Etcetera Poetry

01/05/2024

New issue and poems from Oscar Oswald!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/oscar-oswald

feat. Moscow, Idaho, "a strange, backwards man living in a panhandle," "the category 'experimental'//"a white adobe wall," being led to the wrong conclusions by logical deduction, "a Welsh apocryphal mystic nationalistic warrior poet from the sixth century," Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Creeley, Taliesin, the Exeter Book of Riddles University of California Press Nightboat Books University of Idaho English

"a place in depth no deeper than a spritz
out from a bottle onto skin,
a touch light contact
limb to limb"

“It’s Creeley's duty to the commons — to all that is available of emotional, intuitive perception — that pressures me and pushes me when I’m in a lull. I think he gives us the license to be people speaking in our poems not notions of people or themes of people but us with our intangibles a...

11/16/2023

New post and poems from Marty Cain

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/marty-cain

feat. drinking the poetry Kool-Aid/ acid trips, agricultural labor, spiders, and death/ small-town New Hampshire/ small-press poetry//DIY punk/ "redundancy as the empty churches/of Bloomington give way to prairie/grain elevators anatomically rupture/WET AND GOLD and SPREAD OUT like concrete bruises or/nurtured monoliths of horniness in rain as green disentangles"/ Larry Levis/B. R. Yeager / Andrea Abi-Karam/

Pitt Poetry Series Apocalypse Party Kelsey Street Press Action Books Cornell Department of Literatures in English Garden-Door Press

“I have a very clear memory of ordering Levis’s Winter Stars and walking to the campus post office to pick it up; I read a pretty big chunk of it while walking home, and by the time I got back to my dorm, I’d decided I wanted to read everything he’d written.”

08/14/2023

New post and poems by Stephen Collis, feat. "a counter-weight, a path of disturbances and disorientations" ; "material reminders" ; "some of the more beautiful melancholic prose that's ever been written" ; the middle section of Purgatory ; "no place for the / sun’s light to pass / shadow rend / the clear sky / united" ; Susan Howe, Matthew James Weigel, W. G. Sebald, Dante. New Directions Coach House Books New York Review Books Talonbooks

“When I read Black’s translation […], I noticed how much Purgatory is a poem of displacement, migration, and the search for refuge: everyone is in motion (Dante sometimes has to run alongside the shades in order to speak to them), everyone striving for the shore or the heights of the mountain ...

08/11/2023

06/06/2023

New issue from Valerie Hsiung!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/valerie-hsiung

feat. the world's smallest slinky, "mak[ing] something heard out of something so silent," "not [being] interested in being contemporary in the slightest," "the land of foolishness and bewilderment," "the waywardness of common language,"

"in this era many believe / they do not have to suffer / shadows more than over the grass / as the walker walks over / all we have is pace / a direction / this is the style of our hunting,"

Robert Hayden, Shirley Jackson, Ma Yan

(Ugly Duckling Presse; Counterpath; Essay Press; Action Books; Cleveland State University Poetry Center)

(& don't forget you can sign up for the email newsletter on the "About" page of Etceterapoetry.com)

“Hayden writes about something that I understood in my bones, the coldness and fear and loneliness of a home, but had never talked about to anyone nor heard anyone else speak about, at least not in any way that felt real: feeling a kind of shame and then feeling a kind of shame for one’s shame. ...

03/30/2023

March issue is here! With new readings and poems from Cass Eddington: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/cass-eddington

feat. Felicia Rose Chavez, Robert Glück, Agnes Varda, Cecelia Vicuña, 5 desks in 2 years, "messiness as a method to escape self-doubt and repetition as a method for lowering the stakes of creation," "excessive enthusiasm, a necessary dumb faith in order to imagine alternatives," "the creative resistance necessary to Western rationalism," "the quiet cipher, the engraver / wielding ink and needle in lamplight / composing in the querent’s skin / the body of a ruminant, my own mind / turning itself over and over in the folds / the quire waiting for its holes/ the singer waiting for the choir / the choir waiting for the chorus / for the performance to come together" Haymarket Books, New York Review Books, The New York Review of Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Lighthouse Writers Workshop

“[Kempe’s] fanaticism for achieving sainthood and erotic consummation with Jesus mirrors that of Glück’s impossible (because unrequited) love for his lover L. No stranger to fanaticism (cf. a settler-colonialist pioneer ancestry based in narratives of martyrdom and self-abnegation), I recogni...

