Please check out my latest pandemic-inspired essay on poetry and capitalism at Jacket Magazine – EXCERPT: There is a reason so many observations exist in relation to poetry versus politics. Try as some more privileged poets and industry makers might, they cannot truly and fully permanently attach the value of poetry to the capitalist machinery…
Pleased to post 2 of 3 poems published in the recent issue of Tusculum Review. Thanks to Heather Elouej for the invite. ✨ Enjoy! ✨ EXCERPT: We will probably die without solutions. / In waves. And particles of light. Tusculum Review @ Tusculum University ~~~~~
If you are interested in adopting Bettering American Poetry - Volume 3, email us at BetterAmericanPoetry@gmail.com to request your sampler!
Here lives poetry that resembles a sticky dance floor. Poetry that is at once terraformed music and primal shout and wet kiss and sweaty palm. The "American" in Bettering American Poetry is a kind of ghoulish placeholder for whichever more rebellious, more enlivening world comes next.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
Bodies inhabit landscapes, are part of the landscape, and often the traditions and behaviors of specifically-identified bodies define the landscape.From Hesiod to Patricia Smith to Billy-Ray Belcourt to Ocean Vuong, we’ll interrogate what it means to be a body, to belong, to be scrutinized geographies, and to inhabit the late-capitalist American landscape. Our poems will…
Panel Discussion and Poetry Reading featuring Esther Schor, Murad Awawdeh, Christina Greer, and Amy King Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 7:00 pm The American Jewish Historical Society 15 West 16th Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212-294-6160 10$ general ● $7 students/AJHS members/seniors ● $12 at the door Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “The New Colossus,” is perhaps…
Read more “Give Me Your Tired..” : Poem, 135 years old, Makes Waves
EXCERPT from Introduction: Some may ask: Why poetry? Why respond in a kind of language where meaning is not always transparent, when the subject matter of sexual abuse might rather invite language that states categorically the terms of the experience, that does not allow for misinterpretation or ambiguity? Shouldn’t this be language that gets straight…
Amy King collaborated with the Guardian to curate this collection of poems. She is the author of five books of poetry, received the 2015 WNBA award, is a founding member of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and teaches Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
The only thing I know, something I must try to communicate to the future, is that a more complex and fatal humor defines the body politic. Amy King’s “Perspective” helps illustrate just how nasty and troubling it is...
Amy King’s workshops and critiques are as intelligent and intuitive as she is. She’s introduced me to conceptual ideas that seem at first complex and perhaps over my head—but the way she breaks them down and incorporates them step by step into fun and challenging exercises makes them so accessible that I find myself pondering and using them in my own poetics again and again. I’ve worked with her several times, and I highly recommend Amy’s teaching style—learned yet lucid, erudite yet playful. She’s a joy!
—Jenn Givhan, 2015 Winner NEA in Poetry
Out of the masculine guitar-as-erection sound of rock hard hard rock there emerged two women whose voices are iconic: the cool purety of Grace Slick that soared on the updrafts generated by all that electricity to sing a drug-enhanced surreality and the hot distorted whiskey voice of Janis Joplin that, when she sang the blues of blighted love, wailed for a generation. I know I’m pushing it here, but in the music of Amy King’s voice I hear an heir to those two women.
“This, of course, comes as no surprise to those familiar with King’s work. It is uninterested in evenness and regularity. It is adroit and sharp and scream-y (often in literal caps) and rampaging. You don’t disgorge a poem entitled “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI QUEER PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY” because you are trying to lull…
EXCERPTS from “Folder“: I have given up on importance. The only things awake to awareness are things that no longer compute when we walk to banks or teach signs in classrooms to make sense of dark matter. E equals life times time times how often you find love. ~~~~ This feeling is adjacent to a…
‘Literature is against us’: In Conversation with Anne Boyer BY AMY KING If you don’t know Anne Boyer’s work, you should. She’s a fierce intellect, tremendous poet, and laudable person. I’m grateful she spent time untangling my meandering questions. Her new book, Garments Against Women, is just out from Ahsahta Press, a perfect fit for Boyer’s…
Read more ‘Literature is against us’: In Conversation with Anne Boyer
@ BOSTON REVIEW EXCERPTS (selected by readers / in random order): Poetry is dead by capitalism’s standards—it is not an obvious moneymaking venture, despite traceable employment and readings’ payoffs via the academy—and that emboldens some folks limited by capitalist blinders to herald poetry’s last breath. If Conceptual poets can sensationally spin this mythology and position themselves…
Whacked Out: A Case for the Advocacy of the Unlisted EXCERPTS: I met the place where art and life converge and began to feel—not just intellectually consider—the potential burn poetry could bring to a person’s entirety, psyche included. This “foreign” poetry was about living, conceiving, and feeling in invigorating and consciousness-inducing ways with words that…
Read more FROM POETRY MAGAZINE – Whacked Out: A Case for the Advocacy of the Unlisted
“WINGS OF DESIRE” @ POETRY MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2013 ISSUE ENJOY!
NOT SURE POETRY CAN HANDLE THIS … “POPCORN PUSSY” – A SOCIAL ODE ~~~~~ READ THE RIOT @ SIMILARPEAKS ~~~~~
“UNDERSTANDING THE POEM” “The problem flashes face forward when I want to ask the poet what she meant when she wrote poetry and she is no longer with us.” ~~~~~ DISCOVER “STOP & FRISK” @ CONNOTATION PRESS ~~~~~
Poets’ Roundtable on Person and Persona “So. This is a perversion, I think, many of us engage in, both women and men, but of course…” ~~~~~ CONT’D @ LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
PERLOFF’S RESPONSES CAN BE FOUND @ THE RUMPUS, “BEAUTY AND THE BEASTLY PO-BIZ, PART 2” OR: PART 1 OF “BEAUTY AND THE BEASTLY PO-BIZ” @ THE RUMPUS MAY BE ACCESSED HERE. AMY KING SAYS: July 27th, 2013 at 3:31 pm Hi Marjorie, While yours is an impressive oeuvre, my blog post is not framed as a review…
We are pleased to welcome acclaimed and widely published poet Amy King to Writers on Craft today. Amy King is the author of five collections of poetry: Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Antidotes for an Alibi (a Lambda Book Award finalist), all from Blazevox Books. Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want…
Baudelaire in Airports [click title] by Amy King
The WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry) List was started in December 1997 by Annie Finch with an invitation to a small group of poets, critics, and lovers of women’s poetry. These people in turn invited other people to join, and the list has grown into a well-regarded international listserve by spreading through these networks. In…
If one literary response to the 21st century cultural dislocation rooted in big data and its disruptive technologies is a “conceptual” poetics that brands itself as “uncreative writing” and sees its principal mission in terms of a kind of low-level guerilla warfare against intellectual property rights, then another, perhaps more demonstrative poetics would be one…
The gestural lyric and beyond A review of Amy King’s “I Want to Make You Safe” BARRY SCHWABSKY EXCERPT: At a time when the lyric is widely denigrated and often practiced in a defensive mode if at all, her insouciant confidence that it will serve any end is heartening. CONTINUED @ JACKET2
AMY KING 