Mary Biddinger Reads "Dyes and Stichery"

This post originally appeared as "Dossiers: Poetry & Ohio, Mary Biddinger" at Vouched Books on 02 April 2013.

Black Lawrence Press released Mary Biddinger’s second full-length collection of poetry, O Holy Insurgency, earlier this year. The poet opened her book tour with a reading at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH on 14 February and read several poems from the collection. In the below video, which was taken at the event, she recites the Insurgency poem “Dyes and Stitchery”:



As part of the reading series, participating poets were asked to write brief thoughts on the state of Ohio and/or how they conceive of the relationship between poetry and Ohio. Biddinger responded with the following:

In Ohio sometimes we let our barns grow so old that they topple, and then we plant sunflowers or flights of kale around the mouse boards and rails and ghosts of saddle horses. Sometimes we are a series of roads, but never resolved to just one side. We try the center lane instead, but do not expect a dynamic vista. As children we dumped a deck of cards into a retention pond and most of them ended face-up. We were allowed to touch feathers and eat snap peas right from the dirt, because it wasn’t dirt, it was Ohio, which may or may not have made us, but nonetheless kept us. We knew better than to imagine the bottom of the quarry, a parting of gray waters or primordial catfish emboldened by stray cheese curls and Coppertone. Maybe we don’t raise our hand in class. Maybe the swish of corduroy makes us self-conscious, like the back of a math book, the last inch of a pencil, like opening day and stuck in the church basement with a haystack of missalettes. Perhaps it’s the way this place does not have a way, but a name, which begins somewhere near a downed tree and halfway across the sky.

The final two readers for the Poets of Ohio reading series will be Cathy Wagner (04/04), and Sarah Gridley (04/18). For more information, please check out the series’ Facebook page.

Phil Metres Reads "Home/Front"

In order to archive the posts I wrote during my tenure at Vouched Books, I'm migrating each article to this site in order of their original appearance. Laura Relyea was kind enough to grant me permission to reproduce them here.

This post originally appeared as "Dossiers: Poetry & Ohio, Phil Metres" at Vouched Books on 28 March 2013.

Philip Metres is a poet who teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. He has written a number of books, most recently the chapbooks A Concordance of Leaves (diode editions, 2013) and abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Arab American Book Award, and To See the Earth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2008).

Metres recently appeared at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH for the Poets of Ohio reading series. He opened the performance with a section his poem “Home/Front,” which originally appeared in the Massachusetts Review and won the 8th annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize:


As part of the reading series, I asked participating poets to write brief thoughts on the state of Ohio and/or how they conceive of the relationship between poetry and Ohio. Metres responded with the following:

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own.” While I was in utero, the caterwauling of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was a lament for the four students shot dead at Kent State University—just down the road from where I now live and teach. In a state called Ohio. Basically, to me, this state is a fiction. Nothing unites Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland—and the sundry towns between and around—except that every four years, this humble and homely flyover becomes the prom queen, as presidential hopefuls crisscross the state, promising the moon. “America is just a word but I use it,” Fugazi once sang. And “language keeps me/locked and repeating. Language keeps me/locked and repeating.” When I wrote a poem based on the signs and voices I read and heard as I traveled down its spine, I gather that Ohio is afraid of its mortal soul, and everyone wants you to obey the God of their imaginings. Either Ohioans are very pious and like their radio religious, or they are very rebellious and many preachers are afraid of where we are all heading. Either way, there will be long drives down our very spine to find out the answers.

Upcoming readers for the Poets of Ohio reading series will include Frank Giampietro (03/21), Dana Ward (03/28), Cathy Wagner (04/04), and Sarah Gridley (04/18). For more information, please check out the series’ Facebook page.

