T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetic suite, The Waste Land, of 1922, was born of the Götterdämmerung that was The Great War. Its voices (personas) recount the loss of faith, the rubble-proven absurdity of European (colonial) ‘superiority,’ and the brazen (sexual) amorality afflicting its civilzation, i.e., the displacement of Jesus by jazz, of classicism by capitalism, and of law-and-order by the orgasm.
Interview by T. Liem with Ockert Greeff // Winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award (No. 39)
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
An Inked Shorthand of Marks
T.Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
FEATURED REVIEW Theophylline by Erín Moure reviewed by Bill Neumire
Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
By Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press 2023
Reviewed by Bill Neumire
INTERVIEW WITH ROSIE LONG DECTER AND VALLUM CHAPBOOK-WINNER MAYA CLUBINE
From the Immediate to the Timeless: A Conversation with Maya Clubine
Life Cycle of a Mayfly chronicles more than the life of a river bug. Maya Clubine’s collection, winner of the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Award, takes mayflies as a departure point for thinking about ecosystems, interdependence, and the lessons that we pass down through generations. Clubine considers the growth of a fly from nymph to imago alongside changing seasons, bird migrations, a father’s passing, a daughter’s return. Along the way, cycles tangle like a fishing line. In this interview, critic Rosie Long Decter talks with Clubine about structure, repetition, and the relationship between the cosmic and the minute.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Conyer Clayton | BEFORE AND AFTER
in the first photo
the apple is whole
Blaine Marchand | SYNTAX
my sister is dying at times she states it
her life parsed
phrases/phases terms/terminal …
House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson | Review by Katia Grubisic
“Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery,”: so writes the American poet, novelist, and essayist Siri Hustvedt. So quotes the Chilean-born Québécois poet, novelist, and essayist Nicholas Dawson as he investigates his own illness, pushing through the multiple layered skins of depression, turning it over to examine it in this light and that, as a prism that might allow some strand of light into the complex, ailing self.
Shapeshifters by Délani Valin | Review by Nyla Matuk
“The problem is that I’m a stranger to myself,” Délani Valin writes halfway through her début collection Shapeshifters, in “What are the Ethics of Picking a Stinging Plant?” The third paragraph of this clever, subtle prose poem continues…