Julie Patton

Julie Ezelle Patton’s live improvised performance work has been featured at literary and music festival and venues here in the USA and abroad. Her writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Big Energy Poets, What I Say, I’ll Drown My Book, Shape-Shifting/Transformation in the Art of the Book, About Place Journal, Rust Belt Tales, and elsewhere. New work is forthcoming in Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing (Kore Press).

Julie is the author of Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (Portable Labs), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?), and a creative housing project based in a 1913 binary building, Julie insists is living book, her magnum opus, or summa cum laude.

Julie is a recipient of an 2018 Acker Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Art 2015 Grants to Artists Award, Doan Brook Watershed Hero Award, and other compliments.

Julie plays with Cloud Flowers, her long-standing duo with Paul Van Curen. She will be presenting new work in the 2018 Vision Festival. Julie has also been selected to present her visual communication work in Front International Triennial for Contemporary Art (Cleveland, Ohio) July 14, 2018 through Septemember 30, 2018.

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Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The Garcia Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

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