Author Archives: Shailen Mishra

Traumatic Emplacement: Housing Violence in Poetry

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

Emily Johnston’s series “Traumatic Emplacement” explores poetics of emplacement, and the simultaneity of dislocation and enmeshment in traumatic poetry.

My last post talked about emplacement and Rumi’s call for us to house the guests and violence of emotions, let them sever and mend us. Allison Joseph, featured “SRPR Illinois Poet” in the current issue (38.1), echoes Rumi on this point and poses questions of how we keep violence in its place; how we house without becoming violence. It would be easy to answer, “Just write!,” as freewriting advocates might say. “Writing down the bones,” as Natalie Goldberg advises, puts us in touch with ourselves. But the trauma of violence erases memory; language fails. Joseph reminds us we need “something more than memory.” That is, we need witnesses. Bones aren’t enough. Indeed, poetry must “Remember to lie. The truth works for / traffic court, but not for literature.” Poetry is not “what happened.” It isn’t fact; it erodes, forecloses, and makes again. On the page, we do what we cannot with life: we make it into something worth remembering. The reader is here and now, ready to witness— “not sentences that ramble across the page, / lost, listless, unaware of how they should turn,” but what we carve those sentences into. “Because they must turn… reversals–forward / momentum, then a reversal back… until we end up / where we never thought we could–couples, // tercets, quatrains–moving boxes of poetry, / miniature rooms where you arrange the chairs/and sofa, dioramas of your own dramas.”

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Emily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).

The Appositional Project: Appositional Writing and Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave

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Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

When I was a kid my parents bought my sister and me some silly putty. We pressed it into the Sunday comics and pulled away Ziggy and Garfield. Even though all the putty did was lift ink from the page, it meant that we could stretch Ziggy tall and thin or enlarge Garfield’s head to the size of our little kid fists.

But what if you could lay a sheet of silly putty over a place? What would it pull back? What would resist? What is the significance of contorting and reshaping that which becomes absorbed? The ink that depicts and the language that describes (or has depicted and has described) is wrapped over and under what we conceptualize as a particular place. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading at the White House, during which Goldsmith read consecutive excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and his own book Traffic. Each selection was localized at the site of the Brooklyn Bridge, helping to demonstrate the changing character of the site over the past two centuries.

As more and more writers are turning to appropriative writing techniques (within and outside of the conceptualism moniker), so too are poets culling these material representations of place as a means of investigating the relationship between place, history, and language. In particular, a number of poets are exploring social and cultural trauma within a particular region, incorporating archival materials in an attempt to help repair (which includes drawing attention to) historical wounds.

I have begun referring to this type of writing, as a collection of like-minded poetic projects, by the name “appositional writing.” A few useful definitions of “apposition” in this context include: 1) The act of placing together or bringing into proximity; juxtaposition; 2) The putting in contact of two parts or substances; and 3) The condition of being placed or fitted together. The author of an appositional work, much like a collagist, is invested in the arrangement of found materials, but what makes this type of writing so powerful is the author’s use of these materials in a movement toward repair.

In SRPR 37.1, Becca Klaver’s review essay “Bridging the Distance: Documentation and Disappearance in Performatic Poetry” discusses, along with books by Anne Carson and Cecilia Vicuña, Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press, 2010). While Klaver is primarily concerned with the performatic aspects of each book, I found myself fascinated by Sand’s use of archival materials in the first section of the book, titled “Remember to Wave: A Poetry Walk”, which involves Sand recreating on the page her various “poetry walks” investigating the sociopolitical history of Portland, Oregon.

In an introductory essay at the beginning of the book, Sand makes it clear that this project is an investigation into “how we might map the thickness of time and its political history,” particularly in regard to the places we inhabit. Later in the essay Sand describes the present scene surrounding the Portland Metropolitan Exposition Center before suggesting that we can (and likely should) also examine this landscape “in terms of displacements and exclusions,” as the Expo Center (when it was known as the Portland Assembly Center) had been home in the summer of 1942 to more than thirty-six hundred Japanese Americans before they were transferred to a number of different internment camps scattered throughout the western United States.

In an attempt to make these scars of history visible, Sand sets as the backdrop to several pages in the book a collection of flyers, pages from handbooks, and photographs depicting or related to either the internment at the Assembly Center or the Vanport flood of 1948. Over these images Sand types her poetry as a way to engage these documents and transform them into sites of conversation about the scars of history. The poetry forms a layer on top of the archival material much in the same way that the present so often obfuscates the past, and yet there is nothing covered up here. Everything remains visible, and this is of course very much the point. Sand wants us to remember the details of domination and social control so that we might learn to move toward more compassionate models of engagement.

