art basilisk

in situ | ex patria | 明明不白白 | peep the servile

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Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land

The below piece originally appears as brochure text for a video installation of 王宝菊 Wang Baoju’s《配乐诗朗诵：荒原》 Recitation of Music Poems:The Wasteland Performance Video, 65’06” 王宝菊  2020 shown in September 2023 at Philadelphia’s Pollinator.  What can a notoriously “difficult” 100-year poem written in England by a white male American expatriate poet based in the “unreal city” of London tell us about…

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philoSOPHIA Forum on Translation: Cycles of Engendered/Endangered Contemporaneity in Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway Poems

I’m grateful and pleased not only to have my own work in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA, but also to share space with the writer and artist Han Bo alongside scholars and translators Sun Dong, Yuan Gao, Yuming Piao, and Yizhong Ning in a special forum focused on Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway 《中东铁路》 cycle of poems. Philosopher, translator and theorist Kyoo Lee — “translingual reader of all things…

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Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry

Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry

The Chenjiapu Avant-Garde Bookstore (先锋书店) deck overlooking Wuyi Shan. The village has come to host a number of writer’s studios and, despite being impassable to cars, is being developed as a cultural retreat and eco-tourism destination. This past July I spent two weeks in the Zhejiang mountain village of Chenjiapu translating a set of poems by the Nanjing-based poet Sun Dong. She was able to…

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O Oh (more…)

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“Of Rare Compatibility”: Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Making Kin in the Sericene in _The Journal of Foreign Languages_

“Of Rare Compatibility”: Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Making Kin in the Sericene in _The Journal of Foreign Languages_

I’m pleased to see my article on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and the Anthropocene appear in JFLC. Thanks go out to editor Lauri Scheyer in particular. The paper can be downloaded here and here.

Abstract:Scripting what may be read as a “string figure” companion to Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Jen Bervin’s 2017 Silk Poems project becomes entangled with the damage of the Anthropocene—and with projects…

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Matt Turner's translation of Lu Xun's 野草：Weeds with woodblock prints by Monika Lin from Seaweed Salad Editions

Lu Xun’s 1927 collection of modernist experiments in prose poetry,  Yecao《野草》has, until now, been available in English translation only as Wild Grass, a 1974 translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang originating with Beijing’s own Foreign Languages Press. Needless to say, that was quite a while ago and, in a number of senses, a world or two ago. Mao was still alive and kicking, and the Cultural…

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Generational breakdowns: Deep time fissures & abyssal geological vortices vs. Greatest Generation nostalgia vs. MAGA

Generational breakdowns: Deep time fissures & abyssal geological vortices vs. Greatest Generation nostalgia vs. MAGA

Maga Zi, Great Warring States Sage

It’s really something, isn’t it, to reckon with generational narratives, such as that of the Greatest Generation and the US role in WWII, in light of MAGA on one hand and, on the other, the end-Holocene transition into the [                  ]?

My father recently shared via group email a truly touching Memorial Day Salon columnby US military family man Lucian K.…

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Generational breakdowns: Deep time fissures & abyssal geological vortices vs. Greatest Generation nostalgia vs. MAGA degenerative denialism

Generational breakdowns: Deep time fissures & abyssal geological vortices vs. Greatest Generation nostalgia vs. MAGA degenerative denialism

Maga Zi, Great Warring States Sage

It’s really something, isn’t it, to reckon with generational narratives, such as that of the Greatest Generation and the US role in WWII, in light of MAGA on one hand and, on the other, the end-Holocene transition into the [                  ]?

My father recently shared via group email a truly touching Memorial Day Salon columnby US military family man Lucian K.…

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What is poetry now without photography? With photos as cheap as words why not just take a picture?

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2019 Shanghai International Literary Festival appearance with Han Bo, Monika Lin and Jacob Dreyer

2019 Shanghai International Literary Festival appearance with Han Bo, Monika Lin and Jacob Dreyer

Gesso print art edition cover by Monika Lin

We’ll be launching our debut bilingual poetry chapbook, Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway at noon on Tuesday, March 19 at the 2019 Shanghai International Literary Festival. The event will be in Chinese and English, featuring Han Bo reading his poetry alongside my translations. Book designer (and partner extraordinaire) Monika Lin and writer, art critic,…

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Bad Poetry

what it is to get it out: keep writing

until the bad turns to lit

minds the others see a seed meta-

phor or hear a cock crow at dawn for-

getting how bad it is to be here

alone only because there are so many

of us writing, talk- ing, breaking clever

lines and riffing off-rhymes as if

ever we were able to stay here

paired up in love in the shadow of this

THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION / END-

HOLOCENE:…

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Yang Jian’s Long River out from Tinfish Press My blurb: Yang Jian composes a poetry of slow erosion and quick frosts, of liminal moments that course through and undermine our human-made world’s crude fabrications, clearing the mind for just as long as necessary before its return.

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Han Bo's "Chinese Eastern Railway" | 韩博《中东铁路》

Han Bo’s “Chinese Eastern Railway” | 韩博《中东铁路》

My translations of Shanghai-based poet Han Bo’s nine-poem cycle 《中东铁路》 are up at the Berlin-based lyrikline, accompanying German translations by Daniel Bayerstorfer, Peiyao Chang and Lea Schneider. The poems are densely allusive, experimental and rooted in the complex layered history of the historic Chinese Eastern Railway running through Manchuria (contemporary Dongbei and Inner Mongolia).…

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Aesymnetes LAWKI / Holocene, Sweet Holocene

Aesymnetes LAWKI / Holocene, Sweet Holocene

A utilitarian AI charged with global sovereignty by a cabal of well-intentioned scientists and their monied supporters. Its goal: in the face of cascading catastrophic climate change, nothing less than the preservation to the greatest degree possible of Life As We Know It — life on this planet as it has emerged in the last 10,000 years or so (stitch it into a throw pillow: Holocene, Sweet…

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State of Exception

The anthropocene means a “permanent” — intensifying, long-duration — state of exception. Reichstäglich fires: Western democracy burns and burns. The tire fire, the coal bed fire. Natural causes. A metastate? What is a “metastate?” Wikipedia says: “In statistical mechanics, the metastate is a probability measure on the space of all thermodynamic states for a system with quenched randomness.” As…

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Old poems, new place, good times

Old poems, new place, good times

Three Shanghai poems from Expat Taxes, originally published in various editions of Larry Fagin‘s Sal Mimeo, are up at Alluvium, the house publication of Literary Shanghai. Plus one they like because it has the word “alluvial” in it, previously published in the Brooklyn Rail, as a li’l promo salvo in advance of the reading event at Madame Mao’s Dowry. The poems are old — like 5, 6, 7 years old,…

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Soft focus, soft censorship: "Poetry," "China," and the West of the Business Journalist

Soft focus, soft censorship: “Poetry,” “China,” and the West of the Business Journalist

As much of a pleasure as it was to appear at the Shanghai International Literary Festival with Jen Bervin, Jen Hyde and Wen Jin, it was one mixed — as is always the case for me here in Shanghai — with significant measures of the odd and the off. Don’t get me wrong: One of the things I like about life here is that the “odd and the off” are clearer in the mix than might otherwise be (or at least…

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