Experimental Poetry
A poetry of disfigured visions and avatars.
To create her compass poems, poet and programmer Allison Parrish trained a machine learning model with two parts: one spells words based on how they sound, and the other sounds out words based on how they’re spelled.
Lake Pred was no lake but a precondition, / predecessor assault that kept coming, / preterite arrest we couldn’t quit.
A print project glitched by digital media.
In An Approach, the sentence gradually evolves: word choices change subtly; phrases are introduced, transposed, or deleted; punctuation shifts and changes form. Through these shifts and disruptions, the text begins to accede to a nonlinear logic, through which we can glimpse “the unspoken, which is its subject, between the words, through the words.”
The author discusses Black feminist breathing, academia as access point, and writing three books that came from the same decision.
On visits home I see gifts ripped open, and the confetti. / How much candy is in lil’ piñata? My niece asks. / So much candy he can fly.
I just said I didn’t know / and now you are saying / you aren’t sure I’m cool / that’s cool
“The book can draw in different audiences without catering to them. There’s a kind of rigorous hospitality, an aperture for dialogue.”
“What do you do when you’re born—without your consent—and you find out later that your life was at the cost of someone else’s? That’s how high the stakes can be.”
“I don’t want the kind of career where everything is sensible and safe; I’d rather suffer through the anxiety of wondering where I’m going next than suffer the boredom of dancing in the same safe square.”
Slow-cooked verbiage in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf
The basic conceit of Warm Equations is that a book can abstract the space of conversation typically delimited in front of paintings, that the thematics of a painter’s practice, in this case Alan Reid’s, can be constellated through a chorus of related texts.
Around certain clusters of the dead, almost magnetically, a vortex of opacity gathers in the record.
Audra Wolowiec explores the materiality of language via text, sound, sculpture, and collaborative projects. Her recent solo exhibition at Studio 10, entitled ( ), presented both the immateriality and materiality of her subject matter as subtle and poetic experiences.
A cinepoem—introduced by Leonard Schwartz.
I scrape the snow or shovel the driveway before I go / casual flip of car on lawn spats abut fender’s sis
CAMBRIDGE M’ASS, originally published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press in 1979, marked Robert Grenier’s shift to visual poetry. Celebrating its recent reprint, Paul Stephens talks with him about the oversize poster-poem, where poetry is both map and maze.
Inman is a realist of language’s tendency to become material: his poems exemplify the ways in which writing both preserves and interrupts language, and how it fluctuates in an ambivalent space between being a record of vanished speech and one of language’s living forms.