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…
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.
‘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…
@ 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
“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…
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…
Authors on Artists: Amy King on Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo Paint Is the Abyss’ Law, Living the Accent: Marginalia on Absorption Paint Is the Secretion of Scene on Leonor Fini’s Set I now confer status on you. As in, everything is as good as the next thing. Better yet, in this season,…
Harriet @ Poetry Foundation remarks, “you’ve got to check out Esque Mag Issue 3 … It’s beautiful.” Announcing Esque (click!) For the third issue of esque, REVOLUTIONESQUE, we asked you to tell us about the revolution. We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district…
Read more 108 Beads per Rosary + 108 Poets per REVOLUTIONESQUE
*Click for Poetry Workshop Info* The Rooster Moans: Poetry Cooperative Dates: July 8 – August 4, 2012 For as long as we can remember, poets have addressed the sun and moon, distant lovers and heroes, while also separately singing odes to the gods. The Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington once said, “We learn about the soul,…
The new issue of Evening Will Come is up: A roundtable on poetry and race, featuring Francisco Aragón, Jaswinder Bolina, Veronica Golos, Amy King, J. Michael Martinez, Farid Matuk, Evie Shockley, Juliana Spahr, Orlando White, and Timothy Yu. Here: http://www.eveningwillcome.com/issue10-raceroundtable-p1.html “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” –Alice Walker
“NECESSARY INSTINCT“ @ Harp & Altar Roseanne Carrara Curses To a Translator of Horace The End of the Novel Andy Fitch from Island Freshly Raked The Cloisters Apartments for Sale Geometry of the Lemon Jimmy Carter Attitude Eileen G’Sell Sunday Blanket Praise Amy King Necessary Instinct Jesse Lichtenstein Cause Effect Stephen Sturgeon Three Elegies for…
“That’s what inspires me — people still at work, and dreaming.” READ MORE AT VIDA: WOMEN IN LITERARY ARTS (CLICK HERE)
So The New Yorker publishes poetry, which falls within the domain of the Literary Arts. (I didn’t claim it was always good poetry…) And today, my friend Ben Evans tells me he has now signed on to write about the arts on Huffington Post. Ariana Huffington posted a big note announcing how HuffPo is all-inclusive…
Amy wrote: “If every poet were to record just one book of poems that they loved for the rest of us to listen to, and not just their own poems, how excellent would that be?” I’m picking up positive reactions to this idea in different online venues today. One representative observation: Now that wouldn’t be…
WHAT IT ISN’T… Over the past few days, there has been a flurry of recent debate on the Gurlesque (see my post below). Numerous contradictions, conflations, and confusions abound, coupled with not a lot of resolution or agreement regarding what has cumulatively “taken place” vis a vis the book itself (Ana Bozicevic touches on this…
Giorgio de Chirico So I bought Nights of Naomi and found this poem: THE FRAGILITY OF MARQUEES Ten Tibetan lesbians join hands to form the beautiful skingraft called sleep With bare hands of flood they caress the yellow machinery floating out of my ears Because just as the holding hands is burned up in the…
Ana “bought” (supported? inspired? incentived?) a poem from Molly Gaudry – it rocks! Worth the cash-o-line? You decide: YOU ARE ONE BAD MAMA JAMA, MISS ALABAMA for Amy King and Ana Božičević Hitching home, I hear her holler and honk, and when I turn she pulls over and parks, levels her gauzy eyes on my…
The “I Like Amy King A Lot” Interview FIND OUT: * You’re very involved in participating in the poetry community. What motivates you to be involved with so many projects? What do you get from all your projects? * What is your best coping mechanism for the AWP experience? Do you enjoy participating in the…
David Green, NYC Subway Poet Initial Query So I commissioned a female artist not long ago to make some dolls of my partner-in-crime, Ana, and myself. I was thrilled when they arrived. But their arrival got me to thinking, especially in relation to the film, “Who Does She Think She Is?” — How many of…
EXCERPTS in response to my “The What Else” essay: That is, it is not shaped by a coherent/canonized value system that’s purposed ideologically against a heteronormative poetic tradition… It should exist outside the power structure that contains that discourse, but become accessible by readerly politicized positions… Queerness haunts the machine, articulating differences. We don’t know what…
AMY KING 