The Legacy Suite: Field of Yellow, Field of Knowing
A Conversation with Brittany Rogers
All posts filed under: Commentary
The latest features, essays, interviews from our contributing writers and editors.
A Mouth Holds Many Things: A Conversation with Stephanie Adams-Santos, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Cindy Juyoung Ok
A discussion with contributors to the new anthology from Fonograf Editions
Interview // “Dance Anthem for Freedom and Play”: A Conversation with Elizabeth HooverÂ
“o, yes, there are gaps in all archives, both private and public. The question is what is our responsibility toward those gaps? Sometimes we have an impulse to “fill them in,” but that can perform a double erasure—erasing the erasure, hiding the violence. So can those gaps become sites for the imagination, sites of possibility and play?”—Elizabeth Hoover
Interview // “The Poet as Perceptual Instrument & The Form as an Invitation”: A Conversation with Sarah Mangold
“I do believe the poet is the perceptual instrument of a poem. Not exactly an empty vessel, but a vessel that has been prepared to receive the poem.”—Sarah Mangold
Interview // “Portals of a Shared Humanity”: A Conversation with Tracy Fuad
“Hope is projecting into the future, but joy is almost a temporary eradication of past and future, an insistence on a present tense pleasure.”—Tracy Fuad
Who I Want to Name—A Conversation with Charles Potts
“I demand this of my own poetry. It has to be intellectually rigorous. It has to be about something. It has to have emotional resonance. It has to have musicality and it’s got to have an artistic edge.”
One More Thing: Shelley Wong and Lisa Low in Conversation
“Tonally, in this book, I was interested in ambivalence, in quiet moments of contradiction.”
From Witness From Speech From Image: On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Summer Farah | Critic at Large This essay is also available as a print zine through Open Books. All proceeds will be sent to Gaza Poets Society. The Arab Apocalypseby Etel AdnanLitmus Press, 2007 First Published by Post-Apollo Press, 1989 Dicteeby Theresa Hak Kyung ChaUniversity of California Press, 2022First Published by Tanam Press, 1982 In a Western Art History course, I learned to read images—to follow the eye, from the top left corner to the bottom right as if I was reading a page of words in English, but to let the artists’ lines guide and redirect my focus. To understand what the image is doing by identifying these moments of departure. I also learned art history as a comparative practice: to speak of an era is to put a collection of paintings next to each other and make conclusions about the time, to consider the world that presses into the frame. Before I am an editor, poet, critic, or any kind of writer, I am a reader; I want to follow the feeling. Reading …
Interview // “Poetry as a Tool for Discovery”: A Conversation with Sarah Ghazal AliÂ
“I can’t let go of the poem until it lets go of me, I suppose.” —Sarah Ghazal Ali
Interview // “Generosity in Vulnerability”: A Conversation with Danika Stegeman
“Collage has always made sense to me as an approach to composition. Peering into another person, into language, into a material. Seeing what’s before me, holding it, considering its potential force and its textures. I take it in and then I pour it back out as something I’m also woven into.”—Danika Stegeman