Michael Helsem

M. H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

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Topsy-Turvy

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Trance of language (PoemTalk #172)

Harryette Mullen, 'Sleeping with the Dictionary' & 'Dim Lady'

PoemTalk

from left: Larissa Lai, Maxe Crandall, Julia Bloch

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

An in-person reunion of favorite colloquists after a year of planning: Al Filreis met up with Maxe Crandall (traveling from Oakland), Larissa Lai (having flown in from Calgary), and Julia Bloch (who walked five minutes through campus)—in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House. They talked about two prose poems in Harryette Mullen’s collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, published by California in 2002. The poems are “Dim Lady” and the title poem, “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” Our recordings of Mullen’s performance of these two pieces — they can be heard here and here — come from episode #92 (broadcast in 2005) of Leonard Schwartz’s radio show, Cross Cultural Poetics, an interview/conversation in which Schwartz and Mullen devoted the entire program to a discussion of and readings from Sleeping with the Dictionary.

May 22, 2022

Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles

'GRAFFITE,' Three Suites after Images by Arie Galles, Part One

Jerome Rothenberg

For some time now I’ve been working with Arie Galles on Graffite, a three-part series of graphite drawings with poem accompaniments: MoonFields, CloudPoems, and PepperTree, in that order. Here, with the exception of MoonFields (abstract circles and lines), Galles’s images begin as black and white photographs that he then translates, as with his monumental 14 Stations, into three sets of twenty graphite drawings each, to which are added twenty poems of mine as linkages.