Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and dialogist based in New Orleans. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. His latest books are The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023) and The Charm & The Dread (Fence, 2022). Forthcoming is WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. (2025). His previous books include In Range (Counterpath, 2019), Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2017), Deck of Deeds (Counterpath, 2012), Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection; Fence Books, 2008), To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), Partisans (O Books, 1999), and The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002). His poetry has appeared in over twenty anthologies, including, Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX), Best American Poetry (2023, 2004). Voices Without Borders, Diasporic Avant Gardes, Imagined Theatres, In the Criminal’s Cabinet, Latino Poetry (The Library of America Anthology, 2024). His poetry has recently appeared in the Boston Review, Protean, Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Harvard Advocate, Georgia Review, Yale Review, Fence, Annulet, Diagram, among many others. Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He won the Edwin Markham 2019 prize for poetry. Toscano’s poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Catalan. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, Communication Workers of America, National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and Northwest tribes (Umatilla, Cayuse, Yakima, Nez Perce) working on educational/training projects that involve environmental and labor justice and health and safety culture transformation. rodrigotoscano.com @Toscano200

By this author

Poetic mulching

Zoning in, zoning out

The ‘now what’ question of music and poetics

from 'Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception'

Bumper-car effect

Truax Inimical

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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