Michael Basinski

Michael Basinski lives in Buffalo, New York, and is curator emeritus of the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo. In 2018 he published Opems (Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY). Opems documents his 2018 Burchfield Penney Exhibition titled Opems: Verbal-Visual Combines, which was a solo exhibition of his large scale visual, sound, and performance poems. His 2017 books are Unexplained Noises (Buffalo Ochre Papers), Lot Sa Nots O, and with Ginny O’Brian, Combings. Combination of the Two, an exhibition of O’Brien’s and Basinski’s cooperative visual works/poems opened January 18, 2019 at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. In 2016 he published In Buffalo: Poems of a Polish American Boy (Foothills Publishing). In 2018 his poems appeared in Peach Mag, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Angry Old Man, and the Journal of Poetic Research and in The Canary Island Connection — 60 Contemporary American Poets. In the past he has published in many literary journals including Word/For Word, Fell Swoop, Dandelion, Boxkite, First Offense, Kenning, Lungfull, Tinfish, Rampike, Filling Station, Ur Vox, Damn the Caesars, Yellow Field, Nerve Lantern, Mimeo Mimeo, Vanitas, Talisman, Vort, and Poetry.

By this author

The opem

Some facts and some memories: the Jargon Society Archive at the Poetry Collection State University of New York at Buffalo

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