Teaching experimental poetry
-
Jen Bervin- NETS
Jen Bervin’s project Nets is one of my favorite usages of erasure poetry. In Nets, Bervin uses Shakespeare’s sonnets as her source text, and creates erasure poems from/within them. In her process note, Bervin writes: “I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets’ to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible––a divergent elsewhere.…
-
Shirin Salehi’s “Back From a Walk”
Born in Tehran in 1982, Shirin Salehi is a visual artist, educator, and translator. She regularly teaches classes and workshops at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Living between New York and Madrid, Salehi moves through her artistic practice in three languages: English, Spanish, and Persian. Salehi’s attention to language is evident in…
-
Ulises Carrión’s SONNET(S)
The Mexican conceptual poet Ulises Carrión’s project SONNET(S) was recently published in a re-edition by Ugly Duckling Presse, accompanied by critical essays. Here is a text I wrote about Carrión’s poetics, from an essay that can be read here. Ulises Carrión and the Bookwork Born in the small tropical city of San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz,…
-
R.I.P UbuWeb?
The other day I went to look for something on UbuWeb and I saw this message, which was not there the last time I’d checked. It seems as though the platform has stopped being updated, but the content will continue to live as an archive. Even so, I will be downloading materials to my hard…
-
Holly Melgard on Troll Thread and Self-Publishing
Holly Melgard is a poet, book designer, and writing professor teaching at Columbia University and Baruch College. Her most recent book, Read Me: Selected Works, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2023. Melgard is also one of the founding members of Troll Thread, an independent self-publishing platform hosted on a Tumblr site. Troll Thread…
-
Mónica de la Torre: “My economy is language”
Mónica de la Torre is a poet, translator, and scholar born in Mexico City, who now teaches at Brooklyn College. De la Torre has published multiple volumes of creative and critical work, including full-length poetry collections Repetition Nineteen (2020), Public Domain (2008), and Talk Shows (2007). She also co-edited the volume Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (2020). One poem that…
-
Caroline Bergvall’s VIA
Listen to a recording of Bergvall’s Via Interview with poet and translator Greg Nissan about Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings “Caroline Bergvall’s Poetics of Disorientation” by Rebecca Teich in The Poetry Project Newsletter “Caroline Bergvall’s Lingual Sculptures” by Sina Queyras in Poetry Foundation PoemTalk Episode #64: The Straight Path Gone Astray: A Discussion of Caroline Bergvall’s “Via”
-
Guillaume Apollinaire “Il Pleut”; Natalie Czech “Il Pleut by Guillaume Appolinaire”
“Il Pleut” (It’s Raining) is a poem from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, written in 1918. The calligramme, ever difficult to translate, consists of a text arranged typographically to create an image which is echoed in the semantic meaning of the text. For an interesting essay on Apollinaire and ASCII art, see Tom McCormack’s article on Rhizome: Emoticon, Emoji,…
-
Johanna Drucker – Diagrammatic Writing
Full PDF available here. Diagrammatic Writing was published in 2017 by Onomatopee. From their website: “Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text…
Want to contribute?
