Lynn Xu and Jacob Kahn: May 2, 2024

Jacob Kahn opens by thanking his hosts, then expresses his gratitude for the Students for Gaza encampment at San Francisco State, begun that week on the SF State campus. He reads two short poems from his book Mine Eclogue, "Direct Deposit" (for Alli Warren) and "Burdensome Organ." He then reads a section from a longer poem titled "Utopia," citing Bernadette Mayer's book of that name as model; the poem opens with an epigraph from Mary Oppen and he notes was written during the start of the corona virus pandemic.

Lynn Xu thanks Jacob Kahn, and notes "two great teachers" of hers, Lyn Hejinian and C. D. Wright, who each received The Poetry Center Book Award before her. Remarking that she teaches at Columbia University, whose student encampment in solidarity with the people of Gaza had just been attacked by police, she thanks the students. Xu then reads from And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, accompanied on screen at times by video imagery, at times by the text of the poem. 

Steve Dickison asks about "unanimity" and poly-vocality in Lynn Xu's work. Xu speaks to the "physical integrity" of the book, and "another iteration" that emerges with its performance, and that "dimensional difference" that's "small but also infinitely large."

Kahn notes how Xu spoke of her teachers as precursors and his notion that the Bay Area has a very matrilineal basis among its poets that's not much spoken of, "or not historicized." 

Xu speaks of "speeding up the process of reading" by presenting the words of her poems in a larger font, rendering them "a little bit uncanny." Kahn asks of the installation presentation of Xu's book at MOCA Tucson, an exhibition sharing the same name as her book, and she shows images from the installation, noting the use of Chinese language audio-projected within the space. 

From the online audience: Elise Ficarra asks about temporality in each poet's work; Tod Edgerton asks about the Tucson exhibition of Xu's book: Jimin Seo offers remarks on Xu's work that lead her to speak more of the difference between reading silently and reading out loud; Dickison asks of Xu's encounter, via Lyn Hejinian, with Robert Grenier's 1978 work Sentences, that was printed on 500 cards; Norman Fischer tells of having read Xu's book on an airplane ride, and his shock at the performance level of the work, as she presented it "with a tremendous passion." 

Kahn calls back to the way in which "the sacredness of life is being deeply violated" with the protracted attacks on Gaza, and how Xu's "oracular" work is important in holding to that sense of sacredness. Xu responds that the book seems to leave her after she's made it and sent it off into the world, and speaks of Paul Celan's "message in a bottle," that one is separated from the fate of the book. 

Before closing they speak of Kahn's book, Mine Eclogue, tapping into the pastoral, after Virgil, and the pastoral art works of Bay Area artist David Wilson, whose painting appears on the book's cover.