Features - March 2013

In January 2011, I had the pleasure of hosting ten Canadian poets (and one Belgian collaborator!) first at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, and then at Poets House in New York. For months, Charles Bernstein and I had been hard at work planning a festival that would showcase various different strands of experimental writing in Canada, from sound poetry and multilingualism to activist and communitarian interventions to scientifically inflected conceptual practices.

We suspected that the poetry of Joseph Ceravolo has been on the limits of our poetic understanding for a reason. Therefore, we embarked on a collective effort, a group investigation of the parameters, frequencies, limitations, and timbres we could locate and cull from a famously fugitive body of work. Fugitive because of its publishing history, which may be partially due to the cruel vagaries of human existence.