Five years ago, I made my way from the cacophony of music and celebration during Philadelphia’s annual July 4th Celebration on the streets of the Parkway to the roof of a high-rise apartment building overlooking Philadelphia. A handful of us were up there, drinking cheap beer and waiting for the grand finale fireworks show above the Art Museum that was to signify the end of the night’s festivities. As I sat on the edge of the concrete rooftop, legs dangling down, I took out my phone – which housed, at the time, a less-than-impressive 1.5 megapixel camera – and snapped a photo of the view. Somehow, my little camera managed to create a beautiful moment: the waiting crowds, the Art Museum, ready to bask in its moment of brilliance, the lights of the Cirra Center, the reflection of the Schuylkill River. It’s not a perfect photo, but it remains one of my favorites because it captures a moment of anticipation – a moment of nocturnal quiet before the deafening whistles and explosions of light that accompany a city in celebration. It’s my city, and it’s quite a view.

Jenna Tripke lives and writes in Philadelphia. On any given day you can find her writing, editing, spoiling her three-legged pup, annoying literary academics with her love of Tupac and poetry that rhymes, or planning her next international adventure. You can connect with her at @uneedjenna or www.jennatripke.com.

In asserting its importance by assuming the role of conclusion to Vow, “Love Poem for What Wasn’t” (72-3) also draws forward into prominence the earlier “Love Poem for What Is” (22).  But the “what is” in “Love Poem for What Is” is nothing: “There’s nothing in the world that loves you / more than the space you take up.”  Such an irony evokes ancient precedents: Odysseus’ duping of Polyphemus with the name “No One,” and Aristotle’s assertion that one does not know whether one is happy until after death.

So we enter the aporetic world created when love deforms time: if it isn’t now, it wasn’t then; if it wasn’t already, then it didn’t ever; and so on.  Which is also the world of aporetic protestation, in which to protest at all is to protest too much, in which, as the speaker in Hazelton’s poem puts it, “This is not my speaking voice, but a shiver passing through” (73).

Hazelton, Rebecca.  Vow.  Cleveland St. Univ. Poetry Center, 2013.

H. L. Hix: I am interested by the “double stance” in your work: facing backward in its performative aspect, toward Homer and other exemplars of oral poetry, and facing forward in its new media interests, toward an increasingly digitized future.  Such a chronology oversimplifies things, I know, but I wonder how you see those two aspects of your work in relation to one another.

Hazel Smith: I like the idea that my work faces backwards and forwards, and I am certainly interested in both connecting with tradition and breaking out of it!! However there has been considerable interest in performance poetry in the 20th and 21st century, so I don’t see my interest in performance as only looking backwards, but rather as a contemporary transformation of orality. Sometimes it is a digitised orality too when my voice is manipulated technologically. There is another factor here also which is that I used to be a professional musician and am extremely interested in the whole idea of bringing words and sound together in performance.  My explorations in  performance and new media are in both cases related to the desire to find ways of expanding poetry beyond the page, and they are both connected to a my enthusiasm for working with new technologies. Some of my pieces, such as Time the Magician  (on the CDR of The Erotics of Geography) combine both.

Smith, Hazel.  The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works.  TinFish Press, 2008.

The line between a mockumentary and a prophecy is slender.  If a mockumentary didn’t have something of a prophecy’s truth to it, it wouldn’t be funny, and if a prophecy were obvious it wouldn’t be a prophecy.  That element of absurdity makes Cassandra — the prophet doomed to be ignored — not just possible, but far more likely than the prophet who is heard.

So when machines overrun us, as in Waltz’s “Here Come the Segues” (20-21), which refers to the vehicle whose brand name is Segway, and “The Four Leaf Blowers of the Apocalypse Came Calling” (39-40), we are stationed at a border between an ironic recounting and an unlikely foretelling, in which the onslaught of the more-insistent-than-zombies has begun.

Waltz, William D.  Adventures in the Lost Interiors of America.  Cleveland St. Univ. Poetry Center, 2013.

By analogy with the distinction between high-context language and low-context language, one might distinguish high-detail language from low-detail language.  Plenty of language uses do not attend to detail (the use of “lead” instead of “led” as the past tense of the verb “lead” because the noun “lead” sounds like that past-tense verb), but poetry, one might venture, is high-detail language.

Early in You Are Not Dead, Wendy Xu uses the word “molted”: “After she was just / a pale molted dress we sat there drinking / tequila on the roof…” (21).  Late in the book she uses the word “molten”: “Clutching a molten piece of someone / else’s life” (65).  The use of those words that differ from one another by a single letter associates the recurring imagery in Xu’s book of wings and of birds with the recurring imagery of fire and burning, and thus draws on the elements of the phoenix myth, without having to make explicit appeal to that myth.  Detail at work…

Xu, Wendy.  You Are Not Dead.  Cleveland St. Univ. Poetry Center, 2013.

WINTER

I will stuff a small rag of

its sky into my pocket forever.

-Larry Levis

Greetings, Harvey:

I hope this correspondence finds you well. Perhaps you’ve enjoyed Levis’ couplet before. I discovered these lines within the pages of One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form by Gary Young and Christopher Buckley published by Lynx House Press, Spokane Washington, 2012. Per the permissions in the book, “Winter” was swept into our palms from an unpublished manuscript.

