arena
lurianic redac
sharps exile
shaykh al yahud
responsa
this
sum
for
Word For/ Word is seeking poetry, prose, poetics, criticism, reviews, and visuals for upcoming issues. We read submissions year-round, but issue #34 is scheduled for January 2020. Please direct queries and submissions to:
Word For/ Word
c/o Jonathan Minton
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1) The river was named after the elder.
2) One day, the sons found a river.
3) The river abutted the farmer’s fields.
4) A farmer had two sons.
Like the cute sophomore manning the silk-screening kiosk at the mall,
superimposing someone’s beloved, morbidly-obese Llasso Apso on a puffy-paint sweatshirt,
the weirdly-hybrid crustpunk/goth kid lives in fear of being outed as part
of the reduced-price lunch crowd (weekends, she slouches through the aisles of Aldi’s
with her mom, but she can rock a nipple ring with the best of them) and in the pantheon of
Awesome Ideas (Let’s totally robo-call the President!) even armed militias roaming
the hinterlands (Hard fuckin’ core!) succumb eventually to government forces
like that poem in ninth grade English, My Lost Youth or whatever, where it starts okay
but goes on waaaaaaaaaaayyy too long.
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1. Philosophy is too vain.
2. Even for the poem.
3. The poem is to beat the shit out of Nature and Nature is to beat the shit out of the poem.
4. What’s wrong with the poem being wrong-headed?
5. I write the poem to explain why people stop liking me.
6. Physics is the lowest science.
7. The beginning of the poem was the beginning of the end of us all.
8. And it was all from someone catching a bad cold, obvs.
9. Magic is quite different from Science.
10. And a no-shit-Sherlock to you too, amigo.
11. Who said the poem needs to be animated?
12. Some of us will turn away from the poem for the sake of escaping movements within ourselves.
13. The post-poem world will hopefully not include any philosophers.
14. The poem is nothing more than a marvelous fucking up of everything read or heard.
15. Did I get that wrong again?
16. The poem should be called Legend, since the stuff of the poem is legendary.
17. Legendary bullshit. But still—legendary.
18. The poem doesn’t need enthusiasm to make it real poetry.
19. The poem is external, not hidden—
20. There is no speech to act out in the poem so much as the reenactment of really fucked-up thoughts.
21. Whatever is said of a poem also applies to shitty three-minute pop songs.
22. There can never be too many poems and shitty pop songs.
23. The hard rind of nature = that was going to be my big idea.
24. Epilogue. That’s a big word.
25. This is the wrong poem, with the wrong people, at the wrong time.
26. I don’t mean to repeat what’s already been said about the poem, but [what’s already been said].
27. No one here actually knew how to get here.
28. I had a comment on the poem but I guess I won’t say it now.
29. This poem so important. What are we studying?
30. What will we do now about the poem, and why we will do that?
31. Just to shift focus from the worst-case scenario, let’s focus instead on [worst-case scenario].
32. A distinct lack of fashion, style, gesture, finding flattering angles.
33. There needs to be something mythic about the poem and we have lost it.
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“Songs are emotion. They tell stories. You act a song – you don’t act talk or conversation. In talking versus singing, there are no rules. It’s also a one-way street. Can we say that? It’s the writer, composer, singer telling you what to feel or helping you experience it, and, as Son used to say, it’s all about the music. The beat is all. Even poems have beats to them. Talking is different. Regular speech is different. Even in a play it has to ‘sound real.’ Songs and poems, everything’s heightened. All the emotion is compressed. Every song is a little play or movie. It has three acts. You don’t have that anywhere else. Tell your professor that’s a good question.”
it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is
it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is
it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is it just is
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AG: Let’s begin by thieving from the poet Tom Beckett’s interviews… Where does the poem begin for you?
CG: Four short answers:
1. In the far corner of the field.
This answer is literal. There’s a spot where the energy is peculiar, and it holds you there like a magnet. There’s something about the way I can see from there— it’s not that my way is clear, it’s that the way clears my head and then fills it again with newer, fresher thoughts. If I’m tired, I feel less tired after stopping a while in that spot. It’s a place that allows me to be so still and so quiet that I lose my status as observer while somehow being able to continue to observe. I’m part of the landscape, physically, but my mind is working continuously, unseen and unnoticed by whatever other life surrounds me. A large portion of my collection of visual poems, Ozark Crows, was written from the far corner the field.