To accomplish this, Sand types over the documents that she has incorporated into her book, writing in response to the trauma reflected there. We might relate this action to “appositional growth,” in which tissue is added to bone or muscle in order to strengthen the preexisting tissue that has become damaged or weakened. By adding her poetry to these documents, one might say that Sand is helping to encourage the process of healing within and surrounding the text.

On one particularly charged page, which features poetry typed over a flyer ordering “ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY” to go to the Assembly Center for evacuation, Sand demonstrates how such engagement should always move in the direction of care. Using only words found on the flyer itself, Sand types beside and under the small print of the flyer: “civil control / civil / control / with sufficient / exclusion / civil control / civil control / transport persons   elsewhere / each member of the family / plainly marked / personal effects / of the living / that which can be carried.” By reminding us that “civil control” often works through “exclusion,” where people become things “which can be carried” or transported “elsewhere,” Sand not only shows us the dark history behind Portland’s Expo Center; she also points out how place and displacement are often used as means of social control.

However, Sand’s work here also reminds us that we have the power to engage and speak/write/act against domination. We are able, at the very least, to turn representations of domination into collaborative sites of engagement. Lastly, we are reminded to consider place not only as a location in space but also in time, and to remember to acknowledge trauma that is imbedded in location. Acknowledgement, of course, can often be given with just a simple wave.

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Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue Gun, Tenderloin, Seven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

Crumbling Binaries and Porous Overlaps: Two Poems in Issue 38.1

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Shailen Mishra, Blog Editor & Series Contributor

As I read the two poems “Picking Pole” and “The Machete” by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra that appeared on SRPR’s Issue 38.1, I was intrigued by the crisp diction, details, and thrifty narrative. I paused and tried to dig deep for meaning and purpose behind each word. But soon I became distracted. I was thinking of the historic conversation on the English language that has preceded this poem in the Indian literary movement. One does not have to be aware of this conversation to understand the meaning of the two poems; yet, it helps one to get a sense of Mehrotra’s aesthetics.

The historic conversation is about the “chutnification” or “biryanization” of the English language. When Salman Rushdie entered the world stage with Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, he had set in motion the chutnification process in the most eye-catching manner (though previous Indian authors have made similar attempts to some degree). For authors like Rushdie and the Indian characters in their novels, English has ceased to be a “colonizer’s tongue” that needed to be approached with caution and trepidation. Why, by that time English had become the everyday or even first language for many. And English was getting chutnified, getting influenced by local languages in varying degree. So the polyphony of Englishes that are manifested in Rushdie’s narrative is a bold affirmation that Indians do have a legitimate claim to the English language. And while Rushdie termed this chutnification, the Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali called it biryanization. The emphasis was on a complex whole without being simplistic about which ingredient played a more dominant role than others. Ali who hailed from the Muslim community of North India wished his readers to “hear the music of Urdu” in his English poetry (4 Twelve Modern Indian Poets). Even though English was the conveying medium here that did not put it on competing ground with Urdu.

Mehrotra admits of “chutnification” or “biryanization” in his own works and any writing in “Indian English” for that matter. But he is of the firm opinion that the intersections between languages are messy, and that any neat model of linguistic convergence/collaboration must be debunked as simplistic. When a fellow poet and critic (Rajagopal Parthasarathy) offered a layered model of linguistic interaction (i.e. Indian languages–the mother tongue–at the bottom, Hindi as the national language in the middle, and English at the top), and authors using one language (read English) as a vehicle to capture the linguistic essence of their mother tongues, Mehrotra scoffed at the idea. He writes: “A problem with this model is that it treats Indian poet as someone who chiefly transports linguistic and cultural material from the bottom to the surface…it tends to narrowly equate Indian poetry with Indianness” (5 Twelve Modern Indian Poets) What Mehrotra criticizes is the essentialism that views English as the “other”, hence incapable of capturing “Indian” experience because of its “un-Indianness.” Against such dichotomic separations Mehrotra rails, and his inclusive approach and hybrid sensibilities are not simply limited to linguistic spheres. In his book The Transfiguring Places: Poems, Mehrotra writes: “…As the bus gathered speed, / I saw it quivering in the heat-haze, / A place whose name I hadn’t known or asked, / Which I sometimes think was Shiraz, or a firth / In the North Sea from where the skalds set out” (7). Thus a moment in the obscure region of Uttar Pradesh (India) transforms and transcends spatially and temporally to ask an unsettling question: who is narrating here? An Indian, Persian or Scandinavian poet? Is the answer that straightforward?

