All That Beauty

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

A selection of interviews and rare photos from the legendary St. Mark's Poetry Project for its 50th anniversary season.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.

Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more.

"I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust."—Donald Hall

From the introduction, by Anselm Berrigan: "For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms."

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

The concept of Afropessimism does not refer to Black people, but rather to the likelihood of white society overcoming its own negrophobia, and to a radical distrust in white narratives of inclusivity. What if the ideas and reforms we regard as progressive were just the new and shiny face of racism? In the time of Black Lives Matter, the unswerving dehumanization and killing of Black people form the bedrock of our civilization. But a vast anti-Black collective feeling also manifests itself as a more insidious shared unconscious, hidden from view by the doctrines we deem as emancipatory. This book challenges the simplistic and pacifying aspects of current African American thought. It puts forward alternatives to intersectionality, poststructuralism, and radical democracy, which are often prioritized in the Black analysis of race, gender, and class.

Accessible, historically informed, and politically alert, this book offers a critical analysis of the groundbreaking theories and strategies that radically reimagine the future of Black lives throughout the world.

Norman Ajari is a lecturer in Francophone Black Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Hot wings and tenders est un recueil de poèmes bilingue anglais/français qui décline l'exploration d'une jeune femme queer de son corps, sa sexualité, et ses modalités d'existence matérielles. Alternativement tendres, crus, drôles et vifs, les poèmes de Marl Brun utilisent des protocoles d'écriture en apparence mathématiques pour tenter de capturer l'absurde logique du monde. Ils sont les énoncés analytiques d'une intimité qui demeure sensible et échappe à toute tentative de rationalisation.

A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose.