By Harriet Staff
From Russia: Beyond the Headlines, a great review of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, which is collected on the website Big Bridge and edited by Larissa Shmailo.
Contributors include Philip Nikolayev, Vladimir Gandelsman, Katia
Kapovich, Polina Barskova, Marina Boroditskaya, Dmitry Kuzmin, Maxim
Amelin, Elena Fanailova, Mikhail Aizenberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya,
Alexander Ulanov, Ruslan Komadey, Vita Korneva, Alexander Stessin,
Andrei Sen-Senkov, Sergey Stratanovsky, Alexei Tsvetkov, Maria Rybakova,
Maria Stepanova, Alexandr Skidan, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Nariste Alieva, Felix
Chechik, Vadim Mesyats, and many more. Phoebe Taplin writes of the
anthology:
New York-based Shmailo first approached the webzine “Big
Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an ultra-contemporary anthology
of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is reaching international
audiences and there are plans to extend into a more comprehensive,
bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new
excitement about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we
are all falling in love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems
uses the timeless imagery of the wanderer: “argonaut” or “nomad,”
sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another of Kenjeev’s
bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik,
Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and
translators, but there is a rich geographical diversity too, including
writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or Colorado. The poems are recent,
written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet
dissident, one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square
Demonstration.” Others represent a new generation, like Ruslan Komadey,
born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow
“cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions
of living between the two.
[. . .]
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy,
the “accursed questions”…” Big, abstract themes may underlie them, but
the subtlest poems focus on barely visible details.
In one of Mikhail Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a
tiny moth has come awake,/ and flies like a negligible feather/
reminding me of something about you.” Alexei Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this
shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep walking in the tall grass
/ where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their
paws / only the empty bright air.”
A rich and diverse feast of contemporary verse is available in
English and slated to be released in a bilingual edition in print.
The anthology celebrates the arts of
translation as well as poetry. Pictured: Dmitry Vodennikov. Source: Olga
Salij / PhotoXpress.ru
Poetry is not well represented in the global view of Russian literature,
in part because linguistic nuances
make poems harder to translate than a story or a novel. New York-based Larissa
Shmailo, editor of a groundbreaking anthology, hopes to change all that. “Twenty-first
Century Russian Poetry” tantalizes English-speaking readers with selected poems
from fifty writers.
Russia’s literary
heritage continues to inspire today’s writers. There is an ongoing tradition of
poems about other poets. Where once Akhmatova dedicated her verses to Blok (and
vice versa), now Elena Fanailova writes about Gogol and Irina Mashinskimourns the suicide of Boris Ryzhy, a young
poet from Yekaterinburg.
In her verses “In
Nabokov’s Memory,” Katia Kapovich pays tribute to those, like Nabokov, who: “… never settled down to sink his roots/ in any
fathermotherland.” Maxim Amelin, winner of this year’s Solzhenitsyn award,
celebrates a range of cultures in his rich, allusive work: “If we wipe our memory clean / of its
lingering garbage,/ what then will ever remain?”
Fusions and borrowings are everywhere. Polina Barskova, whose latest translated collection (“The
Zoo in Winter”) had a series of poems with epigraphs from Hamlet, also favors
classical references: “filching Orpheus or fibbing Odysseus.” Catherine
Ciepiela’s translations of Barskova are a sneak preview of “Relocations,” an
anthology of poetry by women due out from Zephyr Press next month.
Ruth Fainlight’s pitch-perfect version of Maria Boroditskaya’s poem to
Cordelia, playfully subverts gender and genre. She tells the daughter of
Shakespeare’s King Lear to reject her tragic destiny: “Like a puppy,/ Pull him by the leg of his pants with
your teeth/ Into the game, into comedy!” Emigrés and wanderers
New York-based Shmailo first
approached the webzine “Big Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an
ultra-contemporary anthology of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is
reaching international audiences and there are plans to extend into a more
comprehensive, bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as
a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new excitement
about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we are all
falling in
love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems uses the
timeless imagery of the wanderer:
“argonaut” or “nomad,” sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another
of Kenjeev’s bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik, Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and
forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New
York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and translators, but there is a
rich geographical diversity too, including writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or
Colorado. The
poems are recent, written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet dissident,
one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square Demonstration.” Others represent a
new generation, like Ruslan Komadey, born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow “cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the
external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions of
living
between the two. Big themes; recurring dreams
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy, the
"accursed questions"…” Big,
abstract themes may underlie them, but the subtlest poems focus on barely visible
details.
