not great, like the commandrine and red bird, but the most beautifully packaged, Spork is fantastic in that regard, Kinda scared to approach percussion grenade, . . Hoooooooo
How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling
Where you cut your hair
For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana
The scissorssister who slits where she goesinto
Cuts as she cuts
Yesterday I was at a Lydia Davis reading and the prose guy who was introducing her kept saying there was no precedent for her, that her voice was her own, blahbeblahbeblah.
And as soon as she started reading, I thought "Russell Edson, " And when prose guy asked her about what she read when she was young she said Russell Edson,
So riding high on having successfully noticed a thing once, I'm just going to guess here one part in the rhizomisphere in terms of the poetics of the poems and oppositional rhetoric of the prose: Amiri Baraka.
For poetics, see constant enjambment of relatively short lines, rhymes of short vowels, and a general brilliance re: rhythm:
“For a total of twelve hours at a clip
The gohomeandfeedthebaby milk of it
That man is a mouth chased by ghosts
Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in”
And like AB, McSweeney has been gleefully crossing and inverting genres scifi, horror, etco man I wish I had time to read Barakas essay on Sun Ras scifi poetry right now, blowing up the expectations we bring to these genres as readers and, after the concussion, forcing us to reassemble them out of the rubble.
Im still working out what is being said about the pastoral, anachronism and etc though if you want that, there are plenty of reinterpreters out there,
What Ive been thinking about is this: part of the supposed purpose of oppositional rhetoric is that it is catalytic, Some are mobilized and some are repelled, It seeks to create a divisive rupture in the audience, and a protected social space, a flammable wall, for those on behalf of whom the rhetoric is employed, That is, ABs poetics and rhetoric were at times and are linked to a definitive social practice of a selfarticulated group, Is McSweeneys art arriving at a similar crossroads Who is behind her flammable wall It doesnt have to be and there doesnt have to be anyone, These are not questions of value but of relations, I feel agitations reading The Necropastoral, I dont understand anything.
I enjoyed her essays tied to other artists in the first,
I really enjoyed her more roaming essays towards the end, particularly "The 'Future' of 'Poetry'" sequence, In The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay, In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence.
Through readings of artists as diverse as
Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.
I found this book at a writer's conference several years back, or rather I asked someone selling chapbooks at a booth what he recommended and he put this book into my hands.
It is a small but beautifully bound book, with excellent illustrations and thick paper, It was clearly designed by someone with a deft hand for typesetting and so forth, so it's a pleasure to hold in the hand, So small, it might as well be a secret,
As for contents, it's a hybrid little exotic piece of work bookended literally by an essay examining a film I've not only never seen but never even heard of, and deconstructing the idea of "the Pastoral"and thanks to a rigorous liberal arts education, I at least caught the references to Boccaccio and Chaucer.
There was just enough to whet my appetite, which I suppose is the point of a chapbook, On the other hand, McSweeney's poetry did nothing for me, Poetic form being a subjective taste and all that, don't read too much into it when I say "I didn't get it, " But I really didn't. I didn't get the imagery or the transitions between ideas, I am running short of sleep these days, though, so, . . come for the beauty of this tiny little book, stay for the essay, and take or leave the poetry, I'll revisit this at some nebulous point in the future, I dare say, Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame, She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, With sitelink Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation, The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe, including such major authors as sitelink Hiromi Itō, sitelink Kim Hyesoon, sitelink Aase Berg and sitelink Raul Zurita.
Action Books seeks to move poetry and poetics from other literary cultures into the center of US poetry discussions and undermine the nationalist rubrics under which literature is marketed and discussed.
In addition to Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame, She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, With sitelink Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation, The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe, including such major authors as sitelink Hiromi Itō, sitelink Kim Hyesoon, sitelink Aase Berg and sitelink Raul Zurita.
Action Books seeks to move poetry and poetics from other literary cultures into the center of US poetry discussions and undermine the nationalist rubrics under which literature is marketed and discussed.
In addition to the University of Notre Dame, McSweeney has taught in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and as a Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
sitelink.