2. Miles from where it ends.
Trying to will the trajectory of an idea is akin to telekinesis as far as I’m concerned. That is, it’s not possible. Often, these days, the poem will end up being a film. Or prose. Or a photograph. But whatever it ends up being, there’s always an identifiable (to me) bright speck where it began. Every time I drive over a certain little stretch of road, I think of the first line of my poem Swedish Fish, a line that scrolled across my field of vision like a Jenny Holzer sculpture. In the late afternoon light, a light pole shadow was cast directly across a speed table in the road. I ran over a shadow and the car went bump. There was something dark and melancholy right under the surface. I was on my way to pick up my children from school and I was thinking about their goodness, their morality, and how as parents we have to decide what to impart to them, what is important. I was thinking about rules and the rules of the road.
When I’m driving alone, if I’m in the right state of mind, I get ideas. Driving is something I find stressful, and it somehow has ended up being a recurring situation in my poems. I came late to it, having grown up in a city, and I’ve never taken to it. Now that I’m older, if a line or idea comes to me when I’m driving, I worry I won’t remember it long enough to write it down. I dictate notes into my phone, forget all about them, and I look for them later, in the mornings, when I write, and they come back to me like gifts.
3. (Since we’re admitting to thieving) With thieving.
I read when I’m trying to find my way into an idea. I particularly read poetry and particularly the work of poets I don’t know very well. I especially love reading prose poems when I’m in a “finding my way in” state. I don’t thieve tone or lines or phrases— only single words. A single word that somehow forms a tether between what the poet I’m reading is trying to do and what I’m trying to begin to do will spur a process forward in unexpected ways. It can dramatically alter the shape of the poem’s route to its idea. Early in my life as a poet, poems began years and years earlier, from a memory, an incident from childhood, a desire to encase a moment and look at it from every angle and for as long as I wanted. I’m sure this is true for most writers, but as time goes on, this cogitation period gets shorter and a sense of urgency takes the place of languor and patience.
4. In a sentence fragment in a dream.
If I’m in a period of remembering my dreams, it always seems to be connected to being in a creatively receptive state. I like working, and I don’t mind working hard when I’m “off.” But whatever I accomplish during those times doesn’t add up to anything beyond word count. I can make a lifeless pile of words as well as the next guy. I can go on autopilot and lean on my tropes. I can make a mediocrity and semi-disguise it as something worth saying, but its costume is always sloppy and sliding off. When I was working on my collection Spoke & Dark, which was built around the idea of the ampersand as a kind of on-ramp that connects us, I would wake up with two words, an ampersand between them, flashing in my mind. Half feverishly, I would write a poem that day built around those two words. “Shoulder & Root.” “Feather & Web.” And “Spoke & Dark.” It was the first time that it was so overtly true that dreaming (and remembering the dreams) and writing were connected for me— it had something to do with my state of mind— and it was the first time that my work drifted toward working with filmed images.
AG: I just love your book Spoke & Dark - there is so much in an ampersand! It makes me think about how 20th century modernism focused on excision, but the Deluezean and improvisational “and” now asks us to add and include. Okay, let me pick up some other threads from the floor beneath the sewing machine here. Some kindling off this forest floor. How important is place to your work? Do you feel like an Arkansas poet? You live there, but you are not from there. How has where you have lived held your body, and the body of your work?
CG: I love this question, especially the way you’ve posed it here. I’ve lived in Arkansas for 17 years. The only place I’ve lived longer than that is the place I’m originally from: Chicago. And during the years I was there, I lived in maybe nine different places. As far as a home, I’ve been in the one I live in for much longer than anywhere else. And yet, my most Ozark-focused collection, Ozark Crows, actually takes place in the sky!