03/10/2023

We've purloined a tiny corner of the table at the AWP bookfair (1622) -- come say hi!

02/22/2023

New post and poems from Michelle Gil-Montero feat. “sounds that bounce, distort, deviate wildly from the speaker’s persona and drive to communicate,” “translation coming in and revealing limitations in the receiving literary scene,” uncannily Moure Moure’s Bueno, “a ‘tangle web webtangle,’” “Placiest places I can muster,” Lorine Niedecker, Alejandra Pizarnik, Wilson Bueno, Yvette Siegert, Erín Moure, New Directions, Nightboat Books. Michelle was recommended by previous contributor Abigail Chabitnoy!

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/michelle-gil-montero

You can also subscribe to the Etcetera Poetry email mailing list here to receive notifications over email: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/about

“As the marafona’s confessions and non-confessions cross-write the story, far more interesting than ‘what (really) happened’ are the fascinations of an interpretive universe in which contradictions pile up. I love how this piling, rather than feel futile or overwhelming-in-a-bad-way, pulls u...

02/07/2023

We have a (relatively new) mailing list! Sign up to get one email a month when a new issue launches!

About Etcetera wants to show the links between reading and poetic practice. It is a series of brief, personal writing about reading from practicing poets, telling about a few books that they remember, that have been important to them. It wants to ask what poetry new or old a poet has found significa...

01/18/2023

New poem and post from Kenning JP Garcia, feat. winged octopuses, the extemporaneous, having a thesis but not coming to a conclusion, NahNahism, E. M. Cioran/True Detective/Eugene Thacker, Leslie Scalapino, David Antin, Nicanor Parra, André Breton // "eidolon. a double unlife." // "the pisstake of missing the point" // "fireworks and playing with fire. and though the bush was burning it was not consumed. sweat on the brow. musty smells rising from the passing crowds. it's a celebration. it's a mourning. it's a gathering. it's just another workday."
Zero Books WEST VINE PRESS

“Nicanor Parra is the author of Poemas y antipoemas (1954). […] He had a particular disdain for certain aspects of poetry and sought to push back against those conventions. I follow in those footsteps […]. Similar to another Chilean poet, Vincente Huidobro, who founded the Creationism school o...

11/15/2022

New post and poems from Kelly Clare feat. the poor image//Hito Steyerl, the "synaptic, metonymic compression" of Susan Howe's collage poems, "edible poems (mostly pancakes)," Jen Bervin's SILK POEMS, a gallery full of potatoes//Agnès Varda, the almost-too-vulnerable, oranges, Mary Ruefle, Inger Christensen, Monica Berlin// "I tried spelling the cloud in potatoes" [...] "but we all just ate the shape anyway--" etc. etc. (MASS MoCA; Nightboat Books; e-flux)

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/kelly-clare

& you can subscribe to the Etcetera Poetry email list here for one update monthly announcing the new issue:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/about

“Work like [the silk biosensor] iteration of Silk Poems reminds me of how far I can push a poetic practice, where language can reside. At various points, I’ve made edible poems (mostly pancakes), interested in how the digested pancake letter ‘L’ becomes part of the human body on a molecular ...

10/29/2022

If you're in the NYC area, check out recent Etc. featured poet Jen Scappettone's exhibit at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island!

“I had this elaborate theory of [Theordore Enslin’s] “walking” habits, and I presented it at the National Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry of the 1960s” at the University of Maine. I was well into the paper when an éminence grise (it turned out to be Albert Gelpi) asked, “Well, Ted, what...

