Colin Browne

The dark containers (PoemTalk #117)

Larissa Lai, 'Nascent Fashion'

Left to right: Colin Browne, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah.

Larissa Lai’s poetry here “is on the move between things,” as Fred Wah puts it in this episode of PoemTalk, for which Al Filreis also gathered Daphne Marlatt and Colin Browne to discuss Lai’s long poem Nascent Fashion (published together with several other long poems in Automaton Biographies). Fred, Daphne, and Colin were on tour together as a Western Canadian trio for readings and events along the US east coast. Fortunately for PoemTalk and Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia was one of their stops.

October 13, 2017

The dark containers (PoemTalk #117)

Larissa Lai, 'Nascent Fashion'

Al Filreis

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Colin Browne on Close Listening

Charles Bernstein

On Close Listening, Colin Browne and I talked about the founding of the Kootenay School of Writing, the limits of narrative in poetry and film and the possibilities of collage, the trickster figure in the work of Charles Edenshaw, and the overlays of personal history and cultural history in Browne’s new book about Edenshaw, a nineteenth-century indegenous artist from British Columbia.

(30:00): MP3

Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt

Video recording of one poem by each

Al Filreis

Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Colin Browne visited Philadelphia on March 15, 2017. They joined me for a recording of an episode of PoemTalk on Larissa Lai’s Nascent Fashion, and then give a triple reading at the Penn Book Center. That reading was recorded on audio and will be available soon at the poets’ PennSound pages. Meantime, I captured performances of two poems as video recordings — Fred Wah reading (his encore poem) from his great book Is a Door, and Daphne Marlatt reading a piece from her Vancouver Poems.

Recently in Jacket2

Digital Poetics 2

Not Your Father’s Confessionalism

William Lessard

A blank text field. Oblong. With rounded corners. It is our refuge where we are free to say almost anything. Some treat it as a mail slot to dispatch their most personal thoughts. Others leap across it as a stage where they become a different person. Or a heaving jumble of Pessoa-like heteronyms, or what most people call trolls. Most of us troll without noticing, or we perform for clicks with a keen understanding that what we type (however non-factual) conjures data about what we are. An armchair existentialist might say the space mirrors the void inside us.

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A reflection from Amish Trivedi

Jerome Rothenberg

Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3 a.m., that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.

Also I don't suffer (PoemTalk #195)

Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"

PoemTalk

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Al Filreis brought together James Berger and Richard Deming (who traveled together from Yale) and Sophia DuRose to talk about two poems by Ron Padgett. The poems are “The Austrian Maiden” and “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo.” Our recording of “The Austrian Maiden” comes from a February 26, 2003, reading Padgett gave at the Kelly Writers House; the poem had just recently been published in Padgett’s book You Never Know (2002). The recording of “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo” — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown. That reading in its entirety is available at Padgett’s PennSound page; the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

April 17, 2024