Poetry
from the spiritual life of replicants
Contributor
Murat Nemet-NejatMurat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on his poem Camels & Weasels. His recent publications include his translation from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Green Integer Press, 2015), and the essays "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterward" (Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, University of Michigan Press, 2016) and "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda (Letters for Olson, gathered and edited by Benjamin Hollander, Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Nemet-Nejat's poem Animals of Dawn will be published by Talisman House, Publishers in 2016.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Blythe Bohnen: Process is Life
By Irene Lyla LeeSEPT 2023 | ArtSeen
Letters, whether they are Roman, Cyrillic, or Arabic, represented, at one time, a physical thing: a boat, or a hawk, a house, or the sun. But over time these markings, in many alphabets, have become abstracted. Now letters that line a page are mere keystrokes for what they once were. Process is Life, a show of Blythe Bohnen’s work at A.I.R. Gallery, features an early body of her paintings composed of paintbrush markings that weave within grids, rising and falling in expressive undulations with deceptive ease, the eye trying to form those shapes into letters. And even though these are not alphabetic markings steeped in an evolutionary history of culture, Bohnen’s study beside a series of loose square forms in “Brushstroke Series” (ca. 1970) offers a small key into the deep thought that went into each character appearing in the show. In the same way letters are not random shapes, these marks were well thought out. Bohnen was, above all, scientifically attentive to the motions of the world, so these compositions echo with life.
Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner
By Norman FischerOCT 2023 | Poetry
Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.
Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master
By Tony LeuzziOCT 2023 | Books
Edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams, the Meyers project was, among other things, a labor of love, not only for Levin and Williams, each of whom in their own way regard the poet, who died in 1979, as their teacher and mentor, but also for Daniel Meyers, the poet’s son. Daniel’s efforts to ensure his father’s legacy culminated in the publication of In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2007)—a handsome, impeccable volume that did not impact the poetry world as it should have and is now, tragically, out-of-print.
Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformative Sculptor
By Brandt JunceauDEC 22–JAN 23 | Books
This artist’s life stares back at the would-be biographer, like a gorgon. The author turned a mirror on it. The tale is made to tell itself, witness by witness, snapped off in an unblinking chain of hard short chapters, almost voice by voice. By conscientious decision, maybe a matter of self-preservation, Brenson is a laconic guide rather than interpreter and thankfully, no explainer.
