Saturday, November 12, 2011

Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis







Jeffrey Side has been doing good things for poetry for a long time via his organization The Argotist.  My favorite Argotist project has been the collection of interviews with various poets and critics, including Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Amiri Baraka, Rae Armantrout, and some guy named Archambeau.


Side has also edited a series of Argotist ebooks. They're downloadable free in pdf format, and my favorites include: Maxine Chernoff's A House in Summer, Jerome Rothenberg's The Jigoku Zoshi Hells: A Book of Variations, and Don Share's Harmonia.


Joining them now is a small collection of my own work, Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis. Here's the promotional blurb:


What if Kafka had written the Kama Sutra? What if the rhetoric of manifest destiny were mashed up with the destruction of Hiroshima? What if the icons of punk and glam found themselves curled up with Sheena of the Jungle? What happens when a poet draws a lucky card in the Mexican lotteria? What if poems were made from the flotsam and jetsam of culture, high and low? What if the author really has died, as Roland Barthes told us he would, and been replaced by the scriptor, whose sole power is to mingle texts? What if Jimi Hendryx had only given us the last two words of ‘Voodoo Child (slight return)’? The questions, if not all the answers, are in the poems in Slight Return: Remix and Ekphrasis.


Hope you like it.


1 comment:

  1. Thanks, Bob, for mentioning the various things The Argotist Online has done over the years.

    Ebooks are always a pleasure for me to publish, as they really do get poetry to thousands of readers in the quickest way possible, and, in my case, free of charge.

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