[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someo
[“The following excerpt is from the final novel of a trilogy which includes the previously published How the Night Is Dividedand A HalfMan Dreaming. It is part of an on-going experiment in the Southern California rural dialect I grew up with among not only Jewish ranchers and farmers but a larger community of diverse backgrounds. Much of the narrative includes multiple portraits of land, water, and a world, for the mo
[The following is from Mark Weiss’s long awaited & very welcome new book, As Luck Would Have It, from Shearsman Books in the UK. Comments by Ron Silliman & Peter Manson appear beneath the poems – a further tribute to Weiss’s presence & prowess in a new American poetry & poetics.]
Poems and poetics