Interviews

This is provocation

Tom Weatherly with Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie

Tom Weatherly
Victor Bockris

Note: Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie conducted a series of interviews with numerous contemporary American poets during the early 1970s, published in various venues. The playful style of the interview with Weatherly is typical of these. (These interviews were collected for a book to be titled The Life of Poetry in 1973, but the book never appeared in print.

September 6, 2019

Caleb Beckwith and Suzanne Stein in conversation

'Political Subject'

Caleb Beckwith
Suzanne Stein

Note: Caleb Beckwith and I have been corresponding about poetry, poetics, and poetry community since becoming friends sometime in 2015, shortly after he moved to the Bay Area from Philadelphia. Late in 2018, I suggested we have a more formal conversation about his new book, Political Subject, recently released from Roof Books. 

Note: Caleb Beckwith and I have been corresponding about poetry, poetics, and poetry community since becoming friends sometime in 2015, shortly after he moved to the Bay Area from Philadelphia. Late in 2018, I suggested we have a more formal conversation about his new book, Political Subject, recently released from Roof Books.

August 15, 2019

Being in a body

Samantha Giles and Lauren Levin

Samantha Giles
Lauren Levin
Picture of a house under construction.
Photo by Julia Bloch.

Note: Lauren Levin and Samantha Giles live and work in a loosely affiliated social, political, and aesthetic scene in the Bay Area. Nether Giles or Levin has any academic affiliation, but both have continued to participate in the professionalization of poetry as curators, as publishers, and as people who write books. 

Note:Lauren Levin and Samantha Giles live and work in a loosely affiliated social, political, and aesthetic scene in the Bay Area. Nether Giles or Levin has any academic affiliation, but both have continued to participate in the professionalization of poetry as curators, as publishers, and as people who write books.

May 15, 2019

Sycorax, spirit, and 'Zong!'

An interview with M. NourbeSe Philip

Jordan Scott
M. NourbeSe Philip

Editorial note: This exchange between Jordan Scott and NourbeSe Philip, undertaken in 2016 and just now published in Jacket2, centers on the role of spirituality in Philip’s book Zong!, which Evie Shockley has said “enacts a critique, but also effects a catharsis or, more accurately, works through a problem that lies at the intersection of the emotions, the psyche, and the soul, if such a thing can be spoken of in the twenty-first century’s secular spaces.” 

Editorial note: This exchange between Jordan Scott and NourbeSe Philip, undertaken in 2016 and just now published in Jacket2, centers on the role of spirituality in Philip’s book Zong!, which Evie Shockley has said “enacts a critique, but also effects a catharsis or, more accurately, works through a problem that lies at the intersection of the emotions, the psyche, and the soul, if such a thing can be spoken of i

May 14, 2019

Inadequacy of skin and feather

Jaimie Gusman on 'Anyjar'

Jaimie Gusman
Rajiv Mohabir

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.

January 29, 2019