10/24/2022

We're back after this summer's hiatus with a new issue -- two new poems from Matthew Cooperman as well as writing on Theodore Enslin, Jen Scappettone, and Joan Naviyuk Kane, feat.: Ted Enslin's walking stick; the Long Island Expressway; "third landscapes"; "hyperboreality"; "agate stone my own / I take from you Lorine"; "turning upside down the world tree of Yggdrasil." Colorado Review National Poetry Foundation

“I had this elaborate theory of [Theordore Enslin’s] “walking” habits, and I presented it at the National Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry of the 1960s” at the University of Maine. I was well into the paper when an éminence grise (it turned out to be Albert Gelpi) asked, “Well, Ted, what...

02/21/2022

New post and two poems from Joe Hall up, featuring Lays potato chips, ten hour shifts at an industrial printing press, being objectively adrift, a CD of a Myung Mi Kim reading at a gas station in Woodbridge, Virginia, representing work//“what work does to our whole lives”, archive-diving, maps, erasure, bursts of binary code, diagrams, company documents, snippets of conversation, gorgeous cinches of sound and sense, revolutionary timing, John Weiners, Myung Mi Kim, Karen Brodine, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Samuel R. Delany, Milton, “Vetiver, retweeted lavender,” “the Niagara, the canal, deposits of capital.” (Black Sparrow Press, Brenda Hillman, Tripwire: a journal of poetics, Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (PAWA) Dusie Press)

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/joe-hall

“The DC-area anarchist poet Wade Fletcher (author of the Dusie chapbook Snitch Culture) used to listen to a CD of a Myung Mi Kim reading while working at a gas station in Woodbridge, Virginia after midnight in 2006, 2007. Imagine it among the racks of Lay’s potato chips, the boxes of ci******es ...

12/14/2021

New post and two new poems from Rob McLennan! Feat. a decade holding the reprint rights to the work of a poet first read in high school, "dark yellow fields / of wild mustard," a puppet, Ottawa's Chinatown, "THOT J BAP," office stacks vs. bookshelves, “the economy / of green grass,” “the amenity of dailyness,” writing openly about grief, George Bowering, John Newlove, Susan Howe, Joshua Beckman, Renée Sarojini Saklikar. (McClelland & Stewart, New Directions, Penguin Random House Canada, Wave Books, Talonbooks, Nightwood Editions)

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/rob-mclennan

“There are handfuls of books I try to keep close at hand at any given time, knowing how often I might return to them. […] Why is there a puppet on the floor? Occasionally the shelves overwhelm. Only today, our five year old suggested I need to give away some of my books. I must have one hundred ...

11/19/2021

Etcetera Poetry is pleased to announce its The Pushcart Prize nominations! Allyson Paty, "In the Allée," Philip Matthews, "After Apologizing," Toby Altman, from "Essay on Ornament," Bronwen Tate, "Tyranny of the Particular," Abigail Chabitnoy "Uncertainty Principle," and Dan Beachy-Quick, "Archive, Academy, Library." Good luck to our nominees!

11/15/2021

New post! A new poem from Dan Beachy-Quick and reflections on John Donne, H.D., Inger Christensen, accuracy, first books, "the new, ancient sun," logics that exceed the poem: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/dan-beachy-quick

"In white lines the invisible whole already built
When from the sky the white gray cloud falls
The gulls swallow the city and fly away
Of the birds what is it that is known"
--from "Archive, Academy, Library"

“I think H.D.’s Sea Garden is as fine a first book of poems as the last century produced. . . . I hardly know what to say about it. There is a quality of thought and feeling, of actual vision in the midst of allegorizing itself, a sense that the hour is equally eternity, and eternity equally an ...

10/18/2021

New poems and post from Abigail Chabitnoy on framing questions, keeping company, crossing genres, white space, sound, forgotten names.

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/abigail-chabitnoy

“In Dark Traffic especially, Kane sets a scene through her command of pacing and sonic dissonance. If consolation is ‘the small gesture of sound,’ Kane writes defiantly into the wind, the howl, and the dive, weaving both reckoning and conjuring while invoking historical violences not yet redre...