The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry

Over at The Millions, the poet/critic/editor/teacher Jeff Alessandrelli wrote an essay titled "The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry." In this piece, Alessandrelli coins the moniker "Nu-Audacity" for a group of contemporary poets. Here's the essay's overarching premise:

In such a spirit of exclusionary inclusion, then, I’d propose conglomerating a group of writers I’d call the Nu-Audacists, ones whose central tenets, as I see them, are as brazen and arguably repugnant as they are nuanced or refined. For the poets of the Nu-Audacity do not believe in Poetry or at least not in the way that many of their contemporaries seem to believe in it. Their work displays an innate awareness to the shrill absurdity of modern life — but they are nevertheless not inured to such absurdity or hardened by it. The Nu-Audacists are largely uninterested in academia or assistant professor, tenure-track academic life. They are post-Internet, meaning that although they often utilize the World Wide Web’s myriad lurings they rarely feel the need to comment on that reality; e-poetry is poetry is Twitter. Broadly and luridly, they believe sex exists. Further, their work is not funny or whimsical; they do not affect poetic “poses” like “sincere” or “confessional” beyond those that they are seemingly unconscious of or uncaring about. For mothers the Nu-Audacity school has Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman; for fathers Bill Knott, C.A. Conrad, and John Wieners. Their great-uncles are Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch on Saturday night, talking excitedly after the movie before O’Hara goes to the bar and Koch goes home to his wife; their great-grandparents Antonin Artaud and Mina Loy. Finally and most importantly, many of the writers in the Nu-Audacity school would no doubt protest their inclusion in the group. To varying degrees, most are willful outsiders. They neither want nor need my or anyone else’s collectivist-inspired help. And that’s the point — by refusing to conform in a way that so much of contemporary poetry insists on, they stake their own defiant place in the game. And for the Nu-Audacists poetry is very much a game

Alessandrelli invokes Unwanted Invented / Vargtimmen as emblematic of Nu-Audacity's concerns and occupations. While I can't say that I agree with everything he has to say in the essay, it's an interesting read for its length and articulates some trends in poetry during the twenty-first century.

Other authors that Alessandrelli references include: Chelsea Minnis, Laura Solomon, Jenny Zhang, Mira Gonzalez, and Steve Roggenbuck.

Three Visual Translations

I "visually translated" three late-career Paul Celan poems, which appear in the "Special Features" section on Denver Quarterly's website. The translations act as a digital supplement to the "Experimental Translation" portfolio that was co-edited by Aditi Machado and Michael Joseph Walsh in the recently released print issue.

In addition to the Visual Translations, I contributed a Translator's Note that provides further context for these pieces.

These translation combine both my interest in collage and poetry into a single project. Please visit the Denver Quarterly online tcheck out the work and support the press.

In other news, the poet Trey Moody conduct an interview with me regarding my recent books Unwanted Invention / Vargtimmen It appeared in the recent issue of The Conversant.

Collages and VisPo

For the past two years, I've taken an extended hiatus from writing in order to pursue visual art. Although I've dabbled in drawing, photography, and street art, collage has been my primary focus.

Recently, my work appeared online in the inaugural issue of Visible Binary, as well as the "Insect Poetics" and "Our Difficult Telling" features at The Volta.

My collages adorn the front and back covers of The Normal School, volume 8 issue 2; they also reproduced another set of images in their online journal,

Now I'm proud to announce that I will have four pieces in the CUTPASTE3 exhibit at the F+ Gallery in Santa Ana, CA. Artist Michael Ziobrowski (a.k.a. xistheweapon) curated this event, which will be sponsered by Volcom. The show also will feature work by some of my favorite, contemporary collage artists; the fact that my collages will appear side-by-side with their work makes me grateful for this opportunity.

[You can read a brief review of the show in the OC Weekly]

CUTPASTE3 opens on Saturday, 16 April and runs through 16 May. If you live in the Santa Ana, Los Angeles, or the SoCal area, please stop by the F+ Gallery to check out this show.

You can view lo-fi images of my work-in-progress on my Instagram account.

You can also check out some older, text-image hybrids I created for Word for/ Word, issue 24.