Norman MacAfee

Harbor Mountain Press published Norman MacAfee’s selected poems, One Class. Two of the poems in it, “I Am Astro Place” and “The Coming of Fascism to America,” first appeared in Jacket. Jack Hirschman: “One Class manifests the three elements — Passion, Provocation and Prophecy — that are the measure of all great books of poetry.” Bob Holman: “Like history where dates are midnight assignations, like sexual encounters that bristle with political implications, One Class presents a unified social theory of life and art, love and politics and aesthetics, that is fearless and human.” Roberto Tejada: “[One Class is] Whitman, Pound and Pasolini breathing in a register wherein the present suddenly irrupts … generous in its embrace and many-accented in its perspective.”

Some of MacAfee’s other books include The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now, about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign; and The Death of the Forest, an opera about King Philip’s War to music of Charles Ives. The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts is producing The Death of the Forest for premiere in 2015. MacAfee translated Heroines, the legendary long-lost manuscript by the surrealist lesbian Claude Cahun in Shelley Rice, Inverted Odysseys. He co-translated (with Luciano Martinengo) Poems: Pier Paolo Pasolini; Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (with Lee Fahnestock); two volumes of letters from Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to My Life and Quiet Moments in a War (again with Fahnestock); and (with Luigi Fontanella) Lines of Light by Daniele del Giudice. MacAfee blogs on Huffington Post and has lived in Manhattan since 1967.

By this author

'I Am Astro Place'

Sixteen drawings for Helen Adam's 'San Francisco's Burning'

The Coming of Fascism to America

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