WHAT IS YOUR FRAGMENT IV: rob mclennan responds

As Jennifer K. Dick explains: "What is YOUR fragment? Poets explain this technique as it appears in their books (see original conversation post HERE for the questions and a response by Lisa Pasold HERE the second response by Marthe Reed HERE and the third by George Vance HERE." I have now added my own voice to the storm, here, as the fourth in her essay series on the poetic fragment.

the seventh issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is now online!

seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics #7

Victor Coleman
from Miserable Singers

Jennifer K Dick
Invisible Collisions: Considering Susan Howe’s Reform of the Poetic, Critical and Autobiographical Essay

Nicole Markotić
ds / junct: in/accessible poetry & the problem body
    (originally presented at VERSeFest 2013)

Gil McElroy
Chance and necessity
    (originally presented at VERSeFest 2013)

rob mclennan
Some notes on Mark Truscott’s Form: A Series

Sandra Ridley
Testamonium


seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics comes out as the natural extension of the eight issues of Poetics.ca edited by rob mclennan and Stephen Brockwell. Highlighting the diversity of voice, style, practice and politic, seventeen seconds continues the resolve to provide a forum for dialogue on contemporary poetics, with a focus on Canadian writing. Over the past two decades, the amount of critical writing published in print literary journals on Canadian poetry, specifically, seems to have decreased dramatically, but slowly returned through a number of online journals. seventeen seconds simply wishes to help strengthen the dialogue and the ongoing conversation about writing through publishing new writing, and conversation about new writing. How else are we supposed to learn anything, unless we keep talking?

rob mclennan: editor

roland prevost: founding managing editor

mdesnoyers : design & (re)compiler

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollektiv,

After a small handful of Dusie chapbook posts (click on the Dusie link at the bottom of this post), I think I'm slowly running to the end. How long, I wonder, before the next run begins...?

Wallisellen, Switzerland: From Dusie founder, editor and publisher Susana Gardner comes the small chapbook from IDYLLS & RUSHES (2011), a collection of short koan-like individual stanza-fragments. What are her fragments working their accumulative way towards?

(one)

Freedom others bitter tonic

subtle certainties proof reflection

idiosyncratic looking-glass woman

among nuances class

rhythmical language, thought.

Moving through this small fragment of (apparently) a longer work-in-progress, as well as her trade collection, HERSO, An Heirship in Waves (Black Radish Books, 2011), Gardner seems to work her poems in longer swaths, writing sequences out as accumulations, waves. Given the amount she has published so far, I'd be interested in seeing some kind of poetics statement on what she's been working on, some kind of essay on how her poems move, and some potential, future targets. I would like to hear her take on some of this, perhaps.

(one)

Tétè-à-têtes platform our ironical

caresses-love, perhaps through

tea-stained swathing. Oh, irritable

rushes—come now, come.

France: Jennifer K. Dick's Tracery (2011) is a small study in textures, from the wallpaper collage that helps hold the cover to the twists of the texts, even citing images from Historic New England, “History of Wallpaper 1845-70: Changing Technology & Increasing Production,” writing: “In the couplets of shadows she could emerge // From the layers of ink printed or be stencilled.” Produced in a numbered edition of two hundred copies, every page is a strip shorn from another disperate pattern, collaged into something parcelled, and traced into this small unit. Does it matter where such a poem might begin, might end?

Where is here, besides? What is she? What is what is where and when does she come to, to gather, a farthing, a farther thing, into being? When is she beginning whereto or for, flax and flummoxed? Lost to grab the back of horsehair spirals, dyed plinth and borderlands, hinter- . To hinder her passage, she shielded or shedding. This wall willing. This was a willing wall, a wishing well, or, to speak of, in that other language, or, as in ornate. Captivate, will she? Or winter the wanderlust wanton wanting? Spelled. She is a die cast, a cast of. Or, ornate, Ariadna-esque lines drowning her back. Trace on her wrist of the Ille. Cup to read her palm, the deep rivulets, moats, canals, then trace the Rhine backwards, upstream, source to be sourcing. Haute, higher still, to speak in tongues, triturate.