Commentaries

Zhang Ziqing (Feb. 2, 1939 - Dec. 10, 2024)

James Sherry, Zhang, and me, at my W. 92nd Street apartment in NY (1994)
Zhang Ziqing (Feb. 2, 1939 - Dec. 10, 2024).

Speed Listening: Reading Machines and Audio Fantasy

1st International Congress on Phonetics and Poetics
Speed Listening: Reading Machines and Audio Fantasy
Nov. 14, 2024 (30 min.): MP4

Linda Mence’s Personification Allegories

Linda Mence, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt and Sintija Ozoliņa

Linda Mence. Photo by Uģis Olte.

Mence’s poems are ambiguously allegorical in the schematism and suggestiveness of their settings and situations: a house under attack by unclear or mystical forces; a garden falling into decay; a train ride that both connects people and separates them.

For her final project in the MFA program at the Art Academy of Latvia, the poet and visual artist Linda Mence created illustrations of the seventeen virtues who figure in the twelfth-century morality play Ordo Virtutum, by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. While working on this project, Mence realized that she found the human figure “uninteresting,” as she recently remarked in a casual conversation, and turned instead to abstract geometric patterns in order to represent the virtues.

Richard Foreman (1937-2024)

Richard Foreman
June 10, 1937  - January 4, 2024

Foreman at EPC/PennSound/Ontological
(PennSound page has many videos of Foreman's theater)

His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it.

Launch for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

with Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Tan Lin, Felix Bernstein, & Charles Bernstein

at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York, Dec. 5, 2024

My thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petelos at the University of Chicago Press. This is my tenth book with Chicago, going back 25 years. Thanks also to Anthony Huberman and Eli Coplan (sound engineer) of GPS for hosting this event.