In one of Mikhail
Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a tiny moth has come awake,/
and flies like a negligible feather/ reminding me of something about you.” Alexei
Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep
walking in the tall grass / where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their paws /
only the empty bright air.”
Maria Rybakova’s
verse-novel “Gnedich” builds on the work of its namesake poet, one-eyed, dreamy
Nikolai Gnedich and his translation of the “The Iliad.” For Rybakova, like
Lermontov and others, dreams are a recurring motif, revealing an interior
world:
“… at night,/ when the
bed was rocking/ and calling itself/ in the false language of dreams,/ 'a
boat.'” Marina Boroditskaya, in Sasha Dugdale’s powerful translation, imagines
herself judged by the “heavenly medical board” and found wanting: “You will wake as a woman again/ With winter
upon you.”
The selected poems are brief, sweet tasters from a Russian feast; in its
current form the anthology is tantalizing and uneven. It might have been useful
to list the poets in alphabetical order and to provide a fuller introduction
that would lead new readers into the text. A slight sense of exclusivity is
reinforced by Eugene Ostashevsky’s
clever version of Igor Belov’s poem about translation, where knowledge of the
original (provided in Russian) is essential to get “the inside joke.”
But these are quibbles and
Ostashevsky’s heroic puns (“Hector/ hectors. Menelaus/lays many”) are worth it. Poetry has often
been poorly translated, Shmailo explained, because the translator lacked the
poet's ear. Gathering together “many superb poets fully bilingual in Russian
and English who are also experienced translators,” Shmailo and her team have
produced something unusual and fascinating: a contemporary Russian poetry
anthology translated by poets.
Thanks to Coldfront Magazine for this great interview with me about The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses and our upcoming appearance at the New York City Poetry Festival. Representing the Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses this Sunday will be Patricia Spears Jones, Sharon Mesmer, Ron Kolm, Michael T. Young, and yours truly!
The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses
Day: Sunday
Stage: The Algonquin
Time: 1:40 PM
Interview with curator Larissa Shmailo
1. Tell us a little bit about your organization.
Founded in 1993,The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses are a loose
(sic) organization of men, women, and others who bring their wit and
wisdom to the poetic arts in their hometown of NYC. Together and
individually, the Feminist Poets have performed on behalf of Girls Write
Now, the Bread and Life Soup Kitchen, 100,000 Poets for Change, The New
York City Poetry Calendar, Share Our Strength/American Express, Poets
in Need, and just for the hell of having a good literary time. 2. Who is reading in your slot at the Festival and why?
Sharon Mesmer, because she has a book entitled Annoying Diabetic
Bitch and is the queen of flarf; Patricia Spears Jones, because she
gives us the credibility of her poetic stature; Ron Kolm, because the
Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses love the Unbearables (a drinking group
with a writing problem) which Ron founded; Michael T. Young because his
poetry is beautiful (read and listen!); and Larissa Shmailo, because I
founded the organization (my poetry is available on the Web and at the
links below).
. 3. Who else are you looking forward to seeing at the Festival?
The Poetry Brothel, Cornelius Eady, Dorothea Lasky, Todd Colby,
Miguel Algarin, and absolutely nothing can happen without Bob Holman! 4. Did you attend the festival last year? If so, what was your favorite thing about it?
Yes, reading with Susan Scutti and Yuriy Tarnawsky was a blast. 5. Why is live poetry important?
It doesn’t matter whether it is important or not: I can’t live without hearing poetry read by living poets.
I am proud to share this new online anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, which appears in the new Big Bridge edited by the visionary Michael Rothenberg.
