This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like, Click Here to Enter!

Our third forum is up on Delirious Lapel, where each day this week you will find new responses.

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like



In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like. This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, we've curated This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like. We hope you'll visit, read, comment, & enjoy!

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
    & Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, & David Lau


Upcoming Forums:
December: 2009 Advent Kalendar (check out 2008's!)
January: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like, round 2

Jennifer Karmin & Bernadette Mayer on Neutrinos

Poetry and science. The etymology of the clitoris. The unnameable. The undefinable. We read our newly finished poems in the living room to Philip Good and Hector the dog. Phil took a picture.

-- Jennifer Karmin

The most difficult poetry assignment I ever envisioned is to write a 10-line poem about neutrinos with alternating lines containing a metaphor and a gerund. Here are Jennifer Karmin’s & my, Bernadette Mayer’s groundbreaking neutrino poems.

-- Bernadette Mayer



vital statistics of neutrinos

a neutrino is form and content
neutrinos enjoy exhaling the universe at 3:15am

a neutrino is ideas and solutions
neutrinos practice writing buckminster fuller poetry

a neutrino is mental ingenuity
neutrinos believe in fighting against inanimate slavery

a neutrino is a trillion trillion trillion clitorises
neutrinos escape interacting with the speed of light

a neutrino is the great experiment
neutrinos hate sniffing gravitational glue


by Jennifer Karmin



A NEUTRINO CASINO

a lepton, the neutrino is a clitoris
to us, a clit, maneuvering
past the explosion, neutrally, not neutralizing
it is a scandinavian country
taking no part in anything moving
a conscientious objector
unwilling to be party to any collision
but, a secretary of state, she has some weight
you know she has been being there
over two hundred trillion trillion trillion massless earths
are passing through the sun every second
not to speak of you, you muon monster!

p.s. if i say to my sister: i’m not me
i’m a neutrino, passing through you
is she still the same?


by Bernadette Mayer




Jennifer Karmin has published, performed, exhibited, taught, and experimented with language in many forms. During the summer of 2009, she presented a durational performance on Buckminster Fuller at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and a live improvisation of her text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice at The French Broad Institute of Time and the River. She also spent one week writing, reading, and laughing with Bernadette Mayer.

Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967, she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh, and worked as Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. She is also known for her wonderful dancing. Her latest collection of writing is titled Poetry State Forest (New Directions).

O SAY CAN YOU SEE

Nonverbal Reviews and Adaptations of Women's Poetry


Mina Loy, Surreal Scene

1. Deborah Poe birds & beads Kate Schapira
   
2. Anna Lena Phillips boots, bottles, buttons Molly Tenenbaum
   
3. Melissa Severin tucks Emma Rossi, Elizabeth Barbato, Suzanne Heyd, and Daniela Olszewska
   
4. Krista Franklin opens a window on Linda Susan Jackson
   
5. Krista Franklin gilds Ruth Ellen Kocher
   
6. Abi Stokes collages Matthea Harvey
7. Tyler Flynn Dorholt splices Sandy Florian, Joyelle McSweeney, Laura Solórzano, and Kim Hyesoon
8. Jennifer Karmin street teams Kristin Prevallet
9. Daniela Olszewska puts a bow on Chelsey Minnis
10. Christine Neacole Kanownik horses around with Jennifer Scappettone
11. Janet Snell goes Dickinson on Nanette Rayman-Rivera

Original Call for Work

What book, chapbook, performance, or poem by a woman poet published/presented in the last year or two has left you speechless? How might that speechlessness manifest itself visually, sonically, or through another nonverbal medium?

Please create a response to this piece; your response can act like a review, adaptation, homage, investigation, companion piece, Frankenstein, child, or any mash-up of the aforementioned. In September 2009, all responses submitted will be featured as part of a forum here on Delirious Hem.

Curated by K. Lorraine Graham and Becca Klaver.

Deborah Poe Birds & Beads Kate Schapira

for Kate Schapira, in response to her hand/homemade book Orientalism.

(sampled song: Ulrich Schnauss' "Between Us and Them")

DEBORAH POE is the author of the poetry collection Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008) as well as chapbooks from Furniture_Press and Stockport Flats Press. Her writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in journals such as Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and FOURSQUARE Editions and A Sing Economy. She has received several literary awards including three Pushcart Prize nominations for her poetry and the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) for her poetry and fiction. Deborah has recently joined the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat, as fiction editor. Assistant Professor of English at Pace University Westchester, she teaches creative writing, contemporary fiction and theory. For more, visit http://deborahpoe.com.

Anna Lena Phillips Boots, Bottles, Buttons Molly Tenenbaum

after Molly Tenenbaum, "I Live in a Yellow Ice Cream Truck" from Now (Bear Star Press, 2007)

ANNA LENA PHILLIPS works for American Scientist by day and is poetry editor of Fringe by night. In the scant hours between, she enjoys commuting by bike and playing oldtime banjo. The recipient of a 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for poetry, she lives in piedmont North Carolina.

Melissa Severin Tucks Rossi, Barbato, Heyd, & Olszewska

"Felt Scrap Reliquary"

Artist statement:

When a poem moves me I usually write it down a few times in a special notebook. Later, when a line spins in my head and my memory fails to conjure up book titles and poets' names, I page through the one of the notebooks. But a plain notebook rarely seems to do certain poems justice. I find myself wanting to capture them somehow, create a better space for them to inhabit.

Poems, like songs and stories, help see me through particular seasons or phases in my life; the words become part of my daydreams, I live the stories, hum a line and make it through a day. When I considered the Delirious Hem project, I just kept paging through my notebooks asking how I could respond creatively, without using my own words, to these works.

I am not a visual artist. I can't take a decent photograph. I can barely draw a line on a page. It's only by the coincidence of my sewing box being next to my bookshelves and notebooks that I even thought to make a better place to keep some of the poems. So, is a felt book a response to these poems? Perhaps not. It's more of a reliquary really--a place for poems to be folded and hidden in pockets that only I know about. They exist with images and object sewn alongside them. It's a scrapbook, a place to contextualize the poems with images that spark my own memories

I have many poems I could hide inside a book like this, but this one is devoted to particular poems:

• "Fairy Tale" by Emma Rossi, from 6x6 #15
• "Lachrymose" by Elizabeth Barbato, from Little Red Leaves 3
• "Sanguinaria" by Suzanne Heyd, from Jubliat #14
• "The Spine Grower" by Daniela Olszewska, from Columbia Poetry Review no. 20

MELISSA SEVERIN graduated from New England College with an MFA in poetry. She currently lives in Chicago whilst unemployed. But she eats her oatmeal everyday and goes jogging and says "in this economy" a lot which keep her positive. Her poems have appeared in MoonLit, 42Opus, Cultural Society, and other journals. Brute Fact, her chapbook, is available from dancing girl press.

Krista Franklin Opens a Window on Linda Susan Jackson

after Linda Susan Jackson's What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press, 2007)



KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist whose poetry and collages have been published most recently in Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, CultureServe.net, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her collages have been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of Tres Colony, an artist collective, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.