April 28, 2012- Dennis Phillips Part 2

This past Saturday we aired our second, and (sadly) last, part of our interview with Dennis Phillips, who we met with prior to his reading at Canessa Park on April 9th. He shared more of his poetry from his new collected works Navigation, which was published in 2011 by Otis Books/Seismicity  Editions. We talked about how the 'capitalist agenda' has informed the 'denaturing of language' and the his efforts to 're-valorize language.' We also talked about his complex novel Hope, published by Green Integer in 2007.  Phillips talked about the experience of writing a novel, as opposed to poetry. He also talked about his current project On, from which he read, both for us, and during the reading following the interview.  

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April 21, 2012: Dennis Phillips part 1

On Sat 4/21 we began part one of our interview series with poet, professor, director, editor, novelist, and surfer Dennis Phillips, who read from his recent collection Navigation (Otis). Craft constraints, lyricism, complex music, intention, language, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” meteorology, mourning, politics, sentimentality, fragments, presence in absence, pronouns, automaticity, prose poetry, the sea, and “rhythm and pacing" are just a few things we touched on during and after our conversation. Dennis Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Arena, Credence, Sand, and most recently Study for the Possibility of Hope (Pie in the Sky Press) and Navigation: Selected Poems, 1985 – 2010 (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). His work, both poetry and commentary, regularly appears in various national and local poetry journals. In 1998 he edited and wrote the introduction for a book on some of the early essays of James Joyce, Joyce On Ibsen. His novel, Hope, came out in 2007. Of Phillips Navigation, George albon writes, “There is rarely a moment when something remarked on in a poem is not contingent to something else, exerting a pull on the first thing and making it part of a warping sequence, just as the something else must also yield gravity to the appearance-field of the new arrival. One could in fact experience the work-line, poem, book, selection—as a progress of appearance-fields.”

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March 31, 2012: Rose Metal Press

This past Saturday we started out the show reading a poem (and excerpt from an essay) by Adrienne Rich who died on March 27. We then moved on to discuss the representational and non-representational in art and writing, aesthetic “programs” influencing the way we write, writing on the surface of language, and mixing poetry and prose—which lead us to our featured mixed genre guests from Rose Metal Press: Carol Guess, Loren Erdrich, Sierra Nelson, and Jim Goar.

“…fist, the stone you skipped as a girl, you were a boy then…” we heard Carol Guess read from Tinderbox Lawn (2008). Thank you Carol for recording several prose poems from this collection, and while sick! Next up was the Invisible Seeing Machine—a collaborative effort consisting of Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson who read from I Take Back the Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (2012). Mixing image and word and allowing reader participation in the making, we enjoyed hearing them share their project. Finally, we concluded with an awesome and energetic reading from Jim Goar, who read from his book The Louisiana Purchase (2011) “assembled from fractured myths, westerns, Disney, fictions, childhood memories, life abroad…”

More info about these writers and their books can be found at rosemetalpress.com.

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