Interviews

The title of the performance is drawn from the 1955 first publication of a “complete” edition of Dickinson’s poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. In what Johnson called a “subject index” he grouped the poems under headers like “Death,” or “Mountains,” presumably so that if you were looking for a half-remembered Dickinson poem you could narrow down your search to likely candidates. From when I first encountered this index, I was fascinated by its quixotic efforts.

In April 2024, Action Books published Friends With Everyone, a collection of poems by Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding. Struck by its political and formal wildness, I reviewed the book for Annulet and co-translated Gunnar’s talk, “Imagining a Hyperpersonality,” to further contextualize his work. Shortly after the review’s publication, I had the fortunate opportunity to meet both Gabe and Gunnar at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. 

I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.

You see, sometime back, I came up with a zippy formula meant to clarify how we might arrive at “political poetry.” It goes like this: if metapolitics is the seedbed of realpolitik, poetics is the mulch of metapolitics.