Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

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Tag: experimental poetry

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Experimental Poets of Color

September 19, 2016 by Erica Mena

Up until a few years ago I thought I had to choose between being a “Puerto Rican poet” and being an “experimental poet.” Puerto Rican poets write about things like their abuela, or El Morro, o la isla, o salsa, o Nuevayork, o cualquier cosa. It probably didn’t help that the only Puerto Rican poet writing in English I knew, knew of, or had ever heard of was Martín Espada, whose work is exceptional and beautiful and extremely lyrical and more or less […]

Categories: Poetry, Teaching • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, teaching

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What do Rosmarie Waldrop, a penis museum, columbian legends, and code poetry have in common?

March 4, 2015 by Erica Mena

The new season of Anomalous Press titles is nearly upon us, and I spent the whole day getting these amazing things off to the printer. (I’m so spacey that I just wrote titles, then it looked wrong so I tried titels, but no, its, definitely titles…) [update: you can now pre-order the whole 2015 season!] And seriously, I say this every year, but these books are so so good! As always, we’re doing super-limited runs of 100, with digital (but beautifully designed) […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: a kendra greene, all-new, anatomy of a museum, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, chapbook, columbian literature, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, experimental, experimental nonfiction, experimental poetry, ian hatcher, iceland, keith waldrop, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, lyric essay, phallological society, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, third person singular

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Small Press Publishing Goals: Making Future People's Heads Explode

February 27, 2015 by Erica Mena

“My mission is to create beautiful, strange little books that a grad student studying the small press movement of the early 21st century will find in a special collections somewhere and they will make her head explode. Can you give us a preview of what’s current and/or forthcoming from your catalog, as well as what you’re hoping to publish in the future? Well, last season we only put out three titles, and they were all poetry. Outer Pradesh by Nathaniel […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: Anomalous Press, experimental poetry, keith waldrop, nathaniel mackey, outer pradesh, poetry, publishing, rosmarie waldrop, small press

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"All good poetry is experimental"

January 20, 2015 by Erica Mena

I recently had the humbling experience of doing poorly on an interview for something I really wanted. I actually interview terribly, so it’s not really surprising to me, but still disappointing nonetheless. One of the members of the committee interviewing me is a poet I’ve admired for a long time, who’s work I’ve studied and taught, and I’m sure that didn’t make things any easier, nerves-wise. One of the questions posed to me that I hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t even ever […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: citizen, claudia rankine, experimental poetry, poetry, susan howe

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Translation is a Compromised Body

October 23, 2014 by Erica Mena

Some smartening of some stuff I said about translation and poetry and compromised bodies at a poetry-gathering last week in LA made its way onto the Poetry Foundation blog. Amanda says these things way smarter than I think I did, though. “Here is what Erica Mena (of Anomalous) discussed in response to these questions (of course, this is just a summary, and many parts are missing): She wanted to contest the idea of translation as a the idea of equivalence—one […]

Categories: Poetry, Translation • Tags: experimental poetry, experimental translation, poetry, translation

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To Do As Adam Did by Ronald Johnson

May 8, 2013 by Erica Mena

The introduction to this book did exactly what any introduction to a selection of poetry should do: made me very, very excited to discover the poetry within. Contextualizing it in the Olsonian projective verse tradition, and then explaining how Johnson’s work evolved into the world-wide concrete poetry movement, before finally emerging into a “big” poem he imagined in the tradition of A, The Cantos, and The Maximus Poems. I was absolutely enticed, and some of my anxiety (that it was going to be […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: concrete poetry, experimental poetry, long poems, poetry, ronald johnson, to do as adam did

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Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen

April 14, 2013 by Erica Mena

Language is a tricky thing, any translator will tell you. You think you know it, and then you miss. A mis-heard word, a mis-read phrase. Expectations aroused and thwarted. The work of the poet. This book explores with delight, despair, and demanding the slipperiness of the English language in the American idiom. An abcedarium of intentionally misdirected language, it is playful and political. She employs a range of techniques, from the occasional (and recognizable) N+7 to some far subtler slidings around in […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: experimental poetry, Harryette Mullen, language poetry, prose poetry, reading journal, Sleeping with the Dictionary

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What Counts

November 5, 2012 by Erica Mena

I recently ran into one of my former poetry professors, someone who had a profound impact on my development as a writer, and a reader, of poetry. I’m a notoriously lousy contact, so we hadn’t seen each other in a while, and he was happily surprised to learn that I was just starting an MFA in poetry. He was very surprised that I was at Brown. I am, according to him, the first creative writer from my undergraduate institution, UMass […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: brown, experimental, experimental poetry, experimental writing, innovative writing, joyelle mcsweeney, MFA, poetry

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To publish: print or online?

April 7, 2011 by Erica Mena

This came up in my post about the 21st century publishing conference I attended a few weeks ago, and about Rebecca Frank Morgan’s comments about the ecosystem of literary publishing. But I think it’s worth further thought. Is there a real benefit to publishing in print rather than online? It used to be, back in the early days of the galactic interwebs, that online literary publishing was stigmatized. I know, how could that be? Aren’t artists, especially writers, supposed to […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, elit, eliterature, experimental poetry, independent publishing, literary journals, new media, online publishing, publishing

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Voices from the Bitter Core

February 17, 2011 by Erica Mena

Voices from the Bitter Core by Ursula Krechel, trans. Amy Kepple Strawser (Host Publications, 2010). Ambitious in scope, and stunningly executed. The voices that blur together and pull apart are simultaneously sympathetic and horrific, the collage technique at once jarring and unifying. This is a work of paradoxes, of dissonance and contradiction, an utterly human work. In its examination of the voices of war it implicitly questions the rationale for killing, without falling into propaganda. The work collapses time, moving […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, political poetry, review, translation

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