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.
Stephen Burt (left) and Michael Scharf at the symposium discussed in this article
A response to the conference titled “Poetry Criticism: What is it for?”— speakers Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, Stephen Burt,and Michael Scharf, moderated by Susan Wheeler, at Wollman Hall, Cooper Union Engineering Building, 51 Astor Place, New York City, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, early in 2000.
ACCORDING TO a recent article by Ian Hamilton in the London Review of Books, Randell Jarrell's descent into madness, and his speculated suicide, were in part provoked by a negative review in the New York Times accusing him of “doddering infantilism.” Jarrell, who was hailed on the Poetry Society of America's panel “Poetry criticism: What is it For?” as being the model poet-critic, apparently could not take the blow, after having dished out a fair share of them for so many years as “poetry's high-purposed body guard.”
