I couldn't resist posting this excerpt from the Constant Critic's revue of Christian Hawkeye's new book, Ventrakl. The reviewer, Karla Kelsey, lays out a list of elements of "poetry du jour." Good to know.
In fact, a list of Ventrakl’s tactics and concerns will read as a description for what it is to be a book of poetry du jour:
Interest in translation, both as overtly stated theme and as mode of composition
Collaboration and a problematizing of monological authorship
Use of ekphrasis, both as an occasion and as a tool for prying into the nature of representation
Use and problematizing of biography, of how to represent a life
Interest in overtly exploring intertextuality
Explicit articulations of a poetics, while, at the same time enacting this poetics figuratively (or by rejection of figure), formally, extra-lexically
Recognizing the necessarily political implications of language, a weariness and despair of facile articulation
The hybrid (the book, part of UDP’s Dossier Series, includes lineated poems, prose poems, invented conversations, biographical sketches, photographs, and quotations)
Documentary poetics
Procedural poetry
The poetic project
The entire review is available here.
