Thomas Devaney

Thomas Devaney is the author of The Picture That Remains (The Print Center, Philadelphia, 2014), A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007), The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and the nonfiction book Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005).

Active in various areas of the arts, Devaney is known for his collaborations with organizations such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, including “New Invisible Cities,” for The Puppet Show (2008); “Tales from the 215,” for Zoe Strauss’s Philadelphia Freedom (2006); and the participant-performance project “The Empty House” at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, for The Big Nothing (2004). Other projects include “Dead Tired: Sleep Text” with Patty Chang at Momenta Art (2011) and poems written for Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009).

From 2001 to 2005 he was the program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House. Devaney is the editor of ONandOnScreen and he teaches at Haverford College.

Photo by David Kelley.

By this author

Mental Feelings

An introduction to reading the poetry of Philip Whalen

Carl Rakosi (1903–2004) in conversation with Tom Devaney, with Olivier Brossard

Feature: George Oppen

Traveling furiously toward you

Morning in Runnemede

The education of poetry

The seeds of its own unfolding

Inverting the middle

Godspeed

Deliberate

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