Mehrotra’s belief seems to be that what we take to be rigid boundaries are in fact porous. And for an artist it is not enough to acknowledge and reveal this porousness, but to enlarge it further to an unsettling, questionable degree, where the things that were formerly oppositional, dichotomic, and separated are found “alongside”, their boundaries not just touching but overlapping each other. Mehrotra provides the brassiest example of this porousness in his translation of songs of Kabir, a fifteenth century Indian mystic whose popularity lies in advocating a casteless, inclusive, and benign side to Hinduism. Into Kabir’s simple and ironical expressions, Mehrotra inserts modern day slangs and anachronisms: “When death already / Has you by the balls” (78), “Smelling of aftershave / And deodorants” (72). What irreverence it may seem? But for Mehrotra it’s about breaching the time barrier between the ancient and modern expressions; thus, “elaborating” upon a point that Kabir is trying to make about the slipperiness of Hindu/Muslim, abstract/concrete dichotomies.

When binaries are disallowed, hierarchies are dismantled, and an awareness of “alongside” is introduced, we see things in juxtaposition, where dualities and multiplicities are preserved, without reducing one thing into the other or without separating one from the other neatly. But, how to express these dualities or multiplicities? Or to say in Mehrotra’s sense, how to “elaborate” upon them? His two poems, “Picking Pole” and “The Machete”, present the inside/outside in a seamless poise. In “Picking Pole”, the time has stilled. The Rangoon creeper is about to sneak in to the house and birds have taken to the roof quite comfortably. While their watcher is outside the house, at the “border” of mango trees, with a pole in his hand to pick mangoes, to sever them from their host bodies. Like an intruder he stands (like the plant or birds), and the act of breaching is mutual here: from inside to outside, and outside to inside. Change the implement in hand from picking pole to machete and another intrusion occurs in the next poem: “Dragging it [the young tree] across the yard, / I almost didn’t see the nest…It looked warm, / Habitable, like the house I entered / To put away the machete…” The irony lies in the narrator’s realization, his juxtaposition of the “inside” of the house with that of the nest. Who is the outsider here? The bird who nested in a tree in the narrator’s property, or the narrator whose dual act of violence (upon the tree and the nest) calls into question his entitlement?

In an anthology titled The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Mehrotra writes in the introduction to the poet Arun Kolatkar’s works: “Details are the cornerstones of our visual world” (54). Moreover, these details need to expose the familiar in a novel way. Mehrotra’s two poems are replete with exquisite details. And seeing them in isolation is missing the point; rather, in their juxtaposition they amplify the porosity of what we take for granted as stable, concrete, and unquestionable.

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Shailen Mishra is a book hopper, story whore, poetry pariah, novelist, three times failed guitar learner, and an aspiring didgeridoo player. He holds a Ph.D. from Illinois State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, he edits SRPR’s blog and manages its website.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 4

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Lisa Phillips, Guest Contributor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

Establishing an appreciation (or awareness) for what a “poetics of emplacement” might look like, or evoke, one that is grounded in understandings of place as a process in flux that is both open to interpretation and revision seems salient to the discussion I see evolving on SRPR’s blog. A poetics of emplacement, to my mind, is entangled with the recognition that places can be in Altha Cravey and Michael Petit’s words “spatially organized as confining . . . manifest a way of knowing, and places are often objects of power created to further particular forms of domination based on gender, sexuality, race, age, class, and physical ability” (102). A “dedication to place . . . better understood as an interest in emplacement” brings forth a nested arrangement of relations both social/historical and geographical/geophysical.

Because I am not familiar with what a poet’s notion of emplacement might be, (and I’m curious) I had to look up the word “emplacement” and its verb form “emplace” to determine the etymological context of the word. On one hand, the word emplacement means the action of placing in a certain position and the condition of being so placed (OED). On another hand, the word relates to placement of a building, a situation, a position. More disconcerting, for me at least, emplacement is a militaristic term meaning a platform for guns replete with defensive epaulements that afford cover from enemy attack. The poetics of emplacement then can be imagined as both a defensive move and an action taken toward others be they foes or friends.

