LYRIC VOICE & the Poetics of the Outsidereal

NEXT FRIDAY, 24 July, the Next Objectivists host our next guest objectivist, the poet, publisher, scholar & educator, ERIC ELSHTAIN!

Eric Elshtain is the author of Here in Premonition & The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter; his work can be found in journals such as McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill. He is the editor of BEARD OF BEES PRESS (www.beardofbees.com) & strongly rumored to be the creative force behind GNOETRY, the human/computer collaborative poetry mechanism.

On Friday, Eric will lead a workshop on the outsidereal poetics of voice. He has assembled a wonderful selection of readings for the workshop, which is attached to this e-mail & includes this poem (among others) by Arthur Sze:

Six Persimmons

1
“Cabron,” rings in the ears as he walks down
the corridor to death row. Where is the epicenter
of a Los Angeles earthquake? Hypocenter of “Fat Man”?
He watches a woman pour honey into a jar crammed
with psilocybin mushrooms. A few cells down,
a priest intones and oozes black truffles in olive oil.
He is about to look at the poems of a murderer,
sees a sliced five-thousand-year-old silkworm cocoon.
x: pinhole, eclipse; the, a; shadow of mosquito,
fern frond uncoiling in mist. “Dot,” says a Japanese
calligrapher who draws a dot beginning on the floor
off the page. He looks at the page, shrugs,
there is nothing there, and pictures budding chamisa
in a courtyard, yellow yarrow hanging over a bed.
In Waimea Canyon, ‘apapane, ’i’iwi.x: it’s
the shapes of ice in an ice floe, a light-green
glazed lotus-shaped hot-water bowl. He opens his eyes
and recalls staring into her eyes as she comes.

Join us one week from today for a potluck dinner & group meditation on a next objectivist poetics of lyric voice!