Bob Arnold

Bob Arnold is the author of On Stone, Yokel, Once in Vermont, I’m in Love with You, Who Is in Love with Me, Stone Hut, Start with the Tree, and other books of poetry and prose, including the train-traveling books American Train Letters and Go West. He is currently working on a children’s book (for a granddaughter). In 1971 Arnold founded Longhouse, as editor and publisher, under the original imprint Our Poets Workshop with various side venues Scout, Poets Who Sleep, Love Thy Poet, and the small booklet series Just So Happens. He edited and published the final Origin (sixth series, 2006) in celebration of Cid Corman, gathering poets and artists worldwide, released free online and now archived on CD. In 2015 he is editing and preparing for Longhouse new book titles by Lorine Niedecker, Janine Pommy Vega, and as literary executor for Cid Corman Of, Volumes 4 & 5. He presents a daily blog, A Longhouse Birdhouse, and together with Susan, for forty years, has run a bookshop from their home. He makes his living as a stonemason and builder in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

By this author

'Fully a book'

The man who always was

Four poems from 'A Possible Eden'

My Sweetest Friend

Swept in with the rain

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza