“Transcultural Poetics”, global action, cross-cultural activity, is something we’re very much in support of here. Transcultural Poetics, the new anthology from Coffee House Press, drawing from the wealth of material available in the archives of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa is thus a timely, welcome and inspiring collection. It celebrates, as the publishers declare, “the leap, the engaged jolt of creation and recognition that cultural hybrids and transcultural alliances and associations spark”. “In essays, conversations, and Socratic raps, it celebrates, interrogates, and annotates the vital work poets perform when they write across borders”. As the poet and teacher Ammiel Alcalay writes: “We are in need, more than ever, of this kind of archival attention, as even our recent past gets consumed by the present. This “news that stays news” [Editorial note – the phrase is Pound‘s, of course] moves from Allen Ginsberg on Aboriginal poetics to Vietnam, the Mayan classics, Puerto Rico, African America and the need for gringos to encounter the world as seen through Arab and other eyes.”
Poet and performer,Tracie Morris: “Contemplative, illuminating unusual, and global, Cross Worlds is an excellent compilation of the confluence of global systems and renowned workers/players/experimenters of language and culture”…”..evoking human interactions beyond our construction of nations and states”, and “prompting us to think about our connection to the planet itself and all its inhabitants”.
Allen’s contribution on Australian aboriginal poetics (from his lecture on July 23 1976 on “Spontaneous Poetics”) has already been featured here on The Allen Ginsberg Project in a two-part post and we’ll draw your attention to it – here – and – here
Other notable contributions include Jerome Rothenberg (interviewed by Anne Waldman & Laura Wright), Pierre Joris (on “Arabic Poetry and the International Literary Scene”), Victor Hernandez Cruz (on “Geographical Distortions – Culture, Politics and Diversity”), Judith Malina (and Hanon Reznikov) of The Living Theater (on “Love and Politics”), Margaret Randall (“Piercing the Walls”), Linh Dinh (on “The Deluge – Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry), cultural anthropologists Barbara and Denis Tedlock (he on translating the Popol Vuh, she on “Hidden Female Shamanic Traditions”), Cecilia Vicuna, Cid Corman…
The book is dedicated to the late great Anselm Hollo
