PoemTalk #136: on Nasser Hussain's "SKY WRI TEI NGS"

Last week we announced the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, but we wanted to make sure that you didn't miss out on episode #136 — on Nasser Hussain's SKY WRI TEI NGS project — which was released during our recent hiatus. For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by Hussain himself, along with Ujjwala Maharjan and Kevin Platt.

As Filreis explains in his PoemTalk blog post announcing the episode, the poems from SKY WRI TEI NGS are comprised solely of words constructed from the IATA's standardized list of international airport codes. In this program, the panel discusses three poems — "ISL AMO PHO BIA," "EAT (FOR MIC LEE)," and "STO RIS" — from the ten in total Hussain read on the same day at an event at the Kelly Writers House.

You can read more about that visit and the program here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

In Memoriam: Leevi Lehto (1951–2019)

We are saddened to share the news that Finnish poet, translator, and digital poetics innovator Leevi Lehto has passed away at the age of 68 on June 22nd.

Our PennSound author page for Lehto houses a variety of video and audio recordings spanning more than a decade. The earliest of these coincide with the poet's visit to our own Kelly Writers House in 2005, where he read his own poetry and delivered a lecture: "Finnish Poetry Then and Now" (the full text of which is also provided). We also have the single track "Elegia" from Audioei 1 / OEI #26, a video snapshot from Charles Bernstein's Portraits Series and Lehto's contribution to the MLA Offsite Series Reading, all from 2006. Bernstein's video tribute for a 2017 celebration of Lehto's life and work, and "Sanasade. A Make Copies Video" from 2018 round out the collection.

We send our condolences to Lehto's family and his many friends within the international poetry community.

PoemTalk #137: on Anne Sexton's "The Ambition Bird"

left to right: Ellen Berman, Anthony Rostain, Ahmad Almallah

Today saw the release of episode #137 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which focuses on Anne Sexton's poem "The Ambition Bird." Fittingly enough, given the poet, host Al Filreis was joined by two practicing psychiatrists, Ellen Berman and Anthony Rostain, along with poet Ahmad Almallah.

After discussing the provenance of both the poem itself and the specific recording under discussion, Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on the episode offers some sense of contemporary appraisals of Sexton's work: "A New York Times review by Joyce Carol Oates of The Complete Poems written in 1981 observed that after the mid-1960s Sexton's writing 'had begun to lose its scrupulous dramatic control and [was] weakened by a poetic voice that, rarely varying from poem to poem, spoke ceaselessly of emotions and moods and ephemeral states of mind.'" He continues, "Berman, Rostain, and Almallah, as PoemTalk listeners will hear, take a very different approach. If an understanding of clinical depression is adjusted by a sense of the deep anger and frustration of the domestic scene of an intensely ambitious woman, then perhaps the emotional ceaselessness, figurative ephemerality, and formal scrupulous control might be seen as of a piece."

You can read more here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

New at Jacket2: "Extreme Texts," ed. by Divya Victor

Today is a very exciting day long in the making: "Extreme Texts" — a groundbreaking Jacket2 feature curated by guest editor Divya Victor — has finally been launched. Here's how Victor starts her introduction of the materials:

When Jacket2 invited me to compose a CFP for a special feature spanning multiple modes of thinking, it was the summer of 2017 and we were several months into Trump's presidency. I had just returned to the United States, where I am a naturalized "citizen," after years in Singapore, where I was employed as a faculty member on a work visa, a status determined almost solely on the state's articulated understanding of my temporary utility to society — a condition that defines and delimits the lives of immigrants everywhere, but especially in oligarchic states (like Singapore and the US) that bank on the sweat and blood of certain bodies, the profitability of distended indenture (including debt), disenfranchisement, carceral surveillance, and other forms of coercion. The CFP was composed at a moment when it seemed that a majority of Americans had acquiesced to live, normally, under extreme conditions, with denuded civil rights, attenuated freedoms of press, increasing inequality of wages, and diminishing access to medical care, and under misogynist, transphobic, and supremacist policies. The moment was marked by fury over Trump's "Muslim ban," an executive order that prevented the entry of foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

You can read more of her introduction here and browse the impressive table of contents, which is divided into "Scholarship," "Engagements," "Cases," and a special "Philippines Dossier." If you don't instantly see two or three or four pieces that you have to read right away, then there might be something wrong with you.

In Memoriam: Kevin Killian (1952–2019)

Killian Kevin in 2012 (photo by Daniel Nicoletta)

We are mourning the sudden and shocking loss of Kevin Killian, who passed away this weekend at the age of sixty-six. Over at Jacket2, editor Julia Bloch has written a lovely memorial that details Killian's many memorial contributions to Jacket over the years, as well as the contents of his modest PennSound author page:

At Killian's PennSound page you will find a collection of recordings that includes a September 19, 1997, event hosted by the Kelly Writers House in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania. The program featured Killian and his wife, the acclaimed writer Dodie Bellamy, in conversation and was organized by Kerry Sherin Wright, director of the Writers House, and Joshua Schuster, who was a student here at the time. 

The recording opens with Killian, midsentence, describing how Jack Spicer came to attend UC Berkeley, where he refused to sign the Loyalty Oath in 1950 ("I don’t know if you have that here," Killian tells the Penn audience, to laughs). Killian coedited, with Lewis Ellingham, Spicer's posthumously published detective novels, The Train of Thought: (Chapter III of a Detective Novel) (Zasterle Press, 1994) and The Tower of Babel (Talisman House, 1994); cowrote, with Ellingham, the biography Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998); and coedited, with Peter Gizzi, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Killian once told Rain Taxi, "I'm an artist with a complicated relationship to California and to the class in which I was born. I guess I'm more like Spicer than I thought."

Killian's PennSound page also includes his 1991 talk on Spicer at the Kootenay School of Writing; a 2007 reading of his poems "Norwegian Wood" and "Is It All Over My Face?" at the launch of EOAGH Issue 3: Queering Language; and his January 31, 2015, reading with CAConrad and Jennifer Moxley at Frank O'Hara's Last Lover, the Philadelphia reading series curated by Jason Mitchell at Snockey's Oyster and Crab House Rose Room.

You can read more here. Thanks to the good graces of Andrew Kenower (of A Voice Box fame), we'll be adding a number of new recordings of Killian in the near future, so watch this space. We send our love to Dodie Bellamy and the great many members of our community who are reeling from the loss of this singular talent.