The anthology features the work of 50 brilliant Russian poets
translated by equally gifted poets, including Boris Dralyuk,Stephanie Sandler, Alex Cigale, Philip
Nikolayev, Matvei Yankelevich, Elena Fainailova, Dmitry Kuzmin, Katia
Kapovich, Phil Metres, Maria Khotimsky, Elena Dimov, Maxim Amelin, Maria
Stepanova, James Kates, Polina Barskova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Oleg
Dozmorov, Alexander Ulanov, Sergei Gandlevsky, Irina Maximova, Alexander
Skidan,Tatiana Shcherbina, Vladimir Gandelsman, Olga Zilberbourg, Maria
Rybkova, Irina Mashinski, Alexei Tsvetkov, and many more.
I'm delighted that my poems "Vow" and "Personal" appear in the mass-market Penguin anthology Words for the Wedding. It is my first appearance in a multimillion-selling book, and I am termed a "contemporary American poet" - which is all I have ever wanted to be.
This book is a great gift for engaged couples and members of their weddings who want inspiration in selecting vows and toasts.
"The Next Big Thing” is an
international game in which writers share the news of their latest project. Pat
Fahrenfort
tagged me recently.
What is your working title of your
new poetry collection?
#specialcharacters. The title refers to the hashtags and ampersands of the
experimental work in the collection as well as to the personae, such as Mary
Magdalene, a dominatrix, a few vociferous madwomen, and a writer manquée named Ritar, that populate the
work.
Where did the idea come from for the
book?
I cut my teeth in poetry in spoken
word. I have several narrative and performance poems from that period in this
collection. More recently, I have been exploring so-called experimental forms,
including vispo, flash, and language poetry. I wondered how I could include these
disparate works in one book, and came up with the idea of a mixed genre
manuscript with a story at the end that married all the forms. So I included my
story in single sentences, “Mirror.”
What genre does your book fall
under?
It’s all poetry, but from a wide
range of poetics. “Mirror” is a send-up of many prose and poetic forms, even as
it creates a new one. For example, I do the exposition in footnotes and use the
names of real living people (who might sue me if they find out) in my
protagonist’s memoirs. And Ritar (my heroine’s name) shares her memoirs more
than a little with me.
Which actors would you choose to
play your characters in a movie rendition?
Kathleen Turner for Mary Magdalene
and the dominatrix. Johnny Depp as Ritar (he could do a female part.)
What is the one-sentence synopsis of
your book?
New form, old traum(ata).
Will your book be self-published or
represented by an agency?
The book is seeking a good home with
a press with a brilliant list and a sense of humor and adventure–I will change
the names of the villains to avoid lawsuit upon request.
How long did it take you to write
the first draft of your manuscript?
Some of the work in the book is over
ten years old, but most has been written in the past few years.
What other books would you compare
this story to within your genre?
Since I have hit almost all genres
in this book, I can only say that the genre-mixing of Ulysses was a huge influence.
Who or what inspired you to write
this book?
Joyce, as above; Nabokov; my friends
at the Facebook Otherstream writing group; Carol Novack with her genre-defying pieces.
What else about your book might
pique the reader’s interest?
I rank out the Paris Review in one poem; Mary Magdalene is a biker chick in
another. This book received an honorable mention in the Coconut Poetry Elizabeth P. Braddock Prize.
And now the blog rolls on to Annie
Pluto, poet and professor of literature and drama at Lesley University.
Please join us on Thursday, April 11, 6:00 pm, at New York City's Cornelia Street Cafe for a special sampling from the forthcoming Big Bridge Magazine anthology, "Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry," edited by Larissa Shmailo
Poets and Translators: Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, Irina Mashinski, Dana Golin, Alexander Cigale, Andrey Gritsman, Larissa Shmailo
The beautiful broadside created by Zachary Bos of Pen & Anvil Press, composed of lines from poems by Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, Therese Svoboda, Bill Yarrow, Annie Pluto, Ben Mazer, and yours truly, to commemorate our AWP reading at Lesley University.
MadHat
Presents and Unlikely Stories: Episode IV are teaming up to bring you a literary evening worth setting your clock for.
New Yorkers Alexander
Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Dana Golin, Susan Lewis, Yuko Otomo and
Larissa Shmailo will be there, bringing you visions global and interdimensional. And Jonathan Penton will be
on hand from Louisiana, drinking your oil spills and stealing your
toothpaste.
