E. Rowan Mena

Not Everyone Gets To Be A Poet

February 7, 2014 by E. Rowan

Anyone who’s been in the academic world as a graduate student recognizes a general malaise that kicks in right about now. The sense of the imminent end of the semester, the end of the degree program for many (and for me this year), the end of funding, the end of certainty. For those still in grad school, but whose funding changes from year to year; for those leaving grad school and entering the whatever-comes-next phase for them; for those with […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: academia, depression, poetry

The Situationist and the City, ed. Tom McDonough

February 6, 2014 by E. Rowan

Got this among a number of S.I. books I’m referencing in putting together a syllabus called The Art of Wandering. What started as an interest solely in psychogeography has transformed, in large part thanks to this collection, into an interest in the relationship between art, politics, and everyday life. The city is the landscape that controls this relationship, and the stage on which this relationship plays out. This anthology took me a while to get through, and not because I […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: psycheogeography, situationist international, unitary urbanism

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Singularities by Susan Howe

February 5, 2014 by E. Rowan

Since Susan Howe came to read last week, I’ve been thinking that I really must immediately read everything she’s ever written starting now go. Before hearing her read I’d read her major works: The Europe of Trusts (which I’m planning on re-reading because it was almost a decade ago I read it); My Emily Dickinson. Recently, you’ll remember perhaps, I read That This. So I went to my local friendly university library and got every book they had of hers. […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: experimetal poetry, innovative poetry, poetry, reading journal, singularities, susan howe

The Hair Experiment, Week 1

February 3, 2014 by E. Rowan

It took me a long time to come up with something to do for the new year. (Self-improvement being the go-to for change in the new year, perhaps needs examination, but that’s a project for another year.) I’m happy with my weight, I no longer smoke, I eat well, I have a good work/life balance (in that I work all the time, for almost no money, but I love what I do so it’s still satisfying). I floss my teeth, and […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: curly, feminism, feminist, hair, shaving, short hair, women's hair

Boston Ballet's The Nutcracker, Undone

December 29, 2013 by E. Rowan

Tonight Matt and I went to go see the Boston Ballet’s new Nutcracker at The Boston Opera House, closing night of the season. We’d been in 2010 to see the last staging of the old set and costumes, which were being updated with great fanfare for the following season. I wanted to see what had changed, and (I hoped) improved from the 30-year-old version I grew up with. I’m not a huge ballet aficionado, but I know my way around. I […]

Categories: Reviews • Tags: 2013 nutcracker, boston ballet, boston opera house, nutcracker, the nutcracker, the opera house

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Torture of Women by Nancy Spero

December 7, 2013 by E. Rowan

This astonishing, terrifying work by the incredible feminist artist Nancy Spero is reproduced stunningly by Siglio Press. The 14 panels are reproduced in full, then showing the details in their full legibility. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from a book, but even so, this work seems massive. Not just in size but in scope. The collage is sparse, encasing the fragments of testimony and witnessing, and of Spero’s imagery in swathes of visual silence. The kind of […]

Categories: Art, Reading Journal • Tags: collage, feminist art, luisa valenzuela, nancy spero, political art, symmetries, torture of women

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Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

December 3, 2013 by E. Rowan

Is it a prose poem? A lyric essay? A hybrid essay-poem? A hybrid poem-memoir? Yes. I’ve long contended that genre is mostly useful to define reading strategy (define? demand? encourage?). We read a poem differently than we do a memoir. Or an essay. And I’ve also suggested to my non-fiction writing friends that poetry and non-fiction have more in common than most realize. Except for those working between those forms: Susan Howe, Anna Joy Springer. Poetry lends a freedom that […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: claudia rankine, don't let me be lonely, lyric essay, poetry, political poetry, prose poetry, september 11

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In A Landscape Of Having To Repeat by Martha Ronk

October 28, 2013 by E. Rowan

Another book in three sections – that makes quite a few I’ve read recently. I wonder about this – the trinity, the triptych, is this indicative of something wanting to go on? Something that needs to move in different ways across the same set of pages? The sections, not overtly connected like the ones in Susan Howe’s That This, are still noticeably linked by images and phrases that repeat. This is the landscape. It has to repeat. The first eponymously […]

Categories: Uncategorized

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That This by Susan Howe

October 13, 2013 by E. Rowan

This book has three sections, each remarkably different from one another, and yet connected by a recognizable poetic voice and interest. The first, “The Disappearance Approach” is about the unexpected death of her second husband. Add this to my saddest-reading-list-ever; it fits alongside Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking and Goldman’s Say Her Name. But these shortish prose-blocks are distinctly poetry, where the others are memoir. Of course, the lines are not quite so clear-cut between the two, but her frequent […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: mourning, poetry, susan howe, that this

Chapbooks Resources

September 4, 2013 by E. Rowan

**I drafted this post a few weeks ago, and wanted to have more in my spreadsheet before publishing, but CLMP just announced a new chapbook/zine membership which you can read about here and I figured I should just get this posted.** I’ve been into chapbooks for a long time. Pretty much since I started working in literary publishing as the senior editor for the fascinating Arrowsmith Press, edited by Askold Melnyczuk. There’s a lot to love about them. One of the things I love […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: chapbook, poetry, publishing

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