poetry | E. Rowan Mena

"All good poetry is experimental"

January 20, 2015 by E. Rowan

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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Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert

January 10, 2015 by E. Rowan

After reading Diana’s Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, in Yvette Siegert’s translation, all the way through in one sitting, I wanted immediately to read it again. It’s a slim volume of equally slim poems, but they’re the kind of sparing that is deceptive. I hadn’t read much Pizarnik before, I’d seen her pop up in anthologies and translation workshops, I can’t tell you how many emerging translators I know who’ve started with her work. But, I think mostly because of estate issues and […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews, Translation • Tags: alejandra pizarnik, diana's tree, literary translation, poetry, translation, ugly duckling, yvette siegert

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Translation is a Compromised Body

October 23, 2014 by E. Rowan

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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Call for Critical Writing on the Gurlesque

June 21, 2014 by E. Rowan

I don’t usually post calls for submissions on the blog, but this one is too exciting not to. Call for Critical Writing on the Gurlesque In the anthology Gurlesque: the new grrly, grostesque, burlesque poetics (Saturnalia, 2010),editors Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg gathered work from eighteen contemporary women poets who are “writing about and through femininity . . .brashly, playfully, provocatively, indulgently.” These poems have “unicorns inthem, and sequins, and swear words, and vomit.” Gurlesque alsoincludes eight visual artists […]

Categories: Call for Papers • Tags: call for submission, gurlesque, poetry

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Poetry in the Streets (of Seattle)

February 23, 2014 by E. Rowan

I have a bad habit, it’s something I can’t really help. I have extraordinarily good hearing, and like many introverts, I’m especially observant in public. I notice a lot of little things all the time, and have mostly learned to tune out (to some degree) other people’s conversations. But I can’t do it when they’re talking about poetry. I have another bad habit, one that I suspect is common to those in my general demographic – MFA-land educated writers. When […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: AWP14, James Franco, poetry, Seattle

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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

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

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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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

E. Rowan Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

Tag: poetry

"All good poetry is experimental"

Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert

Translation is a Compromised Body

Call for Critical Writing on the Gurlesque

Poetry in the Streets (of Seattle)

Not Everyone Gets To Be A Poet

Singularities by Susan Howe

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

That This by Susan Howe

Chapbooks Resources