I never wrote about Chicago until I moved away, and then I wrote about it a lot, in great depth and detail. I couldn’t really see it until I left. Also, I can never seem to get over Lake Michigan. It’s a repeated theme and always seems to be a presence just to the east of everything I do.
Right now I’m working on a new project about borders. I proposed it to a project-specific grant in Northwest Arkansas that was founded as a way to nurture the arts community here. The fact that I received the grant made me feel a part of the community in a way that I hadn’t really felt before. And the fact that the project is about borders made me think about what it means to be “from” somewhere. I started by writing some poems that were about actual borders, and then I found myself moving on to more philosophical concerns, which is where I think my interests actually lie. Where does one voice end and another begin? If a border is over water, what state do the fish live in? I’m also exploring where the philosophical and the actual meet. There is so much new development here, and the wildlife tries to navigate how to live among acres and acres of newly erected borders. They lived in a field or a little woods, and then it’s cleared for housing and people don’t want them there. It’s a story that’s written and rewritten within human communities, too, obviously— over and over and over.
I’m not from Arkansas, but two of the people to whom I’m intimately connected — my children— are. Arkansas is the theatre for the most intense experience of my life. It’s not something I have or am likely to ever write about, but it informs everything I have to say about it, if that makes sense. One memorable incident occurred when my son was around eight. He went down into the little woods and found a tremendous pile of archimedes corals, tiny little fossils that all got washed into the mud during some catastrophic weather event, when the Ozarks were under water. They were there for millennia until he found them. Raising your children on a scrap of land where geologic time is so in evidence would make it difficult for anyone not to think about place!
AG: Ozark Crows covers your current terrain in text and your work often explores visual poetry. You’ve also made an accompanying film to your crow book. How does your poetry intersect with your other visual practices like film and photography? Do you have other practices that extend the text?
I’ve always been around artists working in other fields, collaborating, and combining forms. This is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to your work, Anne—I love multi-sensory methods of exploring, I experience your beautiful work on a level that goes beyond seeing and reading. I worked in the Art Department at Columbia College in Chicago for years, and I went to the interdisciplinary MFA program at Bard College. But during the last 18 years, the time I’ve been raising a family, I jettisoned everything except writing. I picked one thing to keep, the one I thought I’d be most able to continue doing while most of my energy was diverted elsewhere. We started making short experimental films as a family around ten years ago, and when I discovered user-friendly technology, there was this crush of ideas. It was all mostly just for fun, but then somehow it ends up being deadly serious. The family worked together on “The History Of Stars & Ghosts,” a short film that accompanied the release of Spoke & Dark, and I can’t even convey how excited I was to discover the way sound and light — in addition to text— allowed me to get into places I couldn’t get to before. There was no going back.
Photography was an interest that, as I settled into a period of life where I had more time to myself again, was rekindled. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by beauty. Macro-photography helps me in so many ways, to focus, to appreciate, to stop and calm myself. To look very, very closely. From there, I started constructing photo-collages that felt like poems – layering images of past and present. In “Places I Have Lived” and “Elizabethtown,” both sequences from my newest book How Much Of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets To The Ground?, text is secondary to image.
In the past, I pretty much stood by concept of “first intensity,” (a work in certain genre that would need “a hundred works of any other kind of art to explain it.” (Ezra Pound). But what I’ve been feeling lately is that sometimes only a combination of media will work. Two of the films I made last year were very difficult for someone self-taught like me, and they felt laborious, ambitious. The “Twenty Micro-Movies” I made for twenty of the poems in Ozark Crows culminated in a piece called “The Funeral, “ in which dozens of voices of people with a connection to the land beneath my scrap of sky spoke the final phrase of the book: “I will know you.” I had so many files, visual and audio, to create the piece that my computer kept crashing and I was in constant fear of losing everything. But when many of the people who participated gathered in Fayetteville to watch a screening of it, I was consumed with gratitude. There was a warmth and life to that event and I never could have gotten to without making the film. I was trying to get at a sense of community, continuity, memory, elegy, one that not only humans experience. The poem itself was solemn, but the film, the voices, it contained so much more feeling. The other example is 14 Sentences. It’s a very short, simple poem that is part of a sequence called “Notes From Charlotte” in which my daughter handed me scraps of paper with prompts on them. One word per line on the theme of crime and punishment. The film was difficult to make, but oh how I loved the process. It took a simple and somewhat muted piece and turned it into something simmering with fear, dismay, and anger. Working on it was intense and all-consuming, and here’s a thing that I loved about it: The process of making visual things is so, so different— getting what I see in my mind out of my mind and into existence requires intense labor, but it doesn’t require solitude. Writing requires so much solitary space and time around the actual work, and there’s always the fear of interruption, catastrophic and devastating interruption from which you can never recover. With making digital films, interruption is frustrating, of course, but I’m never derailed to such an extent that the whole project is lost. I’ve probably lost an entire book’s worth of text to interruption.
