erica kaufman

erica kaufman is the author of censory impulse (Factory School, 2009) as well as several chapbooks, including selections from INSTANT CLASSIC forthcoming from Least Weasel. kaufman is currently a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where she studies Composition and Rhetoric and its relationship to contemporary poetics. she lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Baruch College and is an associate of Bard’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.

By this author

elvis week (for CAConrad)

admit you're happy day

On "The Location of Things"

'Tender Buttons': A pedagogy

Allowing oneself to 'be the city'

Poetry in 1960, a symposium: Question and answer session

On Barbara Guest, 'The Location of Things'

Recently in Jacket2

Pablo Picasso: A translation in progress of 'The Four Little Girls'

A translation in progress of 'The Four Little Girls'

[November 24, 1947–August 13, 1948]

Jerome Rothenberg

“Harpy with Bull’s Head and Four Little Girls on Top of a Tower with Black Flag,” Plate 13 from the Vollard Suite, December 1934

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. While Pierre Joris and I were translating and putting together Picasso’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems (2004), I began a translation of Les Quatre Petites Filles, the second of the two full-length plays Picasso wrote in the 1940s.

Translation from French by Jerome Rothenberg.

The scene — a vegetable garden almost smack in its center a well.

four little girls singing — we’re not gonna go to the woods no more the laurel trees are down on the floor hey the beautiful babe will go pick them up then we’ll come out to dance hey just like they dance oh you sing dance and hug anybody you want

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (16): For the forty-fifth Presidentiad

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (16)

From Whitman, Sousandrade, Darío, and Emerson

Jerome Rothenberg

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?

What deepening twilight — scum floating atop of the waters,

Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?

Walt Whitman

TO THE STATES

To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad.

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?

What deepening twilight — scum floating atop of the waters,

Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?

The beast that therefore I am

Eight recent poetry titles on the beast

Kristin George Bagdanov

“Living within the sacrifice zone, the beast becomes other even to ‘the animal.’” Above: illustration from page 396 of ‘The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile’ (1895), via the <a href=https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11303375056/in/photolist-idQKAQ-idwqoz-hXmNQF-jYYLfV-i6zQhe-hLBsxS-hLBuei-hRJeWB-idCaYT-hMN2Dq-hVDLX8-ie2Xoe-i1TFe6-id63E5-idEAU>British Library</a>. — “Living within the sacrifice zone, the beast becomes other even to ‘the animal.’” Above: illustration from page 396 of ‘The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile’ (1895), via the British Library.

Eight poetry collections published in the past four years turn to the beast as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. This beastly turn has ontological, political, and aesthetic implications for how we theorize the relationship between poetry and personhood (and all of its Enlightenment-era baggage). This review explores both the impetuses and outcomes of these beast-filled encounters but stops short of offering a grand theory of “the beast,” as such a move would undermine the motivating reasons for embodying and embracing beasts as kin.

I have been a made thing & a hunted thing — Cody-Rose Clevidence[1]