Today I distributed the following announcement widely to 130,000 participants in "ModPo," the free, open-enrollment, noncredit 10-week course in modern and contemporary U.S. poetry:
I am very excited to announce a new aspect of ModPo that I hope will intrigue you and perhaps induce you to participate. We have created a new section of ModPo that parallels the main ModPo syllabus, "chapter" by "chapter" and week by week, and offers links to short video recordings of ModPo people around the world gathered in small groups conducting collaborative close readings of our poems — and related poems — themselves. Yes: we are now calling for crowdsourced collaborative close readings.
[The following is yet another excerpt from the forthcoming Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present, edited with commentaries by myself & John Bloomberg-Rissman and published by Black Widow Press as the fifth volume of Poems for the Millennium. Earlier excerpts have been posted on Poems and Poetics over the last several years, referring to the work as “a mini-anthology in progress,” but the completed work will now appear as a 450 page assemblage to join the other volumes in the
Sandra Ridley is the author of three books of poetry: Fallout (Hagios Press), Post-Apothecary (Pedlar Press), and most recently, The Counting House (BookThug). She has taught poetry at Carleton University and has mentored poets through Ottawa’s Salus and Artswell’s “Footprints to Recovery” program for people living with mental illness. Sandra has also facilitated poetry workshops for the City of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Library, and the Tree Reading series. She knows how to use a compass.
Q: Your work tends to favour the extended sequence, often utilizing extended lyric stretches, and avoiding individual, stand-alone poems. What is it about the sequence that appeals? Are all your poems in conversation with one another?
My first encounter with a Detroit poetry institution was the Woodward Line Poetry series, a monthly reading at the Scarab Club in Midtown organized by James Hart III and Kim Hunter. The series has been running for over 10 years, featuring poets from within and beyond Detroit. I first attended the Woodward Line back in September, when Nathaniel Mackey opened the 2014-15 series.
The January 2015 reading featured two Detroit writers, Steve Hughes and James LaCroix, and a Windsor, Ontario writer, Gustave Morin. Snow had fallen all day, so the crowd was initially sparse.
There’s an endless construction project going on next door to us in Salthill. Traffic on the street shuts down in both directions each day for the arrival of a tractor, and the gravel for a new driveway has just been laid. Large trees have been chopped to hedge-rows. Yesterday, in the morning, a displaced bird flew into one of the exhaust tubes of our apartment, located above the kitchen cabinets. It flapped around and was quiet. Outside you can see the small black hole in the beige stucco where it must have perched in confusion or lost direction.
Talking about landscape in recent Irish poetry brings with it the slur of anti-modernism, of an unfashionable interest in loco-descriptive verse.
Crowdsourcing collaborative close readings of supposedly 'difficult' poems globally
Today I distributed the following announcement widely to 130,000 participants in "ModPo," the free, open-enrollment, noncredit 10-week course in modern and contemporary U.S. poetry:
I am very excited to announce a new aspect of ModPo that I hope will intrigue you and perhaps induce you to participate. We have created a new section of ModPo that parallels the main ModPo syllabus, "chapter" by "chapter" and week by week, and offers links to short video recordings of ModPo people around the world gathered in small groups conducting collaborative close readings of our poems — and related poems — themselves. Yes: we are now calling for crowdsourced collaborative close readings.
Outside and subterranean poetry (65): Thomas Rawlin, 'An Alchemical Poem: 'A Magicall Ænigma''
[The following is yet another excerpt from the forthcoming Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present, edited with commentaries by myself & John Bloomberg-Rissman and published by Black Widow Press as the fifth volume of Poems for the Millennium. Earlier excerpts have been posted on Poems and Poetics over the last several years, referring to the work as “a mini-anthology in progress,” but the completed work will now appear as a 450 page assemblage to join the other volumes in the
A short interview with Sandra Ridley
Sandra Ridley is the author of three books of poetry: Fallout (Hagios Press), Post-Apothecary (Pedlar Press), and most recently, The Counting House (BookThug). She has taught poetry at Carleton University and has mentored poets through Ottawa’s Salus and Artswell’s “Footprints to Recovery” program for people living with mental illness. Sandra has also facilitated poetry workshops for the City of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Library, and the Tree Reading series. She knows how to use a compass.
Q: Your work tends to favour the extended sequence, often utilizing extended lyric stretches, and avoiding individual, stand-alone poems. What is it about the sequence that appeals? Are all your poems in conversation with one another?
A reading at the Woodward Line
My first encounter with a Detroit poetry institution was the Woodward Line Poetry series, a monthly reading at the Scarab Club in Midtown organized by James Hart III and Kim Hunter. The series has been running for over 10 years, featuring poets from within and beyond Detroit. I first attended the Woodward Line back in September, when Nathaniel Mackey opened the 2014-15 series.
The January 2015 reading featured two Detroit writers, Steve Hughes and James LaCroix, and a Windsor, Ontario writer, Gustave Morin. Snow had fallen all day, so the crowd was initially sparse.
Dispossessing
Rereading the poetry of place
There’s an endless construction project going on next door to us in Salthill. Traffic on the street shuts down in both directions each day for the arrival of a tractor, and the gravel for a new driveway has just been laid. Large trees have been chopped to hedge-rows. Yesterday, in the morning, a displaced bird flew into one of the exhaust tubes of our apartment, located above the kitchen cabinets. It flapped around and was quiet. Outside you can see the small black hole in the beige stucco where it must have perched in confusion or lost direction.
Talking about landscape in recent Irish poetry brings with it the slur of anti-modernism, of an unfashionable interest in loco-descriptive verse.