On the borders project, I’ve been using trail camera footage to make short films for some of the poems, (an accidental time-lapse of the moonrise, and deer, deer, deer). Also, I’ve found myself much more interested in sound than I ever was before. The eerie dulling of the senses as I age has me obsessed with the senses— the line where one voice ends and another begins, the sensation of being in a room when everyone is talking at once, trying to make sense of blurred things, etc.. The new pieces are so much more about sound than anything I’ve done before. I bought a “talking photo album” that allows for ten seconds of sound per image, and I have this idea to make it into a traveling poem that can be mailed around. The only form I know for certain that I’ll never, ever attempt is dance.
AG: Never say never about dance! I’m thrilled/fascinated as artist/writers move and layer media to investigate. I keep moving back and forth between things, and I always figure that if I’m staying on some sort of creative continuum, it’s all okay, even if some of that is tedious or difficult. It sounds like your household is one massive collaboration with an IT center. I’d say your work is one endless colab with your immediate world.
Tell me about some of the artists and writers who have been important to you.
I’m going to take the easy way out on this question. Like anyone else, so many writers and artists have been important to me, and the most important changes by the hour. But when, as an undergrad, I learned about the New York school poets (and visual artists and composers, etc. etc), I was consumed with such enthusiasm and joy. I didn’t have a clue about what poetry could be before then. I’d always been drawn to works that approached their subjects in ways that were evocative rather than direct, and this was something that a lot of people I admired were experimenting with at the time. I went to Bard because I wanted to work with Ann Lauterbach. I was at Columbia in Chicago, and my exceptional teachers were the poets Paul Hoover and Elaine Equi. Leslie Scalapino came to visit our class. Barbara Guest visited Bard. Dozens of writers who radiated out of the O’Hara/Ashbery center were important to me. I love the poets they loved and everything going backward from that. I love the painting from that period, too. Here in Arkansas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has an ever-evolving and growing group of works from that time, and I can’t believe my good fortune in having them so nearby. I also love Rosmarie Waldrop and the whole Burning Deck project. She’s been kind enough to send me books over the years, and I have two shelves of them— touchstones. We all love our friends’ work, I know, but I love Jennifer Martenson, Kostas Anagnopoulos, and Maryrose Larkin especially. Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Loren Eisley. I’m drifting away from the easy way out, so I’m going to stop, except to say that my enthusiasms have an intensity that is almost embarrassing. I’m still doing this after so many years because of the particular euphoria poetry offers me. Poetry itself is so important to me!
AG: Which brings me to thoughts and questions about practice… As I get older, I’ve found my habits have to change to keep at this. It’s a question of balancing thrill and sustainability. You’ve been writing a long time. How have you sustained your practice over the long term? How has it sustained you? The dissolve, the resolve. And what are you working on now? Any glimmer of future projects?
