Michael Helsem

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

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Making the invisible visible

Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster in conversation, 2010

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted from an Emergency Reading Series event hosted by Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling on January 21, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was transcribed by Michael Nardone and edited for publication; additional commentary by the speakers is included below in brackets. The conversation, between Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster, explores topics ranging from Disneyfication to the Greek chorus.

September 21, 2018

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (14)

Emily Dickinson, 'A Letter to the Master,' lineated

Jerome Rothenberg

[NOTE. I published this earlier in a nonlineated prose rendering in America a Prophecy, coedited with George Quasha in the early 1970s. Well-enough known as one of three Dickinson letters addressed to an unidentified “Master,” this version, following closely her handwritten draft, emerges (for me at least) as a near-projective forerunner to what would become a dominant form of North American experimental composition a century after her own writing. The result anyway is based on the transcription in The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Amherst College Press in 1986. It will likely be the version used by me and Heriberto Yépez in our transnational anthology of North and South American poetry, now in preparation for University of California Press. That the full-blown sense of thwarted intimacy here is both surprising and overwhelming is also to be noted, as is the quirky and volatile language that connects the voice behind the letter to that of her better-known poems. (J.R.)]

Summer 1861

A very serious joke beneath the (relatively soon to be) exploding sun

Review of Joseph Harrington's 'Of Some Sky'

Matt Reeck

“Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_with_crows_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via Wikimedia Commons.

Joseph Harrington’s first book of poetry, Things Come On, was both a memoir about his mother and a documentary of a time in American history. It was documentary in nature, if the document of history were subjected to aesthetic manipulations and personal refashioning. Of Some Sky, his new book, has a differently indeterminate generic structure: it asks the question of whether humor is possible in poetry whose subject is ecological collapse.