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 ~~~~~
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
PRESS Breaking the Ice With Pints and Poetry @Wall Street Journal The first hour involved cocktails at the Housing Works Bookstore and Café in SoHo. Then there were readings by Colson Whitehead (“Sag Harbor”), Emily St. John Mandel (“The Singers Gun”) and poet Amy King, who runs a popular poetry group on Goodreads. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 20…
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.
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.
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
Roundtable @ Poetry Foundation EXCERPTS: “The quiet confidences, to me, are indicative of a larger understanding at play in the poetry world, and Lehman is only one example of such ‘powerhouses’ who seem to take advantage of that power boldly and blatantly.” ~~ “Whisper campaigns, hit jobs, passive aggressive and aggressive treatments–carried out by poets…
I was lucky to curate this feature with THESE YOUNG POETS and THEIR BRILLIANCE: “All reading is blood.” —Carrie Lorig “On the one hand, we can continue to throw our bodies at police barricades, which we’ve done. Maybe change can be achieved that way. The biggest on-the-ground protest in allof human history, 2/15/03, wasn’t sufficient to stop…
Read more Young Poets Bare All: What Is a Culture? @ Poetry Foundation
Adam Fitzgerald curated a substantial portfolio at LitHub. From his introduction: This portfolio cannot and should not be seen as a codification nor totalizing index of Asian or Asian-American poetry. Indeed, there are many incredible writers not mentioned below (Tan Lin and Srikanth Reddy are just two examples). Yet the chance to foreground just some of…
“…recognizing that women-identified poets are of intense, even transformative value, despite living in a culture that often devalues the feminine. Each writer sings out an older or no longer living poet who had a personal influence on them. What you will find is a series of anecdotes and lead-ins to the work & personhood of…
Read more Call and Response: The Gifts of Women Poets – Part 2
“…recognizing that women-identified poets are of intense, even transformative value, despite living in a culture that often devalues the feminine. Each writer sings out an older or no longer living poet who had a personal influence on them. What you will find is a series of anecdotes and lead-ins to the work & personhood of…
Read more Call and Response: The Gifts of Women Poets – Part 1
Kenneth Goldsmith reading “The Body of Michael Brown” (screenshot via @soulellis/Twitter) “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” —Denise Levertov I have written elsewhere (“Beauty and the Beastly Po-Biz”) about the empire-building taking place under the rhetoric of a liberating avant-garde vis-à-vis Conceptual Poetry as presumably helmed…
Read more WHY ARE PEOPLE SO INVESTED IN KENNETH GOLDSMITH? OR, IS COLONIALIST POETRY EASY?
@ 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…
“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 ~~~~~
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…
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…
COOPERATIVE POETRY The Rooster Moans created an online network of artists where there are no hierarchies. “It allows the students to see that, regardless of level of experience, we’re all working artists, and that being a published poet doesn’t mean that you don’t still struggle and grapple with your art, and/or obviate the need…
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 