The whole thing goes down at 6:30 pm at le poisson rogue, 158 Bleeker St., New
York, in the gallery. Come recover from the AWP Conference with us, or
just gloat that you had more sense than to go!
Please visit my new Web site at www.larissashmailo.com for a complete description of my editorial, writing, translation, and social media services. Also check the "Literary Services" page for information on poetry manuscript review and submission services. (Oh, you know it's time to get published!)
MadHat Presents Live and The Pen & Anvil Press are
pleased to present:
Readings by Terese Svoboda, Ben Mazer,
Larissa Shmailo, Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, Sassan Tabatabai, Susan Lewis, Annie
Pluto, Matthew Kelsey, Ellen Adair Glassie, and Thomas
Simmons!
Featuring host Jonathan Penton reading works by Marc Vincenz and j/j hastain!
\"In a sea of mimics, this poet is an original voice.\" ---Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press
\"Shmailo reads with so much intensity, intonation, energy, in
velvety and sensual voice, that to not hear this would be a missed
experience....Shmailo is intense. She can shock, she can tickle, she can
entrance. Shmailo poetizes devils with the same skill as she weaves
words around God and Magdalene. Her poetry is as lushly sensual as it is
cutting to the bone. This is about love and pain, birth and rebirth,
fields of magnolias, and surviving the Warsaw ghetto... The slap of
shock is appropriate. This is not merely strong performance, it is also
strong in substance.\"---Zinta Aistars, The Smoking Poet
\"Larissa Shmailo does not think small. On Exorcism, she is trying
to do nothing less than exorcise the demons of human evil...While this
is the overarching theme of the Exorcism (and it is, for the most part, a
powerful and effective theme), it is not all that is going on on this
CD. There are a number of individually powerful poems here, such as “The
Gospel According to Magdalene,” “Bloom,” and “Abortion Hallucination.”
They all fit, some tightly, some loosely, into the larger theme, but
also stand well on their own.
---G. Murray Thomas, Poetix
\"The whole CD digs...bringing forth fiery, unorthodox, visceral
imagery of the Devil and Magdalena, lovers and torturers and survivors.
[Shmailo] crafts breath, rhythm, and rhyme, with a relaxed and dancerly
demeanor and natural authority. Highly recommended.\" ---Anne Elliott,
Ass Backwords
\"Exorcism, Larissa Shmailo\'s second poetry CD, displays the
remarkable range and electrifying vitality that have won her admirers
worldwide. Following fast on the release of The No-Net World, Larissa
Shmailo returns to her deepest poetic origins, and from there, reveals
an ascendancy that will mystify and astound.
Begin your Exorcism. Take hold of the promise in “Vow.” It’s yours.
It asks you to join the “people who fought and won” in “Warsaw Ghetto,”
where you’ll find your singing strength. The witty and defiant “Dancing
with the Devil” leads you to learn “How to Meet and Dance with Your
Death.” This fiery and original narrative is fit only for real
explorers. Heed the admonitions to avert unnecessary demons, see the
sweaty face of your own Reaper, and know \"after that, you will never
fear him again, nor seek him.\" The hauntingly seductive puissance in
“He follows her . . .” yields to a caboodle of ghosts surveying a
ghostly city in Shmailo’s sparkling translation of “Dante” by Anna
Ahkmatova.
As illusions of death wane, you will feel the pleasure and pain of
“My First Hurricane.” Then get “Personal” with longing for knowledge of
the beloved. Power returns in the gorgeous “The Gospel According to
Magdalene,” a manifesto of might, whose structural elements are slyly
subverted by sampling. Get under the tongue-in-cheek “Skin,” a grunge
hymn, and emerge somewhere on “Catawissa Road,” where a skewering
Penelope grudgingly meshes with a mad Odysseus. Overcome distaste for
arid wastes when “Ayah” asks why a surplus of sand covers everything
bland.
The still center is “Bhakti,” Shmailo’s homage to tenth-century
mystic poet Mahadevi-Akka, who worshiped the \"Lord White as Jasmine,\" a
destroyer of illusions who offers salvation repeatedly, from world to
world. The savage art song, “Bloom” invokes Colette, Sand, and James
Joyce and the lives of working women throughout the ages.
