From left to right: Kendra Sullivan, Sullivan’s new book “Reps,” and Louis Bury.
We spoke together on the occasion of her recent Ugly Duckling Presse book, Reps, which uses undisclosed constraints as carrying cases — safe deposit boxes — for the stories humans tell each other to make sense of their many capacities.
Kendra Sullivan operates in the vital tradition of poets who undertake DIY cultural work. She is the Director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Humanities, where she is responsible for initiatives such as Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative and NYC Climate Justice Hub. She co-founded the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Brooklyn, and is a member of Mare Liberum, an eco-arts collective.
This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates. Here I included a brief consideration of the DuPlessis PennSound Archive in order to celebrate both the 2024 completion of my recording of all the Drafts and the imminent publication of Drafts in 2025 by Coffee House Press.
This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates.
In a chapter on Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger (1975) in his most recent critical monograph, Michael Golston proposes to treat the enigmatic figure of Sllab as “pure science fiction,” an approach that, so far as he knows, “has not been taken before.” A pertinent question would be, “Why not?” — for Dorn made no secret of Sllab’s genesis in Stanley Kubrick’s “main deific principle” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), “the stone with the music.” Do critics of avant-garde poetry tend to shy away from science fiction?
The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination Michael Golston The University of Alabama Press, 2024, 243 pages, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-6100-6; E-ISBN 978-0-8173-9468-4
Excerpt from cover page of Robert Duncan’s application to Black Mountain College, August 30, 1939. Image courtesy of State of North Carolina Western Regional Archives.
In the late summer of 1939, Robert Duncan (then still using the name Robert Symmes) requested application blanks from Black Mountain College (BMC). Duncan had already finished two years at the University of California, Berkeley, but his plans to continue his undergraduate studies were vague.
From left: Michelle Taransky, Sally Van Doren, Christy Davids
Al Filreis convened Michelle Taransky, Christy Davids, and Sally Van Doren. Sally traveled to be with us for the day: she gave a an evening reading of mostly her new poems, paired with a reading by Michelle; and she spent more time in our studio in an interview with Al about her new poems. For the PoemTalk episode — we discussed a series of numbered poems by Marjorie Welish, going under the title “Begetting Textile.”
After the event, Jose and I chatted briefly, but he had to jet off to class. So we decided to continue our conversation in a slightly more formal context. We corresponded via email on December 31, 2023 and through the first weeks of the new year, first discussing Black Box Syndrome and then Yaguareté White.
In August of 2023, just as the Fall term commenced, poet and scholar Jose-Luis Moctezuma reached out to me about celebrating Latinx Heritage Month at Wilbur Wright College, where he teaches Literature and Composition in the English department. Jose invited me to read from my forthcoming debut poetry collection, Yaguareté White, which was published by University of Arizona Press in February. As a fellow faculty member at the City Colleges of Chicago, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to spend time with a new group of students talking about poetry.
Lyn Hejinian in Berkeley. Photo by Jennifer Scappettone.
In the days after Lyn Hejinian’s passing, her students and friends reached out to each other, texted messages of disbelief and grief, and gathered in different ways, near and far, to read her work and to collectively express what Lyn means to us. This feature is itself such a gathering.
Claire DeVoogd is a multifarious poet based in Brooklyn. Via is her first book. Writing more than eight centuries after the legendary Breton poet based at the English court, Marie de France, DeVoogd addresses her literary ancestor casually and intimately, like a familiar spirit.
Via Claire DeVoogd Winter Editions, 2023, 136 pages, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-959708-04-9
“What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here? What are we going to do? Let’s try putting it in another way.”
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
