Joshua Schuster

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2015).

Joshua Schuster's PennSound page

Schuster discusses Ezra Pound

By this author

On reading Christian Bök's 'The Xenotext: Book 1' ten thousand years later

'100 years of reading and unreading'

The making of 'Tender Buttons'

Recently in Jacket2

From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Two essays

by Amy King

Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt, curators

I offer two spontaneous pieces back-to-back, Catskill Mountain patchworks, because I am distracted these days, letting surface what will, and because Sam and Michael asked. Much thanks to those who speak and challenge via “the socials” (as my students say) and face-to-face, mask-to-mask.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do. — Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

'Collective poesy'

The disruptive pleasures of Caroline Bergvall's 'Alisoun Sings'

Charles Theonia

Photo by Helena Wikström, courtesy of Caroline Bergvall, 'Drift Umeå,' NorrlandsOperan, Sweden.

During an interview from the afterlife, Jack Spicer tells Hoa Nguyen that in making a poem, “you start with a syllable machine and see what ghosts you catch.” Similarly spirited, Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings channels a polyphonous “voice-cluster”[1] of pop stars and feminist icons of art and literature, all centered around Alisoun, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.