Thrill and sustainability! Yes! I don’t doubt that living in a two-poet household is a factor. It’s a running joke between my husband (the poet Davis McCombs) and I that we’re going to quit— as soon as we finish this one project. No, really, this time, this is going to be it. But the truth is, I think that it just becomes the default way in which you process your experiences. It would be like deciding not to think anymore, or not to breathe. The sequence I’m working on now, on borders (in a general, philosophical sense) has a different dynamic in that it’s for a project-specific grant. I’m having to navigate how this accountability makes me feel. I’m so used to being accountable to no one but myself, and I think it’s good for me to consider something and someone else. At the same time, self-awareness is a double-edged sword. I don’t want it to dictate how I proceed, but I’m profoundly grateful for the support and the interest. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that I should never get too attached to any plans I’ve made, aesthetically speaking. I can control Point A, but Point B cannot be willed. Not knowing where you’re going to end up makes for some suspenseful travels! That alone is enough to sustain me. There’s always the chance some illuminating joy is around the next curve.
We know Hannah Brooks-Motl read Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne because she writes, “I used three translations for this book”—
the first she lists is Donald Frame, 1958. (Donald Frame, not Donald M. Frame, as his name appears on the front cover of his translated Essays. An “M” too many?) Even if she hadn’t listed her sources, we could’ve easily guessed she used the Frame translation. Frame translates Montaigne’s titles as “Of [ ]”; it is more usual to translate the titles as “On [ ].” “On Sadness,” rather than Frame’s “Of Sadness.” Frame means “of” as “relating to, ABOUT.” I haven’t looked at Montaigne’s original 1588 “6th” edition, so I don’t know if Frame’s decision is truer. Or, did Frame simply like “of”? I like it. I prefer it.
We know Brooks-Motl used Frame’s translation because she quotes from it—the second line of her poem “Of Sadness” is in quotes, “A stupid and monstrous ornament!” That’s from Frame’s translation of Montaigne.
We can read the same “Of Sadness” Brooks-Motl read and think about what inspired each line of the poem.
First line:
“An accidental failing, or unseasonable surprise—”
The phrase “accidental failing” appears in Montaigne’s essay: “the accidental failing that surprises lovers.”
In Brooks-Motl’s poem, “the” becomes “an”—one accident among many (in Montaigne). For example: Charles de Guise “let himself go at this last accident [the death of a soldier in his army]….” Or, Niobe, transformed into a rock “represent[s]” according to Montaigne “that black, dumb, and deaf stupor that benumbs us when accidents surpassing our endurance overwhelm us.”
The second line is an unchanged quote from Montaigne: “a stupid and monstrous ornament!”—Montaigne’s attitude toward sadness.
Line three: “There’s no unfreezing that shock, it’s not a moment or cart”
Frozen from shock. Turned to stone. After Montaigne invokes Niobe, he explores the idea: To freeze a person by shock. King Ferdinand is frozen and stone: “…until the impact of sorrow, freezing his vital spirits, dropped him in this condition stone dead on the ground.” Montaigne’s lovers (himself, too) suffer “that frigidity that seizes them by the force of extreme ardor in the very lap of enjoyment.”
In a “moment” we are made sorrowful; we appear to be overcome with sorrow in a moment but our breakdown follows an assault of sorrows.
“cart” perplexes me. To cart is to carry. Hmm. To carry sorrow. The weight of it. Maybe so.
Line four: “I’m not brimmed with it yet.” Montaigne writes, “But the truth was that since he was already brimful of sadness….” Brooks-Motl replaces Montaigne’s subject—Charles de Guise—with herself. She’s not brimful “yet”—she will be. She carries sadness (she carts it). There’s room for more, though.
Line five: “Ceasing the habit of speech almost completely.”
…the inability to express oneself when struck by sadness or any great passion. Montaigne quotes Catullus: “…my wits depart amazed, / I can say nothing. // My tongue is numb…”
And quotes Seneca, too: “Light cares can speak, but heavy ones are dumb.”
I don’t find the phrase “habit of speech” in Montaigne’s “Of Sadness,” though it rings Montaigne. Has Brooks-Motl found Montaign’s voice her own?
Line six: “Or vivid with misdirection, and love”
Love appears in Montaigne’s essay at Catullus.
After examples of people stunned by sadness, Montaigne observes the same caused by love. Brooks-Motl writes, “Or…”—she signals an alternative with “or.” Is love “misdirection? Is sadness? Or are we misdirected by people’s response to passion?
And it’s “misdirection, and love”—and. I love, the feeling, can misdirect. Misdirection and love, not love = misdirection.
