Al Filreis

Poems about the poems themselves, such as “Gender,” tempt us to underestimate or even to dismiss metapoetical claims: “I write poems about boobs and dicks.” This is of course deceptive, a misdirection, because ultimately, in every Lasky poem, the words (and overall the voicings of ecstatic, troubled experience) come as a remedy for language’s absence as otherwise the expected state. “I write poems about boobs and dicks,” yes, “But my anger comes not from this / But from being silenced / So that I hate what they like / Not listening to me / So that I could go on and on.”

Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.

He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us. He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” — not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”? The typical poetic existential “here I am” becomes a matter, always, of forgetting and remembering both. (It’s significant that one of the muses here is the poet’s mother, she who suffers from memory loss.)

Sunday, July 14th, New York City: It’s been one week since the death of gifted multi-hyphenate writer, publisher, gallerist, mentor, and community-builder Steve Cannon, founder of the magazine and organization “A Gathering of the Tribes” in New York City. Although many of us are still in a state of shock at the loss, it is important that his recent passing is noted. This comment is a brief mention to mark this time. I’m sure more extensive commentaries by others will follow. Steve Cannon was a great writer. The roots of his work are as a proud New Orleanian. He often mentioned the city of his birth in his reflections on his life and cited his upbringing there in how he expansively considered life, culture, the spirit, art, and organizing disparate people and points of view. (One of his last publications was the book Black Jelly, with poetry by fellow New Orleans native Melanie Maria Goodreaux. 

Here is an excerpt from an seventy-minute interview/conversation with Samuel. R. Delany. Delany was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2016. The discussion took place on February 16 that year. Regina Salmons has done the work of transcription. A video recording of the entire conversation can be viewed here. 

Al FILREIS (begins by quoting Delany’s novel Dhalgren)

“As I walked home, I thought about the hospital again” — this is described earlier in the “It was so easy to tell your story and not mention you were homosexual.” I assume he means to tell your story in the clinic. [Continues quoting Delany.] “It was so simple to write about yourself, and just not to say you were black. You could put together a whole book full of anecdotes about yourself without ever revealing you were dyslexic. And how many people whom I’d just met and who’d ask me ‘what do you do?,’ did I answer disingenuously, ‘Oh I type manuscripts for people.’”