Interviews

'So I continued, issue by issue'

Seth Perlow interviews 'Jacket' founder John Tranter

Graphics by John Tranter from early issues of ‘Jacket,’ adapted from ‘The Left Hand of Capitalism: … about Jacket magazine.’

Note: I conducted this interview with John Tranter via email on May 7, 2013, as research for an article I was writing. After I sent John my questions, he replied with a .txt file that contained my questions and his answers. I cited some of his comments in my article, “The Online Literary Magazine: Some Preliminary Responses,” Letteratura e Letterature 8 (2014), reprinted in The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2022). The “Left Hand” essay mentioned below refers to Tranter’s “The Left Hand of Capitalism: … about Jacket magazine” (1999). — Seth Perlow

Note: I conducted this interview with John Tranter via email on May 7, 2013, as research for an article I was writing. After I sent John my questions, he replied with a .txt file that contained my questions and his answers.

Vomiting gold in Arcadia

A conversation between Marty Cain and Joe Hall

Photo of Joe Hall (left) by Patrick Cray. Photo of Marty Cain (right) by Kina Viola.

Note: Joe Hall and Marty Cain met over the internet in the mid-2010s, and since then, they’ve corresponded, read each other’s work, swum in gorges, and played in a punk band, Joyous Shrub. Joe currently lives in Buffalo, New York, and Marty lives in Ithaca, New York (although Joe also once lived near Ithaca for a brief period). In this cointerview, they discuss their books — Marty Cain’s The Prelude (Action Books, 2023) and Joe Hall’s Fugue and Strike (Black Ocean, 2023) — and matters concerning locality, labor, and the relationship between art and political action, among other subjects.

Note: Joe Hall and Marty Cain met over the internet in the mid-2010s, and since then, they’ve corresponded, read each other’s work, swum in gorges, and played in a punk band, Joyous Shrub. Joe currently lives in Buffalo, New York, and Marty lives in Ithaca, New York (although Joe also once lived near Ithaca for a brief period).

Sarah Riggs and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Sounding Translation episode 2

Photo of Sarah Riggs by Omar Berrada.

Bridget Ryan: Hi, everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In the following interview, conducted by Teresa Villa-Ignacio, the poet, translator, filmmaker, and activist Sarah Riggs recalls how, upon moving to Paris in the early 2000s, she began translating French poets, including Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, and Ryoko Sekiguchi.

Kathleen Fraser and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Sounding Translation episode 1

Image of Kathleen Fraser courtesy of Poets House.

Bridget Ryan: Hi, everyone! You’re listening to Sounding Translation, a podcast featuring interviews with translators of contemporary poetry. I’m Bridget Ryan, Stonehill class of 2023, and the producer of this podcast episode. In this interview, poet Kathleen Fraser shares with Teresa Villa-Ignacio the origins of her 1980s and early 1990s newsletter, entitled HOW(ever), which celebrated innovative women poets in what was then a predominantly male field. Fraser reads some of her poems, poems that impacted her writing, and poems that she translated from the Italian.

Someone's got to keep this generation honest

Corso editors Raymond Foye and George Scrivani, with William Lessard

Left to right: cover of Gregory Corso’s ‘The Golden Dot’ with photo by Allen Ginsberg; photo of George Scrivani by Raymond Foye; photo of Raymond Foye by Amy Grantham.

The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997–2000 (Lithic Press, 2022) is a white-hot summation and extended last word of a poet who was most alone in the company of others and frequently his own worst advocate. The Shelley-infused lyricist, familiar to us from more than a dozen books across forty years, is still in evidence, but there is a newfound clarity and urgency to the work, which is like meeting a long-lost friend after decades apart. It was my pleasure to interview longtime Corso compatriots and editors Raymond Foye and George Scrivani, who have accomplished the heroic task of transforming the fluid manuscript Corso left into the poignant collection we have here. Like many folks from New York City’s poetry community, I knew Corso had a final great book in him, but I doubted the unrepentant hellraiser would ever pull it off.

Note: The youngest foundational Beat is having a revival. After a folio of new poems appeared a few months ago in The Brooklyn Rail, the full collection from which they were excerpted has arrived, and it couldn’t be more of a surprise — and a delight.