ISSUE 7
Last Updated: 15 April 2005

Poems from REAL
Stephen Ratcliffe
11.15 - 11.17
11.18 - 11.20
11.21 - 11.23

View from the Narrows: Postcards
Matthias Regan
Introduction by Chris Alexander
"Thinking back to my conversation with Matthias, I can see him standing in the kitchen, saying something like 'Exactly - because mostly our culture knows the past as repression followed by haunting' - then waving his long arms in a caricature of fear: 'Oooohhh Shiiiit, I'm getting out of here.'"
The Postcards:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50

A Border Round in Six Parts
Rodrigo Toscano >>
"The working-poet side of me, that is, the side that'll have to inevitably return to specifying a constitutive social perspective, one that is evidenced through numerous lexical, syntactical and structural values in the poem - that side, will have to make a multitude of discriminations that lead to concete choices - that side: would like to speak..."

Rain in the Radio: Notes toward a Political Aesthetic
Henry Louis Card >>
"How can we write poetry that is really good & yet is really political? There is a war on, people! CITIZENS TURN TO POETRY AFTER 9/11, we are told by the TIMES; 'a small voice in the ear,' or something like that, Billy Collins says - as though the most poetry could aspire to was a mosquito whine. But where is the 'real' political poetry? Where is the counter-hegemonic poetic response to the war? No one's sure..."

Post-Aparthied Poetics
Nick Lawrence >>
"At the same time, a certain giddiness still obtains at the symbolic level in having to deal with this strange new composite public sphere..."

Poems
Joshua May
wombed terminals
carrot or while i would hope that a confession isn’t ripe
"I's got"

Dear VERDURE Editors
Michael Basinski >>

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Gestural Poetics (review essay)
Jessica Smith >>
"It is no surprise that, as we have few ways of talking about these cross-genre art forms, books that focus on one of these three women's art often rely on biography over analysis. In contrast, I propose to conceptualize these art objects and performance pieces under the rubric of 'gestural poetry'..."

Correspondences (review)
Chris Alexander & Matthias Regan >>
"This movement is very much at the center of Hadfield and Steensen’s CORRESPONDENCE - 'part record, part recognition of the impossibility of recording,' the press flyer says - which takes the form of two modes of writing brought into dialogue. Each page contains about as much text as would fill one or two postcards, and the lyrics - which together recount a series of arrivals and departures, passages through South America - speak to each other in the back and forth language of a literal correspondence..."

Transpacific Displacement (review)
Jonathan Stalling >>
"Rarely does a work of criticism pull one forward as Huang's does - not only because the prose is lucid and intelligent and the project nakedly honest and compelling, but because the critique is so fresh and far reaching..."

 
Kathleen Fraser: Recent Writings, Dialogues

Recent Writings
Kathleen Fraser
CHAMPS (fields) & between
your back to me inside the black suit
Celeste & Sirius
from DISCRETE CATEGORIES FORCED INTO COUPLING (Apogee, 2004)

Into Form: A Conversation
Kathleen Fraser & Lauren Shufran >>
"I don't much care for the concept of naming as 'imposing an order.' I prefer to think of 'the word' as a kind of magnet that invites and pulls potential orderings towards it, from which the poet - as reader and attentive shaper of meanings - begins to see and discover an order (among orders) at that particular moment in her history as it bisects human history..."

Letter to Kathleen Fraser
Jeanne Heuving >>
"The importance of Kathleen Fraser to these letters can be witnessed not only in the letter specifically addressed to her, but in the others as well..."