Jared Stanley | Jacket2

Embracing the unintelligible / On silence, dance, and speech

by Lara Mimosa Montes

Jared Stanley

Note: As I was considering the question of Seeking it Outside Poetry, it occured to me that many of my beloved contemporaries were struggling with the same question. Lara Mimosa Montes’s recent move into dance has helped me to consider the questions of silence, movement, and their relation to the work of unlearning.

You don't have to think of it as poetry: Joanne Kyger's 'Descartes' and 'Bird Books'

Jared Stanley

Why start a series on ruptures and dissimilarity in poetic practice with Joanne Kyger, whose books of poetry seem to be very steady, a daily practice of poetry as journaling, a kind of non-narrative, time-specific work of being, a concern carefully announced by the titles of her books: Going On, Trip Out and Fall Back, On Time?

“What are you going to do? Read all day long?”

— Joanne Kyger

How have poets moved around, gone outside, or flitted beyond writing to find ‘it’ outside of poetry’s worlds, constraints, and specific joys? I’m interested in how poets move in and out and around poetry, becoming more-than-poets by being artists, novelists, musicians, observers, activists, cooks … etc. What pushes the poet outward toward untested genres, or even, fearfully, to renounce poetry altogether? I’m curious about poets’ frustrations with poetry, its institutions and readerships, and how those points of breakage test the limits of how poetry can mean how a ‘poet’s’ identification with poetry changes. I’m not interested in ‘extensions’ of practice, but instead, in the pleasures of dissimilarity between poetry and the other things a poet does.

Jared Stanley is the author of EARS (Nightboat, 2017), The Weeds (Salt, 2012), and Book Made of Forest (Salt, 2008). A chapbook, Ignore the Cries of Empty Stones and Your Flesh Will Break Out in Scavengers, is forthcoming from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Stanley has recently begun an ambitious, multiyear collaboration with the Toronto-based artist Sameer Farooq.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.

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You don't have to think of it as poetry: Joanne Kyger's 'Descartes' and 'Bird Books'

Embracing the unintelligible / On silence, dance, and speech

by Lara Mimosa Montes