Inferno (1980) Directed by Dario Argento
Today my poem “Feast Green and Stained” is part of The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series. My sincerest gratitude to guest editor Don Mee Choi! Thanks also to Francisco Márquez and everyone else involved!
Copies of NOXIOUS are now available from Locker 666 Gallery on the third floor of Lamar Dodd! Grab one before they’re gone! 💀
“I’m driven by the way an encounter with external vastness can become internalized, dismantling more limiting narratives of being. Viewfinding is built from a series of translucent and transparent color-gradient panels that align with the sun setting over the Hudson River.”
Sarah E. Brook’s Viewfinding Opening Reception and Queer Poetry Reading
is next Saturday at 2 PM in Riverside Park at the west end of 68th
Street in Manhattan.
You can click [here] to read the other 25 poems featured in Brook’s Viewfinding
Here’s a digital rendering of a new Sarah E. Brook sculpture called Viewfinding. The sculpture will feature the work of 26 queer poets and it will be installed in Manattan’s Riverside Park this September. One of my poems will be engraved on a translucent color-gradient panel mounted to the bench you see in the above image. For more information about the September opening, click [here]
As you might know, Radioactive Moat Press has joined forces with poet Jake Syersak’s poetry journal Cloud Rodeo to create a micro-press called Radioactive Cloud. The chapbooks, Poems About Moss (by Dennis James Sweeney) and DATACLYSM.jpg (by Carleen Tibbetts) will be available to purchase from Radioactive Cloud tomorrow (August 1st) for just $8 (includes S&H). For more information, click [here]
My students are learning a lot this semester.
there are many storefronts in this mall
and there are many reflections
there is drama there is something reflected
there are mirror columns in this mall
they are for the people they are for the looking
but there are no people in this mall
Many thanks to June editor James Pate
for featuring three poems (and some photographs) from my abandoned mall
series in a special “Liminal Spaces” issue of Burning House Press!
“’Picture me / A field’s eruption / Collared to the city limits / Stomach
knoll / Sidewalk cracks / & advancing subsidence / Aberrant
growth.’ The foundation of In the House We Built is comprised
of lawless ground and whetstone-sharp observations. In her latest book,
Prairie M. Faul envisions herself as a building, an assemblage, a
network—a life-form. A form-giver living it up in a
contorting “home;” a word that sometimes takes at least four seconds to
pronounce. Faul’s speaker is coffee-fueled and many limbed; breaking
down walls and shattering language—all in an attempt to invent a new
one. Stone-hard yet extremely playful, Faul is the exorbitant solo show
no gallery space can contain. In fact, space itself is what’s up for
debate. Authority, expertise, aesthetic purity. Fuck all that and Adam’s rib. This poet isn’t interested in purity, but pority.”
-from my review of prairie m. faul’s In the House We Built
“Something stiffed us in the blink
of an eye. In the heat of a sun. Devonian tongue of light, screeching bulbous
tongue of fluxing mesh! Craggy Mother of our Moon! The tongue flexed its cortex
and Theia flashed her red pigment! Algal conduit of blood-red rubble, of
throbbing lichen. Cryptothecia Theia!
Her hovering mouth, a wreathe of electrical nerves, shot up with a glow and attached
its conduit to a heaving thallus.”
Many thanks to Amy Bonnaffons and Alex Wilhite of 7x7.la for publishing Evidence from Lunar Rocks–a collaboration between myself and artist Sam Shoemaker!
![“[…] Cunningham tends to avoid domesticating the poems into a ‘natural-sounding’ English, instead directly transferring the Swedish language’s natural use of compound words. Imagine if we spoke of the German Schadenfreude as 'damagejoy’ or...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/1249dfd59bebdb0bd61a4a7b3eefedb1/tumblr_p3bno4PmWU1r0mcezo1_500.png)
“[…] Cunningham tends to avoid domesticating the poems into a ‘natural-sounding’ English, instead directly transferring the Swedish language’s natural use of compound words. Imagine if we spoke of the German Schadenfreude as 'damagejoy’ or Poltergeist as 'crashghost,’ and you might have an idea of the strange effects this can produce in English.”
Many thanks to David M. Smith
for interviewing me about my Swedish-to-English translations of authors
like Helena Österlund (Words and Colors) and Sara Tuss Efrik (The
Night’s Belly; Automanias). Read the full interview at Asymptote.
“I was silent / I was completely silent / I was lost / Was I / Was I really there”
Much gratitude to Asymptote and Aditi Machado
for featuring one of my Helena Österlund translations in the Winter
2018 issue! Helena was also kind enough to include audio of her reading
the corresponding Swedish. Check it out [here]
The Myna (or Mynah) bird appears in Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (a
precursor to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix), a film also known for its
inclusion of “Albatross” by Fleetwood Mac. Fassbinder appears to be
linking the bird with fakeness–most likely due to its ability to
reproduce human speech. A character also attempts to kill the bird, but
fails to. A Myna bird is also a witness to the murder of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. In Hitchcock’s The Birds, Tippi Hedren’s character
orders a myna bird for her aunt (but the bird never actually makes an
appearance in the film). My Sunday gift to you: a link to a decent
version of World on a Wire with English subtitles. Enjoy!
Steeletto (2018) Written and Directed by Bambi Deerest
The first excerpt from my translation of Helena Österlund’s full-length collection Words and Colors is being featured in this very special 100% translation issue of Sink Review! They also featured my translation of one of Sara Tuss Efrik’s automanias! Many thanks to Sarah Trudgeon and Steven Karl
