Articles - August 2013

On the convergence of war and wedding (PoemTalk #70)

Laura Mullen, 'Bride of the New Dawn'

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Amy Paeth, Michelle Taransky, and Steve McLaughlin met up with PoemTalk’s host Al Filreis to talk about one of the poems in Laura Mullen’s book Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides (Otis Books, 2012). Enduring Freedom is a coherent project; its poems constitute a series — a number of approaches to the problem of war’s strange but also surprisingly obvious and true convergence with weddings (and wedding planning in particular). The poem we chose is “Bride of the New Dawn.” Our recording of Mullen’s performance of the poem comes from a reading she gave in October 2012, in Berkeley, as recorded by Ross Craig; it was a reading in which she read fifteen of the Enduring Freedom poems.

Into the Field: Rod Smith

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Rod Smith is a poet, editor, and publisher from Washington, D.C. He’s a co-founder of Aerial Magazine and founder of Edge Books, which has published titles by Joan Retallack, Anselm Berrigan, Robert Fitterman, Benjamin Friedlander, K. Silem Mohammad, and many others. Smith, along with Friedlander and Mohammad, is a member of the Flarf Collective.