“Poetry Communities,” a companion to the conference “Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent” held at the University of Pennsylvania last year, is now online as a feature on Jacket2, edited by Katie L. Price and Jonathan Fedors. The feature includes pieces by Maria Damon, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Vanessa Place, Steve Yao, Adeena Karasick, and many others. My contribution, “Everybody’s a Genius,” begins by evoking Dmitri Prigov’s performance with the musician Vladimir Tarasov in the apartment studio of Ilya Kabakov in Moscow in 1986 (you can watch the performance and read Gerald Janecek’s commentary on it here). I then go on to discuss how Vanessa Place appropriates Prigov’s assertions of his own and others’ genius and what this might tell us about the “shout out effect” and Facebook “like” effect in contemporary English-language conceptual writing. In the spirit of this practice, you can even “like” the essay.
A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature 