On THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985

Kevin Killian and David Brazil have done a great service… The selection is wide-ranging, eclectic, and generally highly intelligent… Forces and influences are carefully and thoughtfully delineated, and a map of the progress of poets’ theater in that crucial transition period between high modernism and post-modernism is brought into view. ...The truth is poetry and theater need the spontaneity and rigor each tends to suspect in the other.

—Mac Wellman, BOMB

“If a dream is a rebus, what is a play?” Leave it to poets to take a perfectly good rhetorical question such as this, from Nada Gordon’s play Distraction, and come up with multiple answers, each less likely than the last, and all of them brimful with a belief in complete freedom of expression. With The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, poets Kevin Killian and David Brazil have provided as friendly as possible a reintroduction to a genre that, in contemporary America, at least, has some ways to reclaim the world-historical heights of appeal it held among the ancient Greeks, the Elizabethans and in pre-Franco Spain.

—Jordan Davis, The Nation

Brazil and Killian provide a solid sense of poets theater’s seminal decades, bringing to light its central concerns and lost masterpieces, on one hand and, on the other, revealing its importance to the genre as we know it today.

—Maxwell Heller, The Poetry Project Newsletter

On SEXOPURO SEXOVELOZ/SEPTIEMBRE

Few poets these days are able to evoke and inhabit disquietude with the concentrated intensity of Mexican writer Dolores Dorantes, and this beautifully produced bilingual collection is powerful evidence of this. … [Translator Jen] Hofer is not only faithful to Dorantes’ meticulous deployment of words, but also introduces a ncessary defamiliarizing—one could say baroque—note into what remains for Latin Americans an imperial language, compelling monolingual North Americans to read differently and think differently about their language (which, in the end, is what poetry is all about).

—Christopher Winks, Jacket Magazine

This book is a total thrill…Dorantes can sound at times like George Oppen…Like Oppen, Dorantes is a profoundly political poet, though her own politics feel far from the 1940s Popular Front that was coin of the realm for Objectivists. Ultimately, though, any U.S. frame for reading Dorantes–even one in which she becomes a major new practicioner of the life poem–is going to fail, simply because it isn’t the frame she’s using…

—Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog

Dorantes collapses the traditional separation between author and text; subject and object; writing and written. She makes of herself a text that is written, fashioned, constructed. This gesture, which at first seems effusive and almost Whitmanesque, is actually diffuse and, at times, self-effacing…Although Dorantes seems to reject certain varieties of surrealism–especially what she refers to as contemporary confessional poetry in Mexico that “venerates the creation of image after image with no importance whatsoever given tomeaning”–some of her most intriguing, and powerful, gestures are imbued with bizarre oneiricism.

—Mark Tursi, Rain Taxi Review of Books

Dolores Dorantes is a visionary book whose absent parts reclaim the author and haunt the reader. It contains spectral dimensions, whether one considers the relationship between poet and translator (collaborators, really) who shadow each other across the pages, or if you stop to notice the interplay (intertext) Dorantes allows her readers.

—Guillermo Juan Parra, Venepoetics

Hofer’s “Translator’s Note: May Be I Had to Forget How,” which ends the volume, demonstrates not only her careful awareness of the linguistic risks of translating, but a sense of ethical and political responsibility in the act of translating that is often lacking among American translators.

—Meagan Evans, Zoland Poetry

On HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE

The Clairvoyant Journal records Weiner’s daily life in the three voices her typewriter could legibly distinguish. The result is one of the most exhilarating, exhausting, and unsettling texts ever written, words precipitating out of supersaturated solution to pop up above or below lines already too full to parse. …The implications, for Weiner personally and for any society that might hope to include her, are clearly terrifying, and one of the great achievements of Hannah Weiner’s Open House is that we are allowed to glimpse the acute political consciousness with which Weiner worked through these implications.

—Peter Manson, Chicago Review

…with Hannah Weiner’s Open House, we finally have a first good step toward presenting her work in print in the same kind of comprehensive & intelligent fashion that has so transformed Jack Spicer’s influence…

—Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog

Weiner’s ceaseless effort to find a format adequate to her experiences as a psychic medium resulted in the ever-changing forms and surfaces of her work. As a result, her friends’ and advocates’ efforts to build her legacy make for a series of exhaustive, self-sacrificing labors that, while failing to fix a monument, create something better: a living zone in which Weiner emerges from between and among the Web sites, essays, and books assembled in her honor. Hannah Weiner’s Open House is the latest of these efforts…that in its multiplicity captures Weiner’s own indefatigable zeal for formal inquiry and her effort to reproduce in various media the many voices in her life.

—Joyelle McSweeney, Boston Review

Quite clearly this will be one of the top books to have this year. The writing is invaluable.

—James Wagner, Esther Press

Hannah Weiner’s Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin, is one of the most lovingly assembled and attractively designed selected works collections I have ever seen. If you have only seen the few samples of Weiner’s work included in anthologies like In the American Tree and Postmodern American Poetry, this is an excellent way to get a fuller sense of the scope of her total production. Pieces like “Radcliffe and Guatemalan Women,” which combine discursive strains from different contexts, cohere into a sober and sometimes savage clarity of satirical and/or tragic vision, in ways that might come as a surprise to those who are familiar mainly with the more flamboyantly “clairvoyant” graphic arrangements of the more well-known poems.

—K. Silem Mohammad, Limetree

That Durgin has opened the house, and delivered an edition which allows readers coming to Weiner’s work for the first time to consider the full range of her accomplishment, is in itself a considerable achievement.

—Richard Owns, Aufgabe

Coupled with the “Early and Clairvoyant Journals,” also edited by Durgin…there is now some initial basis to pattern a “whole” Hannah Weiner, though not an “un-split” one (”self” meaning at its root “apart”). Both Hannah Weiner’s Open House and the journals include welcome introductions by Durgin, with the former leaning toward her work’s context while the more discursive online one poses a critical reading emphasizing in part her unique ability. Both include a compass of critical writings on Weiner, which, while all terrific, reveal a relative paucity in light of her importance…A great boon of Hannah Weiner’s Open House lies in gathering her career-wide formal inflections in one place for the first time.

—Sam Truitt, Line on Line/American Book Review

On WHO OPENS

Each poem here moves forward w/ banal yet lifeforce-infused lines which all seemingly relate to each other, then space out into meditations of repetition and some kind of language-prayer. Odd and affecting and issued by one of the more interesting small poetry presses currently (barely) active.

—Brian Coley & Thurston Moore, Bull Tongue

Complicated inner rhymes like Frank Loesser lyrics, so that in the final poem, we’re hearing “Hand talking/ by past will/ Tend” and in another few lines we’re into “talking by/ and walking by/ By fast will/ Hand,” so that we have to keep up with the sense quicker and quicker, yet the music of the line acts like a carrot in front of the reluctant donkey of the brain. Is it a spurious music? The advertising matter, and a little note at the back of the book, informs us that this poem, “Contact,” comes out of Seldess’ interaction (he says) with elderly people with Alzheimers and other memory diseases. (The promo copy uses the word “work,” as though Seldess had a job there among the old people, but the word “interaction” takes it away from the realm of the economic, and places him in a purer light, perhaps a sort of sounding board for people in trouble. And “interaction” implies a two way street more than “work,” as though they weren’t the only ones learning something, no, he was getting something too — besides a salary or hourly wage or whatever.) In any case the poem, “Contact,” stands almost like one of the free-standing rock formations, all crevices and juts, down in Monument Valley, its very otherness isolating it from the world of ordinary poetry, and yet making a satisfying climax to the six poems that precede it, which all depend on the peculiar satisfactions of improvisation, like a jazzman playing a melody “straight no chaser” once, then going to town thereafter.On the back of the book Kerri Sonnenberg is quoted as saying that in this poetry, words “require a certain elasticity to perform an attentive music of formation.” I sort of see what she means, for the words, in changing context, perform their own shimmering, wavery effects, but how do they “require” this elasticity? I would say that he, Seldess, lets the words “acquire” the elasticity to perform the “attentive music of formation” chiefly by the way he changes their context, back and forth, the simplest of words, from “pours” to “porous,” like those word games we played as children in which we were given the letters in “pours” then tossed another “O” and told to whisk it into the first word to reassemble another. You might take the title, “Who Opens,” add an “A” and come up with “Oh weapons,” if you were alert.I haven’t previously encountered Jesse Seldess’ wrtiting before, nor him as a person, but I’ve met Patrick Durgin, the proprietor of Kenning Editions, and read his poetry on frequent occasions, and I think I see a certain similarity between one of Durgin’s own modes of writing, and this recombinant DNA. Maybe I’m just imagining things after having the great freshness of one’s own vocabulary re-strung, freshly washed clothes pinned up to a rope to dry on a spring afternoon. I’m even looking at the picture on the cover of the book and seeing this face, with deepset dark eyes, scraped over by the winds of time and by metal tools, like me trying to read my lottery ticket by scraping away the black with the edge of a dime or a skate key.

—Kevin Killian, Amazon.com Reviews

This book feels almost more like a score for vocal performance than a conventionally lyric work for the page–that is, until you give yourself over to the silent reading process, at which point an imagined recitation begins suggesting itself with increasing insistency. Seldess’s sustained attention to the combinatory possibilities surrounding a few simple phrases is energetic and energizing.

—K. Silem Mohammad, Limetree

Jesse Seldess’ new book Who Opens from Kenning Editions has [an] effect of concentrated energy, as if a villanelle had turned into a tornado made of light.“Who you have continually overheard” is a line that appears and reappears in various permutations, as do others.“As what you headed toward youSaturated unvocalized light”You find you are cross-examining yourself as to where you were and what you were thinking when you last read that line. Then you are brought back to light or the idea of light or the word “light.” And the word material.“Breathing heavyYou worn material”…“Anything

Is you material”

So there is a minimal approach to who this reader is and what her materials might be. There are permutations. And there is this light.

If I ask myself, for the sake of the argument possibly being made in this blog, how or if these are a tonalist, I would say that the attention to sound is one aspect of what I think of as a tonalist. The dissonance is organized. The tone is intimate and yet impersonal. The work is lyric without being centered around an emotion or little story. Speech is suggested but is only one of a number of textures. Elena’s work is more narrative. Jesse’s work has a fractal feeling compared, in Kerri Sonnenberg’s blurb, to a flock of birds (that comment might constitute the only metaphor in (on) the book).

Once you read it you want to read it again.

“Emit matter to converse” the last line, sends you back to the opening line,

“Who you have continually overheard”

and, in turn, to the epigraph, from The Talmud:

“Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is granted.“

—Laura Moriarty, A Tonalist Notes