While I would like to imagine a world in which there were only friends that would indeed be a provincial naïveté. Given that the SRPR’s editor wishes “to make it clear that a contemporary and theoretically informed recuperation of place-based poetics is hardly provincial” it may be fitting to consider how emplacements are built to protect and defend borders, for they are not designed to be attacked from behind. That an emplacement will surely have a blind spot or two makes diffractive reading necessary. Diffraction à la Karen Barad assumes that we will not be able to see everything at once. The idea ought to encourage us to look forward to new situations and positions that afford us alternative perspectives. The pages of SRPR provides me the opportunity to do just that as a rhetor with poetic affinity.

Thanks for an inspiring issue of SRPR.

In case you were wondering what an emplacement looks like . . .

WWII Aleutian Island Emplacement
WWII Aleutian Island Emplacement. Unalaska, AK.
(From http://www.city-data.com/forum/alaska/417413-term-alaskan-22.html)

 

Work Cited:

Cravey, Altha J., and Michael Petit. “A Critical Pedagogy of Place: Learning Through the Body.” Feminist Formations 24.2 (2012): 100-19. Project Muse. Web. 22 June. 2013.

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Lisa Phillips is a doctoral candidate in English at Illinois State. One part of Phillips likes to talk about her accomplishments with other folks who are not that curious, and another part of Phillips is humbled by what other folks do despite enormous obstacles. Middle ground is useful…”I write about things that occur to me, and I try not to embarrass people.” If you’re curious, you ask more questions. If you’re not, you won’t.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map3

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Arielle Greenberg

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

When I moved to a small town in rural Maine after a lifetime of living in big cities and suburbs, I struggled to imagine how I might shift my poetics to suit my new landscape and life.  Maine is blessed with a long and important lineage of place-based poets, but I myself have little expertise or passion, and thus little to contribute, to the many great poems about the sea, the woods, and the farm.  I live in town.

(I was about to say that here in Maine, I do enjoy spending more time outside by choice, interacting with that thing we call “nature,” than I did when I lived in New York City or Chicago…but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. In New York, I walked everywhere, and made decent use of Central Park.  In Chicago, I ran along Lake Michigan several times a week.)

What seemed important to me, though, was to find my own role, my own voice, as a poet “of Maine,” and of this new life which I did in fact choose for reasons related very much to place: access to local food, to clean air, to small communities, to small farmers.

The poetry I’ve ended up writing, almost exclusively, since moving to Maine, is not what I expected to be writing, but it’s a direct response to this notion that I am here, and no longer in a city, living a more “wholesome” life.  The poems, a series, are engaged in the notion of the pastoral—and in ferreting out both the wholesome and the earthy “dirtiness” of that tradition.  These “country” poems are the most sexually explicit, culturally taboo, and provocative things I’ve probably ever written, and in each one, I am thinking about the very direct correlation, to my mind, between issues like clean air and water and issues like gender politics, BDSM, the human as (sexual) animal, and graphic language.

It seems to me this is writing on a  kind of border, yes?

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Arielle Greenberg is the author of several books, including My Kafka Century and, with Rachel Zucker, Home/Birth: A Poemic. She writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review and teaches out of her home in Maine and through the new low-res MFA program at Oregon State University-Cascades. At the moment, she is interested in all things “primal.”

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 2

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

As Kirstin Hotelling Zona (SRPR Editor) writes, “A poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.” A poetics of emplacement looks—looks over, looks beyond knowing and into the generative realm of wonder. Knowing becomes a beginning, a starting point, not the destination. The destination, rather, is rupture. I am totally on board with not knowing. I mean, how cool is it to have permission to write my way into rupture rather than out of it, avoiding messy-ness at all costs?! When I need to light a fire under my intellect, to override that insatiable addiction to knowledge, I turn to Rumi, Jelaluddin Balkhi. His poetry emplaces me squarely in temporality, in permeability, calling us (human beings) to house the guests of our emotions, regardless of their actions in and through our beings, to “Welcome and entertain them all!/Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,/who violently sweep your house/empty of its furniture” (from “The Guest House”). We mustn’t stop at emotion, though. A poetics of emplacement beckons us to welcome the violence of emotionality, not to indulge in suffering, but quite the opposite: to love. To be sure, “The door there/is devastation.//Birds make great sky-circles/of their freedom./How do they learn it?//They fall, and falling,/they’re given wings” (from “On Children Running Through”). We might say that a poetics of emplacement is not only “interested in” that which is overlooked, it is also the road there, the looking beyond itself, the surrender to being “filled with you [love]./Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul” (from “We Three”).

