poets and poetry

Renee Gladman is an artist and writer preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and fiction. She is the author of nine works of prose and one collection of poetry.

Excerpt from Prose Architectures introduction by Renee Gladman: "Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language: I saw it as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if something were being poured or pulled out of oneself, but here, ... See more

In the fall of 1970, the Black feminist poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan traveled to Italy as a Rome Prize recipient in the category of Environmental Design ( We’re On 153).1 She was awarded the prize for work that grew out of her collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Jordan’s connection with Fuller began in 1964, when Jord... See more

June Jordan, The Poetry of Design

Jordan would keep integrating media: “‘These ideas have to reach beyond architecture,’ she said, ‘beyond urbanism, beyond the academy, we need to reach the masses, we need to reach the people,’ and her response was writing in images. (...) She didn’t have training in drawing, as she had had nobody to pay for her to... See more

I prefer old school Audre Lorde’s version of risk:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to sta

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her main focus was Simone Weil. She riffed on Weil’s idea of the void, of making a space inside yourself for the divine to rush into. “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

Maybe this is all taking me back to Annie Dillard, my first writing teacher, whose influence on me abides, and who famously and reassuringly once wrote, “You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.” In other words, the empty-handedness is import... See more