09/17/2021

Bronwen Tate shares two poems from her forthcoming first book, plus reflections on Yeats's "The Stolen Child," Canadian folksinger Loreena McKennit's "The Stolen Child," "what it feels like to be addressed or not addressed," chores, first poems, and gardener-classicists in this month's issue of Etcetera: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/bronwen-tate

“I took a trip to Greece where I was supposed to stay with relatives of a colleague of my dad, but they misunderstood when I was planning to come and weren’t home when I arrived in Athens at age 16 alone! Long story short, I ended up spending a week with a woman named Debbie who taught English there. We swam, ate yogurt and honey, listened to her Beatles records. She also played me a Loreena McKennitt version of Yeats’ “The Stolen Child,” and I think she must have had a book of Yeats as well because I remember reading “The Stolen Child” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” and then buying a book of Yeats myself shortly after.”

(Preorders of Bronwen's forthcoming book available here btw! https://www.bronwentate.com/book)

“I took a trip to Greece where I was supposed to stay with relatives of a colleague of my dad, but they misunderstood when I was planning to come and weren’t home when I arrived in Athens at age 16 alone! Long story short, I ended up spending a week with a woman named Debbie who taught English t...

08/19/2021

New poem and post from Toby Altman feat. cassette tapes, Elizabeth Bishop, and the desert: https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/altman

“I could not say, exactly, what I learned from listening to Bishop, over and over again, as my father drove across the west in his green Suburban—a car he purchased from my mother’s ex-boyfriend, then refused to sell, reasoning it had done enough damage already to the earth and should be quietly retired from its consumption of fossil fuels. I did not learn anything particular or nameable—some specific aspect of the craft. I learned something more permanent than that.”

"And the pigeons nesting in a bed of nails—
So much of what is seen and said
being lost to metaphor, therefore,
once again, on the roof of the City Museum,
St. Louis, pigeons nesting in a bed of nails,
this day, February 29th, 2020."

“I could not say, exactly, what I learned from listening to Bishop, over and over again, as my father drove across the west in his green Suburban—a car he purchased from my mother’s ex-boyfriend, then refused to sell, reasoning it had done enough damage already to the earth and should be quiet...

08/07/2021

Etcetera mention on Above/Ground Press blog! http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2021/08/some-author-activity-brink-norris.html

Kōan Anne Brink has some new work up in the Spotlight series ; Ken Norris' recent reading for mouse eggs has been posted to YouTube ; Summe...

07/15/2021

New post and poems from Philip Matthews! Thank you, Philip, for the idiosyncratic intimacy of your offerings here.

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/matthews

A sample:

“Each time I read Acid Virga (Archway Editions), 2020) I think, who IS this person? even as my brain knows it’s Gabe (Gabriel Kruis), among the dearest people to me on earth. I think we’re meant to feel this sense of remove, like we’re encountering the poet’s reflection (projected, astral, film-like) as he traverses memory, drugged perception, forwarding verse, inducing waves of euphoria and despair in the heart and mind.”

“Each time I read Acid Virga (Archway Editions, 2020) I think, who IS this person? even as my brain knows it’s Gabe (Gabriel Kruis), among the dearest people to me on earth. I think we’re meant to feel this sense of remove, like we’re encountering the poet’s reflection (projected, astral, ...

06/23/2021

Etcetera is a new forum interested in situating poetic practice in its contexts, especially those of reading. Each month, we'll publish a few new poems by a poet as well as writing from that poet on a handful of books/poems/or other works that have been important to them, and usually we'll include a photo of where their work of reading and writing happens as well.

Reading about reading is reading about writing, and Etcetera hopes to trace a path between reading and writing, a way towards discovering new old works you might want to read.

Many thanks to Allyson Paty for this generous, candid inaugural contribution:

https://www.etceterapoetry.com/currentpost/apaty

“It wasn’t “The Highwayman” I liked but Anne’s recitation of it in the CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which I watched as a very young child, before I was even really literate.”

06/23/2021