No, Harvey, I haven’t lost my mind. Neither have you. This spring photograph, merely days old, is a snapshot of my rural Wisconsin commute. Today snow might fall only two hours north of my home; despite springtime, Wisconsin winter is never far from our minds.  Perhaps, however, this is part of the pleasure.

Warmly,

Heather

Heather Lang is a poet and critic studying with Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her poetry has been published in Jelly Bucket and IthacaLit and is forthcoming in The Del Sol Review. She has reviewed for Gently Read Literature and her review of Mary Quade’s Guide to Native Beasts is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine. Heather reads for The Literary Review.

Leslie Alfin, “Of Nutshells and Nuance”

Leslie Alfin Artist Statement

of nutshells and nuance

When a personal story is told, is it in confidence? Is it told under the veil of anonymity? Do we carefully select who will hear the most intimate details of our lives? Do we trust that those who we have privileged with this information will cherish it as we do?

“of nutshells and nuance” explores the nature and impacts of storytelling in managing our lives and the paradoxical transformations that occur in the quality and definitions of experience as personal stories migrate back and forth between the virtual and the material.

“of nutshells and nuance” was conceived at the request of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Innovation Team. It is one in a series of 3 large installations that will appear in the InFUSION Project Space within their new Brooklyn Infusion Center. All three installations were to be developed around the concept of “storytelling”.

“of nutshells and nuance” began as a blog where, over the course of the summer of 2010, people could share their stories.

www.ofnutshellsandnuance.blogspot.com

Stories were submitted that told of life, love, birth, death, fear, addiction and redemption. Collectively they present a provocative demonstration of the tensions between intimacy, anonymity, truth, and fantasy–all underpinned and enabled by the paradoxical dialectics afforded by our relationship with the virtual.

Response by Andrew Allport

Leslie Alfin is a multimedia artist who investigates the paradoxical impacts of a techno-driven economy on individuals, society, culture, environment and the greater biosphere.  Andrew Allport won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize for the body | of space | in the shape of the human.

H. L. Hix: I get a lot of signals about its interest in digital media before the book begins, in the jacket copy, in the fact of its having an accompanying cd, etc.  If I were to start with the creaky false distinction between what is “inside” and “outside” the text, I would note the double entendre of “beam” on p. 5 — beam of steel or wood, beam of light — as the point at which I begin to understand from “within” the text that these poems will worry over our placement historically/culturally in the industrial age or the information age.  From your position as the writer “outside” the text, how do you experience the process of inviting slower readers such as myself, who came to poetry strictly through books, into the contemporary aesthetic/political issues raised for and about poetry by digital media?

Stephanie Strickland: I came to poetry orally, through nursery rhymes, lullabies, jump rope, and hopscotch; but I grew up with books in the industrial age, my father an engineer and my grandmothers both great, idiosyncratic readers. Even then, however, in the fifties of the last century, there were oscilloscopes in my basement.

I was introduced to digital literature (then, e-fiction) in the mid-nineties, attending the first NEH summer seminar on digital lit, taught by N. Katherine Hayles, to which I applied as an “independent scholar,” poet, and representative from a public arts center.

Almost everyone I know today has more digital equipment than I do (since I don’t own even a cell phone), and most also have a firmer (more aggressive, or more ideological) idea about what poetry is. Though the most salient characteristic of urban life in the wealthier parts of the globe is the complex inter-penetration of virtual and gravitational, and though many can’t remember a pre-digital world, they’re still not sure what e-poetry is—an art in its infancy swiftly evolving.

I find the best way to invite people toward e-poetry is to show it to them, read it to them, and talk with them about it. Often one needs to learn how to “work” or “play” e-poetry, as it is an application, a poetic “instrument” which creates a poetry of movement and behavior. To invite writers, specifically, toward e-poetry, I teach workshops which greatly extend the kinds of poems they write and appreciate. We read e-poetry but don’t directly write it unless, as often happens, the students’ own written experiments lead them on. I do refer to examples, like Emily Dickinson’s folded envelope poems made with pins, the 3-d appreciation of which requires a digitally implemented presentation.

Processes of play, discovery, and reflection generally bring people to digital literature unless they have a fixed commitment to the fixity of print. The fixity of print, however, is a 500-year-old anomaly in the many-thousand-year-old history of world poetry, evolving and adaptive in both oral and written forms.

Strickland, Stephanie.  Zone : Zero.  Ahsahta Press, 2008.

This is a little jar, ceramic I believe, with a lid that sits gently on top. It has sat on my desk for several years, quietly in the corner. I picked up this jar from my Grandfather’s house after he committed suicide.

It says private on the front, and yet there was nothing inside the jar when I found it. It reminds me of the private struggle I and my grandfather both have struggled with. It sits there in quiet peace, unwavering, holding little trinkets, reminding me to not keep my struggles private, but to share them so I don’t end up with the same fate.

Nicole Campbell is a mother and step-mother to three rambunctious boys.

H. L. Hix: After describing an auto accident in which “Your yellow car slides on the icy road / and turns its driver / upside-down,” § 46 tells the reader “You now know / there are so many ways to find peace.”  Not all of them, as the car wreck shows, present themselves as ways to find peace.  Is it fair to take this as a theme that is (at least implicitly) present throughout the book, not confined to this one poem?  In other words, to take other sections, too, not only § 46, as identifying ways to find peace?

Michael Penny: Much of Particles is about the difference between existing and non-existing. I equate “non-existing” with peace, and so the book might be about how existence, as much fun as it is, messes that up.

Michael Penny.  Particles.  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.