You may be well schooled by the “Rules of Reflection,” yet there
are perils ahead. This is, after all, an exorcism. A demonic maternal
phantasmagoria scolds in “At the Top of My Lungs,” twisting its
enigmatic wreath of fears and death. But hold your tears—and your
breath—for “Abortion Hallucination,” a lyric hell of loss and blackest
light. Survive its strife. Let “New Life 2” bring you back to life.
Shmailo’s imaginative and noetic variation on a theme by Nobel laureate
Joseph Brodsky sifts for signification in catastrophe, inspired by
escaping the great trapping fire of war. For more to scale, there’s
“Mapping” and, with urbane wit, finding “a use for all that doesn’t
fit.”
Engage interior doom and sacred terrain in “Exorcism,” a syncretic
chant, part found-poem, part puzzle, part indictment, and part prayer
for social justice. If you want, you can fly full circle to “Vow.” Play
that first track again, and you have drawn a perfect circle—that hardest
of artist’s tasks—accomplished by this poet of intense musical,
imaginative, and thematic variety. Possess yourself. Repeat as needed.
You stand on holy ground.\" - Eric Yost
MadHat Presents (formerly the “Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes” reading series of Mad Hatters’ Review) and Unlikely Stories: Episode IV (grandchild of Unlikely Stories and overbearing spouse of Unlikely Books) are teaming up to bring you a literary afternoon of weirdness, whimsy, and complete unpredictability!
New Yorkers Alexander Cigale, Dana Golin, Susan Lewis, Peter Marra and Larissa Shmailo will be there, bringing you visions and images from alien imaginations, global and interdimensional. Joel Lewis will be joining us from New Jersey, with a suitcase of thoughtful analyses and careful observations. Jonathan Penton will be on hand from Louisiana, drinking your oil spills and stealing your toothpaste. And Marc Vincenz will be joining us all the way from Zurich, with his searing and sophisticated cosmologies and romanticism.
The whole thing goes down at Sidewalk, 94 Avenue A, New York, AT 3:30 PM, where the beers are buy-one-get-one-free refill on Saturday afternoons! And after our read, stick around for a Boog City Literary event at 6pm!
Note: This article appeared in the Drunken Boat blog on January 12, 2013
Experimental Poetries in the 21st Century — A Foray
by Larissa Shmailo
In a world threatened by climate change, teetering economies, and war, the landscape of experimental poetry (or poetries) in the 21th century is responding with its traditional stance of épater/engager by any-and-every means possible le bourgeois, and challenging every lexical and hyperlexical convention. But is it a contracting or expanding universe, and is it the same universe as ours, or a parallel one, or one that does not even glance at our own? What does experimental poetry seek, if it seeks at all, today?
Today, Poetry magazine has opened its doors to poets who may not have found a home there previously, publishing the likes of Charles Bernstein, Forrest Gander, and Rae Armantrout. But is experimental poetry a luxury enterprise, to be coopted by the mainstream? Or is it to be supplanted by the spoken word heritors to the folk and protest song? Or is it the very heart of an art which can provide a new thinking we can bring to our problems and perceptions?
In the 21st century, overlapping sites of activity in experimental poetry have emerged: Charles Bernstein delineates some of the movements: “Multilectical, site-specific/fieldwork; conceptual/flarf; ecopoetics; constraint-based (constructivist) work, ESL (writing in English by those from non-English regions, via web-intensified global affinity clusters); poetry in programmable media; and sound/performance in/as recording (especially the use of digital sound archives such as PennSound and UbuWeb). Newly emerging in the broad area of “bent poetics” are disability and the defamiliar body, identity formations as textual medium, nude formalism, “junk space,” ambiance, sprung lyric, mixed/syncretic poetic genre, modular prose, and ongoing collaborations with music and the visual arts. “
Sharon Mesmer states: “The most important trends/contributions are probably aligned to the Language-based multiplicities, where the reader was as much of a participant in the poem as the poet, and the strategy-based borrowings, where a foundation was laid that allowed the poet to relinquish hierarchical control, being inflected by humor and the slight return to narrative.”
