Commentaries - March 2017

Sing Our Rivers Red

Tanaya Winder

Earring Exhibit
Earring Exhibit

Tanaya Winder is from the Duckwater Shoshone, Pyramid Lake Paiute, and Southern Ute nations. She is a poet, performer, and activist and is a co-founder of Sing Our Rivers Red (SORR), a collective of indigenous artists, poets, and activists working to help raise awareness around the crisis faced by indigenous women in Canada and the US. According to the Department of Justice, “Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience assault in their lifetimes than women of other races. One in three will be raped in their lifetime, and on some reservations women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average.”

Daphne Marlatt on Close Listening

Photo: Charles Bernstein / PennSound

Daphne Marlatt talks to me about Vancouver as place and theme in her writing, poetry as documentary, the long poem as a fluid form for the lyric, poems as novels and novels as poems, drift in/as double consciousness, verbal language as and in the body, feminist poetics and writing “in lesbian,” the possibilities for love poetry, and the after-effects of her move from Malaysia to Canada when she was nine.

Daphne Marlatt talks to me about Vancouver as place and theme in her writing, poetry as documentary, the long poem as a fluid form for the lyric, poems as novels and novels as poems, drift and double consciousness, verbal language as and in the body, feminist poetics and writing “in lesbian,” the possibilities for love poetry, and the after-effects of her move from Malaysia to Canada when she was nine.

Earth Art / Poetics - Eaarth Art / Poetics

Earth Art/Poetics

Trust in the object — gateway into the deep time history of matter and form — absorption into the flow of energy. Utopia and entropy — inscribing both into the landscape.

Reconnect to primal forms and forces, rituals of dwelling and shaping, primitive feeling of being exposed and enveloped in the immensity of a landscape.

Art without institutions, capital, possession/property; art in the commons, made of common materials; art of primordial shapes, activities, emotions, and forces.

Ecology and art — can join up to resolve problems in the environment and the art world relatively quickly. Vision that most environmental problems can be solved by becoming aligned with Earth forces.

The rare recordings of Pauline Oliveros, Jerome Rothenberg and more: An interview with Charlie Morrow

[Originally published on Bandcamp Daily along with a description of five of the newly re-released recordings.]

'Look for the Address': Ted Greenwald & me, 1998 interview

© Star Black. October 7, 2008

Ted interviewed me for the Poetry Project Newsletter, part of a series of interviews he did when he was the editor. It was published in the April/May 1998 issue.

Ted Greenwald: What does it feel like to be a poet in the “postmodern” era?