C. D. Wright, 'One Big Self'
PoemTalk producer-host Al Filreis traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and was joined there by Mark McMorris, Mel Nichols, and Rob Casper to discuss C. D. Wright’s book-length poem One Big Self. We focused on the opening five pages of verse in the book, which include poem-sections entitled “Count Your Fingers,” “Count Heads,” “In the Mansion of Happiness,” and “I Want to Go Home.” And we added, from a few pages later, the poem “My Dear Conflicted Reader,” something of a belated proem. These sections can be found in the Copper Canyon Press edition of One Big Self on pages 3–8 and 14.
November 7, 2016
Death's head, proud flesh
A 'Trouble Songs' addendum
Jeff T. Johnson presents “Death’s Head, Proud Flesh,” a new installment to his “Trouble Songs” project addressing the recent deaths of both David Bowie and C. D. Wright.
Last May we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T. Johnson’s sprawling “investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.” Announcing the piece on PennSound Daily, our own Michael Hennessey hailed the article as “a remarkably ambitious and capacious project that brings together the all-too-often disparate worlds of contemporary poetry and music.” “Within,” he continued, “we find Johnson deftly discussing John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Caroline Bergvall, and William Carlos Williams (among many others) with the same skill he dedicates to St. Vincent, Dock Boggs, Amy Winehouse, and Johnny Cash.”