The brilliant experimental poet Leslie Scalapino passed away two days ago, after a decades-long career of crafting devastatingly frank, beautiful, and sometimes longingly abstract poetry. The founder of O Books, a press that helped many emerging poets and writers to get their start, Leslie will have three books published this summer and fall from Litmus Press, Post-Apollo Press, and Chax Press, and Poets House in New York will stage her play Flow-Winged Crocodile June 19th and 20th. There will be a memorial event for her at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st.
Leslie Scalapino was one of the very first poets published in Drunken Boat, in our first issue. Her piece, excerpts from Tango stands out among that of the 11 poets included in that issue. Anyone who has not yet experienced Leslie’s poetic landscapes, should take the time to explore her works today.
must ‘accept’ death of others.
—except them. ~Leslie Scalapino
The folks over at The Lantern Review recently interviewed DB’s own Tamiko Beyer as part of a series on poets and process. Tamiko discusses her homolinguistic translation of Ilya Kaminsky’s “The Craft.”
I think it was April. I was writing a poem a day and running out of ideas. I turned to Charles Bernstein’s Experiments and chose the first one: a “homolinguistic translation,” a translation from English to English. I chose to “translate” Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “A Toast” because I was obsessed with his book Dancing in Odessa and wanted to live in one of his poems for a while.
The result: a whole new realm of diction. And a tone of contemplative urgency from Kaminsky’s poem that infused itself into my own, even when I eventually let go of the constraint.
If you haven’t checked out ModCloth’s blog, ModLife, you’re missing out. Less literary and more pop-culture, they’re a great stop for trend-checking (don’t lie, you want to know if you should ditch the wingtip shoes). They recently gave us a very nice review, in their list of 7 online lit mags to check out. Also on the list, our friends over at Brevity and PANK.
Drunken Boat is now accepting submissions for its “First Peoples, Plural” folio, to debut in issue #13 this winter. We will be considering poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, visual art, sound art, video art, and web art by indigenous people worldwide. Our goal is to present a wide scope of work from a wide scope of people. Works might explore native identity and aesthetic (and their evolution), family, spirituality, sexuality, passing, othering, exoticism, and the media. Deadline: October 15th, 2010.
I found myself needing to read many of the poems a third then fourth time before feeling confident I had read what Vazirani wrote. This exemplified the analysis of her poetry provided by Kazim Ali, who stated that each line can answer the line before it, stand on its own, or open the door for the line that follows.
Read the full review by Hannah Eason.