Line seven: is a direct quote from Montaigne.
“In truth, the impact of grief, to be extreme, must stun the whole soul and impede its freedom of action; as it happens to us, at the hot alarm of some very bad news, to feel ourselves caught, benumbed, and as it were paralyzed from any movements, so that the soul, relaxing afterward into tears and lamentations, seems to unbend, extricate itself, and gain more space and freedom. ‘And grief at long hard last breaks a way for the voice’ –Virgil.”
What is “very bad news”? Love?
Indeed, it can be.
Line eight: “I might cover my face”
Montaigne imagines a painter who documents Agamemnon when he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.
As you know, goddess Artemis demanded Iphigenia as a sacrifice if Agamemnon wished to sail to Troy. Iphigenia was sacrificed.
Brooks-Motl read that passage and instead of writing, “Agamemnon covered his face” she wrote, “I might cover my face.”
The sadness is Brooks-Motl’s own.
Line nine: “Circle the rocks”
As you know, Niobe had many children by Zeus. How many? Maybe twenty. Myth neglects to keep track. She was proud of her brood, and claimed she was Leto’s better since Leto’d had only twins. Oh how stupid of you, Niobe; Leto is a goddess. Her twins, Artemis and Apollo. What’s ten mortal daughters and ten mortal sons compared with immortal twins. Especially that pair. No children were ever as devoted to their mother and her reputation as Artemis and Apollo. The twin archers killed all but two of Niobe’s children.
That last line of Brooks-Motl’s “Of Sadness”—“Circle the rocks”—could refer to Niobe turning to stone. “Rocks” is plural, but then in Montaigne’s essay there are several who turn to stone. King Ferdinand, for example, “dropped… in this condition stone dead on the ground.”
What of the poem as a whole? Can we appreciate it separate from Montaigne’s essay?
Brooks-Motl anticipates the moment sadness will let grief “unbend” her—a moment that will come only when she is “brimful of sadness.” When it does come, it will stop her from the “habit of speech”—a poet’s habit.
Or, she’ll cover her face—perhaps with her hands, and “circle the rocks”—rocks grave markers?
Or could she, released by her own sadness, be moving around (dancing around?) those who remain trapped by shock?
Brooks-Motl ignores Montaigne’s conclusion: “I am little subject to these violent passions. My susceptibility is naturally tough; and I harden and thicken it every day by force of logic.”
Montaigne does not wish to be turned into a stone, so he combats sadness (and love) with reason. He claims to be rational.
Brooks-Motl anticipates irrationality.
Omar Al-Nakib is a Kuwaiti artist and poet. His artwork has been exhibited locally, and his poetry has been published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. He is currently at work on a film project.
Rosaire Appel is a text / image artist using analog as well as digital methods. Her most recent book, Connect Here, was published my Small Editions. Her website is at www.rosaireappel.com. Her visual blog is at rosaireappel.blogspot.com.
Robyn Art is the author of Farmer, Antagonist, which was selected by Jennifer L Knox as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest and published in Spring 2016. Her full-length poetry collection, The Stunt Double in Winter (Dusie 2007) was a Finalist for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize as well as the 2005 Kore Press First Book Award. Her newer manuscript, Amplitude, Awe, was recently selected as a Finalist for the 2014 Burnside Review Book Award. Her chapbooks include Vestigial Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Scenes From the Body, and Landless/Ness, all from dancinggirlpress, as well as Secret Lives of Blow-Up Dolls (dusiekollectiv). Her recent work can be found in The Denver Quarterly, The Illanot Review, Juked, Bone Bouquet, La Petite Zine, Tinderbox, The Burnside Review, and elsewhere.
Andrew Brenza’s recent chapbooks include Bitter Almonds & Mown Grass (Shirt Pocket Press), Waterlight (Simulacrum Press), and Excerpt from Alphabeticon (No Press). His full-length collection, Gossamer Lid, a series of visual poems based on the 88 official constellations of Western astronomy, was published by Trembling Pillow Press. His most recent collection of visual poems, Automatic Souls, is forthcoming from Timglaset.