The late Carol Novack, the publisher of Madhatter’s Review commented, “The landscapes I find most intriguing are populated by poetic writers playing with ‘theatrical play/dialogue,’ ‘narrative,’ digital technological forms, interweaving, connecting, and contrasting text (read or recited)with music and visual art , words unloosened from fetters to formulaic versions of poetic paradigms, writers stretching their wings in collaboration with artists of other genres, or attempting various genres within the same project.”
And what does all this mean to experimental poetry’s writers / readers / audience / victims / perpetrators / partners?
Bernstein speaks to the need for poetry’s constant motion, like a shark per Woody Allen’s definition of a growing love relationship in Annie Hall. Poetry, says Bernstein, is “always moving beyond the ‘experimental’ to the untried, necessary, newly forming, provisional, inventive. Innovation is not so much something you can map as that which resists those maps.” Bernstein often states: “Poetry is a fertilizer, not a tool,” a groundbase for “moving beyond experiment to textual action.”
Geoffrey Gatza, editor of the experimental press BlazeVox Books, comments on the umbrella of writing that is experimental, or what Ron Silliman would term “post-avant,” saying, “There is no grouping or school of poets working towards a goal in experimental writing… Each writer is… reluctant to be a part of one group working towards one idea.” Gatza, whose press includes an eclectic mix of today’s experimental voices, adds, that as always, “The experimental is open to its successes and it is open to glorious failures in the most exciting of ways, ways that traditional poetry can only sound like a beginning violinist attacking a violin.”
Editor Jeff Hansen, formerly of the web-based Experimental Poetry and Fiction, and now the online journal and blog Altered Scale, speaks about computer poetry and Issue 1, the Dada-esque sendoff of poetic vanities and one of the best examples of search engine optimization techniques of 2008. In it, Jim Carpenter’s poetry algorithm, Erica T. Carter (ETC), wrote and published an anthology of “new work” by 4,000-plus leading poets. Says Hansen: “Issue 1 is a wonderful work (and) it’s provenance as poetry is not in dispute. Loss Glazier would say if Language is code, then Code should be treated as language… It is all very exciting, the anger, the congratulations, and the other forms this discussion has taken. And no matter the outcome, it gets poets talking who may not have reason to talk before.”
Mesmer notes that today, using the Internet, communities of writers can now function as “temporary autonomous zones.” (TAZ is a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey in his book of the same name, meaning “temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control”). Mesmer says: “We think of writing communities (the Beats, the New York School Poets, Black Mountain – you name ‘em) as groups of poets who hung out together physically in bars, bookstores, cafes, all-night diners, etc… But now, as the flarf collective has proven, they can exist in cyber-space as well, where poets communicate and collaborate as they do in temporal- space. This, of course, both adds and subtracts a dimension from the experimental toolbox.”
The Flarf movement, less a school or a set of poets, and more of a method with an end game in sight, includes Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Kasey Mohammad, Rodney Konekee, Michael Magee, and Mesmer. Mesmer explains that the Flarf collective “has used the opportunities afforded by technology to continue Language’s non-hierarchical narrator impulse by using debased Internet language to create poems and thus accomplish two things via technology: taking on narrators that even we ourselves might not embrace, thus truly eluding the formal control structures of our own personal choices.”
Speaking to the use of technology in experimental poetry, Bernstein notes that “the several-thousand-years-old alphabet remains our fundamental technology, with the printing press creating a seismic change some 500 years ago. In the last 150 years we are living in the age of electronic/digital reproduction (tape recorders, radio, typewriters, computers, the internet), which changes the function of poetry in and for the culture, and so everything about poetry.” However: “This is not a choice an individual poet makes but a condition we all are in. And much of the most interesting poetry of the past 150 years, and the past year, reveals the technological unconscious of our time and space.” With Star Trek’s Borg, Bernstein warns that, to these movements, “Resistance is futile.”
Novack added, “I see the looming present future as a melting pot of voices disrobed of the tired necessity of typecasting and classification. I embrace multimedia events and online journals that promote authors who play with amazing evolving technology as if it were clay, who utilize the new communicative forms the Internet offers.”
