Hey. Hostile Books is gonna be at Whale Prom. With works by Raquel Salas Rivera, Jill Magi, Tyrone Williams, and Veronica Wong.
Some things will be free. Nothing will be for sale.
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Protest, Poems
I haven’t been reading much since the election. Other kinds of action have filled that space. The exceptions have been The Yerbamala Collective’s scalding pamphlets (which I want to slip into the back and front of every textbook). And, yesterday, a handful of poems from Sibling Rivalry Press’ If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (digital copy here). Some of the poems that kept me up:
from RE Katz’ quickly metamorphosing “A Controlled Fall”: “Do porn or get out alive/do porn to get out alive/do a lively porn to come out/come out alive/come out now/come out national/national come out of poor day.”
from Michael G. Federspiel’s “Here”: “Family is two wolves standing side-by-side / Each with one paw mangled–but touching.”
from Jocelyn Marshall’s “For Them”: “Do not____ this doesn’t include me when / You do not get to _____ you don’t / count, and she / does.”
This is also to say that the election has changed my relationship to poetry. I had a whole stack of books I’ve been meaning to read, and I’ve put that stack aside because those books don’t feel relevant right now. So let me know what you’re reading that meets the urgency of this moment. I’m hungry.
Also, hey why don’t you support the Buffalo #25?
Hoping to get back to semi-regular posting. We’ll see.
Poem-A-Day & Radio Conversation
I’ve been quiet in terms of publishing individual poems as I finish up my third manuscript for Black Ocean but the Academy of American Poets sent this one out in the spring as the Poem of the Day.
More recently, I had a lively conversation with Al Abanado and Jae Newman about religion and spirituality on poetry on Al’s radio show, Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3 FM (Rochester, NY). Most of all I tried to put forward the idea of devotional poetry that isn’t about transcendence, one thats embedded in the local and political. Not that my poetry does that well but thats the sort of relation I’ve been thinking seems most necessary. I also try to put forward some unexpected names as “religious” poets, from the everyday rituals of Yoko Ono to the dharma-punk aspects of C.A. Conrad’s work. And there are many more poets doing the necessary work of queering religion and spiritual practice or reconstituting it through radical feminist and decolonial lenses.
Anyway, here’s the conversation.
JOE HALL 