Articles - June 2011

Into the Field: Souvankham Thammavongsa

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Souvankham Thammavongsa is a poet who lives and works in Toronto. Her parents were raised in Laos, and she was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978. Thammavongsa’s family moved to Canada when she was a year old. Her book Found (2007) describes these experiences, and was made into a short film by director Paramita Nath. Thammavongsa’s first book of poems is Small Arguments (2003). You can find her website here.

Wieners by night (PoemTalk #43)

John Wieners, 'The Acts of Youth'

John Wieners at the Odessa Restaurant, New York City, November 1993. Photo by Allen Ginsberg.

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Ammiel Alcalay, Gary Barwin, and Danny Snelson joined Al Filreis to talk about a poem by John Wieners for which we at PennSound have two recordings. The version used as the basis of this PoemTalk discussion was part of a brief two-poem performance at the Poetry Project in New York, in 1990. (He also read "Confidence" that day.) “The Acts of Youth” was written in the early 1960s and published in Wieners's second book, Ace of Pentacles, in 1964.<--break- />

Into the Field: Kaplan Harris

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Kaplan Harris is a scholar and editor who writes about a wide variety of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, including the work of Ted Berrigan, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and the Flarf poets. With degrees from North Carolina State University and the University of Notre Dame, he currently teaches at St. Bonaventure University in Western New York. For the last several years, Harris has been co-editing the forthcoming Selected Letters of Robert Creeley with Peter Baker and Rod Smith. His article “The Small Press Traffic school of dissimulation” was recently published in Jacket2.