Daniel Nester of Soft Skull Press takes issue with Bernstein’s discussions of “official verse culture” and Ron Silliman’s “grabbing people’s eyeballs” with the notion of post-avant and the School of Quietude. “These poets and others aren’t the first to make their mark by setting up other perceived aesthetics as straw man counterarguments. But that doesn’t mean it advances the art of poetry in any way.” Nester reiterates Wallace Stevens’ statement that “all poetry is experimental…if it is lively, if it is doing its job; poetry presents new coinages, mindsets, shorthands, portmanteaus, neologisms… Twitter poets are the new haiku. Can you say what you want to say in 140 characters or fewer? There’s your new variable foot!”
It has often been noted that experimental poetry speaks to change and uncertainty, also a current in Modernism. Which, as Sharon Mesmer points out, begs the question: Has nothing really changed since Modernism? Mesmer continues: “And if Modernism reflected/spoke to uncertainly, instability, fracturedness, and we’re now supposed to be getting past all that (if only because “been there, done that”) — what comes next? Certainty, cohesiveness, stasis? I don’t think so, since the basic state of humanity is not those things. But I do think there is a general impetus to heal, remake and renew right now, and so it’ll be interesting to see how poetry will roll with those ideas.”
Mesmer concludes, “The 21st century landscape seems to be a post-everything territory, fertile with possibility.” She concludes: “Whatever that New Thing’s going to be we can’t really know at this point, but it’s safe to say it will carry the indelible stamp of whatever came before but with a mind to completely redefining it (which has always been poetry’s way anyway).
Note: These interviews were conducted in 2009, and the opinions of the interviewees may well have morphed, as experimental poetry does each day, month, and year. However, this archeology of contemporary seekings in word, sight, sound, material, time, and space still has descriptive value, and is submitted in that spirit. It is not meant to trample or ignore any seedlings of the past four years.
My poetry, CD, Exorcism, is on sale! Buy the CD with jewel case NOW for only $12.99 or in MP3 for $9.99! Single tracks $0.99.
Features "Warsaw Ghetto," "How to Meet and Dance with Your Death," Anna Akhmatova, "My First Hurricane," "He follows her," and much more! Original music composed and performed by guitarist Bobby Perfect.
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Video trailer for EXORCISM:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnnIz-_mUg"
"In a sea of mimics, this poet is an original voice.\" ---Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press
\"Shmailo reads with so much intensity, intonation, energy, in velvety and sensual voice, that to not hear this would be a missed experience....Shmailo is intense. She can shock, she can tickle, she can entrance. Shmailo poetizes devils with the same skill as she weaves words around God and Magdalene. Her poetry is as lushly sensual as it is cutting to the bone. This is about love and pain, birth and rebirth, fields of magnolias, and surviving the Warsaw ghetto... The slap of shock is appropriate. This is not merely strong performance, it is also strong in substance.\"---Zinta Aistars, The Smoking Poet
\"Larissa Shmailo does not think small. On Exorcism, she is trying to do nothing less than exorcise the demons of human evil...While this is the overarching theme of the Exorcism (and it is, for the most part, a powerful and effective theme), it is not all that is going on on this CD. There are a number of individually powerful poems here, such as “The Gospel According to Magdalene,” “Bloom,” and “Abortion Hallucination.” They all fit, some tightly, some loosely, into the larger theme, but also stand well on their own.
---G. Murray Thomas, Poetix
\"The whole CD digs...bringing forth fiery, unorthodox, visceral imagery of the Devil and Magdalena, lovers and torturers and survivors. [Shmailo] crafts breath, rhythm, and rhyme, with a relaxed and dancerly demeanor and natural authority. Highly recommended.\" ---Anne Elliott, Ass Backwords
\"Exorcism, Larissa Shmailo\'s second poetry CD, displays the remarkable range and electrifying vitality that have won her admirers worldwide. Following fast on the release of The No-Net World, Larissa Shmailo returns to her deepest poetic origins, and from there, reveals an ascendancy that will mystify and astound.
Begin your Exorcism." - Eric Yost
The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses
MadHat Presents (formerly the “Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes” reading series of Mad Hatters’ Review) and Unlikely Stories: Episode IV (grandchild of Unlikely Stories and overbearing spouse of Unlikely Books) are teaming up to bring you a literary afternoon of weirdness, whimsy, and complete unpredictability!