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Emily Johnston's PicEmily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).

Critical Alchemy: On Seth Abramson’s “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now”

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Michael Theune, SRPR Review Essay Editor

**Seth Abramson’s entire essay is now Available for free access**

 

The new issue of Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1 (Summer, 2013)) is now out, and it is chock-full of treasures, including new poems by the likes of Rusty Morrison, Lyn Lifshin, Michael Burkard, Virginia Bell, Danielle Pafunda, Kevin Craft, Susan Briante, Sharon Dolin, Kit Robinson, and featured Illinois poet Allison Joseph.  Along with this new work comes Seth Abramson’s review-essay, “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.” [read the entire essay]

The thinking in Abramson’s piece comes at the right time.  Abramson recently came to the defense of contemporary American poetry by publishing “Why Is Contemporary American Poetry So Good?,” an extensive response to an article in the Washington Post called “Why is modern poetry so bad?,” itself a meditation on Mark Edmundson’s essay “Poetry Slam (Or, The decline of American verse).”  In his Spoon River review-essay, Abramson lays out in great detail why exactly American poetry currently is in a Golden Age.  Anyone following this debate certainly will want to read “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.”

Indeed, I believe Abramson’s review-essay is necessary reading for all those engaged with contemporary American poetry.  I so greatly admire “The Golden Age” for a number of reasons.  However, here I want to put Abramson’s piece in explicit conversation with Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition”–a conversation Abramson invites by mention of Hall’s essay.  For me, it is by listening in on this conversation that I come to more fully appreciate many of Abramson’s insights.  I also find myself better able to formulate some questions I have about this being a Golden Age of American poetry.

In “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall critiques a great deal of recent American poetry for its lack of ambition, for churning out McPoem after McPoem.  One of the reasons for such debased production is the poetry MFA.  Section 10 of Hall’s essay begins with a cry to “Abolish the M.F.A.!”  And this undoubtedly should be the case if MFAs really are as Hall describes them, as “a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair.”  While recognizing, in section 11, that “[m]ost poets need the conversation of other poets,” Hall still condemns the MFA, calling it an “institutionalized café” one that hires and pays mentors who then “make assignments” that then “reduce poetry to a parlor game.”

Abramson argues, however, that this understanding of the MFA is wrong.  According to Abramson, the café has long been institutionalized.  Additionally, understood phenomenologically, the MFA is a much more complex and multifaceted offering/participatory event.  According to Abramson, the workshop itself provides an “intensely juxtapositive space,” a space which also opens further out: the MFA “is also the space in which MFA-seekers use social media, non- or quasi-academic program events, and impromptu social gatherings to share their other artistic obsessions–be they musical, dramatic, studio-art, couture, or literarily ‘off-genre.’”  Abramson says that the avant-garde consistently has worked to move beyond objectification and commodification to more closely approach “the praxis of life.”  Similarly, he tries to move discussion and assessment of the poetry MFA away from the (mere) objectification and commodification (and demagoguery) one might find in an analysis such as Hall’s to an understanding and appraisal of the MFA as praxis, as it is lived, experienced, and even co-created.  In short, it is wrongheaded to think of the MFA (merely, or even centrally), as Hall does, as an assignment-giving institution.

And just as the writing program needs to be understood and investigated as praxis, so does the writer herself–and Abramson, I believe, does a masterful job of describing “the ‘Golden Age poetics’ produced by the children and step-children of the Program Era” (on page 110 in Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1)–this is vital reading).  Again, Abramson notes that “Golden Age poetics cannot be treated primarily as a locus for canonization practices”–rather, now, we must “witness poetry as practice, as culture, as civic engagement, as way-of-life.”

Abramson’s review-essay is a masterful critical work, one that demands that its readers experience and interact with the full praxis of today’s writers and writing.  However, even though Abramson’s piece generally eschews (and sometimes critiques) assessment–defined one time by Abramson as “making self-aggrandizing stabs at permanent assignations of value”–one part of the practice of contemporary poetry is evaluation.  Judgments of value are being made all the time.  So: if evaluation (a practice at the core of an essay like Donald Hall’s) is the blinkered remnant of old ways of conceiving poetry, how might the protocols of poetic evaluation be done away with, or productively revised?  Should they be?  Can they be?  Can we even refer to the contemporary era of America as a “Golden Age” without some degree of evaluation being incorporated into that description?  “Golden,” at least, often designates the best.  (Why not simply refer to our current era as a “Very Productive Age”?)  And, at least to my thinking, it simply is the case that there’s some amazing poetry being produced nowadays, including, for example, Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga, Jorie Graham’s Place, D.A. Powell’s Cocktails, Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight, Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains.  It is because of such works (and many others) that I feel we just may be in a “Golden Age of American poetry.”  But without such excellent work I would not be as apt to make this claim.  Is this an outmoded way to think?

