside the disabling strictures of Western rationalism. Written in lyric bursts of telegraphic intensity, Stecopoulos follows her guides, Artaud and Metcalf, through veils of suffering in order to repossess, from the jaws of evisceration, her own life — and ours.
The selected poems of Larry Eigner is just out from the series I edit with Hank Lazer at the University of Alabama Press. We are able to offer a 30% discount, so you can get this 350-page book for $17.
Eigner’s poetry is one of the splendors of postwar American culture. There is no more perfect introduction to Eigner’s sublime actualizations of the “sustaining air” of the everyday than this selection.
My foreword to the book is included in Pitch of Poetry. It is also on-line here.
Richard Swigg was a great friend of PennSound, editing our extensive sound recording collections of Williams, Bunting, Tomlinson, Oppen, and Replansky. His work was thorough, with the aim of archiving all the audio recordings of these poets. He was tireless in his efforts — he spent decades assembling the recordings — and worked with us in securing permission to make these recordings available on PennSound.
On Close Listening, Colin Browne and I talked about the founding of the Kootenay School of Writing, the limits of narrative in poetry and film and the possibilities of collage, the trickster figure in the work of Charles Edenshaw, and the overlays of personal history and cultural history in Browne’s new book about Edenshaw, a nineteenth-century indegenous artist from British Columbia.
