The text presented here is from Marthe’s Reed’s Ark Hive, forthcoming posthumously from The Operating System. A poetic approach to life in south Louisiana, it’s no wonder that Reed quotes poet C. D. Wright at the start of the work as Wright’s work covering south Louisiana could no doubt be seen as a necessary prerequisite to Reed’s own project. In the opening pages, Reed approaches her predicament as if she were a researcher placed in a foreign land, situating herself among her surroundings, in the midst of a condition of place that is both physically distant and so very different from the places she had previously lived. From there, she leans into language, the language of water, of floods and earth reclaimed, only to be lost again as the seasons change in places that are far away, the words occasionally scattered across the pages like the silt that drives the Mississippi water to the Gulf of Mexico.
[editor’s note. In the wake of Marthe Reed’s sudden and unexpected death earlier this month, I am opening Poems and Poetics to a commemoration of her work and spirit through the posting of an excerpt from a new book now awaiting publication. I had known Marthe Reed first as my student at UCSD San Diego and later as a dear friend and greatly admired poet.
Reading at Morden Tower, Newcastle, circa 1967, with Tony Harrison (left).
[This conversation was carried on between Tbilisi, Georgia, and Encinitas, California in late 2017. Other work by Irakli Qolbaia can be found here and here on Poems and Poetics.]
[This conversation was carried on between Tbilisi, Georgia, and Encinitas, California in late 2017. Other work by Irakli Qolbaia can be found here and here on Poems and Poetics.]
[Reposted here as a follow-up to recent discussions of the use of Ezra Pound’s name by the neofascist Casa Pound party in Italy, as a reminder of the larger problem that confronts us, even today, even as poets. In memory, too, of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. (J.R.)]
[Reposted here as a follow-up to recent discussions of the use of Ezra Pound’s name by the neofascist Casa Pound party in Italy, as a reminder of the larger problem that confronts us, even today, even as poets. In memory, too, of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. (J.R.)]
the breasts of all the women crumpled like gas bags when neruda wrote his hymn celebrating the explosion of a hydrogen bomb by soviet authorities
[The abomination of the neofascist “Casa Pound” party in contemporary Italian politics brings me back to a sixteen-poem series I wrote several years ago, with Ezra Pound — a strong poetry influence for many of us (myself included) and in politics a fool or worse — as the central focus.
Poems and poetics