Kenneth M Cale is originally from Scotland, but now lives in Oregon. His work has appeared in various UK and US journals, including 3am, Five:2:One, and West Wind Review.
Tyler Carter is an assistant professor of English language at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. His recent blogging project can be found at foreignology.blogspot.com and his music project, allmyheroes, can be found at soundcloud.com/allmyheroes.
Chris Caruso earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. His poems appear in online and print journals as well as in anthologies. Originally from New Jersey he currently lives in Boise, but dreams of a small cottage with a Koi pond in Portland.
Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving China. Currently, Yuan lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and BestNewPoemsOnline, among others.
Mark Dow published Plain Talk Rising in 2018. His related essay "Dick Talk" is on the Agni blog, and the book was reviewed in the New Haven Review. Frieda Katz Dow, Mark's mother, studied Gregg shorthand at Martin High School in Laredo, Texas, and won the interscholastic state shorthand competition in 1948.
Luc Fierens was born in Mechelen, Belgium, in 1961. He is a visual poet/collagist provocateur, manipulating the relationship between words and image. His work emerged out of Poesia Visiva, Mail Art and Fluxist circles. He maintains a blog at lucfierens.tumblr.com.
Adam Golaski's writing has appeared in 1913: A Journal of Forms, A Velvet Giant, Almost Crashing, and the Bennington Review. Visit Little Stories for more at adamgolaski.blogspot.com.
Anne Gorrick is the author of eight books of poetry including most recently: Beauty, Money, Luck, etc. for Beginners (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019), An Absence So Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light (the Operating System, 2018); and The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, "“Swans, the ice,” she said," funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016). She lives in West Park, New York.
Carolyn Guinzio is the author of six collections, most recently How Much Of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets To The Ground? (Tolsun, 2018) and Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018). She lives in Fayetteville, AR and can be found online at carolynguinzio.tumblr.com.
David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. His Aeneid Books 1- 6 was published by Shearsman Books in 2015. In 2012, he edited Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (Punctum Books), and in 2011 he co-edited selections from Jack Spicer’s Beowulf for CUNY’s Lost and Found Document Series. He has published academic essays on poetic diction in English poetry from the medieval through early modern period, and is Assistant Professor of English at American University of Kuwait. His latest book, Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems, was published by Delete Press in 2018.
Daniel Y. Harris is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. His individual collections include The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (BlazeVOX, 2018), Volume II of his Posthuman Series, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon (BlazeVOX, 2016), Volume I of his Posthuman Series, The Underworld of Lesser Degrees (NYQ Books, 2015) and Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Červená Barva Press, 2013). His xperimental writing and sauvage art have been published in BlazeVOX, The Denver Quarterly, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stride. He holds an M.Div from The University of Chicago and is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of X-Peri. His website is danielyharris.com.
W. Scott Howard worked at Powell’s Books (1990 - 1993) where he managed the Critical Theory section and the prism interdisciplinary discussion series, and co-managed (with Vanessa Renwick) the Small Press & Journals section and the dew.claw reading series. He received his Ph.D. (1998) in English and Critical Theory from the University of Washington, Seattle, where he was a member of the Subtext Collective. Scott is the founding editor of Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture. His collections of poetry include the e-book, ROPES (with images by Ginger Knowlton) from Delete Press, and SPINNAKERS from The Lune. Scott lives in Englewood, CO where he gardens, writes, and commutes year-round by bicycle, following what crow dost. He is professor of English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where he edits Denver Quarterly.
Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flim Forum, 2016), Che (Stockport Flats, 2013) and B (Stockport Flats, 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press and an e-book My is online at Fence Digital. More junkmail collages are online or forthcoming at ctrl + v, Diagram, Fugue, and Gasher. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he curates the The REV Poetry Series and teaches at Russell Sage College. See: matthewklane.com.
Alyse Knorr is a queer poet and assistant professor of English at Regis University. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She co-edits Switchback Books.
