Participants and audience members at North of Invention (photos by Aldon Nielsen).
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.
Joseph Ceravolo (photograph by Franceso Scavullo).
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.
Massachusetts as a state and as a state of mind plays a prominent role in the works of its poets and writers. This special feature focuses on five poets who have helped shape the literary imagination of Massachusetts and who have been shaped artistically by living there. Not coincidentally, three of the poets featured here appeared in John Wieners’s Measure Number Three — Boston the City and in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945–1960 anthology. The connection of these poets’ work transcends physical place but also is indebted to it.
