Coronavirus
Georgina Hayes, “Face Masks Could Be Giving People Covid-19 Immunity, Researchers Suggest.”
Devon Price, “Do You Have ‘Zoom Fatigue’ or Is It Existentially Crushing to Pretend Life Is Normal as the World Burns?”
Eva Hagberg, “The Pandemic Has Remade Friendship.”
And “Cruise Ships Dismantled for Scrap after Pandemic Sinks Industry.”
Black Lives Matter
Ishmael Reed, “America’s Criminal Justice System and Me.”
Anthony Bogues, “Black Lives Matter and the Moment of the Now.”
Colin Dayan, “Police Power and Can’t Breathe.”
Dwight Garner, “Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ about Our Abiding Sin.”
Jane Hu, “The Second Act of Social-Media Activism.”
Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab Protesters off Portland Streets.”
Shane Harris, “DHS Compiled ‘Intelligence Reports’ on Journalists Who Published Leaked Documents.”
Ken Klippenstein, “The Border Patrol Was Responsible for an Arrest in Portland.”
Katie Shepherd and Mark Berman, “‘It Was Like Being Preyed upon’: Portland Protesters Say Federal Officers in Unmarked Vans Are Detaining Them.”
Charlie Warzel, “50 Nights of Unrest in Portland.”
Conrad Wilson, Dirk Vanderhart, and Suzanne Nuyen, “Oregon Sues Federal Agencies for Grabbing up Protesters off the Streets.”
Gillian Flaccus, “Judge Blocks US Agents from Arresting Observers in Portland.”
Richard Read, “Out of Portland Tear Gas, an Apparition Emerges, Capturing the Imagination of Protesters.”
On July 16, 2020, I took part in the fourth of ten readings around the release of the Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming 2020), originally published as a special issue of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan. Other readers are: Cara Chamberlain, Petra Kuppers, Andrew Melrose, Eléna Rivera, Arthur Sze, and Jen Web. My reading of “Dead Horse Bay” and “Blason III” starts around 29:30 in the July 16 reading .
To find more about the series, visit the Ecopoetics Anthology Facebook page.
Coronavirus Think Pieces
Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations.”
Jodi Dean, “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”
Ibram X. Kendi, “We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic.”
David Harvey, “We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus.”
Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation, COVID Masks, Revolutionary Collectivity.”
Charles Stross, “It’ll All Be Over by Christmas.”
Laurie Penny, “Productivity Is Not Working.”
Corey Robin, “Comrades.”
Masha Gessen on the present.
To accompany the online publication of “Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary” at Dispatches for the Poetry Wars, along with its eventual print publication by Spuyten Duyvil, the editors have organized a series of ten readings over the next few months. The first reading kicks off next week, June 25, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. EDT with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Patricio Ferrari, Peter O’Leary, Stephanie Strickland, Harriet Tarlo, Orchid Tierney, and Edwin Torres.
On July 16, 2020 at 4:00 pm EDT I’ll be reading with Cara Chamberlain, Petra Kuppers, Jake Levine, Eléna Rivera, Arthur Sze, and Jen Web.
Find our more on the anthology’s Facebook and Eventbrite pages.
A lot of stuff was going on for me this year, both personally and professionally, so I haven’t really had a chance to post links since . . . last summer (!), nine months before the global pandemic was declared. So, to catch up: here’s links from late summer 2019–March 11, 2020 that are, by the very nature of posting them now, rather outdated/anachronistic, a window onto a world that is gone yet still all too present (and excessive), a world that most certainly wasn’t going in the direction of human flourishing and that any nostalgia for may be misplaced. . . . I hope to have “Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 1” up sometime soon(er than nine months from now . . .).
Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say” (February 20, 2020).
Nuclear and Environmental
Mary Hudetz, “US Official: Research Finds Uranium in Navajo Women, Babies.”
David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer, “US Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed Seven Russians.”
Kristin George Bagdanov, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’S ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious.”
Alyssa Battistoni, “Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.”
Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change.”
I am totally humbled by the inclusion of my poems, “Dead Horse Bay” and “Archives of Winter,” in a special issue of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: “Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary,” edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan. Other contributors include Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jane Hirshfield, Cynthia Hogue, Angela Hume, Michael McClure, John Shoptaw, Stephanie Strickland, Harriet Tarlo, Edwin Torres, and many, many others.
The issue also includes a section of commentary, reviews, and criticism, including a review of Kristin George Bagdanov’s Fossils in the Making (2019), and essays by Lynn Keller, Hogue, Cole Swensen, and (again) many others.
Here is the press release from Dispatches:
Announcement: Release of Online Anthology
POETICS FOR THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD!
We are delighted to announce the special Ecopoetry issue of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars journal, titled “Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary,” co-edited by Mary Newell, Sarah Nolan, and Bernard Quetchenbach. The issue offers a core sample of diverse approaches to ecologically oriented poetics, representing 150 contemporary authors from a wide range of bioregions and nations. In addition to poetry, the issue features critical commentary, interviews, a preview selection of Cognitive Ecopoetics,by Sharon Lattig, and reviews of current anthologies.
In this time of planetary challenge from changes to climate and water level, atmospheric pollution, viral scourges, and threats of mass species extinction, our interconnectedness across boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, and other sociocultural labels has been underscored by our common plight. How can we bear witness to this situation, how might we harness our fear, anger, hope, wonder, in ways that will encourage a renewed commitment to live sustainably in our shared home? May this anthology offer fresh impressions of the life of this chaotic but still resplendent planet we share. May you find pleasures, surprises, insights, and inspiration, and may some of the poems resound in you and provide sustenance and energy on your own path toward living conscientiously. Visit dispatchespoetrywars.com.
UPDATE MAY 26, 2020
Spuyten Duyvil has just announced that it will be printing the anthology. Order it here.
Well, it looks like my second poetry collection, The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), has sold out. Interested readers, however, can now access a copy on Academia.edu. So check out The Shape of Things (for the first time).
More translations of poems from my second book, The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), are in the August 2019 issue of Literatura. Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin translated into Slovenian “An Ode to 2013: We Are the National Security Agency’s Children,” “Desertification Is Not Just the Earth’s Pastime,” “The Decibel Curfew Does Not Apply,” “That Was a Bad Idea,” and “I Am a Mechanic,” and they appear in Literatura under the general title “Oda letu 2013: Smo otroci Nacionalne varnostne agencije.”
Bauer and Tomažin previously translated “The Shape of Things I,” “Winter, or, Some (Future) Ambiguities,” and “We’re Just Like Yesterday’s Headlines” in the December 2016 issue of IDIOT. (The title of the translations are “Oblika reči I,” “Zima ali neke (prihodnje) dvoumnost,” and “Smo kot včerajšnje naslovnice.”)
This fall, my third at Hartwick College, and as 2019-20 Winifred D. Wandersee Scholar in Residence, I’ll be teaching just one class, ENGL 312 Intermediate Poetry Workshop. Here’s the syllabus.