Irene Koronas is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. Her individual collections include declivities (BlazeVOX, 2018), Volume III in her Grammaton Series, ninth iota (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018), Volume II in her Grammaton Series, Codify (Éditions du Cygne, 2017), Volume I in her Grammaton Series), Turtle Grass (Muddy River Books, 2014) and Emily Dickinson (Propaganda Press, 2010), Her xperimental writing and sauvage art have been published in Arcanum Café, BlazeVOX, The Boston Globe, Brave New Word, Cambridge Chronicles, Clarion, Counterexample Poetics, E·ratio, experiential-experimental-literature, Lummox, Mgversion>datura, Of\with, journal of immanent renditions, New Mystics, Otoliths, Pop Art, Poesy, Presa, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, Spreadhead and Stride. She is an internationally acclaimed painter and digital artist, having exhibited at the Tokyo Art Museum Japan, the Henri IV Gallery, the Ponce Art Gallery, Gallery at Bentley College and the M & M Gallery. She’s a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and is the Publisher and Managing Editor of X-Peri.
Adrian Lurssen’s work has recently appeared in the Boston Review's What Nature anthology, WITNESS, and Poetry City USA. Additional poems in his Watched for Music series are forthcoming in Posit.
"Diana Magallón is the Constantin Guys of the cyber age, and more: she is the Diana Magallón of the next age" (Jeff Harrison).
Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Her book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Also in 2018, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory. Luna Bisonte Prods released Underscore in that same year, featuring a collaborative visual book by K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy is known for working in forms including such as the ghazal, haibun, and pantoum in her individual writing. As an active collaborator, she has worked with Douglas Barbour on an extended poem called Continuations. Murphy’s visual work, both individual and collaborative, is shown in galleries and in private collections. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, Murphy is associated with music in poetry. She earns her living as a professor, organizational consultant, speaker, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life.
Daniel Nester is an essayist, poet, journalist, editor, teacher, and Queen fan. His latest book is a memoir, Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited.
W.E. Pierce is a writer and journalist living near Chicago. His poetry can also be found in The Literary Review, BlazeVOX19, and Heavy Feather Review.
Jon Riccio is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers where he serves as an associate editor at Mississippi Review. His work appears in print or online at Booth, The Cincinnati Review, E·ratio, Permafrost, Switchback, and Waxwing, among others. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona.
Sarah Rosenthal is the author of The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (a collaboration with Valerie Witte, The Operating System, 2019), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals and is anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (P-Queue, 2008), and Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006). She has done grant-supported writing residencies at VSC, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, New York Mills, Hambidge, and This Will Take Time, and has been a Headlands Center Affiliate Artist. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life & Professional Coach and develops curricula for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom. She serves on the California Book Awards jury. Her website is sarahrosenthal.net.
Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using what is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist to his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that gives a new angle of view. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy and his work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com.
Robert R. Thurman is an artist, musician and poet. Thurman is the author of Systems (2015), Connections (ZimZalla, 2017), Machine Language (Spacecraft Press, 2018) and Signals (edition taberna kritika, 2018). Robert’s work has appeared in The Harvard Advocate, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Coldfront Magazine, Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine the Arts and Humanities, Rune: The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters, and The Monarch Review. His work has been exhibited internationally.
Bill Wolak has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared recently in Naked in New Hope 2017, The 2017 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Poetic Illusion, The Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ, the 2018 Dirty Show in Detroit, 2018 The Rochester Erotic Arts Festival, and The 2018 Montreal Erotic Art Festival.
Joshua Zelesnick’s poetry and political essays can be found in various journals and magazines, among them Jubilat, Called Back Books, Mid-American Poetry Review, The New People, Labor Notes, Guacamole Lit Mag, and Counterpunch. A chapbook , Cherub Poems, will be coming out from Bonfire Books this summer. He’s fought some labor rights battles with fellow workers for adjunct professor equity throughout the Pittsburgh metro area, most notably at Duquesne University, where the administration still refuses to recognize a democratically elected union. He teaches writing at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, and has recently completed his high school teaching certification. He lives at Borland Garden, a co-housing community, in East Liberty with his partner and 2-year old daughter, where, with friends, he helps run a living room reading and music series.