Weathering the storms of history

On ‘In Inheritance of Drowning’ by Dorsía Smith Silva

From left to right: the cover of “In Inheritance of Drowning,” Dorsía Smith Silva.

The political bent of the launch was apt; although In Inheritance of Drowning begins with Hurricane María, Smith Silva’s verse traverses the Atlantic Ocean to visit the Puerto Rican diaspora, address America’s history of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide, and draw poetic connections between climate change, American imperialism, and the intersections between social and environmental justice.

In Inheritance of Drowning
Dorsía Smith Silva

CavanKerry Press 2024, 104 pages, $18, ISBN: 9781960327079

To empty rooms (PoemTalk #204)

Horace Gregory, "Chorus for Survival"

Horace Gregory

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Cristos Kalli, Jon Hoel, and Henry Steinberg to talk about two poems about the once hugely famous and now mostly forgotten communist and communist-affiliated poet who thrived for decades but most notably in the 1930s. In the middle of the Depression decade — in the momentous year of 1935 — he published the book Chorus for Survival with Covici-Friede. Our group discussed two poems in the Chorus for Survival series — numbers 5 and 11. In 1944, Gregory traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to record some poems for the Harvard Vocarium, performing six poems include the two we discuss. Jon and Al had met up nearly a year before, discovered a common interest in Gregory, and have co-curated this episode.

Mining Black history

On two docu-poetry collections

From left to right: Alison C. Rollins’ book “Black Bell” and Sheila Carter-Jones’ book “Every Hard Sweetness.”

“Documentary poetics is often lauded for its ability to articulate social injustices and advocate for civil rights,” writes award-winning poet Craig Santos Perez.[1] Two poetry collections published last year harness this ability and mine the African American archive to shine a light on evidence of past injustices in the hopes of a better future.

Black Bell
Alison C. Rollins

Copper Canyon Press 2024, 136 pages, $22.00, ISBN 9781556597008

Every Hard Sweetness
Sheila Carter-Jones
BOA Editions 2024, 134 pages, $19.00, ISBN 9781960145123

Community matters

On the sermons of Tyrone Williams

A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022. 

Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.

The date, Diogenes, and the dog

On Susan Schultz

Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).
Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).

Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest? 

I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement.

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

Excavating intimacies

A review of Siwar Masannat’s ‘cue’

From left to right: the cover of “cue,” Siwar Masannat.

Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer, poet, educator, and editor currently based in Milwaukee. cue, Masannat’s second book of poetry, emerges from her engagement with Akram Zaatari’s project Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, which brought El Madani’s compelling photographs of community members in Saida, Lebanon, to a global audience.

cue
Siwar Masannat

University of Georgia Press 2024, 82 pages, $19.95, ISBN 9780820365978

Between memory and forgetting

From left to right: Carlos Soto-Román, Soto-Román's book “11,” and Leanne Tory-Murphy.

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.