Jack Spicer | After Lorca & A Fake Novel About The Life of Arthur Rimbaud

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  AFTER LORCA   Dear Lorca, These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written. In my…

Georges Didi-Huberman | Light against Light

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    The disappearance of the fireflies—when the blinding glare of spotlights crushes the weak glimmer of glowworms in the night—is an excellent poetic allegory, a lovely “speaking image” on which to build something like a general poetics of light. This allegory has become familiar to us through the intervention of a great poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini.1 So we cannot be surprised that artists and thinkers have elevated this allegory in the field of aesthetics, and that it may lend itself as the title of an art exhibit. And yet its sole purpose is to ask, stubbornly, over and over…

Nathaniel Mackey | Cante Moro

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I would like to touch on the topic of “The New American Poetry“ where it opens onto matters we wouldn’t necessarily expect it to entail—not necessarily “new,” not necessarily “American,” not even necessarily “poetry.” What I’d like to touch on is the New American Poetry’s Spanish connection: Garcia Lorca’s meditation on the “dark sounds” of cante jondo, deep song, the quality and condition known as duende. I’ll be talking about that in relation to an array of “dark sounds” which bear upon a cross-cultural poetics intimated by the inclusion of Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende” in The Poetics…