Note: Jaimie Gusman’s new collection Anyjar navigates the proliferating forms of body, memory, and self, through the lens of the Anyjar, which refers to a vessel that refuses any stable shape.
Above: Norman Fischer (left) and Andrew Levy (right) at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn. Photo by Trace Peterson.
Note: I have long been interested in Andrew Levy’s poetry. He and I have corresponded, and in recent years have read and performed together in New York, so we are familiar with one another’s approaches. Fragmented, collaged, passionate, engaged, the trajectory of Andrew’s work over the nearly thirty years of his publishing seems particularly suited to poetry’s jagged and provisional responses to the present moment in which the apparently out-of-control social and political situation we had been in for some years veered way out of orbit since the presidential election of 2016.
Note: I have long been interested in Andrew Levy’s poetry. He and I have corresponded, and in recent years have read and performed together in New York, so we are familiar with one another’s approaches.
Photo of Serena Chopra (left) by Kasey Ferlic. Photo of Aditi Machado (right) by Siddarth Machado.
We speak, in this cointerview, of our books — Serena Chopra’s Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017) and Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadings (Nightboat Books, 2017) — of epiphany and performance, the sociopolitical import of the line break, of decapitation, autoeroticism, and the sensorium. In so speaking, we discover that we are both, and proudly, grammarians.
Note: Tripwire is a journal of radical poetics and politics founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck. After it halted publication in 2002 (a brief supplement appeared in 2004), the journal was relaunched by Buuck in 2014.
Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted from an Emergency Reading Series event hosted by Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling on January 21, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was transcribed by Michael Nardone and edited for publication; additional commentary by the speakers is included below in brackets. The conversation, between Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster, explores topics ranging from Disneyfication to the Greek chorus.
Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted from an Emergency Reading Series event hosted by Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling on January 21, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was transcribed by Michael Nardone and edited for publication; additional commentary by the speakers is included below in brackets.
