David Antin, ‘War’
On March 26, 2003, before an audience gathered for an event sponsored by the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program, David Antin performed a fifty-minute talk-poem called “War.” It seems to have been a tense gathering. The second US incursion into Iraq had begun six days earlier, led by George W. Bush, who features prominently in Antin’s talk that evening. After delivering “War” this once, Antin apparently never transcribed it — nor apparently then, in his usual mode, lineated this talk-poem. Did he not sufficiently value it, then or later? Is it perhaps too unlike his usual talking performance? Perhaps it too directly referred to the political problem of the moment in relation to the poet’s work?
April 13, 2018
Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (20)
Joanna Kitchel, El Niño Fidencio, and Essie Parrish
[In putting together a transnational and historical anthology of the Americas North and South (now in progress), Javier Taboada and I are looking also at founders and representatives of new or revived American-based religions, who speak and write in forms of prophetic and visionary language that resembles what we otherwise would think of as open-verse poetry. In the present instance the outsider poets on display are Joanna Kitchel, a follower of Mother Anne Lee and the Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming (a.k.a. Shakers); El Niño Fidencio (Fidencio Constantino Síntora), a mid–twentieth-century healer and cult figure from Mexico; and Essie Parrish, cofounder of the Pomo Indian “dreamer religion” of California. The images above are of Fidencio and Parrish. (J.R.)]
[In putting together a transnational and historical anthology of the Americas North and South (now in progress), Javier Taboada and I are looking also at founders and representatives of new or revived American-based religions, who speak and write in forms of prophetic and visionary language that resembles what we otherwise would think of as open-verse poetry. In the present instance the outsider poets on display are Joanna Kitchel, a follower of Mother Anne Lee and the Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming (a.k.a.