I look forward to many, many people reading Seth Abramson’s truly significant review-essay, and continuing the conversation–perhaps here, or else in other venues–it has so powerfully engaged.

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Michael Theune is Review Essay Editor for Spoon River Poetry Review. Theune also is the editor of Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers, 2007), and the host of the Structure and Surprise blog. Along with Kim Addonizio, he co-edits Voltage Poetry, an online anthology of poems with great turns in them, and discussion about those poems. Theune’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. He is an associate professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 1

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Kirstin Hotelling Zona, SRPR Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

Contrary to popular belief, SRPR is not associated with Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, but was titled after the river in central Illinois that was itself purportedly named for the freshwater mussel shells used by the region’s Native Americans and early colonists as eating utensils—as spoons. I love the connections held in tact by our magazine’s name: waterways and words, poetry and sustenance, innovating and naming, observation and transformation. Such associations insist on the interconnectedness of language and place, of knowing intimately one’s surround because such knowing erodes not only one’s sense of self as disconnected but, just as importantly, upends one’s conception of place as equivalent to “environment,” that paltry misnomer that occludes the enmeshment of all vibrant matter and thus preserves anthropocentric paradigms in the very name of “saving the earth.”

When I came on as editor, I wanted to build upon SRPR’s dedication to place along these lines—to make it clear that a contemporary and theoretically informed recuperation of place-based poetics is hardly provincial. The “new” SRPR, then, is interested in a place-based poetic that is less concerned with regionalism’s attention to realism than to writing that leads us to the limits of our comfort zones so that these zones (what we might think of as aesthetic ecotones) are first of all exposed—made palpable and felt—so that we might experience the borders of our own known worlds as permeable, as sites of connection instead of sites of uncontestable difference.

In this way, SRPR’s current dedication to place may be better understood as an interest in emplacement—that is, of the many ways we are situated in and through language, the earth, and each other; in and through our histories and our blind spots; in and through our protests and complicities. As such, a poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.

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Kirstin Hotelling Zona’s first collection of poems, Drift, was published in 2011. She is also the author of a book of criticism, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint (Michigan UP), and editor of Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems and Three Letters from May Swenson to Elizabeth Bishop (Utah State UP). Kirstin lives with her husband and two children in Maine and Illinois, where she Co-Hosts PoetryRadio and edits SRPR. She is an associate professor of English at Illinois State University.

SRPR @ ASLE Conference

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Poets & writers, ecological activists, environmental educators, cultural theorists, ecstatics, & visionaries: Don’t miss out on this year’s 10th Biannual Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) Conference, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, 5/28-6/1:

http://asle.ku.edu/

Be sure to check out SRPR’s panel on Wed, May 29th from 1:30 – 3:00: “The Poetics of Emplacement: SRPR Poets Read.” Line-up includes yours truly, William Stobb, Joshua Corey, Holms Troelstrop, and Adrian Matejka.

Lucia Getsi Reading Series 2013 – Image Gallery & Audio Recordings

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Welcome to the inaugural SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading! The night was a smash success, thanks to SRPR poets Joshua Corey, Naomi Buck Palagi, William Stobb, and Holms Troelstrup, who rocked the Ewing Manor’s old stone bones with stunning performances to a standing-room-only crowd. Lucia Cordell Getsi, SRPR’s long-time editor and benefactor, flew in for the event from South Carolina: thank you Lucia! Enjoy the pics, and check out below the audio recording of the readings!

Photo Credits: Sarah Berryman

 

We dumped the option of video-recording the event and posting it on YouTube. Not that technology intimidated us or our readers were video-shy; rather, we think the AUDIO-ONLY version will keep the distraction to minimum. You can close your eyes and listen and let the words burn into your somatic memory with a sparkful hiss. There’s a risk of post-concussion. But since when has that stopped admirers of sexy poetry?

 

Credits: Live audio recorded and mixed by Brian Hedgepeth

 

Joshua Corey’s Reading:

Naomi Buck Palagi’s Reading:

William Stobb’s Reading:

Holms Troelstrup’s Reading: