On a morning of slow grey drizzle in the southern spring of 1976, at Robert and Cheryl Adamson’s living room table at Lane Cove, Sydney, between bites of a late breakfast and occasional snatches of quiet conversation, Robert Duncan began writing “An Alternate Life,” a poem that evolved from and partly recounts his experiences whilst visiting Australia. He was here on a reading and lecture tour. He’d brought with him the booklets and manuscripts that later became Ground Work: Before the War, his first major collection since Bending the Bow, though it didn’t yet have that title (he referred to its contents generically as “ground work”) and wouldn’t be published until 1984.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries in January 2014. During that month, we will be especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:
— Reviews of recent poetics criticism, theory, and anthologies
— Reviews and articles devoted to poetries outside the US
— Articles or essays on the ephemeral, the local, or the emergent
This exciting news comes to us from Charlie Morrow:
ROTHENBERG CELEBRATION: On December 11, 2013, www.Misterbowlerradio.com celebrates poet Jerry Rothenberg's 82nd birthday with an online broadcast from producer Bent-Erik Rasmussen’s ICMM studios in Svinø, Denmark. Danny Snelson will celebrate by launching the digital version of Jerry's New Wilderness Letter poetry journal.
Robert Sheppard contributed this piece to Jacketissue 9 to mark the occasion of Bob Cobbing's 75th birthday:
I visited Bob Cobbing, and thus met my first poet, on November 3 1973. I was still at school, keen to put on an exhibition of concrete poetry. I recognised this as the wilder edge of the new British poetry I had discovered through Horovitz' anthology Children of Albion and Bill Butler's Brighton bookshop. In the school library there was, unaccountably, Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Bob was in it.
When I arrived at Randolph Avenue to collect some hansjörg mayer posters, Bob was already talking to a student who was writing a thesis on language in visual art. I listened as they talked and sounded some of the Shakespeare Kaku. I remained mute, uncertain. Bob played a tape of himself and Peter Finch performing e colony from the Five Vowels, a then incomplete project. He showed us the work in progress. I stayed for six hours literally learning the life of a poet.
Editorial note: We received the following response to Jerome Rothenberg’s May 2013 commentary on Heriberto Yépez’s book The Empire of Neomemory (translated from Spanish by Jen Hofer, Christian Nager, and Brian Whitener, and published by ChainLinks in 2013).
Il Gruppo: Olson the Imperialist & The Empire of Neomemory
The following statement is a response to Heriberto Yépez’s El Imperio de la neomemoria, excerpts from which recently appeared in Jacket2 under Jerome Rothenberg’s commentary page. In 2007, the book appeared in Spanish. It was recently translated as The Empire of Neomemory. In recent months, the book has received notice while its assumptions remain unquestioned. Its editors wrote:
This work is a dismantling of [Charles] Olson, and of empire, and yet it is also clearly an inside job, a book that could only be written by someone who had spent hours thinking with and through — and beyond — Olson.
