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“imagine his joy as the sun / wizarded forth those abundant sugars / and I plodded barefoot / and prayerful at the first ripe plum’s swell and blush,” reads Ross Gay from his poem “Burial” in this video featuring music by Mary Lattimore. The track is featured in an album called Dilate Your Heart, part of a yearlong release campaign celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of indie record label Jagjaguwar.
“If we are always the threat / To whom or where do we turn for protection?” In this Litquake festival video from 2020, Pamela Sneed reads from her book Funeral Diva (City Light Books, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award’s lesbian poetry prize, and speaks with Tommy Pico about breaking apart genres and writing about pandemics.
“The minute I’m within a sentence, I’m within an orbit of urgencies and rules that to some extent leave me in a position of caginess and wiliness,” says poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum about the presence of spontaneity in writing in this conversation about fables, expressions of queerness, and process with countertenor and actor Anthony Roth Costanzo. The Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists series is coproduced by Artforum and Bookforum, and sponsored by the Morgan Library & Museum.
“To me all good poetry is experimental in some way,” says poet Susan Howe in this film about Emily Dickinson by poet and filmmaker Benita Raphan, filmed on location at the Morgan Library & Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Raphan, a Guggenheim fellow known for her short experimental films, died at the age of fifty-eight on January 10, 2021.
In “Situation 5,” a short film by Jackson Prize–winning poet Claudia Rankine and photographer John Lucas, a history of racial oppression forms the backdrop to a lyrical meditation on racism, imprisonment, and identity. “My brothers are notorious. Though they have not been to prison, they have been imprisoned. But the prison is not a place you enter. It is no place.”
Watch this trailer for the Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum and programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San. The annual festival is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry held during National Poetry Month in April. Read more about the Seattle literary scene in our Seattle City Guide written by E. J. Koh.
“I have so many questions of you, / for you are closer to me than anyone // has ever been, tumbling, as you are, this second, / through my heart’s every chamber,” reads Ross Gay from his poem “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” in this video with music by Gia Margaret, a collaboration from a new Jagjaguwar album called Dilate Your Heart.
The novelist and essayist shares her experience creating a virtual writers group focused on play, and muses on the meaning of productivity and artistic friendship during the pandemic.
“I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude / over every last thing, including you,” reads Ross Gay from his poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” in this video set to the music of Bon Iver. This piece is featured in a new album called Dilate Your Heart, part of a yearlong release campaign celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of indie record label Jagjaguwar.
The author of Anodyne takes a poetic approach to prose writing.
